IN A JAR, DROWSY HEADS OF BLUE IRIS, but not on a summer porch. On the linoleum square pattern of my bathroom floor, blue iris against red in awful amounts. I woke to bathwater running. I tried to move.
“Easy,” said Clarissa. “I think you hit your head on the tub. We’ll get you to the doctor, but let’s clean you up.”
My inner acres of muscles hummed hot and cold. My palm to belly, I felt the cool tight drum, still cramping mildly. My mouth filmy, I coughed. The blood on the floor was thick and black. She unbuttoned my dress and unsleeved each heavy doll arm.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to get you up and in the tub.” She propped me and heaved gently, I winced.
“My god,” I said. “Clarissa.”
“It’s okay.” She cried with no sound. She peeled off my soaked underwear, eased me down in the water with my bra on, then unhooked it. I looked like someone maimed. She soaked a rag in the bathwater, brought it soothing to my neck, my back. I shut my eyes.
She said, “I was bringing irises for Mave, I saw your truck.”
Their terrible bright heads there in the jar on the floor. I was still bleeding. She washed my breasts and my face.
“It’s okay,” she said. Then: “You know, the painting prints Tess gives me never show women as they are.” She shook her head slightly. “Naked women in baths who are never hairy. Ever notice that? Like pearls. They should paint us how we are.” Hair around my nipples, down my belly to my matted nest obscured by red bathwater. I sobbed, dry and hard. “It’s okay,” she kept saying, stains down her white blouse.
“I didn’t know I wanted a baby,” I said, “but I did want it. I wanted her, but she didn’t know.”
“She knew.”
“I’m cold.”
Clarissa worked the rag from water to skin but soon the water was not water, so she pulled the plug and stood me up, wrapped me in old towels, the few left in the closet, my groin and thighs a low- frequency throb. She said she’d lay some garbage bags and blankets on the car seat and come right back, we’d go to the hospital.
I stood in the tub and watched the irises. I knew the baby would have been a girl on a bike finding her way, knowing me, understanding me, and studying the heavy heads of two irises, like two blue planets—one of blue glacial ice, one of blue flame, the hottest part—she would have known both the blue planets in me. My shut mouth. My cold blue lips pressed together. She would have explained me to myself. She would have had an ease in the world.
“She’s gone,” I said to Clarissa coming back with an old robe and a blanket from somewhere. “I’m cold, Clarissa.” She wrapped me up. The water finished draining and left viscous ribbons around my feet, like paint.
“I HAVE THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS,” Mave said.
I drove.
“Where’d that gun come from?” asked Nan. “Were you going to shoot me?”
“You always infringe,” Mave said to me. “Lord over.”
“Were we going to rob a place?” Nan studied the mirror, eye encircled in yellow. Some fierce dark still along her left eyebrow.
“Perforation,” said Mave. “A little breathing help.”
Nan knew what the gun was for, she was only trying to lighten the mood. I steadied on the road and watched the lines, a Jeep bumper, the blank median. I disregarded what state we were in, I pushed it from my mind, all sense of location and compass.
“It was only for protection,” I said, “but Mave’s bad news with a gun. One time she shot my cousin Belinda’s dog in a fight with a groundhog. Took aim at the groundhog after it had already run off—it was a good hundred feet away from Brownie.”
“That was a twelve gauge,” Mave said. “Buckshot radiates out. It’s like shrapnel. This was my Browning, very precise. And expensive.”
“One time she made me turn my pet wild bird loose. I’d found it hit by a car, she deemed it rehabilitated, and a hawk got it. She shot the hawk. Thought I’d feel better.”
“You did feel better.”
“Once she shot a skunk under my house and the smell soaked into everything, all the rooms and curtains, all my clothes, in my hair. You could smell it on my skin. She made me bathe in tomato juice.”
“God, you hold a grudge. I apologized for that.”
“You never apologized for anything.”
“It was rabid. That skunk.” Mave watched the world zoom by. I wanted her to face me.
“You never apologized. You gave me prints of paintings torn from Ruth’s books. For the skunk, you gave me a Klimt—Judith holding the head of Holofernes after she’d decapitated him. She wore that glamorous gold dog collar.”
Mave didn’t face me. No reply.
“Those gold moons on her unfastened coat. She had one boob sticking out.”
She sucked extra air, talked at her window. “Judith’s look is incredible. It’s his best painting.”
“Why couldn’t you just talk to me?” I said.
Nothing. Nothing when there’s something to really say. There can be acres of bitterness and sadness in one person, words lost to briers and quicksand. The truth is, Ruth, I knew she had saved me. She was my savior, 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. I wanted to die. We went back to our houses in Caudell. The humid swamp air filled my room and folded me in, like a raisin in sweet bread. I suffocated all summer. I listened to records, I found Miranda’s compact and put rouge on my cheeks in private, I read about marine life and mariners and Morocco. I saw Evie some but I couldn’t tell her.”
“You couldn’t tell her you loved her.” Nan’s whisper.
“I remember our last day at the beach we looked for shells, but we could find only those dried-out horseshoe crabs with the spiky tails filed thin by stones. I wrapped one in a towel to keep. It stank up my room at home with dead seaweed smell. I would press the spike to my lips till it hurt.”
“Did you know about Evie, Frankie?” Nan touched my shoulder, as if pressing a stamp on a letter.
“I never knew, no. She never told me that before.” What could I do but give myself to it, Ruth? Hear the waves and smell the sea. I had been so small in the shelter of her, and now—now I knew her as small, and wanting. And what did I want right then? I wanted Mave’s steel toes kicked off so she could put her feet in. I wanted to start everything over from the beginning.
“I could have kissed her and died,” said Mave.
“I get that,” said Nan. “Oh yeah.” Nan’s face dreamy and absorbed and sad.
Mave coughed, not harshly, adjusted the nostril fixture of the tubes of air. I heard the air—no, it was the interstate wind. She needed to replenish the air evacuated by talk. “This right here is a closed economy,” she said to the tubing and put her head back. “I’m not going back, Frankie. You know that.”
Mave shut her eyes. I drove. The weight of sorrow was delayed, it hovered then hit. Her gray cropped hair matted at her hot temple. This present, squarish body tall beside me all my life in men’s shirts. Bootstep, bootstep. But it was a young girl’s hand I reached for.
For the first time in our lives, I held Mave’s hand.
THE ROTOTILLER, THE HOE, THE SMOOTH RED BEAN SEED. I bent from the waist for the bush bean hills and sweet corn. I squatted with minor pain to sew the carrots, like ashes, and the zinnias at the perimeter. My body held its miscarriage ache for two weeks, my groin throbbing. I had bled black for a few days, skin pallid. I slept in the afternoons in Clay’s bed—Lottie and me, invalids in the afternoons. But before dawn, I put on the same cutoffs daily, with the folded painting print I never took out of the back pocket, and Clay’s flannel, and drove to my house. Dark and dew burned off to white sky then the deep blue of late spring, the colors strong. There was Mave’s house through the fencerow bushed up with wild rose, as if time had gone backward: she in her house, I in mine, linear time exposed as mere illusion. I lost hours in the garden, I bent, I squatted, until I got tired. Soon, the corn would shoot up, and I’d thin five stalks to three to give room for the stoutest. I’d stake the tomatoes and pull the suckers. The rest of May, all of June. Each dawn.
I lifted the five-gallon bucket to water pepper plants, the plastic handle worn down to its cutting wire. I pulled on leather work gloves and remembered when Mave had gloved me to keep me from scratching out my eyes. I didn’t feel the wire, I felt the inner glove, my fingers feeling around like moles in burrows feeling with their faces. How it might have felt inside an udder dried of milk, each slack but toughened teat.
The blood browned and sometimes overflowed the pads. I went in for onion sets at Matlick Feed and saw the Ellafritz girls who nursed each other’s boys, though the boys were nearly weaned now. Girls who moved like each other’s shadows. Faces always made up, in clothes of teen boys or men, just like me, oversized T-shirts and their belts with a foot of surplus tongue. One of them was going with the towheaded clerk, I guessed. They swung a son up to their hip in a stream of motherspeak—hands off that, like I told you, come ere, come on, slap mama’s leg one more time and I’ll, stop that, come ere. Out in the truck, I saw a spot of blood on my seat. I lifted my flannel to see it blooming down the cutoffs’ inseam.
Clay, for his part, mourned our child by turning mother. He took time off work. Each day, when I came back late morning covered in garden muck and sweat and stink, he had grilled cheese or fried bologna sandwiches waiting for me. He tended Lottie morning and afternoon without complaint. Conversation was beyond us both, but he started reading to me aloud at the table from the Caudell Journal, stories at random, and I would grow sleepy. Before climbing the stairs to nap unshowered, I could hear in my kitchen chair what he was saying between the lines of the county news. He was saying, I wanted it to be a girl who looked like you but who would be easy to know and understand and love.
ONE MORNING CLARISSA BROUGHT ME EXTRA FOIL PIE PANS to string up around the garden at my house. She helped me punch the holes and string the baler’s twine, then we sat in the grass and drank thermos coffee.
“How many days have you worn that flannel?” she said.
“All of them,” I said.
She told me Tess was taking summer courses in Cleveland and her drawing class had a nude model, a man. Clarissa slid out a drawing from a large envelope. Tess had drawn him hairy, frontal, loose sacks hidden in fur. He was thin, or she’d drawn him thin, feminine in the face and tilt of head. Clarissa blushed with secretive awe. We squinted at the cock from the sun hitting the pans.
“Never saw one that beautiful,” I said, and she laughed.
“Life drawing,” she said, her fingertips padding the womanish face on the paper. “Darrell is sick,” she said. “He’s being a baby about it, I can’t stay long.”
“Did he see
this?”
“What do you think?”
“Hey.” I caught her hand. Some bruises at the wrist.
“It’s fine.”
“I thought that was over.”
“It is over. He’s sick, been having dizzy spells and it makes him mad at the world. He just made a mistake.” Small hands always in her lap like small birds, they held the naked man gently in their beaks. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“And Clay?”
“This is as far as I can get,” waving my dirty palm in front of my face, as if in front of someone in a trance. “Right here, up close, and here in the garden. I don’t much stray beyond the immediate.” Stale metal-coffee taste. “My hands move on their own. Clay’s been kind, taking care of things. Grieving in his own way, I guess.”
“Try with him, Frankie. You’re lucky he tries.” Her hair pieced into her eye. She brushed it back, another bruise on that wrist, very blue.
I nudged up my body enough to pull the folded painting from my back pocket. I unfolded it. A page torn from your book of Georgia O’Keeffe prints. I showed her the cattle skull.
Clarissa understood. “Mave’s sympathy card?”
It was Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory. Obliterated nose bone but strong, sinuous horns intact. That morning glory floating like a star. I’d stared at it when Mave had brought it at night. A skull once draped with hide and studded with humanlike eyes. Neither Mave nor I had cried.
But the next night she came again to Clay’s, a vagabond at the kitchen door, and found me in my nightgown at the stove. I wore one of Lottie’s diapers then. She gave me another torn-out page. A photograph of O’Keeffe, her sun-browned hands holding a cow skull as if it were a baby.
Call It Horses Page 15
