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

a silhouette mostly. Stoic. Contemplative. You should have seen her—like a stubborn kid.

Nan returned with a black plastic case. “He had clippers,” she said. “And nice arms.”

“Focus, Nannette,” called Mave.

Nan took an end table and towel out to where Mave waited, opened the case and assembled the attachments in the half light. “They’re battery powered,” she said, and hummed the clippers on then off.

“Ready,” said Mave.

I approached their backs and said, “You sure? Why do you want a bald head?” When I reached them, I saw she had removed her tubing and closed her eyes and bit her lip, which lightly bled. Somehow, this silenced me.

Nan said to me, “If she wants it, then—” and she took a slow swipe right down the center of Mave’s gray head, the short thin hair at first collecting and covering Nan’s hand like a glove and then dropping to the asphalt in a clump.

“Oh my god,” Nan said, “it’s so easy. Doesn’t hurt, right?”

“Right.”

Another stripe of hair, of fur, of concealment. My first thought was—You look like a cancer patient. Then I thought monk, desert hermit. Then I didn’t think. My head emptied. I said out loud, “Want me to order pizza?”

When I came back from making the call, her scalp was bare and Nan brushed hairs from the sheet with the hand towel from the room. The scalp looked cool and eggshell-like: I could picture it hatching a mind if the air had been warm enough, but it was not warm. It had gotten cold without me noticing. I saw Mave shivering, palming her head. She reinserted the fixtures of her outer lung.

“Write about this in the book,” Mave said quietly, closing her eyes again as Nan toweled residual hairs off her face. “And don’t have me grow old in it. I’m out like a firework. The potassium nitrate oxidizes violet and pink, lithium will give the burst some red.” She shot her hands out in a mock burst.

I told her I liked the new look. She said to spell lithium right in the book. She said to keep the title simple. Call it Horses. Call it Hibiscus. Call it The Hundred Years’ War.

I told her I was not writing a book, I never had been. She said, “You’ve been writing it from birth.”

SO THEN WE SLEPT, FULL OF PEPPERONI PIZZA. We were not camped out with feet pointing to the Ozarks. We were in Room 131, having returned the battery-powered clippers and shaken out the sheet. Mave had finally been knocked out by the pills, her bald head eerie beside me on her pillow, like a desert person leaving behind her trappings. All three of us desert people maybe, hermits together, not renegades but runaways. The terminally ill and her two sidekicks, both looking for something they could not name.

Nan whispered, “Tell me what the book is. What it’s really called.”

“The world doesn’t need another book,” I whispered back, turning toward her on my side, her young pretty face lonely across the aisle. “Who would read it?”

“I would read it,” she said. Big-eyed. Quieter, she said, “Mave was shaking, you know. She’s near the end.”

I CUT A STEM OF BITTERSWEET and pictured the tiny head, the exploding-star heart. My ungloved hands on the woody twig and the rust-bright berries would have liked to have held the child’s head, to feel it anxious or happy. So many times the baby I’d lost swelled into my mind. I’ve not told even you of all the many times.

The bittersweet was for Mave’s table. I couldn’t find a clean jar in her house, so I washed one, filled it with water, and set it on top of the eternal rubble. Between a crust of blue mold and a plate of mystery food, possibly pudding.

I don’t know how much of the chemo narrative to describe to you. It’s what you would expect from that unrelenting linearity of story. It was late September. There was the deep burning, the lifted arms and hurling interior body which I could witness from her external body, hurling while stationary—the puking upon the bed. The IV bruising its way in and her discussion about the TV tuned in to inane game shows. “Fucking Wheel of Fortune” she said. “Black humor, these oncology girls.” When they changed it to PBS, an elephant baby was getting a bath. Mave turned on her side, the gown showed her flat butt. I stayed the night on a cot in the room and woke up at some point to eat the egg salad sandwiches Miranda had brought.

At home, I helped her affix the foreign tubing that irritated her ears but did help. The friendship was fraught but not one she was going to give up. She even cradled the portable tank with affection.

“That’s the first round,” I said.

“That’s the last round,” Mave said. “Get me some kind of cushion for the rubber on my ear.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like toilet paper, or a cotton ball.”

“What do you mean ‘last round’? You just started this. It’s not optional.”

“Everything is optional. I’m gone. Out of town tomorrow.”

“Sure. Okay.”

“Get me a book.”

“You’ll die then. Which one.”

“I’m blowing town. Any one.”

There was the tall stack of art books unshelved and piled and unpiled, O’Keeffe on top. Art and Letters. The long thick one you’d clearly loved, with its many dog-eared pages, the pastels arching their backs on the cover, Music—Pink and Blue II. I brought it to her bed. She nestled the small tank beside her and took the book.

She said, “Do you remember the plan we made for our Mediterranean veranda, all that white stone and the whitewashed cottage?”

“No.”

“Well, something you could call a cottage eventually. It would be abandoned, but we’d fix it up because we have pretty good hands, you and I. You could be handier, honestly, but we could make it work. Just trust me.”

“A good view of the sea?” I said.

“Pretty decent. Some obnoxious condos off to the left, but from certain windows