This is Muttie. She came over from Germany on a ship in 1900 at the age of 19. She was an accomplished seamstress. She traveled to California and became a nanny for two kids and taught them German. For most of my life I thought Muttie was a wonderful grandmother and wished she had been mine. I felt that although my mother’s mother was horrible and my mother’s brother was horrible, my mom at least had her father Papa and her grandmother Muttie. Last year when we were visiting my mom, the two of us were playing cards at her table while Maddi and Mia were reading on the sofa. My mom looked over at Maddi and remarked how grown up she was becoming. She said soon Maddi might be wearing make up. I said I didn’t know. Then she called gin, putting down her three sets and said that one weekend, when she was sixteen and staying with Muttie at her home on Hoover Street, they were leaving to walk to the store to get groceries and my mother stopped to put on red lipstick. When they got to the sidewalk, Muttie noticed. She slapped my mother, called her a whore, wiped the red from my mother’s mouth, and told my mom that she was only fit to walk many steps behind her. For nearly forty years I thought my mom had had Muttie as a safe person in her life and within the short span of one little anecdote it was gone. My mom licked the tip of her pencil, counted up her points, wrote down her tally, pointed out that she was winning, gathered the cards, slammed the deck down in front of me and said, Shuffle.
This is my mom as a young girl:
