When Women Were Dragons(33)

“And we are not talking about you, specifically, Mrs. Green. Of course, everyone is very proud of your accomplishments. But you see, that is part of the problem. We’ve had to stop posting the exam scores, because the boys see her loafing in class, and yet still claiming that top score, with no thought at all to their feelings. I ask you, what does one do with a girl with so little regard for others?”

“So . . . little . . . regard,” my mother said slowly, as though her words were heavy weights. My mother’s eyes seemed to widen a bit. And elongate. Or maybe I was just imagining it. She pressed her palms together, and dug her fingernails—now sharp points—into the skin on the backs of her hands.

“And then there’s this,” Sister Angelica said, her thin mouth pressed into a hard line. It was a folder filled with drawings from hours and hours of Sonja’s valiant attempts to teach me how to be a better artist. I had pictures of Sonja on the couch, and Sonja on a stool, and Sonja standing in a field of flowers, the ends of her hair winding through her fingers. Sonja dancing on the water. Sonja on the mountaintop. Sonja drifting across the sky. My drawings were unsteady and I lacked an artist’s eye. But I still drew faithfully, ardently, desperate in my need to improve, in my need to pin down something lovely and honest and true. My breath caught. I couldn’t bear to have my drawings in Sister Angelica’s hands. I couldn’t bear for anyone to see them, or worse, to touch them. Those drawings were mine in a way that nothing had been mine before, and private in a way that I could not adequately explain. I had written Sonja’s name on them, experimenting with different types of lettering, with different stylistic flares. “Sonja,” they said. “Sonja, Sonja, Sonja.”

Unconsciously, my throat made a strangled cry.

“Who,” Sister Angelica said, turning her waspish gaze toward me, “is Sonja?”



I don’t remember much of what happened in the rest of that meeting. My mind went blank. My heart went blank. The world became cloudy and diffuse. I was embarrassed and ashamed, but I wasn’t entirely sure why. I wished I was at Sonja’s house. I wished she was at my house. I wished that the two of us were on a boat, far, far away, sailing toward a more hospitable shore.

A fist landed hard on the desk, startling me into the present moment. “Young lady are you listening to me?” Mr. Alphonse barked, the folds of his neck quivering with the loudness of his voice.

I jumped. “What?” I hadn’t been listening.

Mr. Alphonse sighed. Sister Angelica’s gaze narrowed even more. And my mother’s face was as blank as the side of a mountain. I had no idea what she thought. “Just apologize,” Mr. Alphonse said. “That’s what people do when they know they’re in the wrong.”

I looked at my mother. She offered nothing. I felt my insides grow hot. Was I in the wrong? I had no idea what for. But I was a rule-following child. A dutiful child. And I hated being in trouble.

“Okay?” I said. “I’m sorry.” I felt my skin flush and my stomach turn, but I did not know why. Still, my apology seemed to satisfy my teacher and my principal. They gave each other a curt, grim nod. My mother said nothing. Instead she stood, took my hand, and we walked home.

Mrs. Everly, our neighbor, was at the house, watching Beatrice, which actually meant that she was sitting in the kitchen, smoking my father’s cigarettes and enjoying a shot of his whiskey while Beatrice listened to the radio in the living room. Before we walked up the front steps, my mother grabbed my hand and looked at me, hard in the face.

“You need to watch yourself, my girl,” she said in a low voice.

“From what?” I said. Her sudden urgency was baffling to me. I couldn’t tell if I was angry at it, or afraid, or if I wanted to cry. Perhaps it was all three at once.

My mother took in a deep breath, and composed her face. I thought for a moment that she had a slick of tears glistening at the rim of her eyes, but then she blinked, and it vanished. I wondered if I had imagined it in the first place. Finally, “There is a limit to how much we can hold, and how much we can keep in this world. It’s not a good idea to cling to the things you can’t bear to lose. That’s how we break, you see?” She folded her hands together and rested her chin on her knuckles. “Do you see?”

“Yes, Mother,” I said.

I didn’t see. But this seemed to satisfy her anyway. She turned and went inside.

Three days later, my father, at dinner, somewhere between his whiskey and rye and his final cigarette, looked up at the ceiling and did something he never did at dinner. He spoke.

“Mr. Alphonse came into the office to see me today,” he said, to no one in particular. And then he went into the den to read the rest of his newspaper.

I looked at my mother. She was very pale. But this was nothing new. She had been so pale lately.

Weeks went by and the matter dropped. Or I thought the matter had dropped. I did my best to appear more engaged at school. I still did my best on papers and homework and quizzes and tests. Sometimes, there would be a note at the bottom of papers, saying, “There is a difference between academic excellence and simply showing off,” or a variation on that theme. I did notice that it wasn’t written in my teacher’s handwriting. I couldn’t prove it, but I was pretty sure it was Mr. Alphonse.

One night near the end of October, the winds picked up and blew so hard I thought the house might blow down. The next morning was a Saturday, two days before Halloween. I ran outside to see if everything was still standing, and stood on the front steps for a minute, enjoying the brisk chill in the air, and the warm smell of damp leaves decaying slowly in the morning light. The sun was the color of an egg yolk, set on a wide, blue plate. The colored leaves had all been ripped out of the open-handed trees and cushioned the ground in great, multicolored mounds. I grabbed my jacket from the hook in the entryway and stepped into my shoes and ran to Sonja’s house to rake leaves.