Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “Mave,” I said.

  “Frankie,” she said. Balled up the sheet and carried it, and one of the two table chairs, out to the parking lot, to a far spot where there was little light.

  “I would like you to shave my head,” Mave called.

  “No,” I said. “Please bring the sheet back.”

  “I want Little Gypsy to do it.”

  Nan came out of the bathroom. “Do what?”

  “She wants you to shave her head.”

  Mave sat out in the parking lot facing the small dark hills, barber bed sheet draped around her. Nan and I closed the door. She claimed the Super 8 notepad. I pulled the table up to the bed so I could sit down at a surface, Nan scooted the chair into the other side and drew. She’d noticed the hollyhock too, and in lip liner she sketched a bed of them. She got up after about ten minutes and looked between the slatted blinds.

  “She’s still sitting there. What a nut. She’s not coming in.”

  “She will when the drugs wear off.”

  “You know she has only a dozen of those pills left.”

  “You checked?”

  “Yeah.” She opened the door, yelled, “Come inside, Crazy.” Silence from Mave. “Why do you want a shaved head?” Silence from the parking lot. “I don’t have any clippers. No scissors, even.”

  “Trade your body for some,” Mave said, face to the hills.

  “Fuck off.”

  But after another few minutes, Nan said to me, “What the hell. I’ll be back.” She’d stripped to her black slip, now pulled on her striped dress and ballet shoes. Ellis whimpered after her at the closed door.

  Through the blinds, I watched her walk to a room across the courtyard where a Ford F150 was parked, which I thought was a bad idea. She knocked and the door opened, so I opened our door and stood in it so the shirtless man who opened knew there was a witness. Mave glanced toward Nan, then back to the hills away from me, 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 they won’t interfere with the blue line. And then of course we’d head south, across the sea, to the deserts and the pyramids. Yeah.” She opened the long book, vertically long, to the prints in the middle. There were those couple she had torn ou
t, only jagged edges, the ones we still had stowed in the pockets of our jeans, but there remained Red Hills and White Flower, Red and Pink Rocks and Teeth, Red Hills and Bones. There was still From the Faraway Nearby—that skull with multipronged antlers, and the poppies and poppies and iris and nudes. We looked at them all until we got to the text of the letters. My head near hers, hearing her breath as something no longer her own. No longer guaranteed.

  “It would never work,” she said. “A transatlantic flight, even stowing away on a cargo ship. A road trip is all I can manage, I think. Somewhere we can get to in a few days. I want to go west. Like all the young bucks.”

  Give me her Evening Star, or one of her Blues. Sky above Clouds.I’ll take My Last Door. The horrible black square. I heard Mave’s aided breath. “That dream thing” O’Keeffe called it, whatever it was. Abstraction Blue.

  “I don’t think we should do that,” I said. “What will we tell Miranda?”

  “Gone fishing. Be back tomorrow.” She perused the letters written by O’Keeffe in reply to letters not collected in the book, a one-way conversation. “‘To Maria,’” Mave read, “‘I have left the good country—I must get myself ready for the other kind of life with the dawn.’ Let’s go to her desert, where it’s less peopled, Frankie. We’ll mud up a house and thatch a roof. No, no need.” She turned the page. “We’ll find her roofless room in Abiquiú. I’ve always wanted to see that. I want to see her roofless room.”

  “Want to sleep for a while?”

  “Good idea. You go shop for provisions. We’ll pack tonight.”

  “Mave.”

  “Frankie.” She flipped back to the prints. “Look at this one. This one of Pedernal, the view heading out of Ghost Ranch. Tell me you don’t want to see the mesas. And this, Red Landscape. When she first saw red it was in Texas. Look at her heart in that sky above Palo Duro Canyon, how the white gypsum and red claystone made her feel. The yellow ochre mudstone. Tell me you don’t want to see that.”

  “I don’t want to see that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I want you to rest.”

  “Start packing. Say your goodbyes. Fucking Dillon—sayonara. Should have done that long ago. Clay, he’ll understand. I’ll come up with a roof if you’re afraid it will rain. But the rain will be rare.” The first out-of-breath gasp, the love affair with the tubes and tank beginning. I stared back at the stem of bittersweet, away from her, how it was framed by the bedroom door, like a picture, and I thought, red ochre. When I looked back at her, she’d flipped forward in the book again, to the letters. “‘To Carl,’” she read, “‘Tonight I will sleep in some of our barest country.’”

  Somehow, eventually, she convinced me to leave soon, at the start of October, and in some compartment of myself I knew from the beginning it was her suicide mission, but how could I say I didn’t want to go? And, really, was she going for me more than for herself? Didn’t she know I needed to go? Of course she knew. She always knew.

  I’m cold, she said. I want the scarcest river, she said, the Chama, she said, I want the clarity.

  I DID SEE DILLON BEFORE WE LEFT —not in his grandmother’s house, but in the Shop ’n Save one evening with Clay, the evening before the trip, near the paper towels because I remember the word Bounty off to my left. But first I saw more of Nan’s paintings. I knew they were hers, the same signature style from the Train Cave graffiti, this time on the brick retaining wall at the four-way stop near the Shop ’n Save. She must have painted in the middle of the night, some kind of desperation move—lilies, which seemed pretty, seemed innocent and childlike, until you looked harder. And Clay—how could I have not written more here about Clay?—Clay contentedly set his forearm on his driver side door, window down despite the bite of cool October air. Shirt sleeve rolled up. Such a solid arm. Strong hand upon the door.

  “Clay,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I almost told him I’d be heading west in the morning. “Nothing.” We got out and got our cart as husband and wife, trolled the aisles. It was so strange to be there in the Shop ’n Save getting supplies, Clay unaware that they were road trip supplies—tampons and breakfast bars and donuts. I should have been more strategic about getting Mave’s favorite things.

  Then there he was. In all the force of his decade-aged body. In the paper goods. Clay beside me, he knew Dillon too, and of course what Dillon had been to me. Dillon’s black hair exactly the same, beautiful and smuggled under a forest service ball cap with white netting on the back half, which I saw before he turned my way. Hollower now at the cheekbones. Narrow-waisted still, a T-shirt, blue I think it was, with an animal on it, the hem of it pestering and teasing around the top of his belt. Perhaps Clay understood the privacy needed, the gravity and gruesomeness in the moment, but he didn’t leave my side, simply stood there with our cart, both hands on the handle.

  I saw no boy in Dillon then, I knew he was a husband and he flew planes and dropped killing spray. I knew very little else about him anymore. At one time, he was my mirror and his silence I’d taken for understanding. You’re the one, his wife Nan had said to me at the co-op gathering that night. The one that what? Was I the one he meant to marry, or was I the one that drove him off, closed him out? His eyes under the cap’s visor revealed nothing. I wanted to say I was sorry, and I wanted to say I hoped he was sorry, and I wanted to tell Clay goodbye, all things at once, unceremoniously, in aisle six, be done with everything. I wanted to say, I’m going west. I only half believed it.

  What I said was: “How are you, Dillon?” Fumbling for my jeans pocket.

  “Doing okay. Good to see you, Frankie. I’ve been meaning to come by. Sorry about your mom.” Speaking then to Clay.

  “Thank you. She’s in a better place.”

  The useless talk like hands at my throat, menacing. “Right,” said Dillon. He held tissues, or maybe toilet paper or paper plates—they are also in that aisle. My hands at my sides, big weights.

  It was fitting really, to see them both at once, and in so anticlimactic a setting. I wanted to say to them I somehow had yet to begin my life. If Nan had been there, cleaving to his side. If she had looked at me out of her bat face then, I could not have managed to stay standing.

  “I’m in Athens, Georgia, now, just spraying for moth around here for a while.”

  A few other selves came out, in a layup in league shorts, in cutoffs with his hand down them, in a dress, and one of those Frankies ankle-deep in Heather Run before falling. What is the word, Ruth, for that kind of falling?

  “We heard that,” I said. “We should go, Clay.” And we went—just like that—the longer way to the checkout than the way that would have taken us past Dillon’s body.

  Back at Lottie’s—I still called the house and blue chairs and kitchen Lottie’s—I said to Clay, “I’ll stay with Mave tonight. She should have someone to watch her. I’ll see you in the morning.” I kissed him, oddly, on the forehead because he was seated, as you’d kiss a young boy. Holding my overnight bag small enough for one night but packed full and quickly.

  At the truck, Ellis jumped up when I opened the door and put his front paws on the running board. He could never make that jump himself with his barrel body. I lifted him to hug him goodbye, but found myself setting him down on the bench seat, watching his body breathe as I turned the key fast like a match striking.

  IN THE OCTOBER MORNING, I packed the black Ford pickup, which had run just fine the evening before, while Mave sat, patient and lordly, on her porch beside the broken butter churn. She drank coffee and set the mug on one of the TVs at intervals. I had told only Clarissa, who had promised us a sandwich lunch. The lights were on in Mave’s kitchen and bedroom.

  “Want me to get your lights?”

  “No, it’ll throw them off,” as if we were about to begin our real careers as fugitives. She wore her best flannel, jeans, boots. She had combed her hair wet, her head was probably cold in the early fall air. I made myself not help her step up int
o the truck.

  “What’s with the hound dog?”

  “I don’t know, he followed me.”

  “You sure about this, buddy?” she asked Ellis, who licked her nose and its accompanying tubes.

  I turned the key with great transgression. Nothing. Only the buzz of battery. It wouldn’t start.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Mave. “Sabotage.”

  “It’s not sabotage. Hold on.” I unlatched the hood and wrestled it up, selectively viewing the wires I’d viewed at some point before, to see which one looked different, out of place. Then of course the blue Oldsmobile Royale drove up my gravel drive. The pretty waif got out, ran onto my porch, then saw us in our predicament in front of Mave’s house. Here she came through the fence break, ten years younger than I, many times more lithe, so striking. I saw she’d been struck. The blackened eye and blued arm.

  “Please help me,” with that pleading, ravenous look.

  I calmly thought how odd it was that, twice now, I’d seen Nan’s paintings just before I’d seen Nan. Those calla lilies near the Shop ’n Save a kind of lewd sign, in the semiotics of the lost.

  TONIGHT I WILL SLEEP IN SOME OF OUR BAREST COUNTRY. I believed in bareness more than I believed in filigreed fields and forests or the drench of bog. I don’t know why. Maybe you could tell me why the desert people went to the desert and walked out of their lives, or into their real lives.

  We rose early without agreeing to. We rose fateful. Baby-bald Mave looked out the window at the Super 8 sign and said, “Take me to the scrublands,” as though she’d been waiting to say such a thing. Until now, she’d been careful to hide the compression socks the color of sand dune. Now she stood in them, her legs bare up to her boxers. She rubbed her hairless head, remembering it.

  The truth is, I helped Mave get dressed that morning. The day was different and my throat threatened constriction but did not constrict. Nan not speaking, Nan the one loose with all words and body—Nan whose easy fountain of voice I envied—was quiet and somber and put Mave’s thick wool socks on for her, over the compression socks, and then her boots, saying only, “This one. Now this one,” as if readying a kid for the school bus Mave had once driven. Nan leashed Ellis and took him out as I packed up. We were practiced now at cohabitation.