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

cutting for the noon table and usually one for me. I can see her stoop down every day I am alive. She hitches her skirt, her nylons are runner- free as they slide into her muddy garden shoes. Her hands are flecked with wet parsley and they smell of whatever they have kneaded and seasoned. There’s a pot roast in a crock pot for the twins and Belinda and Tuffie and Belinda’s brood and Rex’s square head. There’s a loud croak in my heart for Miranda and her concave body. Someone who mothers. I know nothing about that, Frankie. The lived-in world was always real to my sister. I fit into her hunched curve at one time. I see now she chose to let it all be wrung from her. I think it was a free choice. I may have been wrong to try to dissuade her.”

Mave watched Nan head back to the bathroom sink to spit, grabbing clothes on the way.

“I told her she has lived a real life.” Mave sipped the bad coffee and winced again. “I wanted to tell her that before I die.”

“I know what you’re planning to do,” I said. “And I won’t let you. We’re going to see the desert and O’Keeffe’s roofless room, and we’ll get some souvenirs, then we’ll go home and you’ll do treatment again.” My eyes watered out the ache.

“Some turquoise,” she said. Mave so tired and pasty, breathing there, her lungs mostly on the outside, wearing that shirt I’d seen every other day of my life though it looked clean this time, sleeves rolled to the elbow. She sat.

Out of the bathroom, Nan said, “I want to see the Grand Ole Opry,” dressed now. “The motel book says we’re only a half hour from Nashville.”

“Me too, Nannette,” said Mave. “Let’s get on the road.”

WE PILED OUR MEAGER LUGGAGE IN THE TRUNK atop the hard lump of mute gun. Nan seemed to have come to terms with her backseat status and was the first to climb in, rubbing sleep crusts from Ellis’s eyes. It was such a tender gesture, gentle with the pad of her forefinger, somehow keeping the red-painted nail from interfering, he held still for it, and afterward licked her wrist, bedded his head into the lap of dollar-store striped dress. In those four seconds, like a barely redirected spring, my thought shifted to touch. I pulled into the same Denny’s for breakfast sandwiches to go, then we left White House, Tennessee, behind.

Mave stayed quiet, removed the cotton balls from above her ears, detached the tank’s network of tubes to rub where the plastic hose weighed on the cartilage. I thought of Clay’s touch, as if I’d walked into low-hanging crabapple branches, then backed away. He would pull down my T-shirt nightdress with decorum after, cover me up, his eyes set close together but a face not unhandsome, only uncertain.

Then I was out there, a sack of organs in the world, sense organs, set of orifices—all of myself hungering now—barreling southbound in that beat-up blue Oldsmobile Royale on Interstate 65 with two other disparate bodies, one with a lovely face unpurpling, the other with a face drying out as if already accustomed to sand and scrub. In the desert perhaps our dead babies would come back, to haunt us more substantially. We should have named them.

One of hers had been Dillon’s. He’d worn a leather bracelet as a boy, I remembered, imprinted with the name Augustus, for his grandfather he said, and someone had stamped it by hand with metal letters and a mallet, and then he had met Nan when she’d been hawking leather bracelets. One of the children would have been named that, Augustus, Gus, Auggie—Come eat, Gus, come comb your hair.

Mave’s cotton balls were yellowed. She held them out to Nan between our seats. “Here, have my ear protectors.” I saw Nan wrinkle her face in the rearview and laugh.

“Who do you love?” asked Mave. “You never did answer me, Gypsy.” She replaced the cotton, hooked the tubing over her ears, into her nostrils. “Come on, this car is sacrosanct. This metal box is a place to let it fly.”

Maybe, Ruth, we were looking for a land that suggested the heart opens out, under the bare chalk-tick of a white sickle morning moon and unto flat craggy ground. Because it’s thirst that’s expansive. It’s thirst that lets everything touch you at once, even parts of you never touched before.

Nan said, “You wanna know? I love sex in general.” Mave raised her eyebrows and nodded. “And funnel cake,” Nan said. She laughed, and Mave beckoned with her hand to say that’s fine, keep going, what else.

“Okay. I also love to paint. But not just the dirty pictures in aerosol. I do scenes. I actually make the paints myself sometimes, from stuff around the house. Like berries or mustard.”

Once, I had seen Nan’s work, wall-size, still wet. I had not yet asked her about it. No sound inside her pause but the engine and the rhythmic seams in the pavement. Then: “Sometimes when I paint,” she said, “I forget where my body ends. Like I don’t have edges. Do you know what I mean, Crazy? I bet you do. I bet you know things like that.”

“People will miscalculate you, Nannette,” said Mave. “People always miscalculate. You bear some resemblance to O’Keeffe, you know, in calculations. Her lover made a mint photographing her nude—did you know? Everyone fascinated by her sex, by the generous give they could feel in her fleshy canyons in black and white. He groomed her like a horse. Like her dark rippling hide belonged only to him within the frame. I don’t give a shit really—give me her own stuff, her reds and rocks, her many skies. What she made with her hands. Give me her color, all untuned. And the bones and buttes. Nobody could give out her body except her.”

I stayed quiet. They did not ask me what or whom I