When Women Were Dragons(11)

Mrs. Donahue provided no narrative. Instead, she stared at me for a moment. Then she spoke, each word punctuated with a rattling breath: “Everything, is, just, too, damn, SMALL.” Her voice was a harsh rasp. She paused, her skin starting to split, an elongating spine pushing out of the back of her dress. Her face snapped forward and she fixed her gaze on me. She smiled. “You should probably run, Doctor,” she said.

And so I did.

—“A Brief History of Dragons” by Professor H. N. Gantz, MD, PhD





5.

There is another memory that I still can’t make sense of. Even now.

It was a Friday morning in late February. Almost exactly two months before . . . well, before everything changed. I was eight. Actually, I was eight and seven twelfths, I told people, because I was a child who delighted in accuracy. I remember standing at the window, staring at the ice crystals that had written themselves onto the glass, an explosion of geometry and light. I had already finished my breakfast and had braided my hair all by myself (I was rather proud of it) and had put on my school uniform. My mother chased me outside so she could clear the breakfast dishes in peace. Or that’s what she told me. In truth, my mother just liked the quiet, an unobstructed space where she could sew or crochet or knit and listen to silence. Occasionally, I would climb up the trellis to peek on her through the window, and watch as she sat, simply tying knots, one after another, each a complex, intricate puzzle. My mother loved string. She loved how a single strand could twist and loop into infinite patterns and infinite possibilities—whole universes could be tangled in a single thread. She made diagrams of each knot in a little notebook that I was not allowed to look at by myself, with corresponding calculations and algebraic expressions that defined the ways in which each wobble, loop, twist, and elbow intersected, interplayed, and bent inside themselves. I didn’t understand how the equations worked, or what they meant. She promised she’d explain the mathematics of it to me someday.

(She didn’t, though. Of course she didn’t. Maybe she never meant to. How can I ever know what my mother meant? Even now, after all these years, she is a memory of a memory of a memory—her own kind of unsolvable, inscrutable knot.)

I didn’t have to leave for school for another hour. Normally, this would be my time to sit with my father (usually in silence, as my father read the paper and I read one of my books. We typically interacted best when we didn’t speak. This remained true as I got older), but my father was away on a business trip. I noticed the way my mother’s lower lip trembled when she said that. I knew better than to ask why.

I had thick woolen mittens that my mother had knitted for me, each painstakingly patterned with her knotwork on the back. In addition to the knots in her craft basket and the knots on my mittens, our whole house was full of lace curtains that she crocheted, and hand-knotted runners on the end tables and sashes on the sofas. She even had special knots that she would slip into my pockets. A knot for safety. A knot for luck. A knot for knowledge. A knot to prevent change. Sometimes, she said that knots were magic. Sometimes, she said they were math. More often, though, she said that both were true, the way a particle can be both matter and light and no one knows why. I thought they were just those things that moms do. Like the notes with hearts stuck in a lunch box.

My mittens were bright red, and stood in contrast to the grey ice and the greyer sky. February in Wisconsin can be like that—a day of warmth will decrease the snowpack, and send melting snow washing into the streets and sidewalks, and then is followed by a frigid blast which encases the world in ice. Partially melted snow piles transform into hard, grey lumps, and the sky becomes dismal. I carefully made my way down the front stairs. My mother had lined my yellow rubber boots with several layers of felted wool, but they were still too big for me—a hand-me-down from another kid in the neighborhood. My feet slid with every step. I let go of the railing and let myself glide down the icy walkway. I spun and glided back.

I would have done that all day, pushing and gliding and balancing and spinning, but an old Ford rumbled down the street and parked in front of my house. My heart lifted. That car had my aunt in it. And with her, Beatrice. Two days a week Beatrice spent the day with my mother, and she spent the other three with a babysitter. I treasured our Beatrice days, seeing her face in the fleeting moments before school, and playing with her all afternoon when I returned home. There was more light and sound and joy in my home when Beatrice was there. I threw open my arms and spun madly on the ice, hoping that Beatrice would notice. She was at this time exactly nine and a half months old. I had a calendar in my room whose only purpose was to mark the weeks since Beatrice’s birth and a chart that documented the things Beatrice could do now, along with her changing preferences and dislikes. I was an expert on my baby cousin.

My aunt emerged from the car, the baby on her hip, and a cigarette dangling from her mouth. That was not unusual. She had always smoked, but since the birth of the baby, she smoked even more. I would have asked my mother about it, but I assumed it would be unmentionable.

“Hi!” I said, waving madly. Beatrice squealed back, her feet kicking in her bright red woolen snowsuit that my mother had made. It, too, had complicated knotwork stitched along the sides.

My aunt lifted her gaze to the sky. “Where’s your mother,” she said, her words heavy with smoke. Her face was grey and her eyes were smudged and puffy. She hitched up her shoulders and rotated them back as she stretched her neck, curling her fingers briefly beneath the base of the skull and pressing into the muscle, as though it hurt.