What You See in the Dark (7 page)

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

A
round 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.

She thought of Cheno at lunchtime, when she took some of her hour to walk over to Stewart’s Appliances. The store, with its shiny radios and washers and sewing machines, was only for people with money. So Teresa stood outside the enormous store with its plate-glass windows reaching all the way to the sidewalk—built brand new and shatterproof after the earthquake—and watched the television sets, six of them playing without any sound. All six sets played a lunch-hour newscast, sometimes flashing pictures of the stark white regal domes and pillars of Washington, D.C., or some other faraway place, and Teresa patiently waited until it was over and the 12:30 musical show came on. A woman sang. Always a different woman, but always the same posture, the same stance—hips angled over to the side and arms straight down, her voice slowly rising to a crescendo Teresa could never hear from behind the window. She stood watching these soundless lunchtime concerts, and anyone watching her knew that she was dreaming beyond the desolation of Bakersfield’s dusty streets to a stage like the ones those women occupied, or to the theaters glimpsed by the audience when the cameras cut away to the interior: tiny round tables and elegant glasses, rows and rows of plush-looking seats. Velvet stage curtains and a spotlight like a tender moon, the full force of all manner of musical instruments, and men at the ready to play them: guitars, pianos, drums feathered gently, saxophones held to the lips with almost unbearable hesitation. Teresa daydreamed as the women sang because she couldn’t hear them through the glass. But she knew it would
be over when the women’s arms finally reached outward to the camera, as if pleading, as if asking a lover back or sending him away, their mouths rounding out to release a last note held so impossibly long that Teresa thought she heard a glimmer of it through the thick plate-glass windows.

On afternoons in the dark quiet of the shoe store’s stockroom, she’d think of her mother boarding a bus and she would think of the hills south of Bakersfield and the pictures she saw of Los Angeles. Her mother had been heading to Texas, but Los Angeles would be the first city she would see, and Teresa wondered if her mother would be moved by the city’s pageantry and decide not to continue.
You’ll understand one day,
her mother had said,
when you fall in love.
Her mother’s words stayed with her for a long time, like the embraces of the chanteuses on her afternoon viewings, full of longing and never letting go. They filled Teresa with both hope and sadness: She understood, as she slid box after box onto the dusty shelves of the storeroom, that she had to fall in love first before she could be any of the women with the open arms. She understood, too, that this same hope and sadness led her imagination to put her mother back on the bus for the long hours to Texas, what she thought would be the hot, dusty sands of the Southwest before the bus stopped with a hiss and the door swung open for her mother’s release. Her mother with the open arms and someone there to receive them.

So when Cheno appeared one evening, the only person on the corner as she arrived home from work, she waited for him by the green door to her little room above the bowling alley. They stood there talking for a bit in Spanish and she asked him
if he had worked that day. He said yes; she could tell that he was lying but she appreciated the effort that he had made, his plain white T-shirt tucked inside his pants, a faint hint of bleach carrying in the air, mixing with the Lucky Tiger oil he used to slick back his hair. Even the way he had hesitated in crossing the street charmed her a bit: tentative, looking at her as if awaiting a sign from a distant star.

They talked for no more than fifteen minutes, her hand on her purse even though there was nothing to guard except her key, and when he parted, Teresa knew he would be back the next day. She let herself in and climbed the stairs, immediately going to the window to peek out, just in time to see his form make its way down the street and finally turn a corner, heading west, walking all that way to the side of town where men lived too many to a house.

The next day, when the Mexican men on the corner watched her emerge, the usual taunts began. “¡Ay, mi amor!” “¿Adónde vas con mi corazón?” She walked on but cast a quick glance to see if Cheno was in the group, attempting to quiet them. He didn’t catch her looking for him, but she was heartened by the uninterrupted catcalling, certain that Cheno had done no bragging of his own. That evening he appeared at the corner with two lukewarm bottles of soda, which he uncapped against each other, and this was the start of his small, edible gifts: candy bars and fresh peaches and cans of Kern’s nectar and dried apricots and shelled walnuts packed into an empty Gerber baby-food jar.

They’d eat these treats sitting on the curb in front of the green door leading up to her apartment, mostly in the early
part of the week. The closer the days got to Friday, the busier the bowling alley became in the evening, and Cheno withdrew, as if he didn’t want to be seen by anyone. She liked this about him, as if their short evenings were a secret between them, despite meeting out in the open. As the days passed, her affection for him grew, the way his gentle fingers carefully handed over his latest gift, not wanting to touch and offend her, his round eyes taking her in like light. She began to notice mornings when he wasn’t at the corner at all, the catcalls uninterrupted, and these disappearances alarmed her at first, until she figured out that he was wheedling himself into more work. She left the curtains open one night so that the dawn light would wake her as she lay in her bed under the window. She hoisted herself up on her elbows to peer down, and sure enough, there was Cheno in the hushed violet of five in the morning with a few other hard workers, ready to go, and not ten minutes later, he climbed into a farmer’s truck and was whisked away, his head turning toward her apartment and his gaze steady on her window.