Snail Silk
The Story of Nora

Bette Bottger Simons

Eventually we had to move from Abbott Street in Highland Park to a house in Maywood. My grandfather needed a workshop in the new place, so he would build it attached to the garage, and add a little playhouse for Jewel and I onto it as well.

My maternal grandfather was a Christian Scientist who became convinced of what he thought were Mary Baker Eddy’s truths, during World War 1. Perhaps it saved his sanity. That was a war of hand to hand combat. My mother’s family album has postcard after postcard from my grandfather, a decorated cavalry officer. He is in a place of rest and recreation in Hamburg.

He writes to my mother: “My dearest Hildegard..”. in writing that ice skates in fancy circles.

Paul Kirberg’s second wife Clara said he was a sick man because he had been gassed in the war, but my sister and I remember him as large, smiling-- and often praying.

When I fell and broke the glass with my hand that day, my grandfather poured vinegar on the finger where my cuticle was cut and hanging with a piece of flesh. He just cut it off. That and a lot of prayers was the best he could do. I have worn a big writing bump next to the fingernail of this middle finger with the lopsided moon. We Spartans have much to write about after the prayers wear off.

Dear Mutti,

The grey backseat of our car
looks like mouse skin
But it prickles my legs
And Jewel says I get on her side
We are in the gas station

After this gasoline goes in the car
Grossvatti says he will buy ice cream
There will be Sunday funnies at home
Jewel can read them
I like it best when that Sunday school
is finished!
 

My sister and I made and invisible line down the back seat of the old Chevy we rode in when Sunday outings seemed endless and whatever grownups found so interesting, looking out the window, escaped us. We were looking out for our territory and came up with “Don’t cross the line.”

These were the days when it was “not nice” to fight or say “bad things,” so we negotiated in silence, my sister who was two years older, dictating the terms. Often we jerked up quickly because our grandfather would start reciting, “ The lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...” or “Our father, who art in heaven...” We were supposed to join in.

I’ve forgotten many phone numbers over the years, but I have never forgotten those prayers.
 

Dear Mutti,

I don’t ever step on cracks
It breaks your mother’s back
Once I slipped

Grossvatti...
mine stomach so heavy
way at the bottom

I was a bad girl
maybe that’s why he did that
the policeman came
Grossmutti cried and cried
Shot in temple he said
I don’t remember this
We are going somewhere else

Once they left
they went to San Francisco
Jewel wouldn’t play with me
so mean
I said, I will kill myself
I took the knife out of the
kitchen drawer and Jewel
she grabbed it
my hand cut all along the fingers
grossvatti sharpens knives
I am the bad one

Jewel got towels
then she was nice to me

Once we had shots at school
I vomited
and Mrs. Dunkley came over
she gave me soup
Grossvatti and grossmutti
were downtown
I got vomit on the rug
so slimy
couldn’t clean it up
Mrs. Dunkley helped.

She’s our neighborlady
I don’t feel like bad girl
with Mrs. Dunkley

But Grossvatti is not coming back
He’s dead
Can you see him?

I think Grossvatti is fat
Fatti is skinny
Fat and Skinny
I hate them
That’s why I am so bad
I cry and cry

The social worker who drove us to the Masonic Home for Children, wrote in the report that went into our files that we were two quiet and polite little girls.

We had been living in a house in Maywood that my grandfather’s wife owned from her first marriage to an elderly man. Our Highland Park home, the one my grandfather had built on a corner of land he bought from a Christian Scientist neighbor, had been repossessed by the sheriff. Paul Kirberg had recorded meticulously all the payments he made for the property and morally owned it, but when the neighbor needed money and asked him for $400, more to clear the title for him, some German stubbornness parading like black boots of honor made him refuse to the point of losing the house and the property. The sheriff removed my proud grandfather from his home, and we moved to Maywood. About a year later, Paul Kirberg went back to his Highland Park home and used his army gun to honorably put a bullet in his temple. Maybe we were told this, but we forgot it and didn’t bring it back into our lives until a girl in the home once broke into the office where the our records were stored. She read everyone’s file and came back and told us all the things she learned.

Paul’s wife went back to her first husband. We went to the children’s home.

I never liked Laurel and Hardy of the movies. They looked so much like my father and grandfather to me. Men were no laughing matter at in my life.