What You See in the Dark Page 5

  “Your toast, miss,” said Arlene. “Thanks, Priscilla. Is there anything else we can get you?”

  “No, ma’am, we’re fine,” said the man, raising his utensils and holding them over the plate.

  Arlene put her hand on Priscilla’s arm. Priscilla looked as if she was about to ignore the man’s signal. “Let’s let them eat now.”

  It took no time at all for Priscilla to report back to the rest, and Arlene shushed them when they all gathered at the kitchen door to have a look for themselves. “It may or it may not be her,” she said to them in a harsh whisper. “But behave yourselves. It’s all about grace.”

  “That’s not her,” someone said. “That’s not her husband.”

  “She’s too busty.”

  “There’s no such thing as too busty.”

  “Grab the magazine,” someone else said. “I think there was a picture of her in there, no?”

  “That’s not her husband,” someone said again.

  “You big dummy, if she’s having an affair, that’s exactly why she’s here and not in Hollywood.”

  “Girls,” Arlene said firmly. “Enough. Get away from that door.”

  “We have to get back to work anyway,” someone said. “The lunch rush is coming.”

  “Fine,” said Arlene, but she moved in front of them to block the door. “But no gawking. Whether it’s her or not, it’s embarrassing to act like a bunch of teenagers when you’re supposed to be working.”

  None of the girls answered back, but she could tell by their folded arms and pursed lips that they resented her tone. Still, each of them gathered an apron or a tray of condiments or a dishrag or a handful of clean silverware and fanned out among the tables and booths. She could see some of them trying to take a good look at the couple, but none of the girls did so obtrusively, the couple involved as they were in their conversation. They were left alone, and as the lunch crowd began to filter in, the girls took to their tables and Arlene positioned herself behind the counter. Cal paid his bill silently and tipped his hat at her pointedly, and after he exited, she had a clear view of the couple as they chatted, the gorgeous yellow of the woman’s blouse and the pretty gray skirt she’d matched it with, the expensive shoes, and the wide belt on her tiny waist. The woman nibbled at her toast and the man spoke more than she did, but never while chewing. He put down his utensils when he spoke and never took his eyes away from her. Such attentiveness, she thought, couldn’t come from a husband. The girls, she knew, had probably already spotted the wedding bands on both of their fingers, but only the girls would know if the bands matched, if the couple had spouses in other places, if their lunch was secret despite its being out in the open.

  More customers rang through the door, the bells tinkling their welcome, and the café filled with the clatter of silverware and afternoon greetings and footsteps across the tiled floors. The couple had never raised their voices, even when the café had been empty, but now Arlene could only guess at what they were saying, how the man held the woman’s attention, how they talked without ever pausing, without ever glancing away in disinterest. The girls flitted around with coffeepots, dashing back and forth into the kitchen, bringing back turkey sandwiches and chicken-fried steak: They were watching all of this between tasks and they would come up with a story, but it would be the wrong one. They would put it together during the next break time, flipping through Modern Screen and finding the picture of that actress and swearing up and down that she was wearing the same earrings if only you looked really close. They would do so because Bakersfield was that kind of town. Here, people believed whatever story they wanted to believe, even if they made it up, and it had already had its own beginning and its own middle and its own end.

  What she wanted to tell the girl waitresses was that life was not anything like those magazines, but she did not want to sound like a bitter woman. She had stories of her own to prove it. But how was she supposed to tell them, when no one bothered to ask her about her life? Especially not lately, since Frederick had left her, and all around her swirled assumptions about the reasons why. When Frederick left her, she was still Mrs. Watson. There was no maiden name to go back to. Not without being able to explain that she was from Oklahoma and he had been from Wisconsin, with no relations in between. She wanted to put down the coffeepot, the slice of apple pie, rest her hand on Priscilla’s shoulder, and explain, to tell her real story, as it had happened. To say to all of them, There’s the story you think you know, and there’s the one I need to tell you.

  She saw that the couple were beginning to wrap up their meal and she walked over to the table, drawing up the ticket right in front of them, trying to overhear anything they might still be saying, but they were quiet. Arlene ripped the ticket from her pad and set it facedown on the table, but she looked one more time at the woman, as if to invite her once again to admit that she was or wasn’t who they all thought. But the woman only stared back at her with a face so shorn of feeling that Arlene did as she had before—she looked away—and her thank-you to the customers came as it did on those days when she was most exhausted, the sunlight orange in the plate-glass windows and the hours too slow, her voice caught in her throat, the very sound that reaffirmed everyone’s worst possible imaginings about her. What man, after all, would have stayed with someone who spoke so sharply, in such an unfriendly tone, her head hanging? How could a woman like that possibly be the mother of that radiant man who tended bar at Las Cuatro Copas, the one who made that Mexican shopgirl beam like she did?

  “It’s her,” said Priscilla, watching as the couple exited the café, the man regally holding the door open for the woman. “I think the girls are right, though. That’s not her husband.”

  “That’s terrible gossip,” said Arlene. “She’s a good woman stopping through town is all.”

  “Did you see the rings? They were different! You can even see it in the magazine!”

  “Do you believe everything you read?” asked Arlene. “Now, enough of this nonsense.” She tried to look at Priscilla in the same way that the woman had looked at her—cool yet defiant, placid yet standing her ground—but Priscilla only retreated and raised her eyebrows. One of the other girls came into the kitchen, and Priscilla wasted no time in leaning her head in to hers, her voice low and conspiratorial. Like schoolgirls. They made Arlene feel old all over again. She wasn’t that old.

  She was only forty-seven. She could remember clear as anything being nine years old, sitting out on the front porch at one in the morning with her mother. Way back when Bakersfield wasn’t such a big city, back in 1921, their farmhouse on the outskirts of town. One night in August, Arlene had been unable to sleep, even with all the windows and both the front and back doors open for a cross breeze, the summer air stuck in the house. At one in the morning, she rose from her nest of blankets on the living room floor and walked out on the porch, unafraid.

  When her mother, awakened by the squeak of the porch door hinges, found her, she came out and sat next to Arlene on the steps. Why are you out here? her mother had asked, but she wasn’t expecting an answer. Your brother is going to be the same person you remember when he left. Everything is going to be just like it was. Nothing’s changed.

  Arlene walked to the empty booth and set about cleaning up the plates. But things always change, she thought to herself. She wasn’t just Mrs. Watson. Her name was Arlene, and she had once had a husband who said her name in the dark, and years ago her older brother had come back from prison to hug her and tell her that she was a sweet little sister. These things didn’t change simply because she had no one to tell them to. Arlene wanted to say this to those girls; she could see their faces as she wiped the booth’s table clean. She took the ticket and counted the money—the man was a big tipper.

  Once upon a time, her mother had told her on the porch, there was a little girl. She had no shoes and no food and she was walking in the woods. It was very cold, but she saw a little house in the trees and there was a yellow light in the wind
ow. She knocked, but no one answered, so she opened the door. The little house was empty. It was very cold and she was hungry and there was a pot with food in it. She could see the steam rising from the pot, so she went to taste it. It was soup and it was delicious.

  She had been nine years old and too old for stories, too old to be resting her head on her mother’s lap, yet too young to be sitting alone on the porch at one in the morning. Arlene had listened to her mother’s voice and closed her eyes to picture the scene. Her mother was remembering the story terribly, leaving out all the details. Arlene saw herself cold and hungry. Her mother’s voice said “woods,” but they lived in Bakersfield, California, and there were no woods to be found. There were orchards, but they didn’t look like anything in the torn pages of the book of fairy tales from which her mother was trying to remember the story, a dense gathering of trees so gigantic that only the trunks appeared on the page. Arlene knew those trees, having memorized them as she stared at the pages of the fairy-tale book. Orchards had order to them, trees in straight lines in every direction, underbrush cleared out incessantly. She was cold, but in the book of fairy tales, that meant snow, which didn’t fall in Bakersfield. There was only fog and light rain that lasted for days.

  At one point, Arlene had rested her hand on her mother’s knee to signal her to stop. When the girl tasted the soup, a wolf was supposed to come in, and then a handsome prince to save her, but her mother had the story all wrong in her attempt to retell it. Her mother told the story too fast. She did not linger on the darkness of the woods, the yellow eyes hiding in the night. She did not describe the warm glow of the house and how it held a promise of refuge, or the color of the soup, a clue to what kind it might be. Arlene was nine years old, already too old for stories, and had wondered to herself, ever since the day she had stared at the torn pages of the fairy-tale book, why the girl had a beautiful blue-checkered dress but ran barefoot. She wondered why anyone would build a house in such dark woods. She wondered who had been cooking the soup, and why the bright yellow windows were not bathed in steam. She wondered what a handsome prince would want with a girl who had no shoes.

  She was a waitress. She was a motel owner. She was a mother. She was an abandoned wife. She served coffee. She had a brother whom she had loved from a great distance, yet never saw again. Her name was Arlene. She served pie. Her name was Mrs. Watson. Her name was Arlene Watson before and during and after. She slid coins off countertops and dropped them into her apron pockets. She wanted to tell this to those girl waitresses to see if they would understand—that she was all of those things, and the town had a story about her and yet the story would never, ever come close to the truth. That she had a story and that it could change and that it was not over and that she was not on the last page. How one day she was happily married, and the next she was forty-seven years old, a thumb on the money in the right pocket of her uniform. Things change, she wanted to say. You don’t know anybody’s story.

  Arlene thought of the woman and the man and wondered if they were really married, if she was indeed the famous actress, if she was having an affair, what she might be doing in Bakersfield. She thought of the richest women she knew in town and couldn’t see any of them wearing a yellow blouse with silk-covered buttons. She lost herself in imagining everything about that woman, even tempted to voice some of her suspicions out loud to the girls, just to see if they might consider her, once again, as one of them. It occurred to Arlene, too, that the woman had stared back because Arlene had indeed discovered something, and it felt like the same stare she gave herself in the early morning hours, just out of bed, when she stared unblinking into the bathroom mirror and wondered how she could go on the way she was, working two jobs and not knowing what was to become of the motel.

  The thing was, it was easy to know what troubled her. Her face in the bathroom mirror during the early morning hours said it all. Her face stared back at her, as if waiting for Arlene to ask something of herself.

  “You take two tables,” she told Priscilla. “I’ve got a headache.” She expected no argument and she thumbed the man’s large tip in her apron pocket as she went back into the kitchen, past the large ovens and the walk-in pantry, and opened the door out to the alley to breathe a little.

  There was a cabin in a deep, dark forest. Someone built it. Someone chopped down those enormous trees whose tip-tops reached far past the boundaries of the pages in the fairy-tale book. There was more than the book could ever show. Someone cleared brush and sent field mice scurrying. Someone endured mud when the rains came, watched the ground dry out when the sun appeared, judged when it was time to get back to work. Someone took shelter under a canopy of branches as the cabin walls went up. Someone swept out the dust. Someone brought food to the cabin, sewed the red curtains in the windows, hauled in the kitchen table, the large pot to place over the fire. Someone lived in that cabin, and yet the little girl pushed open the door without knocking. Seeing no one there, she made the cabin her own and went right over to the steaming pot, claiming it. Hunger was no excuse. Neither was being lost. There was no rain, only cold, but she had run away from home with no shoes. You had to blame her for being stupid, for running away into a deep, dark forest without a pair of shoes. She must have owned several dresses if she had a beautiful blue one that never managed to get torn or dirty. She was never in any danger at all, really, when you stopped to think about it. Sometimes people are just that lucky. Their story works out. Hunger comes and it’s met by a pot of soup. Cold comes and there’s a warm cabin with no one in it. A wolf comes with teeth bared, but a handsome prince comes just at the right time to slay it. You never see how. He just does it, and the past gets wiped away. He takes away the girl in the blue dress and gives her shoes and marries her, a happily-ever-after, and no one ever asks about why she ran away from home in the first place.

  Four

  Around town, she was known as Alicia’s daughter—Alicia, that woman who used to work at the café, the woman who left not long after the Bakersfield earthquake in 1952, boarding a bus, it was said, to go back to her ex-husband in Texas, leaving Teresa to raise herself. You remember a woman like that. Teresa had been almost seventeen at the time, just a year away from being a grown woman in the eyes of the law, but she learned quickly that people in Bakersfield had their own ideas about who she was and could be. Alicia’s daughter. That poor girl left alone. That girl who lived right above the bowling alley, a green door at street level opening up to a narrow, dark stairwell, the room at the top.

  Her mother’s name got Teresa the job at the shoe store, not too far away from the café where her mother used to work. Her mother’s name kept her from being whistled at too loudly by the small group of Mexican workers who stood on the corner by the grocery store, the ones who had been too drunk to be picked up for work, too shy, too old, all of them watching Alicia’s daughter as she closed the green door behind her in the mornings and began her walk to work. Her mother’s name kept the attention of the waitresses who still remembered Alicia from her days at the café, the ones who watched her walk by and wondered how a girl so young, supporting herself, could have much to eat in that little room above the bowling alley. Her mother’s name, for at least a few years after her mother left, kept Teresa in a strange, collective safety, as if people in town knew they should keep a protective eye on her.

  But things change.

  People forgot her mother. The name Alicia hardly danced anymore on the tip of anyone’s tongue. New waitresses came on board at the café, some from Stockton, some from little places like Delano or Tulare, knowing no one in town. People had other things they wanted to remember, like what the five-and-dime looked like before the TG&Y moved in. People even forgot the earthquake, the terror of the tumbling brick, and the railroad tracks just out of town bent into a slithery S. Teresa herself grew past eighteen, past twenty, and by the time she was twenty-three, not many thought it was unusual that she had her own job and lived in a small room above a bowling alley, her one
little window with a dim yellow light glowing at dawn, sometimes the curl of a pale blue curtain fluttering past the open frame.

  She felt sometimes, as she closed the green door behind her and began her walk to work, that people had forgotten all about her, that they’d not only forgotten about her mother but about how her mother had left and why, and once they’d forgotten that story, Teresa would also disappear, like a figure into fog.

  She liked thinking of herself this way, as if it were one of those winter mornings when the Bakersfield streets clutched the fog deep into the asphalt and her own steps dissolved into all that white without a sound. What could people possibly know about her now? What could they say, when the years had eroded their concern and she walked with near anonymity along the streets of Bakersfield, no one wondering anymore just how she was going to take care of herself?

  You have, her mother had said to her, a very good head on your shoulders.

  She could do, she realized, whatever she wanted. She was twenty-three and her own woman.

  When had this idea bloomed in front of her? On one of her walks to work, no doubt, all those mornings, five days a week, sometimes six, when she came down the narrow stairwell in whatever weather. Every day the same thing, the Mexican workers on the corner, the initial whistles, then the fervent admonishment from one of the men to settle down: Cheno remembered her mother. He used to buy a work lunch when Teresa’s mother sold bean tacos or ham tortas during the summer months, Teresa collecting the coins. He knew they should treat her respectfully. Cheno, who was a little shorter than the rest of the men, neither the oldest nor the youngest in the group, the one without tattoos, who knew how to keep his white shirts white, who endured the taunts from the men when he rushed to defend her. She knew he was standing a little apart from the men, as if to guard her as she walked along the block, as if waiting for her to come back. But of course, by the time she returned home from work at the shoe store, the men on the corner had already dispersed, some because they’d been picked up as extra hands in the fields, the rest because the police had chased them away for drinking beer, even if it was in a paper bag.