When Women Were Dragons(30)
We walked home in silence. I stopped dead in my tracks when we reached the walkway to the library and shoved my hands into my pockets. I looked at my mother. Sonja was inside. I could just feel it.
“Please,” I said. “Just for a little while. I’ll be home as quick as I can.”
My mother lifted her chin, not looking at me, but rather regarding the library itself. Mrs. Gyzinska stood at the front door, chatting with an older man wearing a brown wool jacket and brown wool pants, even though it was very hot out. They both had buttons on their lapels, but I couldn’t read what they said. They greeted people as they nervously approached the library doors, their gaze darting this way and that, as though checking to see if they were being followed. There was a sign on the library door that said MEETING TODAY! I didn’t know what sort of meeting. My mother’s eyes narrowed. I saw her catch the notice of the librarian, who nodded at her and smiled.
My mother’s face was implacable as stone. She shook her head.
“Please, Mother,” I said.
My mother turned away, causing a chill in the air that I could feel. “Not today,” she said. “And certainly not by yourself.” She gripped Beatrice’s hand and walked toward home.
She didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. It wouldn’t have made a difference if I had. I shoved my fists into my pockets and followed, my petulance hovering behind me, like a gathering cloud.
15.
Although it was considered bad manners to speak of dragons—just as it was bad manners to discuss money or lady parts or certain illnesses—there were indications that the Mass Dragoning of 1955 was not the end of the matter. Despite what they tried to make us believe in school. Despite the fact that a narrative of the events had been widely agreed upon, and the news outlets largely declined to cover any extraneous dragonings—a dragoning after the fact, if you will.
Still, despite these cultural taboos and implicit prohibitions, there were cases of spontaneous dragoning that managed to rise above the reticence of enforced politeness and enter the public consciousness.
In the summer of 1957, for example, two sisters brought nine Girl Guides on a two-week scouting expedition into the Everglades. The girls were all thirteen, and were all the daughters of well-to-do families in Miami. The leaders were both unmarried, both childless, but together raising a motherless nephew—the son of a third sister who disappeared in 1955 and was never mentioned again. One did not speak of such things, after all. The nephew was fifteen, and an avid scout, and while it was not entirely in line with Girl Guide regulations to have him present in the expedition, many of the girls’ parents felt some relief that such a skilled and strapping young man would be available to assist throughout this dangerous journey.
The troop did not return. Search teams scoured the wilderness and found nothing. Instead, months later, a group of fishermen exploring the Everglades in their shared flatboat woke early to the sound of a panicked yawp, deep in the thicket of green. They found a boy, naked, half-starved, and raving by the edge of the water. There was no telling how long he had been alone.
“Gone!” he said over and over, his screams diminished to a painful rasp. “All, all gone.”
He had no canoe, no gear, no campsite, no life preserver, and not a stitch on him, aside from a pair of socks that he strangely decided to use as gloves. Rangers tried to glean any information to help guide their search for the missing girls, but the boy’s eyes were wide and wild, and his mouth was unable to form sentences. They brought him to a hospital, where he remained for another six months, screaming endlessly for his mother.
A year later, a team of rangers out for the yearly crocodile count found what they believed were the remains of the Girl Guides’ final campsite in a tangled, remote area of the wilderness, far afield from the troop’s intended route. In their official report—the one eventually leaked to the newspapers—they said that they found a collection of fire-crusted tent poles, three deeply dented canoes, and the torn-apart remains of two more, each ripped in half, as though they were made out of paper. They found the camp seats that the girls had made—each hand-stitched with thick leather threading and embroidered with each girl’s name.
What did not make the official report, and what I only learned much later, was that each girl had in her knapsack a small diary. The diaries had, originally, been a troop project, to be used toward their badges in book binding and literary arts. Each girl had become, for a few months at least, a faithful diarist, neatly inscribing the date and an explanation of the day’s events in small, conscientious handwriting. The entries began in December 1956 and continued until—in every single diary—May 14, 1957. After that, the girls did not write anything down. Instead, they drew dragons. Big dragons, tiny dragons. Dragons destroying skyscrapers and dragons swimming with whales and dragons dancing on the head of a pin and dragons skidding down one arm of the Milky Way. Dragons in school desks. Dragons in cars. Dragons doing dishes. Dragons downing missiles. Dragons laying waste to armies or governments or home economics classrooms. There were no words. No explanations. No statements of intent. Just dragons.
No ever one knew for sure what happened to those girls. There were speculations, of course. But the people who did speculate were roundly criticized. Accused of speaking ill of the dead. Or of falling into the clutches of negative thinking. Some even lost their jobs. The Mass Dragoning was history, after all, and everyone was done with that business. It was so much easier to say that the girls had simply vanished.