What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [79]
“Do you think our affiliate will carry it?”
“Of course they will. LA is right over the hill.” She said it as if she traveled right over the Grapevine all the time, as if she knew all about places like Los Angeles and how the big cities had been facing these years of change.
The only time she’d ever been out of Bakersfield was for her honeymoon drive to the coast with Frederick to see the big rock sitting in the middle of Morro Bay.
For the rest of the afternoon, she couldn’t get Petula Clark’s “Downtown” out of her head despite the café’s constant music. She smiled to herself at the song’s foolishness, thinking of Bakersfield’s broad, desolate avenues, its languishing TG&Y with the empty parking lot, its forlorn flower shop across the street. She shook her head at the thought of how much she had liked the song not that long ago, how’d she thought of the song’s promise and invitation. Dreaming just like my young girls, she thought, picturing them awkward with a tray of drinks, the way they flirted with the men their age, what they were imagining for a future. It dawned on her that Petula Clark must’ve been singing of some place she had been enraptured by. Enough to write a song about it. Enough to put to words how the act of going to that place lifted her spirits.
Bakersfield was nothing to sing about.
When the Petula Clark show came on the air, it was the first week of April. The weather was warm. She left the front door open so she could hear any trucks pull into the motel parking lot—she didn’t want to have to rise from her chair once the show started. Petula Clark appeared and sang a handful of songs that Arlene vaguely remembered, others she’d never heard at all. The hour ticked by, but still no Harry Belafonte. The parking lot stayed silent. Finally, he loomed on the screen after a commercial break, Petula Clark in the distance, as if wondering whether to approach him. He began to sing in his delicious voice, and she walked toward him, closer and closer, until she stood by him. The paper said that Petula Clark would touch a black man and wondered openly about an uproar in the South, maybe even in other places throughout the United States. Arlene waited for the moment, almost holding her breath.
Quietly, without much fanfare, Petula Clark rested her hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm. She rested it as if she needed to steady herself. Both of them were wearing white clothing: he in a tucked-in sweater and trousers, she in an elegant and tasteful dress. Maybe the clothing was cream-colored—Arlene couldn’t tell because of the fading picture quality of her television set. They sang the rest of the song with Petula’s hand on Harry Belafonte’s arm, and Arlene heard no murmur of audience disapproval. Then she remembered it had been taped to begin with, not live, not an audience watching them. She imagined people in the South turning off their sets, if they had bothered to watch at all. But she knew they watched. It had been all over the news, how a man and a woman who shouldn’t touch were going to do so. The newspaper didn’t say how they touched, and that was why everyone needed to see it. To see just how much things were changing.
So much time had passed, so many years. And just how were things really changing? She worked in a café that had nowhere to go but into decline. The motel, in the end, was housing a pregnant girl or two, and there wasn’t much she could ever hope for in selling it.
The program ended. Petula Clark did not sing “Downtown,” but Arlene heard a riff of it near the finish. Outside, the parking lot remained quiet. There would be no one coming tonight. When the credits finished rolling, Arlene debated watching the next program