What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [78]
Talk around the café was about the boom in business along Union Avenue. The freeway fed the street like a vein with Los Angeles traffic. The café bustled, but her motel vacancy rate jumped, more than half the rooms empty, some weekends without a single customer at all. When Arlene began to recognize a set of regulars—truckers who went all the way north to Oregon and Washington State—she suspected that many of them stopped not only out of loyalty and familiarity but out of a bit of pity as well.
She watched as Union Avenue underwent construction to accommodate the new traffic, the buzz in downtown all about the flood of anticipated business. Construction crews busied themselves with roof work, facade restructurings, paint jobs, drills busting up the concrete sidewalks. Arlene wasn’t fooled by any of it. The small dot inside her told her to watch the condition of the vinyl seating in the café, the minuscule rips becoming long, jagged tears. It told her to watch as the summer season went by and the owner neglected to freshen up the paint. It told her to watch as the pedestrian traffic began to lessen, the cars inching along the street to the far end, where the town had been dazzled by the newer strip malls and a Texaco gas station selling hot dogs. She kept putting breakfast plates on the table, but now news was about heart attacks and strokes, her sturdy men not doing well in the heat like they used to. The tips got smaller, the hands holding the coins a little sheepish about what they were able to put down. She felt the café slip right through the town’s fingers, the way it stopped being the center of anything, and out in the world, the Cubans threatened, but the small dot within her confirmed that this was the inevitability of all things. The world meant nothing because this was the life she had chosen, this space with plate-glass windows from floor to ceiling, which looked more shoddy by the year.
The president was shot and killed in Dallas and the girls in the kitchen hovered around the TV set, their hands on the antenna to bring in the hazy news. The motel got so bad that Arlene took to letting out some of the rooms at the far end to the café girls who got in trouble with a baby but had no man around. The Los Angeles paper gave her news of the boiling race relations in the South. She had dreams of Kennedy, the president smiling at her with enormous, bloody teeth. Slowly, the familiar faces of the farmers began to disappear, more and more of them.
Things change, but she wasn’t ever going to.
Around town, she was known as just Arlene after all.
When she looked up from the counter, eyes away from the newspaper, it was another year gone, another time coming, the light in the café window sometimes blunt, sometimes wavering, but she was powerless to ever make it appear otherwise.
That was exactly how the years were going to race, now that she had nothing.
You can’t go back in, ma’am—the voice of the theater concession clerk coming back to mock her.
When she looked up from the counter, it was 1968 and she was fifty-six years old. It was as if she’d never been anybody’s anything.
“Arlene,” said one of the girls during a break. She was the youngest sibling of one of the girls Arlene used to supervise, years ago, but now here was proof yet again of change. Her name was Peggy.
“Are you going to watch Petula Clark next week?” Peggy asked. “Do you like her?” She pointed to a picture in the newspaper.
“I do, actually,” Arlene replied. She peered down to the newspaper and followed the girl’s finger to the article.
“It says they might not air her special because she touched a black man,” the girl said, her voice a little louder than it needed to be, gleeful at how she’d caused the slight head raises from some of the older farmers.
“Oh, now …” Arlene began to read the article. “It’s Harry Belafonte.”
“So why is it such a big deal?”
“You know how people are,” Arlene said, but she read the rest of the article, which told her about local affiliates being left