Listen to thisBette Bottger Simons
You can view Chapters One , Two, Three, Four of this serialised and previously-unpublished book before you read Chapter Five.– Eds
Chapter 5
Sherman Oaks
December, 1990
A journal entry:
Daily Log:
Oh mother, would friends have called you Hildie? Your grandsons will be here today – Steven circling in a winter fog somewhere in the skies, coming from New York where he works and I’ve put away the haystack of my week’s clothes – shopped for computer paper first – then pumpkin pie – only one left in the store. I smile, now I'll get the house smelling like home. Cook a turkey for Steven who missed Christmas, even though I’m a vegetarian now – smells like dead womb and raw liver – bless this beast. I cut and hack the neck for my sons not for me but what’s the difference – dead is dead. Julia Child's gravy a must and only red vermouth onion smells and pie crust. I'll ask Andy about his broken nose and wonder if Steven still gets headaches – not push the food, like I want to do. Eat if they want. Our talking the important thing, not the food. My life is so busy now, working on a master’s thesis, but see I still can do it. Microwave mom still gets the kitchen smelling homey.
Now the brothers are here and Andy picks at the turkey says it’s raw and Steve already ate anyway and I see I’m still trying to nurse these two sons and send them off to play safely. Oh Hildie I wish they would marry ... and the bird dead for nothing.
Your daughter, Bette
I think of myself as a woman with little character because my determination to swear off sweets only lasts until I’m confronted with the next temptation. So the day I decided to become a vegetarian and did it, still surprises me. I think the act of pledging not to eat dead animals had a purging effect on me. Deep in my conscience is a need to put my shoe laces in my shoes at night, say my prayers and be very good. When Steve talks about making a phone call at work to his sister in Kenya my grandfather and I are horrified, but it’s I who appease the old Kaiser’s officer in me. If Steve loses face, surely not his job, for not being honest about a phone call, that’s his Karma. Of course he gets my opinion about it first.
My grandfather lost his home in Highland Park because he was too stubborn to give the seller, a fellow Christian Scientist, $400. she demanded what he felt she was not entitled to. Sometimes, looking though the old photograph albums my mother kept, I come upon the record of his monthly house payments, dutifully made according to his agreement. His zest for principle caused made him kill himself. Where matters of principle are concerned, I am always on my grandfather’s side and it’s exhausting, so becoming a vegetarian was a little like consolidating my internal rules. It gives me some dispensation.
* * *
Dearest mother,
Now I am older than you ever were on this earth!. And I am writing to you like a little child. Telling you the things that happened to me after we were separated that cold New Jersey winter of your death. I think you had just had your 25th birthday.
I don’t remember you, but writing to you seems to bring you into my life.
After your father died, Jewel and I were raised in the Masonic Home for children. I don’t remember my first night at the Home in Covina. It was the third time I was wrenched from an attachment to someone who cared for me, but pictures of my sister and I show us both looking very somber and with deep circles under our eyes. I think we got sick a lot and eventually had to go through what was a ritual, maybe a rite of passage, at the Home. We had our tonsils taken out.
The Home had a little brick hospital. It was different than the other buildings because it was only one story and rectangular. It was between the Senior Boys' building and the superintendent’s cottage and donated by the Templar’s Lodge Masonic Lodge. We children came to recover there, after the a tonsillectomy was done in the hospital in town.
The misery of that event in the Covina hospital begins with a memory of lying with a thick necklace of an ice pack around my neck. The pain and the relentless cold of the ice could not be stopped by anyone and I was told to stop crying. I don’t recall that anyone familiar to us came to comfort us. We had each other, that was all.
Back at the home, the Templar’s hospital had one room down it’s shiny hallway that had murals of nursery rhymes painted on it by a senior boy named Coilin Allen.
When I was new and naive and went to the hospital sick, I went eagerly down the hall to look in the glass windows for the blackbirds who had flown the king’s pie and were perched over the doorway. After a while, I learned that coming to the hospital, choosing a strange nightgown from the big drawer in the nurses closet was a sentence in boredom, that paintings on the wall did nothing to relieve.
In our own department, called the Junior Girls we had lots of freedom. On the dirt playground out in back, there was a metal bar jungle gym. We played it was a ship, maybe the one Ginger Rogers and Fred Astair danced on. There were strong wooden teeter totters, where we learned to give and receive “bumps” that would send us flying a foot from the seat. You had to have been terrified as a recipient of these to be motivated to learn how to do them, by placing feet on the ground and quickly pushing the board down and up under your own seat. Older girls did it to lighter younger ones.
Then there were the swings, where most often a younger girl sat while an older one stood on the wooden seat and, pumped, her dress billowing in your face.
In the middle of the yard was a merry-go-round of metal, it’s center like a huge smooth bullet. More often than not it would be pushed to breath taking high speeds. You could hang on a bar that went around the center, head high, and let your body swing out, parallel to the ground. Or you could stand and tough the groaning cap of the fat axle. None of us ever sat on the seats designed for sitting. Even though I spun off and scraped chin, elbows and knees, that merry-go-round was wonderful.
* * *
Another part of this yard had simple bars, a low one and a high one. We climbed them to get at the juicy red privet berries that grew on a hedge nearby. Irene claimed her mother made jam from berries like these. As an adult I was once told they were poisonous. We thought they were a great find. We even ate Hollyhock seeds with apparently no after effects. No one watched or seemed to care.
When it would get dark, we had to come in and change into our long flannel nightgowns. When they were new, they were white and soft as clouds, but as they got worn they got grayed and had a friendly knobby texture. We brushed our teeth by going into the large lavatory with a white hexagonal tiled floor and getting our brush from the metal compartment where our laundry mark indicated who we were. A white towel and wash rag hung from a hook for each of us. I was BX, Jewel was Ji0. Mother, we still sign letters to each other with these symbols.
We only bathed on Saturdays, but each night we went to the library and found a spot on the hard oriental rug to listen to Mrs. Gradler read to us, from her oak rocker.
She had black and grey hair, piled in a bun. She always wore smocks that covered her big bosom. On her feet she wore Dr. Scholl shoes, bumpy with her bunions. They had thick heels and were laced.
Mrs. Gradler was chronically cranky. Only two things could be counted on to soften her. One was getting her neck rubbed by one of us while she read, the other was her fat red haired Cocker Spaniel, Belinda. As much as Belinda pleased her, we displeased her, but we saw she had a good side in any event, because she was so sentimental and sweet to that dog. I adored Belinda. She would lick my scabbed knees. I would kiss her on the head. She always looked sad, so I presumed she was suffering and needed Mrs. Gradler’s affection and mine a great deal.
Mrs. Gradler was British. She was a sea captain's daughter and a large part of our time with her was spent getting our quarters shipshape. My job was to clean the large broom closet off the hallway, where mops were stored. There was a chest of drawers that held dust rags. Mrs. Gradler doused these with oily red furniture polish, so the mahogany chairs of the sitting room, the oak library chairs and table, the bookcases, even the grandfather’s clock could be shined.
I was labeled a “slow poke” and the more Mrs. Gradler demeaned me for moving at a snail’s pace, the more I dragged my brown oxfords. I would take the dust mops out, like skinny ladies and shake their hair over the pergola outside and come back to the closet and sit and wait for the bell to ring for breakfast. Other girls, mostly the bigger girls from the Senior Department were seeing that our hard beds got made. The beds, lined along either side of the long dormitory, had metal frames and springs, and wool army blankets. Our sheets were ironed in the laundry, and we had a ribbed white bedspread to cover them. I often wet my bed and dreaded the morning hours of getting shamed, so the closet was my hideout.
* * *
Dear mother, if we had not been separated, I wonder if I could have told you how I felt about things. I think not. Encouraging children to say how they feel about things is a new idea. So I had to get old to tell you this.
When I was around 8 years old, my life in the dormitory was interrupted by a long stay in the Templar’s hospital. I had my appendix out. Now I will tell you what I would have said to you about that experience, if I could have talked about it, regardless of the times.
