Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “What brings you here today, Jolene?”

  “Just visiting,” I said, and then I waved an imaginary Visitor’s Card in the air. She nodded, because that was usually the last question we got asked, before it was time to shake the preacher’s hand and head out the door.

  • • •

  In the little farming community congregation we’d picked, it was the custom for each child on Christmas Eve to receive two gifts: a generic one, gender specific, from Santa, and a second, specially selected one, from her or his Sunday School teacher. That year was the only time I ever got my name on two presents under the tree, and the last time Mom ever let me go to church.

  The Superintendent, all dressed up like Santa, called the names one by one, and all the boys got yo-yos and all the girls got tops (the stenciled metal humming kind that no girl wanted, and which the smartest ones quickly traded to unthinking boys for yo-yos). The class presents, in contrast, varied a lot. Some teachers were more thoughtful than others, some more knowledgeable, some more generous. Mine was all three. And since I’d been in Mrs. Jarvis’s class for five Sundays, I was eligible for a gift. (A borderline situation, because children who suddenly appeared out of nowhere on the first of the four Sundays in Advent were usually suspect and told they would have to wait till next year.)

  I’d seen two of the girls in my class—girls with the big wide freckled faces and plump trunks about to blossom out with breasts that were common for eleven-year-olds on the coast—get their names called once, for their humming tops, and then a second time, for, oh, miracle, not dime store hair barrettes, or lace handkerchiefs, or new toothbrushes, or Bible-story coloring books, but gold-toned lockets that really opened.

  I could hardly believe it. It seemed too good to be true. That I was a full-fledged member of a Sunday School class, that Mom was actually letting me go to the Christmas drawing all by myself, that a gold locket just like that was about to be mine.

  “Jo-lene,” Mrs. Jarvis called out in her singsong voice, and I was halfway up the aisle with my hand out, wearing (I can still see it clear as day) a fuzzy pink junior-high-type sweater which just begged for a locket, when an arm slipped around my waist and Dad said in my ear: “Come on home, sweet-heart, it’s time you had a normal life.”

  And as we left the church, without my present, I remember thinking that if Jesus loved me so much how come He forgot to mention—Him, of all people, Who surely ought to know!—that it was the mistake of your life to answer to your name in public.

  38

  “FOR SLIGHTLY OVER three times the currently depressed price of this ranch-style, I could own a Soviet white fur coat,” Glenna is saying.

  “You and the Soviets are enjoying good relations? They’re selling you clothes?” Brogan asks her.

  “I’m reading from Neiman’s Preview of Fall catalogue. It says that white full-sweep coats of natural lynx bellies are going for two hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars.”

  “The US of A they sell the bellies; the backs and feet and hands they sell their satellites.”

  “I’m just giving you a report on luxury spending to give an indication of the state of health of the dollar in Texas today, Brogan.”

  “Maybe they’ll take your Joie de Beavre in trade. The Soviets are warming to trade.”

  • • •

  For the last half hour I’ve been sitting out in front of their house, watching the sun shine through their live oak on the new-mowed lawn. In the early light the pink brick and gray shingled house with its wrought iron trim looks like it could be for sale, all fresh and unoccupied.

  Funny, but I’d never noticed before the round white porthole on the front that looks like a camera lens staring out. And that’s creepy coincidence, because I’d just gone by Hoyt and Cissy’s place on Lot 4, Block 48—driven around the neighborhood of run-down houses on Plaza, Empire, Astoria, Jade, past all the little peeling lime green, coral, mustard homes with their palmettos and elephant ears and washed gravel roofs—and when I pulled up in front of theirs on Savoy, I saw that right on the porch, up the cement steps, was a round porthole window, looking straight at me.

  I figured that Hoyt and Cissy were off at the bingo parlor and that I could slip in the back and never be noticed, jimmy open a screen if it was locked, kick over a rusted trike in the weeds—left from when Mom or Brogan was a kid. But the longer I sat, the more that round eye kept blinking at me, the more the sun and shadows kept shuttering it open and closed.

  I don’t know how come I never noticed it before.

  That was earlier this morning. Last night I slept in the waiting room of Humana Hospital, along with about twenty other people. Nobody asked me who I’d come to see, even though I was wrapped in this long black thing like a Halloween costume six months early. I had to sign in, but I signed Jackson, figuring that every hospital in the world has a patient named Jackson.

  It didn’t actually turn out to be a bad place to stay; there was a bathroom right down the hall and I had cafeteria food last night and again this morning. I probably ate better than Mom, who was lying somewhere on the fourth floor—enjoying herself undergoing the treatment for pneumonia. It made me nervous, being that close to her, like she had eyes that could see through walls. It would soon be a week since the scam at the Fern Barn and I knew she’d be expecting me, but I was in no shape to decide how to hide two people; for now, it was all I could do to think about hiding one.

  • • •

  “Myself,” Brogan says to Glenna, holding up the paper, “I’ve been reading the hot fresh news. For example, today the headline reads ALIEN SIGHTS UFO.” He spells it out, s-i-g-h-t-s. “Now, they like variety in their coverage here. Yesterday, if I’m not mistaken, we had the big item top of page one informing us that UFO SIGHTS ALIEN.” He spells that, too, c-i-t-e-s. “Midweek, for a little change of pace, we’ll get the articles on UFO SIGHTS ALIEN and ALIEN CITES UFO, if you follow me. And Sunday, the full banner spread, no initials—that’s to aid your tourist—UNDERCOVER FEDERAL OFFICIAL CITES ILLEGAL ALIEN. Am I right?”

  “Then why are you reading the paper, honey? Why are you right this very minute combing the newspaper if you know it by heart?”

  “I was looking for a picture of Jolene,” he says. “I was merely skimming the front section and the life-style, even though I happen to know that they put this paper to bed yesterday before lunch. That unless the president dies of old age, they don’t add anything to this paper after lunchtime yesterday. But I happened to be taking a look is all.”

  Hearing that, I get a sinking feeling and step around the corner of the house.

  “Here I am,” I say.

  “Jolene!” Glenna in her new pink warm-up suit bobs up in the air all excited, like I was somebody she never expected to see in her own backyard.

  “Well, son of a gun,” Brogan says. “Well, I declare. It’s Jolene herself, big as life.” He wads up the paper and pulls out a wrought iron chair for me to sit in at the same instant that Glenna pours me a fresh glass of pineapple shake.

  It gives me a scary feeling, to have them focusing on me that way, and I wonder what they know.

  I don’t have to wonder long, because Brogan is bursting with it. “We were sitting in the TV room, big as you please last evening, getting ourselves a little news along with a glass of Glenna Rosé—not the real thing, that’s a few years away, but a sampling of what we intend to aim for, if you get my meaning, something classy from California, sampling the competition as it were—and there she was, our very own Jolene, you, looking like a movie star.”

  “Honey,” Glenna elaborates, “they showed you turned sideways with that painter, both of you all dressed up—why, you’re still in that black outfit, aren’t you?—and with that makeup on, honey, you were the most beautiful thing we’d ever seen in our lives. And there were all those people in evening dresses crowding around you, why it was like looking at actors going into the Academy Awards ceremony with all those cameras flashing. When you said model�
�why, I never in all my born day imagined you meant that kind of model. Why, there was nothing else on the news hardly. Was there, Brogan? Was there anything else to amount to anything on the news?”

  Brogan in his new gray warm-up suit is so agitated he can’t stay still and gets up and begins to do a few deep knee bends and arm rotations. “Your aunt is not just talking local, either,” he says. “She means your CBS, ABC, NBC, they all had this same shot of our niece that we raised, looking like maybe she had just stepped over the body of Brooke Shields or maybe Madonna, one of that kind, one of those yesterday folks who aren’t today’s news any more.”

  “And, honey,” Glenna breaks in, jumping up herself and doing some waist bends. “They even showed a couple of the paintings, I mean not the whole things, not on TV, but just enough, your shoulders in one of them with you looking right out of the picture, and in another it was your hair in a pigtail and the camera went further down on that one, it being your back, down to your waist and it looked like you were on some kind of rug. Is that right? You would have thought you were the president of the United States the way all those cameras were flashing. I wonder if they had a plastic shield up when they were taking you, the way they do when the president travels. It’s not really glass, so you can photograph right through it.”

  “It was a private party she was at,” Brogan says. “No nuts were allowed. Unless you have a rich old lady nut with a bunch of diamonds on who had a gun in her girdle. Unless you had that kind of nut you didn’t have a nut at that private party who was going to make you need a shield.”

  “I’m just saying. A celebrity isn’t always safe.” Glenna takes a big breath. “Honey, we could hardly sleep all night. Brogan wanted me to call you—he had it figured that you must be at Mr. Wozencrantz’s house—but then we thought that wouldn’t be right. We tried to get Hoyt and Cissy to ask did they see it, but they hadn’t come home by midnight so we gave up. There didn’t seem to be any point in telling your mother, sick as she is, and to tell the truth we got so excited we forgot to even go by during visitors’ hours, but I guess she was hardly in a shape to notice. Or in telling your dad, either, him being on a rampage right at this time, and I certainly hope he was out showing samples and not parked in front of the evening news.”

  “I said to myself,” Brogan interrupts, “that right there on my TV set was the very face to launch a thousand bottles of virgin-press Glenna Rosé. I said to myself, Brog, when the time comes, you’ve got prime advertising potential right here under your own roof.”

  “You’ll be in all the papers, you know,” Glenna says. “Whatever is on TV always shows up in a couple of days in the papers.”

  I don’t know what to say to them, although they may not be expecting me to say anything. After all, I never have said much around them; mostly I listened while they made their plans or had their discussions about what the true state of things was. Mostly they always liked to have a third party around, somebody they didn’t really have to take much notice of, while they tried their ideas out.

  It feels weird and awful to have them jumping around like they’re doing and all the time keeping their eyes fixed on me, watching every move I make.

  I finish my pineapple shake and get up to go in the house. I need to shower and to wash my hair, and to get out of this Dracula suit that I’ve been in for what seems like about four days spent with every hopeful and mourning family member in Humana Hospital.

  “Hon.” Glenna looks at me. “Why didn’t you tell us? I mean, we would have kept it a secret. Why didn’t you at least tell us, me and your uncle Brogan. You could have knocked me over with a feather; I thought I was going to faint on the spot, when I saw you large as life on that screen.”

  “Some things a person has to keep under wraps,” Brogan explains to her. “Some things can’t be unveiled until the time is right. You didn’t see me announcing for example that my sign-up sheets at the gun-phone display had to do with another project that me and nobody else had occasion to know about.”

  I almost giggle at under wraps and unveiled. That’s about the size of it, I think. I should have stayed under wraps and never unveiled in the first place. I should have stayed in the famous, wild-haired drama teacher’s class and improvised my brains out. Give me another chance, watch, you can’t believe how ready I am to be anything on wheels, a biscuit rising, the color blue. If it’s something else besides me, anything else, I’m ready to go.

  “I just wish you had told us,” Glenna says again. “I’m not fussing; just wishing that we’d been in on it.”

  Why didn’t I tell them what? That I was off in a world of my own about as safe as Daniel in the lions’ den? “I need to get out of this dress,” I tell her now, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Well, sure, let me fill up the tub for you. Have yourself a good soak. I’ve got bubble bath that’s real nice. And bath oil beads.”

  “Draw a bath, that’s what you say,” Brogan corrects her. “You say, ‘Let me draw you a bath.’ ”

  “What’s wrong with ‘fill up the tub’? Jolene knows what I’m talking about.”

  I can feel my skin crawl; it seems like I can’t do anything by myself any more. “That’s okay,” I say. “I know my way around here.” I laugh a little, to remind them that, after all, I’ve lived here for half a dozen years.

  “You want me to iron you something to wear? What about makeup? Did you bring your things back with you? Is he—I don’t mean to pry, but is he going to pick you up here? Will we get to meet him?”

  Oh, Jesus, I wish I were back with the tiger mask on my face or maybe behind the wooden crocodile snout, snapping my hinged jaw.

  Henry? I don’t know if they’ll get to meet Henry or not. I don’t know what I’m going to do about all my things over there at his ordinary house which is less than a dozen blocks away but that’s something at least that I can keep either one of them, or him, from finding out. Maybe that’s what I should concentrate on: getting out of this slice of the pie. It’s getting sticky in here.

  Of all the times in my whole life for Mom to be taking a health treatment, this is the worst. Think of a number between eighteen and twenty. That’s me, Mom. Remember? I’m the one who was in Mrs. Evans’s class. Ridiculously, knowing that Glenna and Brogan won’t have an idea what I’m doing, I hold up all the fingers on both hands and then make fists and hold up all but one. Nineteen years old and worse than an orphan. I’ve got foster families everywhere.

  They think I’m exercising along with them, or stretching, and before where they would have asked me, What on earth are you doing? Got a cramp or something? now they just look at me, like anything I’m doing must be the sort of thing that a model who’s on TV would do. And they don’t have to understand it, because it’s in another realm from theirs, it’s part of another, bigger world out there, with different rules.

  Wouldn’t you think that they’d want, at the least, to tan my hide for appearing butt naked all over eight walls bigger than life? In full view of, I was about to say, the whole collection of museum friends, but I guess the whole city is more like it. Wouldn’t you think?

  “I just wish you’d told us, honey, that’s all.”

  “Some things have to be kept under wraps, Glenna. I told you. Now don’t get on the girl, she needs to get herself freshened up and rested up. Go draw her a bath, like I said.”

  “I just want to know about her plans for the coming evening, if you don’t mind. You don’t mind if I ask you, do you, honey?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I tell her. “I’m going to stay here. Get to bed early.”

  “Not before we take you out for a proper dinner,” Glenna says and smiles real big at Brogan. “I mean, this is an occasion that only comes once in a lifetime.”

  At that moment the phone rings.

  “Excuse me a minute,” she says, and puts on her secretarial voice as she picks up the cordless phone. “Temple Enterprises,” she announces. Then her face breaks into
a flutter of smiles and flushes as she listens. “Why, sure, she’s right here. She’s right here, sitting here with us. Why, of course you can.” She covers the receiver with her hand and mouths to me: “It’s him!”

  Oh shit. How on earth? I guess it’s not that hard. If my name’s Temple and I have an uncle Brogan … I guess it’s not that hard. Then if Henry has any sense he’ll know that it’s just a stone’s throw back down New Braunfels from his house to theirs. But then if he was going to show up—like Dad, like Mom—he’d have already done it, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t be on the phone. Thinking about that, calming myself by reasoning that out, I say, “Hello.”

  “You need to call a reporter on the East Coast. He called here for you, but I didn’t want to give him your number. With a number they can trace an address. That’s why I didn’t let them have a last name. Now I’m going to give you a number, call him collect—magazine reporters like to be called collect—and tell him the minimum you can. Don’t say anything you don’t want to read for the rest of your life. Say you modeled to save money for an acting career. Say you have an unlisted phone. Say you’ve been in a few college productions. Say you weren’t born in this country. Say anything you want to that you can live with. Got that?”

  “Do I have to call him?”

  “If you don’t, they’ll make something up. They’ll ask around. They’ll print anything third-hand that makes good copy.”

  “You’re just scared they’ll call your mother and daughter.”

  “They already have. Mother can straight-arm a tractor. No problem. Karen told them she thought you were a costume-design major.”

  That makes me want to give the tan girl with the light lashes a big hug. Costume design—that was quick thinking. It must have come from my being at her house pretending to be an antique dealer. But with a twist. I like that. I like it a lot. “Maybe I’ll say that.”