When Women Were Dragons(73)
I felt dizzy. I sank onto my heels and the phone cord pulled tight. “I’m not sure what you expect me to do.”
He sighed. “Don’t go out after dark,” he said. “And stay away from that library lady. She has a history that you can’t even fathom. I hear even J. Edgar Hoover is scared of her.”
“No one is afraid of little old ladies, Dad. Don’t be absurd.”
“You’re so na?ve. Listen to your father. Listen to your teachers. Don’t talk to strangers. I won’t always be here to protect you, you know.”
I bit my lip. He wasn’t protecting us. Did he know he was lying, or did he think I wouldn’t notice? I wasn’t sure it mattered either way. Still, he was paying for our apartment until August, and the groceries still came every Saturday and I had my allowance arriving like clockwork at the bank, and I wasn’t about to gamble with that money. “Okay, Dad,” I said.
“I’m glad we had this talk, Alexandra.”
“It’s Alex,” I said. And I hung up.
Could they come back? From a scientific perspective, the answer is obvious. It is not unusual for an organism to return to the ground of its making, as is the case for the northwestern salmon, or to the place of its transformation, as is the case for the horned toad. Why should it not be so with dragons? That we have not seen a mass return of the mass dragoned gives us no indication as to whether we will. Indeed, it is from folklore, and its oblique—and often fearful—relitigating of the stories of its dragoned daughters from long ago, that we can glean that sometimes they certainly did return. Were the battling dragons in the deep reaches of Uther’s castle merely a misinterpretation of a couple of bickering aunts? I tend to think that perhaps they were. Was the dragon Vishap, living for decades on the top of Mount Ararat with her brood of children (both dragon and human), merely a kindly mother and foster mother, making a home for her heart’s beloveds? It is difficult to say. But as I conclude this paper, I must offer a note of caution to my colleagues, to my superiors, to the United States Congress, and to my country: It serves no one to close our eyes and stop our thinking. There is so much that we do not yet understand, and there is a great deal of work to do. When faced with the collective trauma and grief and fear that gripped this nation as we watched thousands of women step out of their very skins and transform into creatures of tooth and claw, of heat and violence, there was an inexorable pressure to simply look away and refuse to speak of what happened and forget. Forgetting was frankly easier. But without questions, there can be no knowledge. What does the river do when the salmon returns? Does it dam itself up and bar any entrance? What does the tree do when the butterfly returns to the leaf where it once was egg, once was larva, once was chrysalis? Does it quake in fear, or does it welcome its wanderer with open arms? So what should a town do when the mother who once escaped into the sky, in a scream of rage and fire, decides to return? What should this nation do if they all come home?
—“A Brief History of Dragons” by Professor H. N. Gantz, MD, PhD
29.
The morning of March 23, 1964, began like any other day: with Beatrice pouncing on my bed wrestling me awake until we both fell on the floor.
“You’re late! You’re late! You’re late!” she sang. Loudly. I held my finger up to my lips to remind her that we needed to keep it down. It was only five in the morning, and the walls of our apartment were thin.
“Late for what?” I yawned.
“The day!” Beatrice crowed. “You’re late for the day!” She spun about the room.
I rubbed my face. Five was as good a time to start as any. I wasn’t done with two of my problem sets, and I needed to mail them in by Friday.
“Fine,” I said. “Put your uniform on and wash your face. I’ll make breakfast.”
After eggs and toast and instant coffee for me, I slipped an art smock over her school uniform and set her to work at her art table while I completed my physics homework.
Outside, a siren sounded. I made myself a third cup of coffee and finished my work and affixed stamps to the envelope and readied myself for school.
Beatrice pressed her face against the window. The sky was red and gold. “Today’s the day!” she called to the world. “Today’s the day!”
“What are you even talking about,” I said absently as I hunted for a clean pair of socks. Beatrice wouldn’t say.
Outside, the claws of winter were only just starting to recede. Snow piles, once looming along each sidewalk like trembling mountain passes on the brink of avalanche, were now collapsing into great dark puddles that pooled on every street. We all wore heavy galoshes to and from school, slipping into flats as soon as we arrived. I walked my bicycle as Beatrice skipped to school. “Today’s the day! Today’s the day!” she sang at the top of her lungs.
I was starting to get annoyed. We arrived at her school. I crouched down to rebuckle her boots and resnap the barrettes securing her hair above each temple. This was a futile gesture. She would be a rat’s nest by noon.
“I’m so happy.” She hugged me tight. “I love you so much, Alex. What a good day it is!” She lifted her face to the sky, then skipped up the stairs and went into the building without looking back.
“Weirdo,” I said, smiling in spite of myself and feeling my breath suddenly catch. I loved her so much. And every once in a while, the immediacy of that love would catch me off guard and knock me flat. Whatever happened when I graduated, I told myself, it was me and Beatrice. Me and Beatrice against the world.