When Women Were Dragons(19)

10.

There are memories that we carry that are not our own.

Or perhaps I am talking about myself. There are memories that I carry that are not my own. This should be impossible. And yet.

My auntie Marla was, in the years of my childhood, a towering figure. She stood slightly taller than my father in her low-heeled boots and, prior to her transformation and subsequent disappearance, took up more space than any other adult in my life. I remember her in wide-legged trousers and a sleeveless shirt tied at the waist, her long-fingered hand shading her eyes as she tracked a plane streaking across the sky. She had a sharp jaw and wide, penetrating eyes. She had strong muscles and quick hands and a keen sense of how a thing might be properly put together.

She loved me, and she loved Beatrice, but I think she loved my mother most of all. I think that maybe my mother would always pull my aunt’s love toward herself. My mother was the dearest darling of her big sister’s heart.

As far as I can figure out, my aunt nearly dragoned at work. She had felt it coming on all day.

Marla was the only female employee at the auto repair shop. Her boss, a blotchy, slumped man with a nervous laugh, tried to fire her more than two dozen times, to give her job to a family man. And every time, he’d beg her to come back, with his oily cap clutched in his hands, because they really couldn’t get by without her.

(Besides, they all knew about my uncle. His string of firings. His love affair with the bottle. My aunt, they decided, was as much a family man as anyone.)

On the day of the Mass Dragoning, my aunt sat in a wooden chair in the break room fully slumped over, pressing her chest to her thighs. She curled her hands around her ankles and hung on tight. She tried to shake it off. According to witnesses, she carried a photograph in her hand all day, until it became wrinkly and damp from her hands. It was a picture of me and my mother and Beatrice all sitting on the sofa at my house. Normally, she kept it in a blue frame in her cubby, but one of her co-workers—Earl Kotke, a drinker, sure, but a kind enough fellow, and perceptive, too—said that he saw her take the picture out of the frame and carry it with her. He saw her take it in and out of her pocket and sometimes press it to her heart. He watched as she rubbed her thumb, again and again, over each of the faces.

It was many, many years before I could bring myself to seek out her former co-workers —those who were still alive, that is—and ask about what happened. After all that time, it was too hard for many of them to bring their sense of loss into words. Their hearts were too broken. They loved Marla—everyone did. Most of them simply rested their faces in their calloused hands and wept.

I transcribed each of these conversations. I’m a scientist, after all, and I know that data matters. The interviews meander a bit, and sometimes they disagree, but the central fact they reveal is this: Around one o’clock in the afternoon, Marla rolled the dolly out from under an old truck, laid her tools neatly on the ground and held her hands to her heart for a moment or two. Then she looked at her boss and said, “You boys can take whatever you want of mine. I won’t be needing it anymore.” And then she walked out the door.

The men didn’t understand it. “We figured it was for lady reasons and she’d be back,” her boss, Arne Holfenson, told the local newspaper for the single story they ran on the topic. What he told me, years later, was “I saw the look in her eye, and I hoped to God, I hoped with everything in me, that she would come back to us. But she didn’t. After all this time, I still beat myself up that I didn’t beg her to stay. Maybe she would’ve if we’d asked. Or maybe she would’ve gotten confused and eaten us instead of that idiot husband of hers. In any case, I wish she could have known how desperately we wanted her to stay.”

Even now, I can see my aunt that day in my mind’s eye. I can see her deciding to leave her car at work, striding through the streets toward home. I can see her pausing, watching dispassionately as one house burned, and then another, or as a hapless husband ran out into the yard and down the sidewalk with the seat of his pants blackened and smoking, as an irate-looking dragon pursued him, flying down the middle of the road.

I can see her arriving home.

I can see her sending the babysitter away and gently informing her that she won’t need to come back.

I can see her gathering Beatrice in her arms and rocking her to sleep, inhaling the sweet scent of her baby’s scalp every time she kissed the top of her head.

I wasn’t there. Obviously I wasn’t. But I have seen it. I have felt it. In my head. In dreams. And in those secret places in my mind where the eye sometimes roams. This memory is not mine. And yet, it is.

In this not-memory memory, I see my aunt lingering at the crib, letting her fingers drift away from Beatrice’s damp curls, and silently closing the nursery door, tiptoeing down the hall. I see her pausing in the living room. Holding her hands again to her heart. Lifting her face toward the window. Stepping out of her men’s boots. Stepping out of her coveralls. Stepping out of her underthings. Stepping out of her skin. Stepping out of her life. Greeting her husband with talons and sharp teeth and a refining fire before launching into the sky.

I loved my aunt.

I had no means to mourn my aunt.

And then I had no aunt.

My baby cousin, Beatrice—

I’m sorry. I misspoke.

My sister has always been my sister. I have no cousin as I have no aunt and no devoured uncle.