Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

Nonette’s mouth twisted open in scorn. I left. The next day Nonette was extremely friendly to me. When I walked onto the ward, she immediately grabbed my hand as though we’d interrupted some wonderful conversation the day before, and she tugged me toward the glassed-in porch, which was freezing cold but where patients went to talk privately. I sat down beside Nonette in an aluminum lawn chair. I was wearing a sweater. She had on a thin cotton shirt, button-down style, a man’s shirt with a necktie and men’s chino pants. Her shoes were feminine kitten heels. Her hair was slicked back with water or Vitalis. She was an odd mixture of elements — she looked depressed but, it could not be denied, also chic. Today she wore black eyeliner and her face was prettier, more harmonious in the subdued light.

She didn’t smoke. “It’s a stinking habit,” she said when I lit up. I was smoking the ones with low tar and nicotine because I was smoking too much there, constantly, like everyone else, and my chest ached.

“I should quit.” I stubbed out my cigarette. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I wanted to talk to someone my age, not those jerks, shrinks, whatever. You’re not bad-looking either. That helps. I wanted to talk about what’s bothering me. I came to get well, didn’t I? So I want to talk about how really, truly, sick I am. I’ve talked about it, I know I have, but I haven’t really told it. Or if I have, then nothing happened anyway. So that’s why I want to talk about it.”

She paused for a moment and leaned toward me. When she did her whole face sharpened, her eyebrows flowed back into her temples, her mouth deepened.

“If I could just be born over,” she said, “I’d be born neutral. Woman or man, that’s not what I mean. I wouldn’t have a sex drive. I wouldn’t care about it, need it or anything. It’s just a problem, things that you do, which you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, something like that, living with us for a summer.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Not in stupid France,” she answered. “Anyway, he comes in without knocking and kneels by my bed. He uncovers me and he starts giving it to me with his mouth. And I’m like, at first I don’t know what, ashamed of it. I could buy a hook for my door, though; I could tell on him. I don’t, though, because I get so I want it. He strips himself naked. He teaches me how to jerk him off. And then he does it to me again.

“I’m a little girl, right, I don’t even wash very well. Next time he brings along a washcloth and cleans me first. We have a ritual. Where’s my mother and father? They sleep at the other end of the hall, down the stairs, with the fan going in their room. And my cousin is a fucking Boy Scout! Was he going for a fucking merit badge? Anyway, he goes home. Things happen. I think I already feel different, I am different. There is a smell on me, sex, that no one else in my schoolroom has. I look at the older boys. I know what’s coming. I go searching for it.

“Look at you…” She laughed suddenly, drawing away. “You’re, like, fascinated…”

She stared out the windows onto the snowy grounds. “I’m not French,” she said gently. “I’m messed up. I’m in a state hospital. I think I want a sex-change operation. I want to be a man so I won’t have to put up with this shit.”

“I’m not giving you shit.”

Her mouth gaped mockingly. “Oh, look at you, trying to be tough. You’re not tough. You’re like, a little college girl, right? Who the hell cares. I’m from the university, too, I have a Ph.D. Pretty Hot Dick. I am a man, posing as a woman. You want proof?” Then her face closed in, bored. “I’m just kidding. Get the fuck away from me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “You’re really beautiful.”

She wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t look at me now.

“You’re an Indian or something, aren’t you,” she mumbled. “That’s pretty cool.”

I went back into the common room and played gin rummy with Warren, who couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t think he was taking all of his medication, but if he had discovered a way to hide it he was pretty slick. We watched him every morning. He seemed to swallow. His mouth was empty.

A policeman was standing in the office the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. L. He’d just brought Warren back. After we finished playing cards, Warren had marched outside, through fields, down a narrow road that ran west, and twenty miles later was turned in as he crawled into a farmyard. Warren had fallen and bloodied the side of his head. He was sleeping now, sedated, and it was not until late afternoon that he rose, came out to sit in the lounge, one side of his head swollen dark and bandaged. I sat down next to him.

“I hear you had a bad day.” These words popped from my mouth. Yet I was curious. Perhaps it was cruel to be so curious. I asked about the voices he heard — if they were hard on him.

He straightened, shrugged a little. He was wearing a different, almost-new yellow shirt. He ran a hand up his face gently, exploring with his fingers. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his little folded-up dollar bills. He tried to give it to me.

“No,” I said, curling his dry fingers around the money.

“Please.” His old eyes begged, moist and red. “I did it because they told me…,” but he choked on what he might say and his voice was a crow’s croak. He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. And then I saw, just around the edges of his face, in the balled musculature and the set of his eyes and jaw, that he was inside a waking dream. He raised his arms. He recoiled. He sat down in a chair and began taking apart some invisible thing in his lap. Then he went statue-still and lifted his head. Gazed off to the side in a fugue of stillness, listening.

The Kiss

NONETTE AND I were sitting on the frigid sunporch, and this time she was also smoking.

“I’m only doing this disgusting thing so that I won’t be disgusted by the fact that you’re doing it,” she said.

I shrugged and dragged hard. She was belligerent in a low-key way that nobody took too seriously. And she had told that story about being raped by her cousin, the Eagle Scout, to every nurse, aide, doctor, and other patient available. It was just a conversation opener. Here, of course, it was not supposed to matter whether or not the story was true because the important thing was her need to tell it. I was now trained to think that. Nonette wore a man’s black suit, a gravedigger’s suit, a Charlie Chaplin bowler. All too big and comically masculine. She took my cigarette from my hands and crushed it out. Then she suddenly reached out and held my face in the cup of her palm. She leaned toward me and kissed me. There was nothing upsetting about it, at first, it was no different than the other times I’d kissed someone for the first time. There was the same tentative heat, the same curiosity. Only she was supposed to be crazy, I was supposed to be not crazy, and we were women. Or maybe Nonette was just troubled, I was less troubled, and she claimed she was a man. She pretended she was a man. Or she pretended that she was pretending.

She drew back into her chair, settled, crooked one leg up, and hugged her knee. She stared at me, assessing my reaction. I was suddenly and completely charged with an electrifying embarrassment. I burned and burned, losing control. I forced myself to rise, and even so I stumbled, awkward and big, to the door of the sunporch and the entrance to the ward. She was still watching, now smiling.

The truth is, the fact is, I didn’t know at the time women could kiss women in that way anywhere but in Paris. I didn’t think it could happen, or had never heard of it happening, in North Dakota. I was staggered with tender surprise.