When Women Were Dragons(28)

—“A Brief History of Dragons” by Professor H. N. Gantz, MD, PhD





14.

As Beatrice grew, so did my mother’s agitation. Everything seemed to annoy her, but nothing so much as my father.

“Your daughter is speaking,” she’d say when my father stopped listening again.

“Hmm?” my father said.

When did my parents’ fights begin? It’s hard to say. But once they started, they never really seemed to stop. They fought over whether he would read Beatrice a bedtime story and they fought over whether he would help me with my homework and they fought over whether a pat on the head was sufficient and they fought over whether he would attend school functions and they fought over his increasing business trips. Eventually, my mother began sleeping in the same room as Beatrice and me. Sometimes she’d cuddle into Beatrice’s bed. Sometimes into mine. But usually she slept curled up on the floor, her face turned toward the window, her eyes glinting with stars.

People remarked that my mother looked more youthful—even childlike—with every passing year. Her hands seemed smaller. Her feet swam in her shoes. As Beatrice and I grew, my mother seemed to diminish. I assumed at the time that this was because she slept with us in our room, that doing so somehow made her become more and more like us. I didn’t know what it really meant until it was too late.

Every night, my mother wound a piece of string around each of our wrists—three times around, with a complicated knot tied at the divot between the two bones, right below the heel of the hand. The knots were tiny marvels of twists and whorls and interlocking loops. Sometimes they looked like a flower. Sometimes they looked like a cluster of stars. Sometimes they looked like the diagrams in a physics book depicting time and space. My mother tried knot after knot—different forms and shapes and processes. She consulted her notebook, crammed with computations and diagrams and algorithms and proofs. She consulted her stack of books on knotwork, each one dog-eared and underlined and scrawled with notes in the margins. She said she wanted to find one that would last for a week, at least. More often than not, they completely unraveled during the night. I would find string on the floor, or hanging off the bed, or tangled in Beatrice’s hair. Bits of string could be found in any corner of my mother’s once-immaculate house.

“Mother,” I said one morning, my exasperation getting the better of me, “must you?” I had woken up with string in my mouth, but she insisted on tying yet another new knot around my wrist. I tried to pull my hand away, but she held me firm with a smile.

“Knots are beautiful, don’t you think?” She twisted three loops together, and left it at that, which didn’t answer the question at all.

“Yes,” I said, “But what are they for?”

My mother performed a complicated bend, followed by a pattern of sequential clover leaves, each inserted into the one before it. She held the tip of her tongue gently between her lips as she concentrated. Her nostrils flared. When she spoke, it was more to herself than to me. “When my great-great-grandmother emigrated from Ireland, she had a sash that she wore around her waist, which contained the marriage knot for every couple in her family, going back twelve generations. It was a marvelous thing.” She squinted as she coiled the working end around the base of the knot. She had no intention of answering my question. I didn’t know why I bothered. Still, she continued: “The knots bound them together, you see? And their new family too—each loop, each strand, each twist pulled together into one shape that could withstand any calamity. It’s amazing what a knot can do.”

“I’d rather not wear it, Mother,” I said, “if it’s all the same to you.”

“You’re wearing it,” she said, and her eyes became hard, for just a second. Then she softened. “Just think of it as a love knot.” She pressed it with the center of her thumb. “Because I love you.” And she wandered down the hallway and to the stairs.

I looked at Beatrice’s wrist. Hers had already unraveled. It had only been finished for a few minutes. “Well. They’re not very good, are they?” I muttered so my mother wouldn’t hear.

This didn’t stop her from tying more. I didn’t ask her about them after that. I certainly didn’t ask her about why she was sleeping in our room. It did no use to ask questions in my house. There were no answers anywhere.

Beatrice was to start school for the first time that fall, and my mother pulled out the sewing basket and the measuring tape, and began carefully restitching my old uniform jumpers to fit Beatrice’s tiny frame. I was always small in comparison to my classmates, but Beatrice was dainty. Light and fast and bouncy. She moved as though she had springs and wings, hopping from room to room like a cricket.

(And oh! Memory does funny things to us, don’t you think? As Beatrice bounced and vibrated and resisted my mother’s attempts keep her in one place as she attempted to sew, I thought that word: cricket. Instantly I found myself pinned—no, flooded—by the memory of myself at four years old, listening at the door as my aunt rubbed oil into my mother’s scars and my mother told the story of Tithonus. Of true love forgotten and of health and youth shrinking, drying, shriveling into a husk of itself. I remembered the low hum of my mother’s voice, and the smell of oil and perfume and illness. The muscles on my aunt’s back flexing and releasing as she ran her thumbs up and down my mother’s body. My aunt’s voice catching at the thought of my mother as a cricket, kept safe in her pocket forever. I shook my head, trying to force the memory away, and yet, still it persisted, the past looped and wound into the present, the two entangled pulled inexorably into an unbreakable knot. No amount of tugging could pry it loose.)