When Women Were Dragons(7)

3.

Looking back, I think perhaps my mother had similarly complicated feelings toward my aunt. She loved her sister. And yet. As my mother recovered, a chilliness spread between them.

“I can do it myself,” my mother said in the kitchen as my aunt kneaded the bread dough. “No need to trouble yourself,” she said in the bathroom as my aunt scrubbed the grout. She said it when my aunt tried to braid my hair or when she attempted to dust the furniture.

“I’ll take over, thank you,” she said as my aunt read me a story. She lifted my small body out of Marla’s broad lap and snatched the book away.

And when my aunt called me Alex, my mother’s eyes narrowed. “It’s Alexandra,” she said, her voice flat and final.

The room went cold. My mother held me tight. My auntie Marla’s face went strangely blank. “Of course,” she said. Her words were soft and muffled as snow. “Would you like me to see to the kitchen?”

My mother’s arms squeezed around my body like an iron vise. “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Thank you for your assistance today,” she added, as though my aunt was a troublesome employee who needed to be shown the door.

My aunt smiled, briefly and vaguely. She slid her hands into the deep pockets of her dungarees and rocked back on her heels. Her eyes flicked toward the window, briefly, and then she turned toward the door. “Of course, darling,” she said. “I can see I’m in your way. Give me a ring if you need anything.”

My mother didn’t respond. She just held me tight as she listened to my aunt’s footsteps hitting the wood floor, then the tile of the entryway. She flinched as the front door swung firmly shut.

Auntie Marla returned the next day, and the next, but even I could tell that something had changed. A storm lingered at the edge of the sky, biding its time.

My mother’s color came back and her strength returned—in dribs and drabs at first, and then as a flood. Her hair once again shone. And her patience with my aunt grew more and more thin. Auntie Marla was prone to saying shocking things from time to time. I didn’t understand what she meant or why it was shocking, but I did notice that the things she said often made my mother’s face turn red. Also, my aunt frequently mentioned my mother’s life—her work, particularly—from before she got married. My aunt wanted to talk about it all the time. How proud she was of my mother. And when she did, her face would shine and her hands would clasp together, as though she was praying. My mother, on the other hand, became more brittle and tense and closed—like a clockwork toy, wound way too tight.

“Top of her class, your mother was, Alex,” Marla would say, in a voice like the narrator of a fairy tale. “She left everyone in the shade. A mathematics magician. An absolute—”

And then my mother would leave the room, closing her bedroom door with a definitive slap.

Finally, after months of simmering frustration, the voices of my mother and my aunt boiled over. Dishes clattered and a jar splintered in the sink and an open hand cracked against a soft cheek. My mother grunted with frustration. My aunt cried for a single second and the room went terribly still. I hid under the table. I put my hands over my ears. I still remember everything.

Specifically, this: Just before the front door flew open and my aunt stomped outside, my mother paused on the front stoop. She called to her sister’s retreating figure, “Come back when you choose a normal life. Get a husband. Have a child. Maybe then we can be friends again.”

My aunt didn’t turn around. I saw her chest expand, hold, and slowly contract. She tilted her face to the sky. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The house was silent after my aunt left. For a long time. My mother gave me a stack of paper to draw on and she again retreated to her room.

And while my aunt did not set foot in our house for two years after that, she still accompanied us to church. Marla and my mother sat on opposite sides of my father and me, like bookends—my mother in embroidered dresses, and my aunt in loose-fitting woolen slacks and a blouse that opened at her throat. She was the only woman in slacks in church—which would have been shocking at the time, and probably not allowed in most churches, for most women—but my aunt had a way about her that made people think that whatever she did was perfectly fine. People besides my mother, that is. After all, most women didn’t fly planes or work in auto repair shops, but she did both of those quite well, and then once they thought about it that way, no one really cared about the pants. Both Marla and my mother wore the matching veils that my grandmother had given them before she died—hand-knotted lace, with complex and beautifully wrought patterns, curling around each of their faces, attached to their hair with bobby pins. Every Sunday, all through Mass, the two sisters gave each other sidelong glances, as though each daring the other to say something.

Eventually, my aunt did exactly what my mother wanted. She got married. To a shiftless drunk. I was only six, and even I knew it was a terrible idea—primarily because I overheard everyone say so. Still. She was a wife now. And, true to her word, my mother and aunt were friends again. Sort of.

They didn’t mention the argument. They didn’t mention the long separation and silence. They became brisk with one another. Brittle. Vague smiles painted on their faces like the hardened gaze of porcelain dolls. They didn’t mention this either.