Part Three
Ten
When had she picked up the habit of faithfully reading the Los Angeles Times every day? Not the Californian, the local newspaper she glanced at while at the kitchen table or in the motel office or swiping down the café counters, but the print from over the Grapevine, the pulse of the large city but a couple of hours away. At the café, Arlene had always been left to clean up the discarded copies of Modern Screen and Look that the girls left behind, and for a while she took these home with her on the sly, the magazines tucked into a paper bag in case anyone saw her slipping out the door with the very gossip she chastised the girls for believing. And people were watching her, after all. Back then, in the initial days after the news spread about the dead girl and Dan’s involvement with her, Arlene thought she would never live down the heavy stares in the dining area of the café. Arlene volunteered for kitchen cleanup and washed dishes and bused tables, kept herself moving, all to avoid those eyes. In the kitchen’s break area, she swept up the girls’ cigarette butts and candy wrappers and, at first, stacked the magazines neatly in a corner. As the months went on, Arlene found her voice again — the stern, somewhat prickly voice she was capable of — and when the girls found the magazines gone one day, none of them dared ask what might have happened to them.
The pleasure she took in the magazines, she knew, was nothing but escape, yet maybe for the first time, sitting in the armchair of her living room, flipping through the pages of a Photoplay, Arlene knew what the girls of the café might be dreaming about, why they were moved by picture after picture of movie stars posed with one leg pivoted forward, jewels haloed with gleam. All of this taking place just over the Grapevine, another way to live altogether, the dust giving way to red carpet and camera flash and expensive champagne. Sometimes, in the pictures of the much younger starlets, she could almost see vague semblances of the café girls, similarities so sharp that Arlene felt she, too, could imagine their regret over living in Bakersfield.
The local paper, carrying word of her own real world, appeared on her porch every day and remained there, curled up with its rubber band, yellowing after a few days of going un-collected. She knew what the paper said. She had a life much more regrettable than the café girls did. She stuck to the magazines: perfectly useless information, but a needed distraction from the local news, the chatter that went on in the café as she ran plates under hot water. What ran in the newspaper was not rumor anymore as the days went on. Truth was confirmed. It was true that the girl had no family in town and that there was no one to claim her. It was true that Dan had fled and no trace of him had been found. It was true that he had beaten the girl to death in the dark stairwell leading to her apartment above the bowling alley. It was true that a Mexican was deported, though everyone knew he had had no involvement in the death whatsoever.
Other things were true as welclass="underline" Arlene did not know where Dan had gone, though sometimes she felt as if the town didn’t believe her. It was true that the girl was the daughter of a woman who used to work in the café years ago, around the time of the earthquake in 1952, but so much time had passed that people couldn’t even remember where that woman had gone.
Arlene knew what was in the local paper better than anyone else did, yet her eyes never left the glossy movie magazines, seeing the same pictures, the same stars, over and over, as she leafed through the pages day after day. Would the news about Dan ever go away? Would the feeling of being stared at in the café’s serving area ever lessen, the silent accusation? At home, she would pause and put down the movie magazine, close her eyes. But there was no wishing away what she had to face.
“You’re faster than the young girls,” the new shift manager had said, almost two months after Arlene had taken to volunteering to do anything that would keep her in the kitchen. “I need you back out front.” The shift manager was in his late twenties, but respectful of her. Without prompting, he called her Arlene and not Mrs. Watson. Arlene liked this about him, as if he wanted to let her know that he didn’t think of her as anyone’s mother.
His voice was fraught with his own need for help, but she could still detect the kindness underneath it. “Those girls,” he said, “are too slow to handle anything all by themselves.”
At first, put back full-time at the front of the café, Arlene felt on display, charging briskly by customers without saying a word, aware of the large plate-glass windows and the people walking by, maybe staring inside at the woman who worked there. Her fingers trembled sometimes from nerves, jittery in anticipation of the arrival of the police, coming to break the news of how they’d captured Dan. The deputy who used to come in daily for a grilled cheese, home fries, and a cola stopped doing so, as if to spare her the discomfort. It was like that for a while — all jitters, forks slipping out of her fingers, one time being spooked so badly by the glimpse through the plate glass of a Bakersfield officer coming along the sidewalk that Arlene dropped a whole tray full of dirty dishes.
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.