When Women Were Dragons(16)

8.

We lived in a town in Wisconsin that was about a two-hour drive from Milwaukee. The men on my block worked in the paper factory or they worked in the glass factory or they worked for one of the small fabricators producing particular objects that would eventually get fitted into cars or airplanes or trains. My father worked for the bank. Once upon a time, my mother did too, but then she got married—which, my father often said, was the whole point.

Except that it wasn’t. Even then I knew that it wasn’t. I had watched how my aunt became, somehow, less of herself after she got married. Lines of frustration dug into her face. She was pale and distracted. She worked harder than she did before, and longer hours, because now she had more mouths to feed, and one of those mouths seemed hell-bent on drinking the three of them into poverty. Her marriage gave her the gift of Beatrice, but not much else.

My parents stopped going to church after my aunt . . . well. After my aunt ceased to exist. They never applied for the assistance from the Lost Mothers Fund, because that would require them to admit that she existed in the first place. They asked their church to refrain from saying Auntie Marla’s name in their yearly Mass with the Litany of the Missing Mothers, but the church refused to comply. Marla was a member of the parish, after all. Her name remained on the list, and so my mother walked out and vowed to never return. For the rest of the spring and all of that summer, Sundays became a day of stasis. We made no plans; we spoke little; even the house seemed to hold its breath. It hadn’t occurred to me before that they only attended Mass at my aunt’s insistence. One would think it would be the other way around. But without my aunt, my mother had no reason to require that the family rouse themselves early on a Sunday and make themselves presentable, and without my mother’s requiring, my father was happy to sit in the backyard and silently read his paper.

We were still members of the parish, officially. I still attended the parochial school, and my mother still went to the Junior League meetings in the church basement, and still showed up to prepare soup for the poor and frozen meals for the shut-ins. She still provided her famously beautiful hand-knotted lace for the Christmas auction. But Mass she could not abide. Not without—

Well. No one could say.

Besides, as a family we were adjusting to our new addition, while pretending that we had no addition and therefore needed no adjusting. We were adjusting to the loss of my aunt while also pretending that I had no aunt. This sort of thing gets exhausting after a while.

And while my mother was busy not saying and not explaining, I was harboring secrets of my own.



Three days prior to the chaos of the dragoning, my aunt came over for dinner for what would be the last time. Beatrice and my uncle came with her. Before Beatrice was my sister.

(What am I saying? Beatrice has always been my sister. She was never not my sister. You see? It is so, so easy to lie. Sometimes, it’s difficult to stop.)

On this particular evening, it was getting late, and my father and uncle had gone outside to smoke cigars. It was April, but the nights were still quite chilly and damp. They put on their wool jackets with thick scarves and gripped their cigars. They shivered as they guffawed in the dark.

My mother did the dishes. My mother was always doing the dishes. Beatrice was asleep in the portable bassinette set up in the living room. My aunt usually didn’t help my mother with the dishes because my mother was constantly admonishing her for doing it wrong.

“How about I get this child ready for bed. That way you can sit down and have a nightcap when you’re done,” my aunt said.

My mother didn’t reply. She just banged the pots. My aunt took that as a yes. Before we went upstairs, she grabbed her bag, a heavy canvas equipment bag from her Women Airforce Service Pilots days. She slung the strap over her shoulder and followed me up the stairs. She sat silently on the end of my bed while I slipped into my nightgown and brushed my teeth and washed my face. She paged through my notebooks (mostly math problems and pictures of spaceships copied from the comic books that the boys from school read avidly, but that I was not allowed to have for reasons I did not understand). She examined the structures I had made with Popsicle sticks and glue (bridges and castles and a trebuchet), and noted the bin full of discarded dolls shoved off in a corner. I knelt on the ground in front of her and she brushed and brushed my hair, holding it in her fist while she flattened the whole mane of it down my back. Even then, I wished it was short. I often asked my mom if I could have a head full of small, tight curls like my aunt, and my mom would say something about crowning glories and then I would pout.

My aunt assembled my hair into two tight braids. She stood me up and looked me in the face. We remained that way for a long time, just staring eye to eye, while she seemed to try to come up with what she wanted to say. I knew better than to start the conversation. I knew I must be seen and not heard and should never speak unless first spoken to. I was a girl who knew how to wait her turn.

Finally: “You know,” she said. She brought her hands to her face and pressed her fingers deep into the plumpness of her cheeks. “When I was a little girl, I had a secret hiding spot in my room, where I would conceal things from my mother. Nothing bad, you understand. I wasn’t a bad child. But I had things that were mine. I couldn’t show them to my mother because they were just for me. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said.

I did, though. Of course I did. I had been hiding things from my mother for a while. I learned how to pull a piece of the paneling off the inside of my closet, slide it out, hide things inside the gap between the paneling and the main wall, and then slide the panel back in place, making it look like nothing had ever been touched. I had several things hidden in there. Nothing bad. I also was not a bad child. But I kept a sketchbook in there where I drew unkind pictures of my teachers and my parents. I kept three notes written to me by a girl who no longer attended my school and were important to me in ways that I couldn’t identify, but I knew in the deepest place in my heart that my mother would not—and could not—understand. I had drawn pictures of myself—in a general’s uniform, or flying an airplane, or in a business suit, or with a horse’s body, or as a robot. These, too, felt both subversive and private for reasons that were unexplainable, but true nevertheless. I wasn’t about to show them to anyone, my aunt included. I tried to make my face blank. This always worked with my mother.