Louise Erdrich - The Plague of Doves

“I can’t leave here,” I say.

And I walk out of that place.

WHEN I LEFT the hospital with Corwin, I took my purse and my diary and nothing else. I left Anas — the entire boxed set — annotated. In the margins where she described tall buildings— phallic? And where she noted the cast of light on a Paris afternoon— impressionistic? Where she loved a woman, question marks, exclamation points, checks, and stars. I didn’t know if I could actually bear leaving the safety of the hospital, but I just kept going until we reached Corwin’s car. I’d lost a lot of weight and hardly exercised, so I was dizzy and had to ask Corwin to stop the car once so I could puke. Corwin was living with my aunt and Judge Coutts, and he said that the two of them had changed his life and given him self-confidence. When he first moved in, he hadn’t entirely stopped using or supplying (of course the two of them didn’t know this), but after I went to the mental hospital he meditated on this form of commerce and ended up laying it down for good. He was straight now, he said, which gave me an opening.

“Well, I’m not. I’m a lesbian,” I told him.

He said I couldn’t be. I didn’t dress like one.

“Like you’d know,” I said.

He says he did know. He’d been around. “They dress like me, aaaay.”

We drove along quietly for a while.

“I’m really sorry I gave you that acid, man,” he said. “Did it, you know, change your head around?”

“You mean did it make me a lesbian?”

He nodded.

“I don’t think so.”

We drove some more. We’d known each other stoned, sick, drunk. We’d beaten each other up in Catholic school, so silence between us was comfortable, even a relief. I looked out the cracked car window — the world was beautiful all along the road. Some of the fields were great mirrors of melted water. Golden light blazed on the slick surface. I started feeling better. Sitting in a car with the boy whose name I had written a million times on my body, and besides that, in blood, and telling him about Nonette and having him take it pretty much in stride took some of the dark glamour from my feelings.

“Do you actually know any lesbians?” I asked.

“Not to talk to,” he said. Then, a moment later, “Or any I could set you up with, if that’s what you want.”

A heated flush rose along my collarbone.

“Hey,” Corwin said after a while, “you don’t have to go anywhere with this thing just yet. Take it easy.”

I didn’t answer, but I felt better thinking I did not have to rush out and do anything about being a lesbian. I could just exist with it and get used to it for as long as I wanted. Nobody could tell from looking at me. I looked basically the same, though frail. And I looked sad. I knew because my mother said my sadness made her cry. But sitting in the car knowing I looked sad made me feel self-consciously sad, which isn’t really sadness at all.

As we passed onto the reservation, I saw that the ditches were burning. Fires had been set to clear spring stubble, and the thin smoke hung over the road in a steady cloud. After Corwin dropped me off at our house, I sat with Mooshum outside, drinking cool water from tall galvanized water cans. After a while, I thought I’d be all right. Something about those cans — maybe the galvanizing — always made the water taste good.

As the sun went down, light shot through the smoke and turned the air around us and off to the west orange gold. A strange, unsettling radiance crept up the sides of the trees and houses. Mooshum and I watched until the light began to recede. The air turned fresh and blue. It was very cold, but still we sat until the darkness had a brown edge to it, and Mama came to the door.

“Come in here, you two,” she said, her voice gentle.

Walking on Air

A FEW DAYS later, I rang the bell at St. Joseph’s convent. About two feet up a dog had scratched to get in many times, scoring it white. I waited, rang again, and heard a faint tink-tonk sound deep inside. There was a firm step, and then Mary Anita herself pulled the door open. She no longer wore the strict black habit, but regular clothes. Nunnish clothes, a baggy cream sweater set and a long blue A-line skirt. Soft tie shoes instead of elegant black nun boots. Her hair surprised me, a foresty brown with gray streaks and swirls, vigorous and beautiful, though she had cut it short. She peered steadily at me. Her eyes had weakened, perhaps, and she blinked behind round glasses, then took them off as she opened the door.

“Evelina Harp!”

Her huge face lighted, but her eyes were still. She gestured me inside and so I entered, wiping my feet carefully on the rough mat. The walls were a calming tan color and the place smelled clean, like there were no old or extra things in it. I followed her into a small receiving room, which contained a couch, an easy chair, a box of Kleenex balanced on the chair’s arm. On the wall, there was an arrangement of dried flowers in a red willow basket. A crucifix hung over the dark television. She told me that she was happy to see me and asked me to sit down. She was much smaller now — the weight of her jaw had pulled her face down and changed the angle of her neck so she hunched and peered up from underneath her delicate brows, giving her look a penetrating gravity.

We fell into an awkward silence, and then she asked me how I was.

“Not so good,” I said.

There was another silence, longer now, and I wished that I hadn’t come.

“What is wrong?” Her gaze was tender and lingered on me. She was very happy that I’d visited, I could see, and now she was worried about me, one of her endless flock. I couldn’t bear to tell her the truth, so I said something else.

“I’ve been thinking about becoming a nun!”

“Oh!” She clapped her milk-white hands. Her skin was pure and clear, translucent almost. A frightening joy shone out of her, then faded.

“It would be extraordinary if you had a vocation.” Her voice was hesitant.

“I’m really thinking about it.”

“Truly?” She folded her hands like the wings of birds. We both looked at her hands and I thought of the Holy Spirit, the dove settling to sleep, silent and immaculate.

“I think not,” she said suddenly, raising her eyes to mine. “It’s just that I don’t see you in the convent,” she continued, gently. “Have you had some sort of special experience you’d like to share with me?”

I smiled in dumb surprise and had really no idea what was going to pop out of my mouth. “I was in a mental hospital.”

She looked at me sharply when I said that, but when I smiled, she laughed, that tinkly musical laugh that surprised people. “Yes, yes…. Were you cured?”

“I guess so.” I paused, less awkward now. “Maybe you’re right about the convent. The problem is, I don’t believe in God anymore.”

Her eyes narrowed under the silky brows. Her gaze, though quiet and neutral, unsettled me.

“Sometimes I don’t either,” she said. “It’s hardest when you don’t believe.”

“I imagined that you, I mean of all people…”

“No,” she said, “not a firm faith.”

“So the reason you became a nun”—my voice was low, I felt I might be pressing her too far now, but I wanted to know—“was it because you’re a Buckendorf? Because a Buckendorf hung Corwin’s great-uncle?”

She concealed her reaction behind a lifted hand, and took some time to answer.

“To live my life atoning for another person’s sin?” She said at last, her voice scratchy and faint. “I wouldn’t have had the strength. But then again, the hanging undoubtedly had something to do with my decision, growing up and finding out. Knowing one could be capable.”