Jolene waited out there by the edge of the property, crouching in the bushes in her shift with her arms folded across her breasts. She waited for Phil to come out and take her away, but he never did. Mickey is the one who opened the door. He stood there looking at her, in the quiet outside, while from the house they listened to the shouting and the sound of things breaking. Mickey’s hair was sticking up and his glasses were bent broken across his nose. Jolene called to him. She was crying; she wanted him to forgive her and tell her it was all right. But what he did, her Mickey, he got in his pickup in his bloody shirt and drove away. That was what Jolene came to think of as the end of Chapter 1 in her life story, because where Mickey drove to was the middle of the Catawba River Bridge, and there he stopped and with the engine still running he jumped off into that rocky river and killed himself.
MORE THAN ONE NEIGHBOR must have seen her wandering the streets, and by and by a police cruiser picked her up, and first she was taken to the emergency room, where it was noted that her vital signs were okay, though they showed her where a clump of her red hair had been pulled out. Then she was put into a motel off the interstate while the system figured out what to do with her. She was a home wrecker but also a widow but also a juvenile with no living relatives. The fosters she had left to marry Mickey would take no responsibility for her. Time passed. She watched soaps. She cried. A matron was keeping an eye on her morning and night. Then a psychiatrist who worked for the county came to interview her. A day after that she was driven to a court hearing with testimony by this county psychiatrist she had told her story to in all honesty, and that was something that embittered her as the double-cross of all time, because on his recommendation she was remanded to the juvenile loony bin until such time as she was to become a reasonable adult able to take care of herself.
Well, so there she was moping about on their pills, half asleep for most of the day and night, and of course as she quickly learned this was no place to regain her sanity, if she ever lost it in the first place, which she knew just by looking at who else was there that she hadn’t. About two months into the hell there, they one morning took off her usual gray hanging frock and put her in a recognizable dark dress, though a size too big, and fixed her hair with a barrette and drove her in a van to the courthouse once again, though this time it was for her testimony as to her relations with Uncle Phil, who was there at the defense table looking awful. She didn’t know what was different about him till she realized his hair was without luster and, in fact, gray. Then she knew that all this time she had been so impressed he had been dyeing it. He was hunched over from the fix he was in and he never looked at her, this man of the world. A little of the old feeling arose in her and she was angry with herself but she couldn’t help it. She waited for some acknowledgment, but it never came. What it was, Aunt Kay had kicked him out, he was sleeping in his office, his business had gone down the tube, and none of his buddies would play golf with him anymore.
Jolene was called upon to show the judge that she was, at sixteen, underage for such doings, which made Phil a statutory rapist. There was a nice legal argument for just a minute or two as to how she was a married woman at the time, an adulteress in fact, and certainly not unknowing in the ways of carnal life, but that didn’t hold water, apparently. She was excused and taken back to the loony bin and put back in her hanging gray frock and slippers and that was it for the real world. She heard that Phil pulled eighteen months in the state prison. She couldn’t sympathize, being in one of her own.
Jolene didn’t think much about Mickey, but she drew his face over and over. She drew headstones in a graveyard and then drew his face on the gravestones. This seemed to her a worthy artistic task. The more she drew of Mickey the more she remembered the details of how he looked out at her on the last evening of his life, but it was hard with just crayons — they would only give her crayons to draw with, not the colored pencils she asked for.
Then something good happened. One of the girls in the ward smashed the mirror over the sink in the bathroom and used a sliver of it to cut her wrists. Well, that of course wasn’t good, but all the mirrors in the bathroom were removed and nobody could see herself except maybe if they stood on the bed and the sunlight was in the right place in the windows behind the mesh screen. So Jolene began a business in portraits. She drew a girl’s face, and soon they were waiting in line to have her draw them. If they didn’t have a mirror, they had Jolene. Some of her likenesses were not very good, but since in most cases they were a lot better than the originals, nobody minded. Mrs. Ames, the head nurse, thought that was good therapy for everyone and so Jolene was given a set of watercolors with three brushes, and a big thick sketchpad, and when the rage for portraits had played itself out, she painted everything else — the ward, the game room, the yard where they walked, the flowers in the flower bed, the sunset through the black mesh, everything.
But since she was as sane as anyone, she was more and more desperate to get out of there. After a year or so she made the best deal she could, with one of the night attendants, a sharp-faced woman sallow in coloring but decent and roughly kind to people, name of Cindy. Jolene thought Cindy, with the leathery lines in her face, might be no less than fifty years old. She had an eye for Jolene right from the beginning. She gave her cigarettes to smoke outside behind the garbage bins, and she knew hair and makeup. She said, Red — Jolene had what they call strawberry hair, so that of course was her nickname there — Red, you don’t want to cover up those freckles. They are charming in a girl like you, they give your face a sunlight. And, see, if you keep pulling back your hair into ponytails your hairline will recede, so we’ll cut it just a bit shorter so that it curls up as it wants to and we let it frame your sweet face and, lo and behold, you are as pretty as a picture.
Cindy liked the freckles on Jolene’s breasts, too, and it wasn’t too bad being loved up by a woman. It was not her first choice, but Jolene thought, Once you get going it doesn’t matter who it is or what they’ve got — there is the same panic, after all, and we are blind at such moments. But anyway that was the deal, and though in order to get herself out of the loony bin she agreed to live with Cindy in her own home, where she would cuddle secretly like her love child, she did so only until she could escape from there as well. With just a couple of clicks of door locks, and some minutes of hiding in a supply closet, and then with more keys turning and a creak of gate swings, Jolene rode to freedom in the trunk of Cindy’s beat-up Corolla. It was even easier, after one night, walking out Cindy’s front door in broad daylight once the woman had gone back to work.
Jolene hit the road. She wanted out of that town and out of that county however she could. She had almost a hundred dollars from her watercolor business. She hitched some and rode some local buses. She had a small suitcase and a lot of attitude to get her safe across state lines. She worked in a five-and-ten in Lexington and an industrial laundry in Memphis. There was always a YWCA, to stay out of trouble. And while she did have to take a deep breath and sell it once or twice across the country, it had the virtue of hardening her up for her own protection. She was just seventeen by then but carrying herself with some new clothes like she was ten years older, so that nobody would know there was just this scared girl-child inside the hip slinger with the platform strap shoes.