The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [105]
“If I could just be born over,” she said, “I’d be born neutral. Woman or man, that’s not what I mean. I wouldn’t have a sex drive. I wouldn’t care about it, need it or anything. It’s just a problem, things that you do, which you hate yourself for afterward. Like take when I was nine years old, when I had it first. He was a relative, a cousin, something like that, living with us for a summer.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Not in stupid France,” she answered. “Anyway, he comes in without knocking and kneels by my bed. He uncovers me and he starts giving it to me with his mouth. And I’m like, at first I don’t know what, ashamed of it. I could buy a hook for my door, though; I could tell on him. I don’t, though, because I get so I want it. He strips himself naked. He teaches me how to jerk him off. And then he does it to me again.
“I’m a little girl, right, I don’t even wash very well. Next time he brings along a washcloth and cleans me first. We have a ritual. Where’s my mother and father? They sleep at the other end of the hall, down the stairs, with the fan going in their room. And my cousin is a fucking Boy Scout! Was he going for a fucking merit badge? Anyway, he goes home. Things happen. I think I already feel different, I am different. There is a smell on me, sex, that no one else in my schoolroom has. I look at the older boys. I know what’s coming. I go searching for it.
“Look at you…” She laughed suddenly, drawing away. “You’re, like, fascinated…”
She stared out the windows onto the snowy grounds. “I’m not French,” she said gently. “I’m messed up. I’m in a state hospital. I think I want a sex-change operation. I want to be a man so I won’t have to put up with this shit.”
“I’m not giving you shit.”
Her mouth gaped mockingly. “Oh, look at you, trying to be tough. You’re not tough. You’re like, a little college girl, right? Who the hell cares. I’m from the university, too, I have a Ph.D. Pretty Hot Dick. I am a man, posing as a woman. You want proof?” Then her face closed in, bored. “I’m just kidding. Get the fuck away from me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “You’re really beautiful.”
She wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t look at me now.
“You’re an Indian or something, aren’t you,” she mumbled. “That’s pretty cool.”
I went back into the common room and played gin rummy with Warren, who couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t think he was taking all of his medication, but if he had discovered a way to hide it he was pretty slick. We watched him every morning. He seemed to swallow. His mouth was empty.
A policeman was standing in the office the next morning, drinking a cup of coffee with Mrs. L. He’d just brought Warren back. After we finished playing cards, Warren had marched outside, through fields, down a narrow road that ran west, and twenty miles later was turned in as he crawled into a farmyard. Warren had fallen and bloodied the side of his head. He was sleeping now, sedated, and it was not until late afternoon that he rose, came out to sit in the lounge, one side of his head swollen dark and bandaged. I sat down next to him.
“I hear you had a bad day.” These words popped from my mouth. Yet I was curious. Perhaps it was cruel to be so curious. I asked about the voices he heard—if they were hard on him.
He straightened, shrugged a little. He was wearing a different, almost-new yellow shirt. He ran a hand up his face gently, exploring with his fingers. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his little folded-up dollar bills. He tried to give it to me.
“No,” I said, curling his dry fingers around the money.
“Please.” His old eyes begged, moist and red. “I did it because they told me…,” but he choked on what he might say and his voice was a crow’s croak. He rubbed his face and closed his eyes. And then I saw, just around the edges of his face, in the balled musculature and the set of his eyes and jaw, that he was inside a waking dream. He raised his arms. He recoiled. He sat down in a chair and began taking apart some invisible thing in his lap.