What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [20]
She was only forty-seven. She could remember clear as anything being nine years old, sitting out on the front porch at one in the morning with her mother. Way back when Bakersfield wasn’t such a big city, back in 1921, their farmhouse on the outskirts of town. One night in August, Arlene had been unable to sleep, even with all the windows and both the front and back doors open for a cross breeze, the summer air stuck in the house. At one in the morning, she rose from her nest of blankets on the living room floor and walked out on the porch, unafraid.
When her mother, awakened by the squeak of the porch door hinges, found her, she came out and sat next to Arlene on the steps. Why are you out here? her mother had asked, but she wasn’t expecting an answer. Your brother is going to be the same person you remember when he left. Everything is going to be just like it was. Nothing’s changed.
Arlene walked to the empty booth and set about cleaning up the plates. But things always change, she thought to herself. She wasn’t just Mrs. Watson. Her name was Arlene, and she had once had a husband who said her name in the dark, and years ago her older brother had come back from prison to hug her and tell her that she was a sweet little sister. These things didn’t change simply because she had no one to tell them to. Arlene wanted to say this to those girls; she could see their faces as she wiped the booth’s table clean. She took the ticket and counted the money—the man was a big tipper.
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