Call It Horses by Jessie Eerden (the reading list .TXT) 📕

There was Liza, running a Weed Eater with safety goggles on.

Dear Liza.

I would write her—I would retrieve the Discount Tire ad from the trash and write on the backside. A letter within a letter, Ruth. From the team photo on the table, our small eyes looked out from the grainy half-circle of our bodies and hair and scratchy uniforms—Liza a well-managed, capable forward, married for how many years, and Clarissa with the most delicate fringe of bangs and a curvy body that sat the bench unless we had at least a ten-point lead and it was fourth quarter, married for years now too, to Darrell who hit her—did Liza know that? When he’d first slapped Clarissa, she’d driven her Toyota to my house and stood at my front door as if a weight pulled her head down to one side, and her fair hair fell in pieces across her face, like a horse’s mane. I gave her a bag of ice wrapped in a towel, I put her in Mother and Dad’s old bed, and I drove my truck three miles east to the Tide family’s farm. I scanned the evening horizon of alfalfa field until I saw Darrell’s stout figure rendered small and harmless by distance. I took the pocked right-of-way as far as I could in the pickup then got out, grabbed the tire iron from the bed, and walked the rest of the way to find him mending fence, and he said my name as a question. I pointed the heavy tool in reply, and a hint of a smile might have curled his lip mostly hidden by moustache.

“What’s this about, Frankie?”

“Don’t you ever,” I said. “Never again.” What was I going to do? Beat him bloody? He neither denied the slap nor swore off it. I drove home knowing I could protect no one. And now, looking at our three younger faces, I felt again the keen exposure for which there is no protection—not from hornets, not from battery, not from grief.

On the back of the ad, I drew our young bodies as horses, small stick-figure ponies, each its own fateful letter, a sound uttered beside the deal for winter tread.

EVERYBODY SAID I WAS GOOD ENOUGH IN THE NINTH GRADE to play for the boys’ team. There was no high school girls’ basketball in 1968, only the community league the plant sponsored. But I wasn’t skilled. I was forceful, I was scrappy. I dribbled poorly, passed too hard, and shot lead balls two-handed, but I was fast and could rebound. Most games I fouled out. I had one good move, and I lived for it: I’d steal the ball and hurl myself down court for a fast break, barely managing the dribble, and my body—ever cordoned off—stopped sensing its boundaries. I felt everything at once in the tiny community building gym as I drove without grace to the basket. The building doubled for our games and—with the hoops folded up to the ceiling—baby showers and spaghetti dinners and gun shows. The smell of concessions lingered always: popcorn and hotdogs on a reel, nicotine mouths of coaches chewing Juicy Fruit. Driving to the basket, I gulped in all the adolescent salt and skunkiness, someone’s perfume, the milling around of women eating cake and laughing at a shower, the caving in and down of the bleachers where hundreds sat because the scattered twenty people each had so many selves and histories, and each sound they made ricocheted against the cinderblock walls and multiplied.

That’s when I could always feel Dillon.

My second self, a shadow with heat.

I could smell his burnt smell and feel the goldening of his skin from his afterschool work at LaFaber’s foundry. He was too young to work legally but they gave him some hours anyway. His body lengthened in those hours of flame and then he slipped into the community building to watch us girls play. I went in for that layup able to see myself from outside, how he could see me, and if I scored I could blame that thrill for the electric shocks moving up my legs. It was not sexual in a way I could have separated out and named. At fourteen, I still felt equal parts male and female. Dillon and I swapped clothes, we fished blue gill in Heather Run with wetted oats, brown sugar, and soybean meal balled up into bait. I tented my hands over his eyes, lying in the sun. He weaved yellow yarn into my black hair.

After games, I was limp and wrung, and the close bodies of the girls were bright. I moved with Clarissa and Liza in a hot huddle, the three of us a little on fire and a little sleepy. We went to Liza’s and jumped on her trampoline, though we were too old for it, then lay on the springy surface that dented under our butts and shoulder blades and tilted us toward each other. The trampoline sat near a slope that ran down to the dog pens and neat pullet cages that chirred out their constant sound, the circumference of the trampoline the edge of our young-girl heat. They teased me about him, but I’d say no, it was Clarissa he wanted, and I’d do a steamroll over both of them with hands crossed over my chest like a corpse to make them laugh. And I believed it because she was the one all the boys watched, Darrell Tide in particular, who was then a high school senior. She had real breasts and wanted to quit the team because the running and jarring hurt her; I had almost enough to cup with a very small hand.

We lay there until we grew cold, until the brightness of our bodies dimmed and we pulled back into ourselves. I wanted to stay out there longer, alone, to outspread my arms and legs with no sweater. I wanted to be