What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [22]
Four
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.
But things change.
People forgot her mother. The name Alicia hardly danced anymore on the tip of anyone’s tongue. New waitresses came on board at the café, some from Stockton, some from little places like Delano or Tulare, knowing no one in town. People had other things they wanted to remember, like what the five-and-dime looked like before the TG&Y moved in. People even forgot the earthquake, the terror of the tumbling brick, and the railroad tracks just out of town bent into a slithery S. Teresa herself grew past eighteen, past twenty, and by the time she was twenty-three, not many thought it was unusual that she had her own job and lived in a small room above a bowling alley, her one little window with a dim yellow light glowing at dawn, sometimes the curl of a pale blue curtain fluttering past the open frame.
She felt sometimes, as she closed the green door behind her and began her walk to work, that people had forgotten all about her, that they’d not only forgotten about her mother but about how her mother had left and why, and once they’d forgotten that story, Teresa would also disappear, like a figure into fog.
She liked thinking of herself this way, as if it were one of those winter mornings when the Bakersfield streets clutched the fog deep into the asphalt and her own steps dissolved into all that white without a sound. What could people possibly know about her now? What could they say, when the years had eroded their concern and she walked with near anonymity along the streets of Bakersfield, no one wondering anymore just how she was going to take care of herself?
You have, her mother had said to her, a very good head on your shoulders.
She could do, she realized, whatever she wanted. She was twenty-three and her own woman.
When had this idea bloomed in front of her? On one of her walks to work, no doubt, all those mornings, five days a week, sometimes six, when she came down the narrow stairwell in whatever weather. Every day the same thing, the Mexican workers on the corner, the initial whistles, then the fervent admonishment from one of the men to settle down: Cheno remembered her mother. He used to buy a work lunch when Teresa’s mother sold bean tacos or ham tortas during the summer months, Teresa collecting the coins. He knew they should treat her respectfully. Cheno, who was a little shorter than the rest of the men, neither the oldest nor the youngest in the group,