What Summons Joanne

Maynard first began calling Joanne “vole” in the third grade; it was one of the vocabulary words in Mrs. Chosokabe’s class, along with “furious.”

The nickname itself wasn’t an astute critique of her appearance, nor did it prompt at the time any indignance to comically set her face ablaze; Maynard had simply labeled her so loudly, with a ketchup-smudged sneer, that it became Recess Law.

Vole stuck, and then so did Maynard.

When she was thirteen, she began to recognize that the condiment-like grime of Maynard’s personality somehow only adhered to her, finding its way in her hair and clothes every day, year after year. The day she realized that she was covered in Maynard and surrounded by change she couldn’t control, Joanne made an impromptu trip to visit her grandmother, her babcia, who would know what to do. She took two city buses by herself and showed up at the small townhouse right before dinner time. Her bottom lip had been shredded by chattering, uneasy, teeth, but she smiled wide when she saw her favorite family member.

“Kochanie,” her grandmother had said, opening the door without hesitation.

Joanne felt brazen and wild that evening, marching about on the brightly colored Polish kilim rug and gesturing with tense limbs while she spoke of the unfairness. Maynard targeted her each day, shone a light on her in front of everyone, and she didn’t seem to have a choice in how she appeared to others when he was controlling the vantage point, no choice in whether she wanted a light on her at all.

“You’re angry,” her grandmother observed. It was a soft warning.

Upon reaching her adolescence, Joanne had developed her grandmother’s fiercely stoic stability, yet that day she felt flappable and unhinged. With eyes trained on the ceiling and her shoulders thrown back, Joanne indicated to her pants: her prized high-waisted acid wash jeans.

“It came today,” Joanne said through her teeth. “Phillip Maynard told everyone before I even knew.”

Her grandmother patted the spot next to her on her green floral love seat. “Sit,” she said sternly.

Joanne hadn’t wanted to get any blood on the furniture, but she only needed to be told once. “Mom calls it a crush,” she said, crumpling into the older woman’s shoulder.

Joanne buried her face into her babcia’s black velvet sleeve, breathing in the earthy meadow tones of the comforting Vol de Nuit perfume. The matriarch’s fragrance was one of the main constants about her, while her appearance and presence were the others. Her grandmother would wear her hair in a bun so tight and sleek that any strong emoting or brow raising would nearly shift her entire hairline up from her head. When she was in a room, she spoke conservatively, but with command, and always in a lower octave than anyone else. That day, Joanne’s grandmother did something surprising; she brought a tear-dampened fingertip to Joanne’s chin, and she tilted up the young girl’s face so that Joanne might see the red hue surrounding her babcia’s eyes.

“Listen to me,” the older woman said. “You feel overtaken by this, I know. Your anger is so hot and consuming. But you, kochanie, cannot let it eat you alive. Do you remember why?”

Joanne could only detect fear in the rough, taut, features of her grandmother’s face. The emotion appeared wrong on its canvas, as subtle as a sigh but as imposing as a sigh during a deafening silence.

“Our family curse,” Joanne said quietly, pained that her grandmother’s lone tears were a result of her own display of uninhibited and intense emotion.

“Yes. Until now, it was just a collection of stories, hm? Now, after today, it becomes real.”

Joanne dug her fingers into her babcia’s arm, felt the fabric and the frail wrist underneath. She watched the concern and the control meet one another in the woman's wrinkled brow. Joanne, too, felt conflicting dichotomies inside of her, understanding that she had safety with her grandmother, but also that she had the power to invoke pain and create uncertainty.

“What we can do, what we can summon and the damage we can cause . . . you do not have the luxury of losing control.” Her grandmother gently dislodged Joanne’s hand from her arm and unfolded her fingers. In Joanne’s palm, the older woman placed a tampon. “You are a Sowa woman. Your brothers and your father do not understand.”

----

It was exactly seven months after the wedding. Joanne Sowa lay in bed wondering which title she hated more: “vole hole” assigned to her at age fourteen, when Abe Connelly snapped her bra so hard it left a welt or “Mrs. Maynard,” attributed to her last month by the pharmacist when he’d explained that her prescription wasn’t available.

She’d woken up thinking about it. She had reached for her cigarettes, remembered that she was out, and then she’d just stayed put. It was one o’clock now.

Her eyes traced familiar patterns on the ceiling as she asked herself questions, over and over and over. Stone-faced but feeling like an animal searching for wet soil in a metal cell, she considered it all. And she felt vindicated in her tortured mindscape. Had she stopped being the vole, or had Maynard just decided she could be something else? Had he claimed her even before she knew who she was?

“You’re ruminating,” her therapist would have said if she had gone to their last scheduled appointment.

“I’m in hell and out of meds,” she would have responded.

More questions circulated in Joanne’s head. Why had he picked her that day to be his vole? Was it because she’d worn her hair in a braid that day, with the showy sparkly ribbon? Was he just attracted to shiny things and mistook her for a shiny person? Had she once been shiny, and he had dulled her down?

Eventually, and per her pattern, the questions forged together and became one big scream inside of her. Spanning the canyon of her mind and the depth of her being, the scream pounded and beat along her neural pathways. Like a teenager on a warpath, yanking posters off the bedroom wall, the scream tore away anything coherent or repetitive and filled her with black. It wasn’t a relief, and it wasn’t an act of suffering; it was just louder than anything else.

“Jo – honey! Hey!”

The scream died, and Joanne’s eyes broke away from the ceiling. She took in her husband standing in the doorway to their bedroom. He had his nice slacks on with a blue button-up shirt tucked in. His curly blond hair gave him a disheveled appearance, but she knew the amount of time and product he dedicated to each strand in the mornings. He was an objectively nice-looking man, with attentive blue eyes and a bold and large crooked grin. However, when he sneezed or sometimes fumbled while walking down an uneven street, when he’d appear bewildered or disrupted, his nose would scrunch and his face would shrivel and shrink into itself. When he was thrown by something, and his face seemed to catch the unexpected moment like a baseball mitt, that was the image Joanne held dear. It was ugly.

“We have to be there soon,” Maynard said, cocking his head, confused. “I got off from work early. You’re still in bed?”

Joanne sat up. She took in a breath and released a piece of herself through the exhale. Auto-pilot mode was activated, and she felt the animal inside of her stop digging and wait.

“I had a headache.” She stood and made her way to their walk-in closet.

Maynard crossed their room quickly, intercepting her by gently seizing the crook of her arm. He kissed her forehead. Joanne watched this gesture, removed and sitting alone in the audience section with an applause sign illuminated. She patted his shoulder twice with gratitude.

“I miss your grandmother too,” he whispered as he released her before heading toward the hallway. “See you downstairs in fifteen minutes?”

“Ten,” she corrected him. “We need to stop and get cigarettes on the way.”

----

Upon arriving at her parents’ home, Joanne and Maynard took turns hugging her brothers, their children, her cousins, her aunts and uncles, and then re-hugging the family members who visited the bathroom during these greetings. With appetizer plates in hand and – in the case of her brothers – beer and cheese hot on their breath, many of them told Joanne she either looked tired or remarked on how fit Maynard was getting.

“Still smoking, huh?” her cousin, Charlotte, asked with disgust as she pulled back from their embrace.

Joanne sighed and glanced around for her parents. Both of them were probably in the kitchen, so she waded through the sea of Polish family members and left Maynard to fend for himself.

When she saw her father helping her mother remove the chicken from the oven, Joanne paused and watched for a moment, with the bustling racket of family chattering and chewing behind her. She wistfully observed her parents’ natural choreography. The way they could understand each other’s rhythms wordlessly, moving to the same chords but in different bodies, showed their dance was born from dedication and an awareness of the worst and best in each other.

Her mother slipped around her father, tucking his shirt tag back in, and set her oven mitts on the counter before hugging Joanne. “You’re wearing all black, sweetie? This is supposed to be much more casual than the funeral, you know.”

“It’s what babcia would have worn,” Joanne said, noticing that her mother appeared bright and invigorated. It didn’t surprise her, despite knowing that her mother had been visibly upset at the funeral the previous day. Tears, rage, and shame never burrowed into her mother’s face the way they claimed territory in hers.

“Get something to eat, and then go find your auntie Bea, yeah?” Her mother handed her a basket of warm rolls. “She wants to talk with you about Lena.”

Joanne absentmindedly hugged her father with her free hand and shot her mother a questioning glance. “Is everything okay?”

“I’m sure,” was the breezy response. “Also, we’ll be making very informal toasts to your babcia later, so you and Phillip are more than welcome to share anything you’d like.”

Joanne’s heart was seized by a quick icy fist before she shifted the basket in her hands and took a deep breath. “Why would Maynard have anything to share?”

Her mother smiled and waved her off. “Oh, he already asked to say something. You don’t have the monopoly on grieving, you know.”

“She was my babcia,” Joanne bit back.

Her father gave her an inquisitive look before he and her mother returned to their synchronistic kitchen two-step. Joanne faded back out to the living room, fighting the bitterness as it rose from her gut. She’d never been a part of anyone’s dance.

----

Her aunt Bea was the one who had to locate her. Joanne immediately became distracted by her brothers and Maynard – and their volume. They were raucously exchanging stories around the sofa, clanking beer bottles and sending crumbs flying with every howl or animated wave of the arm. Most of the family had been sucked into their testosterone-fueled gravitational pull, snickering and egging them on. As the case with every family gathering or even friendly social meet-up, Maynard was at the center.

Briefly, Joanne took him in and tried to be anthropological without any other unpleasant perspectives seeping in. However, she couldn’t only perceive his puffed chest and social standing; she saw his bravado and his bullshit. He was a dominant male in a world that was built for him. Evolutionarily, he was ill-equipped, but his bright colors and theatrics allowed him access to closed doors and closed people – access he never should have received. Without attention feeding him, perhaps he would have been forced to introspectively advance or perhaps he would have withered away and died. She didn’t know, and it plagued her.

By the time her aunt found her and pulled her to the corner of the room, Joanne and her inner captive were breathless and exhausted.

“Has your cousin called you?” her aunt asked urgently.

Joanne’s cousin, Lena, was eighteen, and probably the melancholiest and most tattooed member of their family, so naturally everyone seemed to assume Joanne was her brooding mentor.

After shaking her head, Joanne realized she hadn’t seen Lena at their grandmother’s funeral the day prior. “What’s going on?”

Aunt Bea held Joanne’s hands as her mouth curled up with a restrained weepy snuffle. “She’s disappeared. Only for a few days, which isn’t that unusual, except she had told me . . . a plan of hers recently.”

“A plan?” Joanne tried to appear vaguely aloof, but this was the most interesting conversation she’d ever had with the fifty-something-year-old single mother.

Her aunt regarded the lively, tittering, huddle of family in the center of the room. She cautiously lowered her gaze to their clasped hands. Then she squeezed and released. A little electric jolt occurred as Joanne’s hands fell. The fear in aunt Bea’s eyes lessened drastically; this sudden change sent a sharper quake through Joanne’s body.

“She’s just had me so worried, Joanne. Her so-called friends have really taken her down some bad paths. I just feel like this isn’t my little girl. And she’s so-” Aunt Bea swallowed audibly and cradled her arms. “I think she’s emotionally unstable.”

Joanne studied her aunt, trying to stay with her in that moment, despite the noise slamming against them. She took in the subdued worry, the handcuffed desperation, and she saw a prisoner hidden behind her aunt's crows’ feet.

“She has had me so scared, Joanne. She said she was going to run away with these other kids. Yes, she graduated, but she’s not mature enough to really live on her own.” Her aunt looked to her for some validation.

“Aunt Bea.” Joanne’s voice was wary.

Her aunt seemed to detect that Joanne was arriving at destinations quicker than she could speak, so she rushed to continue, flustered. “I’m a good mother, dear. You know that. Lena had me worried to death, and her friends came over the other day. I was sure it was to pick her up and sweep her out of town. Well, her friends were the problem, Joanne. I just hadn’t meant for Lena to see what happened to them.”

Joanne reached for her aunt Bea, sensing such a sorrowful desperation, but then she retrieved her arm quickly. She felt a foreign trepidation grow inside of her as she studied the face of this woman she’d known all her life. Her father’s younger sister had only ever given her silly, frivolous, Christmas gifts or made vegan food for potlucks and complained when it touched meat on someone else's plate. The simple pedicure-enthusiast divorcee had never appeared threateningly fragile before. In that moment, though, Joanne stood before her and felt terrified that this woman would break apart and cut their entire family with her shards.

Joanne finally managed it out. “Did you summon something?” she asked.

Her aunt parted her lips, alarm reddening her cheeks. Before she could speak, a clanking sound rang out, then, and Maynard asked for everyone to be quiet, please.

“We’re all here to celebrate and honor the amazing Maja Sowa,” Maynard announced, clapping a hand atop one of Joanne’s brother’s shoulders. He looked like he was emceeing a wedding.

“Is he leading this?” Joanne heard herself ask no one in particular. And no one in particular heard her.

“I’d like to kick this off with a little story about how I first met the formidable, scary as all hell-” Maynard paused for laughter, “-incredibly generous and loving goddess that was our babcia Sowa.”

Maynard pointed to Joanne and gestured for her to come stand by his side while he controlled the room. Joanne couldn’t force her legs to move, even if she sent them the signal. When she didn’t budge, Maynard parted the Polish sea and slid in between Joanne and her aunt. He wrapped an arm around his frozen wife, skimming her shoulder with his beer bottle. Everyone gazed upon them—him—as if he were singing the gospel. He indulged in their focus, and Joanne could practically see him salivating.

“If you didn’t already know, Jo and I were obnoxiously sweet on each other since way back in elementary school.” He gave Joanne a quick squeeze. “Our teachers always needed to separate us in class because we spent so much time flirting and exchanging heart eyes!” Maynard let out a well-timed bark. “I mean, we were so sickeningly cute that I would give her pet names and she would spend her recesses just watching me from across the playground.” He regarded her with a coo. “That’s right, darling, I did notice.” Then, to the others, he continued. “This went on for years, of course. One day, our seventh-grade lit teacher called our folks in to talk about our distracting budding romance. Except, Jo’s parents were both working, so in walked babcia-”

Maynard continued to talk, which Joanne knew because the faint buzzing continued. She lost track of his narrative, though. Instead, she was paralyzed by the scream. It took over, hijacking her body and filling her vessel with the stunned, paramount-sized, outrage that had no tone of voice or audible inflection. It just carried on inside of her, its destruction as sudden and unmovable as a spoken threat with dead eyes. The scream rattled on in the cage until she had the realization that she was rocking - twitching, in fact. His lies, his narrative, had broken her, hadn’t it? She couldn’t quell the scream anymore, and this lucid thought was both terrifying and freeing.

“No!” She asserted.

Maynard’s arm jerked from her shoulder, and the tone of the room shifted and adopted a fragile awkwardness.

Joanne turned to Maynard and spat at him, her finger jabbing his face. “No heart eyes, no school yard flirting, no pet names.”

“Jo-” Maynard clutched at his chest, mouth slack, with his bright eyes seemingly begging her to stop talking, to give him back the reins.

“I didn’t want to be seen by you,” she said. And then she was stumbling out of her parents’ home, the scream still echoing in her mind’s caverns. Throwing open the door, she found brief solace at the sight of dusk overtaking the neighborhood in which her parents resided.

She closed the door behind her, heart hammering, with the scream clawing at the inside of her eye lids. Her legs shook as she reached for the railing of the front deck to balance herself. Only a moment passed before the door flung open behind her and Maynard scrambled out. He eased the door shut and took a deep breath.

“Jo, what was that?” Maynard asked cautiously. He didn’t appear to be treading softly due to guilt or shame. No, he looked like his face had caught a baseball, and he felt pity for her.

Joanne straightened up and constricted the muscles in her wobbly legs. “Tell me why you called me vole,” she demanded. “And don’t tell me it was because you liked me.”

Maynard’s shoulders dropped, seemingly relieved. “Oh, hon, is that what this is about? Baby, that was just a funny nick-”

“Why did you call me vole?” Joanne felt the air between them – the stagnant three feet of space – become darker and more obstructive as the night took hold. She had a thought of wanting him to see the whites of her eyes and nothing else. It pummeled her that she craved his fear, not his worry for her. “Tell me now,” she said lowly.

Maynard recoiled, eyes bouncing around nervously. “This isn’t you, Jo. I’ve never seen-”

Joanne was hungry for more of his discomfort, so she stepped toward him, the moon feeling encouraging against the nape of her neck. “I’m not your vole,” she hissed. “You tell me right now.”

Maynard began to turn away, then, as if retreating or escaping, or maybe even dismissing her. He didn’t have an audience and he didn’t have the control, which she saw that he recognized, but she couldn’t let him leave her and take her power with him. Her mental scream took a new shape, assumed a new identity, and she could abruptly hear her own voice carrying it out. With no pillow to muffle her or laugh track to drown her out, she released the fire, just wanting to destroy Maynard with her own DNA at the scene of the crime. Her scream was released into the world, sounding justified and strong, and hoarse.

Maynard faced her and watched, clearly floored by the capacity of her rage. She had gotten his attention, and now she wanted his blood.

“It was just because I thought you were meek,” he croaked. “I thought you were meek like a little vole.” He shuddered. “I was just a dumb kid with a crush.”

Joanne heard the disruption in the sky before she saw the bird. Pale, pale, fierceness with precision to its flight, it emerged from behind a cloud and rounded the roof of the home next door. It was angelic and ethereal in its sheen contrast against the descending evening. Mostly the intent of its movement and the confidence with which it appeared made the barn owl seem mystical and so powerfully capable.

Joanne lifted her arms, as if guiding the owl, and her scream expanded. She knew in that moment that she could ask Maynard all that she’d always wanted to know, crush him with an interrogation that exposed all of his dirty deceits and manipulation. However, no words could form. She couldn’t fit her questions in the space that her wailing possessed. The scream had taken on its own life. And this life was soaring now, advancing upon them.

Taking in the barn owl as it cut through the sky, pride swelled in her as she realized how massive it was. It was her monstrous predator, her power, and she wondered if this was her dance partner all along – her creation and her sole mate. It all should have filled Joanne with a sense of supremacy and a war cry that shredded enemies’ ear drums. It should have been her victorious moment, but she found herself considering the pitiful man before her.

Maynard seemed to witness her creation, too. He sunk down to his knees on the front porch. His shoulders quivered, as he tracked the owl with saucer-shaped eyes. His cry was barely audible, barely a murmur. It wasn’t reasonable, but she could hear it through her own scream. She could hear it loud and clear.

“I love you, Joanne,” Maynard breathed. “I just don’t understand why you would marry me and hate me all the while.”

With her arms still above her head like a crazed conductor, she pondered that. Briefly, she let herself be there on the porch with Maynard and just see the worst of him while imagining the best of him. His eyes were locked onto the bird, and she took him in. There were no questions truly left for him. In fact, the questions now lay at her feet.

The shadow of the great barn owl was upon them, the giant angel of death. Amidst her scream, she wanted to tell the owl not to kill him. She wanted to-

“Joanne!” she heard him shriek.

And then her scream was being swallowed, systematically, along with her entire body and sense of self. She was knocked to the patio as her head was overtaken by the barn owl’s beak. Black. The coldness that descended upon her as she realized that she was its prey almost numbed her to the pain. Its throat gripped her, sucking her further in and enveloping her as easily and gracefully as it would a tiny speck of dust upon the ground. She felt herself slide deeper, and the crushing of her bones overtook the sound of her scream.

Maynard's soft crying stayed with her, in her, until she heard nothing at all.