Owning Jolene

by Shelby Hearon

  “Do I?”

  I walk all around Karen, pretending to take my time studying her. “No,” I say, finally. “She had coarser features. She was not really pretty the way you are. She had this dark coloring and big features and so she photographed well.”

  “Did Dad dream up that outfit for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It looks like a costume.”

  She slips away toward her grandmother, then comes back. “Thanks,” she says. “That was nice about looking pretty. You don’t lie worth a damn, but that was nice.” She grabs the artificial hand and gives it a shake and we both laugh.

  Henry has me come and pose for some pictures. In a couple of them we are facing each other, which I don’t like a lot because I’m not confident about my profile. In a couple more we are looking straight out at the camera and he tells me not to smile, so I don’t. In one he has me reach down and hold the hand up to my chest. I curve my own hand around it, and that brings a blush to my face that I can feel, hot all over my cheeks, because it reminds me of what I’ve got on when I pose. But Henry is standing near me and he says, Don’t smile, chin up, look at the camera, hold the hand higher, the sort of instructions that he gives me when we’re in the studio alone and I follow the sound of his voice the way I do when he’s painting, and that has the effect of making all the friends of the two museums fade away, the way you see in films when everything gets blurred. Then I’m not nervous any more, but just listening to Henry.

  “What name shall we use?” one of the people with a camera asks him.

  “Jolene,” he says and spells it.

  “Last name?”

  “No last name. Just Jolene.”

  I turn to him, touched that he is remembering about Mom and Dad and not getting the Temple or Jackson in there, and not getting it in there for Brogan and Glenna either.

  I eat a cookie and have some punch that doesn’t have alcohol in it and then a cup of some that must have wine; then Henry comes over and wipes my mouth with his handkerchief and walks me toward a set of stairs that is roped off but that leads to a second floor Mexican Folk Art show. While he’s patting my face I look up overhead and think about the glass skywalk, and just for a minute I wish I were up there and not down here, but then I get over that.

  “Remember what you promised,” Henry says.

  I nod. “I didn’t run away when Mom turned up, needing a rest, at the Fern Barn,” I remind him. “Not even when I had to help make it stick, getting her admitted to Emergency.”

  “No matter what.”

  “I already said I wouldn’t.”

  “Hear what I’m saying.”

  “I do,” I tell him, thinking that we’ve been over this about a dozen times already.

  “In the beginning I wanted the paintings. Now I want you, too. I don’t want to lose you. Will you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I love you, and this is all I have to give you. Do you understand?”

  “I don’t know.” He says it so seriously, that he loves me. Like he was about to get killed in war or go back to some wife or die of an awful cancer, one of those times in films when you know that it’s going to be over, because if it wasn’t going to be over then he wouldn’t be telling her that he loved her—he’d be asking was there gas in the car or did she want to go to Lou Tess to celebrate or would she brush her hair or something like that.

  It scares me.

  He leans down and kisses me on the mouth, quickly. “Come on,” he says, “it’s time for our show.”

  I walk with him, because he’s holding my hand, and we go across the big stone-floored reception area, through an aisle made by the Friends who have all stepped out of the way, and the rest of the people who have finally got to crowd inside. Henry takes a pair of silver scissors somebody hands him and cuts a red ribbon that is across the doorway to a great big room called Contemporary Galleries.

  • • •

  Facing us is a free-standing panel that tells about the show. About Henry and all his other shows, and that this one is dedicated to his uncle, the original Henry Wozencrantz, a noted photographer, and next to that is one of his uncle’s pictures, framed and hung, and I’m glad that Henry already showed me one, because otherwise it would be quite a start, seeing how much the woman does look like me. That reminds me, and I lift my head way up and push my shoulders back to imitate that long white neck.

  To the left of the panel is a beautiful all-glass-and-metal elevator. You can look up and down to some of the polished brass machinery that must once have been part of the original brewery, and I think to myself that the elevator with its glimpse of a great gleaming world below is a work of art itself, and should have a label on it.

  Then Henry turns me around, with everybody sort of standing there waiting—and I am staring at a six-foot-high picture of myself. Naked. Clear as day, down to the tiniest detail. I lose my breath as if I’d been hit in the stomach; I can’t believe it.

  It is one of the very first poses with the sheet around my middle and the hand, the first porcelain hand, between my breasts. It isn’t in color exactly, but looks very much like the uncle’s photographs, all in different shades of brown. And I remember something I didn’t want to hear at the time, L.W. saying that Henry’s paintings were like early daguerreotypes, and I see that is true.

  Everything is clear as day and magnified besides: my breasts and how one is a little bigger, my shoulders which are thin and one is a little higher, the way my eyes turn slightly down at the corners, the little bit of flesh above each knee, the way my mouth looks when I am daydreaming. The way you can see the tip of my tongue.

  Numb, not knowing what to do, feeling Henry holding tight to me the way you would hold a little kid in the middle of four-lane traffic, I read the card at the side of the picture.

  Henry Wozencrantz (1942– ), American

  FEMALE MODEL, oil on canvas

  (It is all in Spanish, too, naturally, so it also says MODELO FEMININA and so forth.)

  With the crowd following us, we walk around the room slowly, and I can hear them all talking to each other, whispering mostly, and I can feel them staring at me—not me holding Henry’s hand, but me up there, everywhere you look all over the walls.

  I try to pretend I am not here.

  (I lived a long time ago, maybe in some place like Paris. I lost my hand in an accident when I was a child. For a time I was the mistress of a photographer old enough to be my father, but then I ran away from him. I had to leave my hands behind.)

  All twelve pictures in the room are me. There I am on the couch with the hand held between my thighs and I see with burning cheeks that my crotch which is about level with my real eyes is, in the picture, three times life size. Or more. I see, everyone sees, the smallest creases on my stomach, the chewed fingernails on my left hand, my dark round navel, and that disconnected, torn-loose hand all over me.

  Henry is dragging me along, because I can hardly move, but he is not saying anything. People get in front of us, then realize where they are, who we are, and scoot out of the way. I don’t know what Henry thinks; I don’t know what I think. I am almost to the door, that’s what I think: I’ve made it. I’ve seen them all and I’ve made it and I didn’t run away, just like I promised him I wouldn’t, and in one more minute I’m going to duck through that door and hide in the bathroom until all the Friends and their friends go home.

  Then I am going to leave.

  Leave Henry and San Antonio and my name and everything that anybody could ever recognize again. I’m going home, to Pass-of-the-Camels Park, to Beauregard Heights, to Honey Grove Hills, to Tierra Blanca Estates, where I belong. Back to the normal life with the oil rig salesman and the ice cream-eating babysitter. Back to adventure with Sears soaps and piano pupils and me answering to the name of Sonny.

  I’m going to run away from all these people staring and staring at Jolene, and not a one of them will ever see me again, not ever.

  36


  I AM PULLING Henry along now, past the last awful one, through the curved brick archway, into another room with its cool stone floor. I glance about, looking for a way out, and then I see them. Four more walls in an even larger gallery, each hung with two or three or (the farthest wall) four pictures of me. There are the Indian blankets, with me naked in front of them, face pressed into the dyed wool, legs spread, braid down my back. There I am looking in the antler mirror. Wearing the turquoise necklace, the chaps, the spurs.

  I want to cry out but no words come. I open my mouth but I can’t make a sound. I try to holler and a dry noise like paper crumbling is all that comes out.

  I jerk my hand, resolved to leave it behind if Henry won’t let go. When I get it free, I tear off the cape and stick the artificial hand, sheathed in its clammy glove, into his.

  “Here, hang on to this.”

  “Don’t,” he says.

  Everyone is behind us now, talking for all they’re worth. I look back and see Karen, who knows that I am freaking out. I see Mrs. Wozencrantz, who is talking with her Hallie and Millie buddies and looking at her famous son’s pictures as calmly as if they were a series on the uncompleted Fern Barn.

  Then I see the stairs, steep and white.

  “You promised,” Henry shouts at me as I bolt.

  But I am gone.

  Up one flight to the European gallery, up another round of enameled metal to the Oriental gallery, up another—with the sound of someone, but, of course, Henry, behind me—to the Spanish floor. I am heading for the skywalk. I am heading for that tightrope of glass that will lead me over the center hall and the staring crowd below, down the other tower and out of the museum.

  The skywalk seems miles long and I can see (down in the street) cars and, to the other side, more yellow brick buildings that must have been part of the old Lone Star Brewery, too. But I am not sightseeing; I am running as fast as seems safe with glass on both sides of me, four stories in the air. When I reach the second tower, I run down a hall and find the stairs to the floor marked Antiquities. It is a trap down here, however, because there are all the Near East pieces and they’re all behind glass and walls, so there is nothing open but a narrow hall. I pass a women’s bathroom, but am scared to go in; I know that when I come out there will be Henry, waiting.

  I run down a flight and find myself in a room full of Mexican animals and ceremonial figures. There are dozens of them all around me: acrobats, dogs with hoops, monkeys with barrels, open cases of dance masks made of human hair, papiermâché, leather, bone. There are sugar skulls. I mean to run on down and out of the building, but the room closes around me like a secret hiding place. I can stay and put on a jaguar’s spots, a devil’s horns, crocodile jaws. Suddenly, I don’t want to leave.

  It’s foolish, with Henry pounding right behind me into the room, but I think that if only I can find the right face, the right magic clothes, then I can Purloin Letter it right in front of him and he will never see me.

  I stand still, hiding behind a skeleton big as a man, with my arms at funny angles and my knees bent. I cover my face with a tiger’s mask that has real boar bristles for whiskers.

  Henry, winded, sits down between two other skeletons, part of a graveyard band.

  “You promised,” he says.

  “I didn’t leave.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “I like this exhibit better. Better artists. I thought I’d be in this one instead.”

  “That hurts my feelings.”

  I make a tiger’s growl.

  Henry sighs and plays the drum of the skeleton beside him.

  “You lied,” I tell him.

  “When I saw you, the resemblance, I couldn’t think of anything but painting you. I was afraid if you knew what—”

  “I’m going to cut them in little pieces and stuff all of them into Hefties and put them in the dumpster.”

  “They belong to me.”

  “I belong to me. Just because I let you dress me up and then undress me in public doesn’t mean I’m yours. I get to say if I want to be naked as a jaybird three times larger than life all over eight walls in a public place. I get to say.” By this time I am crying a lot and the inside of the tiger’s mask is getting wet. I take it off. “I want to go.”

  “Then go.”

  “You’ll try to stop me.”

  “Nobody will stop you any more.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “What did your mom do when she smuggled you past your uncle and aunt?”

  “You know.” He isn’t really asking. He knows. I’ve told him all those stories. “You know.”

  “I’m telling you no one can do that to you again.”

  “Right now that doesn’t sound so bad.”

  “I’ve given you the cloak of invisibility. Fame.”

  I step out from behind the skeleton. I feel bone tired and my eyes are hot and red. “Then if you don’t mind I’m just going to go right downstairs and out the door and head for home.”

  Henry plays a few notes on the drum. He gets up and dusts off his coat and tails. “Where’s that?” he asks, handing me my cape, which has fallen to the floor.

  37

  “JESUS LOVES YOU,” Mom said.

  I was glad. I liked it whenever she decided that I could plug back into Sunday School.

  This time we were living in Espiritu Santo Shores, a suburb of Corpus Christi that Mom called the Holy Ghost outskirts of the Body of Christ.

  We’d found the area while cruising up and down the Gulf past Mustang and Padre islands, eating in diners, and picking up postcards to send back to Brogan and Dad from Cow Trap, Chigger, Chocolate, Blessing, Buckeye, North Pole, Gas Field, and Flour Bluff. Mom had taken a liking to the religious atmosphere of the coast where every little wide spot in the road had at least one white frame pitch-roofed Assembly of God or boxy plain-windowed Church of Christ for every four families, maximum.

  In our past moves, I’d already had a sampling of Sunday Schools. I’d visited around among the denominations learning who had robed choirs and who didn’t even allow piano or organs, who had altars and who had tables, who had grape juice and who served wine, who had one God and who had the Trinity, who sang songs you knew by heart and who had hymns you could hardly move your lips to. I liked them all, and missed the experience when I wasn’t allowed to go.

  But Mom—who wasn’t of two minds about much of anything in this world—was of two minds about church. On the positive side, she wanted me to be exposed, because, she said, exposure to religion was a requirement for being a child, plus also because she didn’t want Dad going around saying she was raising me a wanton heathen. On the negative side, she considered that churches were, in the main and as a group, composed of busybodies who were always wanting more information about you than you had the inclination to provide.

  The problem was the Visitor’s Card, which was always present in the rack on the back of the chair or pew or bench in front of you. Now the Visitor’s Card was obligatory because the people sitting on each side of you hadn’t ever seen you in their church before. And in the part of the service where you turn and hug or shake hands, and say Hello or God loves you to your neighbor, these people were going to indicate that you were a stranger in their midst. So if you’d already filled out your Visitor’s Card, they could take a peek (or plan to take a peek later), and then they were relaxed about your being there and would automatically whisper helpful guidelines to you about the right way to do the holy rituals in their chosen place of worship. So they might indicate that the congregation always came in on the second stanza of the hymn after the choir sang the first verse by themselves, so you didn’t blare out “This Is My Father’s World” and humiliate yourself. Or that the tiny white pledge envelopes were also used for bills and coins so nobody got to see what anybody else put in the polished brass or sterling silver collection plate. Or that they were now using the new (or back to using the old) version of the Lord’s Prayer or the
Creed or the Confession of Faith that the elders or deacons or synod or mission had approved, so you’d know ahead all the niceties such as whether you’d be asking God to forgive your trespasses, or only your debts.

  This time, when we lived in Espiritu Santo Shores, I got to go to Sunday School five weeks in a row, every week from right after Thanksgiving to Christmas.

  Before our first Sunday there, Mom and I went through our usual practice session.

  “We’re the Galimatiases,” Mom would say, or the Farfouillers, or the Desordonners. She had these French names that always made her crack up laughing, and she’d have me say them over until I had them right. No fractured French like Aunt Glenna’s, she insisted, not from us.

  Her theory was that picking an unusual name was far more convincing than saying you were Brown or Jones or Smith. Plus, if anyone asked if you were kin to someone they knew, whose name maybe sounded sort of like her made-up one, you could say that your family came from Chillicothe, and since nobody knew where it was, that put an end to that.

  “We’re the Enchevêtrers,” she said, getting us ready. “Say it now. Now, say it again. Okay, now, What’s your name, little girl?”

  “Jolene Enchev-êtrer.” I always got to be Jolene, because Mom thought that me keeping my own name for Sunday School was a stabilizing factor.

  “What’s your mother’s name?”

  “Mrs. En-chev-êtrer.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Uh—Corpus Christi?” Usually the rule was that we claimed the big city connected to our suburb, because it was safe to say El Paso or Texarkana but not Pass-of-the-Camels Park or Honey Grove Hills.

  “Wrong, wrong, wrong.”

  But sometimes another line of reasoning was at work. It might be the big city was too small, too near, too familiar to our particular evangelical community, and then I was supposed to say the opposite side of the state. So in El Paso I could say, I’m from East Texas, and in Texarkana, I’m from West Texas, and in Tierra Blanca, I’m from South Texas. So on the Gulf I thought about that and answered, “North Texas, ma’am,” and got Mom’s toothy grin that meant that was the right answer.