Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  Why not Florida, Nan had whined, to the beaches? Why the desert?

  Because it has rained here for forty days and forty nights, said Mave—

  No it hasn’t, said Nan—

  Something is rotting, Mave went on. It’s my feet, I think.

  But it’s true we were drowning. The swamp would have to rupture and drain; there would have to be something else, something new and strange, even for Nan. The red rocks—wouldn’t they have the secret? Some message etched a billion years ago into their sandstone ledges?

  Again the conviction to call Clay, and, again, I dodged it. I grabbed my wallet and circled back to shut the trunk. But first I surveyed Nan’s rubble, her black overnight bag unzipped to its skimpy contents and various cosmetics spilled from the bag. I fought the urge to rummage. Some brown powder dotted the trunk bed from a compact; I dusted it off and felt a bulge, something solid and bulky beneath the thin carpet pad. Under the carpet corner, a handgun. Mave’s Browning pistol.

  Unbelievable—when had she stuck it there? I looked over to where she’d disappeared with Ellis. I’d seen the gun before, loose in her hands, or sitting off to the side, her gaze blackened, the gun like a hairy spider about to jump. I covered the pistol and gathered Nan’s tubes and mini jars into her bag and shut the trunk.

  Inside, it was dim, everything orange plastic and brown. Old- fashioned bar stools lined a counter where a few truckers had installed themselves, one waitress in white tending them. Sun-bleached photographs of wildlife hung above the diners’ heads on the wall where the sun hit in full force. A buck with a washed-out rack, a wolf pair running, a bear in a grove somewhere far from I-64. I saw that Nan had claimed a booth in the back and had also attracted the attention and talk of a man middle-aged. So be it.

  I headed to the bathroom. Two stalls, both empty. I sat to pee in the cleanest stall. On the door, drawn in lipstick at eye level: a huge calla lily with stamen sticking out enlarged, an obvious cock. I recognized the signature curves in Nan’s lines. The crude provocation but also the quick artfulness, no question. I smeared it with toilet paper, riled more by the gun in the trunk than by Nan’s lewd graffiti.

  At the booth, Mave sat on the outer edge of her side, elbows on the table, not moving. Nan was slunk up to the wall under an aged photo of seals sunning. I sat beside her. I planned to take up the topic of the gun another time. I couldn’t tell whether Mave knew I knew, whether she cared one way or the other, her nonchalance aggravating.

  “Our mascot says to order him a T-bone,” Mave said.

  Nan was already nursing a Miller Lite. “Compliments of Patrick.” She wiggled her fingers at the dumpy man now watching her from a stool at the counter. Her lips calla lily shade.

  “Little Tramp,” Mave said, “do you love anyone?”

  “Patrick.”

  “Right.” Mave’s alien tubing looked too normal to me. “Under the voluminous webbing of your hair, what do you think about?”

  Sip of Miller Lite and quiet. A woman with two toddlers struggled into the place and made a brief racket.

  “Fish and chips please,” I said to the grim waitress. Nan ordered a burger and Mave two T-Bones, one wrapped to go. I mentioned the bag of kibble on the floor of the backseat, but the order for Ellis stood.

  “Perhaps you don’t love anyone,” said Mave. “Perhaps you think of nothing, like a chimp they would teach the signs for milk and hungry.” Her face grimaced at a secret pain then went slack, its edges softened by sickness and painkillers. I wished I still smoked. I guessed this was supposed to be her suicide mission, and I had not agreed to that. I sipped on the huge Pepsi cup of water and watched her put both hands palm up on the table in some kind of surrender or game. I was angry. Nan tucked a piece of hair and eyed the seals in their heap by the sea, and her smallness and softness agitated me further.

  Then, out of nowhere, in this nowhere diner stale with beef and starch odor underscored by the bleach I could always detect, in the booth of weary brown padding, Mave spoke of you plainly for the first time in all those years, to this backwater girl we didn’t even know.

  She said, “Nannette, I’m going to tell you about someone named Ruth. This is going to be a truth-telling trip. Ellis and I decided that out back where we raised our legs to piss.”

  Nan’s black eye pulsed.

  “Save your air, Mave,” I said.

  “Who’s Ruth?” Nan said.

  “Somebody I love.” Mave like a rock face, like a too-big boy. Like somebody dying.

  “Love as in love love? You love women? I had you figured for that.”

  “What’s funny about you, Gypsy, is that each time you open your pouty little mouth, I grow more curious about you, who you are, why you’re with a brute husband, why you think you’re nothing.”

  “I don’t think that,” said Nan.

  “Truth-telling, remember,” said Mave. “I’ll tell you what Ruth is like. She is not like me, that’s for sure. She has a way, she’s warm, she treats people like they’re small animals. Or big ones. Really, to her, we’re all chimps she’d teach to sign milk.” There in the booth, talking of you as present, as nearby. The waitress set a steak with fries before Mave, then our orders. Smell of grease. A greasy to-go bag for the hound. Toward the steak, Mave leaned down, studied its gristle and juice. She said, “Ruth has no family. She wears a loose braid.” I did not know these things.

  So this is how I came to see you, really, intact for the first time—you of whom I’d not seen one photo, whose story I’d only glimpsed in Mave’s rare drunken anecdotes, whose face was no face to me, and whose body had always been the ashes of letters. I saw you alone and braided and animated and tending scared animals. I wanted Mave to stop.

  “You took too many pills,” I said, even-keeled, trying to deflect. Nan picked up her beer as if I were trying to take it. How could Mave say things about you to Nan that she had never said to me?

  “Ruth chooses the underdog,” said Mave. “Perhaps because of her own ailment, a leg fractured and poorly pinned and screwed back together. She’s acquainted with pain. The fury toward one’s limitations. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, Nannette, but I have a graduate degree. I’m her diamond in the rough, so to speak. Picture me, this product of alfalfa and ridge and mountain bog, poor as dirt when I go up north, and I sit in on her lecture. She speaks into the room like she’s reading cue cards written by a poet. She’s old Boston money—huge inheritance—but lives like a pauper, except she’s vain about her hair, like you, Nannette, like you.” Mave’s eyes all fog, her words a slur. “She has gray silk hair in that long-ass braid. And some pricey pieces in her apartment, she can’t help herself with those few things. And east wall, south wall of a house—where the light hits matters, Ruth says—she faces the Janus head bookend north and south. Thirteen years my senior, and my professor, but a body lean like a jaguar. She does like cashmere.”

  Nan sat greedy and rapt and I was erupting, the battered cod in front of me stirring up nausea.

  Mave’s voice grew more slurred and scattershot and her eyes bugged out, still clouded with drug. She said, “I met her and knew her already—like learning a language and the spelled word surprises you with familiarity. She’s a linguist. You may not know what that is, Little Gypsy, that’s okay. Frankie can explain it to you. Only men in her field, but Ruth is the one who went to the Sinai Desert alone and listened to everything for the first time. Language does more than signify, you need to know that. It originates. It makes a little bread.” Mave took a bite of steak and chewed. “She studies hieroglyphs. Words that have gills and scales and skin and fur. It’s so simple, even you will be able to understand it, Nannette.”

  She studied Nan’s slunk body unmoving, seemed to decode her. Then she studied me but still spoke to Nan. I was beginning to think that Nan was a conduit.

  “Ruth wants to make the world right. When the Black students picket the Quonset Hut, she carries a sign, even with her limp. When the pregnant girl gets kicked
out of the dorm, Ruth makes up a cot. When I go to her with all the iterations of myself, in a bundle of scraps, and all the possible ways to live, innumerable—” Mave stopped in the middle of the thought. We were quiet. The waitress filled my big water cup and left the scribbled bill.

  “So where is Ruth now?” Nan asked.

  “She tatted lace once,” Mave muttered. “Can you imagine that? She always wanted to fix cars, too, but only because she likes to say spark plug. She loves to say piston.”

  I’d had enough of your unveiling. I felt all the private, secret years exposed in the shoddy light of the booth. Mave took long draws of rough breath and she was finished.

  Nan waited. Her bruised young face expectant. “Where is she now?” she asked again. She looked at Mave, at me. Everyone in our dim booth so breakable and somehow out of place.

  I said to Nan with a plainness I hated, “Ruth is dead.” My first words spoken to her since we’d left. And now I write the preposterous words here, on a dollar-store notepad, in this letter unending. I write to you, the dead, about the dead. To stay alive.

  Another Miller Lite appeared, the waitress’s white uniform dissolving to ghost. Attentive Patrick at the bar nodded his head and waved. Nan slid the bottle over to me, and I took it.

  ALL THESE NOTES FROTH UP AND SPILL SLOWLY FROM THE RIM.

  So I started learning real facts about you at a diner just over the Kentucky line, and you who were always otherworldly to me took on a mundane bodily form and almost a face. I write to you now, though you’ve been dead years, because I need to keep my hands doing something and because, for that brief time in my childhood, I had written you almost daily and in secret, and you had seen some kind of promise in me. Also because you were the one Mave loved, and I did not know, I never really knew, what she harbored toward me, only that I was her counterpart in the universe. But love? In O’Keeffe’s Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory—a print I still keep folded up somewhere—was I not the blue morning glory and she the one with intact horns?

  What can I say of you, Ruth, most intimate stranger? What more do I know of you besides a gift of lilac soap delivered by Mave and the flutter of words—and, after a greasy Kentucky supper and beer, those revelations yielded up to Nan, the loose gray braid that might have resembled my mother-in-law Lottie’s? When I still had your three years of letters, maybe I could have formed you from them, with a fully rendered face, as if you were a paper doll.

  Your letters to me that blew up my head.

  Always with Mave’s name and Massachusetts return address so Mother didn’t know they were from you.

  I first wrote only to Mave, and she shared my letters with you. I was eleven when she left for Northampton at age thirty-nine or forty, beginning at Smith College on scholarship so late in life, after years as an autodidact, then on to her master’s at Amherst. I didn’t know all the details of her circumstances then. And I didn’t know about you at all. I remember the occasion of my first letter to Mave clearly. A Sears Roebuck catalog appeared, thick and promising, in the mailbox, too large to allow the metal door to shut all the way. I saw it from the house, like a tongue sticking out. Then I saw a boy I didn’t know, dressed in a collared shirt and nice pants, steal the catalog and run. He ran out of my sight, toward the back of the house. I went down to the cellar to look for him out the high-up smoky window that faced the back, and there he was among the thick wires of black-eyed Susans, hidden from the road but not from me. I pressed to the window, standing atop a crate. He propped open the catalog in the big flowers, unbuckled his belt, and pulled fast in his underwear, struggling mightily against the underwear band, until his body shook stiff and still. My one hand warmed the cellar window glass. My other trailed along me, along the thigh in my jeans, along my blouse and neck and ear. He wiped his hand in the grass, the tree leaves red rust. Fall was beginning around this boy. He disappeared, and soon after, I heard the knock at the front door. I listened to muffled voices from the cellar and reached the kitchen as the boy handed a pamphlet to my mother. I understood he was a Jehovah’s Witness boy witnessing.

  A foreign pole of ache formed in me, throat to pelvis. Through the front window, the catalog tongue stuck out again from the mailbox. I did not fetch it. In my mind I flipped through the sneakers and tents and Maytags to the negligee, the beige and white silks, the brown eyes and long hair he must have turned to. I did not exactly want the boy to touch me, but I suddenly wanted him to be me and me him—I wanted us to switch places. Our private moments had come in contact to make an exquisite loneliness. I felt within me plenty of boy and plenty of girl, and I then wondered if that was what Mave felt since my mother had told me, confusingly, when I’d asked why Mave was not married, that she loved like men love.

  Mave lived at an address I knew only from a paper in a kitchen drawer. I could still see her in boots upon porch steps, and I missed her very much. I had so often climbed the stepstool she’d put by her sink just for me, and I had accepted wet mugs and plates into a dishtowel from her strong hands, sometimes extra aware of my own hands moving and holding as if they were someone else’s.

  So I wrote a letter to Mave. I asked if she was both man and woman and told her about the boy and the things I felt and how I did not think Mother would understand. Then, when I finished all that, I continued onto another page writing about everything and feeling freedom in it. A long letter about basketball games, Dillon, Clarissa and Liza, the sad colors of fall that came so quickly and how the winter would soon look like slate. And she wrote back to me, a brief letter, in her all-caps print and incomplete sentences that made me fill in the gaps myself, writing the same way she spoke. Inside, maybe we are multiple—I remember she wrote that. After three exchanges, she enclosed a letter from you.

  Your letters came on soft blue paper, written with care in blue ink, not quick and choppy like Mave’s handwriting. You did not write to me as a stranger addressing a child, asking what grade I was in and did I play any instruments and what was my favorite season. You wrote about books and sometimes music, always news of the world though never news of yourself, not what happened during the day or how old you were, or why you were writing me. Instead, you wrote about the painter Jacob Lawrence—his newest Dream painting of a Black woman sitting in a room dreaming, in one window a wedding and, in the other, someone holding a vase of flowers, always a vase of flowers, you said—and you wrote about the Civil Rights struggle, which was not much spoken of in Caudell. You suggested I study the words tribe, nation, race, words to be peeled open: where were the words born and how did we come to wield them like weapons, one nation of people over another? Nation in the Latin and the Old French peeled back to expose birth, to be born, to be uttered into the world, a spectrum of Black, White, Male, Female, each of us simply uttered like a particle of human light.

  I found you peculiar. My hands shook when I read your letters.

  Often you wrote of the desert, how in the Sinai you heard the original language inside of language. How in Persia there could be no larger sense of night, of scope. Mostly you wrote about words themselves, and about my own letters to Mave, which you had been reading all along. Words without limits, blurred at the edges like bog land; words as rooms one walks into, words holding million-year-old species like amber—see the trilobite and the ancient fern, the spinal column of something extinct still preserved in a word’s withered curve.

  Then, when I wrote back, though I didn’t understand who you were, I wrote Dear Mave and Ruth, as if to the same person. The blue letters answered me, enclosed in Mave’s at first, and eventually only the blue letters in envelopes with Mave’s name, so Mother never knew about this woman who wrote to me something like (I don’t have it now to read exactly)—What is beautiful is you don’t write words to be remembered. You are a tiny leaf miner carving tracks in tunnels of chlorophyll on ephemeral leaves, writing out only its desire for food, like someone making tracks in snow to disappear. Because of that, the letters bring me joy here in Northampton.
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  You called it a second waking. We wake to words in our mouth—think of that word Mouth, lips wide and back for the O, then rounded, narrowed for the U, the diphthong. We speak what we hear, we name what is named for us: this is your mouth, these your toes, your sheaf of paper and flower seed packs, and they pet our heads and say Good as if we’re puppies pissing in the right spot. Good, you can survive. What is this? They check us, pointing: Dog. Chair. Dress. From speaking to writing, when we start to write, it’s in shadow of the spoken, an echo or repetition, the voice saying, Repeat after me with lines and shapes, and the hand in its proud flourish matches the names with the correct marks, dots, and sticks.

  But some have a second waking, you said. It comes when a word does not chase after a thing, but engenders it. You write the word Light and there is light, a dim glow maybe, almost secret, but there. You write the word Bird and a new species of warbler sings. You write the story of the Tree and the tree thus grows. It all felt like myths or poems to me—bits and pieces of Egyptology and hieroglyph, these first words that wrote the real trees, the flooded river banks, the freedom of all people and nations among stars rising, and all people’s beauty, a person’s beauty as something to name and to call forth. A vase of two cut lilacs with ants furious and alive in them. Have you ever seen them so furious? you asked.

  I understood to some degree what you meant about that electric current in words. I understood that when I sat down to write Dear Mave and Ruth—and eventually, during the three years, simply Dear Ruth—the air shifted, and I had a feeling of starting over from the beginning. Of being changed into myself. You sent me the collected letters of van Gogh, in which I mainly looked at the plates of paintings. I told no one, not even Clarissa, about the strange letters on blue paper, but I showed Dillon the van Gogh paintings, and he loved them.

  Then you died, without my ever having met you.

  Mave came home, with the money and books you left her, and moved back into her falling-down house where she and Mother and Miranda had all grown up. She carried all those hundreds of books in pillowcase sacks, one by one from the car, like heavy litters of kittens to be drowned. She had no bookshelves so she used bricks and plywood and two-by-fours. Shelves leaning and bowing, a sorry shrine. I was fourteen. I had sent a few letters that you had not answered and these Mave brought to me tied together in a bundle and unopened, and Mother saw and questioned until Mave confessed I’d been corresponding with you. Mother demanded those unopened letters and all the others I had from you, so I gave her the box of blue letters and she burned them in the fireplace—why didn’t I save some of them? Why didn’t I fight her? Maybe because Mave didn’t fight. She simply squatted in her boots and watched the fire and drank whiskey from a jar and accepted the reproach. Mave passed her hand through her coarse cut hair, so short. I wanted to touch it and was surprised that I did so. With my hand on her head, we mourned you.