Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Where’s everybody?”

  L.W. looks embarrassed. “They go shopping on Saturdays. That’s why I invited you over. They always did that when they both worked, did all the grocery shopping and got the car washed and picked up the cleaning, all that. They got in the habit. I think to go out now in the middle of the week would be to admit they’re idle, and they won’t do that. So Saturday is still shopping day. Then Sunday they go to Church of Christ.” He hesitates. “But they aren’t gone as long on Sunday.”

  I try to put him at his ease. “It was a good time for me to get away. My aunt and uncle are pretty frantic about this party they’re having next week.”

  He nods. “Want a Coke?”

  “Okay.” I don’t really like carbonated drinks, but I’m being friendly.

  When we get our Diet Coke cans, he leads me down the hall, past the bathroom, to his bedroom. He’s jumpy as a cat about taking me in there, because I guess it shows what’s on his mind, and why it matters how long his folks are going to be gone. But I’m really glad, because of what he’s thinking and to get to see his room, which I’ve imagined a lot.

  Sure enough, there’s baseball glove on the wall, and also about a dozen jackets and sweaters and caps, even cowboy hats, all hanging on hooks over the end of his bed. The bed is pushed against the wall, so that the stuff on hooks makes a sort of headboard.

  He sits on the bed, still nervous, and I sit right down beside him. But then, instead of what I’m naturally expecting, he starts to talk about—bilingual education.

  “You don’t see other immigrants around here, Czechs, Germans, Swedes, insisting that their kids get educated and their old people get to vote in their native language. They get over here and the first thing, they take English as a second language, and they pass the test and then they have English as a first language. And their children win the Westinghouse Science Fair and they don’t walk around all the time with a signboard on advertising the fact they’re foreign.”

  “You’re right about that.”

  “Well, in The Second Peloponnesian War—”

  And then I see that he’s been leading up to his play again, and repeat the title so he can admire it.

  “—I’ve got a Czech and a German, played by Archie and me, and they argue about what language the main character should speak. He’s the Mexican. They argue over him like two dogs over a bone. He’s the bone. And all the time all he wants is to speak the cash language.”

  “That would make a good title, Cash Language.” I’m trying to be agreeable.

  But suddenly L.W. looks at his watch. His face turns red and he places a hand on my knee. “Here I am letting the time get away from us, Jolene. And they’ll be coming back before long.”

  Then I relax, because I know now he really wants to do it after all. Here on this neat bed under the hooks with all the hats and sweaters. I like that. Quick as a wink I pull off my blouse and kick off my shoes. I pull up my skirt and then look at his face and stop. He’s just staring at me.

  I take off my panties, but his nervousness is catching. If he thinks we’re going to have trouble, then maybe we are.

  “What do you like?” I ask him, real friendly, trying to get things going.

  “I don’t want to just get you in the house and then lunge at you,” he says, leaning over to give me a deep kiss. “But not having a place of my own yet, when they’re gone—”

  “I like you a lot.” I help him with his belt.

  “You sure?”

  “Let’s do it, and then we can go to the diner before they get back.”

  “Is that okay?”

  I kiss him some more and then help him out of his jeans. What I see I like a lot; he’s got a wonderful build and I’m ready for him as soon as I see what he’s got.

  The bed is narrow, so he helps me up on top, and I close my eyes and ride until he comes. I mean he comes almost as soon as I start, so then I don’t know what to do. Because I thought I’d come first a couple of times and then we’d rock awhile and then do whatever he wanted.

  He wraps his arms around me and holds me real tight, saying my name over and over, in a sort of singsong way, Jo-leen, Jo-leen, and it’s the first time I’ve really liked my name.

  Then he isn’t moving any more, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Get off?

  But the problem is solved in an awful way, because at that moment we hear the front door open, and someone—his mom—calls out, “Buddy?”

  I grab my clothes and he grabs his and we’re dressed in two seconds flat while we hear the sound of sacks being dumped on the floor and the door being closed.

  L.W. looks at me and I look at him. I’m not worrying about them as much as he is, because I’m still sort of confused and wishing I’d had time to come.

  We hear a woman’s heels clicking down the hall floor toward L.W.’s room.

  Then the back door opens and a girl’s voice calls, “Anybody home?”

  “Archie,” he whispers.

  Before they get to us, he pulls a sweater off a hook and throws it around my shoulders. Then, instead of moving farther away or standing up, he scoots over until he’s sitting right up against me with his arm around me. He grabs a Diet Coke can and is feeding me sips from it when his mom and a wide-faced girl in a jumper meet at his doorway.

  “Hi, Mrs. Dawson,” the girl says.

  “Hello, Archie.”

  “Buddy?” His mom stops dead when she sees me.

  “Something wrong?” Archie stops, too.

  “It’s okay,” L.W. says in a real serious voice. “It’s okay. She’s okay. Aren’t you, Jolene?”

  “I guess so.” I haven’t yet got the drift of the scene we’re playing, so I sort of lower my head and swallow.

  “She had a terrible scare,” he explains. “Mugged—”

  They look at him and he tightens his arm around me.

  “—at the diner on San Pedro. How she had the presence of mind to drive here—”

  “I didn’t know where else—” I wipe one eye with the back of my hand.

  “Gracious!” Mrs. Dawson sucks in her breath.

  “Gee, are you hurt?” The girl bounds into the room.

  “You were really brave,” L.W. prompts me.

  I take a breath and plunge into it. “I guess I got so mad at him that I didn’t have sense enough to be scared. I just hit him for all I was worth. I hope he’s not still lying in the street. The fat guy—”

  “Al, at the diner.”

  “—stuck his head out when he saw there was trouble. I guess he called the police.”

  The girl makes a face. “And they haven’t showed up yet, I bet.”

  “Arch, this is Jolene Temple. Remember, I told you?”

  “Sure, the poet.”

  “Arch and I—” He turns to me.

  I look up and smile bravely, overcoming my recent fright. “Why, you’re the one working on the play.”

  “That’s right.” She sits down on the bed, too.

  “I’ll just make us all some tea.” Mrs. Dawson hurries off to intercept Mr. Dawson in the hall and whisper that that girl in there was attacked right out in broad daylight. And we hear him boom that no place is safe any more, that you can’t set foot outside your door, that they’re everywhere.

  I hadn’t got the idea from L.W. before that the student clever enough to take Cary Grant’s real name was a girl. Right away I have to wonder if she knows what we’ve been up to. To wonder if she’s ridden L.W. herself, out of his jeans right here on this little bed. I have to wonder if she can smell the sex.

  Surely she can. I look over at her, expecting her to be furious. But she seems at home in the way that a friend would be, some guy that had been tossing baseballs with L.W. since maybe third grade. Pal. That’s what she looks like, a pal.

  The idea comes to me that maybe while we’re being Buddy and the Niece and she’s being the Pal, that what she’d really like would be to be undressed and all over L.W. like a case of t
he measles for about twenty-four hours. But I could be wrong. I could be projecting. If I’d come to see L.W. and knew where the back door was, and that I was welcome to come right in without knocking, I’d sure know he’d been screwing the girl with the mussed-up hair and mashed around just-kissed face whose panties were still shoved up under the pillow at the head of the little bed.

  But Pal doesn’t seem bothered one bit. She jumps up and goes off to help his mom get the tea, giving us a minute alone.

  L.W. looks wrung out.

  “No sweat,” I whisper, grabbing my red cotton briefs and stuffing them in my bag. “You did great. That was some improvising.” I give him a slow kiss before I get out of there. “See you at the Sub Rosa.”

  Then I’m down the hall and out the door.

  Standing by the retama/huisache, I let out my breath. One thing has been definitely decided: L.W.’s house is no place to disappear into.

  22

  I IN PASS-OF-THE-CAMELS PARK I was a movie star.

  That’s the subdivision we moved to after the Terminix “man” stole me out of the hall at school. The Suburb of Suburbs Mom called it, and it was. Acres of homes, miles of homes, a maze of homes. It had three basic models which repeated eenie, meenie, miney, and then repeated in mirror image, miney, meenie, eenie again. There was the basic onestory ranch, the split-level ranch, and the two-story saltbox. We had a ranch split reverse, in which the piano pupils had to step down into the living room that Mom christened the Practice Hall.

  To understand something about the child star routine, you first have to understand something about El Paso where our ’burb was located. For starts, it’s the westernmost part of the state, although it isn’t what’s commonly called West Texas, being too high and too dry. Picture a desert in the mountains. For another, it’s on the time zone of Phoenix and Tucson instead of little d and San Antone.

  (You can get the idea if you think about the fact that our move from Texarkana to El Paso is the same distance as from El Paso to L.A. or Texarkana to Savannah; the same as from New York City to Florida or San Francisco to Canada, for those people who get all the states in the middle mixed up. Or from London, England to Florence, Italy, for the international set.)

  But that’s geography, which is only another way to say that day to day and person to person we were in another world out there in Pass-of-the-Camels Park from where we’d been in Honey Grove Hills in East Texas.

  Mom, making a dry run around the playground of the elementary school our bunch of houses fed into, decided—seeing that everybody was tanned dark as an Indian and that everybody’s hair was dry as a tumbleweed and that they all wore boots and jeans, boys and girls—that I was going to stand out like a sore thumb and she’d better turn that to my advantage.

  She studied the terrain and came to the conclusion that it was a safe bet that people who lived in what was really the western part of the U.S., instead of the Texas part of it, were going to be taking their cues from Hollywood. So that was the basis of her plan.

  I entered school a month late, with a pale face, dark curly hair, short ruffled skirt, and sunglasses. I mean if you see a kid in third grade with shades on you think either that she’s blind and wonder where her dog has wandered off to, or that she’s somebody big. There were a couple of other touches, just to round the image off. One was an ankle bracelet Mom got at a thrift shop, the other was me wearing shoes with a heel to them. Are you getting the idea? Here was this Jolene, coming into class around Halloween, wearing this Lolita outfit, milk-white like she’d been kept indoors since the cradle, and nobody knew what to make of her, me, so they didn’t make anything. Like Mom said, I was invisible. They had nothing to compare me to, so they didn’t compare. I was the kid from somewhere else.

  After that, it was only a matter of mentioning a couple of words to my teacher in a loud voice, words like audition, tests, script, and then, on the playground, asking interested questions like What is kick ball? and What’s a fire drill?

  Then, out there in Pass-of-the-Camels Park, in the westernmost part of the state, I could go right on about my business. Which was, then as now, attracting as little attention as possible.

  23

  I IN THE SEMI-OPULENT aqua and gold ground floor suite at La Fonda Sur Rosa, Glenna and Brogan are dressed straight out of “Dallas.” You can almost see the cameras cutting in for closeups.

  She’s reeking of Shalimar, the perfume she used to wear when she and Brogan were dating, and has on pencil-thin heels and a black suit with the new short skirt and gold metallic-cloth lapels. Her hair is in a lot of stand-up gold curls, and worn open and almost to her ankles is the Joie de Beavre fur.

  Brogan you can hardly recognize. He’s got on this Bobby Ewing hairpiece called Alternative Natural Hair Addition and you honestly can’t tell it isn’t his. Where before he had that kind of bird nest that he was always patting to be sure was still there, this is thick hair that’s brushed to the side all loose and natural. Along with the hair he’s got a new gesture—I guess the Natural Addition freed up one hand—in which he grabs his chin in a thoughtful way. Definitely terrific how you believe what he says, where before you thought he was maybe bluffing. Now he looks like he thinks maybe you’re the one who’s bluffing, that maybe your check is the rubber check. Amazing.

  Before everybody arrives, he takes his hairpiece off to show me. It’s about a zillion pieces of matching hairs threaded through this see-through plastic “scalp” that, as near as I can tell, is Velcroed right onto his head.

  He jumps around to show me how it stays put.

  “Even when he’s active,” Glenna says, “it doesn’t budge.”

  And I know that means they gave it a heavy-screw test the night before.

  • • •

  Suddenly all at once men flood through the door, shaking hands with Brogan and heading for the bar. Those who spot Glenna sitting on the arm of a chair with her legs showing and the fur dragging the carpet get a peck if they’ve met her before, and if they really know her get a hug as well. The drop-ins and words-of-mouths and friends of friends nod at faces across the room to look like they belong, and Brogan shakes, claps, or nudges them all, because today’s crasher is tomorrow’s client.

  The ones he knows are introduced to me, and the Model thing is working fine. I’m dressed in black with a lot of eye makeup and have moussed my hair so that it looks like early Farrah Fawcett. Exactly what guys think a model should look like. And I have on heels, too, because models are supposed to hit the six-foot mark. My mouth has got a lot of gloss and I don’t wear any jewelry—as if I’m on assignment. I’m completely into it, so that every time Brogan says, “You remember Jolene, our little niece, well I guess she’s not so little any more, now that she’s taken to being a fashion model, ha ha,” I hold out my hand and give them a knuckle-cracking shake.

  The rancher types all think that’s great; you can tell. They all have some fantasy about a model. Maybe the buckets of money they think girls make, or the centerfold idea, something. I can see their minds supplying lots of details, and that’s fine. I’m on stage.

  L.W. comes in after about half an hour and gives me a salute. Rather, gives me what a stockbroker would think was a high sign. Then, with a quick smile, looking like maybe he has overdressed for this crowd, he unbuttons his vest and loosens his silk tie. Perfect. He’s a pro.

  Everybody gets a drink and then crowds around a table with an aqua cloth, courtesy of the motel, to munch on ribletts and surimi crab-claw analogs.

  Across from the food, on another table, is this giant display that Brogan has rigged up of a cellular phone made to look like a gun. He saw in the paper a couple of weeks ago a picture of a couple of Arabs on the East Coast trying to sell the phone company on the idea, and mocked one up for himself. For this party. It doesn’t actually work, and he thinks it may be illegal, but it’s an instant stopper.

  The men (and now there is a small group of women, too, in low-necked cocktail dresses and dangling e
arrings) all have to pick up the gun phone and put it to their ear, their head, point it at each other, then break into belly laughs.

  Below the display, Glenna has hand-typed about fifty sheets of paper where the customers can sign up at the bottom if they are interested in seeing a demonstration of the gun phone when it’s actually operative. SIGN HERE FOR GUN-PHONE DEMO a big sign says, propped against a quart of Jack Daniel’s.

  Everybody signs. Some of them sign up partners who can’t be there, or bankers they know will take it as a joke, oil prices being what they are, or maybe enemies that they think will fall over dead at somebody walking into their office with this black gun thing.

  It’s a real conversation piece. The pee-say dee resistance, Glenna says.

  And, except for the demo, Brogan is not doing any selling. No cookie king flyers; no cocoa photos. He’s acting like he’s having a big time giving a party—no expense spared, only the best—for all his good clients. Maybe he’s going to deduct the party on his income tax, but nobody faults that. The main thing is that nobody feels pressured. Nobody feels that this is in any way a squeeze. So they all relax and get another double and talk about the subject dearest to their hearts: the mess Texas is in.

  “Great party, Brog,” someone says. “I’ve had four fingers and nobody’s breathed a word about Chapter Eleven for five minutes.”

  A man in a plaid jacket says, “The only thing in this state that’s making money is cul-chure.”

  “You taking ballet?” Brogan asks, to loud guffaws.

  “Houston, let me give you an example, is paying one bunch of million dollars to bring down two hundred and fifty pictures of that hotshot Wyeth’s girl friend.”

  “If I painted two hundred and fifty pictures of some naked little lady my wife would cut off my hand to the elbow,” says a fat man next to him.

  “That’s not all she’d cut—”

  “I mean second, she would.” More guffaws.