Remain in Light

Just that morning, Lo had been told to remain in light by the tarot reader in the Crystals ‘n’ More store next to PetSmart, which was next to Target, which was her ultimate destination. After she’d sat down, Lo had drawn a single card, as instructed, from the young woman’s deck: The Fool. The drawing of this card cost Lo 15 dollars.

As Lo stared down the wildly happy face of a court jester type fellow—scary-happy—the reader said softly, “Remain in light.”

“Remain in light: could you say more?” Lo had asked, flashing her double-wide smile—the former middle school teacher in her searching for mutual edification. “That was a Talking Heads album, though you’re probably too young—” 

“I totally know that album,” said the twentyish employee.

“Oh, that’s cool,” said Lo. “That you know it.”

Lo certainly didn’t know what David Byrne had meant with that album title, but the wording had always made her sense sunlight on her skin, and by extension, comfort inside. 

“But I didn’t say in light,” said the reader, who didn’t exert much effort to enunciate. “I said to remain light.”

“Oh,” Lo said. “I see.” 

“Like, don’t stress, just, like, dance,” said the girl of a woman with greater volume than before. 

Lo remembered dancing to her husband’s vintage records during their early courtship, at first self-consciously, but soon enough, with abandon. That time in their lives was something else. 

Lo decided that she preferred the preposition-containing advice, so she claimed it. Perhaps to remain in light was to have fun while also maintaining comfort and safety.

“I DJ on the side,” said the so-called psychic, whom Lo had almost forgotten was there.

“Good for you,” said Lo. “Super fun.”

Lo had scribbled her shopping list before she dropped the boys at preschool. Do something whimsical, she’d added in ballpoint. Therefore, what a dreamy coincidence she’d drawn the Fool. 

Whimsy, by definition, wasn’t supposed to be plotted, but she was discovering that it could be. Now she had an assignment to dance!

The psychic DJ dusted her hands, perhaps to demonstrate the card’s weightlessness, then tried to sell more magic. 

“The only thing, though,” said the young woman. “Your card’s upside down.”

“Oh? What does that mean?”

“Just, like, chaos.”

“Chaos?”

The girl rolled her arms in a gesture similar, Lo thought, to the twiddling of thumbs.

“Turbulence?” Lo asked.

“Yes, that,” the reader said, checking a laminated cheat sheet. “Poor planning and, like, danger.”

But no, despite being a 40-something mom type with progressive lenses and reusable shopping bags in tow, Lo did not want chaos-cancelling spells ranging from 60 to 99 dollars. 

“So, you’re totally okay with oblivion,” said the young woman, glancing at her watch.

Lo shivered. Was her own oblivion scheduled for sooner rather than later? If so, would 99 dollars hold it off? Ha. She got up to leave and said thank you. She would focus on the positive. The playful Fool was the perfect card for her at this moment in her life, as was that misheard advice. 

Lightness had not been her forte pre-motherhood, but she had changed. Now she was tired, so tired that she knew how to live in the moment. Of course, almost every moment was occupied until the kids’ bedtime. Almost. An empty moment was a window to be opened. 

In the odd, free-form moment, she sometimes posted idiotic things on social media, including, most recently: “Isn’t she gourd-geous?” alongside a photo of herself smirking, holding misshapen gourds over her bare breasts. The post was well-liked, especially by her husband, Stanley, for whom it also prompted an erection and a request for a quickie. 

As she paced toward Target in her New Balance sneakers seeking two pairs of royal blue socks in 4T, she picked up a discarded paper cup and slam-dunked it into a red trash bin.

“Score!” she said to a stern man exiting the automated glass doors. Once inside, she grabbed a handcart, skipping the disinfectant wipe, sprinting toward the children’s section, humming “Once in a Lifetime” in anticipation of what she’d find. 

So many people didn’t have the ability to laugh or be easy, and of course Lo understood why. Schools and big-box stores and concerts and churches and groceries were machine-gunned regularly, often at random; multiple wars raged; cancer found someone else close to her nearly every month; not to mention the dying earth. But what, she wondered, if we could remain light, and/or remain in light, even at death’s doorstep? 

Death was only one more moment speeding by! No need to be self-conscious about it! No need to get a stomachache. 

With that, she flashed on the word oblivion, and the irrational worry that had washed across her when the young psychic revealed the card’s face: a court jester falling into curling flames. No. Dancing atop those flames: that’s what he was doing.

“Future flames,” Lo told herself, dusting her hands, imagining the Fool wearing New Balance. 

Still, the future felt soon. Every morning it arrived anew. What was it David Byrne was saying about time in “Lifetime”? That it wasn’t holding onto us and it wasn’t chasing us. How clever he was, but what did those lines even mean? Stanley so loved Talking Heads, their artsy album covers in five black frames on his office walls, his devotion both immature and admirable.

“Where is the children’s section?” Lo asked an old man stocking soup on shelves.

“It moved far away,” he said, pointing toward the very back of the store.

She walked fast. She tried to click her heels but missed. Her gut spasmed briefly, the pistachio “sauce” she’d enjoyed with her Starbucks threatening havoc. The twins were already in Pre-K. Next week was already Spirit Week, during which the boys would wear school colors one day, mismatched clothing the next, then a Halloween-theme, and so on, which meant Lo was out wasting money on kids’ socks and maybe hats and, yeah, a tarot reading in the name of frivolity, of whimsy.

“Banish dread,” she counseled herself, patting her tum-tum. She dashed through the women’s section, tossing a pair of banana-patterned ankle socks for herself into her handcart. This shopping trip was already a party even if the store speakers were right now coincidentally, eerily playing that famous Talking Heads song about a serial killer. Wasn’t it a funny song if you really listened?! No question!

These quick-blurring days she relished things she would have dreaded previously, such as popping in to visit her mother-in-law in memory care, where, invariably, at least one resident would try on her coat or go through her purse while Lo made chitchat with her husband’s mom. Upon discovering her coat or wallet missing, Lo would ask around. 

“Have you seen a lavender jacket, about yay long?” she’d inquire of the woman wearing it.

It might take some tickling, but Lo always reclaimed the stolen goods. Everyone, with the exception of the catatonic, would cheer up, including the worn-out aides.

One more thing she did that was light: Wearing socks patterned with cats, poop emojis, owls, dinosaurs. People liked them, and somehow these socks made random moments, when she looked down at her ankles, feel all right. She certainly didn’t worry her kids would not have a planet to grow old in when she looked down at her socks and found sloths. Fun was a kind of faith.

“Hey there,” Stanley texted, his familiar greeting. “Help, I’m craving bread.” He was cutting carbs altogether. 

“Maybe something gluten-free?” she wrote back, thumbing through a rack of bright, women’s tops on clearance.

“Woman, I said bread!” he typed, adding two weeping smileys.

She grinned broadly, involuntarily, and resumed hurtling herself toward children’s.

Lo didn’t believe she could pray for life to go the right way, but she did believe that she had manifested Stanley, a philosophy professor at a community college. She’d visualized a man with a mind with windows. That’s who he was. 

He’d said, on their third date, seven years ago, that he’d always wanted a woman with the most seismic smile on earth. 

Regrettably, Stanley did believe, like Nietzsche, that life’s moments were meaningless, that they stacked up, repeated, didn’t add up to a sum of real value. However, Stanley loved that Lo bought extremely overpriced, heart-shaped artisanal bread on special occasions. They devoured their first loaf the night they conceived the kids. While it was baking, they agreed its rosemary-infused aroma equaled the meaning of life. They may have been slightly stoned at the time.

“We can’t afford twins,” Lo had said as she showed Stanley the sonogram.

“To quote Michel de Montaigne,” he’d said, “or to paraphrase: Let us choose to live virtuously and well, ‘with a soft and easy tranquility.’”

“Let’s name the twins Soft and Easy,” she’d said.

“You’ll be a fun and effective mom,” he said, laughing. “And I’ll impart existentialism.”

“This is magic bread,” she said.  They’d thawed the second loaf they’d stored in the freezer the second they’d returned home from the ultrasound.

“The aroma alone!” Stanley proclaimed.

Finally in children’s, Lo found precisely the striped hats she’d envisioned, which unnerved her. Her stomach gurgled, and another shopping mother turned to gawk. Lo winked at her. In response, the woman giggled, the gurgle redeemed. 

Fishing through the enormous bin of kids’ socks proved moderately frustrating, but, with effort, Lo found two blue pairs in 4T. 

From there, she fled to the deserted home section, browsed the faux ceramic planters, and let out a quick, loud fart.

The kookiest thing Lo sometimes did post-motherhood was to visit Target, select the key items she needed, then, while she was checking out the home aisle—no one else ever on hand—fart at will. She’d come to see it as a rebellious move. It felt easy but also controversial, as if she were making her mark, an impolite gesture to polite society, to the eventual forces of doom. 

She was alive, so she let her own happy fart rip. Take that, insecurity. Take that, oblivion. Her life was her own, and it was a pretty great life. Sometimes.

Lo was still in the home section when she got the call from her husband’s colleague’s husband that the campus building Stanley taught in was supposedly being held at gunpoint by a team of disgruntled dropouts, a team of them. She sat down in a wicker chair and shook her head. Actually, her head was shaking for her. She noticed that the chair was shaking, too. Cheap, bad luck chair.

“S?” she texted her husband.

He didn’t reply. She farted on the cheap chair without meaning to. She registered that Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” was playing.

The colleague’s husband texted again: “Only one gunman. But he’s supposedly deranged.”

“Deranged?”

“As in, he’s waving a gun.”

She searched her phone for news reports but came up blank. Her phone’s battery was at nine percent.

“Stanley!” Lo wrote, lying on a display rug now. 

Nothing. She gripped the tassels on the edge of the rug, removing a large handful: oops. A rather stoic female manager helped her to her feet. She almost told the manager to remain in light. She felt suddenly sick to her stomach, dizzy, but then it passed. 

“I’m getting you some bread,” Lo texted Stanley before she could rethink the stupid idea, then her phone died, another awful sign.

She ran, leaving her handcart with the manager—shoes squeaking not dancing—got back inside her car and floored it.

When Stanley found her, nearly two hours later, she was in the parking lot of the artisanal bakery. The sunlight was too bright.

“Baby,” he said, knocking on her window. 

Stanley tried the doors. Locked. He knocked again. She registered him through the glare but couldn’t seem to smile in response.

“No one hurt. It was a toy gun,” he said loudly. “Colossally sick student prank.”

“A prank,” she said to herself. “A prank?”

She touched the warm glass; Stanley touched the glass.

She waited for her smile to find her, like a familiar punchline or a comforting fart. It didn’t. She half-remembered that her socks were patterned with turtles. Ridiculous socks wouldn’t ever cheer her children in the face of losing their dad.

Stanley lay down on the hood on his back, alive and well. Beautiful. She would simply ask time to stop. “Please?” she whispered. She took in his stretched-out form, his slight paunch lifting with his breath, his graying hair more noticeable in the midday sun. 

Eventually, she rolled the window down. “Hey there,” she said. She could feel the big warmth of the October sun. She could smell bread baking—they both could.