Owning Jolene Read online

  He also said we’d tell her I was an antique dealer—the kind who handled Southwest artifacts, so she wouldn’t expect me to know about her valuable pieces.

  That made sense to me, my being that, because Henry’s studio-house had a lot of old western stuff, which I’d never paid much attention to. But it fit in with what we’d just seen, and it made sense that he’d take an expert along if he was going to buy something to go with what he had.

  “I love the antler mirror,” I said, by way of thanking him. “It’s wonderful.”

  “Next week you can look in it while I work,” he said. “Take your mind off posing.”

  Then I could see that he was off and painting in his head, and that made me comfortable again.

  • • •

  I thought I wouldn’t have any trouble with his mother’s house, because I was all dressed up and knew what I was going to say. But the place knocked me cold. It was all filled with the heavy old furniture that you see in the kind of places you pay admission to tour. It looked like the kind of house turned into a museum that Glenna and Brogan always went to, to show that they appreciated culture. The kind of house where the rooms are roped off so that the tourists don’t get careless and stain the upholstery or break a fragile chair leg or chip a piece of carving off some precious Republic of Texas chair.

  It was older than any house I’d ever been in, and had a lot of features that I knew meant it was expensive but also knew were the kind of thing that Aunt Glenna would have covered up as soon as possible.

  For instance, the floor was an almost black brown and the boards were so worn they actually curved down in places, like in the doorways and on the stairs, from years of people’s feet, but it was polished to shine like a pair of men’s shoes and only had a few rugs scattered on it. And the table where we ate was scarred and nicked and had long dark marks on it, and it was also all waxed and we ate off placemats that left most of the wood bare.

  “We’re informal here,” Mrs. Wozencrantz said while we filled our plates with bubbling hot green enchiladas and carried them into an enormous formal dining room.

  She was a skinny straight-up-and-down woman with gray hair and a skimpy gray dress, with the kind of weathered skin that looked like she’d spent most of her life outdoors. Henry’s daughter, Karen, was a younger version of the same thing. Although I could tell she was almost my age, she didn’t have on any makeup, and with this really tanned skin and light hair and eyelashes, she looked like she would be more at home with horses and dogs than with people.

  (The main thing was, she looked unhappy. She looked mad at somebody, maybe her daddy. And I wondered if Henry had ever painted her or if she wished he had. And decided that if I was in her place, I’d be unhappy, too.)

  Mrs. Wozencrantz tried to be polite. “Jolene, is it?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Henry tells me you’re an antique dealer.”

  “I often work with artists,” I said, into my part. “They have a good eye.”

  “Did you enjoy the show?”

  “It was interesting.” I paused a minute, then added, professionally, “Not everything was in good condition.”

  “What did you buy, Henry?” she asked him, and he told her about the mirror and named a price so high I almost choked on my food.

  “Are you really a dealer?” his daughter asked me.

  “More a student of antiques,” I lied, which I hated doing. I knew she knew she knew what was going on with me and her daddy, and I wished I could tell her the truth. Kids her age—it hadn’t been so long since I was there myself—get lied to all the time by everybody.

  “I mean, you’re just pretending, aren’t you?”

  • • •

  Later, Henry took me on a tour of the house. His mother had gone to her room for a nap, he said, and his daughter was out with some friends. I didn’t believe either one of those stories for a minute. I thought they were both behind some thick white wall somewhere, listening to every word we said.

  He took me to a room that used to be a back porch and showed me a whole stack of drawings he had done, he said, a long time ago. They were almost like photographs, with every detail lifelike, and some of them looked a little like me. I thought how much I’d hate to have my face painted close up like that, and was glad that now he had a different style. Being painted like that would be worse than being stark naked in the middle of a busy intersection.

  I looked around. It was more of a storage room than a studio, and I could see why he’d got a new place.

  He showed me a shelf that contained more drawings, and a bunch of old brushes in jars sitting on the floor, and some boxes of colored chalk he called pastels. He stared at the stuff for a while, then took me back into the main part of the house.

  He pointed out the library that had a lot of his mother’s art books, and the special seventeenth-century desk where one of his wives used to write letters, and a chair where one of them had sat drinking a lot and watching the sun set. I didn’t ask which was the mother of his daughter with the pale eyelashes; I didn’t get a feel for either of them, even as ghosts.

  We took the antler-framed mirror and let ourselves out the door. And the main thing I felt—besides that nothing was ever going to happen between Henry and me—was sad, that in the whole huge house full of furniture worth a fortune, all Henry had that belonged to him were a few jars of dried up paintbrushes.

  4

  “THINK OF a number between two and four,” Mom said in my ear.

  “Three,” I answered stupidly, forgetting that it wasn’t her I was supposed to be talking to.

  “This isn’t me,” she said. “It’s your teacher. Remember? Your nice teacher, Mrs. Evans.”

  “Okay.”

  I knew she was going to show up any day. I’d got a card from her, sent to me at Dad’s house, saying that she was in New Mexico having a great time at Carlsbad Caverns. That she’d see me in Chillicothe.

  Whenever she claimed to be out of the state—which she never was—I knew it meant she was just around the corner. And Chillicothe was another code between us, because it was an old Indian name that meant “the big town where we live.” So whenever she wrote me something like that, I knew that any day she’d be showing up to steal me back.

  “Three o’clock right before school’s out, Jolene, we’ll talk about what to do concerning the problem your daddy spoke to me about.”

  I blinked, trying to keep in my head that she was meaning to be someone else when she said that. Did she mean she was going to be there at three? But that was time for the bell. I hoped she wasn’t going to appear at recess; I’d been through that before.

  My dad, whose name is Turk Jackson, had kidnapped me from the playground of my school in Beauregard Heights, and then, again, the same thing, in Honey Grove Hills. (Honey Grove Hills, a name that meant the locusts were supposed to be hanging from honeycombs, was just an area of Texarkana that got its name from a scraggly row of trees the developer had planted at the gates to the subdivision. Its attraction for Mom was that the houses looked so much alike it was all we could do ourselves not to get lost every time we came home from the store.)

  The day she called pretending to be the teacher, I was back in San Antonio with the high school kid Dad had hired to look after me until he came home from the office. At that time he was a big-shot salesman for some oil rig equipment company, and wore a suit with a vest to work. The student had been instructed not to let anyone at all talk to me on the phone. Not even if she claimed to be my aunt or my grandmother.

  But Mom had figured that all out. First she’d called the school and said that she was Mr. Jackson’s secretary; that he needed my teacher’s name so he could call her to talk about the distressing matter of the custody fight. When she had that, she called the house, and asked for Mr. Jackson, explaining that she was Jolene’s teacher, Mrs. Evans. She said this to the sitter, who was eating the last of a half gallon of Rocky Road ice cream and wishing she was with her b
oyfriend. When the sitter said he wasn’t home, Mom, being the teacher, said that she’d tried his office, and that, oh, dear, maybe she’d better talk directly to the poor little girl.

  So that was that. The sitter handed me the phone without a moment’s pause, and turned on the TV. Anyone would have done the same. Mom could sell oil to the Arabs, Uncle Brogan says.

  “Three o’clock,” I repeated, trying to look like a kid talking to her teacher.

  “That’s Mrs. Evans talking, not me. That’s her saying she’s going to have a little chat with you right before the bell rings, see. This is me. That was her; now this is me. Nod your head like I’m still her. Are you nodding your head?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now, here’s what the plan is. I have to get the lay of the land. But you look for me after lunch. There’s some spare time after lunch, before the class bell rings. Bathroom time. Wash your hands time. You gobble up your lunch tray—be sure to eat, we aren’t stopping till dark, not even a potty stop, so do that, too—and then you look for me. Generic. Got that? I’ll be there, plain as day, but Purloin Letter. You remember what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you nodding your head? Now the signal will be what I told you. Think of a number between two and four. Got it?”

  “Three.” I could feel a giggle coming on, but tried to stifle it.

  That was one of my mom’s oldest jokes. She’d wake me up when we were on the lam, saying, “Think of a number between four and six,” if she was letting me know that five A.M. was the time to scoot.

  It was good to hear her voice again. Good to have the old jokes back.

  The trouble with Dad was that he was a total stranger and we didn’t have anything to say because we didn’t know the first thing about each other. All he knew for sure was that I was his blood kin. (I imagined he saw me with each red blood corpuscle stamped with the little black letters TURK JACKSON like a bunch of M&Ms.)

  So he was always going through this hassle and expense, and taking Tums, and missing sales that should have been in the bag, because he thought it was his fatherly duty to steal me back from Mom.

  He’d show up—a balding man with a way of rocking back and forth on his heels—promising, I’m going to give you a normal life, That being the one thing he was sure I was never going to have with Mom.

  I guess in the beginning when they were doing the mushy stuff as she calls it, they didn’t stop to think that they weren’t wanting the same thing at all. Dad for his part when they got married had it in his mind to “take her away” from her gambling family who could hardly keep a roof over their heads, or at least a roof the bank wasn’t foreclosing on. So he was always saving money for a rainy day and she was always saying she enjoyed a little shower.

  Early on, he set aside a certain amount for a month’s rent so they could move out of the room where they were living with my grandparents, but Mom, not liking to see money lying idle, spent it on a set of World Books for me, who, of course, was still too young to read. Then Dad tried another angle and began a big all-out savings program so they could make a down payment on a house of their own. But Mom had no interest in a permanent roof; her idea of romance was to see the sights, to encounter adventure. So when she found the passbook and saw that, by coincidence, the balance was exactly the cost of three seats on the Flying Longhorns’ Tour de France, she decided it was the chance of a lifetime, and tucked the tickets in Dad’s Christmas stocking: “See le monde with Midge and Turk.”

  That was when they split for good, except for disagreeing over which one of them got me.

  • • •

  The next day, knowing what was coming, I managed to get out of the house with some money. Dad kept a few tens—I guess all salesmen do that, have stashes of money, of bonuses or percentages or under-the-counter stuff, for dry cleaning the good suit or getting a smart haircut. I took three bills and left him two. That seemed fair; there were more of us.

  I was wide awake and excited when we drove to school, and gave Dad, who had fallen asleep in front of the TV the night before, a big kiss when he let me out. He gave me the old pep talk about how everything was all right now. “Normal,” he said, sounding tired. “Things are back to normal now.”

  Sure enough they were.

  I ate my lunch in two minutes flat (no great sacrifice if you remember elementary school food) and dumped my tray in the bin. Then I ran down to the restroom for one last visit before I left for the day.

  I had no idea what to expect, but I knew Mom would come along. Trying to look casual, like a kid who belonged in the hall, I hurried to the lunchroom again, and then turned and trotted back, both times looking right ahead, not dragging my feet or looking down, ready to say that I was in Mrs. Evans’s third grade class and was where I belonged.

  The big wall clock was ticking away, and I began to get nervous. I knew once I got in the classroom things were going to close up and there wasn’t going to be any easy way for Mom to get me out. Still, I thought maybe she’d barge in saying she was the woman who did free hearing tests (she’d done that before, too) or something like that.

  I looked up and down the halls, about to duck back in the bathroom, when I saw a Terminix man at the far end of the building, holding up three fingers.

  Think of a number between—

  I ran toward “him” as he lugged his exterminator spray gun toward the outside door, and then we were through it and around the corner of the building and into a car parked in the SCHOOL OFFICIALS ONLY lot and out on the street before I heard the bell ring, the bell that meant lunch was over.

  “Mrs. Evans will call Dad when I don’t show up,” I told Mom.

  “I left a note in the school office.” She was cool as could be. “Asking them please to excuse Jolene for the rest of the day; that the lawyers on the other side were taking depositions.” She looked pleased with herself. “We’ll be six hours down the road when your dad gets home from work.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, showing her the tens.

  “Smart cookie, you are,” she said, taking two of them and putting them in her purse. “Very smart cookie. Did you eat?”

  “Sure.”

  “Pee?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’re going all the way across the state, right across its equator, its big fat waistband, as far from Honey Grove Hills and old Texarkana as you can get. We’re going to El Paso. Next to the border of New Mexico. Nicely adjacent to Diablo, El Capitan, Bright Light, and Frijole. I’ve got us a swell place lined up in Pass-of-the-Camels Park, which is a suburb so big it looks like L.A. from the air. So big our house has six digits. So big it’s impossible not to get lost; we’ll need a map to find our door. The houses are built in three styles which repeat, eenie, meenie, miney, down every block for miles and miles and miles. Pass-of-the-Camels Park is the Suburb of Suburbs.”

  “It’ll be good to be home,” I said.

  5

  I FIRST MET L.W. at a party last year.

  I was putting one of Mom’s rules into effect: check out the terrain before you make your move.

  Mostly I was looking for a man, and for sure I wasn’t likely to find one the way things were going, not with Brogan and Glenna keeping closer track of me than they did of her prize fur coat. You’d think they’d understand that at eighteen I wasn’t a kid at camp having a buddy check every time the whistle blew and a bed inspection at lights out. But I guess they’d got so preoccupied with the idea that I belonged to them until I was twenty-one and that it was their legal job to keep me safe from Mom and Dad until I was of age all that, that they forgot how it was to be grown and really needing somebody. (Besides, I sometimes thought that Brogan and Glenna had been together since the crib; it was impossible to imagine either one of them being with somebody else, for example.)

  I was going to check out the neighborhood, as Mom would say, the neighborhood in this case being a drop-in party. One advantage I had is that in San Ant
onio you can pretty well figure that you can show up almost anywhere at any function that some program chairman has gone to the trouble to put a notice about in the paper. That you’ll be welcome because their main worry is that nobody will show. For instance, if there’s a concert or an opening or a play or something arty like that, you know they’ll want a crowd; or the same if it’s a special interest group (Czech Cooking or Skiing the Alps, for instance), especially if it happens to be downtown but won’t appeal to tourists.

  So when I saw a notice about a “Texas Exes Thirsty Thursday, Cash Bar, Nachos and Mariachis,” I knew that would be a good gathering for me to get an idea how to pick up somebody in an okay way.

  I wore a long poet’s skirt, a crinkled blouse made in Taiwan, sandals, with my hair loose. And I knew I was doing fine when nobody gave me a second glance. They all walked past and around me as if I wasn’t there, except once when someone in a friendly way asked me for another Margarita and then, seeing her mistake (I didn’t have a tray, I wasn’t wearing an apron), apologized.

  They were all in finance, and went around introducing themselves by their institutions—Smith Barney, Shearson Lehman, Dean Witter—the way I imagined their moms and dads must have mentioned sororities and fraternities.

  I got with every sentence they spoke a glimpse of a world where T-bills tumbled and bond prices rose sharply. It was a different world I listened to, getting the cadence of unfamiliar words, catching hold of those that interested me. I stood there with nobody noticing, between someone in convertible securities and someone in mergers and acquisitions, liking the sound of their strange language and storing it for future use.

  They were in lovely costume. All of them had shiny blunt-cut hair. The boys wore dark silk suits with white shirts; the girls, white suits and dark silk shirts. It was the end of summer.

  I was comfortable, standing there in the Zona Rosa cafe, eating nachos and eavesdropping on Texas Exes. I wasn’t just someone off the street who’d heard the sounds of a party along the river and decided to drop in—although maybe some of them had. After all, I’d had a year of college; I knew my way around.