What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [23]
She thought of Cheno at lunchtime, when she took some of her hour to walk over to Stewart’s Appliances. The store, with its shiny radios and washers and sewing machines, was only for people with money. So Teresa stood outside the enormous store with its plate-glass windows reaching all the way to the sidewalk—built brand new and shatterproof after the earthquake—and watched the television sets, six of them playing without any sound. All six sets played a lunch-hour newscast, sometimes flashing pictures of the stark white regal domes and pillars of Washington, D.C., or some other faraway place, and Teresa patiently waited until it was over and the 12:30 musical show came on. A woman sang. Always a different woman, but always the same posture, the same stance—hips angled over to the side and arms straight down, her voice slowly rising to a crescendo Teresa could never hear from behind the window. She stood watching these soundless lunchtime concerts, and anyone watching her knew that she was dreaming beyond the desolation of Bakersfield’s dusty streets to a stage like the ones those women occupied, or to the theaters glimpsed by the audience when the cameras cut away to the interior: tiny round tables and elegant glasses, rows and rows of plush-looking seats. Velvet stage curtains and a spotlight like a tender moon, the full force of all manner of musical instruments, and men at the ready to play them: guitars, pianos, drums feathered gently, saxophones held to the lips with almost unbearable hesitation. Teresa daydreamed as the women sang because she couldn’t hear them through the glass. But she knew it would be over when the women’s arms finally reached outward to the camera, as if pleading, as if asking a lover back or sending him away, their mouths rounding out to release a last note held so impossibly long that Teresa thought she heard a glimmer of it through the thick plate-glass windows.
On afternoons in the dark quiet of the shoe store’s stockroom, she’d think of her mother boarding a bus and she would think of the hills south of Bakersfield and the pictures she saw of Los Angeles. Her mother had been heading to Texas, but Los Angeles would be the first city she would see, and Teresa wondered if her mother would be moved by the city’s pageantry and decide not to continue. You’ll understand one day, her mother had said, when you fall in love. Her mother’s words stayed with her for a long time, like the embraces of the chanteuses on her afternoon viewings, full of longing and never letting go. They filled Teresa with both hope and sadness: She understood, as she slid box after box onto the dusty shelves of the storeroom, that she had to fall in love first before she could be any of the women with the open arms. She understood, too, that this same hope and sadness led her imagination to put her mother back on the bus for the long hours to Texas, what she thought would be the hot, dusty sands of the Southwest before the bus stopped with a hiss and the door swung open for her mother’s release. Her mother with the open arms and someone there to receive them.
So when Cheno appeared one evening, the only person on the corner as she arrived home from work, she waited for him by the green door to her little room above the bowling alley. They stood there talking for a bit in Spanish and she asked him if he had worked that day. He said yes; she could tell that he was lying but she appreciated the effort that he had made, his plain white T-shirt tucked inside his pants, a faint