The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [102]
I got my Psych 1 professor (the course was nicknamed Nuts and Sluts) to help me find a position just for one term. I was hired as a psychiatric aide. That winter, I packed a suitcase and took an empty overheated Greyhound bus to the state mental hospital, where I trudged through blinding drifts of cold and was shown to a small room in a staff dormitory.
Warren
MY ROOM WAS small, the walls a deep pink. In my diary I wrote: I shall cover them with scarves. I had a single bed with an oriental print spread. The lush landscape had pagodas, small winding streams, bent willows. This, I liked. There was a mirror, a shiny red-brown bureau, a tiny refrigerator on a wooden table, a straight-backed blue chair. Blue! My secondary muse—the color blue. I took the refrigerator off the table, and made myself a desk. I put everything away, my long skirts and the hand-knitted turquoise sweater I wore constantly. I’d met none of the other aides yet. There was someone in the next room. The walls were thin and I could hear the other person moving about quietly, rustling the clothes in her closet. There were rules against noise, against music, because the people on the night shift slept all day. My shift would begin at six A.M. So I showered down the hall and dried my hair. I laid my uniform out on the chair, the heavy white rayon dress with deep pockets, the panty hose, the thick-soled nurse’s shoes I bought at JC Penney.
As always, I woke in time to shut off the alarm just before it rang. I boiled water in my little green hot pot and made a cup of instant coffee. The sky was a pre-dawn indigo. I put on a long, black coat I’d bought at the Goodwill, a coat with curly fur of some sort, like dog fur, on the collar and cuffs. It was lined with satin, and maybe wool blanketing, too, for it was heavy as a shield. The air prickled in my nose, my skin tightened, and an intense subzero pain stabbed my forehead.
I walked across the frozen lawn to the ward and sat down in the lighted office. The nurse coming on duty introduced herself as Mrs. L. because, she said, her actual name was long, Polish, and unpronounceable. She was tall, broad, and already looked tired. She wore a baggy tan cardigan along with her uniform, and a nurse’s cap was pinned into her fluffy pink-blond hair. She was drinking coffee and eating a glazed doughnut from a waxed-paper bag.
“Want some?” Her voice was dull. She turned to one of the other aides coming on and said that she’d had a rough night. Her little boy was sick. They all knew one another, and the talk swirled back and forth for a few minutes.
“What am I supposed to do? Can you give me something to do?” I asked in a too bright, nervous voice.
“Listen to this,” Mrs. L. laughed. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty. None of the patients are up yet.”
“Except Warren,” said the nurse who was going off duty. “Warren’s always up.”
I walked out of the office into the hall, which opened onto a huge square room floored with pink and black linoleum squares. The walls were a strange lavender-gray, perhaps meant to be soothing. The curtainless windows were rectangles of electric blue sky that turned to normal daylight as the patients rose and slowly, in their striped cotton robes, began wandering down another corridor that led into the big room from the left. Everyone looked the same at first, men and women, young and old. Mrs. L. handed out medications in small paper cups and said to