Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “They couldn’t sell it for twenty-five thousand, that place.”

  “Multiply by three. Times three. You could sell a leaking dog house for seventy-five G in that part of town.”

  “Did you forget the bottom fell out?”

  “So lien-fettered upward mobes have got to drop their one ninety-nines and move down in a hurry. But they got to keep their kids in the Alamo Heights even if they’re eating Alpo. So here comes this little bungalow on the right side of all the tracks. No way it won’t be a hot item.”

  “If we bought it, could we make a profit selling it?” She takes a finger and smooths the wrinkle between her eyes.

  “I’m not putting Hoyt and Cissy on the street. Besides, in three years we can get double. There’s going to be a turn-around, you’ll see.”

  “Brogan, paying for this customers’ party is already breaking the piggy bank.”

  “I’m coming up with something.”

  “I saw the flyers of your cocoa king.” She sniffs.

  “Something new. I got an idea. Give me a little time to polish the fine points. The bank’s giving Hoyt and Cissy thirty days’ notice. To come up with the back payments, P-I-T-I, principal, interest, taxes, insurance.”

  “This is eight times since I’ve known you, Brogan Temple, they’ve done this. Seven times we bought the house back, starting on our honeymoon. We got a box big enough for a Kelvinator holding deeds to that place.”

  “You got to understand the urge.” Brogan is full of sympathy for his parents. “It’s excitement. What’re you going to do at seventy years with no dough and nothing to do but watch the tube and you can’t see too well for that? And you’ve given up smoking because your doctor doesn’t understand it’s your only occupation; so you’re retired from the only thing you ever knew how to do well.

  “And you fight a little, but they never got a lot of pleasure from that, and you shop some, but that takes money. Besides, you don’t know what to buy that you don’t already have too many of. Their house looks like a three-car garage sale already. But you can get in the Pontiac and drive across town and then you get in the atmosphere of winning. You get that close.” He holds up his fingers half an inch apart. “You get that close to the big one. Maybe even win fifty or a hundred. That feels great. It makes you forget you lost three.”

  “Your mom never gambled, did she?” Glenna turns to me for some third-party sympathy.

  I consider how to answer this. Gambling, you could say, is all Mom ever did. But not that way, no, not bingo. “No,” I tell her.

  “Brogan doesn’t gamble.”

  I don’t see how she can sit here and say that, but she’s thinking about being cased for coverall. About waiting there with your favorite bingo card lacking only that one number and you’re going to win one thousand dollars when they call it. Brogan doesn’t do that.

  “You worry sometimes it’s inherited,” she says. “Like heavy drinking, or being color-blind.” She looks at me. “I bet if I had kids, I’d be a nervous wreck, worrying were they placing bets on Little League or something.”

  “The first time,” Brogan says in a solemn voice, helping himself to a sweet roll, “the first time it happened, Hoyt called me up and said, ‘Son, we lost our hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place.’ This time he said, ‘On Baltic and Mediterranean.’ It’s real sad, isn’t it, hon, how when the bottom falls out your image of yourself deteriorates.”

  17

  MOM ALWAYS had a soft spot for that house on Savoy Street, her parents’ lime green asbestos-siding house with its gravel roof and its turning-brown elephant ears in the run-down neighborhood with the high-class names: Jade, Plaza, Empire, Astoria.

  If she’d had the money and we hadn’t been on the run, it would have been her and not Brogan who bought back Lot 4, Block 48 every time Hoyt and Cissy lost it to the bank.

  We lived in the house in the early years of my life, but I don’t remember the time when things were good between Mom and Dad. My first clear memories are of what she calls the Running Hot and Cold Phase, between the purchase of the World Books and the Tour de France tickets in the Christmas stocking.

  Their scenes in those days went something like this. Dad would stand there—feeling his bare crown and rocking back and forth on his heels—shouting that if Mom wanted to go off on some wild goose chase that was her prerogative and no business of his, but that he wasn’t having any child of his chasing geese, no thank you, ma’am, and that if Mom wasn’t interested in his normal life, he’d be glad to give it to someone else, namely his daughter; then Mom would counter that if Dad wanted to miss out on seeing the sights and having the adventures of this one-time lifetime that was his private problem, but that she had no intention of depriving certain people—for instance, her daughter—of a ringside seat on Experience.

  Then Dad would storm out to a motel until it was time to hit the road for a week of selling his drilling-rig supplies, and they’d both have a chance to cool down.

  Mom was still a little bit in love with Dad, I think, in those days. For one thing, he reminded her of Uncle Brogan. Both of them, hefty men, had this problem with their hair: they were losing it. When I was really little, Dad and my uncle were combing long slicked-down strands over their bald spots. Later, when Dad was grabbing me off playgrounds and out of churches, he and Brogan both had moved to fat dark wavy hairpieces that sat on their heads like caps. (I guess that by now Dad has followed Brogan’s lead again and is having them weave a kind of bird’s nest on his head with his own and borrowed hair.)

  So Mom would stew for a few days, say that we were going to move on, that it wasn’t working out staying in the same city with this man whom she’d married too young, that he was nothing but a crimp in her style. Then she’d weaken and start to think about a reconciliation, as she called it.

  Then, when it was time for Dad to wheel back into town, if she was in the mood to indicate that the coast was clear, that Dad could come in, cozy up on the couch, watch me turn the pages of the World Books, bring in his sample bags and stay the night, she’d send him their signal: one of Hoyt’s white handkerchiefs tied outside on the porch rail.

  This game made constant arguments between her and Cissy.

  “You are giving up, is what that says,” Cissy claimed. “A white flag means surrender.”

  “A white flag is a temporary truce,” Mom insisted. “It means stop shooting. Red Cross waves a white flag on the battlefield. Generals on horseback who’re getting together to talk things over wave white flags. It means Don’t shoot.”

  “I say it’s plain as day surrender.”

  “It’s a cease-fire is what it is.”

  Theirs way typical of all the arguments in our family, because the matter wasn’t anything that either of them, Mom or Cissy, was about to settle by looking it up or calling a library. They just liked to have a topic to debate, to exercise their minds and show that there were two sides to every question.

  As it turned out, the white handkerchief made fights between Mom and Dad, too.

  I remember a typical time.

  It was one sunny winter afternoon right after a bitter cold norther. Seeing from what was flapping in the strong wind that hostilities were suspended for the moment, Dad pulled up out front in one of the big rattling showy clunkers that he liked to drive in those days, came up the steps and marched in the front door.

  “I get the distinct impression you’re leaning toward a reconciliation,” he said to Mom. “Glad to know it. In my opinion it’s time for things to warm up.”

  “Where’d you get that big idea?” Mom asked him, shooing me over in a corner, patting the sofa beside her.

  “That white thing you put out there. Means you give up, is how I read it. A white flag means a person gives up. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong,” Mom said.

  Then they picked up where they left off on the old fight, until finally Dad stalked out of the house on Savoy—with its falling-down porch, its
one-car garage, its sagging palmetto.

  “The cease-fire has ceased,” Mom hollered at his back, as she crammed Hoyt’s white hanky in the trash.

  18

  “WE’RE GOING to a show,” Henry says after he’s wrapped me in the sheet and put the flowers back in their vase.

  I know he doesn’t mean a film; show to Henry means art. “Is it an opening?” I’m excited by the idea. I haven’t been out anywhere with Henry since we went to see the cow skulls and to meet his mother. “Who shall I be?” Last time I wore the banker’s suit because I was being an antique dealer; but he may have another idea this time.

  “Indian,” he says. “It’s an exhibit of Navajo blankets, on loan from Dallas.”

  “Little d,” I say, using Brogan’s name for the rival city.

  “Little show, more than likely, but I want to see it.”

  When I have my skirt on, which is deep blue and comes almost to my ankles, and a white shirt I wear a lot because it’s really loose and has no collar, he walks behind me and braids some blue yarn into my hair. He puts a silver belt on me and the turquoise necklace, and then he rubs some dark color across my forehead and nose and chin and cheeks.

  I look in the antler mirror when he’s done, and it’s amazing. I could be weaving on a loom at the show and nobody would give me a second glance.

  • • •

  The blankets, it turns out, aren’t in a gallery like the Sun Dog, but at a little museum called the Bernais which is really a very old mansion where you step down onto a cool tile floor and where there are lots of carvings around the ceiling. Right inside the door is a table with flyers about a Game Show Auction that’s coming up in the fall, and glossy catalogues about today’s collection.

  Henry gets permission to take some pictures, even though there are about a half-dozen signs that say NO PHOTOGRAPHS MAY BE TAKEN OF THIS EXHIBIT, because the curator is bobbing around all excited that a real artist is here.

  While the jumpy man talks to Henry and Henry is snapping away, I read about the hangings. The brochure says that the ancestors of the Navajos came up out of the bowels of the earth to this world. That they lived in a sacred place surrounded by four mountains (four is their magic number) and that their baby girls were propped up in their cradles so that they could watch their mothers weave. That each baby’s hands were rubbed with spider webs, so that she would grow up weaving, too.

  Henry wants me to come with him. He is looking at everything very fast, which is his way. Finally, he stops at two beautiful blankets, both striped, thin stripes, in white, brown, blue, and red. He feels the blankets although there are signs that say DO NOT TOUCH, but again the curator—who is talking to him nonstop the whole time—doesn’t mind at all. He even helps Henry lift the bottom of one serape-style to feel the weight of it.

  The red, the man explains, is raveled Spanish flannel in this one, but over here the red is cochineal, which is made from crushed insects.

  Henry isn’t listening. He has me stand in front of one of the striped ones and then another. Then he moves me to one with red triangles and fatter stripes.

  The man tells him that the pattern in that one goes all the way back to the Arab invasion of Spain in the seven hundreds, maybe to China before that. And would Henry like to see the documentation?

  “Here,” Henry says to me, “stand here and face it. Turn your back.”

  So I do. I turn my back and stand real close to the blanket until I am almost touching it and I put my hands on it, too, since that seems to be all right. I get into my part, imagining that I’m learning to weave from the way the red yarn and carded indigo wool thread themselves into diamonds and stripes. That the pattern is magically in my hands, and that my hands can make this pattern that no other baby girl will ever grow up knowing how to make.

  Then I hear a voice say, “Jolene, is it?” and I freeze. What if it’s Henry’s mother? (Of course it is, because I recognize that skimpy straight-up-and-down gray voice.) She will see me being an Indian instead of an antique dealer. I have a moment of total panic, but then I remember that Henry is here, and calm down. He will know what to do.

  “Hello, Mother,” he says, not sounding surprised that she has appeared.

  The curator bustles around even faster now, like he’s decided that something really important is going on in his cool old museum.

  I turn around, looking at Henry.

  “You remember my mother,” he says casually to me. To her he says, “My good fortune to have found myself a most satisfactory model.”

  “Hello, Mrs. Wozencrantz.” I hold out my hand, which naturally doesn’t know the first thing about weaving any more, because the spell is broken.

  She barely looks at me but says to Henry, “Do come say hello, won’t you, just for a moment.” She gestures to two ladies a few feet away who look just like her. “You remember Millie, from the Friends of the Bernais, and Hallie, from the Friends of the Fine Arts? Just say hello, won’t you? It gives them such a thrill to say they’ve seen you.”

  “I’m working.”

  “One minute, please.”

  “Come on,” he says to me.

  He kisses the cheeks of the two women in gray who are so thin you could blow them over like paper dolls in their floating dresses.

  “Is that Karen?” one of them whispers, noticing me.

  “Hush,” the other whispers back.

  “This is Henry’s model,” Mrs. Wozencrantz says smoothly, as if my being that was old news to her and she’d known it all along. “Models are back in fashion,” she tells her friends. “Since, well, really before all that to-do about Wyeth. He was simply part of the trend. No doubt he’d been holding them for years, until it was the fashion again. Soon we’ll be back to figure studies entirely, isn’t that so, Henry?”

  “Back to the seventeenth century like everything else,” the one called Millie pronounces.

  “The more things change—” the one named Hallie murmurs, then speaks in French (real French, not like Glenna’s).

  “Won’t you two join us for a bite of lunch at Lou Tess?” Mrs. Wozencrantz asks Henry. “We’d so like that.”

  “I’m working,” Henry tells her, and hurries me off down a long wall of striped blankets to a new one that he likes, a yellow and orange and black and white chief-style blanket. He has me do it again, turn my face to the wall and stand there against the red bands made by the raveled Spanish flannel.

  Then he doesn’t take pictures any more, or even seem to remember I’m there. When I get tired and turn around, hoping the dark smudges on my face haven’t wiped off on the stripes, he doesn’t even notice.

  After a while I sit cross-legged on the floor and go back to reading about the Navajos while the ladies back down the hall talk and talk to the curator, and Henry paints and paints in his head.

  19

  THE NEXT DAY the phone rings at Glenna’s, and when I answer it (not thinking) a familiar voice floats in my ear.

  “Think of a number between one and three.”

  “Two,” I say numbly to the dial tone.

  Two what?

  Two when?

  20

  AS I PARK in front of L.W.’s house on Rosewood, I notice that there’s one of those trees with green bark in the yard. I guess I didn’t see it last time. Glenna and Cissy are always arguing about those trees. Cissy saying that they’re called huisache; Glenna that no sir they’re retamas.

  Their argument is a lot like Mom and Cissy’s about the white flag (does it mean truce or surrender?): it isn’t going anywhere. That is, neither one of them is ever going to check in some tree book and see for sure which tree has leaves like needles and a green bark. Because in my family nobody really wants to risk being the loser in a fight.

  I’m convinced that’s why Mom and Dad finally let me move in with Glenna and Brogan, because otherwise with all the stealing back and forth, one day one of them was going to get backed into a corner and have to get a lawyer and have a court case. And then
some judge would get to settle once and for all who I really belonged to.

  This way, I can see that I’ll be sixty years old and Mom will still be claiming, She’s mine because I raised her, and Dad will still be insisting, She’s mine because I gave her a normal life, and Brogan and Glenna will be swearing, She’s ours because we provided her a decent home and a college education.

  I’m thinking about all that when I park my car and look at the green-barked tree, whatever it is, because I’m wishing I could disappear for good into L.W.’s house. Become a fixture like his mom in the living room ironing on her puffed sleeves and his dad at the dining table putting to rest the wandering week. Jolene in the kitchen, say, making chocolate chip cookies with toasted pecans and condensed milk, pulling the hot trays out of the oven, having reversed them top to bottom and front to back twice during the baking to be sure they are all even, calling to the rest of the household, “Come and get it, you all.” Pouring four glasses of cold milk to set on the counter.

  I see it like the opening of a play. The curtain goes up and Mom spits on the iron to see if it’s hot enough and Pop wets the tip of his pencil and shuffles some papers—they’re on either side of the stage—then, upstage, Buddy is sitting on his single bed under a hanging light bulb smacking his fist into a baseball glove, while downstage the Niece is pulling the trays out of the oven with two big potholders shaped like puppies.

  Mom’s call has put the fear in me for sure.

  21

  I WAS SURPRISED when L.W. asked me over out of the blue, and I’m even more surprised when I get inside. Something looks strange, and it takes me a minute to grasp the fact that his folks aren’t home.

  At least his mom isn’t busy inside the front door and his dad isn’t through the arch bending over charts. In fact, the ironing board is put up, and the dining table is set for dinner with a thick lace cloth and big white napkins tucked through wooden rings.