The Plague of Doves (26 page)

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.

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.

 

“I'm going home next week,” she says one morning. “My parents said okay.”

Her parents? Why haven't I ever seen them? A sudden burst of energy pulses from the center of my chest, grabbing all along my nerves. I clap my hands, fast, making sounds to divert the awful feeling, and then I wring them in the air, shedding the pain like drops of water.

Nonette looks at me and shakes her head, smiling. “Are you all right?”

I catch my breath, let it out slowly. “Have they been down to visit?”

“Sure. You work days. They drive down for dinner, then we visit in the early evening.”

“Next week, next week.”

My face stretches in a stupid smile and she twinkles back, into my eyes. Super cute! Popular! She's not okay, I think. She's crazier than I am if she can deny this. She must be. I tear my gaze away and feel my chest blaze. My ribs glow, hot, the bars of a grill, sending warm streaks washing to my feet. My thoughts spin a series of wild if questions.
If she wasn't crazy, if I was, if this was not out of the ordinary, if it couldn't be helped, if I were wrong, if people could see, if this thing with her was a new thing, the first of many, if she left here, if it meant nothing, if she didn't care at all about me.
I step away from her. She has a lovely face, so gentle, a kind and pretty face. An American face. She is wearing a blue sweater, a plaid skirt, knee-high stockings, ultra-normal Midwest catalogue clothes.

“Come and see me?” My voice is miserable.

“Sure! I will!”

My throat half shuts and I gulp at air. I struggle to get a good, deep breath. The air hurts, flowing deep. I'm smoking way too much. She doesn't mean it, of course she doesn't, not now, not ever. I am part of
what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. I can hardly breathe for wanting her so terribly. I walk away with my hands shaking in the scratchy white cloth of my pockets. I keep going and without punching out I walk back down the corridors of the hospital, out the doors, across the snowy central lawn and straight to my room.

Nonette's Bed

I CALL IN
sick the next morning, and the next morning after that. Two days go by. I can't make it to the telephone. I can barely force myself to get up and walk to the bathroom. At some point, I tack a note to my door. I forget what I've written. Once I'm in bed again a kind of black-hole gravity holds me there, or maybe it is fear. All I know is that the air is painful. Acid flows back into my brain. My thoughts are all flashbacks. I see moving creatures in the Chinese landscape of the bedspread and I throw it in the corner of the room. And there's pain, gray curtains I can't push aside. I breathe pain in, out, and the stuff sticks inside of me like tar and nicotine from cigarettes, making each breath just a little more difficult. A week goes by and then Mrs. L. comes to the door and calls, “Can I come in? Can you answer?” I try. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out. It is such a peculiar feeling that I start to laugh. But there is no sound to my laugh. I go to sleep again, sleep and sleep. And the next time I awaken Mrs. L. is in the room, sitting at the side of my bed, and she is using the voice she uses with the others.

“We're going to move you,” she says. “We've called your mother.”

Which is how I end up in Nonette's bed after all.

 

I am sitting on the cracked green plastic sofa in the patients' lounge, wearing my nurse's shoes, only now with no uniform, just baggy jeans and a droopy brown sweater. I have talked to my mother on the phone and tried to persuade her not to worry about me, that I only need a rest, that I am all right and will be back in school when the next quarter starts. I have signed myself in, I'm nineteen, and I can do this. I have told
my mother that I'll use this voluntary commitment as a rest period—but the fact is, I am afraid. I fear losing my observer, the self that tells me what to do. My consciousness is fragile ground, shaky as forming ice. Every morning, when I open my eyes and experience my first thought, I am flooded with relief. The
I
is still here. If it goes, there will be only gravity. There were body magnets underneath the bed in my little pink nurse's aide room. There are magnets beneath the bed here, too, but they have a comforting power since it was Nonette's bed and something of the lost happy calm of her skin, her hair, the length of her pressed against me, resides in the bed along with the drag and pain.

 

Warren enters the patients' lounge. He sees me sitting on the sofa and he walks over, in his careful and dignified way, and he stands before me. He is wearing a rust-colored jacket and gray woolen slacks. He has dressed in his best clothes today. Maybe it is Sunday. He is wearing a striped tie of rich, burgundy, figured silk, and a shirt with turned-back French cuffs. Instead of cuff links, I see that he has used two safety pins.

“You should have cuff links,” I mutter.

“I'll slaughter them all,” he says.

“Shut up,” I answer.

 

I LIE THERE
days, and more days and days. I do not get out of bed. I do not read Anas Nin—she cannot possibly help me now. I am past all that and, anyway, she helped get me into trouble by providing the treacherous paradigm of a life I was always too backwards, or provincial, or Catholic, or reservation-or family-bound to absorb and pull off. I no longer want adventure. The thought of Paris is a burden. I'll never see the back of Notre-Dame or visit the bird market or eat a croissant. The coffee I drink will always be transparent. Which is all right, as I am sick of endless coffee here. No, I'd better figure out where I am in this life. So I lie there trying to work it out in my mind.