Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  I glimpse you sometimes, Ruth, in the Sinai, in knee-high boots, treading. Upon the barren scrub, could you not see yourself in the light, in the red dust, finally with absolute clarity?

  I thought meanly toward Clay—There is lasagna in the freezer. Sing your pious songs, Clay, you are the kindest man really, but you knew, didn’t you? That our matrimony would settle over us like soot in a summer chimney where birds get stuck and pulse and quicken and then give in? Sing the refrains that sit like stacked bowls in the cupboard of your mind. The clerk appeared with a clutch of thin towels and I jolted, as if she had caught me in a low-down, untoward act. I returned to the car.

  “You see a pool?” asked Nan.

  I looked up and said it would rain soon.

  WE GOT DENNY’S CLUB SANDWICHES TO GO. Room 110 was poorly lit, everything beige except for the matching beach paintings. I breathed in the lingering tar smell emanating from the walls.

  “It stinks in here.” Nan dropped her overnight bag, crinkling the Family Dollar bag inside.

  “I used to smoke,” I said. “I prefer smoking to non.”

  “Maybe there are more people on this trip besides you.”

  There was a table with two chairs and Mave sat, unwrapped the Denny’s foil, and Ellis snapped to attention at her elbow, waiting. He got the pickle and cheese. I said I forgot something and walked into the drizzle. I popped the trunk to feel for the pistol bulge. Still there. I would hide the keys. Nan slipped out of the room barefoot and walked to the vending machine a few doors down. She wore Dillon’s Army jacket that must have been in her bag. Fritos, Twizzlers.

  “Where’d you get quarters?”

  “Found them. Twizzlers are for you.”

  The little bit of rain slimed the road dust in my arm hair. In the room, Nan sloughed the jacket to the floor, bolted to the bathroom with her bag, and started the shower with the door open. Mave watched the open door as she lay down.

  I sat and scanned the Tennessean. Top headline read “Two Dead Babies Found, Omaha, Nebraska.” The first paragraph said their skeletons were discovered in a septic tank outside the city. Near a Catholic home for girls. I quit reading and took up the notepad with the big red six on it, the Bic pen.

  “Work on your book,” Mave said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Eat something.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “You cannot write of hunger unless you are hungry.”

  “I think I should call Clay.”

  “And say what?”

  “That Ellis is with me.”

  “You can take dictation for the book if you like, you can quote me. This codeine should kick in soon, and I’m liable to speak French. Should be profound.”

  “Are you feeling pain?”

  “I feel like a tiny man stole into my body through my butthole and is sucking away my air and he’s taken an electric sander to my left lung. Also—if you’d like an inventory of the details—I’m in a shitbox motel with you and Gypsy Moth making our way at crawling speed to a desert I may never see. I have only one more of these portable tanks. And you forgot to say no mayo on my club.” Her arms spread out like Jesus. “I’m fine. Write something from your dream head.”

  “It’s empty. Sorry about the mayo.”

  “Then use something else.”

  “I’ve got nothing, Mave.”

  “Then make it up whole cloth. Shit, you know you don’t know what to say until you start. Use the goddamn brain I helped shape.”

  “Helped warp,” I said. I held the notepad. “I’ll just call Clarissa again.”

  “Write about the day. Write down her pathetic but sincere offering of Twizzlers.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “I’m the one with no time.” Voice sharp. “You’re lousy with time, you’re rolling in it, you’re like Ellis in carnage. You have the stench of time scumming up your fur.”

  I almost mentioned the gun but didn’t. I rubbed my dirty arms. The Army jacket lay heaped like old skin. Nan sang in the shower.

  “YOU OKAY?” Clarissa asked over a fuzzy connection. “Where are you?”

  The payphone in the lobby was within earshot of the clerk, who feigned busyness.

  “Has Clay called?” I asked.

  “Twice. What do you want me to say when he does?”

  “What did you say?”

  “That I don’t know where you are.”

  “Miranda?”

  “I told her Mave’s with you, that she had an appointment.”

  “What about Dillon?”

  “Dillon wouldn’t call me, Frankie.”

  I felt quiet and thick. I felt him all at once, unbidden—he was dark and young and compact, his limbs were my limbs, he tied things in my long draping hair and I left them there for days, didn’t comb out the knots. I heard Tess in the background.

  “Tess says to get her a turquoise ring.” More muffled talk. “And to live it up, you owe it to Mave.” Clarissa laughed. “Frankie? You there?”

  “This is stupid. I don’t know that she’ll even make it.” In my throat, the admission gathered itself and lodged. “I know she won’t.” A petty cry, too, for Mave’s thin suicidal breaths and for everything else buzzing—for Nan’s body unto his mouth in their home I’d never seen, and Nan’s pathetic but genuine clamber for some kind of life, and Clay’s kind hands handling me and that time he said he hoped it would be a girl that looked like me.

  “She’ll make it as far as she needs to. Listen, just sleep awhile—have you stopped for the night? Just sleep.”

  BACK IN THE ROOM, I found Nan’s dirty doodles on the notepad, vulvas in lip liner. I lifted the top page and underneath, on the next sheet, a sketch of a woman with arms reaching out, a feathery movement, her hair in mid-swing. Sketched fast but with skill. It looked familiar; it reminded me of something Clarissa might draw. Nan’s disastrous hair was flattened wet and harmless, and she donned the striped blue and pink dress, the price tag hanging off it. She held the newspaper, irked, pacing the wall by the heater not on, back and forth, antsy, under the paintings of palm trees and ocean and conch shells. Any calm Clarissa had willed into me dissipated to restlessness. Mave lay horizontal and quiet, holding a pillow over her eyes.

  Nan started chattering about the horrible headline story I’d already had my fill of, how the tiny skeletons had been there for years, how the nuns probably made the teenage girls get rid of their babies, they’re like that, nuns. Maybe the girls hadn’t even known what happened to their newborns—whoosh, taken away—and they probably didn’t get drugs for the birth even, nuns don’t give drugs to wayward girls.

  “Cool it, Nan,” I said. “Mave’s trying to sleep.” I found my toiletry Ziploc. I wanted a shower, but she kept on.

  “I will not cool it, I know what I’m talking about. I know some things you don’t, despite what you and Crazy think about me being second-rate.” Young face going stricken and a body in a dress I’d bought her.

  “I’m showering, Nan. Watch TV or something.”

  “I heard your husband’s band play once,” she said.

  I dodged it, knowing my nerves were frayed. “I’m going to shower, just cool it.”

  She blocked the bathroom door, agitated and fretful. “Look at me. I said I heard Clay’s band, they were pretty good. He looked pretty good to me. I’d sleep with him. You wouldn’t care, would you? If I fucked him?”

  The slap was hard and loud. Her head swiveled back to the right. Stayed there. Mave creaked the bed. Nan slowly raised her face, her eyes welling up.

  “Finally got that out of your system,” she said.

  All heat in my face, I needed air. “Nan, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “Yes, you did. You expect the same thing from me as everybody else. You think the same as everybody, that there’s nothing to me. But I told you, I want more.”

  My hand was hot, her left cheek red in the bad light. Her eyes darted to Mave, who I knew was watching.

&nb
sp; Nan said, “Dillon found me when I was selling these dumb leather bracelets at a road stand in Georgia. I embossed them and painted them, they were pretty and worthless. You know how intense he is, those eyes that see everything and make you feel like you’ve got layers, and his silence that seems shy and sweet at first. He’s a slow smolder, but I knew early on he was dangerous and he’d trap me. He got me pregnant, but I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be bound.” Nan in the new striped dress on a truth-telling streak. “Ask me how many I threw away.”

  “How many what?” I said.

  “Ask me how many babies.”

  “How many?”

  “Three. His was the third.” She smoothed her dress with the Tennessean rolled up. “I’m not proud of it, but I thought I could be an artist or something. More than a body for men and babies. They didn’t give me enough drugs for that last one. And the nuns and priests protested outside the clinic. They had all these blown-up pictures of unborn alien babies. They said horrible things about me, but they didn’t know me.”

  I felt my jealous coil heat for a moment, my throat constrict at the mention of a child by Dillon and the choice to throw away a thing I could not stop from slipping through my fingers. Mave stayed quiet.

  Nan said, “I was in bed for a few days after that one, told Dillon it was flu, but, when I could, when he left for a half-day flight spraying for moth, I got some paint and I found their church and I painted huge cocks on the walls. A bunch of beautiful colors.”

  Mave started laughing softly, and Nan smiled at her own transgression.

  I said to her, “I lost one once. Last spring.”

  She didn’t say anything, but nodded. Dead babies hung in the nicotine air, and she moved away from the bathroom door, all renegade and sore, slapped. So beautiful in her wild look. She said, “I should have kept going, painting all the walls everywhere, really painting. But how? I ended up bound to Dillon in the end, baby or no baby.”

  I felt the Ziploc still in my left hand. “I’m sorry I hit you,” I said.

  “It’s all right.” She bit her lip.

  “No, it’s not. I’m sorry.” I entered the bathroom and shut myself in softly and got the shower as hot as I could upon my back, my closed eyes, my neck, my belly.

  I LAY BESIDE MAVE, NAN IN HER OWN DOUBLE.

  “I have to say, I miss the hibiscus,” Mave said. “The flora of the homeland.”

  “There are hibiscus here,” I said. “We’re only a few hundred miles from home.”

  “I miss the walnut trees.”

  “We’re in the same temperate zone.”

  “I miss the sphagnum moss. That we’ve surely left behind. We’ve left the swamp farts. All the putrid skunk cabbage pussing out marsh milk.”

  “Okay, yes. We’re out of the swamp.”

  “But the changes are imperceptible. I want it to look different, Frankie. Blasted, like another planet.”

  “Should have gone to Miami then,” said Nan. “Told you. Climb a fucking palm tree.”

  Mave laughed and so did Nan. I twisted loose my thick rope of wet hair and strung it out on the pillow above my head. I laughed and it felt good to laugh after tonight’s heat, after telling our horrible truths. Mave said we’ll swing by the bus station and send Little Gypsy packing, we’ll drug you, she said, and you’ll wake up in your sunny Florida. Nan kept laughing, loose and easy, lightened. I breathed in the tar, stretched up my arms, hands meeting in the woods of my wet hair. You know—I could almost see us young and unfettered and untrapped and full of promise. I could glimpse a shape under the baby blanket wadded in a wagon. Pulling the Radio Flyer behind my girl self, and there was that shape of a thing I could almost see, something almost born, before cousin Belinda got in, whining for her turn to ride. It was a body haulable, transportable. And small.

  I’M UP AT THREE A.M. WRITING YOU.

  One time Mave said, “The spring snow is so marvelous. My mind is white and bald as that. Or maybe it’s white as garden lime and burnt.” She stood in her filthy bathrobe facing the window as I scrubbed her floor, though she hadn’t asked me to. I cleaned the grime to reveal tongue fitted to groove. I used a Brillo pad and cleaned a square of floor to blondness. And what was my mind like?

  In the spring of our first year married, Clay’s band got invited to play the Good Friday fish fry under the pavilion at Snyder’s Crossing. I could easily conjure the smell of trout and crappie and catfish in tinfoil and the cheap punch in Styrofoam cups, the crackle of the tinny amp and Clay’s new song. He said he would need to hold extra practices in the house. We sat at supper, the two of us, with asparagus I’d cut from Lottie’s overgrown bed and lamb from Rex.

  “You’ll come out and hear us,” he said in a vague tone somewhere between question and statement.

  “At the Crossing?” I speared asparagus at the tough stalk and bit. I hadn’t been to the church in almost two decades, even to see the bathroom that Belinda’s contractor husband—her second one—had installed. I said, “Last time I was there, the outhouse still stood, with that prim lattice around it, like something of another century.” He turned his face toward the dark rectangle of screen door and the spring night beyond it. “Clay, I get to hear you every practice. Private concert.”

  “I don’t ask for anything much,” he said, and the supper glow—plate, milk, tender meat, the things that compose the comfort of supper that man and wife share routinely—warmed his oval face that turned now from the door to me. His ease so evident whenever we courted normal routine. “The other wives come out to hear us.”

  “I’m not the other wives.”

  “Frankie.”

  “Clay.”

  He lost his ease in a soft snort. As offering, I said I’d prepare snacks for practices.

  He said, “And I need you to tend to Mom,” salvaging at least a feeling of the glow, a hint of it.

  “Of course,” I said. Lottie’s body had started to fail.

  I did as he’d asked, and I attended each practice.

  Stew always arrived to practice last and plugged in his bass with no preamble. I watched him like a cat from the kitchen for the first few measures, then looked in on Lottie asleep and retreated to the back steps to wait for him to smoke with me. Sometimes he did. Sometimes I set a kitchen chair beside Clay strumming and singing—he sang well—and I held a plate of sweet breads.

  I remembered once showing up at the fish fry, about fifteen years old, in Belinda’s indigo taffeta pageant dress. I arrived before my mother and dad, and the Easter snow lingered like icing in eddies of shade. I had no sweater, only a sheer organdy overlay down to the capped sleeves that were pure flutter. Belinda had won Miss Fireworks in the July Fourth pageant, and she of course had boobs, so I balled up socks to pad my training bra. There stood everyone, wearing jeans and flannels, as I knew they would. They ate the battered fish and set their punch and paper plates on the big white oak tree stump, and here I came in my cousin’s borrowed eveningwear.

  Dillon was there, part of a half circle of boys much older. He watched me with some amusement and allowed me, as always, my privacy. There were no amps then, only an acoustic. The guitar started and Aunt Miranda’s waify voice began the Good Friday hymn—Were you there when they crucified my Lord? I knew the refrain and waited for it—Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. I shook. The hymn so old and heavy, and how gloriously sad, the Lord’s body coming down into the good, dark Friday night.

  I knew the older boys, finished eating, would take off for the Matlick Feed parking lot in their fathers’ trucks, and the girls would clump up at the Dairy Delite for shakes and would watch the boys from across the street, one or two bold enough to cross over and slip into a truck cab and let things be unbuttoned. I cried listening to Miranda, her voice stronger than her stooped body. I felt my own body skinned, so keen to the cold air. The earth itself seemed like God’s huge body, crocuses coming up all over God’s chest and face and into the thick hair of rye p
asture, creating new wounds each time. My yearning was real but scattershot. The smell of Belinda’s lilac body spritz I’d stolen mixed with the Wesson-oiled air, and my stomach churned. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Miranda finished, all somber and bent.

  “Frankie, you want your trout on paper or fine china?” asked one of the boys, and people laughed.

  I boiled, gangly in the big dress. My nausea swelled. I looked at the big fryers and the closed cooler holding hostage the fish yet to fry, the channel catfish and crappie—I pictured their living selves and tiny O mouths—the flashes of their faces burbled in me and sent me toward the outhouse behind the chapel, head down, watching the dress’s ruffle darken with wet grass. I rounded the white-painted lattice that hid the outhouse door, uprighted the door latch, stepped into the darkness, and vomited.

  Pee and vomit go far down in an outhouse, Ruth. You hear the earth swallow it and can imagine the limestone underworld, the stalactites in the throat that catch the excrement. I wiped the mucus strings with toilet paper, shut the lid, and sat. I no longer smelled the fish, only fake lilac and the fake berry of the air freshener. I hooked the door’s hook into its eye. I could see, in the dusky light coming through the high air vent, the friendly small spiders stirring in the pyramid stack of toilet paper rolls. Someone had stowed, in the corner, a blue cross eraser with He Lives at the center, where the haggard body would have hung.

  Dillon knocked on the door and said my name, but I didn’t answer and he left me alone. I was cold and wanted his Army jacket to wear. The dress gapped forward, and through the gauzy deep-blue organdy I could see my small breasts and my hard chest bone, and I thought about how one is supposed to receive the Lord who lives into the heart, right in that space, with the balled knee socks. My desire was crocus blue, a vague intensity, as before, but I became aware inside the outhouse that whatever I was yearning for was something I could not have. I longed to have a Belinda-like body and the normal sweetness of the Dairy Delite girls. But more so, oddly, I had a great want for the clean smell of grass after the Easter snow, which falls so lightly you can mistake it for heavy dew, and this was of course right outside the door, beyond the outhouse lattice, and still I knew I somehow could not have it.