What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [74]
When the Actress finally pulled over, putting a stop to the music, putting a stop to the rain, Arlene saw what was, in essence, her own life, right there on the screen. The long porch of her own motel. It wasn’t her motel, exactly, but an image of it, as if she’d closed her eyes to remember where she lived, out by the old highway, and there, up on the blank white canvas, the screen had called back at her with the best it could do to mock what she knew by heart.
The porch light. The doors. The way the porch sat a little high off the ground. The front office as the anchor to the rest of the building wing. It was her place. Hers! It was what the Director and the Actress had come to see.
And yet it wasn’t. Arlene wanted to turn around and say something aloud to the young people watching, if they had even bothered to notice that the Actress had been moving from Phoenix and past Los Angeles to nowhere but Bakersfield. None of them could possibly know that motel on the screen, its front office filled with strange stuffed birds. She had no such thing! Her son was not a thin, cowardly type holding a tray of sandwiches and milk. That story he was telling about a mother who was losing her mind was absolutely false.
All the young people sat quiet, listening to the thin coward on the screen, and Arlene listened, too, her hands on her purse, but finally she rose to her feet when the coward put his eye to a peephole in the wall, and they all saw, yet again, the Actress in her underclothes. Yet again—and in a bathroom! She’d had enough of such filth. Arlene rose to her feet and walked with purpose up the aisle, the silhouettes in the dark leaning to see around her. She could hear the pull of a shower curtain and she grimaced at the audacity of people like that Actress, people like that Director, people who reveled in adultery, in bras and cleavage and hairy chests, in theft, in deceit, in madness, in nakedness, in peepholes and lurid spaces. Arlene pushed her way through the velvet-padded door of the screening room and out to the plush carpet of the lobby, no one out there except the clerk at the concession stand.
“You can’t come back in, ma’am,” the clerk protested when he noticed that Arlene was heading for the exit, but she paid him no mind. She clutched her purse even harder when she heard a burst of screaming from the audience, but she moved on, not turning around. She was missing the answer, surely, to the jagged titles on the movie poster, and the screaming continued faintly, a hint of laughter even as the door to the Fox closed behind her. Who would want to know such things? She stood in the early evening of Bakersfield, the street lined up and down with the other patrons’ cars ready to take them home.
What a change—to go from the dread of being talked about as the mother of Dan Watson to stupidly wondering if the young people in town would think of her as a woman offended by a film, stomping out in indignation.
She went to work the next day and faced her usual stoic customers, looking for some sign that one of their sons or daughters might have mentioned seeing her at the picture house, but no one said a word. She set late-breakfast plates in front of Vernon and Cal as she always had. None of the young waitresses asked if she’d seen any films lately. No one said a thing.
All the days could do, she realized, was roll along. For all her shame in admitting that the spectacle on the screen had embarrassed