Manuel Munoz - What You See in the Dark

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 This time, though, the anticipation had been replaced by a sense of confirmation, that her deep suspicion of the Actress and the Director would reveal that they had been up to something — exactly what, she didn’t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.

All the young people sat quiet, listening to the thin coward on the screen, and Arlene listened, too, her hands on her purse, but finally she rose to her feet when the coward put his eye to a peephole in the wall, and they all saw, yet again, the Actress in her underclothes. Yet again — and in a bathroom! She’d had enough of such filth. Arlene rose to her feet and walked with purpose up the aisle, the silhouettes in the dark leaning to see around her. She could hear the pull of a shower curtain and she grimaced at the audacity of people like that Actress, people like that Director, people who reveled in adultery, in bras and cleavage and hairy chests, in theft, in deceit, in madness, in nakedness, in peepholes and lurid spaces. Arlene pushed her way through the velvet-padded door of the screening room and out to the plush carpet of the lobby, no one out there except the clerk at the concession stand.

“You can’t come back in, ma’am,” the clerk protested when he noticed that Arlene was heading for the exit, but she paid him no mind. She clutched her purse even harder when she heard a burst of screaming from the audience, but she moved on, not turning around. She was missing the answer, surely, to the jagged titles on the movie poster, and the screaming continued faintly, a hint of laughter even as the door to the Fox closed behind her. Who would want to know such things? She stood in the early evening of Bakersfield, the street lined up and down with the other patrons’ cars ready to take them home.

What a change — to go from the dread of being talked about as the mother of Dan Watson to stupidly wondering if the young people in town would think of her as a woman offended by a film, stomping out in indignation.

She went to work the next day and faced her usual stoic customers, looking for some sign that one of their sons or daughters might have mentioned seeing her at the picture house, but no one said a word. She set late-breakfast plates in front of Vernon and Cal as she always had. None of the young waitresses asked if she’d seen any films lately. No one said a thing.

All the days could do, she realized, was roll along. For all her shame in admitting that the spectacle on the screen had embarrassed her, no one actually cared. She was nothing but a shadow in the dark.

Over at the girl’s apartment, no other cheap bouquets ever showed up, and she began to wonder if there might even be another story attached to the one she had seen. Maybe it hadn’t even been left in memory, but was the remnant of a date gone wrong, some young people at the bowling alley, perhaps.

August passed. The fall came, with the light softening in the window. December rolled past, and with it the first anniversary of that young girl’s death, but no one looked at Arlene in silent knowing. Not the other waitresses, not Vernon, not Cal, not that young deputy who would come in for a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola.

People were going to forget that girl, Arlene realized. Just as they were beginning to forget her — Arlene Watson.