Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Kind of you, Brog.”

  Something about this is beginning to give me the creeps. Dad saying, Some things don’t change, rings a bell in my head. Glenna thinks everything is settled and sets her empty blender on the floor and gives me a big hug. Her eyes are wet. And all the time I’m hugging back I’m thinking that this doesn’t sound like Dad. Or, rather, that it sounds a whole lot like Dad and I know what that means, even if they don’t.

  “I guess I’ll be on my way,” he says. “Thanks for the Mr. Jack.”

  “Keep in touch.”

  “Oh, I’ll be in touch all right. You’ll be the first to get a notification of my whereabouts and those of my daughter who I am as of this minute no longer going to allow to stay in this environment where no telling what has been going on. Living in sin with a man old enough to be her father, and I should know. Plus carrying on with some cocaine-snorting, funds-embezzling stockbroker on the side. You hung yourself, Brog. I heard it from the horse’s mouth.”

  Then, just as he hollers at the top of his lungs, “Come on out here, Jolene, I know you’re in there, come on out,” I unlatch the screen and follow my suitcase to the ground.

  I figure I’ll have his rental-red car in my rearview mirror before he’s hefted himself up off the couch and turned the knob on the bedroom door.

  30

  I GOT MY SEX EDUCATION in the Panhandle.

  We were on the run again, pulling a U-Haul loaded with our possessions, looking, as always, to widen our horizons. Studying the map at a back-road barbeque stand, Mom considered our options. We had time: no one would think to look on the old highway, now barely a two-lane, plus Dad thought I was at a pep rally and would be for two more hours.

  In Honey Grove Hills, Mom recalled, we were a stone’s throw from two states, Arkansas and Louisiana. In Pass-of-the-Camels Park, we had quick access to three borders: New Mexico, Mexico, and Arizona.

  “Look at this,” she said, pointing to Amarillo in the Panhandle, “only a hop, skip, and a tank of gas from four states of the Union: Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico.” It was too much to pass up.

  So we didn’t.

  Within a day of our arrival, she’d located us a brand-new tract house on Palo Verde Drive (“green wood”), in Tierra Blanca Estates (“white earth”), on the outskirts of Amarillo (“yellow”), only a picnic away from the nearby Red River with its hundred-and-twenty-mile-long gorge.

  It was a colorful locale.

  Palo Verde, we learned, got its name from the clump of green-barked retama/huisache optimistically planted on every block; Tierra Blanca, from the surrounding mineral-leached, flash flood-bleached acid soil; and the metropolis itself from the yellow flowers on the yellow banks of a nearby yellow lake.

  Mom thought we’d found a safe ’burb at last; that we’d come there to stay. The Panhandle, she reasoned, was too far away from civilization for Dad to travel on a hunch. He’d miss too many days’ work—and besides, there were more oil rig supply salesmen than oil rigs in that part of the world already.

  • • •

  “What do you want to know about boys?” she asked me one night when I was working on math.

  My guard went up. If I answered Nothing, that meant I already knew everything there was to know, and I’d be in deep trouble. If I told her something specific, anything specific, then she would focus on that. I knew what had brought this on: I’d got my period, I was developing breasts. I was scaring her to death. If she could have squeezed me back into four-year-old Sonny’s secondhand suit permanently she would have.

  What I wanted to know about boys was mostly how to get alone with one without Mom knowing about it. But I knew that wasn’t the right thing to say.

  “Why?” I asked, having learned that a question was the best answer.

  “It’s time you were asking.”

  “Well, I have, some.”

  “Have what?”

  “Asked.”

  “Asked who? You’ll get misinformation. You’ll get in trouble.”

  “Asked the boys. I figure they know anything I need to know about boys.”

  “Give me strength. Give me sustenance.” She fixed herself a bowl of cereal. Her hair was up in plastic home-permanent rollers, drying after a shampoo. She thought piano teachers should have body to their hair. She also thought they should wear a lot of nevy blue. It was part of the image.

  “Men,” she started in again, “—boys are only small men—men are all gamblers. That’s what you need to know. I’m not interested in discussing the birds and bees, did you think that? Or how to kiss French or when to smack his face, did you think that? I’m talking about the basic personality of the male of the species. They gamble. They gamble for you, then they gamble with you, then they gamble you away.”

  “You’re talking about Granddaddy.”

  “Tell me something new.”

  “But not Uncle Brogan—”

  “Says you. My brother’s life is one big throw of the dice, one big draw to an inside straight.”

  “Not Dad.”

  She made a face. “No, not your dad. His only gamble was me. He folded after the first hand.”

  I did have something on my mind about boys I wanted to know: how Mom happened to get involved with one, namely, how she and Dad had got together. I knew there’d been a time when they seemed in love, but even then they were fighting with each other and tugging at me. (I sometimes imagined the nurse in the hospital showing me to them and both of them making a grab for the kid wrapped in the blanket.)

  “I do have a question.”

  “It’s time you were asking.”

  “Why did you start going with Dad?”

  “End of sex education for the semester. It’s time for your bath.”

  “Tell me how you met him.”

  “How I met Turk Jackson.” Mom stood up like she was in front of a class reciting, giving her plastic rollers a little pat. “How I met Turk Jackson was I was some dumb girl who laid eyes on this big lunk with this full head of hair—which he had in those days—and those white teeth flashing like headlights, and I thought I’d just fall head over heels like a ton of bricks, having nothing else dumb to do that week.”

  She sat back down, shook out her fingers, and began to play notes in the air, as if she was accompanying herself with a little melody along with her words. “So I did. I said, Here I am, take me, make a mess out of my life. Stomp all over my feelings. Make me promises you’re breaking faster than you can make them. So he says, That’s just what I had in mind, baby. Stick with me and we’ll head down the road to yesterday. Stick with me and we’ll be two flat tires on a deserted road without a spare. Stick with me and we’ll go nowhere.”

  She got up, closed the imaginary piano, and took a bow. “I believe that’s more or less what we said, your dad and I, in the front seat and the back seat of whatever revved-up automobile he was making late payments on at that time.”

  “Okay.”

  “What did you want me to say? We were a match made in heaven but we never got there?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “I was just telling. I’m not going to say it was your fault, for getting born, if that’s what you’re fishing for, because you had nothing to do with it. If you’d never come along we’d be doing just what we’re doing now, which is trying to get even.”

  I wanted to believe her, but I was not sure I did. “But if you hadn’t had me, you wouldn’t ever have to see Dad, or hear from him again.”

  “So maybe that’s why the stork flapped her wings over the cabbage patch, did you ever think of that?”

  I hadn’t but what she said made me wonder if just once—there on Palo Verde Drive in Tierra Blanca Estates—some truth had accidentally crossed Mom’s lips.

  31

  HENRY IS MAD I’m late.

  And that I’ve come back with only a suitcase. Most of all he’s mad I let Dad get me in a frantic state of mind again. And that I let myself out the window and d
idn’t have it out with Dad.

  I tell him he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how it is not to feel safe anywhere at all. He has no idea what it’s like to wonder every time I’m out if everybody I pass or anybody I speak to is really Mom or Dad in drag or some new getup.

  I tell him how long it took me just to drive back here to his house. That first I drove all up and down every street in the -wood section off San Pedro, and then every street in the -hurst section, and then hit the subdivision whose streets are named for the flowers of Texas, thinking that if Dad was back there somewhere he’d never make it out and end up out of gas on Indian Paint Brush Drive.

  I tell him how I drove all up and down the franchise strip, past Taco Cabaña, Jack in the Box, the Four Seasons: Mustard, Mayo, Catsup, A-1. And that he has no idea how many red cars there are in San Antonio, cruising down the middle of the street, or on a side street nosing into traffic, or jumping a yellow light at an intersection. Maybe a million I say.

  I’m in my sheet, with the hand against my cheek, trying to calm down and get myself into a frame of mind to pose.

  Henry has taken my hair out of its braid, because he’s not in the mood for the Indian now, and he’s brushing it out while I tell him about Dad showing up at Glenna’s.

  “If I’d been along that wouldn’t have happened,” he says.

  “What? Dad?”

  “Your running away.”

  How does he know that?

  “If I’d been with you, wahat would you have done when he showed up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You would have said, ‘There’s Dad.’ ”

  “Yes.” I can see that what he says is true. I’d have seen that car and frozen and grabbed Henry’s sleeve, and then told him, “That’s Dad.” And then waited. Because Henry would have known what to do.

  So how come he knows that, I’m wondering. And how come that’s true?

  “What would I have done?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Gone over and shook his hand and asked him how was the drilling business going.” Henry says it “bidness” and that makes me giggle a little, his putting on that accent. “What would your dad have done?”

  “He’d have told you that hair oil costs more than crude and that the only thing people are interested in putting in a hole these days—” And then I really do giggle. “Saying, ‘Pardon me, ladies,’ to Glenna and me, if we were around.”

  I know what Henry is trying to tell me, that I have to deal with who they are right now. That at Brogan’s phone customers’ party I should have introduced Dad to a couple of clients who were big on diamond bits or whatever they’re using these days. That I should have taken a glass of wine off Mom-the-waiter’s tray and said, Thanks I sure do need this, my whistle’s dry, and then gone right back to talking to the women ranchers.

  Is that right?

  I can see it sounds right when he says it, see it clear as day, but what Henry doesn’t understand is that something can be right and you can’t do it. Because you’ve spent all your life not doing it, so you can’t suddenly say that you were wrong to have a fear of heights and so trot out on a high wire, or fear of falling and go jump out of an airplane. Some ways of acting get set in you when you’re young because they’re all you know how to do, and then they stay with you, like stuttering or left-handedness.

  “You don’t understand,” I tell him.

  “Let’s talk about this running away,” he says.

  “I tried to do what you said, but I couldn’t. Just sit there.”

  I’m thinking that it’s easy for Henry to say that my folks won’t do anything if I don’t pay any attention to them, but that only means he doesn’t know them. He’s thinking of his polite Mrs. Kraft-Wozencrantz with her formal-informal dinners. He’s not thinking of Midge Temple and Turk Jackson, grown people, pulling some kid back and forth like a couple of hounds with a rubber chicken. He’s thinking of himself, Henry, a boy who could go back and find his daddy and then go hang around his uncle, because if he didn’t show up no body was going to come looking for him, and if they didn’t look up and see him, nobody was going to wonder where he was.

  “You ran off and left your actor friend at your aunt and uncle’s party.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to see L.W.”

  “We’re not talking about the matter of this boy in your life when I need you to concentrate on what we’re doing because the show is only two weeks away. We’re talking about your running away.”

  Sometimes the way Henry says things reminds me of Mom. I halfway expect to hear him say, Are you listening, Jolene?

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “You sound like Mom.” I have to laugh.

  “All the better. She seems able to get your undivided attention on any and every occasion.”

  I move my head so he can’t touch my hair.

  He’s sorry and says, I’m sorry, a couple of times. He says let’s sit at the table and have a cup of cocoa. I think he’s going to want to make love again, but he’s already moved on from that.

  He takes my hand, my real hand, and then he lays his uncle’s mistress’s hand on top of our hands. And his other hand on top of that.

  “About running away,” he says.

  “I can’t help it. I had too many years of running away with Dad or running away with Mom, and now whenever I see them I guess my legs just start to go. Anyway, at least I didn’t leave town with her after Brogan’s party and end up someplace where you could never find me, in some ’burb so big you’d still be looking for me when your show is over. And I didn’t go off with him today, head out for some rented house where he still probably thinks he can leave me with a sitter eating Rocky Road ice cream.”

  “I want you to make me a promise.”

  “I don’t like to do that.”

  “When was the last time you made a promise?”

  “They were always after me to promise—”

  “Jolene.”

  “What?”

  “Will you forget your mom and dad?” He says this and his voice sounds back to being mad again, but then he buries his face for a minute in the pile of hands and I don’t know for sure where he is.

  “You asked me when was the last time—”

  “I want you to make me a promise.”

  “I don’t like to do that.”

  “It’s a promise you won’t want to keep.”

  “Then why am I going to make it?”

  “Because. Because a long time from now you’ll be glad you did.”

  “Tell me what it is.” I think he means something about running away from Mom and Dad, or maybe about not going to see L.W., and there doesn’t seem to be any point in saying I’m not going to do what I’m going to do.

  “Promise me that you will not run away after the Fine Arts show.”

  “But I won’t be posing any more, will I?”

  “I’m not talking about your running off from the studio; I’m talking about your running away from the museum. I’m asking you to promise that you will not run away from the show.”

  I think about going with him to the little museum with the red, brown, blue, and white blankets, and remember that he knew how to make me feel safe, even when his mother showed up. And I think about the Western Artifacts show when we got the antler mirror, and I was being a dealer, and we had a good time.

  But then I remember that those other times were different: they were before Mom and Dad had crashed the scene. What if the chaps-and-spurs dealer had turned out not to be a dealer after all, and had waved four fingers at me? What if the curator of the little museum had been Dad in another, wavier hairpiece? What would I have done? I look at Henry and I know I can trust him, but I’m not so sure about me. I don’t want to make him a promise I can’t keep, so I pull my hand, my bottom hand, from the stack. “Do you mean if one of them—?”

  “Forget Mom and Dad.” This time he actually shouts at me.


  I mess with the sheet.

  He warms up our cocoa. “Promise me,” he says, calm again and through with being upset.

  I think about it, about how if Henry is with me then it will be different. About how this matters a lot to him. “Okay,” I say.

  “This will require a blood oath.”

  “Henry!”

  He gets out the box of hands, and something from another drawer that looks like a pot of lip gloss, but must be paint, because he wets his finger in his mouth and dips it in the pot, and paints a red drop on both my hands and his hands, in the same place on the inside of the wrist, and then on a couple of my favorite of the uncle’s woman’s hands, an early porcelain one, a metal one in its fleshy sleeve. Then he presses all our wrists together.

  “I, Jolene, do promise Henry …”

  I’m getting the giggles again. “I, Jolene, do promise Henry.”

  “Not to run away at our show.”

  “Not to run away at our show.”

  “On my oath.”

  “On my oath.”

  “So help me.”

  “So—help me.” I hide my mouth.

  He puts the paint and hands away, all but the one I’m going to use. He wipes the paint, which is soft, like lipstick, off our wrists.

  Then, holding mine circled in his fingers, he says real low, “I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “You?”

  “They’ll say odalisque. Matisse. They’ll say Matisse. The press have meager minds. They lack talent. The only thing they can draw is comparisons. Maybe I should hang a couple of my uncle’s. Let them compare Wozencrantz with Wozencrantz. That’s the thing to do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” he says, pulling off the sheet and leading me in to pose.

  32

  “IS IT FAR?” Cissy whines. She is not enthusiastic about this family outing. She’s dressed in an aqua pantsuit, nothing fancy, not her good-luck clothes that she saves for bingo. Her hair is a kind of dyed red that Glenna calls henna and Mom calls drugstore red. She has what Mom also calls a maximum fidget factor, which is why she’s so tiny no matter what she eats, and that isn’t much anyway, because she goes crazy sitting still at a dinner table.