Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

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 window. 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.

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.