When Women Were Dragons(26)

Finally: “What are those?” she asked.

I let out a sound, midway between a grunt and a groan and a sigh. “Carrots,” I muttered.

Beatrice leaned in and squinted at the seeds. “They don’t look like carrots.”

I carefully pinched a seed from my hand and made a show of placing it carefully in its row in the dirt. “They will. A seed may look like a quiet, lifeless thing—just a speck—but that’s just a trick. There is another thing it wants to be. Very soon it will split its skin, sprout out of itself, and become . . . bigger.” Just saying so made my arms go goosebumped, even though the day was hot. I thought about my aunt. I tried not to think about my aunt. It wouldn’t do me any good to think about my aunt.

“Why does it do that?” Beatrice asked. She stood and climbed onto the old tree stump. Sometimes it bothered her to be small.

“Everything does that. Everything changes. Everything starts out as one thing and then turns into another. It’s part of being alive. You’re not the same as you used to be. I remember when you were so small I could fit you in my pocket.”

Beatrice considered this. “Am I a seed?” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. I started to pinch the dirt over the seeds, one tiny bit at a time, being careful not to bury them too deep.

“What will I change into?” Beatrice asked.

“A carrot,” I said.

“Nuh-uh.” She shook her head. “I will not.”

“Fine,” I finished my row, and pulled myself to my feet, my shoulders aching a bit. “You’ll turn into an elephant.”

Beatrice laughed. I wiped off my sweaty face and smiled. It was impossible to be in a bad mood when Beatrice was laughing. “I will not!” she squealed. She climbed onto my back, and I spun her around until we both landed on the grass.

I pulled my list of chores out of my pocket. I still had to turn the compost and pick the peas. I sighed.

“Okay, then. If you aren’t going to turn into a carrot and you’re not going to turn into an elephant, then clearly the only possible option is for you to turn into . . .”

I paused for effect, but Beatrice was impatient.

“A DRAGON!” she howled at the top of her lungs. “I WILL BECOME A DRAGON!” She returned to her spot on the stump and threw open her arms, as though they were wings.

The effect was immediate. My mother, without a word, stood, strode over, hooked Beatrice under one arm, and marched her inside. Beatrice was too shocked to cry. I stared at their retreating figures with my mouth open.

I have filed this memory away. I didn’t know what to make of it at the time. It was sharp and unstable and dangerous. I remember the smell of the dirt. I remember the buzzing of the honeybees as they made their way through the garden. I remember the distant clucking of feral chickens, where my neighbor used to live, but no one spoke of her anymore so it was like she never existed. I remember the calling of chickadees in the great elm trees that guarded the fronts of all the houses on my block. And cardinals. And the occasional crow. I remember how uncomfortable I felt—like my skin was pricking and stretching. Hot and cold at the same time. Like my body was a thing that just didn’t fit anymore. A thing to be changed.

I loved my sister. My cousin. My sister.

She looked like my aunt. I had no aunt. I missed my aunt.

I wanted to see my friend. My Sonja. My Sonja, Sonja, Sonja. For reasons that I couldn’t identify. My skin became suddenly attentive at the thought of her, and my heart tripped over itself beating fast, then slow, then fast again, and it was so good to have a friend.

Friend.

Even then, even on that day, I knew the word friend was inadequate in its meaning and scope to explain how I felt, or what she was to me, but I had no language to explain it to myself. No context. It was another thing that was unmentionable.

My mother yelled inside. Beatrice yelled back. I wanted to go see Sonja. But my mother’s anger rooted my feet to the ground. I wouldn’t have been able to leave if I tried.

There are moments when the bones of the earth feel as though they’ve rearranged themselves without our permission. I was inexplicably angry. I had never felt rage before. I had read the word rage in books, but I didn’t know what it felt like. My bones were hot. My belly was hot. I kicked a rock across the grass.

My mother came outside, an inscrutable expression on her face. She stood above me. She seemed to enlarge. That can’t be possible. I must be misremembering. My mother was a tiny thing. But in that moment, she towered over me. Her face shadowed.

“Inappropriate,” she hissed.

“But, Mama,” I began.

“Inappropriate,” she said again. “That is not allowed in this house.”

“But, I didn’t even—”

“How many times must I say it?” She drew a deep breath in through her nose. And then she hit me. Once. Right across the face. It didn’t hurt. But it was shocking. My mother had never hit me before. Never. I stared at her. Open-mouthed. “Inappropriate. Never let it happen again.”

But what, though? That Beatrice mentions dragons? She was only five! Surely she didn’t mean anything by it. And I hadn’t done anything. Surely my mother would see how unreasonable she was being. To change the subject, I showed her my neat rows of carrots, each one marked by a string staked into the ground. Except that there wasn’t. The knots attaching the string to the stakes had somehow gotten undone, and the string itself had unraveled into bits. And beyond that, the knots holding the twine lattice for the peas loosened, sending the plants into a tangled mess on the ground. And the slings set up to hold the squash. Everything had unraveled. Even the knot in my pocket.