When Women Were Dragons(100)

I folded my hands across my stomach and pressed. The smell in the office—Lysol and dust and underground mustiness—was making me nauseated. Or maybe it was nerves. “How much did she tell you?” I didn’t have to say who she was.

He sat at his desk and steepled his fingers, resting his chin on his fingertips. He grinned. “Oh. Heavens. Everything. About you, certainly. Probably more than you know yourself. That’s Helen all over.”

“I read your pamphlet,” I said. “A Physician’s Explanation of Dragoning. I had a question and—”

“I hope you instantly forgot everything you read. Even a year after I wrote it, I realized that a good percentage was wrong. Now I feel that most of it is.”

I nodded. “Clearly.” I tapped my chin a few times with my fingertips—a nervous gesture I had developed that Marla insisted would give me pimples if I wasn’t careful. “My aunt gave it to me a long time ago. When I was a little girl.”

“Yes, your aunt,” he smiled. “Marla. She was part of the group I studied. It’s amazing how science can work sometimes—a pebble can give us insight into the nature of the mountain. Or a single, whizzing particle can intimate larger truths about the stars. I was fond of Marla. And her . . . special friend. I was there on that terrible day when her heart broke forever.”

“Well,” I said, frowning. “Not forever, exactly. Edith lives with us now.”

His eyes twinkled. He pulled out a steno pad and wrote something down. “Now that, young lady, I did not know.” He paused and clapped his hands. “I know something that Helen Gyzinska does not. This never happens. How marvelous!” He bounced in his chair a few times and added another sentence. “I wonder how they found one another in the end.”

“No idea,” I said. “I never asked.” I shifted uncomfortably.

He resumed writing in his steno pad. “Are they still in love?” the doctor asked, his voice light and neutral. He didn’t look up.

The question startled me. In love? I had never asked that either. They were simply adults who had somehow come into my sphere and invaded my life and were helpful in their way. I hadn’t once considered their internal lives or motivations or feelings. All four dragons slept together in a heap, cuddled in a nest that they built in the corner. Tails curled around middles and arms and legs entwined. I never asked them to name this, and they didn’t do so for me. They just worked together and cared for one another and admired one another’s skills and service and humor. They just held one another close. They sweetly bid goodnight and kissed one another in the morning. And they were all good mothers to Beatrice.

In love. I turned the concept around in my head, trying to get a sense of its size and shape and mass.

“Yes,” I said, understanding for the first time. It felt like a burst of light in my head. “Very much so. All four of them are very much in love, I believe.” I pressed my hands to my cheeks. I hadn’t hugged Marla since she returned, but I felt an ache to do so now. I thought about Sonja. If those dragons were in love, then what was I? I spent every day with Sonja. I spent every minute I could. We clung to each other. Still. There was a bit of a fog when it came to putting a name on what it was that I felt, what it was that we were to each other. I suddenly had a profound need to know, but I did my best to put that thought aside and save it for later. I was talking about my aunties. I looked at the doctor in the eye. “It’s incredibly nice, actually.”

“Well, of course it is,” he said, writing something down. “That’s love for you. It’s why we’re all here, after all. And why we hang on.”

I was quiet for what felt like a long time. It’s time to tell him why I’ve come, I told myself. I held on to the arms of my chair the way a castaway clings to a lifeboat, like the world around me was wind and wave and the ocean’s abyss.

The timer rang and the good doctor made us tea. “I’m assuming you take milk. I simply assume that everything is better with milk, but then I am from Wisconsin, after all.”

He handed me a mug. The tea was nearly white, and the separated cream floated on top in a thick pool.

I grimaced. “Doctor Gantz,” I said, “there’s something I need to know. My father, before he died, told me that my mother should have dragoned. He thought that maybe the cancer wouldn’t have taken her if she had, and then maybe she wouldn’t have died.” My voice shook.

The doctor sipped his tea. He thought a moment before he spoke. “I’ve heard that hypothesis,” he said, finally. “I don’t think there’s any evidence for it either way.”

“So he’s wrong?” I said. My throat felt constricted as though wounded, as though I had swallowed a fish hook. I did my best to remain impassive. I don’t know how successful I was.

Dr. Gantz set his cup on his desk. “No, I’m not saying your father is wrong, I’m just saying that we can’t know if he’s right. Our knowledge is so limited. Look, there are those who insist that the ability to dragon is sex-specific, and moreover that its expression is subject to the will of the individual—in other words, it’s bad women making bad choices. That’s a misreading of the data in order to support a foregone conclusion and a limited point of view. Fortunately, we have enough evidence to reject the first notion out of hand—sex-dominant, sure, but the human-dragon organism is far more complex than we previously thought. I do subscribe somewhat, and with reservation, to the theory of choice, however, though with the caveat that some individuals find the need to dragon so powerful that it becomes an inexorable force. They couldn’t stop it if they tried.” He shrugged. “It’s multifaceted, this condition.” He sipped his tea again. “As for your mother. One could certainly argue that perhaps the cancer itself prevented her changing. But I’m not sure I believe that. One could similarly argue that the change itself would have interrupted the progression of her cancer because of the reorganization of tissues and cells. Perhaps that could be true if she was actively sick, but her cancer was in remission in 1955. Dragons have died of all sorts of things—pneumonia, heart attacks, organ failure, and, yes, cancer. Just because they live longer than us, and have profound differences in their anatomy, respiration, metabolism, and other systems, it doesn’t mean they can’t also get sick and die someday. Your mother died of cancer. What form she was in at the time is irrelevant, but that doesn’t make her loss any less painful. Does that help?”