Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Did you pee? We’ve just got about five minutes.”

  “Yes, indeed. Made a big production out of it. Fluid in and fluid out, I told her. Made a big production and leaned on the LVN like a big ton of old straw so she’d get the point of how helpless the woman in 408 was at this time.”

  “Great. Now here’s the plan.” I unpack the suitcase while telling her about the missing agent in the men’s room.

  “Now here’s what you do,” I say. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “Here’s what you do. You get into these clothes—they’re the best I could find. You get into these clothes and back out the door of this room, so if the woman in white looks up you’re going to look like you were trying to come into the room and that I’m pushing you out of it. Got that?”

  “Got it.” Mom is now standing on the floor, spry as can be, pawing over the garments. She pulls the trousers on over some panties she’s fished out of a drawer in the bedside stand. She pulls on the turtleneck over a bra she materializes from her purse which hangs on a hook inside the closet door.

  It’s a double room, and all this time some other patient two feet away, whom we can’t see because the white curtain is completely wrapped around her bed, is wheezing and moaning.

  “Don’t bother about her,” Mom says, waving her away. “She’s a terminal.”

  Mom puts on the tux jacket, sees the problem, rolls the sleeves up almost to the elbow in the trendy style, and turns the collar up as well. The icing on the cake, she takes an eyebrow pencil from her bag and makes stubble on her chin and upper lip with quick flawless jabs not even bothering to look in a mirror.

  “You’ll have to wear your own shoes.”

  “No problem.” And of course there’s not, because she never owned a pair of heels and these are basic flats, definitely gender-general shoes, the next thing to loafers.

  “That’s good.” I hand her the hat, fascinated at how her old tricks take right over. She’s back and ready to go on; she hears the sound of music and the rustling of the audience. What a ham, my mom. What a performer. “Now here’s what we’re going to do,” I say, as she shoves the hat down tight, puts the shower cap back in the drawer, the shades back on.

  “What? What are we going to do?”

  While I admire her attire, she scratches herself under one arm, with the other folded across her chest. She’s the best.

  “What we’re going to do is, you’re going to back out that door—”

  “Don’t repeat yourself, Jolene.”

  “And then you’re going to turn toward the nurse’s station and grab your wienie, got it? The nurse is thinking that I’ve been visiting my mom here, and you’re the old man, the snorting agent who’s just come out of the bathroom. And then we’re going to march right to the elevator an hour after visiting hours are over and Purloin Letter it right out the front door.”

  “What’s holding us up?”

  In the hall, I wave at the LVN who puts her finger down on the page to mark the spot and waves back. She stares at me to get it in her mind that sure enough it’s me, right here in Humana Hospital, on an ordinary night when she was just marking time. A big event right here on her shift.

  “Your mother okay?” she asks, just to remind me that she’s bent the rules a tad.

  “She’s fine. She liked the gown, she liked the color, but she was half asleep.”

  “You found your friend, I see,” she says, making a gesture in the direction of my booking agent, who is holding himself and hop-skipping along, in a real hurry, scared to death to be in a hospital.

  “He tried to follow me in her room, but I didn’t let him in. Who knows what he might have—”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Sure, Jolene.”

  • • •

  I have a little delay with the getaway, because Mom wants to keep watching how the emergency room doors fly open every time a car wheels up the steep drive, but even so I figure that by the time somebody brings around the sleeping pill to the woman in 408, we’ll be heading up Broadway, through Brogan’s piece of the pie on our way back to home plate: Lot 4, Block 48.

  I have to detour once at Stop-N-Go to make a phone call, but that doesn’t take long, and while I’m there I grab some of her favorites: Oreos, Fritos, a Baby Ruth, and a Dr. Pepper to wash it down with.

  “Supplies,” I tell her.

  She takes to the treats like a dog to a sirloin strip and before my eyes the color comes back to her face.

  “Brogan says you’re famous.” She wipes her mouth, still in her hat.

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “You’re cased on coverall.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Well,” she says, “early training.”

  “Where’ve you been living?” I ask.

  “Here and there.” She’s cautious out of habit. “One place and another.”

  “Like old times.”

  “Wrong. Definitely wrong. Not like old times. Old times people liked their girls to play piano, boys, too, headed for the concert stage. Liked them to learn the scales. To learn their fingering. Every Good Boy Does Fine. Good Boys Do Fine Always. E,G,B,D,F; G,B,D,F,A. Now they’re not interested. Piano lessons? What’s a piano? What’s a lesson? You must be kidding, Mrs. Temple. Pay money to learn to count one-and, two-and, three-and, four-and? That’s straight out of weird, Mrs. Temple.”

  “So what’ve you been doing?”

  Mom bites her lip; looking like a man in a turtleneck and wrinkled tux coat who wishes he had a fix. “You wouldn’t believe.”

  “You’re versatile.”

  “Church organist. Masonic dances. I was almost down to public school.” She sniffles but then gets a grip on herself and polishes off her candy bar.

  When we pull into the old neighborhood, going down Empire past Jade, turning onto Astoria, back to the old place on Savoy, she whimpers slightly, and I can’t tell if she is relieved or sad or both to be back.

  The lime green asbestos-siding house with its peeping porthole looks the same as when I was here last: no FOR SALE sign in the yard; trash bags piled up at the curb; circulars spilling out of the mailbox.

  “Hoyt and Cissy’ll rat to Brogan where I am,” Mom mentions.

  I don’t say that it doesn’t matter any more who knows where she is. That we won’t be playing that game any more. Because I know she doesn’t see that after a while escape takes on a life of its own; that after a while you’re not running from, you’re just running.

  “They’re off playing bingo,” I tell her.

  “You know that or you’re guessing?”

  “Guessing.”

  “Good guess. Come on, I’ll show you where they hide the key.”

  In the old days when we lived here, Mom would always leave me to wait in the front by the drooping elephant ears. Then she’d come back, waving the key in her hand, saying, “What you don’t know you can’t tell a certain interested party who might be nosing around.”

  This time she leads me to the backyard and lifts up a rubber mat that’s lying beside the sweet gum. Under which the grass has long since died. There on the ground is a house key, tied with a twistie to a beer can pull. “Vole-la,” Mom says, back in good spirits, imitating Glenna’s French.

  She unlocks the door, puts the key back under the rubber mat with the pill bugs. Inside, she looks around the kitchen. The breakfast dishes are on the oilcloth-covered table. Coffee grounds are in the sink. It smells of cigarette smoke.

  “Same old place,” she says, looking glad. She gives me a squeeze and then flaps her tuxedo jacket like bat wings and dances a little two-step in her pleated prop-room pants.

  I put on some coffee. Thinking it’s late; that I should just make up a bed for Mom.

  But when I go to look for her, she’s rummaging happily in the storage room off the back bedroom.

  “Amazing treasures here.” She gestures to t
he string-tied boxes and piles of clothes. “I guess every week of my past life is right here, filed away, waiting for me to dig it out. If I want, say, the program from the exact Valentine’s Day sock hop of my senior year, well, here it is.”

  Tired of her agent’s role, she changes into a silky dress with a white a white collar that must have been hers in the past, as it’s too big ever to have fit Cissy. It looks good, being a sort of dressy seaweed green with a lot of dots and bows. She finger-combs her hair, puts on some bedroom slippers, and continues to dig.

  “And what have we here? I declare. This is right back in style. Look at that. See that hemline? See those shoulders? A little musty. Is that a hole? No, I think that’s just a spot. Nothing to it. And dishes—I wonder if they have a dish elf that lives in this room making these sets of plastic dishes the way the shoemaker’s elf made shoes. I might just take myself a set, I’m down to a few essentials right now.

  “If and when I get my car in working order—that’s how come I dumped myself on Brogan’s lap at that greenhouse, I’d run out of gas in several respects—I’ll be on my way. You can’t be in my business trucking around on foot. You can’t be in my business and be stuck on public transportation either because ’burbs don’t have public transit, that’s how you know they’re ’burbs: they depend on cars for their existence.

  “Look at this, Jolene, look at this. A bird cage. From before you were even born. I think I may take this. Living alone I get lonesome without somebody to talk to. A bird is a nice thing to have, stays where you put it, uses the newspaper, sings a little, or that kind they used to have—budgies—talks to you. I’ll get myself a budgie. Teach it to say: ‘I see a piano teacher.’ And what’s this? Would you believe. Under all this stack of papers, the good old World Books. I’m traveling light; I’ll just pack them up and take them along. It never hurts to have information at your fingertips.”

  That’s my cue to exit, when Mom starts planning her next move.

  I slip out front, look up and down the street, then stop just long enough to tie one of Hoyt’s white handkerchiefs to the front porch rail.

  43

  J—

  Smart cookie, you are.

  Arranging a reconciliation.

  Me turning around expecting it to be you, Jolene, standing there and instead there was Turk Jackson, your dad, looking like he’d seen a ghost. Me. Wearing the green polka-dotted dress that I was wearing the very first time he laid eyes on me.

  I felt like I’d seen a ghost myself.

  It was spooky, I tell you.

  What’re you doing here in Lot 4, Block 48, I asked. I don’t recall sending out invitations.

  It was my understanding, he said, that the white flag out front was a certain message in my direction.

  That’s when I knew you, Jolene, had been up to some tricks while I was busy pursuing nostalgia. But I didn’t let on to your dad that it wasn’t me tied that handkerchief. Meaning what? I asked him.

  What?

  White flag meaning what, I’m asking you.

  He had to think that one over, your dad. What he had to gain and what he had to lose. He had to think that over for a bit but then he came out with it. Ceasefire, he said, is what I understand is being indicated.

  That’s right, I said. This is a cease-fire truce we seem to have here.

  By this time we were sitting on the sofa like old times.

  You’re looking fine, I said, to indicate I was good as my word and holding my ammunition.

  A man has to keep up appearances, he said. Then, the same for you.

  A woman can’t relax her standards.

  He moved closer at that point. You could do worse, he said, than yours truly.

  What’s your sudden interest in my life, I asked. I thought she was the point, I said, meaning you. I thought our girl was the point.

  She was not the point, he said. Okay, she was a point, maybe, but not the point. She’s my blood kin, so I had a duty. But you’re my wife. Don’t you see? A man has a duty to his blood kin, but his wife, that’s a choice.

  Since when did you remember you had a wife?

  Since the last twenty-one years, that’s when.

  That didn’t make me back away. That’s news, I said.

  Come on home, Midge, he said. It’s time you led a normal life.

  What’s a normal life, I ask you? I asked him. What’s a normal life in this day and time. Selling oil rig equipment when there aren’t any oil rigs? That’s normal? I want to see the world, at least the U.S.A. part of same. Twenty-one years I haven’t so much as left the great state of Texas, looking after our girl, making sure you couldn’t come after me across the border with a warrant. I want to see the rest of it; there’s adventure out there.

  Where’s adventure? he asked me. Out where?

  For instance, I said, in the state of Connecticut they have discovered a canoe-shaped channel of gold right smack under the ground. The thing is to spot the trees that sweat gold traces; just go for the ’burb with the right bark in the backyard and you’ve got yourself a gold mine. That’s adventure. That’s a new horizon. I always say a move should provide an education.

  The gold mine is sounder than the oil well, he conceded.

  Those places up there still have an interest in piano teachers, I encouraged him. They still like their girls (boys, too, I said) to learn the scales, to have a certain polish.

  Sounds like a normal life to me, he said.

  You got a car that works? I asked him.

  Salesman has to.

  I’ve got a set of maps.

  That could come in handy.

  We sealed it with a kiss.

  Where’s she gone? he asked me. Our girl, meaning you.

  Time will tell, I said.

  I did my best.

  Your best was real good. You were a stabilizing influence.

  You showed her the sights.

  Our job’s done, I guess you could say.

  Looks that way. Between us, he said, I was running out of steam.

  Entre nous, I told him, the same here.

  And then the rest of it was just mushy stuff and you don’t need to hear about that. But imagine this, your mom and dad going off on a second honeymoon in a bright red Chevy Nova that’s waxed till it could pass for a Corolla. Going off generic as any old married couple taking the grand tour.

  More than likely when we’ve seen it all we’ll be back—ready to settle down in Chillicothe.

  Love,

  M—

  44

  “I’M HOME.”

  “What kept you?”

  “This and that.”

  Henry is in his drawstring pants; I’ve slipped into my lizard shoes.

  “Want some cocoa?” he asks.

  “Not now. Now I want to do it sitting up and then I want to do it leaning over the table, and this time I get to knock the vase over and the flowers off.”

  “I’ve created a monster,” he says, sounding glad to see me.

  “You created who?”

  Henry checks me out up close to see where I am. Still touchy, he decides. “Her,” he says, gesturing to a stack of clippings about our show.

  “That’s right, Jolene. You created her. Not me.”

  “You got a lot of phone messages,” he says.

  “Celebrities don’t have to return calls.”

  “You saw we made the cover?” He holds up the Newsweek.

  I think about that we, who all it could mean, and decide it’s okay. “Me and everybody else in town,” I tell him.

  “I called your aunt’s house for you.”

  “I went to see L.W.”

  “The actor. The necrophiliac.”

  “Actually, I went to see his play.”

  “Was it good?”

  “No.”

  That makes him want to do it, too.

  We do it sitting up and we do it with the flowers and vase, and we do it under the covers like a married couple, complete with cocoa in the HIS a
nd HERS cups. Then, because those were all his ideas before, we do it another way that I invent, in the studio, using the black cape that I wore to the show. And all the time we’re doing it when I say, and moving on to something else when I’m ready, and we don’t stop until I’m out of breath and out of interest and ready to be wrapped in the sheet.

  “I’m thinking of a new series,” Henry says, because of course he’s been painting in his head the whole time we were making love. “With the articulated skeletons. The graveyard band.”

  He gets out a catalogue from the Mexican Folk Art exhibit to show me, and for a minute it makes me really mad, that all the time I was hiding up there behind the papier-mâché bones, crying and going to pieces about being downstairs on eight walls for the whole world to see, he was taking time to pick up a catalogue just in case. But then I decide that if there’s going to be another show, this time I want some of the ideas to be mine.

  “I liked the crocodile head and the tiger’s mask,” I tell him.

  He is busy sketching something out on a piece of paper, so I ask him Did you hear me, and he says yes. “I liked you in the tiger’s mask,” he says.

  “I want to play with the hands.”

  He looks up. “The Fine Arts show is moving to Washington, that’s why I was trying to get hold of you.”

  “Will we go to the opening?”

  “In the fall.”

  “I want to be the Indian this time.”

  “In the fall,” he says. “I’m going to be paired with someone.” He doesn’t look pleased. He flips open the magazine and shows me the picture of the kid curled up on the floor by a houseplant, which I’ve already seen in Humana Hospital. “A Brit. They’re still beating the theme about live models. They think in generalities.”

  “Do you mind? Him being there, too?”

  “If it had to be someone, he’s fine. He’s good; he’s different.”

  “I want to go as the Indian next time,” I say again because he didn’t answer me.

  “Do you?” He looks as if he might smile but he doesn’t. He messes with what he was drawing again and then he holds it up for me to see. It’s a tiger’s face he’s done with colored chalk.

  “I want to play with the hands,” I tell him.