“Awfully defensive,” said the Director. “Whatever was she talking about?”
“In the café,” said the Actress. “She was our waitress, the hostess. Did you see her, Carter?”
“I did, ma’am.”
“What was she angry about?” asked the Director.
“She recognized me and I told her she was mistaken,” said the Actress, and yet while she saw that such an exchange shouldn’t have warranted such a reaction, something else about the woman lingered with her, a strange understanding.
“So unpleasant,” said the Director. “In any case, I’m sure the set decorator can put together a typical room from a few photographs. It’s an easy layout to copy. Flat, rectangular. Nothing complex.”
No, the Actress thought, not complex at all. Carter drove them back into Bakersfield. She put her hand to her forehead and leaned against the door, sighing audibly as if she were tired, and the Director took the hint. The ride back was quiet. She thought about the woman, her fierce response to their presence, to her small white lie. What kind of person was she to react with such defensive hurt? she wondered. The woman was a café hostess, but what was she doing at the motel? Was it a second job? No, not if she was still wearing the uniform. Perhaps she was the wife of the man who owned Watson’s Inn, an unhappy marriage, given the way the Actress had noticed the woman casting glances at her and Carter during their meal. The woman had tried to figure out if she could place her as a Hollywood star, to be sure, but she had also paid mind to the way she set down the plates in front of Carter, her eyes darting quickly to his face as if to gauge if he was pleased. A café waitress. A wife. A motel owner. A harried café waitress. A lonely wife. A desperate motel owner. She spun the words in her head, more and more of them, inventing, watching Bakersfield come into view. Who could live in this city? What brought or kept them here?
The Actress thought of what she’d discussed with the Director that evening, about exteriors and brevity and visual cues, and she brought all this to bear on her character, the Phoenix secretary. A Phoenix secretary was not enough. For simplicity’s sake, yes. But a Phoenix secretary had an interior, too, a heart filled with dark hope and longing after she’d looked at a photograph and with justifications she’d made while lying awake in the dark. The Actress would not gloss over these things, however much she had to invent them, have hints of it flash across her face. It’s all in the eyes, the aging silent actress had told her many years ago, and she was discovering that this was truer than she ever thought possible, that the aging actress had been talking about more than just beauty all along.
Part Two
Eight
The months went on and things did not change. October rolled on through November, the December gray finally blocking out the sun. As the year wore on, Arlene took notice some days of how the morning looked through the plate-glass windows. How did Bakersfield ever get through the summer heat, the intolerably white sunlight? The only thing changing was the season, but who paid attention to that? Not the girls chattering along and unfocused while the customers waited for coffee. Not Dan, still seeing the young Mexican girl from the shoe store, sometimes even daring to come into the café with her, her little shoulders sporting a new winter jacket. What could Arlene do? Did she want things to change? The farmers noted the change, though you couldn’t tell from Vernon, who still came in during the late morning, or Cal, who joined him at the counter not fifteen minutes later. They bantered with her, and the exchanges were mechanical yet soothing to Arlene, like listening to a clock. No, not much was changing except the weather, the seasons, Arlene ending her café shifts at five with the streets nearly gone dark. Her Ford was a serviceable’52, but the engine doubted itself more and more as the chill of evening settled deep all around her. She made the nervous drive home with a certainty that her headlights would fail, but they, too, held on. It was a change she wouldn’t have wanted — the need for a new car when winter was making money scarce all around the city.
More and more, once she got back to the motel, she would find the parking lot empty and Dan nowhere to be seen. He’d taken up with that girl enough to sometimes close the front office too early in the evening, the motel mostly empty. Who knew how many customers had driven away when no one answered the knock at the front office? Tonight, the parking lot was empty for a weekend, and she knew even before she pulled up close to the front office that Dan had already left.
Every once in a while, back at the café, Cal would read the latest news about the new highway, and she would keep up her nonchalance, acting as if she wasn’t already alarmed at the current downturn in business. What was it? The lack of paint? The two new motels nearby that had come up that summer? Was her rate in line with the rest of the city? She thought about how much worse it would get if the highway diverted the traffic away, as Cal kept insisting it would.
Things change, she thought to herself, though this was a slow, creeping change, like water seeping underneath a door.
This evening was going to be like every other evening. Dan had purchased a TV for her from Stewart’s Appliances, a hefty color set to appease her for his absence, but it was a complete waste in her mind, since half the programming was in black and white. These days, she’d come home from the café so exhausted that, with Dan not around to cook for, she had started buying those new frozen dinners. Turkey with gravy, corn, cranberry sauce, and rice that didn’t taste half-bad. She sat in front of the set and found a teleplay about to start, a story set in New York City about a young couple struggling for money and living in a cramped apartment, the husband a drunk who staggered around. His voice blared out of the speakers so loudly that Arlene had been tempted to get up and turn down the sound. Something was strange about the story, these city people struggling like small-town folk, when everything she’d seen about the big city dazzled with easy luxury. Arlene watched with mild interest, turning every once in a while to the parking lot, which remained empty of customers, until she realized that the characters were never going to leave their shoddy apartment, were never going to step out into the glamour she’d seen in magazine spreads. She turned the set off, wrapped a sweater over her shoulders, and walked out to sit on the porch.
Those were the days, she thought, when she could feel change coming. Sitting on the porch as a little girl, her mother trying to retell a story, but all along they had been waiting for her brother. She rubbed her arms against the chill, but it wasn’t just the cold — it was the knowing, the thought of her young self anticipating her mother’s anxiety, wanting to live with it somehow. How had she known such a thing, at her age, going out to the porch at one in the morning because she knew that, come dawn, her brother would be standing at the edge of the dirt road that passed in front of their farmhouse, the Sierra Nevada bright gold in the east, and her mother running to him, crying and smoothing his hair just like she had done to Arlene, and no one in the family saying anything about where he had been?
What would her brother have made of how big Bakersfield had become? He had gone off to Los Angeles after his release from prison, but he had never returned. Just like her husband, Frederick. Her brother had left so long ago that hardly anyone remembered that she had a sibling. She thought of this, how she hid the fact under her tongue, how she rarely told anyone that her own blood had once been in prison. She remembered how everyone from the nearby farms had gathered in the early afternoon to welcome her brother home, his long bus trip from up past Sacramento to Bakersfield. They had led him to the backyard, and the men sat squat-style in a circle, drinking beer, her brother the beginning and the end of the loop, the one who balanced on his haunches the longest without having to get up to stretch. “Prison will harden you to stand anything,” he had bragged, the men laughing, but his voice carried over to her and settled inside like the smoke from his cigarettes, one after the other. He lit one up as a signal to the rest of the men that he didn’t feel like talking, that he’d rather listen to the stories of their years, all that time he’d been locked away.