Woman in the Dark and Light
Suzanne Morris
August 20, 2023
–after Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting, “Automat”
Mama was an Edward Hopper painting.
I know the artist was thinking of her
in that time of long ago
when women were
new in the workforce
and starting to go out alone
at night, too,
the woman all to herself
in the automat
late at night, having a cup of coffee,
wearing hat, coat and gloves, and
a closed look
that would ward off any threat
of intrusion
the bright discs of overhead lights
reflecting off the big plate glass window
looking out on the deserted street
behind her.
I know he followed Mama
into the dark night
when she snuck through her bedroom window
wearing red high heels and a string of pearls
headed for the bright lights of
the nearest East Texas town,
followed her still, when she was a
single working woman
clerking at the W. T. Grant store
in Houston,
saving from her weekly check
to pay on the
newest fashions she’d
put in layaway
dreams enfolded in clouds of
tissue paper;
followed her even to where she
eventually wound up,
a wife and mother of two
loading the wash at the laundromat
nearby on Telephone Road
late at night when
no one else was there,
machines coin-operated like food slots
in the automat where
you had to bring your nickels
to open the little doors
coins jangling in Mama’s pockets
under the bright lights above,
the round glass dryer doors
an audience of eyes
looking out at her
Hopper etching the man in Night Shadows
walking alone
up the middle of the dark
deserted street
past those big plate glass windows
like the peeping Toms
we always knew were lurking
somewhere out there.
Suzanne Morris is a novelist and poet. She has contributed to several poetry anthologies, including Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022). Her poems have appeared as well in The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Pine Cone Review, and Emblazoned Soul Review. A native Texan, Ms. Morris resides in Cherokee County.
