Call It Horses Jessie Eerden (top ten books of all time txt) 📖

studied Nan’s slunk body unmoving, seemed to decode her. Then she studied me but still spoke to Nan. I was beginning to think that Nan was a conduit.

“Ruth wants to make the world right. When the Black students picket the Quonset Hut, she carries a sign, even with her limp. When the pregnant girl gets kicked out of the dorm, Ruth makes up a cot. When I go to her with all the iterations of myself, in a bundle of scraps, and all the possible ways to live, innumerable—” Mave stopped in the middle of the thought. We were quiet. The waitress filled my big water cup and left the scribbled bill.

“So where is Ruth now?” Nan asked.

“She tatted lace once,” Mave muttered. “Can you imagine that? She always wanted to fix cars, too, but only because she likes to say spark plug. She loves to say piston.”

I’d had enough of your unveiling. I felt all the private, secret years exposed in the shoddy light of the booth. Mave took long draws of rough breath and she was finished.

Nan waited. Her bruised young face expectant. “Where is she now?” she asked again. She looked at Mave, at me. Everyone in our dim booth so breakable and somehow out of place.

I said to Nan with a plainness I hated, “Ruth is dead.” My first words spoken to her since we’d left. And now I write the preposterous words here, on a dollar-store notepad, in this letter unending. I write to you, the dead, about the dead. To stay alive.

Another Miller Lite appeared, the waitress’s white uniform dissolving to ghost. Attentive Patrick at the bar nodded his head and waved. Nan slid the bottle over to me, and I took it.

ALL THESE NOTES FROTH UP AND SPILL SLOWLY FROM THE RIM.

So I started learning real facts about you at a diner just over the Kentucky line, and you who were always otherworldly to me took on a mundane bodily form and almost a face. I write to you now, though you’ve been dead years, because I need to keep my hands doing something and because, for that brief time in my childhood, I had written you almost daily and in secret, and you had seen some kind of promise in me. Also because you were the one Mave loved, and I did not know, I never really knew, what she harbored toward me, only that I was her counterpart in the universe. But love? In O’Keeffe’s Ram’s Head, Blue Morning Glory—a print I still keep folded up somewhere—was I not the blue morning glory and she the one with intact horns?

What can I say of you, Ruth, most intimate stranger? What more do I know of you besides a gift of lilac soap delivered by Mave and the flutter of words—and, after a greasy Kentucky supper and beer, those revelations yielded up to Nan, the loose gray braid that might have resembled my mother-in-law Lottie’s? When I still had your three years of letters, maybe I could have formed you from them, with a fully rendered face, as if you were a paper doll.

Your letters to me that blew up my head.

Always with Mave’s name and Massachusetts return address so Mother didn’t know they were from you.

I first wrote only to Mave, and she shared my letters with you. I was eleven when she left for Northampton at age thirty-nine or forty, beginning at Smith College on scholarship so late in life, after years as an autodidact, then on to her master’s at Amherst. I didn’t know all the details of her circumstances then. And I didn’t know about you at all. I remember the occasion of my first letter to Mave clearly. A Sears Roebuck catalog appeared, thick and promising, in the mailbox, too large to allow the metal door to shut all the way. I saw it from the house, like a tongue sticking out. Then I saw a boy I didn’t know, dressed in a collared shirt and nice pants, steal the catalog and run. He ran out of my sight, toward the back of the house. I went down to the cellar to look for him out the high-up smoky window that faced the back, and there he was among the thick wires of black-eyed Susans, hidden from the road but not from me. I pressed to the window, standing atop a crate. He propped open the catalog in the big flowers, unbuckled his belt, and pulled fast in his underwear, struggling mightily against the underwear band, until his body shook stiff and still. My one hand warmed the cellar window glass. My other trailed along me, along the thigh in my jeans, along my blouse and neck and ear. He wiped his hand in the grass, the tree leaves red rust. Fall was beginning around this boy. He disappeared, and soon after, I heard the knock at the front door. I listened to muffled voices from the cellar and reached the kitchen as the boy handed a pamphlet to my mother. I understood he was a Jehovah’s Witness boy witnessing.

A foreign pole of ache formed in me, throat to pelvis. Through the front window, the catalog tongue stuck out again from the mailbox. I did not fetch it. In my mind I flipped through the sneakers and tents and Maytags to the negligee, the beige and white silks, the brown eyes and long hair he must have turned to. I did not exactly want the boy to touch me, but I suddenly wanted him to be me and me him—I wanted us to switch places. Our private moments had come in contact to make an exquisite loneliness. I felt within me plenty of boy and plenty of girl, and I then wondered if that was what Mave felt since my mother had told me, confusingly, when I’d asked why Mave was not married, that she loved like men love.

Mave lived at an address I knew