When Women Were Dragons(18)

There were those in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and even in Congress who would have happily preferred the public believing in what was later termed the theory of devouring, as it removed the question of why. I truly believe, even now (especially now) that if the dragoning had been smaller in scope, there would have been a more concerted effort at the suppression of news and a more robust campaign of misinformation in those early days. It had, after all, worked before. But it is difficult for any propagandic apparatus, no matter how advanced, to counteract the force of millions of eyewitnesses. Which is why a smattering of facts, as unclear as they were and often poorly contextualized, did make their way out.

By the end of my fourth-grade school year (a little over a year after the event itself), the evening news and the textbooks and the harried teachers had, at last, come to a consistent explanation as to what had actually happened in the Mass Dragoning. Specifically this: that one day, on a perfectly ordinary afternoon in April, exactly 642,987 women were not eaten by dragons, as was originally reported. Rather, they became dragons. All at once. En masse. And then they left everything behind: babies in strollers and roasts in ovens and laundry half-hung on the line.

There were some devourings during those brief hours at the outset, when the dragons, still astonished at their transformations, and wildly acclimating to the needs and modifications of a body that had become so large and sharp and shiny, had perhaps overstepped a bit. No babies or children were devoured—though the televangelists claimed, and still claim, otherwise. However, more than six thousand husbands did find themselves swallowed, and another eighteen thousand or so suffered severe burns after their office buildings burned down. Also among the dead: 552 obstetricians; more than six thousand pastors, ministers, rabbis, imams, and priests of various denominations; several score of youth workers; twenty-seven entire parent-teacher associations across nine states; and dozens of office managers, factory foremen, politicians, and police detectives (this is how it became obvious that dragons are bulletproof), not to mention a goodly sum of retired teachers and school counselors.

And then, just like that, the dragons left.

Many went to the mountains, with a preference for the Alps (tourism has never been the same). A large number made their home in the ocean. They were rarely covered in the news, except for the occasional interactions with submarines and radar stations, as it seems the dragons were, and remain, intent on protecting the now-flourishing pods of great blue whales. There were dragons who created communes on otherwise uninhabited islands, and dragons who relocated to Antarctica, dragons who made quiet homes in the jungles, and dragons who launched skyward to explore the cosmos.

There were a few dragons who tried to keep up appearances, reluctant to leave their homes and husbands as their sisters flew away. They attempted to re-don their aprons and oven mitts, busying themselves with laundry and bed-making and dinner preparations until their spouses returned home at the end of the day. Housework, one can imagine, was difficult due to their increased size and razor-sharp talons, and the fact that they emitted flames every time they hiccupped or burped. Nevertheless, they persisted, and greeted their husbands with freshly applied makeup and a home-cooked meal and a tentative “So, darling, how was your day?” as usual.

Unfortunately, the dragons who did so were naturally the sorts of wives who would be married to the sorts of husbands who did not take kindly to great changes in their routines. The husbands who reacted to the dragon situation by scolding and yelling did not, as one might expect, last very long. Still, there were a few who managed to speak softly and kindly, and told their wives in tender voices that they understood, and that they would weather this and all challenges to their marriage, and that they were still very much in love. And in truth, those husbands really did try their best. In the end, though, their dragon wives did not remain suited for a life of homemaking. The lives they lived no longer fit. They found their gaze drifting elsewhere—beyond the limits of the house, beyond the limits of the yard, beyond the limits of the daily tasks of washing and straightening and keeping up appearances. They found that their vision had widened to contain the whole sky, and beyond the sky. The more they looked, the more they longed, and the more they longed, the more they planned, and finally the husbands returned home one evening to dinner in the oven, several meals in the freezer, and notes on the dining room table, still somewhat scorched, saying, “Thanks for trying, my love. But we both know it wasn’t going to work anyway.”

The husbands looked in vain for their dragon wives, but it was no use. They weren’t coming back.

All told, the Mass Dragoning of 1955 was a disaster of unimaginable scope, and it brought the nation, for a moment, to its knees, reeling in a state of loss and confusion and sorrow. There were few people in the entire country who did not know at least one affected family. The country had no precedent for this scale of national grief, and as a result every single coordinated response—on a national level, or a community level, or even at the level of individual families—was neither honest, nor useful, nor kind. We had no guide, you see? No agreed-upon workable models or determined courses of action. This was an unspeakable loss. And many chose to never speak of it.

My mother certainly never did. She never once spoke her sister’s name after that day. Never. She never mentioned her brother-in-law again. Disappeared. Devoured, presumably. She certainly never discussed the Dragoning. And my father didn’t see the need to say anything beyond “A little less noise, there,” or “Where on earth are my socks?” She also made sure to sell the family television set, and she “accidentally” spilled coffee on the radio. She threw the newspapers away the moment my father was done reading, and I was not allowed to touch them. My home was a place devoid of information and explanation. All truth, all context, I had to discover myself.