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

Mini bouquets on some of the others, a nativity scene for Christmas, an abstracted head of a girl with two braids and you could tell it was her daughter Tess. A doe and fawn, an eagle, a stand of two- centimeter pines. All scenes small as a thumbprint on dried-out and chipped birdhouse gourd.

“Just an idea I had,” Clarissa said. Delores brought biscuits around with butter, and Clarissa said she had enough necklaces for everybody. Goods collected at her feet in thanks. “Darrell thinks they’re too country-looking,” she said. Tuffie slid on the eagle necklace and petted it there above her flat chest, her rim of lilac bra showing.

“Darrell’s a dumbass,” Tuffie said. She set both jars of Miranda’s pickled eggs beside Clarissa’s loafers.

Clarissa frowned but didn’t defend her husband. We all knew she locked herself in the bathroom to draw and paint. Always his sorrowful head would hang after a slap, the handprint not yet faded from her face, though she promised me those days were over now. She pulled at her sweater, done with the attention.

“Rayletta,” I said, “remember that time you brought a baby pig to the co-op in a cat carrier?” And we went down that road and conversation picked up again and Hope returned to the kitchen, called out for a ladle and funnel for the ready bouillon. I went in search of what was left in the drawers and said I’d look for a ginger ale for Belinda.

I wished Mave had come. From the stove, looking through the kitchen’s archway into the poorly lit living room, I saw the huddle of faces all skeletal then fleshy, depending on the orientation of each face to lamplight. Hope carried half a dozen filled Gerber jars into the living room to deal them out and give instructions on freezing, and Tuffie replaced her at the stove.

“How’s the sex going?” she asked me. “You getting anywhere?” Raised her eyebrows.

I laughed, ladled more pungent liquid into a tiny jar. She said to do it once a month somewhere other than bed. “When Lottie’s napping.” She winked, screwed on the Gerber lids, wiped the dribbled bouillon. Then I could see the specter of Clay’s head, like a little boy’s that I guided between my legs, like a sipping calf at a bathtub trough, like a bird mouth. Trembling. And close on the heels of that image, the unbidden force of the long-absent Dillon quivering into my skull, our bodies itching on Rex’s alfalfa square bales as we rolled off the ragged quilt heedless and hot. And where was he now, and in whose arms?

Behind us, the screen door scritched the porch. Tuffie and I turned. Liza stood holding a plastic shopping bag, wet hair brushed back and clipped, willow-weed thin in a blue coat fully buttoned.

“Liza, you made it,” I said, glad for her quick, clearing wipe of my mind. I remembered her as military and certain, but here before me she stood washed out with grief.

She held up the bag. “I brought something I made.”

I took it and thanked her and said come on in. We entered the living room’s rising warmth and humid air. I wiped my upper lip. The bag was almost weightless. No raw honeycomb from her mother, something thin and folded instead. Liza put her hands in her coat pockets.

The room of voices gentled. Delores gave the broken easy chair to Liza and buttered her a biscuit. I pulled out the cloth from the bag and unfolded a white cotton nightgown, eyelet trim, two darts at the bust along the sides, one embroidered purple aster at the chest. It would hit mid-thigh. It was girlish. Belinda complimented Liza, Hope made a joke about it maybe fitting her left leg, Tuffie touched its hem. I turned out the gathered seam at the front, all the seams so neat and perfect, not the nests of thread ends that plagued my few sewing projects, and I remembered Home Ec with young industrious Liza and how we’d laughed at my inner seams looking like ratted hair and how I’d stood watching her work, the rhythm of the Singer machine calm, like someone brushing fur. In the chasm between eighth grade and the co-op night smelling of simmered bouillon fell Liza’s widow heart and empty bed, and I could feel the women shutter it out.

Nobody wanted the nightgown, I could tell.

The pretty thing hung like an apparition from its ribbon straps hooked on my forefingers, purple aster like a wound. “I would love this,” I finally said. I gave her a squash for it, I gave her all the kraut, her favorite, and I gave her the pint of beets. Delores said the nightgown was perfect for a newlywed.

AN HOUR LATER, MAVE MADE IT OVER. She was lit. It was about eleven and everyone had gone but Rayletta, who gave me one more from her pack of Virginia Slims. She stowed the rest in her purse with the black-eyed Susans, their roots double-bagged and getting thirsty.

Mave stayed out on the porch, holding a lidded pint jar and a fifth almost empty.

“Mave, where you been?” said Ray.

Mave was still on the nicotine patch that blued her dreams. She bore a look of deep offense and ached toward our smoke through the screen mesh. She said, “I couldn’t get the Pontiac going.” The car had sulked in the driveway instead of rolling over the walnuts in the ruts. I pushed open the door and she hobbled in, steel toed boots untied. She sat on the bench beside Ray and set the jar on the table, the bottom barely covered by a few shelled-out nuts—she said she had pried them loose with a ball-peen hammer. Just a handful and an IOU. Rayletta accepted the jar and wrapped Mave’s hand around the last quart of canned sausage as if it were an even trade. I stuck one of Lottie’s potholders in Mave’s shirt pocket.

“Couldn’t start the Pontiac,” she said. Whiskey