book

Snail Silk: The Story of Nora 8

Bette Bottger Simons

You can view Chapters One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven of this serialised and previously unpublished book before you read Chapter Eight. – Eds

Upstairs

Dear Mother,

I’m upstairs at last, in the Intermediate Girl’s Department. I’m in the Pink Room. Patsy, Pearl, Jackie, Donna and I.

I slide down the banister to the Junior Boys Department. They gave Mrs. Gradler lots of little Boys, so it’s not the Junior Girls Department anymore. I’m not in the honor room anymore, I’m upstairs. Here’s how we go down the banister. When Mrs. Gradler isn’t looking, I put my hand on my dress in front and in back then zip once, zip twice and jump off on the floor. I won’t fall. It’s four floors down. You get a hole in your stomach if you look to the basement.

Miss Babcock we can call Miss Linny, but I call her Miss Babcock. She keeps a string across the open door of her room. It’s to keep us out because we would just go in all the time otherwise. She made this string by braiding eency weensy braids.

Then she waxes it. It’s very strong. I almost choked myself two times now because I started to run in. I pretended it didn’t hurt. I hope no one saw me. She likes her privacy.

Miss Linny is very flat and tall. She’s very old but her hair is black and thin as spider webs. She wears a hairnet I think.

Her dresses are dark blue bumpy silk. Crepe. They call this crepe. She has a V-neck lace collar for each one. I think they are pretty.

Miss Linny has a chart she keeps on the bulletin board outside her room. It’s high up, but you can see if you got a “minus” or an “F” for not doing your work. I get all “pluses” so I get to go to the movie in town on Sunday.

If you get bad marks, you can “work them off” on Saturday. That’s when we vacuum and wax.

Oh mother, there’s so much to tell you. She teaches us embroidery and how to make a punch pillow. You have a needle machine with yarn in it and punch through cloth. We can make them for Christmas presents. I'll make one for Mr. and Mrs. Dunkley, they take us to their house in Maywood sometimes. We get to call them Mommie and Daddy.

But here in the Intermediate girls, we have a book club on Sunday nights. Mr. Downen comes and sits and listens. He always looks mad but he’s really not. We give book reports on articles from Wee Wisdom magazine and things like that. There’s always a report on good manners. Then we get to serve refreshments. We have 1/2 of a Mars Bar. They are like little chocolate suitcases and inside a layer of caramel stuffed with peanuts, neat and straight across the soft white pillow part. We chew and crunch.

Miss Linny never eats one. She is so skinny. Afterwards, she says to brush our teeth. “You can fool me but you can’t fool the germs”, she says.

Oh yes, I take piano lessons ! Miss Lyle comes Wednesdays.

She wears a camel coat. I just love a camel coat. She wears lipstick and it really shines. She goes to USC. It’s a college somewhere far away.

I can practice my lessons two banisters up on the roof floor, or four banisters down, in the music room.

The music room has a stage, and a harp, but no one is supposed to touch it.

The upstairs piano? Outside the door where it is, we can be on the roof of the building and there is a wall all around. Over the wall is a ledge like a sidewalk.

No one knows if you stand on it. You can see the rows and rows of orange trees from there and the other buildings. It makes my stomach get so tight.

Mrs. Gradler is out of sight now. I’m an Intermediate Girl.

Love,
Betty Bottger,
5th grade Intermediate Girls

* * *

Dear Mother,

Irene is in my class. She is my roommate . We are upstairs in the Intermediate Girls. She has green eyes and freckles. She has a big sister like I do. They are in the Senior Girl’s building. She cries to see her sister. I never see Jewel here. I don’t cry about it. Irene has a baby sister too. That baby stays with her mother. Irene puts the picture under her pillow each night. It is wrinkled and she cries about it. Now I cry too, about grandfather because he died and I came here. I never cry about you, but I have your picture with my father on my dresser. You smile and wear that dress with fur like Christmas tree tinsel around the neck and sleeves and skirt. At least that’s what it looks like. My father stands over you with his hand on your shoulder. Irene’s father is dead. He had T.B.

I think Paul likes Irene. She gets in trouble with Miss Linny. She is in my grade at school. Everyone says Bobby Hopkins loves me. I can’t stand it. My cheeks get so red and I just don’t talk. Irene waits for Paul to talk to her at our window, in the Intermediate Girl’s building. She is a good reader and she has good handwriting, but Miss Linny gives her lots of minuses.

Love, Betty

* * *

I was nine years old before I got my first friend. Irene and I were immediately paired because we were in the same grade. She was smarter, but I was taller. She was always in trouble. I was always good. She sang on key. I sang off key. She could fight. I could mope. She played piano by ear. I played by note. I practiced and got praised. She didn’t practice and made music we all loved. She saved her church donation money for ice cream. I put mine in the collection plate.

When we were in high school, she ran to the lunch line and got us a place right away. She bought us a mint bar and a Baby Ruth every day. She got us fat. If I rejected her to follow my big sister around in high school, she hung around with someone else, until I was ready again. I don’t know why she stuck with me, she was full of life and mischief.

Irene had high cheekbones, a straight nose, and dark elegant eyebrows over her clear green eyes. She was beautiful and didn’t know it. We spent much of our time together not talking to each other because of some offense. I would go to college, she didn’t know what she would do.

I was cruel to her in my righteous superiority. I never did anything to warrant her friendship, maybe I didn’t want to depend on it, I had done without a friend for a long time. Maybe she saw me as vulnerable and protected me. I took strength from her in a way that seems unkindly now. Life had toughened her. It made me selfish. But then I am a Taurus.

Sherman Oaks, 1991

* * *

Dear Mother,

Once I counted all the women who took your place raising me. There were eleven of them, and only a few of them had ever had their own children. Celinda E. Babcock was my favorite spinster mother.

We never called her “Miss Linny”, but we knew that other girls before us had. It sounded relaxed and affectionate. Our group of girls had come up the cold cement stairs from Mrs. Gradler’s and we had to establish our own ties with her.

Our first tie was that braided and waxed string C.E. Babcock kept across the doorway of her room in the Intermediate Girl’s Department. It wasn’t there because she didn’t care for us, but because she wanted some small moments of peace from our continual intrusion into her little room with its high single bed, that had the black metal frame we all had. She did have the luxury of an ornate bureau and a mahogany desk with a glass book case above it.

She could not close her door because she had to supervise us, so the string, which all of us innocently dashed into and hung ourselves on more than once, served to remind us that fragile Miss Linny could get exasperated.

She had no bathroom of her own but claimed one toilet stall and one tub for herself. The toilet stalls, with their marble walls and wooden doors were high off the white tile floor. We girls were merciless about her privacy when the metal tongue blade latch fell into place. Worse yet, she shared with a little cubicle for her bathroom articles among our cubicles. We loved seeing her take out her teeth, as her tall thin frame bent furtively over the low wash basin.

Miss C.E. Babcock must have been close to 70 when we girls arrived. She was a flat woman with soft black hair, held to her head with a net that edged onto her forehead a bit as the day wore on.

She had round gold rimmed glasses. Though she was very thin, we often caught sight of a corset in her closet.

She was kindly and strict, a woman of endless rules to tame the active agile girls that wiggled and squirmed in those rooms that never stayed neat enough or clean enough for her.

We knew this because she had developed a system of grades for our performance of tasks. We had “minuses”, “Fs”, “Ps"and “Qs”, and got rewards or more work accordingly. Celinda Babcock was never far from us girls, in spite of the waxed string. On her day off, she took the long ride on the street car that ran through our little town. It was called the red car. She traveled to Hollywood where she maintained a California Bungalow duplex for herself and her two sisters. Her personal family life always seemed like an extension of “Little Women”, though she grew up on the Prairie and told me endless stories about her life as a child there.

Miss Linny’s day off always included going to some crafts or needlework class at the Broadway, so she could come back to us with more projects we could learn to make. Under the fatal string, we would come to visit her and learn to crochet with thick, soft white cotton string, or punch yarns into a frame to create a picture for a pillow, or make a “shell box”, or work on the embroidery of a tablecloth.

Each item was suitable for a Christmas present for whatever relative we might have. A major piece was always created for Mr. and Mrs. Downen, for whom she held enormous respect.

Mr. Downen made an appearance on the Intermediate Girl’s floor each Sunday night when we held “Book Club” in the living room that appeared as one came up the wide stairs to the Department. We all sat on the maple furniture that was pushed against the wall. Near the ceiling, blue stenciled Colonel men and women danced endlessly around the walls, above the glass bookcases, a few lamps and the beloved radio that leaned against the wall like a fat dwarf, waiting for less formal moments, like Miss Babcock’s day off.

We girls had prepared “book reports” from stories in magazines. We recited these in front of the circle we made on our chaird, and for Mr. Downen who came to be our “critic”. He was pompous and austere, so his comments were awesomely received, and we were grateful for the refreshments that ended the club meeting. Mars Bars in those days before the war were twice the size they were after the war.

Miss Linny had mixed feelings about our performances in the world but was unequivocal about her love of our cat, Carlos. He was enormous and probably as old for his species as she was for hers. He was unique because he had a tail that made one big curl. I loved him endlessly, though I didn’t let him out as I was supposed to.

One day in fall, while we were in school, Miss Babcock came home from her day off and picked up Carlos to take him down the stairway. She couldn’t hold onto the banister. Her shoe slipped on the cement and she fell, chipping the elbow of one of her incredibly thin arms.

Miss Linny recovered after what seemed like many weeks in our little hospital, but soon after this she retired .

For a while, we girl’s were free to slide the banisters with abandon, forget our “Ps” and “Qs” and save our necks.

Like her stiff corset, she had held us all together, giving us respectability and competence, being so faithful. We who had suffered such bad losses in our lives before had this now too.

She died in a convalescent home many years later, but each of us who knew Miss Linny have some piecework of her in us. I loved her very much. You would have liked her too because I know you sewed for us and would have taught me things.

L. Betty

* * *

Dear Mother,

I go to Bunny’s after school every day now. After I change my school clothes. Her mother is Nurse Martineau. Her grandmother sends for me. They call this lady “Mammy Yokum”. Senior boys named her that, like in the cartoon strip, Little Abner?

Mutti, Bunny is a crippled girl. She is big on top and looks ok, but her legs are like table legs. They are fat on top and skinny on the bottom. She walks rocking back and forth, sideways and Mammy Yokum and her mother say she must wear her braces. They are all metal and leather and rub her legs and scars. I rub her legs for her. She cried once, that’s why I rubbed her legs because it is so sad to be crippled. She plays the piano down in the sunroom. That’s at the end of the long hallway in the hospital. I’m so glad I don’t get sick anymore, I just come to visit Bunny and listen to Moonlight sonata. Her fingers are stiff like her legs, but I like the music anyway, even though I just have to sit and wait for her to finish practicing. They called her Bunny because she was so little when she was born. I feel so sorry for her.

Nurse Martineau stays in her room. She talks with Senior Boys I think. She smells smoky a lot.

Nurse Martineau is so pretty. She has curly hair and wears a white uniform and that stiff white cap and a pretty pin on the collar. Once I saw her in her cape. It was blue on the outside and red on the inside.

Mammy Yokum takes care of Bunny. They call for me to come an play almost every day. I can’t say no because I feel so sorry for Bunny.

Love,
Betty Bottger

* * *

Dear Mother,

We are at Balboa again. We came in a big bus. We could hardly wait to see the bridge and go over to Little Island. We were all jumping up and down about going to Balboa.

Now that I’m older, I won’t stub my little toe on the metal bunk beds. That really hurts. Once Jewel had a blood blister and she poked it with a needle and the blood squirted out. She didn’t go to the nurse’s cabin even.

I go all the time. I go to see Bunny. Mammy Yokum gives Bunny lots of money to buy candy on Big Island. She gives some to me. I try not to look like I am begging, but she seems to get all she wants.

Mother, we get a nickel each week. If you have really been good, you get a dime. When I was in Mrs. Gradler’s Department, she would give us pennies. We would line up outside her cottage and she would sit in her chair and stare in your face. I always looked at that skin lump in the corner of her eye, because her eyes and black eyebrows are so scary. She would say, you have not been good, so you get two cents, or three cents. My heart beat so fast, waiting in line. But then we went to the store and got licorice or a big sucker, bigger than a lager marble, grape maybe, with tootsie roll inside to squash, after licking for about an hour.

Now that I’m bigger, and have more money I can get those creamy white Aba Zabbas that squeeze out peanut butter.

We don’t just have fun with the candy. We can take out the dory. Bunny likes to look for sailors. She sees one and I row fast. We laugh and laugh. She wears a brassiere already, so does Lucy.

I learned to row from Mrs. Gradler. She would sit in the front of the boat and say “stroke, stroke”, like they do to prisoners in movies about old ships. She talks like they do in some movies. She is English. I’m not in Mrs. Gradler’s Department anymore. I chase Sailors with Bunny and Lucy.

Love,
Your former daughter

* * *

Dear Mother,

Now we have to wear shoes again, school has started. I don’t go to Bunny’s anymore. I didn’t want to go a few times and I think they got mad at me over there. Mammy Yokum stopped phoning for me to come.

I had to have some shots, for my bad breath. Mr. Downen said my breath was bad. But mother, his breath really stinks. I think he was smelling his own on my face. I don’t cry when I get a shot, but my arm gets so red and hot and swells up. Then it itches and itches. Nurse Martineau said she doesn’t know how this happens.

I really hate going to the hospital sometimes. The doctors come and we have to go and take our blouses off. I’m scared just thinking about it. This is the worst thing ever. Mr. Downen sits there by Dr. Megan. He watches us. I guess he is taking good care of us. The doctor told Irene to jump up and down so he could hear her heart better. She wears a brassiere now and had to take it off. It was really awful. Poor Irene.

On Saturdays, the dentist comes. When I was really little I had so many cavities. The dentist drills into the tooth and then there is this sharp thin dagger in the center of it. Even when I was little, I kept my mouth open and didn’t cry. I make a noise and Nurse Martineau who was always there, thought I was cute. She and the dentist said I was a good patient. They laugh and listen to the baseball game together, while we keep our mouths open, waiting for the drill to hit that screeching place. Kids say that some dentists give you laughing gas or morphine or something so you can’t feel it, but our dentist doesn’t bring that with him when he comes.

We have different jobs to do when we get home from school. I worked in the Hospital kitchen a lot. There’s nothing to do there, but Mammy Yokum sends for me a lot. I think she made a mistake on the money that she is supposed to put into my account too. But I don’t say anything.

Donna hangs around with Bunny now. Irene and I hang around.

Love,
Betty

* * *

Dear Mother,

This church has a deep tank

On the stage where the minister bores us
He wanted me and the others to do it
Put on that white gauze gown, there,

In front of all the people

Going under water would be nothing
His other girls afraid of that

But the wet gown
The staring

My red cheeks

They talk about hypocrites in this church
The rows of spread legged ladies

With purple hair

Hunkered over their hymn books
Well

They did not get me in their tin tub

The minister in the white shoes and baby blue suit
He came asking for me at our home

Where is this red cheeked girl I want to baptize
In my big tub?

Gone to the Episcopalians she is
But If I had done it

Would his baby blue suit cling to him
Afterwards

Would his shoes squeak ?
I got away dry

* * *

One year they told us that our Sunday services in the little music room in the basement were over. There would be no more staring at the little stage with it’s silent harp, the chest of old music, and us girls, singing Up From The Grave he arose, He Walked In The Garden Alone, or the Doxology.

Those mornings were the one time Mrs. Gradler from the downstairs and Miss Babcock from the upstairs met, with their groups of girls who had prepared the music and the readings. Betty from upstairs played the piano by ear.

Mrs. Gradler, left Belinda the dog in her room, took off her smock and kept her temper in control for the hour.

Miss Babcock wore a special one of her lace collars fixed on her dark crepe cress. She was tall, thin and tight lipped, her soft fine hair, still under the hair net.

Mrs Gradler was short wide and full bosomed. With her thick graying hair in a large bun at her neck.

My grandfather had been full and my father thin, like Laurel and Hardy. I never thought those comedians were funny. These two women didn’t make me laugh either. Parents were serious business in my life.

So with the ending of our basement Sunday services, we could chose which church we would attend in the town of Covina each Sunday. Who among the fat and thin of my big group of mothers and fathers would guide me?

I got off the bus with a few of us girls at the Christian Church. And stayed there for a time until we learned of Baptism.

When we defected to the Episcopal church, the young minister of the Christian Church, visited the home a few times, to get his potential converts back into the flock, but we were free to choose-church and parents. I also choose Miss Babcock. She liked cats.

* * *　

Dear Mother,

I’m the War Stamp girl. I go to each room in my elementary school and ask, “Who wants to buy War Stamps today? Please help win the war.”

Some children may have money. I’m in the 8th grade room and Mrs. Borden goes to her purse in her desk drawer. I watch her pink nails as she open up her purse to buy $2.00 worth of stamps. I tear them off carefully. But it’s the cafeteria that’s the most fun. I walk there in my brown oxfords and the green print dress that I have sewn myself.

When I was in seventh grade Miss Mauer taught us sewing. She will be in the cafeteria making the brown bread, kneading the large soft cushion of dough. She wears her hair in braids across the top of her head, like I do. Her chunky body is covered with her clean white apron.

"Please buy some War Stamps. Help win the war.” I say, in her yeasty domain. She smiles patiently, stops her work to wipe her hands and go to her black leather purse. Mrs. Mauer’s family is German, like mine was. She buys $3.00 worth of stamps. She always does. She has a brother in the war.

I half hate her stocky legs and sturdy shoes. She is without any curls, like Mrs. Bordan, but she never chases us away at recess when we come to watch her, sitting at her table with our chins on our fists. She spreads thick peanut butter on the new grainy bread she has made, creating great stacks of sandwiches for lunch. She is the cook, the sewing and cooking class teacher and the 5th grade teacher in the afternoon, at our small country school. I am the 8th grade girl who sells the War Stamps, though I have never purchased any myself.

Love and V for Victory

* * *

I remember when I first heard the war had started. I was sitting in Florence’s living room in Maywood. She and Craig were like foster parents to my sister and me. They would take us from the children's Home where we lived, to stay with them for the weekend, every six months or so. Florence kept peanuts and square caramels in candy dishes in her living room. I sat in her prickly plush arm chair which was as big as a bear. I ate and ate her candy and peanuts. The wooden radio stood importantly on the floor, bigger than a tombstone. The war was announced. I knew something important had happened that would make be very serious but I continued to munch the peanuts and glue my teeth together with the caramels.

That summer Bunny said, “Let’s go look for sailors”. We giggled excitedly and rowed around Balboa island, looking for sailors.

It was many years before the true seriousness of the war came to me. I was in my thirties and I had small children. One afternoon the tv showed me pictures of the opening of the concentration camps. I sank to the floor in horror and dismay and for the first time cried in anguish over the war.

* * *

Dear Mother,

Miss Lyle wears a camel hair coat, a belted one. She sits at the side of the piano when I take my lesson. She is so elegant. I feel kind of clumsy in front of her, if I’m dusty from the playground. We have our piano lessons on Saturday morning. Sometimes I miss it because Irene and I get to go horseback riding with a girl at school. I feel badly, but it is really fun to go horseback riding. This girl’s mother takes us to stables where we get to let the horses run!

Miss Lyle has given me Mozart’s Sonata in C major. It is so beautiful. I just love it when she will play a little bit for me. I would rather watch her than play. I practice every day. Irene hardly even practices and she’s better than I am. Irene plays the Moonlight Sonata.

Miss Lyle is a student at USC. It’s some famous place far away from the home and our orange groves. Her lipstick sparkles. Her dark brown hair is shiny too.

She has fingernail polish on. I love to watch the way she touches the music. When she plays the piano, her fingers make the keys seem like silken white bars, giving off beautiful sounds.

I can’t think of anyone here who wears lipstick. She smells like leather. She has a purse that goes over her shoulder. Sometimes I think she wears perfume. Of course she wears hose and heels.

I think I’m going to be a piano teacher like Miss Lyle when I grow up.

Love,
Betty Bottger

* * *

Eventually Miss Lyle left us. She was engaged. I would never see him, only imagine him. I never finished the last movement of the sonata in C or that last part of my life. How could I become piano teacher if I couldn’t look at Miss Lyle, out of the corner of my eye each week.

My next teacher was a middle aged woman who lived in the town. In spite of fingers that bent were bent with arthritis from the joint before the fingernails, she was able to play the piano. I watched her in horror and fascination.

While Miss Lyle had waited patiently for me to get to the Alla Turk movement, of the C Sonata, Mrs. Grimes offered to get me any music I wanted. I wanted ballet music. She got me Capella, but I never practiced.

She decided my sister and I should play a two piano duet, since the pianos were available. We never got along anyway, so trying to play a duet with each other was a new way of fighting.

One day we learned we would be invited to her house for a party of all her students. We would be have to play our piece and make a record of it on her recording machine. Then we practiced out of fear. I still have that awful record of the awful experience. The piece was called “Que Viva!”

Since my life as a pianist never come to fruition, being a piano teacher gradually faded from my mind. In high school I thought of being a fashion designer, but only because my sister thought of it first and I did well in art class. When the application for UCLA came, the practical thing to do was take courses for elementary teaching.

Today I love Mozart for himself. I’ve had two pianos, two camel hair coats, one husband and three careers.

My daughter played the piano beautifully. Her teacher was a man who was so enthusiastic about her level of excellence that he didn’t want to lose her as a student, when she went off to college. When she was home between semesters, he would phone to give her a piano lesson. It got so she asked me not to tell him when she was home.

She hasn’t played the piano in years.

Once in a while I finger something. In my mind it is beautiful, in reality, I am one of those people who you hope will please find the right notes during the long pauses. Miss Lyle left me and a career choice vanished. The world of music was saved. Even though I lost you so early in life, your baby grand piano stands in my living room today. When we were sent to the home for children, Florence Dunkley arranged for the instrument to be moved to her friends house. Years later, my resourceful sister, found out where this person lived and went and claimed the piano. It stayed in her house many years, and then she gave it to me. Someone told me my mother loved the song “Springtime In The Rockies.” I think of her when I am at her piano.

* * *

Dearest Mother,

Sherman Oaks, 1992

I’m trying to remember what I wore for graduation from eighth grade and elementary school. I think the ceremony was held in the Auditorium over the cafeteria. I know that’s where I was in the Christmas play when I was in the fourth grade. No I didn’t have a speaking role I was too shy for that. I was the Madonna, yes. Mrs. Maurer put a towel across my forehead, then folded it over on each side of my face, like a nun's headpiece. I sat over a crib with a doll tucked in straw, a flash light shone up on my face. It was uncomfortable and I had to hold very still. I’m sure it wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to say no.

I was so surprised when I heard that “ohhh” from the audience. The Christmas play was almost over and the curtain came up on the last scene with me over the crib and the boys dressed as shepherds. I thought I was a fat unnoticed child. I didn’t really realize that I was something of a star. I guess because there was no one there to be proud of me mother, with you dead for so long. But Miss Maurer put the towel on my head and gave me that moment. Mothers come out of nowhere sometimes.

Your grown daughter,
Bette

* * *

Dear Mother,

Florence Dunkley has been a kind of foster mother to me since I was seven. Now I’m about to graduate from Charter Oak school and she won’t come. She gets mad and there’s no telling why or how long she won’t talk or write to us. I don’t know what I did.

I don’t care. I write to her and she doesn’t answer. She and Craig don’t ask for us to visit on weekends anymore. I don’t have to hear their fighting at night. I'll be in high school in September. I’m afraid and excited. Joanne and the other girls have gotten angry because they asked to wear high heels to graduation and Mrs. Downen said “No”. Joanne is really making a fight about it.

I’m Mrs. Downen's girl. My job is to clean her house each day. It’s a big honor to be Mrs. Downen's girl. I can’t wear high heels. The white penny loafers we got in Covina smell nice but I can’t like them when Joanne and the others are making such a mess of it. I'll wear the loafers. Someday I'll wear heels – and white gloves too, and a dress with a swirl skirt. It will be when I’m older and not so many people I know look at me. I have a pair. I bought them from the Sears Catalogue with our Christmas present money last year. They are brown wingtip style. I have hose too. But I won’t wear them. Not yet.

No one I know will be at the graduation. Miss Babcock is gone now. I don’t like Mrs. Bruce who took her place. Miss Babcock broke her elbow and she went to Hollywood to live with her two sisters. They are like the Little Women. I think it is my fault that Miss Babcock broke her elbow. I should have put Carlos out. Now he is gone too. I am tired of being so bad, but I don’t care so much anymore.

I have to move from the Intermediate Girls building to the Senior Girls Building. Jewel says I can room with her. She will be at the graduation. She’s been Elizabeth’s friend ever since I can remember, but now she’s going to be my roommate. She told me all the classes I should take. I think she hates Florence. I’m sure she doesn’t hate Craig. But I see her point about Florence being strange and not being our mother anyway, though we call her mommy. And I did write.

I’m going to be a Senior Girl. I’m finished with the Girl Scouts now, and watching Mrs. Mauer knead bread in the cafeteria, and being the girl that gets Mrs. Borden her tea. I don’t need anyone to see me graduate. I don’t even remember you, Mutti. I’m going to high school.

Your daughter,
Betty

* * *

Now I think the graduation didn’t take place in the auditorium, but on the front steps of the school, where Greek pillars framed a cement stage. I remember gladiolus, the smell of the new dress, and something new “the excitement of not having anyone who cared about me at the graduation. Freedom. There was no need to smile endlessly trying to please a grownup. I was getting grownup.

I also remember who told me how beautiful I looked as Mary in the Christmas play. It was Mammy Yokum.

_______________