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

the twin boys peeled from her. Until I could grow my own garden, Rex and Miranda kept me in food. They feared I’d starve with Mave, who survived on oatmeal, Campbell’s soups, sardines, oyster crackers, and Jameson. They watched our two houses—mine and hers—as though watching the onset of catastrophe. I did not tell anyone that I often dreamed I fed Mave my curled-caterpillar body and sometimes it looked like a dream-snake eating its tail and sometimes like hands holding. But Mave took care of me, in her way. She paid the bills, paid off my house with your inherited Northampton money.

And she guarded my mind. She kept it stoked, banked like a fire. A month after my parents died, she sent me back to school, but I cared for nothing except the new biology teacher, Doreen Betts. Ms. Betts, with her large horse teeth and wild eyes, came into class and unfolded a napkin of vitamins, like precious metals she’d mined—holding them out in two palms like that—all colors and sizes and shapes. No one knew what they were. This was 1970. Vitamins are the future, she said. She’d worked in embryonic research in Oklahoma, she said, and it had led her to capsules and candy-coated pills. She didn’t teach from a book; she stood squat and solid in front of the class, eyes searing and bright, and told us about her experiments, about the hearts of unborn babies ticking like tiny bombs. She was fired within a few weeks, which set Mave livid, and Mr. Dolan took over biology but was more versed in geology so we moved to intact stone with no ticking heart about to blow my world apart.

“I quit,” I told Mave.

“Good call,” Mave said. “I’ll teach you my goddamn self.” She ignored Miranda’s fits and the phone ringing off the hook.

I had only two years left, and maybe it was a shame to quit because they started a girls’ team for the school the next year. Mave put up a basketball hoop for me, over a dirt patch lousy for dribbling. Dillon stayed in for two more years. He came over some evenings and fed me balls for jump shots; he’d let his hair grow to his chin and watched me through a dark shag, a silent body leaning into my own silence. I got the job as janitor at LaFaber, only half time, working from one p.m. until supper. I liked the scrubbing, I liked what happened to my hands at the mercy of the chemicals, I liked that I had the early hours to read whatever Mave dropped off in the morning dark before her school bus run. Fiction and poetry, biographies, semiotics books and Egyptology books from those chaotic shelves, the library all yours, with R.S. initialed inside the covers, with your annotations written in the hand I knew from the blue-paper letters. How thickly you were with us, though Mave hardly ever spoke your name. Often I read nothing but your annotations, which built small, crude rooms in the margins. In a translation of the Pyramid Texts, next to the line You are born for Osiris, you’d scribbled a list in pencil: sugar, rubbed sage, masking tape, baguette, clothespins. A shopping list, I guessed. Further down: no, no, no, your disagreement with the translation. And then a sketch of a boy with big hair and an elegant nose, perhaps Osiris himself. Beneath the sketch, these lines:

I kissed him on the forehead once, for falling from a limb.

I washed him and set him in new towels and talcum, lavender scent, even though he is a grown man.

Because he is a grown man.

In a book on meteors, I found inked in the margin: Some bodies are see-through, are honeycomb. And I erupt. I understood almost nothing except that there are layers and inner rooms in books; there are so many thickets.

None of my learning was straightforward. I knew little about what Mave had studied in graduate school, but it seemed to me her accumulated knowledge was a stack of papers and someone had opened a window—perhaps at your death—and the loose pages scattered in the wind. Every so often, she snatched a page midair and read it aloud to me. That’s what her homeschooling felt like. When I learned the word entropy, I realized that’s what was happening, the books entropic, my mind getting sucked out of windows and into others, everything being blown apart like I’d wanted when listening to Ms. Betts detail her godless experiments. I was grieving and isolated, but I was writing in a notebook and, in the midst of chaos, feeling myself form.

Mave’s direct tutorials were enigmatic.

“Sadness or anger,” she said once. “Which is the wiser sister?”

Or, pulling a pressed brittle leaf from a book: “Look at this leaf. Don’t screw up your face to study, open your pores. Eat it. Tell me what it is. That’s how you read. Understand?”

Once, she drove up in her emptied bus, I made us pancakes with Bisquick and she found peanut butter for them. It was winter, I was layered in sweaters over long johns.

“Needs syrup,” Mave said. She squinted at something indecipherable in the paneling and pursed her mouth. “There’s a whole wilderness in a thing called a mother,” she said. “What does that word mean, inside out? There’s a wilderness in it.” She let that sit, took a bite. She told me about the Ellafritzes, though I already knew about them. The Ellafritzes fostered only for the money and sometimes adopted. Mave had checked her route around six that morning, to see if she would need chains to the make the hill. Off Randolph Road, she saw a tiny light in the bus stop—could have been a lighter, that small. Six a.m., single digits out.

“I came upon two of my bus kids, a girl and her little brother wrapped in blankets, two hours early for the bus, holding a flashlight. They were Sandy Ellafritz’s two natural kids, not