Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  The foreman’s wife Delores brought a basket of biscuits covered by a tea towel, set them beside Miranda’s pink apples, two jars of pickled eggs, and frosty Ziploc pints of frozen sweet corn, my own preserves, and the two quilted potholders Lottie had contributed though she’d stayed home. Delores was the secretary in the plant office, wore a pantsuit out of tune with my house and this crowd. She produced a rectangle of butter from her efficient dairy close to Monroeville, a boutique dairy she called it. She asked Hope if her grapes had yielded, said she’d put an ad in the Penny Saver for a bushel of grapes, as her vines hadn’t produced.

  “Bud will produce,” Tuffie told Delores, and Delores took a can and laughed. Tuffie’s black eyeliner dramatic, black hair like mine but thinner, with a single lock bleached and dyed psychedelic blue. She was in her late twenties and still at the Citgo, had never worked at the plant, but she and Belinda always came anyway when the co-op met every few months. Ray’s golden headscarf like a moon rising beside them, Ray took a sip.

  No Liza yet. No Mave.

  Out the screen door, one more single headlight, and that would be Clarissa, her driver-side light out. Hope took over at the stove, I pushed open the door that faithfully scuffed the porch boards. I walked through the scrim where the kitchen air met the cool of September. My old friend, my long friend who loved me, though I was a woman of flint. I could dimly see her hair falling in pretty pieces about her face, pestering her eyes. I waved. She hoisted a cardboard box from the backseat of her and Darrell’s sorry car and bumped the door shut with her hip. The white ankle socks with loafers caught the porch light and made her look younger than we both were. Her curvy body always tentative, wary, her voice weighted by deference but face full and open.

  “You made something new?” I asked.

  “It’s nothing.” She hid a smile. I told her I put two butternuts back for her so she could trade for something else.

  Inside, most of the goods heaped up on the living room floor on an outspread sheet: black-eyed Susans dug up to replant and rubber-banded in wet paper towels—I hadn’t seen those come in—my scrubbed squashes, the dwindling beer, the quarts of ground sausage like brain matter, a carton of Belinda’s Virginia Slims. Belinda was explaining the contribution.

  “You are not.”

  “Again? Damn, you’re a baby-making machine.”

  “Aren’t the first ones fifteen months apart too? They have ways to prevent it, you know.”

  Belinda reddened, said Jack was straightening up. They were getting married for sure. Her third child, and he would be her third husband. Still, Belinda, under her blond bangs curled with an iron and aerosol sprayed, beamed innocence at us. Ray gave her a sausage jar and opened the carton to pull out a pack.

  They made way for Clarissa. She set down her box and took a padded stool, humbling her hands in her lap. Delores reached into the box and picked up one of the necklaces of waxed thread strung with a small slab of painted gourd, a tiny scene. Everyone ringed around. At LaFaber, Clarissa designed the bronze memorial plates: for headstones, for pews refinished In Loving Memory of. The necklace went from hand to hand and reached me. A tuft of lilies sprouting a tiny cabin with porch and chimney, big enough for a bean beetle. She’d used fingernail polish for color, she said, old eyeliner pencil for the sketch, some lacquer.

  Mini bouquets on some of the others, a nativity scene for Christmas, an abstracted head of a girl with two braids and you could tell it was her daughter Tess. A doe and fawn, an eagle, a stand of two- centimeter pines. All scenes small as a thumbprint on dried-out and chipped birdhouse gourd.

  “Just an idea I had,” Clarissa said. Delores brought biscuits around with butter, and Clarissa said she had enough necklaces for everybody. Goods collected at her feet in thanks. “Darrell thinks they’re too country-looking,” she said. Tuffie slid on the eagle necklace and petted it there above her flat chest, her rim of lilac bra showing.

  “Darrell’s a dumbass,” Tuffie said. She set both jars of Miranda’s pickled eggs beside Clarissa’s loafers.

  Clarissa frowned but didn’t defend her husband. We all knew she locked herself in the bathroom to draw and paint. Always his sorrowful head would hang after a slap, the handprint not yet faded from her face, though she promised me those days were over now. She pulled at her sweater, done with the attention.

  “Rayletta,” I said, “remember that time you brought a baby pig to the co-op in a cat carrier?” And we went down that road and conversation picked up again and Hope returned to the kitchen, called out for a ladle and funnel for the ready bouillon. I went in search of what was left in the drawers and said I’d look for a ginger ale for Belinda.

  I wished Mave had come. From the stove, looking through the kitchen’s archway into the poorly lit living room, I saw the huddle of faces all skeletal then fleshy, depending on the orientation of each face to lamplight. Hope carried half a dozen filled Gerber jars into the living room to deal them out and give instructions on freezing, and Tuffie replaced her at the stove.

  “How’s the sex going?” she asked me. “You getting anywhere?” Raised her eyebrows.

  I laughed, ladled more pungent liquid into a tiny jar. She said to do it once a month somewhere other than bed. “When Lottie’s napping.” She winked, screwed on the Gerber lids, wiped the dribbled bouillon. Then I could see the specter of Clay’s head, like a little boy’s that I guided between my legs, like a sipping calf at a bathtub trough, like a bird mouth. Trembling. And close on the heels of that image, the unbidden force of the long-absent Dillon quivering into my skull, our bodies itching on Rex’s alfalfa square bales as we rolled off the ragged quilt heedless and hot. And where was he now, and in whose arms?

  Behind us, the screen door scritched the porch. Tuffie and I turned. Liza stood holding a plastic shopping bag, wet hair brushed back and clipped, willow-weed thin in a blue coat fully buttoned.

  “Liza, you made it,” I said, glad for her quick, clearing wipe of my mind. I remembered her as military and certain, but here before me she stood washed out with grief.

  She held up the bag. “I brought something I made.”

  I took it and thanked her and said come on in. We entered the living room’s rising warmth and humid air. I wiped my upper lip. The bag was almost weightless. No raw honeycomb from her mother, something thin and folded instead. Liza put her hands in her coat pockets.

  The room of voices gentled. Delores gave the broken easy chair to Liza and buttered her a biscuit. I pulled out the cloth from the bag and unfolded a white cotton nightgown, eyelet trim, two darts at the bust along the sides, one embroidered purple aster at the chest. It would hit mid-thigh. It was girlish. Belinda complimented Liza, Hope made a joke about it maybe fitting her left leg, Tuffie touched its hem. I turned out the gathered seam at the front, all the seams so neat and perfect, not the nests of thread ends that plagued my few sewing projects, and I remembered Home Ec with young industrious Liza and how we’d laughed at my inner seams looking like ratted hair and how I’d stood watching her work, the rhythm of the Singer machine calm, like someone brushing fur. In the chasm between eighth grade and the co-op night smelling of simmered bouillon fell Liza’s widow heart and empty bed, and I could feel the women shutter it out.

  Nobody wanted the nightgown, I could tell.

  The pretty thing hung like an apparition from its ribbon straps hooked on my forefingers, purple aster like a wound. “I would love this,” I finally said. I gave her a squash for it, I gave her all the kraut, her favorite, and I gave her the pint of beets. Delores said the nightgown was perfect for a newlywed.

  AN HOUR LATER, MAVE MADE IT OVER. She was lit. It was about eleven and everyone had gone but Rayletta, who gave me one more from her pack of Virginia Slims. She stowed the rest in her purse with the black-eyed Susans, their roots double-bagged and getting thirsty.

  Mave stayed out on the porch, holding a lidded pint jar and a fifth almost empty.

  “Mave, where you been?” said Ray.


  Mave was still on the nicotine patch that blued her dreams. She bore a look of deep offense and ached toward our smoke through the screen mesh. She said, “I couldn’t get the Pontiac going.” The car had sulked in the driveway instead of rolling over the walnuts in the ruts. I pushed open the door and she hobbled in, steel toed boots untied. She sat on the bench beside Ray and set the jar on the table, the bottom barely covered by a few shelled-out nuts—she said she had pried them loose with a ball-peen hammer. Just a handful and an IOU. Rayletta accepted the jar and wrapped Mave’s hand around the last quart of canned sausage as if it were an even trade. I stuck one of Lottie’s potholders in Mave’s shirt pocket.

  “Couldn’t start the Pontiac,” she said. Whiskey wafting from mouth and skin, but the black walnut meat was still the stronger, more bitter smell.

  I SLEPT THERE, AT MY OWN HOUSE, ALONE. I let the muggy air and the sound of their voices sift over me. I wonder now, Ruth, what you would have made of this congregation, the things made, cooked down, bundled up. It was all uttering, wasn’t it? Uttering like prayer, a way to connect to the life inside our lives as our outer lives unfolded in ways we had not expected. Sleeping in my childhood bed, I corralled my thoughts away from memory, from Dillon, and toward the next unfoldment, what I might next say to Clay at supper—maybe a request for a new porcelain sink after all, maybe for a trip together, maybe my hand would be at rest upon his shoulder as we spoke.

  I headed back to Clay and Lottie’s in the morning, almost forgetting the hambone in the pillowcase on top of the fridge. Pulling into the driveway, I saw Ellis from a ways off. He was the one for whom I intended the bone, though I knew I should make a soup with it. The hound was excited, jerky, scampering and dancing like a younger dog, not his usual languid, thick self that was supposed to draw toward me in welcome. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, circling the yew bush. He didn’t notice me and I didn’t see Lottie’s face appear at the door’s window, so I parked and switched off the ignition and sat in the cold truck cab with the goods stacked up beside me. Mini jars of bouillon, the sausage, what was left of Delores’s block of butter that I needed to get to the kitchen, the doe and fawn gourd necklace painted tenderly in the insufficient light of Clarissa’s bathroom. I pulled the pillowcase holding the plastic-bagged hambone into my lap. Nowhere to go but here, I said inside my head, to this other house and this unfolding day. My hangover was subtle, my jaw sore from something. Despite my mental gestures of the night before, I felt a stab of fierceness for myself, as if the life inside my life were a thing I might hoard. Beside the necklace sat the cotton nightgown that would fall to mid-thigh, though I would likely never wear it.

  Ellis paused by the yew, stalked, prepared his haunches. I saw him dive in with an instinct prior to his domesticated days. I was out of the truck with the pillowcase in hand, and I ran sluggishly to find too late that he’d chomped a small bird from the low nest in the bush. No, I said, no, drop it—he watered his eyes at me, caught and longing, but he unclenched and let the broken thing drop.

  We both looked at it. Its head nearly severed from its tiny body. It twitched and would not live. I knelt on the ground and took the dog’s brown face in my hand. I shoved him a little, his woman-eyes stupid and hurt. I felt my own stupidity or helplessness or hoarding as I postponed entering the house. He nuzzled the pillowcase, and I didn’t want to give him the hambone from Ray, but I gave it and it felt good to do so. I put my hand out and his wet nose came out of the snuffled sack of bone, the salty marrow of some other beast, and his grateful tongue hit warm and sandy on my palm. I bent into it, on my knees, in our small huddle of want and greed and harm. “Hey, Flop,” I said. “You cruel thing, come here.” Another tiny bird, bereft in the thick center of the bush, chirped open-mouthed and upward.

  Ruth, I remembered, as I knelt there in the grass in front of that strange home, one of the birds, the carrion birds, a hieroglyph you’d sketched in a letter. The gray kite that scavenges. Its shrill sound the sounded-out letter attached to its drawing. The bird is its sound—the living sound that means mourning and sadness, but even so, the living sound.

  MAVE SAID SHE NEEDED TO GET HORIZONTAL. She shifted in the vinyl seat, pulled her wallet from her back pocket as if it were agitating her, and held it. I’d looked in the wallet once—a photo of Miranda and my mother Margot as girls with carefully arranged hair. A pressed flower gone brown between two pieces of clear contact paper cut in a square. “All my plumbing is rusting up,” she said, hovered her hand over her chest and scanned, down and up. “Yeah, all of it.”

  “You do need to lie down,” I said. It was dusk. The blue signs cropped up and brightened in the headlights. I looked for offerings of lodging with food nearby. Fast food at the next exit and a Motel 6.

  “I want to know why I can’t drive my own car,” Nan said from the back.

  “We’re going to take this exit,” I said.

  “It’s my car. We could at least take turns.”

  “We’re going to find a place to sleep.”

  “Frankie,” she blared.

  “Nan. Why are you bringing this up now? We said I was driving if we let you come along, and you said okay.”

  “I changed my mind. This dog fucking drools.”

  “Be useful, Nannette,” said Mave, “throw yourself out the window.” Voice airy and light and inwardly focused, like a voice trying to remember something.

  “She doesn’t mean that,” I said. I told Nan that this was as much her car as the bag of new clothes were her clothes.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” She stuck her head between our seats.

  “It means Frankie drives,” said Mave, easing her posture as we got within a mile of a bed. I studied her past Nan’s head for the illness and drugs filching the light from her skin. It had been a couple of hours since she’d taken something. She was fading out. Nan jutted in further.

  “Give me shotgun tomorrow, Crazy.” The back of her hair was exploding, flattened in a wide spot.

  “Tomorrow you get the trunk,” Mave said.

  “Fuck off,” said Nan, as if they were now a comic routine.

  I exited, heading for the huge red six on a pole sprouting from a Denny’s lot. Mave waved her hands in front of her. “Let there be hash browns, let there be cable TV. And I saw that it was good.”

  “I’ll go in,” I said.

  “I’ll go in,” Nan mocked from her angry slump.

  “You’re welcome to pay for the room.”

  Mave got out and stretched, scratched her butt. Shook her oxygen tank, like a can of shaving cream. She said, “We’ll wake to the Warm Morning stove, bank the fire in its belly, dress languidly. Nan last so we can linger on her little body. Then a Western omelet, hot coffee, and hash browns,” one hand spreading up and out like a slow firework. She kept talking, walked toward the streetlamp in the evening gray. We watched her, Nan and I.

  “How can you tell when she’s talking out of her head, and when she’s just talking?” she asked.

  “Sometimes I can’t.”

  Mave leaned her back against the lamppost, closed her eyes.

  “Nan,” I said, turning to the backseat, “why did you drive to my house? And why are you here with us in this motel parking lot?” No response. “What is it you want?”

  A murmur, delicate face in profile, pointing toward Mave.

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I just wanted more.” She faced me but eyed Ellis and stroked his head. “I want the more that you two have. Like a bigger life or something.”

  “There’s nothing big about my life.”

  She didn’t say anything else, so I said, “Probably no pets. Keep him down on the floor, okay?”

  “Yeah. Ask if there’s a pool.”

  SMOKING OR NON, I TOLD THE CLERK SMOKING. This was White House, Tennessee. She studied Mave under the lamppost through the window and I saw the woman’s kind yellowed eyes go tragic on the oxygen tubing. People always studied Mave to
ascertain—man or woman, crazy or drunk. She spied Nan, too, in the lot’s light. The TV bolted to the wall blinked out the weather, colored globs all over the US map, rain on its way. I grabbed the Tennessean for whenever the other two watched TV. We would need dinner.

  “Anyplace to eat besides Denny’s?” I asked.

  “Not especially.” She wanted to ask how long does the old woman have or something more trivial: are you headed to the Grand Ole Opry, where’s home, who slugged that pretty girl in the car? “You’re in 110, around back,” she said. “Here’s two keys.”

  I thanked her and asked for extra towels, and she ducked out to a back room. In a full-length mirror in the lobby, between piled chairs, I caught my own yellowed eyes. I thought of the antique mirror Clay would walk past, heading upstairs to bed wondering where on earth I was, how the glass would yield to him his gentle oblong face washed softly by the hall light and, beyond him, the cavernous house with the blue kitchen chairs where we had sat and he’d offered me pancakes and offered me everything only a year and a half ago, and what kind of steward of his offering had I been? I’d not even been able to carry his child.

  The motel felt moldy like a holding tank, but I already sensed the desert coming, where eyes could unyellow. Where there would be no comfort, no routines, no supports, no gentleness to confuse you. Nan was mistaken. There was no enviable largeness to my life, only an internal useless clutter of confusion, crowded like the landfill of Mave’s porch. Mave had said, as we’d packed, that we would take dirt baths out there, she would wash her remaining hair with sand. She’d said, “Your mop will take longer.”