When Women Were Dragons(4)

The stranger looked at me. She smiled. Her smile sort of looked like my mother’s, but her body was all wrong, and her face was all wrong, and her hair was all wrong, and her smell was all wrong, and the wrongness of the situation felt insurmountable. My knees went wobbly and my head began to pound. I was a serious child in those days—sober and introspective and not particularly prone to crying or tantrums. But I remember a distinct burning sensation at the back of my eyes. I remember my breath turning into hiccups. I couldn’t take a single step.

The stranger smiled and swayed, and clutched my father’s left arm. He didn’t seem to notice. He turned his body slightly away and checked his watch again. Then he gave me a stern look. “Alexandra,” he said flatly. “Don’t make me ask again. Think of how your mother must feel.”

My face felt very hot.

My aunt was at my side in a moment, sweeping me upward and hoisting me onto her hip, as though I was a baby. “Kisses are better when we can all do them together,” she said. “Come on, Alex.” And without another word, she hooked one arm around the stranger’s waist and placed her cheek against the stranger’s cheek, forcing my face right into the notch between the stranger’s neck and shoulder.

I felt my mother’s breath on my scalp.

I heard my mother’s sigh caress my ear.

I ran my fingers along the roomy fabric of her floral dress and curled it into my fist.

“Oh,” I said, my voice more breath than sound, and I wrapped one arm around the back of the stranger’s neck. I don’t remember crying. I do remember my mother’s scarf and collar and skin becoming wet. I remember the taste of salt.

“Well, that’s my cue,” my father said. “Be a good girl, Alexandra.” He extended the sharp point of his chin. “Marla,” he nodded at my aunt. “Make sure she lies down,” he added. He didn’t say anything to the stranger. My mother, I mean. He didn’t say anything to my mother. Maybe we were all strangers now.

After that day, Auntie Marla continued to come by the house early each morning and stay long after my father came home from work, only returning to her own home after the nighttime dishes were done and the floors were swept and my mother and father were in bed. She cooked and managed and played with me during my mother’s endless afternoon lie-downs. She ran the house, and only went to her job at the mechanic’s shop on Saturdays, though this made my father cross, as he had no idea what to do with me, or my mother, for a whole day by himself.

“Rent isn’t free, after all,” she reminded him as my father sat petulantly in his favorite chair.

During the rest of the week, Auntie Marla was the pillar that held up the roof of my family’s life. She said she was happy to do it. She said that the only thing worth doing was helping her sister heal. She said it was her favorite of all possible jobs. And I think this must have been so.

My mother, meanwhile, moved through the house like a ghost. Prior to her disappearance, she was small and light and delicate. Tiny feet. Tiny features. Long and fragile hands, like blades of grass tied up with ribbon. When she returned, she was, impossibly, even lighter and more fragile. She was like the discarded husk of a cricket after it outgrows itself. No one mentioned this. It was unmentionable. Her face was as pale as clouds, except the storm-dark skin around her eyes. She tired easily and slept much.

My aunt made sure she had pressed skirts to wear. And starched gloves. And polished shoes. And smart tops. She made sure there were belts properly sized to cinch her roomy clothing to her tiny frame. Once the bald spots began to disappear and my mother’s hair returned, Marla arranged for the hairdresser to come by the house, and later the Avon lady. She painted my mother’s nails and praised her when she ate and often reminded her that she was looking so much like herself. I wondered at this. I didn’t know who else my mother would look like. I wanted to question it. But had no words to form such a question.

Auntie Marla, during this time, became my mother in opposite. She was tall, broad shouldered, and took a wide stance. She could lift heavy objects that my father could not. I never once saw her in a skirt. Or a pair of pumps. She wore trousers belted high and stomped about in her military-issued boots. Sometimes she put on a man’s hat, which she wore at an angle over her pinned curls, which she always kept short. She wore dark red lipstick, which my mother found shocking, but she kept her fingernails trimmed, blunt, and unpainted, like a man’s, which my mother also found shocking.

My aunt, once upon a time, flew planes—first in the Air Transport Auxiliary, and then in the Women’s Army Corps, and then briefly in the Women Airforce Service Pilots during the first part of the war until they grounded her for reasons that I was never told, and had her fixing engines instead. And she was good at fixing engines. Everyone wanted her help. She left the WASP abruptly when my grandparents died, and worked as a mechanic in an auto repair shop to support my mother through college, and then simply continued. I didn’t know this was a strange occupation for a young woman until much later. At work she spent the day bent over or slid under revving machinery, her magic hands coaxing them back to life. And I think she liked her work. But even as a little girl, I noticed the way her eyes lifted always to the sky, like someone longing for home.

I loved my aunt, but I hated her too. I was a child, after all. And I wanted my mother to make my breakfast and my mother to take me to the park and my mother to glare at my father when he was, once again, out of line. But now it was my aunt who did all those things, and I couldn’t forgive her for it. It was the first time I noticed that a person can feel opposite things at the same time.