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

beets, lined them up on the rough-lumber table, and slept. Saturday he invited me over to his mother’s for a pancake breakfast.

I brought a pint of beets for Lottie. He set them on the cold woodstove. He’d made a big production of it. Cool Whip set out, too much bacon in the skillet, syrup that wasn’t simply brown sugar and boiled water with imitation vanilla. He stood steadied by the good fortune of the morning, like any forty-nine-year-old man who still lived with his mother and who had never had to miss certain things—the small scent of lemon dish detergent, the assuring rustle in the other room, mended jeans. And now maybe a wife. But in me, there was bone and edge that offered no refuge—did he not know this?

You wrote me once, Ruth, that people could layer like the earth, a permafrost tundra on top and a magma heart. You wrote: That hot blood around your heart, all you feel, eventually you’ll share it, it will come to surface. A thaw, or an eruption.

Clay still had all his hair. The West Virginia Division of Highways had not been bad for his back, there was muscle, but he hid a small paunch with untucked shirts. A body established, maybe, but still lean for the most part. He was a different pale than I was, pasty with a boyish face and full mouth and a scar on his chin. He’d told me his favorite season was winter, when he plowed the secondary roads before dawn. I liked that. He was careful to keep his wrist-watch safe, washing dishes as he cooked, the whisk and mixing bowl and spoons.

“Your pancakes are professional,” I told him. “Silver dollars.”

He smiled. I was glad he said nothing. His good singing voice came out nasal when he spoke, bland boiled chicken. I sat on the kitchen chair, one of the set of four that someone had painted blue to match the bonnets of the girl reiterated in measured succession on the wallpaper trim. I asked if his mother Lottie would join us and should I set a plate, but he said she wanted to give us privacy. He shifted his weight then, facing the stove with his spatula, jeans taut against his other butt cheek just beneath his shirt tail.

Lottie came into the kitchen anyway, in slippers that suggested lightness and fleeing, already planning her retreat to the woods behind the house, to the trailer that would be new and cheap. I knew Clay had reserved the cheapest on the B&J Homes lot in Monroeville. Did Lottie see in me what Clay didn’t? She habitually held the tip of her long braid when she spoke, when it was uncoiled from a bun and hung mid-belly, trailing over her shoulder. I wanted very much to see her hair completely unfurled.

Lottie handed me a recipe card for wilted lettuce made with bacon grease, as Clay brought the skillet to the table and scooped out bacon with a slotted spoon, leaving the drippings. He set the shriveled meat on paper towels doubled up on a plate. To the hot drippings, add vinegar, sugar, salt, onions, and pour it hot over a bowlful of leaf lettuce. The handwriting on the recipe card was shaky. There was a tiny rolling pin in each corner of the card. He would set aside the skillet for her, or for me.

“Thank you, Lottie,” I said. “I brought you a pint of beets, there on the woodstove. You ought to sit with us.”

No, no, she slipped out, having studied my face.

Clay sat down across from me. He gave the jam jar a quarter turn as if to have the label pointing a certain way, to create a triangulation with the label on the margarine tub and the label on the real-deal maple syrup. Don’t, I thought, my throat got thick. I’d worn a loose white button-up blouse with thin capped sleeves because it looked feminine, my skin browning already from the garden work, my upper arms dense. I had kept slender enough though I had to resist the curve starting in my shoulders, always cautioned by Miranda’s slight humpback. I was attractive enough with a thin oval face, though I wore a look of severity I couldn’t help, and premature lines creased my forehead as if to stress my overthinking. Clay had competent hands. He looked briefly to the V of my blouse.

He’d clerked at Matlick Feed as a kid, stocking shelves, turning the labels out, the way he might turn my body. He would be fifty in October. My tied-back hair pulled at my temples, too tightly held in place, none of it gray yet.

“We aren’t kids, Clay,” I said.

“Well, no,” he said. Pinched his voice.

I’d been a kid when he’d signed on to plow snow and lay blacktop for the State. He’d surely been steady and hungry-within-limits like an Eagle Scout. Would he have ever gone beyond? Would he have taken the oval rubber change purse we found in the birthday box in Sunday School at Snyder’s Crossing, Jesus Saves on one side, the slit on the other, taken it to the woods like Dillon and Clarissa and me—three inseparable friends then—and squeezed top to bottom so the slit puckered open for the insertion of change, labial and suggestive? The indelicate Dillon who was my mirror self, who was two years younger, the boy version of me with hair just as thick-black as mine and ways just as solitary, and Clarissa like a honey-haired doll who loved us both for nothing and who melted to a blush as he stuck his tongue in the purse.

“We’re not kids,” Clay softly repeated, nasal and coaxing. He served me bacon. “Love can grow. After, sometimes.”

In my throat, a mean clog. Usually I’d stand, stretch my body, unslump, make passage for air. But I sat, breathing poorly, I eyed the walls, I watched all the blue-bonneted girls. A wheeze threatened in Lottie’s kitchen, though I had long