When Women Were Dragons(111)

I built a house on the lot where I first saw a dragon. The original house was long gone. So was the chicken coop. Beatrice accused me of being morbid, living so close to where our parents lived miserably together—even though that house, too, is long gone. I told her that my choice has unity, though I didn’t explain why. I never told her about the old lady’s transformation—about the scream and the scrabble and the thud. I never told her about that quiet, awestruck Oh! Is it strange that I never did? Perhaps it is. Even now, with context and understanding, that memory remains a hard, bright, dangerous thing. Broken glass in the shelves of my mind. Still, that memory is mine. And I cherish it, regardless.

Now I am the old lady with the chickens and the garden. The one who gives out snacks or chats or a beautiful basket of eggs to any wandering child who stops over for a bit of company. Perhaps this is my destiny—to be the one sensible thing in an often senseless world.

My house now is filled with pieces of my life. Every room contains elements of my mother’s knotwork—from the curtains to the table runners—each modeled after her notes and diagrams. I even managed to find a copy of her senior thesis, housed in the archives of the Department of Mathematics, a treatise on the topic of topography, which is now displayed on my dining room table. When my stepmother passed, I inherited a box of my father’s old hats, which now occupy a shelf along the crown molding, each quiet and empty and somehow diminished. Every corner of my house has Camilla’s artwork—her sculpted platters and her undulating vases and her lovingly hand-built nudes. Each piece is imprinted by the touch of her hands, the closest thing I have to the memory of her body. I have painted the walls of my study with images of Norwegian mountains and flowers and trolls, in memory of the youth I shared with Sonja. I have built gazebos and high roosts for Beatrice and any other dragon who wishes to stop by or just rest their wings for a while. Every day I work in the garden. I hand out books to furious girls in memory of Mrs. Gyzinska, and write their recommendations when they apply for college. And I have learned to fix engines as a tribute to my aunt. Retirement is wonderful, after all. And filled with diverse occupations. I highly recommend it.

I woke this morning in the hammock, which meant that Beatrice had not been by. She was out changing the world again. Speaking. Organizing. Intimidating politicians or world leaders or clergy members to change their minds and make the planet a better place. Beatrice my cousin. Beatrice my sister. Beatrice my child. And now, perhaps, Beatrice my mother, caring for me as my body fails. I feed the chickens and water the beans. I pick a bowl of ground-cherries and hunt for eggs. And then I rest on the lounge chair in the garden and look at the sky.

Birds circle overhead. Dragons, too. Beautiful things. There is so much beauty.

Nearby, a dog barks.

Nearby, an engine hums.

I close my eyes and listen to the drone of cicadas, calling to one another from tree to tree to tree. Memory is a strange thing. It reorganizes and connects. It provides context and clarity; it reveals patterns and divergences. It finds the holes in the universe and stitches them closed, tying the threads together in a tight, unbreakable knot.

I learned this from my mother.

And now I will teach it to you.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

An acknowledgments page is, by its nature, incomplete. There are a thousand people that likely should be thanked for their assistance and kindness and care in the creation of any book, and a thousand times a thousand more that we have likely forgotten. I will say that I would not have been able to push forward if it weren’t for the encouragement of one writing group—Martha Brockenbrough, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, Laurel Snyder, Laura Ruby, Tracey Baptiste, Anne Ursu, Kate Messner, and Linda Urban—or the kind and incisive critiques of another—Lyda Moorehouse, Naomi Kritzer, Theo Lorenz, Adam Stemple, and Eleanor Arnason, also known as the Wyrdsmiths.

I need to thank Steven Malk, my fearless agent, who wholeheartedly encouraged me in the writing of this frankly bonkers book, despite the fact that it was a stark deviation from my other work and well outside my comfort zone. “Have fun with this,” he told me after I showed him some early pages showing the enthusiastic devouring of a hapless husband. “Make some trouble.” So I did. And I’d also like to thank my lovely editor, Lee Boudreax, who believed in this story from the word go, and whose boundless enthusiasm gave me the courage to shape it into what it became.

I’d like to thank the kind librarians at the Central Library in Minneapolis, as well as the shockingly thorough library at the Minnesota Historical Society. I’d like to thank the Freedom of Information Act, which allows anyone, even dirtbag authors like me, to read through the transcripts depicting the real-time horrors of the House Un-American Activities Committee during McCarthy’s heyday, so that we might never repeat that shameful history.

And thank you to my wonderful family—my husband, my kids, my siblings, my parents, my cousins, and my found family of neighbors and friends—who have to live with a person often hijacked by her own imagination, and wounded by the world. The work of storytelling requires a person to remain in a state of brutal vulnerability and punishing empathy. We feel everything. It tears us apart. We could not do this work without people in our lives to love us unceasingly, and to put us back together. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by boundless love. I owe the universe a great debt to be held in such care.

I often say that I write my books by accident, and I almost always mean it. This book is no different. This book would not exist if it weren’t for a marvelous editor and anthologist named Jonathan Strahan, who kindly asked me to write him a short story about dragons for a new book. I had convinced myself that my writing days were behind me but said yes because Mr. Strahan is just so darn nice, and what kind of trouble could I get myself into, really, with just one more story? And then I, along with the rest of America, listened with horror and incandescent fury to the brave, stalwart testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, as she begged the Senate to reconsider their Supreme Court Justice nominee and make a different choice, and I decided to write a story about rage. And dragons. But mostly about rage.