Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  Glenna turns to me. “Honey, I’ll need your help.”

  “All right.”

  “I mean we’ll need a pretty girl.” She stacks the credit cards and puts a rubber band around all but one of them. “I mean you can dress up and pass the cheese or something.”

  “Okay.”

  Glenna purses her mouth. Realizing she’s making wrinkles, she takes a finger and smooths the lines on her forehead. “When I was growing up, my mom thought we were having a party when she baked Mamie Eisenhower’s pumpkin pie.”

  “Your mom …” Brogan makes a face.

  “At least my mom didn’t lose her house in a bingo game every other week.”

  “Shush.”

  “Jolene …” Glenna is trying to figure out how to say something to me.

  I’m trying to figure out what it is, and if it’s something I can do. I owe her a lot. She was the one who decided that she and Brogan should take me. She was the one always at home that had to get the phone and hear my mom and dad screaming that I’d been kidnapped right off the playground, right out of the hall, from Sunday School, from a birthday party. She was the one nice enough to take me in six years ago, give me this nice safe place here with her and Brogan, make clear to Mom and Dad that these premises were definitely off-limits to them until I reached the age of twenty-one. That if they came creeping around, hanging out in the hedges, peeping in the windows, ready to pounce and drag me back when somebody’s back was turned the way they liked to do, that they’d have her, Glenna Rose Temple, right arm of the law, to personally answer to. Like I say, I owe her a lot.

  “Honey,” she says again, smoothing at her wrinkles, “is there something else we can say you do? I mean there’s nothing wrong with actress, I mean if you were. If you were somebody in the movies, if you were Cissy Spacek or something. But these clients just don’t get the right idea when you say actress. It sounds, I don’t know—but if you could think of something else?” She looks at me, hopeful, wanting to be sure she hasn’t hurt my feelings. “I don’t guess there’s anything wrong with just telling them you’re a student in college. That’s something to be proud about.”

  This seems to me the perfect time to tell her the news. “Well, actually, I’m not right now.” I scoot my chair across the brick patio closer to hers. “I didn’t want to tell you all—I was afraid you’d be mad because I wasted that tuition money. But I didn’t see a future for myself, like you say, in films. So I’ve got a job, for now, as a model.”

  “A model?” Glenna Rose brightens up. “That’s great. Did you hear that, Brogan? Jolene is a model.”

  “Is that so?” He comes over and looks at me to see how he should take the idea. “I thought you had to be skin and bones.”

  “Not any more. They like you natural now.” I try not to imagine myself in Henry’s studio when I say that.

  “I thought you had to be six foot tall?”

  “That’s high fashion.”

  “Hot coat-ture,” Aunt Glenna says. “Paris. You’re talking Paris, Brogan, skin and bones. Here, people like to see what looks good on someone like them.” She turns to me. “Well, that’s swell, honey. And you should have told us right off. Don’t worry about the money. I’ll get the doctor to write a note and say you had mono and you’ll get every dime back. You’ll get your tuition back and be making money besides.”

  “Maybe she’ll pay for the party,” Brogan kids. He pours himself a Snappy Tom, looking, on balance, pleased at this development.

  And for the millionth time I think how lucky I am to be living with them.

  For one thing, neither Mom nor Dad would have let my story go for one single minute without getting to the bottom of it.

  12

  A WEEK AFTER the planning session, I get a postcard from Mom.

  It says:

  J—

  I’m in Tennessee, having a great time finding out how the natives like all those Japanese auto plants.

  See you in Chillicothe.

  Love,

  M—

  13

  IT’S CREEPY, the way Mom and Dad always make their moves at the same time, as if they were connected by telepathy.

  The day after I get the card from Mom, which I don’t show around, Brogan gets a letter from Dad, which he does. Dad says he might be in the vicinity in the near future, that he might stop by to look in on his “must be nearly grown by now” daughter.

  I can’t figure out this sudden interest on their parts. It’s been six years since I even set eyes on either one of them. What do they want with me now?

  Brogan and Glenna tell me not to worry; that I am absolutely lead-pipe safe from Mom and Dad. Brogan says that he and Glenna got a quit-claim to me—and then he stops and explains that’s a term used in the oil business about leases on the back forty but that he means Mom and Dad don’t have any more right to come sniffing around me like hound dogs. Besides, he says, the statute of limitations has run out. Imagine, he jokes, if parents could come back forty years down the road and yank you back.

  To which Glenna asks, And what does he think his are doing?

  But I don’t wholly believe what he says, because I’ve got fear running up and down my backbone with those two letters popping up out of the blue, and I don’t have the confidence that he does that Mom and Dad aren’t up to their old tricks again. Sometimes when you’ve been feeling more or less safe and then something comes along and pulls that feeling out from under your feet, it’s almost worse than it was before. I mean in the old days, when I was a kid, I sort of got used to it. It became almost a game: hightailing it out of this place; hunkering down out of sight in that one. But now I don’t think I could start all that up again. Or, rather, starting it all up again is too truly awful to think about.

  But it isn’t until I get up in the middle of the night, not sleeping too well, to get a drink of water, that I get some idea of what might be behind my sudden popularity. Behind Mom and Dad suddenly deciding that I’m up for grabs again.

  • • •

  “I think this model business is okay,” Brogan says, in a worried hoarse whisper, “but there are a bunch of consequences.”

  “Like what?” Glenna sounds half asleep.

  “It upsets the applecart, taxwise.”

  “How’s that?” She doesn’t sound as sleepy.

  “You can’t claim a dependent who’s nineteen unless she’s in school full time and making peanuts a year. You follow? Her being a kid and in school and not working we had every angle covered. Now, I don’t know. There goes nineteen hundred bucks for a dependent.”

  “You think that’s why that lunk got in touch? He needs the extra cash? Would he go through all that again to get nineteen hundred off his taxes?”

  “Would Turk Jackson sell his mother for five dollars? Besides, times are tough. With the whole state claiming Chapter Eleven, how many folks are buying drilling-rig parts for wells they’ve closed?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “Plus having her back would give him Head of Household. And if he doesn’t earn any more than my sister, he can also get Earned Income Credit.”

  “You think Midge will show up, too?”

  “How many people are shelling out these days for piano lessons do you imagine?”

  “Oh, hon.”

  “I’m not meaning to worry you. That’s a swell girl in there. I’m not giving her up. I just had this thought in the back of my head, when she said she’d got this modeling job.”

  “How would the feds know?”

  “They got eyes. They got eyes with computers.”

  “Then she can just enroll and take something. How do you know that she’s making money anyway? Maybe she’s doing tearoom modeling for department stores. Maybe she gets minimum wage. What’s that, about a dollar seventy-five?”

  “Dating yourself, baby. How about three thirty-five.”

  “No kidding? Is it? Let’s ask her.”

  “Ask her what?”

  “Wh
at she makes.”

  “That’s her business.”

  “She could pay us rent.”

  “Forget that idea. I only mentioned it. I got dollars on the brain these days.”

  “I bet that’s why he wrote. That big lout gives me the creeps.”

  Silence. Then, “Brogan?”

  “What?”

  “Do you think maybe we’ve protected her too much?”

  “Protected her? Too much?”

  “You know, sort of kept her close to home, put a wall around her, trying to make sure that nobody could come take her away.”

  “There’s no such thing as protecting girls too much, so put that idea out of your mind. It’s a contradiction.”

  Everything is quiet, and then Glenna says, “Brogan?”

  “No more tonight. Come on. Forget it for now. We got enough on our minds.”

  “Brogan?”

  “All right, what?”

  “Should I wear my coat?”

  “Should you wear your coat?”

  “You know, my Joie de Beavre, my genuine full-skin dyed beaver with fox shawl collar. To the customers’ party.”

  “You bet. Greet them at the door. Tell them you ordered it over the cellular from your Lincoln Continental. We’ll run the air conditioning all evening.”

  “You’re sweet, you know?”

  “That’s me.”

  14

  I DECIDE that maybe I should look up L. W. Dawson.

  That maybe I was in too big a hurry to say it wouldn’t work out for us.

  If he hadn’t been in the phone book, I wouldn’t have worried. Years with Mom and Dad had taught me how to find any needle in any haystack. I had out my city map—remembering that he said he lived near San Pedro—and I filled up the old Buick that Brogan and Glenna had given me when I first got my license (back when it was only a ten-year-old car, the kind you’d give away in those days when the Blue Book price was about fifty dollars and everybody had money then and was getting excited about imports).

  On the map there were about four different areas in that general part of town, residential areas. Each with a little cluster of houses—Anglo beginning to mix down; Mexican beginning to mix up. Each the kind of neighborhood where you can imagine behind every door somebody retired peering out between the department-store curtains at who is moving in next door and getting ready for the offensive or the defensive, depending on their personality.

  In other words, the kind of neighborhood I like a lot. The kind we never lived in, even in the early days, because Mom figured there wasn’t much demand for piano teachers among the retired, and the young in such areas were too busy moving up or moving down to be bothered with such refinements. But, principally, because she liked us to be lost in the crowd, and each of these was the type of neighborhood where having a one-of-a-kind house was the rule. So if somebody was coming over to see you, you’d be able to mention, “It’s the pink stucco with the Spanish tiles,” or “It’s the Tudor with the stone collie in the front.” And even your acquaintances would never need to know your house number, and your real friends wouldn’t even know the street name. They’d just know to turn off San Pedro at the green house with the fifteen hanging ferns on the porch, then turn right by the yard with the dozen clay ducks on a painted pond, and then yours would be the third house, the peach one with the twenty-three bird feeders, each a careful replica of the White House.

  I was going to look up all the Dawsons one by one, picking first the subdivision whose streets ended in -wood (because I liked the sound of those best), and then going on to those with -hurst, and finally, a newer one, not as old and settled, an area where the streets had the names of Texas flowers (Bluebonnet, Paint Brush).

  If I didn’t find L.W. that way, I had other tricks up my sleeve. I won’t go into all of them, but one thing you can do—I know because Dad was always doing it—when people are hiding out is you can go to the elementary school and find out if there is an L. W. Dawson enrolled, or, in this case, if there ever was one. You can say you’re his long-lost sister, that’s what I was going to use, or you have bad news about the little girl’s grandmother, that was Dad’s line, and then they’ll look it up for you every time. School people are proud whenever they can produce definite information on three-by-five cards for you, so they never pursue why you’re asking. That way, if L.W. lived with some folks named Smith, of which there are pages and pages, or Rodriguez, of which there are even more pages, then I could still find the address where he’d lived. Then, if he’d moved, well, that begins to take time, but you get the idea how it goes. Because somewhere in there, to enroll in school you’ve got to show a birth certificate, so the real name gets written down, and once you’re written down in a school you’re there forever.

  (And I guess Jolene Temple/Jackson is enrolled in at least a dozen.)

  But in this case it was as easy as opening the phone book—by which fact I got the information that his folks had nothing to hide and never had. There was an L. W. Dawson on Rosewood and also a Lenox Worth Dawson at the same address. I liked that. It made me wonder whether he was the one who was called “L.W.” at home, or if the son used those old names and the daddy got the initials.

  I told myself I ought to call first. What if he wasn’t there? What if he was but it was an awkward time for me to show up?

  But I knew that to pretend to be weighing the options was an exercise in talking to myself. Because I never, and I am never in my life going to, pick up the phone unless somebody is standing by me and I can’t get out of it. (Mom and Dad used to make me be the one to place calls, be the one to get in touch with Brogan and Glenna, or the bank, or the car lease place.) The reason is that you are without any disguise on the phone.

  They can’t see if you are in a poet’s skirt or a broker’s suit or if you are someone they’re supposed to know. All you’ve got is your voice. And I know those funny scenes in films when people play at being different people on the phone, using different voices—or they’re not being funny, they’re being killers—but the point is that you, who are watching the film, know who they really are and what is happening. You can pretend to be the person being fooled, but you’re not being fooled. And you’re not in real life being the one trying to lie and having only your voice to do it with.

  Plus every time the phone rang when I was a kid, it was usually Mom or Dad, the one who didn’t have me, pretending to be someone she wasn’t or he wasn’t, to find out if I was there, or where I was. And I always got this sinking feeling when people said they were the school principal or the dentist—because I knew one of them was on my trail again.

  The point is that to me the telephone is an instrument for lying—and I can’t imagine that people who aren’t would want to talk on it if they could help it. (It proves my point that right this minute Brogan is calling up his clients about the big March 2 Texas Independence Day Bash, at La Fonda Sur Rosa, telling them that the economy is turning around, that if they’ll only buy even more phones than the ones they already have, so they don’t even own a car without a phone, then they’ll all be rich as Creases, as Brogan always pronounces it.)

  • • •

  So I head for Rosewood, which runs right into San Pedro. And in a way I’m disappointed: it’s no challenge at all. And I have to smile to myself, as if I were missing the old days. As if I were enjoying the shoe being on the other foot, and me being the one looking for someone for a change.

  That makes me laugh a little, and I decide that if somebody who looks all wrong answers the door—Mrs. Lenox Worth, or L.W. Senior—then I can pretend I’m the Avon lady. And thinking about that brings Mom back, so I’m not quite smiling any more by the time I pull up in front of the Dawsons’ house and see that their name is written on the mailbox in metal script made to look like rope. Like a lariat painted copper on the cream-colored box. “Just look for the mailbox”—that’s what you’d say if you lived in their house and weren’t hiding out from anyone.

  When
I ring the bell, L.W. himself answers the door (which has a shellacked rope lassoed around it, too), and I’m really glad to see him. That’s how L.W. makes me feel.

  “Jolene.” He looks knocked-out surprised.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I tell him, which, naturally, since I’m here, is the truth.

  “Come on in.” He’s got on jeans and Keds and a T-shirt. And looks younger and shorter. He looks like a kid who ought to have a baseball glove hanging on his bedroom wall, and some old posters, and a pile of dirty clothes that his mom in an apron is hollering at him to pick up before supper.

  He takes me into the house, which is one of those where you walk right into the living room. (The kind Glenna turns up her nose at because it doesn’t have an entry hall that lets you put up a mirror and a nice little table.) It has tan carpet and tan wallpaper, and windows that are so covered up with filmy tan curtains and tan liners and tan valances that you can’t be sure there are really windows there. Maybe the Dawsons have blank walls that they’ve fixed up to look like windows. People who have nothing to hide, Mom always says, don’t give a second thought to closing up everything tight as a drum as they don’t have to worry about looking suspicious. So they don’t; they look like they can’t stand the sight of who is moving in next door. My guess would be that the back windows of the house are nailed shut, just to be on the safe side. Because you never know these days who might come around, even to your house on Rosewood.

  His dad and mom are busy. That’s another thing I learned from Mom. When kids come over for lessons, or whenever someone rings the doorbell that you’re not expecting, you have to have your busy business already set up, ready to go. Because people think it’s strange if you’re just sitting there, or (worse) lying there, and aren’t busy. Especially in subdivisions. (Although I imagine it applies even more to changing neighborhoods like this one. People who aren’t busy around here are more than likely up to trouble.)