The Plague of Doves - Louise Erdrich [106]
The Kiss
NONETTE AND I were sitting on the frigid sunporch, and this time she was also smoking.
“I’m only doing this disgusting thing so that I won’t be disgusted by the fact that you’re doing it,” she said.
I shrugged and dragged hard. She was belligerent in a low-key way that nobody took too seriously. And she had told that story about being raped by her cousin, the Eagle Scout, to every nurse, aide, doctor, and other patient available. It was just a conversation opener. Here, of course, it was not supposed to matter whether or not the story was true because the important thing was her need to tell it. I was now trained to think that. Nonette wore a man’s black suit, a gravedigger’s suit, a Charlie Chaplin bowler. All too big and comically masculine. She took my cigarette from my hands and crushed it out. Then she suddenly reached out and held my face in the cup of her palm. She leaned toward me and kissed me. There was nothing upsetting about it, at first, it was no different than the other times I’d kissed someone for the first time. There was the same tentative heat, the same curiosity. Only she was supposed to be crazy, I was supposed to be not crazy, and we were women. Or maybe Nonette was just troubled, I was less troubled, and she claimed she was a man. She pretended she was a man. Or she pretended that she was pretending.
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,