Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden

Abstract

Reviewed by: Call It Horses by Jessie van Eerden Jayne Moore Waldrop (bio) Jessie van Eerden. Call It Horses. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Dzanc Books, 2021. 246 pages. Hardcover. $26.95. In Call It Horses, three women—a niece, her aunt, an unwanted stowaway—hit the road in a long, rusted Oldsmobile Royale in the late 1980s, leaving Caudell, West Virginia, for Abiquiu, New Mexico, and the desert landscape of Georgia O'Keeffe. From the start, nothing about the trip hints at pleasure or relaxation. Instead, the journey is more of an escape from everything they know as they attempt to outrun the grief and troubles chasing each of them. There's been no planning for the trip, which heightens the atmosphere of escape. Frankie, the driver and narrator, is in her mid-thirties. She was orphaned as a teenager and raised, sort of, by her aunt Mave. After dropping out of high school, Frankie was homeschooled, sort of, by Mave, who unevenly tried to show Frankie a bigger view of the world through books. As [End Page 108] the journey begins, Mave is close to the end of her life from cancer, her condition so fragile she requires portable oxygen tanks and an assortment of pills for the pain. Mave wants to reach Abiquiu, but she can't make it there alone. Nan is a young artist with a black eye courtesy of her husband Dillon, who was Frankie's first love. Nan is unwanted and relegated to the back seat, invited because she has the only car that's still running at the time of departure. She's described as loose in her actions and her words, a revealing indictment in a story built upon the value of language and finding the proper words to name things. As in the archetypal American road trip, the women head west, traveling through West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and along I-40 into the desert, in search of the landscape of Georgia O'Keeffe. In sections set at home, the reader can almost feel the heaviness of the lush, humid landscape, a place of forests, caves, and bogs filled with decaying vegetation. There's stark contrast between the thick air that constricts Frankie's airways and the clear, bright paintings of O'Keeffe's desert world filled with flowers and bleached skulls, which are seen as "souvenirs of death." The novel is structured as a series of letters written by Frankie to Ruth, a deceased linguist who was Mave's longtime lover. Ruth, who had studied the languages and hieroglyphs of the Sinai Desert on sabbaticals, had been Frankie's pen pal for three years when Frankie was a teenager. At the time, Mave and Ruth lived together on the east coast in a relationship considered immoral by Mave's sisters. Ruth, who had grown up with privilege and opportunity, had observed promise in young Frankie's writing, and from that point, both Ruth and Mave encouraged her writing. [End Page 109] Although Frankie and Ruth never meet, their correspondence becomes a private, sustaining lifeline for Frankie during adolescence. After Ruth's death, the letters stop. Mave had returned to West Virginia with an unexpected inheritance of money and books, along with a grief that alcohol couldn't assuage. But even after death, Ruth provides a measure of stability for Frankie amid the cluttered chaos of Mave's life. The letters provide structure for the novel, but the narrative is remarkably nonsequential, written with layers that need to be peeled like an onion from Frankie's garden. It's a short novel, but not a fast read. Significant details from the past weave throughout the letters. Some readers may wish for more straightforward linear movement in the storytelling. Frankie's writing finally, carefully, takes shape in the form of a journal documenting the road trip, written on a Dollar Store notepad. I write you about the dead. I write you to stayalive and, after all this time, I write you, stillto become myself…. On a rough-lumber tablewith a vinyl tablecloth, I write this to you.Dear, Ruth, can you feel the unfolding of ourdisaster? I should write each...