The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [104]
“They blew spiders under my door.”
“Hey!”
I snatched the spoon and box away. One quick grab and they were both mine.
“Nobody blew spiders under your door.”
“My children did,” Lucille said stubbornly. “My children hated me.”
Warren came in. He had been looking more disorganized, unshaved, his shirt buttoned wrong, his pants unzipped. His hair stuck to all sides in clumps. But for about five minutes, we held a perfectly normal conversation. Then he mentioned General Eisenhower and was off. I left, carrying the box of cornstarch.
Nonette
MRS. L. WAS admitting a new patient, a young woman sitting with her back to me. I paused in the door of the office. There was something about the woman—I felt it immediately. A heat. She was wearing a black dress. Her eyes were angry blue and her lips very red. Her skin was pasty and shiny, as though she had a fever. Her blond hair, maybe dyed hair, was greasy and dull. She swiveled in the chair and smiled. She was about my age. Each of her teeth was separated from the next by a thin space, which gave her a predatory look. I handed the cornstarch box to Mrs. L., who put it absently on the windowsill.
“This is Nonette,” she said.
“Is that French?” I asked. That was it. She looked French.
The new patient didn’t answer but looked at me steadily, her smile becoming a false leer.
Mrs. L. pursed her lips and filled in blank spots on the forms. “Nonette can sleep in twenty. Here’s the linen key. Why don’t you help her settle in?”
“Fetch my things along,” Nonette ordered.
“Evelina’s not a bellhop,” said Mrs. L.
“That’s all right.” I lugged one of Nonette’s suitcases down the corridor. She smiled in an underhanded way and dropped the other suitcase once we were out of Mrs. L.’s sight. She waited while I carried it to her room, and watched as I took her sheets, a pillowcase, a heavy blanket, and a thin spread of cotton waffle-weave from the linen closet. Her room was one of the nicer ones, with only two roommates. It had built-in wooden furniture, not flimsy tin dressers, and the bed was solid. It even had all four casters on the legs.
“Fuck this dump,” said Nonette.
“It’s not bad.”
“You’re a bitch.”
“You’re a bidet.”
In a Salvation Army store I had acquired a 1924 edition of a French dictionary called Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustr. I’d gotten to the B’s. The page with the word bidet also had beautiful tiny engraved pictures of a biberon, a biche, a bicyclette, and a bidon.
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,