When Women Were Dragons(17)
My aunt’s mouth twitched with a smile. “Liar,” she said. And then she kissed my forehead. “But I love you. I love you so much. I am going to give something to you. It’s nothing bad, and it’s nothing you have to worry about. I just don’t think your mother would understand. But it’s important to me that you have it. Do you understand?”
I folded my hands and fidgeted. I didn’t know what to say.
My aunt gave my shoulder a little squeeze. She reached into her bag. She pulled out a stack of letters, bound with a particularly intricate knot. And a small booklet called Some Basic Facts About Dragons: A Physician’s Explanation. And a photo album with a picture on the front cover showing three women in uniforms with their arms wrapped tightly around one another’s waists. My aunt was in the center. Her hair was long then, and had been pulled back into a rapidly unraveling bun. Her head rested on another woman’s shoulder. They all looked incredibly happy.
She set each thing on my bed. I stared at them. My aunt stood and walked to the door. She paused.
“What am I supposed to do with them?” I asked.
My aunt shrugged. “Maybe nothing. Maybe this is pointless. But no matter what happens in the coming days, I want you to have this. Some things are hard to talk about, and then the world clams up and pretends like it was nothing. Or they act like it never happened in the first place. But maybe that’s a mistake. Just because people won’t talk about something, it doesn’t mean that it’s any less true or important.”
“Do you want me to read it?” I frowned at the booklet. It had two images on the cover. One was a shape that I had never seen before but I now know is a line drawing of the female reproductive system. The other image was that same drawing transformed and fleshed out as the face of a dragon. At the bottom it said, “Researched and Written by a Medical Doctor Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous.” Under that, someone had written, “Also known as Dr. Henry Gantz. You can’t fool me, old man.” It looked like my aunt’s handwriting. I certainly didn’t know who Dr. Gantz was. In any case, the book didn’t look particularly interesting. “I mean. Do I have to read it?”
Auntie Marla smiled. “It’s up to you. You can read the book or you can read the letters, or you can look at the pictures, or you can never look at any of it again. There’s a letter to you in there, but you can ignore that too—there’s absolutely no obligation here. I just . . .” She paused. Her gaze drifted to the window. For a moment, moonlight lit her face and her eyes reflected the sky outside. She reached her arms around me and gave me a squeeze. “These things are important to me, and I want them someplace safe. You don’t have to think about it again. You really don’t. It’s enough for me to know you have them. Does that make sense?”
“Yes,” I said, even though it didn’t. She hugged me one more time, and I realized that her chest and shoulders trembled. She pulled away and smiled, but her eyes were wet. She didn’t say anything else.
And with that, she closed the door.
I slid the booklet and the pictures and the bundle of letters into the hidden cubby in my closet, and fastened the panel shut.
I never, never, told my mother. Even after the sirens and fires. Even after keeping our eyes on the ground as massive shadows streaked across the pavement. Even after the ashes covering her dress, and the smoke lingering in Beatrice’s hair. My aunt’s treasures stayed where they were—unread, untouched, unmentioned.
It wasn’t my first secret. And it wasn’t my last. But it was my biggest secret. It still is.
9.
Despite my mother’s aversion to hard conversations, the nation went through a short, and only somewhat thorough, reckoning of what had occurred. This was difficult, given the assumed femininity of dragons, and the Mass Dragoning’s accepted connection to something as private as motherhood. Embarrassment, as it turns out, is more powerful than information. And shame is the enemy of truth.
But the sheer scope and numbers of the Mass Dragoning of 1955, and the impact it had on the nation’s population, workforce, economy, and family structure, did require a national conversation, albeit brief, uncomfortable, and not altogether accurate. At school, after some resistance by the staff, we all worked through a special curriculum distributed by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, mandated for all schools, both public and parochial. The curriculum, however, went through many major revisions over the next eighteen months, requiring schoolchildren everywhere to discard out-of-favor workbooks from time to time (in point of fact, we were supposed to burn them) only to replace them with new books with a more up-to-date text, until those, too, needed to be replaced. In those first chaotic weeks after the Mass Dragoning, Sister Margareta, my third-grade teacher, taught us the earliest accepted explanation: that dragons, either escaped from Hell or intentionally released from its Demon Gate by sinister forces in the hidden global war between good and evil (Russian, presumably), had devoured a certain subset of the nation’s mothers, for reasons unknown. And likely reasons unknowable. After all, who can reason with a dragon? This was wildly incorrect, of course, but most people were still grappling with the events that day—burning buildings and devoured husbands and half-exploded homes and motherless children weeping in the streets. Newscasters did their best at piecing the narrative together, with patient and firm reporters once again helping America come to grips with difficult things.