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

she was my everything. Her boots stepping onto the porch were my heartbeat. But I did not believe she loved me. She’d used up all her love on you.

The Oldsmobile glided on, our indifferent vessel. We moved closer to what? Farther away from what else? I sped up, passed the Jeep, three others, a semi. We got closer to a place that was nothing we knew. That’s all we cared about. The non-humid air, no denseness or swamp, dry wind through a screenless window, no fruit flies. I remembered then—we were in Tennessee with the skinny hot trees too much like ours. I wanted extreme siltstone and shale. I wanted the canyon—to body forth what was inside me in its craggy gash. And Mave? Mave imagined a gun’s report against the canyon wall, and I couldn’t bear it. I inhaled deeply and knew she could not do the same as she sat there drowning.

Abruptly I said, “We’ll take a couple of days out here, see the desert sights, then get you home and back into treatment. That’s what we’re going to do.” I rolled down my window to the interstate noise.

“Little Gypsy,” Mave said to her window, “I was going to knock off a few convenience stores. Just petty stuff, when the money ran out.”

I heard a rustle of pages. Nan had the atlas back there. She spoke too quietly to hear over the wind.

“What?” I said.

“You could talk to her now,” she said, not to me. Yellow-hounded eyes looked to Mave, who stared resolutely out the window. “It’s not like you don’t have time. And the radio’s broke.” Nan studied me. “But you don’t have all the time in the world, Crazy.”

In her eyes, an acceptance I refused. She accepted the gun’s intent, the purpose of this trip. I shook my head at her. I heard one heartbeat, two, one bootstep, two. I pressed on the gas and passed a stream of steel and color and tires and fumes.

“By the scale, looks like two hundred miles to Memphis,” Nan said. “I’ve never been to Memphis.”

I was sick of Tennessee, but Mave had asked for Memphis. She’d given me an article about Sun Studio before we’d left, another about the Lorraine Motel wreathed and memorialized for Dr. King. She was silent. She fiddled with the cotton ball and tube over her left ear.

Nan asked, “Did you know we’re going to cross the Mississippi?”

“Wondrous,” said Mave.

“Okay. Tell Frankie something you never told anyone else. The car is sacrosanct.”

“My dress size?” said Mave.

Nan offered no retort, she was quiet, I was quiet. The car filled strangely with waiting. I didn’t look at Mave but she held her small oxygen tank in my periphery, in front of her with both hands, as if about to address it. Only road wind for some long minutes, a brief flapping of ears from Ellis waking. I figured Mave would deflect, or fall asleep.

Then she said, “First time I saw the ocean was with this girl Evie. We were thirteen, and her mother took us. We loved the boardwalk and there was a shop crammed floor to ceiling with airbrushed T- shirts and flip-flops and license plate key chains. All kinds of dresses Evie tried on. I of course remained in my jean cutoffs, but she begged until I put on a white beach dress with thin straps and a bunchy skirt. I looked at myself and cracked up, but Evie didn’t. The shopkeeper was a woman from Israel who had landed in Ocean City. Her accent was thick, she asked me, ‘Are you afraid of looking like a woman?’ I told her no and kept the dress on. Evie put a ribbon around my head—my hair was short, in a pageboy cut—the Israeli woman brushed rouge on my cheeks from the compact in her purse. I didn’t believe that girl in the mirror was me until I waved and the reflection waved back.”

I drove steady, keen. Had she told you this story, Ruth? Had she told you everything and thus had little left over for me, or had this been held back in reserve? My eyes stung, the road blurred.

“I took it all off and hopped the railing over to the sand and the water. Evie followed and bought watermelon from a vendor. She was wearing three boys’ names on her forehead when she caught up with me. That game, you know, sticking seeds to your forehead and naming them for boys you might marry, though she wouldn’t marry any of them, she married a different boy, in the Army, five years later. We stripped to swimsuits and waded into the Atlantic no farther than where we could touch, even though we were strong swimmers.” Mave paused, breathed.

“You were afraid of sharks,” said Nan, coaxing out the story.

“No. It was the bigness of it. What we knew was a swimming hole with a limestone shelf to swim to. Evie said, ‘There’s nothing to mark our turnaround out here, except the coast of Morocco.’ We hid that we were scared mountain girls. We went in up to our chests, in our ugly pilled swimsuits, and dunked our heads. Then we went back to a quilt her mother had spread on the sand, where her mother was asleep. We pulled on our cutoffs that showed the wet at our crotches. We didn’t towel off or anything and our hair dripped. When Evie spoke I kept seeing my rouged cheeks in the mirror. She stuck her hands in her wet back pockets, with her elbows out in chicken wings, and beyond her head I saw the day moon—I still see that as clearly as yesterday—and Evie threw her head back to laugh and there went everything. Her chest mounded under her green suit, her neck was so free, she was a flower on a curved stalk of green.” Mave stopped again, sucked air, rubbed the label of the tank.

“Did you touch her?” asked Nan.

“No. But she was my first.