Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

Later on, I was sent to check on Nonette. She had gone to her bed, pulled the covers down, and slid underneath with all of her clothing on. I could see her heavy shoes sticking out the bottom. The sight of her boot soles filled me with pity and joy.

THERE WAS NOTHING in the many stories of reversal and romance among my aunts and uncles to guide me here. A kiss from another girl set me outside the narrative. None of the family stories could touch me. I was in Anas’s story now. A dangerous love that could destroy. At the same time, I was so scared of what the kiss might actually lead to that I couldn’t think of anything to do but eat. I stocked my little room with food and did not stop eating long enough to think. Boxes of crackers lined the wall. Fruit yogurt in the cold space between the window and the storm glass. Cans of soda. Fruit pies and peanuts, bags of apples. I talked on the phone in the hallway for hours, smoking, tracking down my housemates, friends, even Corwin, who was distant with me. I didn’t really care. I kept him on the phone as long as possible because, after hanging up, there was nowhere to go but back into my room, where the food waited. As long as I was eating I could concentrate on what I was writing or reading. My eye traveled over the pages, my hand from bag to mouth. For the hours until the hour I could fall asleep, this worked. I didn’t have to figure out what I was doing, what Nonette was doing, why I couldn’t think of her and why I couldn’t stop thinking of her.

AFTER ESCORTING A patient to the beauty parlor one late morning, I am returning alone through the steam tunnels underground when she is there. She is walking toward me with no escort.

“I have a pass.” Nonette grins, stopping when we’re face-to-face.

We’re standing close and there’s no one else in the tunnel, lit by low bulbs, whitewashed and warm, branching off into small closets and locked chambers full of brooms and mops and cleaning solvents. Her face is clear and bright, her hair a rumpled gold in the odd light; her eyes are calm and full with no makeup. She is beautiful as someone in a foreign movie, in a book, a catalogue of strange, expensive clothes. There is green in her eyes today, her eyes are sea glass. I can almost taste her mouth, it’s that close again, pink, fresh with toothpaste. She is wearing jeans, a white sweatshirt, sneakers, and gym socks. I am wearing my cheap white uniform of scratching false material with tucks and a front zipper. She puts her fingers on the tongue of the zipper at my throat. She laughs.

“Got a slip on?”

I take her hand around the wrist, my thumb at her pulse.

“Stop, stop,” she pretends, but her voice is soft. I follow her around a corner, then a sharp turn, through a door, and we are right in the middle of the pipes, some wrapped with powdery bandages of asbestos, some smooth, boiling copper conduits. My cap snags. I let it fall. We walk into the nest of pipes and duck low, underneath the biggest, walk down the cast stone steps to the other side, a kind of landing, completely closed in. Behind us there is a wall of rough brick and flagstone that smells of dirt, of fields in summer with the sun beating down just after a heavy rain. The heat brings out the smell.

“Let’s sit down,” she says. “I’d like to get you stoned but I don’t have anything.”

I’m still holding her wrist. There is barely room to stand. The pipes, running parallel, of different lengths, graze the tops of our heads.

We sit down together. I’m shaking but she’s very calm. Anyway, it isn’t the way I thought it would be. After the first few moments, there is nothing frightening at all about kissing her or touching her. It is familiar, entirely familiar, much more so than if I were touching a boy I’d never touched before. The only thing is I keep shaking, trembling, because our bodies are the same, and when I touch her I know what she is feeling just as she knows when touching me, so it seems both normal and unbearable. We don’t take our clothes off, do anything, just touch each other lightly on our arms, our throats, our hands, and kiss. Her whole face is burning, and soft, like flower petals.

She says, “That’s enough.” I should go back now and she will follow. Any longer, and they’ll miss us. As I walk back down the corridors of whitewashed stone, through the five doors, back onto the ward, I begin to imagine how things really are. I invent her story. My thoughts take off. Nonette came here in obvious need, and I was here for her. She was here for me. I came here not knowing that I would meet the one I’d always needed. A week, maybe three, and she will be all right. I’ll leave with her.

“Nonette said you asked for a patient visit.” Mrs. L. sits behind her desk, a stack of forms beneath her spread hands.

“Yes,” I say, though I didn’t ask. But I’m smiling, slowly blooming at the idea. Nonette’s idea.

“We like to encourage our aides to work with the patients during off-duty hours, and I don’t see anything wrong with it, as long as you know that she presented here with some real problems.”

“I know that. I’ve talked to her about them.”

“Good.”

Mrs. L. waits, watching me a little too carefully. I am not supposed to know a whole lot about each patient’s personal history, not more than the patient wants me to know.

“Look,” I say, “she told me about her cousin forcing himself on her. I know she came here out of control, and I still don’t know exactly what precipitated it. I don’t know what she’s dealing with at home, at school, or if she’s going back there. The thing is, I really like Nonette. I’m not doing this because I feel sorry for her.”

Mrs. L. bites her lip. “Your motives are good, I know that. But you’ve got to know, to understand, she’s on lithium and we’re adjusting her dosage. She’s depressive, and then she has her manic spells.”

“We’re just going to make a batch of cookies.”

Mrs. L. smiles at me approvingly, and signs the pass.

There is a small kitchen in the basement of the staff dormitory, just one room with a stove and some cupboards, a fridge, an old wooden table painted white, and six vinyl chairs. We make our favorite cookies. Both of us like molasses cookies, not baked hard in the middle. We make three batches and bring them upstairs, to my room. The cookies are still warm as we eat them, crumb by crumb, sitting on my bed with the cookies in our fingers. We drink cold milk. Later, we take our clothes off. It isn’t strange at all, the covers pulled back, the willows on my bedspread bending over the streams and the curved Chinese bridges. She has small breasts, pointed, the nipples round and rough, slightly chapped because she doesn’t wear a bra beneath her shirts.

I hold her hips and she sits over me. She is older than me by two years and knows so much more. How to come sitting up. She spreads her legs and shows me, with a clinical cool, then bends over me while she is coming and begins to laugh. We begin to laugh at everything I’ve never done, and then we do it. She shows me how to start off light and slow, barely brushing each other, so when we come it will happen again, and again, and it will be endless between us. Just before nine o’clock I walk Nonette back to the ward, a bag of cookies in one hand.

“Do you think about, you know…” I finally ask her, at the door.

“Do I think about what?”

Nonette looks at me, her face bland and empty, smiling. She looks more and more like a girl in a ski commercial. Healthy. When she came that afternoon, she made me look into her eyes, deep with pleasured shock. Now her eyes are scary cheerleader eyes.

“Do I think about what?” she says again.

I look down at my feet in boots. About what is going to happen to us? I am dressed in jeans, a coat and sweater, like a normal person, like her. I don’t answer. It is a night so cold and dark the snow makes squeaking noises as it settles in drifts along the big, square yard. All night, the trees crack. You can hear them, the tall, black pines. I stand there as Nonette walks into the hospital, as the glass and steel doors shut behind her with the movie-ending sound of metal catching, holding fast. The locks are automatic, but, still, I try them once she disappears into the bright corridor.