Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Let me tell you about Fort Worth, another example here. Fort Worth, Texas, has got a several-million-dollar campaign to fix up their stockyards. Make them into the Williamsburg of the West.”

  “I heard Williamsburg was itching to be the Cowtown of the East.”

  “I heard Fort Worth got the new paper-money plant in-stead of Dallas.”

  “Little d could use some of that mint green about now.”

  “What I want to know is,” says the man in the plaid jacket, “What’s San Antone doing?”

  “I’ll tell you what San Antonio, the third largest city in the third largest state in this U.S. of A., is doing—”

  “You’re behind a census. Make that the second largest of the second largest.”

  “—in exactly twelve months’ time we’ll be home to a brand-new Sea World, that’s what.”

  “That’s not culture, that’s tourism.”

  “In six months we’re going major league with a domed stadium.”

  “That’ not culture, that’s sports.”

  “That’s not sports, that’s hearsay.”

  “What about the fifty-three-million-dollar HemisFair Plaza hotel complex, what do you call that?”

  “Real estate.”

  “A scam.”

  “I’ll tell you what San Antone is doing for culture,” says the fat man. “It’s building a six-million-dollar Fern Barn. Don’t laugh. We’re talking about connecting your Botanical Gardens to a fifty-foot palm house plus a sunken room for tropicals, plus a free-form reflecting pool, plus the whole shebang which is architect-designed and trapezoid-shaped out of your glass and metal, is going to be partially underground. Now that’s culture. While little d Dallas is busy getting itself a few more busted banks, our town here is acquiring for itself a one-of-a-cultural-kind commodity.”

  A silence falls. Nobody knows what to say to that. A Fern Barn?

  Brogan decides it’s time to bring out his wad of twenties and riffle the folded stack, and he does. Peeling off two with out looking and pressing them into the hand of a waiter who walks by carrying a fresh bucket of ice.

  • • •

  I get a glass of soda and steal a glimpse in the mirror over the aqua sectional sofa. It takes me a minute to recognize myself, and that’s good. Behind me I see L.W. and give him a smile, but he’s listening for all he’s worth to some entrepreneur talking about fire ant eradication.

  “Fire ants …” The guy begins what sounds like a canned pitch. He’s dressed in a shiny suit and has a razor-thin mustache. He looks like the kind of fall guy in films that you know is going to break down and spill everything when the gang gets to him.

  “Fire ants are like fleas and roaches, boy. We’re not going to rid the world of fire ants. They’ll probably be around longer than you and me. But for your pasture and rangeland, even your vegetable garden, my product is fire ant specific. It has very little effect on native ants, all right? No effect whatsoever on honey bees. It also, let me say, has no effect, guaranteed, on aquatics or mammals. Your dogs and cats, mammals. We think we’re innovative with this product that has a half-life of thirty years and works up to ten years. Now eighty pounds per acre broadcast of the product will reduce the population immediately, the effective population, as you’ll perceive in one minute. You interested in this?”

  “It sounds like a good investment to me, sir.”

  “Investors are what we need. Let me explain to you the way it works. You know your old worker ants are the ones who forage out to feed the colony. Well, we have developed these defatted grits impregnated with soy oil—that’s the attractant—and then our insect growth regulator is imbedded in that. No worker ants develop. Got it? We’re not killing fire ants, we’re just zinging them right straight up into the flying stage. Growing them up in a hurry. You apply this growth regulator in the fall and spring, and before the ants go into hibernation they grow wings and fly off and your colony deteriorates. Only one problem, sonny. Flooding. If your application becomes too wet you can forget it: the grits become hush puppy mix.”

  “That’s an amazing product you’ve got there.” L.W. looks as if he’s considering cash flow.

  “You can say that again.” The sleazy man, being an experienced salesman, waits for the other guy to think it over out loud.

  “I’m in investments,” L.W. tells him. “But these days, I guess you understand, I’m playing it cautious.” Slicking down his hair and checking his tie, he says, “Just about the time I began to get the hang of the market, and figure out that a fellow on his toes could make an unobtrusive dollar, the fat hit the fan and insider-trading became a dirty word.”

  I grin at him across a sea of shoulders, and turn to mingle with the women, who are all bunched up together in a corner.

  “Hi.” I squeeze into the small circle where they’re talking about what a bunch of ape shit horses asses the men are.

  “This is too rough for your ears, honey,” one of them, a redhead in rhinestone glasses, says to me companionably.

  “She’s their niece,” a big busty blonde explains.

  “She’s just Brogan’s niece. She’s not the niece of every limp dick in the place, is she?”

  “I didn’t ask the exact pedigree.”

  “I’m Jolene Temple.” I give each of the five women a big handshake, which makes them feel better. A big hard squeezer.

  “Growing up in this kind of environment will stunt your growth,” the redhead warns me.

  “Must not have.” The blonde gestures, indicating that I’m as tall as she is and then some.

  “Tell us about yourself, honey. You were nice to come keep us company. Not your fault how these things go. Women in positions of ownership aren’t exactly welcome around here.”

  “I think we ought to stick together,” I tell them. “We women.” I look around at the group, and see that they are interested. “My mom and I used to go to this diner run by a fat man named Pete who served the best biscuits west of Natchez and cheese grits with sausage that would make your mouth …” I’ve just got to the punch line and checked to be sure they’re all following me when I say, “Eat here or we’ll both starve,” when I notice this certain man whose back is turned to me.

  My voice trails off, although the women seem to like my story and pick it up and begin to toss it around, talking about how the goddamn truth it is.

  He’s standing by Glenna’s side, and at first I think he’s talking to her but then I see that he isn’t talking to anybody; his shoulder is aimed over her head and he’s facing the Sub Rosa’s idea of wall art.

  The way he stands—rocking back and forth on his heels—reminds me of someone. And even though I don’t recognize the suit or even the thick head of brushed-back “Miami Vice” hair, something about him has an awful familiarity.

  For a minute I hope I’m wrong. But then I get a sinking feeling. Because if Brogan can have his Alternative Hair Addition on then there’s no reason Turk Jackson can’t Velcro one on his head, too. Because that’s who I’m looking at, no doubt about it.

  Glenna never tumbles, because she’s working full time, watching traffic at the gun-phone table, being hostessy, eyeing the room, making sure the Mr. Jack and the roll of twenties are flowing as planned.

  Dad turns and finds me looking at him. Since he can’t give me a wink because he’s wearing shades, he just nods his head and shoots me that sad-looking smile, the smile of a man who’s doing his duty, who’s come to take me back and provide me with a normal life.

  I head toward the bar, edging slowly, keeping a lot of suits and bomber jackets between us. There’s a door into the bedroom part of the suite, and I’m thinking that I’ll cut out that way.

  But when I get almost there, I nearly trip over a thin white waiter who’s got a tray full of glasses. He’s holding the tray with one hand, sloshing whiskey everywhere, and with the other he holds up two fingers—and nods “his” head toward the bedroom.

  I look again at the face, and see, even wi
th the tight man’s wig, that, of course, it’s Mom. Mom doing her number right under Brogan’s nose. Right here in the middle of his March 2, Texas Independence Day, party for customers.

  I look around to see if my folks see each other. Mom has spotted Dad, but he hasn’t seen her. The usual.

  She waves the fingers at me again, and jerks her head to let me know we’re going to slip right out through the door I was headed for.

  My feet freeze. I look around for L.W., but there’s no way I can explain it to him in time. How my parents could be here and nobody know it; how their being here is the absolute worst.

  There’s only one thing to do and I do it.

  Running out the door, down the hall, and through the glittery gold and aqua lobby, I get in my car and head for the only safe place in the world I know.

  Henry’s studio.

  24

  WHEN I FIRST started posing for Henry, I thought we would probably fall in love. Then it seemed that as soon as I moved in with him, it was his turn to have that idea.

  That first morning when he came in and found me here, half asleep, I was afraid he’d be mad. But he went straight to the kitchen, which is right by the still-life table, with me tagging along behind, and dumped some flour and peanut oil and buttermilk and ice in a bowl, with some salt and baking powder, and before the coffee had even dripped through he had made us hot biscuits. This was before he asked what I was doing here or how I got in.

  And even after Henry arrived, the studio didn’t look like a studio at all. It looked like what it was when he wasn’t working: an ordinary house on an ordinary street. Before he rolled his easel out of the closet-cabinet where he locked it up for the night, in case thieves broke in, you couldn’t tell it was a place where anyone painted. If you’d come in the double front doors, through the big tiled room where all the western stuff is, and wandered back to the glass-walled room, all you’d think is that some furniture hadn’t arrived or maybe that it was off getting slipcovers. It was the same thing as if Mom had rolled her piano behind a secret panel when she finished her last lesson for the day, and let the split-level ranch pass for any other like it on the street in a neighborhood of similar streets. Safe. That’s how it felt that first morning—that the studio wasn’t really a studio after all, but just a place where you could sleep late while someone was fixing you breakfast.

  As soon as I got here and had pulled the Buick around back so it didn’t show from the street, and let myself in with the key that Henry keeps under the edge of what once was a stone birdbath, I called the Sub Rosa and left a message for Glenna.

  Aunt Glenna—

  Mom and Dad showed up at the party.

  I’ve gone to stay with a modeling friend for a couple of days.

  Don’t worry. I’m okay.

  —Jolene

  I was sure that my leaving wasn’t going to be any problem. She and Brogan were used to my disappearing over the years, and I knew they wouldn’t send the police looking for me if I left them any kind of message at all. I also knew that they’d probably never tumble to the fact that Mom and Dad were there unless they got my note. Then Glenna would look around the suite and get really mad. She’d tell Brogan later, and they’d lie awake and talk about Midge and Turk and how they never gave up, did they, and then they’d get back to talking about the customers’ party.

  I didn’t do anything about L.W., and still haven’t, but I need to do something. A couple of times I was going to call him, later that night, and again the next morning, but there was Henry with the biscuits. And then there was Henry wanting to make love, under the covers, with the crumbs and plates all around, and me in a shirt and some shorts of his. Wanting to make love straight style with him on top and a pillow under my hips as if, I don’t know, as if it was the wedding night of some nervous couple. And he had a big time. He would come and then step back and arrange the bed and pillows and plates, leaving a little bit of honey oozing onto the sheets. Then he tied a ribbon on my hair and called me Sugar, and came again the same way.

  It was really a nice time.

  Later, Henry got around to asking me what was going on, why was I here. But he asked in a natural way, as if he was asking about the weather, and I told him everything. And what I noticed while I was talking was that it was okay to do that, tell him everything that had ever happened with Mom and Dad, and how they’d showed up at the party, without even stopping to think about whether I should or how to say it.

  And even while I was telling him, in the back of my mind I was remembering saying to L.W. that my parents were separated, when he’d asked why I wasn’t living with them, that their jobs took them out of town.

  I realized listening to myself tell Henry everything that I could never have told L.W. the business about Chillicothe or the stealing me back and forth from playgrounds and classrooms. And I was not sure why. I kept asking in the back of my mind: why? But some things you just know. I could have said to Henry that my dad had escaped from the pen at Huntsville. Or that my mom had been picked up for (what do they call it in the paper?) vagrancy. And not been bothered telling him.

  But I didn’t know why that was so. You would think that somebody with a mother like Henry’s and a house that looks like a museum full of precious furniture would be harder to tell things to than someone whose mother irons in the living room, but that wasn’t so. Because someone whose mother irons in the living room and whose house is lined in tan everything from top to bottom, you know they can’t handle anything weird.

  You know they’re looking out the window (the window of their mind), peeking through the curtains, afraid they’re going to see something weird and not know how to handle it.

  I even thought that L.W. felt that me tucking my red panties under his pillow was weird, just a little, and my reaching so fast for his belt. And at the time I was telling Henry about Mom and Dad, and the ongoing phone calls and postcards and fights to see who owned Jolene this week, at the same time I was wondering how a non-weird person would have had sex with L.W. on that single bed on Rosewood under the baseball glove and what she would have done.

  What would the Niece do—after she let the chocolate chips cool, and everybody had said yum and had another, chewy but crisp—when it was time to have the love scene, center stage, so that the ironing might continue under dim lights and the calculating intercalary days, also. How that love scene would be played. Probably she, the Niece, would say, I’ve never done this before, and then Buddy would take her, thump, solid and quick as a good catch, and he’d feel like a real man and she’d begin to cry.

  For sure she wouldn’t begin, with the sheet wrapped around her and crumbs from a wonderful hot biscuit all buttery and messy still sticking to her lips, to tell him everything there was to tell about renting the furniture for a piano teacher’s living room and charging the guest soaps at Sears, or the Terminix “man” holding up three fingers and the white waiter holding up two, or dissolve into laughter about how really awful it was, being in the middle of the tug-of-war between Mom and Dad.

  In spite of that, or anyway, I was feeling a little bit guilty about L.W. The thing was I’d invited him to that party, and he was a really good sport and came, all dressed up in his broker suit, and talked to the sleaze about the fire ants, and did a swell job, and then I’d disappeared. It seemed like a bad trick on him, and was not the way I had intended it to be after the party. I thought that after Brogan’s cellular phone people left we’d go out for scrambled eggs and bacon, maybe to the diner on San Pedro if it was open, or maybe some nice place on Broadway, the all-night kind where they serve butterscotch pie with whipped cream on top and chopped pecans, that kind of place, and talk about what a help he’d been. And hold hands. After all, we had done it, even if his mom and the Pal did come hurrying into the house together to check out what was going on.

  But then when Mom and Dad showed up it was the way it is when the lights come up and the curtain goes down and you realize that the scenes lasted too long and
the acting wasn’t that good, that you paid too much for the tickets, that you’ve run out of things to say to your date, that you have to go to the bathroom, that your feet hurt, that the car has a flat tire, that your wallet has been lifted—in other words, that the play is over and it’s reality time.

  Besides. What do you say to somebody normal when your folks catch up with you?

  I was afraid maybe Henry was ready for me to pose, and that the talking was over, the way the making love is when he’s ready to start painting. But he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I decided that maybe he came in early every morning and sat around for a couple of hours getting himself ready to begin.

  “What can I tell L.W.?” I asked him.

  “The actor.”

  “Yes. He was sort of my date at the party.”

  Henry washed the bowl and pan, automatically without thinking about it, and then poured us each some orange juice into paper cups. “Tell him that—” he fixed us back on the bed like a married couple leaning on a pile of pillows having a little chat after sex. “That, umm, an old lover, someone who took advantage of you when you were very young, showed up and that you were scared. That you didn’t want your aunt and uncle to find out. That it’s some horrid secret from your past he mustn’t ask about.”

  I giggled a little, because what he said sounded absolutely right. Like something you could almost say out loud in the living room on Rosewood with the Dawsons listening.

  And then I knew clear as day how the love scene would be played. While Mom pressed pleats and Dad began a month with Sunday, the Niece would say to Buddy, I can’t, not yet, not now, there is some terrible trauma in my past. I was hardly more than a child. Please don’t ask, oh, please, don’t make me tell. And he would hold her tight Under Brown Umbrella as the lights dimmed.

  25

  TODAY HENRY MAKES more biscuits and we eat them again on the bed. I posed until late last night, and we slept without moving until the sun came up.

  It turns out Henry stays here most nights during the week; on the weekend he stays at the fancy house unless he tells his mother he’s not coming. March 2 was really a Monday, but Brogan had his party on a Sunday night, and that’s why Henry wasn’t here when I came.