Ten
When had she picked up the habit of faithfully reading the Los Angeles Times every day? Not the Californian, the local newspaper she glanced at while at the kitchen table or in the motel office or swiping down the café counters, but the print from over the Grapevine, the pulse of the large city but a couple of hours away. At the café, Arlene had always been left to clean up the discarded copies of Modern Screen and Look that the girls left behind, and for a while she took these home with her on the sly, the magazines tucked into a paper bag in case anyone saw her slipping out the door with the very gossip she chastised the girls for believing. And people were watching her, after all. Back then, in the initial days after the news spread about the dead girl and Dan’s involvement with her, Arlene thought she would never live down the heavy stares in the dining area of the café. Arlene volunteered for kitchen cleanup and washed dishes and bused tables, kept herself moving, all to avoid those eyes. In the kitchen’s break area, she swept up the girls’ cigarette butts and candy wrappers and, at first, stacked the magazines neatly in a corner. As the months went on, Arlene found her voice again—the stern, somewhat prickly voice she was capable of—and when the girls found the magazines gone one day, none of them dared ask what might have happened to them.
The pleasure she took in the magazines, she knew, was nothing but escape, yet maybe for the first time, sitting in the armchair of her living room, flipping through the pages of a Photoplay, Arlene knew what the girls of the café might be dreaming about, why they were moved by picture after picture of movie stars posed with one leg pivoted forward, jewels haloed with gleam. All of this taking place just over the Grapevine, another way to live altogether, the dust giving way to red carpet and camera flash and expensive champagne. Sometimes, in the pictures of the much younger starlets, she could almost see vague semblances of the café girls, similarities so sharp that Arlene felt she, too, could imagine their regret over living in Bakersfield.
The local paper, carrying word of her own real world, appeared on her porch every day and remained there, curled up with its rubber band, yellowing after a few days of going un-collected. She knew what the paper said. She had a life much more regrettable than the café girls did. She stuck to the magazines: perfectly useless information, but a needed distraction from the local news, the chatter that went on in the café as she ran plates under hot water. What ran in the newspaper was not rumor anymore as the days went on. Truth was confirmed. It was true that the girl had no family in town and that there was no one to claim her. It was true that Dan had fled and no trace of him had been found. It was true that he had beaten the girl to death in the dark stairwell leading to her apartment above the bowling alley. It was true that a Mexican was deported, though everyone knew he had had no involvement in the death whatsoever.
Other things were true as well: Arlene did not know where Dan had gone, though sometimes she felt as if the town didn’t believe her. It was true that the girl was the daughter of a woman who used to work in the café years ago, around the time of the earthquake in 1952, but so much time had passed that people couldn’t even remember where that woman had gone.
Arlene knew what was in the local paper better than anyone else did, yet her eyes never left the glossy movie magazines, seeing the same pictures, the same stars, over and over, as she leafed through the pages day after day. Would the news about Dan ever go away? Would the feeling of being stared at in the café’s serving area ever lessen, the silent accusation? At home, she would pause and put down the movie magazine, close her eyes. But there was no wishing away what she had to face.
“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.
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.
The days kept going. She spread the news of the world on the café counter and watched the stories swallow up her hands, ink all over her fingertips. The light stung in the windows again, announcing spring, anticipating summer.
“Has anyone come to see you about your motel, Mrs. Watson?” Cal asked.
It was July. It was 1961. She looked up at Cal.
“You’ve been asking me that question for years, Cal.”
“The planning is over,” he said, pointing to the newspaper. “They’re building.”
She had known they were. She didn’t let on that she had stood on the edge of the motel parking lot, shading her eyes west. Past the fiery line of sunset, she could see nothing but empty space there, a horizon pulled taut. She didn’t know what she had expected to see—cranes, maybe, or the elevated ramps and thick pillars of highways like she had seen on television.
“Why would they come see me?”
“Are they anywhere close to your property? Could they buy you out?”
There hadn’t been much letup in her motel bookings. Sometimes weekends were slow, but that had always been the case. Still, from the banter of some of her more talkative customers, she knew the route was being built well west of her.
“I have no idea how close I’ll be to the highway.”
“It’s a freeway, not a highway,” said Vernon.
“Freeway or highway, what’s the difference?” she asked.
“We already have a highway,” said Vernon. “That’s the problem.” He sopped at his eggs over easy with a piece of bread and grabbed his silverware to demonstrate. “See these two lanes?” He placed the fork and knife next to each other. “They’re going in the same direction. There’s two other lanes right next to them going in the opposite direction. Just like the highway we have now.” He hovered his hand over the silverware, as if it were a car traveling. “Problem right now is that we run right through Bakersfield and Tulare and Kings-burg and so forth. The city traffic slows for all sorts of reasons. Stop signs or speed limits or cars pulling into motel parking lots.” Vernon motioned his hovering hand slowly to the right of the silverware. “With the new freeway, you don’t have none of that. Just a straight shot through. You get on by a ramp and you get off by a ramp. Easy breezy. No stop signs, nothing to slow the traffic down.”
“So?” she asked. “How’s that different?”
“Come on, Mrs. Watson,” said Cal. “Don’t tell me you can’t do the math. If I’m paying a trucker to get a load of eggs to Sacramento, do I want him there in five hours or seven? He could do five on the freeway because he never, ever has to stop or slow down. Unless he wants a cup of coffee.” He held out his cup. “That’s a different story.”
She poured, and Vernon finished with the silverware demonstration, taking them back up once again for his breakfast. “I hate to say it, but Cal was right all along. You should start thinking about selling that motel if you can.”
“No, Vernon, I can’t let that go.”
“Darlin’,” he said, putting down his utensils, “you’re just not going to have people stopping at the motel anymore. Not unless one of those ramps is close by.”
“People will still use the old Ninety-nine. Why wouldn’t they? You don’t just tear up a road that goes through town.”
“Arlene, you want to see it? You want to see the freeway with your own eyes?” Vernon asked. “What time do you get off shift today? I’ll drive you out there myself.”
“I get off at three.”
“I’ll be here.”
That afternoon, Vernon followed her to the motel. He drove a brand-new truck, sturdy and somehow elegant for its size and what he used it for. Vernon, she knew, was the kind of man who kept his possessions meticulously clean. She regretted that it was a Tuesday—the motel parking lot sat empty for lack of customers, and she hated for Vernon to see this. Arlene hurried from her vehicle with keys in hand, if only to keep Vernon from surveying the scene and saying something about her spotty business.
His truck was comfortable and the ride smooth. The air conditioner was on low, but the cab felt almost cold. “I’ve been watching them start on this thing for years. Just bit by bit. And they’ve got people working from here all the way up through Sacramento.”
“That’s good work, I guess,” Arlene said. “There’s always people looking for a job around here.” She looked out at the fields rolling by, and for the first time in a while, she thought of her older brother.
“I knew your husband, Frederick, a little bit,” said Vernon. He cleared his throat.
“How so?” She knew this but, surprised that Vernon had mentioned Frederick, put up a pretense.
“In town. You know how it is. Good people.”
The truck hummed along and Arlene waited for him to continue. She realized, too late, that she hadn’t said anything in agreement.
“I think he would’ve wanted you to sell that motel,” he said.
“He ain’t dead, Vernon,” she said. “He left me.”
“Arlene, he’d want you—”
“I could give a good goddamn what he would’ve wanted me to do.”
Vernon pursed his lips a bit. “What I mean … what’s best for you …” That didn’t sound right either and he stopped with a brief sigh. “It’s just a bad decision to hang on to that place, Arlene. Believe me. I’ve got property. You might end up with taxes on a place you can’t afford if the money stops flowing in. That’s all I’m saying.”
Up ahead, finally, she could see how the landscape had changed. Up ahead, she could see what it meant when Vernon said “ramp.” The road elevated in the distance.
“See that?” he said. “That’s the freeway.”
He slowed to a crawl and then turned the truck onto a dirt lane bordering a vineyard. The bumpy lane paralleled the new freeway, a deep ravine and fencing separating it from the site. Vernon guided the truck among the holes and the kicking dust and then finally stopped. “There it is.”
The two lanes shot north. The pavement seemed to glisten in the afternoon sun, a fresh gray, free of oil or grit, almost reflective in its newness. The lanes spanned wide, with generous shoulder room on either side, and even though Arlene could see enormous mounds of earth and gaps in the pavement only several feet away, it was clear that the freeway was a progression unimpeded. Up ahead, she could see the beginnings of a ramp and a completed overpass.
“Ah, that,” said Vernon. He eased the pickup truck along the dirt lane as far as the property line allowed, and Arlene could see why he had driven that distance. An enormous green sign loomed: union avenue.
“That’s the exit?”
“Straight into town,” said Vernon. “That means if someone takes that off-ramp and is looking for a place to sleep, your motel will already be behind them.”
The truck was still running, the air conditioner going at its low hum, still cold. Even so, Arlene could feel the sweat beginning to stick to the back of her waitress uniform. They sat in silence for a while, Vernon not turning off the truck.
Finally, Arlene shook her head slowly. “I wouldn’t know how to handle all that … paperwork … and … well …”
“You need to do it, though,” said Vernon, and he reached over and set his hand on top of hers. His hand was enormous and she could feel the calluses on his palms from his hard work. It was sweaty from having held the steering wheel. His hand did not move and neither did his fingers, and Arlene’s heart beat fast at his gesture. She waited for him to say something, maybe something about Frederick, what a fool he had been, but Vernon said nothing, and for a moment, Arlene wondered if his hand was nothing more than reassurance, that he recognized the gravity of her situation more than she did. When this thought crossed her mind, Arlene found herself oddly moved, and she felt tears coming, a knot in her throat. She swallowed hard to keep from crying.
Vernon moved his hand to her knee.
She pulled away as if touched by fire. “Vernon … ,” she said.
“Arlene, I just want you to know …”
“Take me home,” she said. “Please.”
What she had wanted was a quick drive home, but instead she had to endure the slow ease of the dirt lane all the way out to the main road. Their silence deepened and she kept expecting Vernon to offer a measure of apology. He stayed quiet, and Arlene felt the tears form and fall. She had no choice but to wipe at her cheeks and she turned away to the side window to do so, but she knew Vernon had seen her.
“I’m real sorry, Arlene … ,” Vernon began when he had pulled his pickup to a stop back at the motel parking lot, but by that time, Arlene had already opened the door to the truck cab and jumped out. She hurried to the house, listening for Vernon’s truck to gear. It finally did as her hands shook, trying to get the key into her front door lock.
She felt deeply shamed for the rest of the afternoon. That’s what the feeling was, in the end, a deep shame. Arlene could not identify what it was about Vernon or his gesture or her tears that prevented her from touching her dinner that evening, that kept her with her eyes open all night, lying in bed with her hands involuntarily smoothing her stomach, as if she were trying to keep something from rising. Whatever it was, though, felt exactly like all of those afternoons in the first months after Dan had disappeared, the eyes in the café silently watching her, felt exactly like the moment she had moved through the darkness of the picture house, her shadow laughable in its anonymous anger. She was no one that anyone had to worry about, and to think that someone like Vernon might ever have held feelings for her. What a fool not to have seen it, not to have believed it. All this time, she had been thinking of herself in the way others saw her—an abandoned wife, a lowly waitress, an aging woman whom no one could even bother to gossip about anymore—but Vernon himself had not.
The next morning, she rose with a bleary resolution to apologize to Vernon, somehow send him a sign that she, in fact, understood what he was offering, that his gesture was not unlike the shine of the camera bulbs in the movie magazines, a promise of a different life altogether. He had her best interests in mind, saw her as belonging in another space, not the motel, maybe not even the café.
But Vernon did not come in for his usual breakfast, Cal sitting alone with his newspaper. The next morning, he did not come either. Cal made no mention of Vernon’s absence and she was too embarrassed to pose an innocent question to him about Vernon’s whereabouts, to ask if Vernon had taken ill. Arlene let the anticipation sit. The small dot within her knew better. It knew in the same way she knew something when she stepped out of the picture house, when she saw the taillights of Dan’s escape, when she rested her head on Frederick’s chest on their wedding night, when she spotted her brother on the road, years and years and years ago.
Things change, the small dot told her. But she was not going to be able to.
This was July 1961. Vernon never came into the café again. That fall, Cal married a clerk from the shoe store, and the two had a baby, and the farmers who came in to fill where Vernon and Cal had once sat were not much interested in either Arlene or her daily newspaper reading, the outside world being something they would rather not deal with.
She wished now that she could remember the day—the exact day—when she stopped looking at the café door in anticipation. The day she stopped waiting for a policeman to come in to report on Dan, Vernon to come in with his hat in his hands. Time just passed.
It took a year from that moment for the freeway to open, in summer 1962.
Talk around the café was about the boom in business along Union Avenue. The freeway fed the street like a vein with Los Angeles traffic. The café bustled, but her motel vacancy rate jumped, more than half the rooms empty, some weekends without a single customer at all. When Arlene began to recognize a set of regulars—truckers who went all the way north to Oregon and Washington State—she suspected that many of them stopped not only out of loyalty and familiarity but out of a bit of pity as well.
She watched as Union Avenue underwent construction to accommodate the new traffic, the buzz in downtown all about the flood of anticipated business. Construction crews busied themselves with roof work, facade restructurings, paint jobs, drills busting up the concrete sidewalks. Arlene wasn’t fooled by any of it. The small dot inside her told her to watch the condition of the vinyl seating in the café, the minuscule rips becoming long, jagged tears. It told her to watch as the summer season went by and the owner neglected to freshen up the paint. It told her to watch as the pedestrian traffic began to lessen, the cars inching along the street to the far end, where the town had been dazzled by the newer strip malls and a Texaco gas station selling hot dogs. She kept putting breakfast plates on the table, but now news was about heart attacks and strokes, her sturdy men not doing well in the heat like they used to. The tips got smaller, the hands holding the coins a little sheepish about what they were able to put down. She felt the café slip right through the town’s fingers, the way it stopped being the center of anything, and out in the world, the Cubans threatened, but the small dot within her confirmed that this was the inevitability of all things. The world meant nothing because this was the life she had chosen, this space with plate-glass windows from floor to ceiling, which looked more shoddy by the year.
The president was shot and killed in Dallas and the girls in the kitchen hovered around the TV set, their hands on the antenna to bring in the hazy news. The motel got so bad that Arlene took to letting out some of the rooms at the far end to the café girls who got in trouble with a baby but had no man around. The Los Angeles paper gave her news of the boiling race relations in the South. She had dreams of Kennedy, the president smiling at her with enormous, bloody teeth. Slowly, the familiar faces of the farmers began to disappear, more and more of them.
Things change, but she wasn’t ever going to.
Around town, she was known as just Arlene after all.
When she looked up from the counter, eyes away from the newspaper, it was another year gone, another time coming, the light in the café window sometimes blunt, sometimes wavering, but she was powerless to ever make it appear otherwise.
That was exactly how the years were going to race, now that she had nothing.
You can’t go back in, ma’am—the voice of the theater concession clerk coming back to mock her.
When she looked up from the counter, it was 1968 and she was fifty-six years old. It was as if she’d never been anybody’s anything.
“Arlene,” said one of the girls during a break. She was the youngest sibling of one of the girls Arlene used to supervise, years ago, but now here was proof yet again of change. Her name was Peggy.
“Are you going to watch Petula Clark next week?” Peggy asked. “Do you like her?” She pointed to a picture in the newspaper.
“I do, actually,” Arlene replied. She peered down to the newspaper and followed the girl’s finger to the article.
“It says they might not air her special because she touched a black man,” the girl said, her voice a little louder than it needed to be, gleeful at how she’d caused the slight head raises from some of the older farmers.
“Oh, now …” Arlene began to read the article. “It’s Harry Belafonte.”
“So why is it such a big deal?”
“You know how people are,” Arlene said, but she read the rest of the article, which told her about local affiliates being left to choose whether to broadcast the event. Inside, she held a quiver of disbelief and anticipation over how angry the show sponsors had been about Petula Clark touching Harry Bela-fonte, the fine line being walked. What kind of touching was it, these two being so harmless? She continued through the rest of the article and then handed the newspaper back to the girl. “That’s some stuff.”
“Do you think our affiliate will carry it?”
“Of course they will. LA is right over the hill.” She said it as if she traveled right over the Grapevine all the time, as if she knew all about places like Los Angeles and how the big cities had been facing these years of change.
The only time she’d ever been out of Bakersfield was for her honeymoon drive to the coast with Frederick to see the big rock sitting in the middle of Morro Bay.
For the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t get Petula Clark’s “Downtown” out of her head despite the café’s constant music. She smiled to herself at the song’s foolishness, thinking of Bakersfield’s broad, desolate avenues, its languishing TG&Y with the empty parking lot, its forlorn flower shop across the street. She shook her head at the thought of how much she had liked the song not that long ago, how’d she thought of the song’s promise and invitation. Dreaming just like my young girls, she thought, picturing them awkward with a tray of drinks, the way they flirted with the men their age, what they were imagining for a future. It dawned on her that Petula Clark must’ve been singing of some place she had been enraptured by. Enough to write a song about it. Enough to put to words how the act of going to that place lifted her spirits.
Bakersfield was nothing to sing about.
When the Petula Clark show came on the air, it was the first week of April. The weather was warm. She left the front door open so she could hear any trucks pull into the motel parking lot—she didn’t want to have to rise from her chair once the show started. Petula Clark appeared and sang a handful of songs that Arlene vaguely remembered, others she’d never heard at all. The hour ticked by, but still no Harry Belafonte. The parking lot stayed silent. Finally, he loomed on the screen after a commercial break, Petula Clark in the distance, as if wondering whether to approach him. He began to sing in his delicious voice, and she walked toward him, closer and closer, until she stood by him. The paper said that Petula Clark would touch a black man and wondered openly about an uproar in the South, maybe even in other places throughout the United States. Arlene waited for the moment, almost holding her breath.
Quietly, without much fanfare, Petula Clark rested her hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm. She rested it as if she needed to steady herself. Both of them were wearing white clothing: he in a tucked-in sweater and trousers, she in an elegant and tasteful dress. Maybe the clothing was cream-colored—Arlene couldn’t tell because of the fading picture quality of her television set. They sang the rest of the song with Petula’s hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm, and Arlene heard no murmur of audience disapproval. Then she remembered it had been taped to begin with, not live, not an audience watching them. She imagined people in the South turning off their sets, if they had bothered to watch at all. But she knew they watched. It had been all over the news, how a man and a woman who shouldn’t touch were going to do so. The newspaper didn’t say how they touched, and that was why everyone needed to see it. To see just how much things were changing.
So much time had passed, so many years. And just how were things really changing? She worked in a café that had nowhere to go but into decline. The motel, in the end, was housing a pregnant girl or two, and there wasn’t much she could ever hope for in selling it.
The program ended. Petula Clark did not sing “Downtown,” but Arlene heard a riff of it near the finish. Outside, the parking lot remained quiet. There would be no one coming tonight. When the credits finished rolling, Arlene debated watching the next program to lull her to sleep, but instead she got up from the chair and turned off the TV. She walked out to the porch. She thought of her days as a little girl. All these years. She was fifty-six years old. She put her hand on her elbow, resting it there the way Petula Clark had touched Harry Belafonte. The gesture had meant nothing more than kindness. The gesture reminded her of Vernon, how long it had been now since she’d seen him, and of all the regrets in her life, this was the one that stung the most.
It was all hers, all private, the one thing that no one else had witnessed, all hers to embrace. She knew Vernon would never have spoken about it. His hand on her hand, then on her knee, the calluses, what a hard worker he was. All those years, he’d been a very kind customer, seated at the counter with a comforting regularity. He had meant well by her. He could have spared her what was coming. He’d been a very decent man, but it was too late, too late. She was standing on a dark porch, just as she had been years ago, waiting for her brother. She tried to think back to the day when everything—everything, everything—had gone wrong, to the day that had led to this moment, but she couldn’t see it. She looked as hard as she could into the dark but she couldn’t see it.