by Tawni O'Dell
It only took until her third pageant before Jolene won one. She was fourteen when she was crowned Laurel County Fair’s Pine Princess, and at the precise moment when that crown began its journey from its satin pillow to the top of her golden head, the answer to why she wanted to be in pageants became blindingly obvious.
I was there. I had reluctantly left the fairway with a group of my buddies and our girlfriends, loaded down with stuffed-animal trophies and big clouds of pink cotton candy, to join my mom and Zo in the grandstand to watch the event.
Jolene stood absolutely calm and poised in a green strapless dress with her hands clasped prettily in the folds of her skirt while all around her the shoulder pads and sequined appliqués and torn hemlines of the other girls’ attempts at cutting-edge eighties fashion jostled and squirmed and vied for attention.
The chairman of the Laurel County Fair’s Events Committee, acting as emcee in one of the organization’s official red blazers stained with black patches of mud from awarding the tractor-pull ribbons earlier, made the announcement. Then he took a little silver tiara off a dusty yellow satin cushion held by the year’s previous princess, who was smiling bravely and scanning the audience for her mother and the funnel cake she had promised to have waiting for her once she had conceded her throne.
Jolene’s fixed gaze followed the crown’s journey. She watched the arc it made from the pillow through the fairground air, thick with the sound of cheering and the smells of livestock, cooking grease, and diesel fuel, until her eyes rolled back in her head like she was having a seizure as she tried to see it actually descend upon the top of her own head.
Mom paused in her whooping, grinned at Zo, and looked relieved once again.
“She wanted the crown,” they said in unison.
“Which pageant is that one from?” I ask her.
She glances back at it again.
“Miss Mid-Atlantic Seaboard,” she says. “Do you remember my talent?”
“Modern prance?”
“Modern dance,” she corrects me. “Do you remember the girl who went right after me? She did a lame gymnastics routine, but she had a great body and she wore a knockout glittery multicolored bodysuit that made her look like a rainbow trout.”
“Yeah, I remember. It completely changed the way I looked at fish.”
“She has a porn Web site now.”
The word “porn” makes me think of Chastity. The words “glittery,” “bodysuit,” “Web site,” “gymnastics,” “girl,” and “trout” all make me think of Chastity.
“I e-mailed her.”
“You e-mailed her porn Web site? What did you say?”
“I asked her if she remembered me. Congratulated her on her Web site. Asked her what else is going on in her life. That kind of stuff.”
“You congratulated her on a porn Web site?”
“Sure. I admire that kind of confidence. I really do. I could never let a stranger see me naked, unless, of course, I was having sex with him.”
She walks out of the room and comes back wearing a denim jacket with suede fringe over her uniform and carrying her purse.
“So what do you have planned for today?” she asks. “Are you going to work?”
“Of course I am.”
“You’d better shower and change your clothes first.”
“Yeah.”
She turns to leave, then stops.
“Tell me something, Ivan. Why did you come back here? Definitely not for me or for the boys or for Mom. Why? I want to know.”
I don’t say anything.
“I never blamed you for needing to leave,” she goes on. “Mom and I were prepared for that. You went away to college, and then we were ready for you to go on with your career and move to Chicago. That was fine. That was great because we knew it was best for you.
“But I do blame you for what you did instead. Cutting us all out of your life the way you did. I never understood it, and I still don’t. You never said you were sorry.”
“I never realized I did anything wrong.”
“You have a responsibility to people who love you. And I don’t mean you have to do things for them. I mean you have to let them do things for you.”
“I couldn’t.” My head begins to pound. “You don’t understand.”
“Okay. I don’t understand,” she says, trying to calm me. “Then explain it to me. What happened, Ivan? What could possibly be that bad? What did you do? I can’t believe this is all about your leg. You’re not that shallow. You’re not a quitter either.”
My need for a drink is automatic. There’s no desire involved anymore. I know it won’t bring me pleasure or even relief. It’s become instinct. A learned instinct.
“Look at you. You’ve been here for almost a year, and you still don’t even have a place to live. You’re drunk every night. You’re getting into fights. I have to nag at you to bathe and put on clean clothes. You’re worse than all three of my boys put together. What’s going on with you?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
The pain in my head is getting worse. I stand up suddenly, knocking my chair over. We both look at it lying on the floor.
Jolene waits for me to set it up.
Despite the indignity of wearing a uniform the same color as a traffic cone and a name tag promising the customer “Service with a side order of sunshine,” there is nothing subservient about her. She is in control here. This is her domain.
She faces me with her back against the kitchen counter, her hands gripping it on either side of herself, like a protester defending a condemned landmark from the wrecker’s ball.
For the first time since I showed up unannounced on her doorstep eight months ago, after I got the newspaper clipping telling me Reese would be getting out of prison within the year, I get a glimpse of the possibility that I could become unwelcome. I don’t believe she would ever completely shut me out of her heart, but she might be able to lock her front door.
“Okay,” she says, slipping into her jacket. “You do what you want. You’re a grown man. But you’re not going to do it here anymore. I don’t want to see it, and I don’t want my boys to see it. I’m not going to let you make me pity my big brother.”
She leaves through the back door.
“Was that an ultimatum?” I call after her.
She doesn’t respond.
As soon as I hear her car drive away, I head for the cabinet where she keeps her booze. There’s nothing in it but a bottle of grenadine, a half-empty bottle of Old Granddad, and two bottles of Tequila Rose. I grab the bourbon and take a seat at the table again.
A Welch’s jelly-jar glass with a Pokémon character on it sits in front of me. It has a little orange juice in it. I pour it half full of whiskey.
I take a drink. It tastes like shit.
I look up and find Volodymyr staring at me.
I have no way of knowing how old the czar was supposed to have been in this portrait. His long hair and drooping mustache are youthfully dark, without a touch of gray, and his pose with one leg bent, his foot on an altar stair, holding a scepter topped with a jeweled cross out and away from him as if ready to take a swipe at a pesky fly or bash in a Mongol’s head is the casually aggressive stance of a young, confident king wanting to show forward movement and religious endorsement, but his eyes belong to an old man. Not a defeated or bitter old man who curses his age, but an enlightened one who knows that his years are a gift and only with the passage of time can a man gain an understanding of life that makes him fit to guide others.
They are alert but calm, full of ancient composure and wisdom but also hope and curiosity. He’s a grown-up wearing a child’s simple, awkward crown made of iron, not gold, set with stones chosen for the variety of their colors, not for their value.
As a child I was convinced this was what God must look like before I stopped believing in him.
Dad loved that portrait. He was so proud of it. He showed it to everyone who came to visit us.
&nbs
p; He would explain exactly where it used to hang in his family’s small, spare farmhouse in Ukraine. He would tell the story of how he eventually traveled back there after his release from Magadan to find all the members of his family dead and the house destroyed but the portrait somehow miraculously whole, lying in the ashes, ripped from the frame, singed, scratched, bent, but salvageable. He would tell of his mother’s respect for the artist who painted it, her love for the rich colors, her devotion to the subject: the man who brought peace and Christianity to her people. He would insist it was the last thing she saw before she closed her eyes permanently against the starvation that had already taken her two young daughters. When describing the women in his family, Dad never mentioned the war. He called them casualties of faith.
I get up and walk over to the sink. I pour out my drink. I turn the bottle upside down, close my eyes, and listen to the sound of the whiskey disappearing down the drain. It’s a very small victory.
12
I DRAG MY BODY UPSTAIRS. IT’S NOT EASY. MY KNEE IS KILLING ME.
I strip in the hallway and check out the damage to myself in the mirror on the back of Jolene’s bedroom door. My knee is the size and consistency of a small, rotten grapefruit. I have a fresh purple bruise on my lower back from Jess. I have a black eye. My knuckles hurt. My joints ache. My head is pounding.
The image in the mirror doesn’t bother me. It’s almost comforting. It reminds me of my ball-playing days. It reminds me of my dad and the other miners when I saw them without their shirts on or in a pair of shorts in summer. Almost all of them were scarred in some way, but somehow none of their injuries made them want to stop working. They only seemed to further ignite their desire to go back inside. The more battered a man was, the more alive he became.
I’m not sure where I stand with Jolene right now, if I’ve been kicked out altogether or if I can redeem myself and stick around a little while longer.
Last night, after we found the photo for Val at Zo’s house, I mentioned that I had seen him in his pickup earlier. I also mentioned the lollipops sitting on his front seat and how I knew they came from Dr. Ed. Like the man himself, Dr. Ed’s lollipops have remained unchanged during the forty-five years he’s been giving them out. They are no-frills suckers, simple, solid-colored candy disks wrapped in clear cellophane with white sticks bent into loops to make it easier for young children to hold.
Val went to see Dr. Ed, which means Dr. Ed might know where he is. Jolene insisted that I talk to Dr. Ed today and find out what he knows about Val’s whereabouts. She also insisted that I let her deliver the photo. I said no. We compromised, and I agreed to let her do it if I went with her.
She accused me of being overprotective of her. I told her I was protecting Val.
I decide to go see Dr. Ed before going to work. I’m avoiding Jack. He was out yesterday afternoon and didn’t see my black eye. He won’t be pleased about it. It was okay for Ronny Hewitt and Andy Lineweaver to resolve their difficulties the old-fashioned way, using fists instead of lawyers, but it’s never okay for one of his men to get sucker-punched.
This house has only one bathroom. Jolene gave up any claims of ownership to it a long time ago without much of a fight. She understood that she was simply outnumbered by the filthy-footed tribe of towel-dropping, urine-spattering, toothpaste-spitting men she had created, and quietly removed all her cosmetics to a vanity table in her bedroom and all her female necessities to a shelf in her closet, including her own tube of toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, soap, and a set of plush clean towels. She doesn’t use her own bathroom; she visits it like a guest spending the night or a girl going to the communal showers in a dorm, bringing along the items she needs to get clean, then taking them away with her again.
I step over the damp towels heaped on the floor and the puddles of water, pull back the shower curtain hanging by half its rings, and step into the bottom of the tub stained a permanent gray from dirty feet. A cake of green soap with black fingerprints on it sits in a slimy soap dish. I use the Spider-Man shampoo.
The sink bowl is caked with formations of dried toothpaste like tiny pale blue stalagmites. A tall plastic cup with a smiling cow on it and Valley Dairy’s promise for free soft-drink refills holds four toothbrushes with crushed, shaggy, petrified bristles. I find the one that belongs to me and brush my teeth.
The rest of the area around the sink is scattered with small plastic dinosaurs and pirates Eb takes in the tub with him, a couple crumpled Dixie cups, Josh’s deodorant, a comb with half the teeth missing, and my razor. I can’t find any shaving cream, so I use Mr. Bubble.
Next I head to Eb and Harrison’s room for a clean shirt, underwear, socks, and jeans. I’ve been granted temporary usage of a dresser drawer and part of a closet in their room.
Harrison’s side is picked up and orderly. Eb’s side of the room is covered in junk. At first glance it appears he’s just a run-of-the-mill slob, but upon closer inspection the random mess takes on meaning in the form of distinct piles of very specific objects: tabs from pop cans, receipts from stores, popsicle sticks, drinking straws, fortunes from fortune cookies, plastic spoons, colored toothpicks, regular toothpicks, hardened pieces of gum, beads, crayon tips, nails, screws, kernels from Indian corn, rocks, painted rocks, sticks, rubber bands, hundreds of little scraps of paper with writing on them, marbles.
The individual collections are either pushed into round piles or laid out in straight, measured lines.
I look down at the stuff and notice a couple photographs sitting in the middle of it. At first I’m not sure they’re my dad’s Magadan photos. The idea that one of the few precious remaining pieces of my dad’s history could be carelessly left on the floor of a six-year-old boy’s bedroom, where they could be trampled, fingered, wrinkled, or ripped, makes so little sense to me that I’m certain I must be mistaken.
I walk over and pick them up.
There are four of them. My dad received them in the mail before I was born from a fellow survivor who had gone back to see the Siberian work camp.
The first time I saw the photos, I couldn’t figure out what they had to do with war. They weren’t anything like the pictures in magazines and history books my dad had shown me about World War II. They didn’t show soldiers or flags or clean, hopeful girls with shiny hair and red lipstick waiting in America for their husbands and boyfriends to come home.
One was an aerial shot of Magadan as it was then, almost fifteen years after the war, a grimy gray grid of a city set firmly into the gray rock that makes up the northern shoreline of the great gray Sea of Okhotsk.
The other three were taken at the site of the work camp. The first was a distant shot of the jail. A small, square building with iron bars on its single window. It was the only structure that had survived the passage of time and the brutality of the elements, and it jutted from the bare rock like a last remaining tooth stub in a dead man’s gums.
The second photo was of a mountain of curled and cracked shoes and belts. When the workers died from starvation or radiation poisoning, the precious leather was saved to be used for other purposes while the bodies were buried behind the pile in endless rows marked by sticks with can lids nailed to them with the worker’s number engraved on them.
The final photo was of this. Most of the markers were gone, but here and there were a few sticks, and one had a lid that had somehow managed to catch the weak daylight and reflected it back in a flash of startling silver.
I don’t understand what the pictures are doing here. I feel momentarily betrayed by my mom. She’s supposed to be the caretaker of Dad’s artifacts. What is she doing giving them to Eb?
But my misgivings quickly pass. Why not? What good are they doing sitting in a drawer where no one will ever see them? I can’t know what impact they’re having on Eb—if the effect will be great or trivial, if he will learn something from them or learn to deny something in them—but whatever the lesson is, he’s entitled to experience it as much as I was at his age.
———
Dr. Ed still has his practice in the same small brown brick professional building he started out in. Very little has changed in his waiting room since I used to sit in it as a kid. He has the same pictures of clowns and frisking puppies on the walls and the same poster of a grinning cow explaining the benefits of milk, but now he also has a poster of a pierced, tattooed, green-headed Dennis Rodman explaining the benefits of HIV education.
The toys are different: padded, rounded, plastic, safe. Gone is the wooden pounding bench I used to beat the hell out of and the talking pull-string Raggedy Ann doll Jolene used to love, that I wanted to beat the hell out of by the time she finished playing with it.
One little boy pushes beads up and down twisted tracks of bright-colored wire, and two little girls are clustered around a big pink plastic dollhouse, but for the most part, kids sit and silently play their GameBoys or watch the big TV mounted in the corner. The room resonates with muted electronic beeps, occasional coughs, and the symphonic swells of a Disney soundtrack.
I present myself to Dr. Ed’s thick-necked, flush-faced sister, who’s been his receptionist for as long as I’ve been a patient.
She’s holding a phone receiver between her cheek and shoulder while taking a clipboard from a mother. She hangs up the phone and tells the mother her HMO has a copayment of twenty dollars, then eyes the box of cigars I’m holding and the clock set inside the belly of a grinning red Buddha.
“Is he busy?” I ask her.
“No,” she says before answering another call. “These kids are here for show. He doesn’t really see any of them.”
“I need to talk to him for a minute. I’ll let myself in.”
She wags a finger at me while she takes care of the caller, then gets up from her seat with the murderous, sluggish resentment of an elephant being poked and prodded into performing a headstand. She opens a door marked STAFF ONLY and beckons for me to walk through it. She always insists on opening the door herself. I think it’s a form of territoriality.
