Read Online Sweet Land Stories by E. L. Doctorow - Free Book Online Page B

never sat back with her shoes off, and though kind and correct as far as Jolene was concerned, clearly would have preferred to have her home to herself now that Mickey had someone to take care of him. Jolene knew this—she didn’t have to be told. She could work her fingers to the bone and Aunt Kay would still never love her. Aunt Kay was a Yankee and had come to live in the South because of a job offer. She and Uncle Phil had been married fifteen years. She called him Phillip, which Jolene thought was putting on airs. She wore suits and panty hose, always, and blouses with collars buttoned to the neck. She was no beauty, but you could see what had interested Phil—her very light blue icy eyes, maybe, and naturally blond hair, and she had the generous figure that required a panty girdle, which she was never without.
    But now Uncle Phil got in the habit of waking them up in the morning, coming into their room without knocking and saying in his deep voice, “Time for work, Mickey Holler!” but looking at Jolene in the meantime as she pulled the covers up to her chin.
    She knew the man was doing something he shouldn’t be doing with that wake-up routine and it made her angry but she didn’t know what she could do about it. Mickey seemed blind to the fact that his own uncle, his late mother’s brother, had an eye for her. At the same time she was excited to have been noticed by this man of the world. She knew that as a handsome smiling fellow with white teeth, Phil would be quite aware of his effect on women, so she made a point of seeming to be oblivious of him as anything but her husband’s uncle and employer. But this became more and more difficult, living in the same house with him. She found herself thinking about him. In her mind Jolene made up a story: how gradually, over time, it would become apparent that she and Uncle Phil were meant for each other. How an understanding would arise between them and go on for some years until, possibly, Aunt Kay died, or left him—it wasn’t all that clear in Jolene’s mind.
    But Uncle Phil was not one for dreaming. One afternoon she was scrubbing their kitchen floor for them, down on her knees in her shorts with her rump up in the air, and he had come home early, in that being his own boss he could come and go as he liked. She was humming “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and didn’t hear him.
    He stood in the door watching how the scrubbing motion was rendered on her behind, and no sooner did she realize she was not alone than he was lifting her from the waist in her same kneeling position and carrying her that way into his bedroom, the scrub brush still in her hand.
    That night in her own bed she could still smell Uncle Phil’s aftershave lotion and feel the little cotton balls of their chenille bedspread in the grasp of her fingers. She was too sore even for Mickey’s fumblings.
    And that was the beginning. In all Jolene’s young life she had never been to where she couldn’t wait to see someone. She tried to contain herself, but her schoolwork began to fall off, though she had always been a conscientious student even if not the smartest brain in her class. But it was that way with Phil, too—it was so intense and constant that he was no longer laughing. It was more like they were equals in their magnetic attraction. They just couldn’t get enough. It was every day, always while Aunt Kay was putting up her numbers in the Southern People’s Bank and Mickey, poor Mickey was riding his oil route as Uncle Phil devised it to the furthermost reaches of the town line and beyond.
    Well, the passion between people can never be anything but drawn to a conclusion by the lawful spouses around them, and after a month or two of this everyone knew it, and the crisis came banging open the bedroom door shouting her name, and all at once Mickey was riding Phil’s back like a monkey, beating him about the head and crying all the while, and Phil, in his skivvies, with Mickey pounding