What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [21]
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