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

was careful but somehow pleading when she’d catch my gaze in the mirror, since I’d shown her that my body, too, had some give to it, and a tenuous bridge had appeared between us. I knew she was in the blue Olds with us for reasons beyond her fear of a beating. Mave feigned obliviousness to the small shift in our triangulation of feeling. She studied the atlas.

What is the body, black and blue and straining to breathe? Angular, furred, beautiful. What did your face look like, this face she found beautiful?

I remembered Mave telling me, “There is no soul, but you can have one if you want one. It’s a free country.” We’d looked at the skinless man in the science textbook I kept after dropping out of school—digestive system, respiratory and circulatory systems.

“The body diagrammed like a cross-section of an engine,” she’d said. “Breathe.”

I’d breathed.

“That corporeality, the sensate—it yields up everything in bottomless creative action. Breathe and feel it.” She’d left my kitchen table brusquely then, out the scraping screen door, to pass through the break in the fence and retrieve your books. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl who said the earth is our original ark and our senses everything. I watched her return, her godless, stony face godly to me, and my breath, where I’d sat at the rough-lumber table, extending to fingertip and toe and almost visible.

In the car, about the atlas, Mave said, “You know this was printed in 1984. These roads might not exist. The one we’re on could be erased.”

“Then we’ll drive off into the Kentucky horse fields,” I said.

“In six years anything can happen. I-64 probably got rerouted, like a river.” Mave flipped to New Mexico and lifted her glasses to read the tiny names of desert towns and landmarks and reservoirs. I’d studied that page.

“I want to see one of the Great Lakes,” Nan said into the car’s new and generous wind. “What do you say? I hear they’re so big, they’re like the ocean. Let’s hit one on the way. We’ll all need to buy bikinis.” She was now banking on an increase of friendliness.

“Thank you for your contribution, Nannette.” Mave took out a pen and circled something in New Mexico.

“How about it, Frankie?” said Nan. “Go for a swim? I bet you tan good.”

“Geography’s not Little Gypsy’s strong suit,” Mave said.

“Oh, fuck off.” Nan laughed and Mave turned and smiled with an ease that pricked my jealousy though there was a bit of fresh hurt in Nan’s laugh. Then, “Could I at least get some clothes? I left with nothing. And smell like wet dog.” I heard a reshuffling, Ellis’s heft being shoved off, a flopping of ears and a huff.

Mave told me she was circling all the monument names where white people tried to make it up to the Indians, we should see those. “Important for your book,” she said.

“Okay, Nan.” I watched her confused face in the mirror, considered her body in its apricot dress, a collection of veins and organs and bones not skinned visible like the science textbook man, all bodies really only glimpsed. “We’re coming up on Elizabethtown,” I said. “We pick up the interchange for I-65 there. Should be a mall or something.”

“If I-65 hasn’t been rerouted,” said Mave.

I PULLED INTO A SMALL PLAZA. Dismal-looking, but there was a Family Dollar next to Double Dragon Chinese takeout. “This okay?” I asked.

Nan didn’t answer but lit out toward the automatic doors.

“I’ll get some eggrolls for me and the wet dog.” Mave doodled now in the thin margins of New Mexico. “Make it quick.”

“You want anything?”

“Polka dot bikini.”

I followed Nan. The late afternoon sky fell on the bald plaza, on the shopping carts gone wayward in the parking lot. The sales in Family Dollar were announced in marker on neon-pink poster board. Toddler clothing 20% off, it said. Hot dogs and buns for your Labor Day cookout, a month-old sign. My body felt emptied from the drive, weak against the store’s air-conditioned gust, as if I lacked substance, as if this trip were without a purpose and it were true all the roads might disappear. My throat closed a little as I watched Nan hold up a dress to appraise. Maybe the trip was indeed aimless, or maybe I was afraid of its unspoken aim. The unspoken gun.

The normalcy of Mave’s cancer ebbed away into the camouflage- print onesies and left behind the disease’s acute strangeness—sudden sting. Nan waved at me, as if we were friends. I felt as though I’d walked through a spider web and caught a struggling fly, and she couldn’t see that it buzzed loud and hopeless against my brain.

I pulled out one of the onesies that said Born a Rebel. Another one, plain white, said Cuddlebug. Another, splattered with colorful decals of food stain: Good Thing I’m Cute. I wandered toward the little girl aisle, the lace-trim toddler dresses perhaps still 20% off, the purple rompers. Unwise, given my floaty body and unmoored head, given the indelible mental imprint of the little girl I have not yet mentioned to you, Ruth, because I mention her to no one. I got out of the aisle before I would have to ask the bored clerk for a paper bag to breathe in.

“You like the stripeys?” Nan asked like a child from outside the fitting room. In her twenties, still nubile, in a dress from the Junior section.

“Sure,” I said. It hugged her and hit her mid-thigh. My jeans sagged on my nearly middle-aged hips, I fingered my leather belt. Sexy as a feed sack. “Just hurry up.” Maternal and warm as a thing of bronze. “Hurry,” I said again, and Nan registered a wound. Offense throbbed in the black eye.

Over by the cheap jewelry was a mirror at face height. I loosened my ponytail and let my black hair soften down onto my shoulders and back. Only a few grays and still thick. I wished for a brush. When had my skin settled into