The Bright Side of Going Dark

by Kelly Harms

  “Are you just staring at my butt?” I ask.

  “Through a seven-hundred-fill goose-down bag, yes.”

  “Enjoy,” I say.

  “I will,” he replies. “How’s your view?”

  I look up. It’s tree leaves, the undersides, branches, a few low clouds, and sky. “Amazing,” I tell him. “I am up on the roof at night in the city of my soul.”

  “Are you going to sing your notes?” he asks.

  “My heart is already singing,” I tell him. “It’s singing loud.”

  PAIGE

  Another day, another #shoppingspree! You guys know most of the time when I’m at home I do a ton of shopping online. I mean, great deals, two day shipping, who’s with me? But I think I might be missing out on one of the side perks of shopping, the in-person browse. Today is all about spending QT with the QT in my life, and I guess that means popping into every little store in downtown #Copperidge. Surprised how much I enjoyed the sights, flavors, and people to be found in each spot. Not surprised by how much I spent! #YOLO #dearvisaIcanexplain

  Do you have a favorite small retailer? Tag and share below! xo Mia

  Imagine, if you will, a woman in her middle thirties, very woman shaped, a bit understyled, a bit overclothed, skin the color of fluorescent lighting. Add in her sister, who she barely knows: more than ten years younger, built for bikinis and beer ads, in a coed-chic orange cotton dress with both wrists swathed in bandages. I have a PhD in computer science. Jessica flunked out of communicating. She has my mother’s eyes, round and innocent, and bright-pink lipstick painted in a bow. I also have eyes and lips. That is all we have in common.

  Now we are out on the streets of downtown Copperidge, outside a high-end clothing purveyor, staring each other down.

  “We need to go in there,” she is telling me. “Mia would want you to. Call her if you like.”

  “I will not be calling Mia Bell to ask her which overpriced resort-town boutique to shop in. Don’t you think she has better things to do with her time?” I ask. “Besides, I can see the price tags through the window. They are selling short-sleeved sweaters for two hundred dollars! Bad enough you have to store a garment that is only appropriate three days a year. Why would you go broke for it?”

  “Ok, Paige, I’m not going to tell you how to do your job, but that sweater is exactly like something Mia would wear.”

  “Then she is wasting her money,” I say. “Doesn’t mean I have to do that.”

  “But you’re supposed to be her right now,” says Jessica. “Forget how you dress”—she waves at me up and down like she’s trying to obscure her own vision of my outfit—“and channel the client.”

  I exhale aggressively. “Ok. The client. Let’s see. She’s a self-absorbed shopaholic and has infinite closet space, and anything she wants is given to her for free. I’m channeling.”

  “You sound like you don’t even like her,” Jessica points out.

  “I don’t know her,” I say. Then add, “Not really.”

  “Well, I do. She’d go in there,” says Jessica.

  I sigh and get my scare quotes ready. “Since I took over, ‘she’ already went to a bookstore and a yarn store. ‘She’ has spent almost two hundred dollars being ‘herself.’ Can’t we do things that aren’t shopping?”

  Jessica shakes her head. “If she were spending the week in Copperidge, she’d be spending it shopping, going to art galleries, and eating at high-end restaurants. She’d be going to hear music and drink at wine bars. She might go for a sail. She’d definitely go to the gym. Some kind of hip class unique to the location. Maybe a bike ride.”

  I blink at my sister. “Ok, forget Mia. We’re here for you, mostly, aren’t we? What do you want to do?”

  Jessica smiles, victorious. “I want to go in there.” She points at the store in question.

  I roll my eyes, but at the same time I start for the entrance. If it’s what Jessica wants, it’s what we’ll do. But I won’t like it. I fear it will be one of those stores where the first thing the shopgirl tells me is that they don’t sell anything in my size. I hate that. Since I have no control over other people’s manners, and culture shifts around weight discrimination are going to take as long as culture shifts around everything else, I should just stop being bothered by that one of these days. Maybe today. Maybe I’ll try on a nice too-small short-sleeved itchy angora sweater that I would wear exactly once. Maybe I’ll stretch out the sleeves on purpose.

  Jessica trots up next to me. “Ok, what we want to do is watch out for mirrors and size tags. Mia is a waif. She doesn’t eat any foods that are white.”

  “Is that a common dietary preference?” I ask.

  “It’s an extremely unpleasant one,” Jessica says. “I wish I could do it.”

  “There is a certain dissonance between those two sentences.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You’ve never worried about your weight.”

  “I worried about it plenty when I was younger,” I tell her. “Now I have learned to trust my doctor, who assures me I’m perfectly healthy. I no longer have anything to worry about.”

  “That’s good! But. Some people don’t operate that way.”

  “How do some people operate?”

  “They worry about what other people think. They wish they could look more perfect.”

  I look at Jessica, trying to understand what she would possibly change about her body. “Jessica,” I say. “There is plenty of good evidence showing that dieting is a fool’s game. If your general metrics indicate good health, then you simply are the size you are. Your dress size, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad, just a neutral fact.”

  “Where does being suicidal fall within my general health metrics?” she asks.

  Hm. “I suppose your cognitive perception errors do make self-acceptance quite difficult,” I admit. “The meds will improve that. Now, let’s get this over with. You point out things Mia would wear, and then I will photograph them, and then we will leave.”

  Jessica shakes her head. “How on earth did you get this job? Just follow me.”

  She walks in and smiles at the salesgirl, who is in fact a man, forcing me to note a weakness in my lexicon. He is a man wearing a sports jacket with a T-shirt. I find those sorts of outfits to be very intimidating. They look like what the bad boyfriend in Hallmark movies would wear. “Hello,” he says. “Welcome. Are you new to our store?”

  “Yes,” replies Jessica, which I believe is a mistake, because now he will continue to talk to us. “I’m not from here.”

  “Oh, fun!” he says. “Visiting your sister?”

  I look up at him. “How did you know we were sisters?” I ask.

  He looks at me, amused. “Are you kidding? You two look exactly alike.”

  I turn to face my sister and narrow my eyes, trying to see any similarity. Maybe this is just something he says to flatter whomever he thinks is the richer member of the party. Clearly I am the one with the money, as I have a purse, a contraption specifically designed for holding money. Whereas Jessica seems to prefer to carry her girly ephemera around in a free-with-purchase makeup bag covered in sequins.

  “Don’t we just?” says Jessica. I ignore her social ministrations. “We need something cute to wear for tonight,” she tells him.

  “What’s tonight?” he asks.

  “Girls’ night,” she replies happily. “We’re going to go out and indiscriminately flirt with men.”

  My eyebrows shoot up.

  “I’m afraid that at this boutique you’ll only find clothes that appeal to very discriminate men,” the guy says. “But if you don’t mind that, I can help you out.”

  What follows is a process so boring and onerous I can’t even begin to describe it. It is the part where one would fast-forward if one were watching an otherwise tolerable romantic comedy. As I am subjected to it, I marvel that this place stays open. Who would possibly put themselves through such an ordeal without a suicidal sister forcing them? Imagine a small
try-on room with a mirror of its own, but every time you put something on, people shout at you to come out, come out and show them! This is no way to find clothing that fits you while providing durability and comfort. Everything takes three times longer than it should due to questions like How’s my butt look in this one? By the end I think I would be happy if I never had to consider anyone’s rear again.

  All that said, Jessica appears to smile through much of the process. Some studies have shown that smiling can actually cause serotonin release, and so I insist I buy her some of the ridiculous overpriced, impractical clothing she likes, to keep the smiles coming. She then insists I also buy some ridiculous overpriced, impractical clothing for myself. Though I cannot stress enough that what I already own is very versatile and could be worn anywhere we go this evening, and also that the job of clothes is to adequately cover one’s privates and that is all, I eventually give in. I buy some stretchy jeans, which feel close enough to sweatpants, and a gauzy ecru linen sweater. The sweater cannot be worn without sufficient underpinnings due to its airy construction out of what looks like the remnants of an exhumed mummy. (I also have to buy the underpinnings, but they at least are soft.)

  I note with some pride that buying clothes from this racket at least provides a living wage to their creators—everything in here turns out to be fair trade. After we’ve taken several pictures of everything, including the shop person, Jessica makes me go into the fitting room again and put the new clothes on to wear out of the store, as though I came in in nothing but a flour sack. Then, clad to her satisfaction, I positively demand we get on to the eating portion of being influencers.

  Over nice sweaty glasses of mint limeade at a nearby outdoor café with a strange profusion of purse dogs, Jessica hands me her phone, and I give her mine, trying not to be neurotic about the idea of handing someone an unlocked minicomputer of mine own. We start scrolling through the new photo options for my next Mia post. I am startled to see how good they are.

  “Jessica!” I exclaim around my stainless steel straw. “These are stupendous photographs. Much better than mine. How did you learn to use your camera so capably?”

  “Gee, thanks,” she says. “It’s a class in my major. Content creation for social media.”

  “Content creation!” I exclaim. “That’s what they call taking photos?”

  “And writing posts. Yes. That’s exactly what you’re doing for Mia. That’s what Mia does, normally. Content creation. I mean, you work for Pictey; you know this. They are in fact just content providers.”

  “They certainly are not. They are a social media platform. They connect the world one hashtag at a time.”

  “That’s what you think,” she says. “But how do they make money?”

  “Through ad sales,” I say.

  “And do you need people to be connected to sell ads?”

  “Certainly. You need them to come back over and over again to feel connected. Connected to their friends and their ‘friends,’ like Mia, who they would normally not have access to.”

  “But what makes them come back? The fact that Mia is there, or the fact that Mia posts constantly and you might have something new to see every time you return?”

  I must stop to consider this.

  “If users just wanted access to Mia, she’d never have to post again. She could just be chatting directly to friends, meeting new people privately through their posts, interacting one on one. But if that were enough, she never would have hired you.”

  I think of the speed with which her follower numbers fall between my posts. And then the quick rate of rebound after just one new picture.

  “How much does she post on an average day?” I ask.

  “It depends. Sometimes thirty times. Sometimes ten. And not on a schedule, so you get that random-reinforcement effect.”

  “Are you taking UX engineering classes too?” I ask, surprised at her understanding of random reinforcement.

  “What exactly do you think a communications major is?” she asks. “Or for that matter a college degree? Everyone has to take some psych and some English and some arts and some comp sci.”

  “Well. I didn’t realize that. I thought that was only at good schools.”

  “Colorado is a good school! Jeezaloo, Paige.”

  “Mom says that,” I note. “Pick some photos. We need to get cracking if we’re going to do thirty posts today.”

  “You only did three yesterday, so we don’t have to do much to improve,” she says. “If Mia is watching, you’re already fired.”

  “She’s not watching,” I say confidently. I am starting to get an inkling of why that might be. “But I agree—we need to step it up. Thirty posts! My goodness. It takes me half an hour to write one. Mia Bell must be a very busy woman.” I set down my limeade and force myself to make some eye contact with Jessica. “Jessica, I would like you to know that I’m very glad you are helping me with this, and further pleased that you are not dead, as even achieving ten posts a day would be a struggle without you.”

  “It’s my pleasure,” she says. “It’s actually quite a relief to be doing this with you.”

  “Oh?” I ask.

  “I’ve been in the hospital for a long time. Mostly wasting time and Mom and Dad’s money because I’m too freaked out to be totally unsupervised, and trying to make friends with the nurses out of loneliness. The people who came to see me early on were obsessed with my suicide attempt and talked about nothing else. Self-care, cry for help, was it their fault, blah blah blah. No one but you came to see me later on, and you don’t seem that freaked out by what I did. You’re just on to the next thing now, even though you’re walking through town with a girl covered in bandages.”

  “Actually, I was very freaked out. I needed to do a special breathing technique at one point, one that I have not used in a very long time.”

  “Well, you didn’t let on,” she says. “And you also don’t seem to think I should act happy right now, or sad, or any particular way. So it’s good. You’re the right woman for this job.”

  “Whereas you,” I note, “are the right person for my job. You take very representational photos with excellent use of light, and you seem to instinctively sense what Mia would do in any given situation.”

  “Thank you. On that note, Mia would talk about how this restaurant provides stainless steel straws with the limeade.”

  “Very true. Take a picture of my limeade,” I tell her.

  “Wrong,” she says.

  “Wrong?” I repeat dumbly.

  “Look at the limeade,” she tells me.

  I look. There is a glass with a straw and a sprig of mint. A third of it is filled with pale-greenish liquid and an icy slurry. “Should it be . . . full?”

  “Yes, it should.”

  “So I need to order a second sugary beverage just to take a picture of it, even though I have no interest in drinking it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Excess sugar can have a detrimental effect on the human gut biome,” I tell her.

  Jessica shakes her head and says, “You really aren’t a natural at this.” When the server walks by, she catches her eye and asks what else is served with the stainless steel straw.

  “Anything you like,” she says. “We have as many of those straws as we have tall boys.”

  “In that case, will you bring us one of these rosemary gin and tonics?” she asks, pointing to an entry on the cocktail list.

  “What on earth!” I exclaim.

  “But use half tonic, half soda water,” she adds, ignoring me. “We’re watching our sugar consumption.” With that she raises her eyebrows and wiggles them at me.

  “No problemo,” the server says. “That actually sounds like it will be really good. I’ll be right back with that.”

  I send a sharp look at Jessica the moment the server steps toward the bar.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Alcohol is contraindicated in cases of severe depression,” I announce. “It�
�s going to reduce the efficacy of the medications and certainly just make you feel bad too.”

  “It’s for you,” she tells me. “Post two or three shopping pics now so you can drink the gin when it arrives.”

  “At this hour of the day?” I ask. “I don’t think I need to be drinking.”

  “Maybe you don’t,” says Jessica. “But I need you to be drinking. If you’re going to succeed at the internet, we need to turn down the volume on that noisy brain of yours.”

  MIA

  My mom’s landline rings the day after we get back from camping. I don’t know what to do. Do I answer it? Where is it? Does it have caller ID? I follow the sound, but it’s coming from the base charger of the cordless phone, not the handset. There’s no display on the base. I wander around Mom’s house looking for the actual phone part until it stops ringing. The machine picks up, a click, a whir, and I hear the voice of a stranger asking for me, saying she heard I was a certified yoga instructor, and could I teach a vinyasa class at her studio later today. My heart swells. I go outside to find my mom.

  She’s sitting in the garden but not gardening. Just sitting there. I think she might be meditating until she sees me and waves me over. I notice she’s got wet eyes.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Listening to the bees. They sound sad.”

  I listen. “Really? Bees get sad?”

  “I’m not sure, actually. Mostly I just said that to see if you’d believe me.”

  “What are you really doing?” I ask.

  “Thinking about Andy.”

  “Happy or sad thoughts?” I ask.

  “All the happy thoughts are sad,” she tells me. “To be honest, I seem to be stuck in the mourning process a bit. Having you here makes me see that.”

  I sit down next to her, legs outstretched to avoid a row of greens, and put my arm around her shoulders. “Would you like to come do yoga with me?” I ask her. It’s Mom who first taught me yoga, when I was a small child. It was a little more counterculture back then. She did it with incense burning and lots of chants.