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

were drawings of Clarissa. Some others were red pastel and, in some, I could hardly make her out, but she was there, even in abstract, one in blue ink with a gold streak like a scar of light, some mixed media, according to the card beside the frame—gelatin print, bone, paper, gouache, collage with an old photo of Clarissa painting her gourds on a backyard table I knew very well—I’d found her the plywood at Rex’s to put up on sawhorses. The bone crushed and sprinkled onto glue like road-dirty snow. A tiny bit of lace at the edge. I didn’t know the right words for this. One was a field, with a flowing section of Heather Run—I somehow knew it was Heather Run and its laurel and moss, appearing clipped from the marsh like a lock of hair, and even this was Clarissa portrayed. It was her body, blue and black and lace.

“Gouache.” I said the word quietly, but Clarissa heard me. She said nothing. A speechless widow in her best jumper.

“I want to talk about my body of work,” Tess said. All faces in the room rearranged themselves in her direction. A man in a dark jacket, older, probably her teacher, put a hand on her back as though he were going to first introduce her, but she stood and gave him her stool and she started speaking from the oak of herself, discussing each method and medium, needing no introduction to the world except the one she got when she slipped out of Clarissa. I want to talk about my body of work, she said, and she did. It was a body you could handle and bathe and sniff up and down, in its creases, a body to nurse and nurse from, a body you soap up and take a bed pan out from under and hurt and heal and salvage and raise up. I could make out other bodies then, in the strokes of gouache—could summon Lottie, could summon you, Ruth, the limpidness of Clay, the shock of Dillon, could summon the living and the never-got-to-live. She said all this without saying it that way. The man in the jacket, all the women and men, nodded and admired. I was in awe of her.

Clarissa’s face so hot and so unbruised and so seen. Tess crossed the gallery and kissed her.

After an hour or so, when we left to drive back across the Ohio, with the dash lit like the city at night, it started to rain. We would get home late. I thought how, despite the time of night, I would pour new Murphy Oil and new hot water and do the boards tongued and grooved in my own house. I wanted to do that and nothing else, to arch over those boards and think about the bone-lace evocation of my friend’s body and all bodies. And I knew, too, that, newly alone and afloat in her house, Clarissa would get out the paint box I’d given her, the ochre and the horsehair brushes, and clear the dining room table because at last she could take up all the space she wanted. I pictured her in the New Mexico light in O’Keeffe’s roofless room, the box of parsley, the still life skulls and hollyhock, the vision of feeling coming out in oils. The rain dousing the canvas so the colors clarified.

As if seeing what I saw, knowing what I knew, she said, “I think I do my best work when it rains.”

IN THE MORNING, I brought Mave a bud in a vase and a sprig of sumac. I told her about the art show.

“You smell like the janitor you used to be.” She studied the vase I’d set on the TV tray. Bathrobe over a dirty white V-neck, unlaced boots. She said, “A bud cannot be forced but will give, in time, and will be the color you did not expect.”

“I’ve befriended the paper bag again.”

“I heard who showed up for Darrell’s wake.”

“Miranda tell you?”

“Is it reasonable to mourn yourself before you’re dead?”

“It’s not even ten,” I said. “How much have you had?”

“How much is left, you mean. Enough for a quarter pint each.” Mave touched the sumac as if it were poisonous. “You pour.”

“No.”

“Then light up so I can get a whiff,” she said.

“Miranda told me Dillon’s dropping gypsy moth spray around here. I didn’t even see the webbing in the trees, but if you look around.”

Mave carefully moved a few books that were open to black-and-white photos of ornate buildings onto a book pile already started on the floor and gestured that I sit in the chair covered in peeling contact paper.

“Miranda said he’s married,” I said. I did not sit. “They’re staying at his grandmother’s. It’s been so many years. He could have written. Or called.”

We both stood among the ruins of her dining room until she went to the kitchen for what beer was left. She would drink the half pint herself.

THEN LOTTIE. Only a couple of months later, in late August, she was part of what became our thick fog of funerals. Right after Tess’s art show, I had handled Lottie with greater care and focus, absorbing myself with her, partly hiding from Dillon, but that wasn’t all of it. I felt her lean against me when I helped her walk. She would lay her head on me when I escorted her to the toilet, press into my neck just above my shoulder joint. I somehow pictured clearly the joint free of skin tissue and cartilage, saw both of us as bones, brief and calm, until I’d lower her to the commode and hold up her nightgown for her and we’d both fully flesh out again at the sound of her peeing.

She died when I wasn’t there, only a few minutes before I walked into the house. The kitchen was still, sealed, one of the blue chairs overturned. I righted the chair and pulled old bananas from the freezer