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

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