When Women Were Dragons(94)
My mother’s love of the Tithonus poem confounded me while she was alive, and it confounded me when she was gone, and it continues to confound me after all these years. It never stopped me from reciting it and holding it close. The words that she whispered became the words that I whispered. I wore them uncomfortably, like a dress that fits in theory but still feels off. Does memory decay? Does it shrivel and dry up and collapse? Is it a cricket in the pocket of the goddess, alive only through the force of misplaced love? If I held on to my mother’s memory, did that mean that she was still with me? Did it see what I saw, or feel what I felt? I was a motherless girl, but my mother was with me all the time. It still wasn’t enough. I closed my eyes and smelled the smoke and listened to the paper burn. I watched it in my mind’s eye, trying to find my mother’s eye as I did so. I hoped she saw it. I hoped she saw me. I hoped my mother became larger than herself in death. Larger than a dragon. Larger than everything.
38.
I was not, by any means, a typical student at the university. First, I lived a fair distance from any student housing, on a block of old factory buildings and warehouses. We were the only residents. Second, I had a ten-year-old to raise. One whose gaze was set firmly on the sky and who daily demanded to be allowed to dragon.
“Not yet,” I said every day. “Please, not yet.” Though my emotional reaction to the notion was becoming—and I noticed it at the time—less fraught. It felt like more of a delay to the inevitable. Moreover, the distinction of corporeal form began to feel more and more arbitrary to me. Perhaps this is a function of college life: we inexorably shed ourselves of our closely held preconceived notions. Or, perhaps more likely, Beatrice was simply wearing me down. Each day I saw the look on her face as she watched a local pod of dragons make their daily flight over our heads as I walked her to school, a look of pain, and hope and longing. None of the elementary schools in the area allowed dragoned students to attend, which provided me my original excuse to delay any major transformations—her access to education was a bottom line for me, and must be protected at all costs. But how long would that be the case? There were dragons attending universities, after all. And dragons attending church. And dragons meeting friends in the park. And dragons demonstrating at the Capitol. Every day between our home and school, Beatrice saw dragons assisting tree-trimming crews or beautifying the side streets or working alongside the sanitation department.
Dragons, it seemed, were everywhere.
Not to mention the dragons who lived in our home.
Back in May, before I arrived at school, on that terrible and wonderful prom night, with flocks of newly dragoned girls tossing their dresses on the ground and joyfully taking to the sky, my aunt Marla whisked me out of the collapsing gym to safety. We landed on the sidewalk in front of my building, breathing hard. Beatrice had undone her partial dragoning, and the process exhausted her so that she sat down on the stoop and instantly went to sleep. My aunt looked at me, her eyes suddenly wild. She had just remembered something.
“Your father didn’t find out, did he?” my aunt asked urgently. The night air was choked with sirens. Dragons circled the sky. A car sped down the street and squealed out a U-turn at the sight of Marla on the sidewalk. “About the accounts?”
“What accounts?” I asked.
She pressed her paws to her mouth. “What of hers do you still have? Show me everything,” she said.
Marla explained that she had insisted my mother open an account in her own name before she got married, in my name when I was a baby, and then another one when Beatrice was a baby. All three were in a bank in Madison, out of reach from my father.
“We started it with what our parents had left for us—their savings, the dregs of their farm after the bank had its share, a measly life insurance policy—and then we both contributed, every month. Your mother had to hide it from your dad, but it wasn’t all that hard since he never paid any mind to the household accounts because he was, and I mean this very sincerely, a sexist, useless oaf. The money I kicked in, though, was nothing compared to what your mother did with it. I told you, remember? I told you she was a sorceress with numbers, and I wasn’t kidding. She made it grow just by looking at it.” Marla’s eyes brightened with tears. “We never touched a dime. She said we could use them at the right moment. I believe that moment is right now. Show me what you have.”
I went in and Marla stood outside and stretched her long neck up so that her head rested in the window. Beatrice was delighted. She could barely keep her eyes open, but still she was delighted. A dragon. A real dragon. Right here in our apartment. Well, just her head, but still. What a wonderful day.
(What do we call her? Beatrice asked before she fell asleep again.
She’s my aunt, I told her. Mother didn’t like mentioning it. It was too sad when she left. I wasn’t ready to tell Beatrice the whole story. I didn’t know when I’d be ready.)
After spending too many minutes rummaging through the haphazard folders that my father had dropped off over the years—bank crates containing birth certificates and baptismal records and the like—it finally occurred to me to open mother’s carved box. The one my father had handed to me back in March, still hidden under my bed. My hands shook as I held it on my lap. Marla’s eyes grew wide.
“Oh,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. “I made that for her. A lifetime ago.”