When Women Were Dragons(91)
36.
There was no graduation that year. Really, they shouldn’t have given us our diplomas at all since we simply missed the entire last month of school. Almost a third of my graduating class disappeared. I should put that word in quotation marks. “Disappeared.” That was the official line. But they didn’t disappear. We knew exactly what happened to those girls. And for the most part, we knew exactly where each of them went.
And it wasn’t just my school. Girls across the country, once again en masse, dragoned that May. They called it the “Little Wyrming,” but only when reporters were trying to be cute. Girls as young as ten and as old as nineteen dragoned that day.
The scale of the transformations was not even close to the numbers of the Mass Dragoning of 1955. Nationwide, well under thirty thousand girls stepped out of their skins and set their teeth against the sky. Many regions had no dragonings to speak of. Instead there were concentrated pockets scattered at random across the country. Another difference: while some girls opened their wings and struck out, like their dragon mothers and aunts before them, to seek their fortunes in the oceans or the mountains or the jungles or the sky, many, many of them stayed where they were.
The girls whose families kicked them out (alas, this was common) created communes in the parks, or they took up residence in abandoned factories or barns. Most of the dragoned girls attempted to continue with their educations, and went to school as normal the following Monday, forcing their overly large bodies into the narrow gates of schoolyards, only to be stopped by police, or newly formed anti-dragon brigades, or in some cases the National Guard. School principals and head teachers did not take kindly to potentially unruly students with the ability to breathe fire. The thinking went that the risk of insubordination with dragoned students was incalculable. How on earth could they be educated when they couldn’t be subdued? principals wondered. At first, most schools took a hard line. Letters to the editor in newspapers across the nation were exclusively dragon-related for months. Tearful groups of concerned mothers of the non-dragoned went on television and demanded that their daughters be safe from any dragon influences at school. They asked for America to please think of the children.
HUMANS ONLY signs read.
Librarians, on the other hand, were far more sympathetic. And flexible. And very soon, small learning communities, geared toward the specific educational needs for recently dragoned young women, began to form in libraries around the country.
My town was one of the communities with a heavy transformation burden. The morning after prom, dragons were everywhere. In the parks. Loitering on bus benches. Sunning themselves down by the river. Or taking long strolls along country roads, before remembering suddenly that they knew how to fly. Little old ladies shooed dragons away from their rose bushes and their fruiting trees. Old men insisted that they stay off the lawn. Police officers told people to move along. But no one in an official capacity made any sort of plan as to what to do with the new dragons—most of whom were still minors. There was no consistent policy. The president of the United States, while giving an address talking about “new challenges” in vague terms, refused to even say the word dragon. But by the way he stammered, everyone could tell he was thinking it. The nation, once again, decided to carry on as though everything was normal.
Nothing was normal.
Older dragons—from the Mass Dragoning and other spontaneous transformations along the way—continued returning in larger numbers to their home grounds. Not all of them. But in significant numbers over time. Here and there. The dragons would simply arrive. There was no announcement of their arrival, and no pattern either, and yet, Mrs. Gyzinska always seemed to know when a new batch was about to show up. She had a large covered picnic area installed next to the library, and hired two former social workers (both transformed) to coordinate support and services to returning dragons. She also applied for (and received) several large grants from different foundations, which funded the creation of communal living spaces for dragons in several decommissioned factories around the Midwest. The dragons seemed to appreciate this. They weren’t there to make trouble. They stayed in the communal spaces for a little while, but then they simply got to work. Some went to family farms and helped with the planting. Others took it upon themselves to volunteer with food distribution in poor communities. Others could be found mucking along riverways, pulling out the discarded remains of industrial refuse and coaxing back the green.
“Well, I for one am not surprised,” Mrs. Gyzinska told me when she stopped by the apartment to give me my graduation present—or more of an end-of-school present. “We can’t solve our problems unless we all work together. All of us. And heavens. Do we ever have problems.”
Dragon crews showed up to repair the gym. They fixed the cars that had been overturned accidentally on prom night. They formed sewing circles in the park and donated sweaters and baby clothes and blankets to the local charity center.
“Ignore them,” city officials said, without saying who exactly people were supposed to ignore. As though by ignoring them, eventually the dragons would go away.
They didn’t go away.
Gentlemen, I am as surprised as you are to find myself called back in front of this committee, though I suspect for different reasons. I know that this is a difficult time for many of you—change is hard, after all. It is painful to let go of the things we once thought were true. We have reached, I believe, the mystic’s Cloud of Unknowing. Or Kierkegaard’s saltus fidei. His leap of faith.