What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [71]
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