Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  I squinted and looked at what seemed to me to be a great big sand dune, maybe one of the type used in films, that camels ride across while the sun is about to fry them and the heavy music is playing. “That’s a shoulder,” Henry said. “Look at this.” Then he showed me another that was some sort of big bridge or half a donut, because it was round and light at the top, then dark at the bottom like an open place or a hole. It looked beautiful, which is a strange thing to say about something like that, but it did. “That’s a kneecap,” he said.

  Then he put the slides away and talked a little bit about the way he puts paint on canvas, and all the time I was not relaxing totally—in case there was going to be some kind of quiz afterwards, to see if I’d understood what he said or to see if I was paying attention. But then when he got ready for me to pose, it was all right. Because that’s when I saw that all the painting he does is sort of in his head, and that whatever he puts in his pictures while he’s working is not anything that anybody can recognize. And that all he wants from me is for me to hold still and concentrate, and I didn’t mind learning to do that.

  “I’m going to paint your breasts with the artificial hand between them,” he said that first day, arranging me with a sheet tied to keep the bottom of me covered, so I wouldn’t distract him by being too nervous. “They’re too big. I’m going to do them like two green grapes. Just the green grapes with the, ummm, wrist.”

  I shut my eyes and tried to imagine something as big as a wall with two green ovals and a sort of tree trunk (the wrist) in the middle. I liked that, and relaxed some.

  After a while he said, “They’re too small. I want something heavy. Something with veins. I’m going to do them like cantaloupe. With only—hold it lower, lower—only the fingers, the index finger.” And I imagined the rind of melons with something joined and pointed (the finger) crawling up between them. And that was when I got it right, concentrating on holding it.

  The smooth porcelain felt, that first time, as if the little girl’s hand had been torn loose at the wrist trying to break away. As if somebody had held on to the owner and wouldn’t let her go, so she pulled loose and left her hand, the way animals, tearing themselves out of traps, leave a paw behind.

  10

  TODAY, HENRY SAYS I can select another hand. This is because he’s so pleased still, about the spilled flowers and the tablecloth business.

  He hasn’t been in the mood to do it sitting up any more, so he’s been trying something new. Today he got the idea he’d like me standing up, bending over, and first he tried it with me leaning over the back of a chair, with my panties at my feet. Then he got me to stand by this table where he puts stuff like bowls of fruit or vases of flowers, things that other artists might paint, still lifes, but he doesn’t do that. He just keeps the table with something arranged on it, as a sort of joke for himself.

  Anyway, he had me leave on my skirt and lean across the table, and then he took his arm and knocked over the silver vase with some daisies in it, and the water dripped on the floor and he pushed my skirt up and the top of me was lying face down, and he thought that was great. He did it a couple more times. Each time starting with the vase full and sitting up there, and me in this skirt, and then pulling up my skirt and knocking over the vase. It made him come real fast, but it also made him laugh at the same time. Because of course he was painting in his head.

  • • •

  He knows I love to look at the hands, but usually he won’t let me, because, he says, he has memories about them, and that I let the memories out—Pandora’s Box—and that gets in the way of his working.

  The history of the hands is that his uncle was a famous photographer, and when Henry was a young boy, maybe about fourteen, old enough to be thinking about doing it, his uncle had this mistress who’d lost a hand. (He always says she was his uncle’s mistress, but since his uncle never married, I don’t think that’s the right word. More likely, she was his uncle’s girlfriend.) Anyway, the uncle would have the black cloth over his head that old photographers used, and she would stand there posing in a black cape, sort of like she belonged a hundred years ago in Paris, Henry says. And she had these big dark eyes and all this long dark hair. (At first he said I looked just like her, but then he took that back.)

  She had lost a hand in an accident—someone closed a car door on it when she was a kid. She didn’t really live, naturally, in Paris before cars, but in some ordinary place like Beauregard Heights, where she was just another little kid. She’d had all these artificial hands made for her as she grew up. The ones that have the fingers curving and fixed like a doll’s, made of fine china. Then there are the later ones, that have a spring inside so that you can open and close them like a clamp. These are made of heavy steel and each has on a tight glove of what seems like real skin. That’s so you can get them to match the color of your own, Henry says. The way dentists have false-teeth chips to match your own teeth. What is strange about these is that the glove, the covering, comes way up over the wrist. That’s because it’s made to slip over the end of your real arm so that it will look real, too.

  I could look at the hands forever. My favorite, the one I picked first, the one I’ve been holding when I pose, was the very first, the oldest. It’s a porcelain one, very dainty looking, with slightly spread fingers and the palest pink nails painted on.

  When Henry first opened the drawer and let me see the whole collection, I could hardly stand it. I don’t know why I love them so much, or why it makes me so happy to look at them, touch them. It sounds creepy, but the way some little girls play with dolls, I bet I could play with the hands all day long. I’d like to take them all out and arrange them on the bed in rows. And hold each one up to a sleeve, and sort of grow her up. Does that make sense? Probably it sounds weird. But some things you think would sound weird to tell don’t seem that way at all when you do them. It feels as if it would be the most natural thing in all the world, to get the hands out and play with them.

  • • •

  “I’m going to sit you down today,” Henry says, “so take your pick. Something different. My uncle always chose for her. He didn’t want the hand to show; just the fingers, from under the cape. It was his private joke. You can’t tell it in his photographs of her—and he did a whole collection, two shows—that she has anything wrong. They made him famous; and no one spotted the hand.”

  (I sometimes try to imagine this business about what people mean when they say famous—his uncle, my drama teacher with the wild hair. Exactly what it is they’re talking about. Whether they’re saying they could walk down the street of any city and that everyone would turn to look at them, the way you would if somebody like Michael Jackson passed you. Or if it only means that they get written up in places that only other people who do the same thing know about. For instance, in books about acting, or photography magazines. Maybe it means that everybody moves out of the way when you come in a room; that they all stare at you. That kind of famous would be embarrassing. I wouldn’t think you’d brag about that.)

  Henry says he used to come and stand and watch his uncle shoot his mistress for hours. That he was in love with her, or thought he was, the way a fourteen-year-old boy would be. That he would have given anything in the world to have sex with her. That she was very beautiful but that she never looked at him—only at his uncle.

  He shakes the drawer slightly, ready to start. “Go on, pick one,” he says.

  I select one of the grown-up hands, with its smooth fingernails complete with half moons, its curved, shaped fingertips, its tight flesh slipped over cold, spring-held metal.

  He sits me on the couch and takes off the sheet. I try to put my mind on posing. He has me hold the hand between my legs, and he spreads them so that the hand is right on top of the hair down there. That actually feels okay. I don’t need to distract myself with the antler mirror any more, or even to have the sheet tied around my hips. I can put my posing on automatic.

  I lean back and get ready to conc
entrate on how it will look. The fingers spread as big as fence posts, poked in the black grass between two huge white sand dunes, on a bare part of the beach.

  But then Henry decides he’s going to put the necklace on me. “You’ll feel dressed,” he says, laughing. And I can tell that he’s already through painting and has moved on to sex in his head.

  So I let him put the flat turquoise and silver necklace around my throat, and I do feel more dressed, and then I laugh, too.

  11

  “YOU THINK about yourself a certain way long enough, that’s the way you get to be.” Uncle Brogan is talking about the state of Texas.

  “You think about yourself a certain way long enough, you get delusions.” Aunt Glenna Rose is talking about Brogan’s scheme for a cocktail party for his cellular car phone cronies at the La Fonda Sur Rosa Motel—which everybody in the city calls the Sub Rosa.

  I’m in the middle between them, listening, because they like to have a third-party opinion. That’s one of the reasons they decided to take me in when everybody got tired of Mom and Dad stealing me back and forth all the time.

  We’re on the patio, where we sit every Sunday morning, no matter whether it’s baking hot in the summer or crisp and bright blue, like now, at the end of winter. They’re in their pink sweat suits, having Snappy Tom and feeling fit because they’re not drinking Bloody Marys.

  “Look at the mess Texas is in. Here you’ve got the Energy Department of the federal government deciding to make a toxic dump instead of wheat fields out of Deaf Smith County, so all the Panhandle’s in an uproar.

  “You’ve got the red tide infestation poisoning the entire shrimp and oyster industry from the mouth of the Colorado to the Mexican border, for God’s sake, ten thousand bloated fish on Gulf of Mexico tourist beaches. And our very own trees, our own Oldest Plants in the South trees, are suffering from the Texas Live Oak Decline disease.

  “Plus, doesn’t this take the cake, some bunch of dropout indigents have dug up our one-hundred-million-year-old dinosaur tracks right up the road here on farm-to-market 1826, stolen them right out of the ground.

  “And those are just the trivial complaints; the mosquito bites. I’m not even mentioning that thirty-three thousand and nine hundred individuals, that’s neighbors and cousins and old buddies from junior high, have filed for the big Chapter Eleven.”

  “Are you counting us?” Glenna Rose is spreading out a stack of plastic credit cards on the wrought iron table.

  “Think about it. When you were growing up, bankrupt was what you went when you lost your houses on Boardwalk. It wasn’t something happened to real people. It’s an epidemic. Chapter Eleven is spreading down every street. I bet we have at least two folks right here in our very own neighborhood, right here off North New Braunfels, who have declared bankruptcy this very week.”

  “Hmmm.” Glenna makes one row of MasterCards and a second row of Visas.

  “Texas,” Brogan says, “Texas, the state of Texas, is like a fat kid with pimples who can’t get a date for Saturday night. Last year, the year before, he could have had anybody including your head cheerleader. Now he can’t even get a yes from a barking dog.”

  “Brogan, listen to these prices.” Aunt Glenna is reading off the room service menu sent out by the motel along with the confirmation of their suite. “I’m reading to you. Oysters Rockefeller. Bienville or Casino.” She uses a heavy French accent.

  “Forget oysters at this point, hon. You’ve got some vested interests invited who aren’t going to want to be reminded of the trouble in the coastal waters.”

  “Canton ribletts, sweet and sour dipping sauce. One hundred eighty-five an order. Fenneled sausage in crust, the same. That’s just snacks, Brogan. Snacks. Your basic cheese and crackers—Jarlsberg, Camembert, Boursin—is ninety-five. One order of nachos. I’m talking about a tiny little plate of nachos, period, is twelve bucks. Plus the bar. Look at this.” She holds up a glossy laminated list headed FULL BAR. “We’re not having these clients of yours spending an evening with Seven-Up. Full bar, it says, six hundred sixty-seven, and it’s a bunch of junk. I mean who drinks this stuff? Dewar’s? Bacardi? Sweet Vermouth? They must be some kind of chain-mentality motel, thinking they’ve got folks from Detroit or something. I mean it looks”—she works on a piece of paper with a ball point—“it looks like we’re talking about five a bottle per Lone Star and about eighty dollars a bottle for Jack Daniel’s by the time they get through adding on for the ice and glasses and service. For those prices we could have it at your five-star restaurant out on Broadway. We could have it at your five-star restaurant out on Broadway. We could have it at Lou Tess!”

  She turns to me for a third opinion. “Jolene, honey, do you understand why we have to have this party at the Sub Rosa? Why we can’t have it here at our own house?”

  Brogan answers her before I can say a word. (That’s one reason I like to be around them a lot; most of the time they don’t even know I’m here.)

  “I’ll tell you why. We’re going to get them to thinking like Texans again, that’s why. Get them to thinking like boys who can get any Saturday night date in the whole damn school. Give them back a good view of themselves. Give these ranchers and business types a party like in the good old days, with ice sculptures and Mr. Jack on the rocks, and a mountain of little pink crawdaddies on toothpicks, and ribs enough to look like the remains of the Alamo.

  “We’re going to turn them around. Do you get the idea? Glenna? Jolene, tell her what the message is, can’t you? You young folks understand the concept of the loss leader.”

  “I figure”—Aunt Glenna Rose is adding up sums of money, this time having to do with credit cards—“we got maybe, just outside maybe, about one hundred fifty dollars’ worth of credit here before me. That is not enough to serve your cellular transceiver preferential customers an order of French fries. Not to mention the drop-ins and the word-of-mouths and the friends of friends.”

  “Look what I have here,” Brogan announces. He’s pacing back and forth, looking red in the face but healthy. He’s sucking in his stomach and every once in a while stops to do deep knee bends or arm swings. Now he is waving something in the air.

  “What’s that?” she says.

  “It happens to be a check for four hundred and twenty five dollars made out to yours truly, that’s what.” He slaps it down on the table in front of her. “A consolidation loan. I got myself a consolidation loan.”

  Glenna Rose’s soft voice rises to a shriek. “Brogan Temple, I’m looking at us owing twenty-four thousand dollars basic minimum, and twenty-four hundred just to keep them from cutting off our credit, minimum basic, and you’re planning this humongous party with four hundred twenty-five dollars?”

  Brogan drops into the chair next to her. “Hon, you got to have cash. You got to have cash for the fellow who parks your cars and the one that sets up bar and the one that does a little extra number on not noticing all the liquor you brought in yourself. This is essential cash flow, Glenna. You’re looking at the cash flow that makes this possible.

  “The motel, they’re going to take our card. They’re in the business of taking anybody’s card because they’ve got two hundred rooms to rent out every night, and they know if they turn away everybody who’s extended himself a little on his credit that they’ll be the ones claiming Chapter Eleven by the end of the week.”

  He bends down close to her face and gives her a kiss on the ear. “What we needed was the twenties. You got to have a pocket full of twenties. Clients, they see you got loose twenties, when they’re taking out bank loans to pick up the dry cleaning and vaccinate the baby, they get the idea you’re rich. If you’re rich, and you’re in the business of selling cellular automobile phones, then maybe they get the idea to expand the number of car phones they’ve got, and then they’ll be rich, too. While their brothers-in-law are having to sneak across the state line to file their Elevenses in Louisiana.”

  Glenna flicks through the cards. “I should have
kept my own name.”

  “You didn’t have an own name.”

  “I did so.”

  “Besides, what’s the point of an own name in a community-property state? You got homestead. We file a Chapter Eleven you get the homestead and they can’t take it away from you.”

  “Honest?” Glenna Rose likes their great big sprawling gray and pink ranch-style a lot.

  “You bet. But that is not going to be the case. Let me read you this little item here.” Brogan takes a newspaper clipping out of his attaché case on the empty chair. “This is the photo of a man in the little state of New Jersey buying two hundred thousand pounds of cocoa for his business. He’s driving, see here, down the Garden State Parkway, talking into his cellular, on his way to the headquarters of Nabisco to negotiate the cocoa powder for a secret project. This is such hot news, this man’s call—you have to understand we’re talking East Coast now—that it was on the front page of the paper. It is such hot news that this entrepreneur, this cookie king, is ordering his cocoa powder, discussing his top secret recipe, because he’s doing it on a car phone.”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “The company sent it around. Front page, third section, New York Big Times.”

  “That looks like a Lincoln he’s driving.” Glenna squints at the grainy heavyset man in the clipping, then at his car.

  “Good P.R. Now, what are our ranchers going to think? That they should give up? That they should quit? Just because the price of oil has dropped to the height of a gopher’s behind? Because their cattle are going to be munching nuclear wastes instead of alfalfa? Because half the fish in the Gulf of Mexico are floating face up? When this cookie cutter has got his picture in the center of the page, smuggling in secrets for a new batch of chocolate chips? Making money hand over fist? They’re going to see this—I’ve got a flyer being printed up right this very minute—and ask themselves why aren’t they out there drumming up business. That’s what they’ll be asking. Are they quitters, are they whiners, are they going to let East Coast cocoa brokers get it all? That’s what they’re going to be asking.”