What You See in the Dark (21 page)

“You’re faster than the young girls,” the new shift manager had said, almost two months after Arlene had taken to volunteering to do anything that would keep her in the kitchen. “I need you back out front.” The shift manager was in his late twenties, but respectful of her. Without prompting, he called her Arlene and not Mrs. Watson. Arlene liked this about him, as if he wanted to let her know that he didn’t think of her as anyone’s mother.

His voice was fraught with his own need for help, but she could still detect the kindness underneath it. “Those girls,” he said, “are too slow to handle anything all by themselves.”

At first, put back full-time at the front of the café, Arlene
felt on display, charging briskly by customers without saying a word, aware of the large plate-glass windows and the people walking by, maybe staring inside at the woman who worked there. Her fingers trembled sometimes from nerves, jittery in anticipation of the arrival of the police, coming to break the news of how they’d captured Dan. The deputy who used to come in daily for a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola stopped doing so, as if to spare her the discomfort. It was like that for a while—all jitters, forks slipping out of her fingers, one time being spooked so badly by the glimpse through the plate glass of a Bakersfield officer coming along the sidewalk that Arlene dropped a whole tray full of dirty dishes.

But things change. She had always told herself that on particularly difficult days. Things change. People would forget. People would find other things to whisper about. Who whispered now about her husband having left her? Who even remembered? Most of the bachelor farmers who used to give her the eye and the sweet talk stopped doing so, their heads dropped over their plates as soon as breakfast came. That had to do, she knew, with her getting older, not with her being divorced, not with what had happened to Dan.

Spring came, the light sharper in the window, Arlene walking across the street, where she could drop a few coins into the aluminum stand for a copy of the
Times.
During the postlunch afternoon lull, she would read with increasing interest about the world outside Bakersfield: catastrophic earthquakes in Chile, missiles firing into the skies above the vast oceans, the threatening pulse of the Russians, border skirmishes in Africa becoming near blooms of war. The rubble of the world clouded
out her own. She let her eyes rest on sports scores, the columnists eagerly awaiting the baseball season. She read of Kennedy and Johnson, a photograph of Stevenson’s bald head reminding her once again that, indeed, the years had passed, even though her mind insisted on marking time only from the murder in December. It couldn’t be so, she told herself, and opened the folds of the newspaper to bring the world in. Sometimes the arts beat covered the passage of a traveling photography exposition, and Arlene began to read of ancient pottery and medieval paintings with a mixture of awe and regret that such things existed in the world and she had no way of seeing them. European dance troupes pranced across Los Angeles stages, and after more than a few afternoons of making herself read the reviews, another kind of regret began to manifest itself, too: that she could understand, at least a little bit, the measure of argument and feeling that went into such reviews, and that the most joyous of them sparked in her a thirst to see a thing with her own eyes. When that feeling bubbled within her, she’d smooth the newspaper flat on the café counter and look up, the harsh light of Bakersfield coming through the plate windows. Spring had changed to summer.

The heat appeared to make everyone forget about what had happened in December. In June, the bowling alley put up a new neon sign, so big that it obscured the window of the apartment above, the place where that girl used to live. Sometimes, Arlene would drive by, urged on by a need to see a light on in the window, some sign that the landlord had rented the apartment out again. She was within the safety of her own vehicle, and yet she looked up warily and with a bit of shame, only to see the
window always dark and empty of a curtain or a shade, as sure a sign as any that, months later, the apartment remained still and bare.

Was she the only one who knew this? Was everyone forgetting? As much as she wanted the town to forget, she found herself helpless at the thought of such obliteration, the world overwhelming everything it could contain. The wide pages of the newspaper brought story after story, and even in the middle of summer, when she politely declined the telephone solicitation to resubscribe to the town newspaper she never read, Arlene was certain that even the story of the girl was fading in the minds of everyone in town, tumbling past rumor and into the darker jaws of complete erasure.

People left her alone. By July, most of the farmers regained a distinct comfort around her, and those who remained for a leisurely cup of coffee in the afternoon borrowed sections of the
Times
and spoke with her about Cuba and Nixon and the Chicago Cubs and the resurgent Germans. More and more of the men took the front section and the editorials and the sports columns, but she tucked the arts pages under the counter, her own private and more mature version of the daydreaming the girls still did over their movie magazines. The cinema postings sometimes boasted full-page advertisements for films soon to premiere in Los Angeles, the ink so profuse that it rubbed black on her thumbs, but Arlene liked the way she thrilled to the promise of a coming film, along with the attendant glamour of its premiere. She knew it would be weeks before the Jack Lemmon picture arrived in Bakersfield, and that the Italian films, with their curiously abstract but beguiling posters,
would never show up at the Fox, but she scanned the advertisements daily whenever a weekend approached, as if the films themselves held something extraordinary in the promise of their arrival.

One day, that Actress’s face appeared in an advertisement. The lettering of the film title cracked itself over the page, spread jagged like a plate dropped and shattered on the café floor. The Actress looked over her shoulder, mouth agape in a silent scream. Arlene studied it for a moment before raising her head from the counter and looking over at the booth where she remembered that Actress sitting. It was empty now, but she could see her clear as anything, her kind face somehow able to communicate her need to be left alone. And yet there she was on the page, the advertisement’s crooked terror a stark dismissal of what Arlene thought she knew about that Actress, passing through town.

The next day, the same advertisement appeared in a larger size, the silhouette of a foreboding house added to the background. Arlene hadn’t bothered, the previous day, to pay attention to the cramped credits running along the bottom, but today, because of the larger size, she could read the names, and when she spotted the Director, she saw, as if it were just yesterday, that man’s face peeking out at her from the backseat of a nice sedan.

If this was the film they had been shooting, she had no idea, then, what they could have wanted at her motel. Houses like the one in the silhouette didn’t look at all like those in Bakersfield, where the roofs sat low and the buildings wide and long, the better to open doors for a cross breeze. She looked at the
silhouette of the house, how easy it was to read its implied menace, then thought of the single, bare window above the bowling alley. She had to stop herself from thinking that Bakersfield wasn’t a place that spelled anything out in cracked letters.

After work, she drove by the Fox to see if the film would be playing, but nothing was showing except a negligible comedy and a western, films she knew had shown briefly in Los Angeles with hardly much interest. Things came slowly to Bakersfield. At the Fox, she got out of her car to see the posters behind the coming-attractions queue, but nothing showed of the Actress’s movie, and she walked back to her car and pulled into the quiet streets where nothing much ever seemed to happen. Her quiet town. She lived here. She had never left.

The film would come soon enough, she knew, and she resolved to see it, but when the deep heat of August arrived, the film with the menacing house had yet to appear. This was the loop she’d drive: first the silent apartment above the bowling alley, hoping for a light in the window, then to the Fox, hoping for the film. Nothing changed.

Then one afternoon she spotted an earnest but cheap bouquet of flowers at the foot of the green door to the apartment: she pressed the accelerator firmly without looking again, not wanting to catch even the silhouette of the person who may have been trying to remember that girl, and she knew, too, even before she arrived at the Fox, that the Actress’s face would be looking out at the Bakersfield street from the movie poster, her silent scream over her shoulder. Sure enough, when Arlene rounded the corner, the film had arrived.

A small line of people had queued up to see it, and she joined
them without hesitation. Every other woman in line was not only young but with a man—a date, a husband—but Arlene was alone, still in her waitress uniform, and if anyone from town recognized her, no one made a motion. The patrons were a younger set than most at the café, not at all like the farmers or the farmers’ wives, not at all like people who might have whispered behind her back about how Dan Watson had now been missing for almost nine months. They were here to see a film, young people who didn’t bother with busybodies who whispered with the Western Union clerk to see if Dan Watson might be getting secret money transfers in Mexico. They lined up at the refreshments counter for popcorn and candy, Arlene slipping into the screening room and taking her seat as quickly as she could.

It had been a long time since she’d been to a picture house. It had been years—since Frederick—and when the screen lit up, Arlene startled at the bright white, the scope of what she was about to see, and she remembered that bubble of anticipation. This time, though, the anticipation had been replaced by a sense of confirmation, that her deep suspicion of the Actress and the Director would reveal that they had been up to something—exactly what, she didn’t know—but as the credits cracked across the screen and the film score jittered the audience, she felt even more certain in her desire to maintain the anger she had felt against them that day. The film—she felt it in her bones—was going to confirm it.

But when the screen read “Phoenix” rather than “Bakers-field,” and the camera’s prying eye brought her inside a room that looked nothing like her highway motel, Arlene let go of
the righteous grip she’d held on her purse, but then tightened it again: she felt fooled by the Actress—brazen in her underclothes in the very first scene of the film! All along, Arlene had thought she would see her motel or even a replica of it. For all her hopes of seeing her place on the screen as a confirmation that she existed in the world, the story was set in Arizona, a woman in a bra and a man bare chested in a hotel chair.

Arlene almost stood up, indignant, but thought of all the young women in the audience, all the young men, and their silence behind her meant they didn’t mind at all what the Actress was doing on the screen. Arlene wouldn’t fool any of them, walking up the aisle with a nonchalance that suggested she was merely going to get a box of chocolates, so she sat and watched the Actress. Arlene quieted her mind enough to listen rather than just watch, and she learned that the Actress was playing a secretary deeply in love with the bare-chested man. She listened as they declared themselves to each other, thinking of Frederick, remembering the man who had sat across from the Actress that day, wondering if this might even be the same actor now. She saw immediately the Actress’s dilemma, the wish to be with a man she loved—what an old story—but there was no way in which they could be happy.

What did a search for happiness have to do with jagged letters and the dark silhouette of a house and the Actress screaming silently over her shoulder?

The Actress in her bra. The tittering of the young people in the audience, all behind her. Later in the story, an arrogant rich man flaunting money, drunk from an afternoon lunch. Arlene couldn’t picture the farmers at the café doing such a
thing, though a small dot within her knew better. All kinds of people did things just like what she was seeing on the screen. The Actress eyed the rich man’s money, and Arlene knew she would steal it, her ugly confirmation coming in the form of the Actress plotting an escape from Phoenix, clad once again in her bra. Arlene thought of the newspaper’s film reviews, the dance shows it touted, the traveling photography exhibits, the whole world of art set before her on the pages without ever hinting it could contain such crude ideas within it. Near nudity and adulterous affairs and now stealing. She could hear the young people in the audience laughing in nervous identification with the Actress as she made her way away from Phoenix, evading a policeman staring back at everyone in the theater with enormous reflective sunglasses, the jittery film score reviving yet again as a rainstorm drove the Actress into a dangerous situation. Yet Arlene still couldn’t find the nerve to get up.

When the Actress finally pulled over, putting a stop to the music, putting a stop to the rain, Arlene saw what was, in essence, her own life, right there on the screen. The long porch of her own motel. It wasn’t her motel, exactly, but an image of it, as if she’d closed her eyes to remember where she lived, out by the old highway, and there, up on the blank white canvas, the screen had called back at her with the best it could do to mock what she knew by heart.

The porch light. The doors. The way the porch sat a little high off the ground. The front office as the anchor to the rest of the building wing. It was her place. Hers! It was what the Director and the Actress had come to see.

And yet it wasn’t. Arlene wanted to turn around and say
something aloud to the young people watching, if they had even bothered to notice that the Actress had been moving from Phoenix and past Los Angeles to nowhere but Bakersfield. None of them could possibly know that motel on the screen, its front office filled with strange stuffed birds. She had no such thing! Her son was not a thin, cowardly type holding a tray of sandwiches and milk. That story he was telling about a mother who was losing her mind was absolutely false.