Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “What’s wrong?” asked Nan.

  “Not here,” said Mave, “next turn.”

  I still saw the tremor in the pool. My arms were weak. I gripped the steering wheel then popped the trunk and got out. I shoved aside the suitcases, lifted the thick carpet cover, and unwedged the Browning pistol. Mave opened her door, but not in time. I threw the gun overhand into the river below. Tiny splash. I got back in the car.

  In the rearview, I saw Nan about to speak but she didn’t. Cars zipped past, honked, complained. Mave’s door was still open and I asked her to please shut it.

  She put both palms on the atlas and smoothed it out and did not look at me, she set her jaw. She took a breath that was not deep, and I panicked with a second of doubt, but I summoned the magic of that kid in his cape, dripping wet. I wanted her to live, Ruth, don’t you see? We would finish this joyride then go home, get treatment, and she would live. And I believed it as I signaled and pulled us back into the flow of traffic and onto I-40.

  MY COUSIN BELINDA HAD ALWAYS HAD AN INKLING. She got pinned like a bug early. A beautiful body pinned to the mat and felt up by boys at the fringe of supervision. And pinned by Miranda stooped and hopeful to have a second-self with pageant potential, not too smart, thank god, nothing of Mave’s ruinous genes. “Not the brightest,” our mothers said at the kitchen table, whether or not Belinda was within earshot holding her rouged doll by the hair. They petted Belinda’s head; my mother did so greedily, wishing me more like my cousin, softer, more in line. Miranda certainly saw me as heir to the ruin and ill-colored and strange, and then after Mother and Dad died, a feral animal raised by an unnatural drunkard. From the start, I was left to develop my mind in peace and wear boy clothes without hassle. Belinda wore everything fitted to her early-forming breasts and slim waist, a body like carved ivory.

  But she had an inkling of what lay beyond the frame, like someone studying a photo’s narrative beyond its border: there is more than the posed figure, there is more than this. By rights, she felt sorry for my dearth of everything—Pity you never had boyfriends, god your chewed nails, here’s a dress I don’t wear anymore, here’s a spare husband, a baby you can hold and coo at.

  When we played as small girls, she made shadow puppets of her life to come. She played house, able with a broom, played beauty shop or soap opera. I played tractor trailer and pulled my wagon. Once, as I tied a bandana around my neck and got ready for a cross-country, she said, “It’s God you haul in there.”

  “It is?” I said.

  We looked at the empty Radio Flyer wagon I had not yet stocked with cargo and I supposed it was true. There was God’s poor body, there were the sores between the God-toes, there God’s sleeping head.

  “Now me,” she said and crawled in atop God, folding up her skirts and holding onto the edges, knees up so I saw her pretty blue panties. “Haul me to the Train Cave.” And I took off down the gravel drive.

  “Slow it down!” she yelled.

  I ran faster, flinging rocks. The wind whipped.

  “Slow it down, there’s potholes!” Her voice rattled. I took her off-road, into the rye grass along the fencerow, down the right-of- way that crossed the Heather Run culvert.

  I stopped, panting, the old T-shirt of Mave’s hanging mid-thigh, my boy boots a good fit. I bent down and squinted into sweet Belinda’s face, her hair blown back as if aerosol sprayed. She had an inkling, I knew, about everything; she had a vast heart with new living birds in it, vaster than mine would ever be, and eyes that could see even though she’d turn to look the other way, always and ever, my cousin, like a sister, same age as me. Our futures would bear out as they willed, without asking us.

  “You smell like a cow barn,” she said.

  I pulled her pretty hair. I took off toward the cave before she could hold on, but she held on, wailing.

  IN MID-MAY, I WAS FIVE WEEKS PREGNANT, and Miranda and the Snyder’s Crossing women held Belinda’s combined bridal and baby shower in the community center. This was the spring of 1990. Belinda was waddling into her eighth month. They’d hinged the basketball backboards up to the ceiling and set out tiny white cakes sprinkled with edible snow glitter, marshmallow snowmen for favors, mints and salty peanuts. All decorations had been held over from the shower planned for December, when Jack had gotten cold feet. Then he’d come back poking around and the wedding was on again.

  Belinda sat in the metal chair up front by the table of presents, boobs and belly straining her dress, giddy like someone who wasn’t on her third marriage and third child. Our pale Tuffie took the seat beside her to feed her gifts. At twenty-eight, Tuffie had a plank for a chest and was snide and protective and stricken.

  I sat at Miranda’s table feeling like my soul had grown a goiter. The smells from the LaFaber League concessions booth lingered—popcorn, hotdogs, fritters. On the far side of the court, my adolescent self went for a layup, pounded the ball in a graceless dribble. And did that phantom girl not always summon the ghostly Dillon, watching her every move? And what would Dillon think of Clay’s child growing in me like a tiny bat hung upside down?

  “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” said Belinda. An ornament with B & J in puff paint, First Christmas; a black nightgown miscalculating her bust; a pretty wooden rattle.

  Jack’s was a family of churchgoers. The women in his family were all there, and Stew’s wife Jennie, my old friend Liza thinning down and closing up, dangerously, and Liza’s careful mother, and Clarissa and her daughter Tess, on break from art school, who was starting to wear her hair piled up on her head in ropes. Mave was reluctantly present and accounted for. Rayletta and Hope were on shift, but Hope had made a clothespin bag of calico, in the shape of a baby’s dress hanging on a clothes hanger, and had sent it with me on behalf of the co-op.

  I watched Miranda across the table from me. I resembled her despite her fair coloring and hair. In profile, her shoulders were mine and I stretched mine back. Her nose was mine, her gesture too: left arm crossing the stomach and propping the elbow of the right as her right hand cupped her cheek, held her own face, as if, when it came to tenderness, she had to see to it herself.

  My own palm to cheek, I watched Belinda strip plain brown paper from a box and lift out something sizeable. She looked at it for a few quiet seconds then held it out for us to see. A two-foot house-like shape, edged in metal, a mosaic of tiles all over the front. There were four small wooden doors, or shutters, asymmetrical. Tuffie reached over and pulled open a door gingerly to reveal a piece of patterned cloth behind. She pressed the door shut and opened another, different cloth. It brought to mind an old Advent calendar, it abstractly evoked a doll house.

  “It’s mixed media,” Tess said. “For the baby’s room.” It was a disturbance of style among the muted pastels of burp cloths and Christmas ornaments. I could tell Belinda was moved and confused, I could sense her secret self, her knowingness, her inkling, lodged inside. Then she turned babyish, in-turned her feet, pressed together her knees.

  “Thank you, Tess,” she said. Tuffie took the art piece and peeked into the other two doors privately.

  Clarissa glowed, Tess just finishing her second year of art school in Cleveland, Tess whom she had gotten away from the violent moods of Darrell Tide. Tess wore a long scoop-neck sweater and camouflage leggings, her hair in that messy pile, boots that looked like Mave’s steel toes but blacker. She sat close to her mother, like a sister.

  I felt my face, thumb at my jaw. Belinda oohed over tulip placemats, but her heart had shot out a sliver of its raw self, had come up for air before sinking back down.

  That morning a bird had kamikazed Lottie’s picture window and I’d found it nearly dead in the leaves. I’d ringed it slowly with my whole hand, slid its feathers and wings down, put it in a box with no holes punched in it. The comfort of the dark, or the terror, had roused it back to life. I’d lifted the lid and it had fled. Now my hand was on my flesh and fur, my red hue, warm. Who is it we touch, Ruth, when we touch our own skin? Is it no
t, often enough, someone other than we expected? We miss her, the expected one, by a split second—she has just slipped out the storm door, and we seek her, up at the skin surface, not understanding.

  “Classic, Mave,” said Belinda flatly. She’d unwrapped some kind of metal dragon incense burner, held it as if it were a dead kitten. Mave stood against the wall with her hands shoved in her pockets, loving the gag. A gift to her from one of her school bus kids who was into fantasy and picked on, and she’d rewrapped it. Miranda puffed her downturned lips.

  My abdomen was hard and watertight. Only Clay and Mave and Clarissa knew I was pregnant, and probably Tess. Clay wanted a little girl and wanted to tell everyone, but I’d said not yet. And I would not sit in that seat near the foul line on the gym floor. No baby shower for me. I’d refused the bridal shower too—instead, Mave had come over with a set of nesting dolls made in Ukraine, each one with perfect circles on the cheeks. We’d both cracked up.

  I tried to unwrap the sticky paper from a glittered stale cake, then abandoned the effort. The pink mints looked like tiny hard pillows for a tiny hard woman to lay her head on. After the gifts, women milled about and got ready for the games—they would guess Jack’s favorite color and shirt size, the baby’s name, the mother’s measurements.

  “You got an eye for decorating,” Jennie said to Miranda. One of Jack’s sisters fawned over the gift table, but kept at some distance as though the art piece might bite. I stood to go and said goodbye to Clarissa.

  “But you’ll miss the fun,” she said, and Tess handed me a favor from the table, the stale marshmallow snowman, laughing and widening her eyes. I said I had to relieve Clay, he was watching Lottie. Mave would stay to heckle; she waved me on. I crossed the gym floor’s faded out-of-bounds line, removed the snowman’s licorice-smelling hat, and put him in my hot bitter mouth.

  IT’S TRUE I MEANT TO HEAD HOME to help Clay after Belinda’s shower. He’d been sitting with Lottie, and he was due at Danny’s for practice. They practiced there now, because of her, so I hardly ever saw Stew after he sobered up and rejoined. But instead I drove to my own house sitting spectral on the hillside. Tess was on my mind now, and I wanted to find the book of van Gogh’s letters you gave me, with his plates of paintings, thinking I’d give them to her. They were somewhere in the closet of my old room, with the LaFaber League participation trophies of gold plastic and the bedspread I’d lain under as an orphaned teen. I was tired; I thought I would lie down a while in my room.

  Screen door scuff on the porch, a sound I always heard before I heard it, such dust on everything, an extra layer of dark. I stood still. Inside me, a hot cinder. I made it as far as the kitchen table, then sat, my legs light and boneless, my palms to my belly, its tight hot skin pulsing through the dress, then pain, god, like a wrenching. I gripped the table, reached down and pulled back blood. My throat closed to a wheeze, I fumbled for the paper bags still kept in a drawer, I breathed into one, sucking and puffing out the bag. I made it to the bathroom, another deep cramp and I dropped the bag and held onto the towel in its ring so to not fall, and with the other hand I held a cake of lavender soap, some version of it sitting forever on the white saucer by the sink year to year to year. I held it, smelled it, knew I needed to get to the phone, vaguely remembering I’d disconnected the phone, then so dizzy I let go and felt my body sway as if it were someone else’s, toward the edge of the tub.

  A dream—still sharp to me now—held me in strict channel, vivid like a memory because it was a memory as fully as it was a dream: I am on my house’s porch in the full frothed air of a summer noon. My mother alive but like a colorless lithograph. Mave there too, but it’s in that season when she is back and forth from Northampton and starting to pull away. All hands occupied with work, and on the overturned washtub sits a jar of water with a molded peony stem, ugly, like a furred typhoid tongue, so big that I know I am small. The dense air wads into curled blooms fallen from the Rose of Sharon, the white infolding the dark pink stain. At the edges, the forsythia, long done.

  On either side of the washtub peony, Mother and Mave string half-runner beans for the canner. A colander and a soup pot full of picked beans sit on TV trays. Newspaper stretches lazily across each lap to catch the throwaway caps and strings. A bowl between them to catch each bean strung and snapped. Where I sit on the porch floor with my own smaller bowls, I am eye level with their laps, with the newspapers that crease down in between their knees. The pages—the funnies or world news—flap down off their thighs like the V-birds I know how to draw in a landscape. You make little Vs in front of the round sun for effect, some just above the trees, some small which means far off, some big and wide to be up close. There’s a broken wingtip when the lead breaks from pressing too hard. The V-birds ring your head like buzzards in a bad picture, but might be eagles in another, herons mallards swans, little wrens or swallows. Usually they are swallows, flying around Uncle Rex’s cattle barn I know how to draw well, with a hayloft and a small loft window.

  “Sit up straight, Frankie,” says Mother, “you look like Miranda.” Her voice scrapes. I unstoop myself, I take a drink of the iced tea made with Red Rose tea bags, it’s still warm from the boiled water mixed with cold, it’s too sweet. They drink hot coffee, and my mother says to Mave, “It’s so sad, and the little thing is an orphan.”

  The hundred Red Rose tea bags hide tiny ceramic monkeys I love, pink-colored zebras, blue elephant figurines for the windowsill. One comes free with each box, and as a child I assume the tea leaves have grown them, as if from figurine-seed. I often draw the small hard animals, a monkey face looking up at the V-birds, and I draw my mother’s face, which is a face afraid and somehow emptied. I love what I don’t draw: her back, sitting at the edge of a bath she fills for herself. Coil of her hair knotted perfectly upon her head. The discolored white nightgown against which her morning body strains when I come downstairs and ask her questions she doesn’t answer, as if they confuse her. I do draw the blue elephant figurine, her favorite, on the sill.

  She talks about a Lithuanian boy from gospel radio and her voice, for him, is tender as lamb’s ear.

  “I said sit up straight.” A different voice for me.

  “Margot,” says Mave, who winks at me. Mave is slow and clumsy at the bean work, she is here visiting, having come from the someplace else. The someplace else is in her voice and will never leave it now. She wears a big belt buckle with a blue stone in the middle and a shirt somehow soaked in men’s aftershave, her face and whole being strong and thick. She slits the tip of the bean easily enough, but struggles to catch the string and pull it the full length of the bean before it breaks. My mother, though, is expert, exact. I watch her thin, thin wrists at the end of her arms that come out of the capped sleeves of her top, and I want her to look at me.

  “It’s the saddest thing” goes her sweet voice above my head, meaning it’s the most beautiful thing and not the saddest. “Cancer of the brain,” she says.

  I am eye level with the V-bird newsprint that catches strings the way a beautician’s floor catches ringlets, and the V-birds tremble a little as my mother and Mave ease out their legs, as they maybe get closer to having to pee, which I suddenly need to do now, but I want to hear what my mother is saying about the boy with no family and the orphanage with no doctor. The Lithuanian boy who has cancer, he has made it across the airwaves onto money-raising gospel radio that she tunes into from seven to eight a.m. daily. He has no running water there, or decent bedding. “His village ruined by famine,” she says gently, “and they say the other children bring him their bread and sing him songs.” Her voice is a tendril, a petal, somehow rehearsed. Mave says nothing but watches me.

  I’ve got to pee, as well as the other thing now, and my bean bowl lies still so my mother can tell. She says, “Go on, you’re squirming”—in the harrowing voice—but I want to hear the talk about the boy. I can’t hold it anymore. She says, “You come back quick to finish your beans,” in the tone of someone talking abou
t a picture that’s indecent, that should never have been drawn.

  I set aside my beans and rise and huff past Mave, who touches my arm and says, “There’s special soap for you,” in a supple voice even though Mave is neither supple nor soft. “It’s lavender from Ruth.” Ruth. The first time I hear the name. As I go inside, I hear Mother’s voice turn angry toward Mave; something has upset her, but I don’t stay to listen.

  I find the soap wrapped in crinkled paper and sitting on the sink next to the bits of yellow Dial my mother saves to slivers on the saucer. I unwrap and hold the purple square of it after I finish and flush. I love this sweet-smelling thing that’s come into my world from someone named Ruth or someplace named Ruth—this is before the blue letters. I love it all the more so because of the boy in Lithuania, his small body a secret nursed inside my mother’s voice. He has never smelled something like this—and does his head hurt, and what in fact does he smell in his rough bed? Orphans in short, raggedy pants keep wary of him and give him their supper because of his throbbing head, his worried skull.

  I switch off the bathroom light and close my eyes a minute. I am filled by the thing in my hands. I see myself in the bathroom dark and the Lithuanian boy in his bunk in a stone room. And I grow big, huge, with wanting. I want my mother, I want to live beyond her bony instructions, I want her voice to croon that I am beautiful, I want her to understand me like Mave does, I want the place Mave lives in and has come back from and will go back to in her man boots, her world as big and true as the name Ruth. I want the loveliest life. A span of pain, as if my skin were stretching, comes all over me—I balloon out and crowd the boy up against the hard wall till he cries, till he can’t breathe. Then I stop.

  I wrap the lavender soap back in its paper and tuck it into my pocket. In the kitchen, the light is dusty on the pitcher of sweet tea. Mother pulled out the tea bags, wrung them, left them beside the pitcher on the counter. Red Rose bags browning there and drying out. All at once I bust them up with my lavender hands, crumble them onto my bare feet and the floor, I sprinkle tea crumbs on my head, tea leaves that grow the rose kangaroo, the tiny blue elephant—they can grow a tiny me too, tiny and pretty and simple and loved forever, a greenblue Frankie, wondrously small, a tiny hard figurine. No, still too large. I want to be the farthest bird, drawn there, barely a tick of pencil before the evening sun.