Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  He gets them all out on the bed for me. I put them back in the drawer and then get them all out again for myself.

  There is the very first young one with the tiny white half-moons, the porcelain one that looks like an old china doll’s hand. Then there are two that must have been from when she was in grade school. One has a cut on the back, a real cut, like something scratched the hand; another has a Band-Aid that covers a real tear. Both of these are worn down on the sides of the palms from years of leaning them on desks. Then there are the bigger ones with bigger knuckles and the skinlike gloves that come way up the wrist, the ones that work like real hands, that have a metal cord inside you pull to open the thumb and finger so you can pick things up. The lady ones with small but visible veins and long red fingernails.

  I get a little bowl of cold water and the tiny brush that’s used for cleaning them. Then, when I have wiped them dry, I line them up in order and, one by one, try them on and grow her up.

  “I want them to be mine,” I tell Henry.

  That makes him have to talk about something else—about how he wants me to have fifty percent of the Jolene pictures, and how I’ll get a lot more than that from the offers that are pouring in. That he’s sorry about springing the pictures on me; that he’s sorry I went crazy. I know that mostly he means that he’s sorry I’ve asked for something he doesn’t want to part with.

  “I want the hands,” I say. “I want them not just to play with but to have. I want them to be mine.”

  “You can get them out whenever you want.”

  “Have, Henry.”

  I can see he’s having a lot of trouble with this idea. Thinking that if he loses me he’ll lose them and then maybe, this is the way his mind works, he’ll lose his old daddy who couldn’t read and write and his uncle and the camera and the mistress, and there will be a great hole in things that all the losses will leak out. I can see he’s thinking that maybe if he gives me the hands he’ll have nothing left of himself and will be the bony boy again named Henry Kraft whose mother is shedding the ways of a ranch hand’s wife in Denver, Colorado.

  But I don’t let myself be talked out of wanting them by the look on his face. “Own them,” I say.

  “What if this doesn’t work out?”

  “What doesn’t work out? Us? We already did. We already did work out, Henry. Are you saying what if we don’t end up together in a condo on the coast of Florida sending cards to all our folks?” And I have to laugh at that, being reminded of Mom and her stream of postcards from every little town in Texas.

  “Okay,” Henry says.

  He cuts out the tiger’s face and then the eye holes and ties some yarn at the sides and puts it on me, a paper mask.

  “To get the idea,” he says. He is already moving toward the easel, not even thinking that it’s the middle of the night and we’ve just settled something important. He’s not thinking about any of that now because he’s on automatic.

  I don’t mind. I shake myself out to loosen up. I like this two-story glass-walled room when it’s pitch-black outside and the bamboo hedge keeps it private and we can’t hear a sound anywhere in the house or in the city. It feels good to let time spread out and things stand still.

  I try to remember what it was like up there in the museum when I was standing behind the skeleton with my arms and legs all at angles, when I was crying behind the mask with the real boar bristles and there were other faces around me made from human hair and leather, rags and glass—snouts and teeth and ears and beaks. When, past me down the aisle, there were riders on straw donkeys, hats on clay monkeys, wedding veils on sugar skulls. I try to remember what it felt like to hide there with Henry beating that drum.

  The last time, all the pictures were in Henry’s head; I didn’t see them. I wasn’t here. I wasn’t anywhere here; I left my body for him to use the way the museum person had the hides and limbs and costumes to arrange in rows and cases, the way the real animals and true dancers were somewhere else.

  This time I am going to be here.

  Still wearing the tiger’s face, I get two of the uncle’s woman’s hands and hold them out in front of me. I scratch the air with them until I can tell that Henry knows that they are paws with claws, then I pound them up and down in the air until I have a rhythm going, until I’m sure he understands the paws are beating the skins. Then I drop the sheet to the floor so I have nothing on but the mask, the hands, and the reptile shoes making iguana feet, and I can see the picture we’re doing as clear as day, as clear as if it was already hanging big as life in Washington, D.C.

  It feels good just to stand here again not paying any attention to anybody with nobody paying any attention to me.

  I’m ready to pose.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Shelby Hearon was born in Marion, Kentucky, in 1931. She grew up in Kentucky but later moved to Texas, where she was graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1953. Over the years she has taught at a number of universities, including American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and creative writing at the University of Houston, Bennington College, and the University of California at Irvine. She was the recipient of an Ingram Merrill grant in 1987, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1983, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for Fiction in 1982, and has five times won the NEA/PEN Syndication Short Story Prize and twice won the Texas Institute of Letters best novel award. This is Miss Hearon’s eleventh novel. She and her husband, Bill Lucas, live in Westchester County, New York. She has a grown daughter and son.