The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  Though none openly admit it, the Bridge Ladies, like most women of their day, groomed their daughters for potential mates. Yes, they sent us to college for an education but also hoping we would meet our husbands there. As recently as this past spring, 2015, my mother voiced her wish that my daughter choose a college with a good ratio, and she wasn’t talking about teacher to student. Marriage was essential for our mothers. They feared for us going forward in life without the same protection they believed came with marrying a Jewish man.

  One of the Bridge daughters put it this way: “They’re from that whole generation of women whose prime focus was not career, but getting a man. So that’s your capital.”

  I resented this pressure when I was in my twenties. I knew how badly my mother wanted me to marry, and it made me feel defective and unlovable even as I rejected her outdated values. I was pursuing a career; I wanted a soul mate, not a meal ticket. I once asked my mother what she would prefer: if I got married or won a Nobel Prize. “Don’t be ridiculous” was all she said in response.

  I posed the same questions to each of the ladies:

  Did you always know you would get married?

  Absolutely.

  Did you ever consider marrying a non-Jewish man?

  Never.

  Did you know you would have children?

  Absolutely.

  Did you ever want anything else?

  No (except for Bette).

  Why not?

  It never occurred to us.

  Was it the cultural expectation or was it what you wanted?

  Both.

  In just one generation, the world they knew would radically change. Bridge daughters, collectively: some married Jewish men, some intermarried, some divorced, and some, god-forbid, did not marry. We would not return their serve. We got birth control and advanced degrees, slept with men we never intended to procreate with, moved to big cities, and lived on our own. If anything, I defined myself in fierce opposition to my mother, putting career and personal fulfillment over marriage and children.

  I am well aware that for my mother how I appear before her Bridge club is as much a reflection of her as it is of me, and because I want to make a good impression with the women, I don’t mind making an effort, though it’s never quite enough for her. My mother wishes I would wear some makeup and accessorize with a bracelet, earrings, anything. She has been known to say, with just a hint of desperation in her voice, “Not even a little lipstick?”

  I don’t have to look at her to know what she is wearing. She could be a senior model for Eileen Fisher, with her wardrobe full of mix-and-match slacks, tops, and jackets. Her ensemble is rounded out with black Mary Jane shoes with fat Velcro straps, earrings, and a matching strand of beads, in all likelihood purchased at a quaint New England crafts fair or from one of the “funky” shops in downtown New Haven where all the jewelry vaguely resembles a model of the solar system. But I give my mother credit for putting on her beads and bracelets, her Bakelite earrings that look like miniature mahjong tiles, or the gold ones that resemble tiny wine casks.

  I marvel at how much care all the women put into looking nice for Bridge, especially as they only have each other to impress. But it’s not about that: these women do not leave the house unless they are pulled together. Going out without lipstick on was like walking outside naked. When I ask each Bridge daughter what she remembers from the Monday club, the first thing they mention is how the ladies dressed. They were elegant, grown-up, always wearing hose, heels, skirts, and pearls, their hair teased, curled, straightened, or frosted.

  I can tell my mother is relieved when I show up at Rhoda’s looking “nice.” In this case: black jeans that aren’t too shabby, a loose-fitting cream blouse (“anything but black!”), shoes instead of sneakers, and the only necklace I wear: a gold pocket watch with roman numerals finely etched like scrimshaw on its elegant ivory face. I had admired it since childhood, often hunting for it among my mother’s many jewelry boxes. Once, when I was home after graduating from college, which in my case is a euphemism for barely graduating, having been felled by a major depression, my mother happened upon me in her dressing room admiring the watch.

  “Take it,” she said.

  I was astonished. She couldn’t possibly mean it? I felt I had been caught red-handed and declined her offer.

  “I’d rather you enjoy it while I’m still alive,” she insisted.

  I always thought the gift, given in haste, was my mother’s way of telling me something she could never say, something that would always remain unsaid.

  “Take it,” she urged. “I want you to have it.”

  When the house was quiet on a Monday afternoon, it meant our mothers were out playing Bridge. For all we knew they could have been having an affair with the tennis pro or embezzling the Sisterhood’s Scholarship Fund. If someone was murdered in New Haven on a Monday, the ladies had an airtight alibi. What the ladies actually did at the Bridge table was a mystery. Even the score pad divided into two columns was like a riddle out of Alice in Wonderland: We and They. Who were they? Who were we?

  It wasn’t a game you could learn in an afternoon, like Scrabble or Monopoly. It wasn’t even like other card games. No, Bridge was complex and certainly not for children. Still, I loved everything about playing cards: the suits and their symbols, the red Hearts and Diamonds, the black Spades and Clubs one petal short of a lucky clover. I loved the backs of the cards: some with elaborate Spirograph designs, others with animals, flowers, or covered bridges. My favorite had a pair of winged cherubs on bicycles in the center of the card and bare-breasted mermaids in each corner. I was mightily impressed with a deck of cards my dad brought home from a trip. They had the Pan Am logo and he said they were complimentary. How could such treasure be free?

  I loved playing War, then Spit, then Gin Rummy with my dad. I loved Spades and Hearts and was the mastermind of an after-hours game of Hearts at sleepaway camp where a small group of us played by flashlight on our counselor’s bed behind a partition at the back of the bunk.

  Before I was old enough to understand any card games, I invented my own called Card Mountain where I’d throw a blanket in the air and let it fall into whatever shape it would take. I would then set up the cards, by suit, in the folds and nooks of the blanket, creating my happy fiefdom of cold-eyed kings, scornful queens. Jack was the dashing prince, and the number cards their loyal subjects. Sometimes I would have to throw the blanket a few times to achieve maximum ramparts and parapets, and when I was finished I would collect all the cards and tuck them back into their box, the blanket left in a pile like the pale outline of a ruined fortress.

  As the ladies head over to Rhoda’s dining room table for lunch, Bea makes a straight line to the far end of the table. “We’re not rigid,” she says, “but this is my seat.” Today, decked out all in purple, her metallic tennies and crystal bracelets that throw rainbows when the light hits them just right, Bea could be a poster child for Jenny Joseph’s famous poem, “When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple,” which celebrates old age as liberation from traditional conventions and expectations. The poem always grated on me, since the sad fact is that when you are old you are more likely to wear Depends and a Life Alert necklace. But not Bea, she is spry, sharp, funny, and the only lady outrageous enough to occasionally drop the F bomb. Bea isn’t an old hippie or part of the counterculture, she just does her own thing and in this way stands slightly apart from the others.

  Rhoda serves her kugel, and the ladies pass around a salad. She is the only one who has a “gentleman friend,” her generation’s term for boyfriend. There are framed pictures of them on the kitchen counters and scattered around the condo: at a benefit, on a cruise, with friends. It was unexpected this late in life, but I’m convinced it’s responsible for the spring in her step.

  I feel like an interloper. Do I participate or observe? Am I trying to impress them or they me? I am sitting next to my mother and it’s as awkward as if we were strangers on a train.
We are careful not to accidentally touch or make eye contact. Conversation starts with The Oscars. They all watched at least a part of the ceremony. The ladies are avid moviegoers, even though most movies today are “dreck” by their standards. Those who saw the foreign film Amour loved it; others avoided the all-too-real depiction of dementia. In a flush of civic pride, they were annoyed with screenwriter Tony Kushner, who portrayed Connecticut, their state, as voting against the Thirteenth Amendment in his movie Lincoln. They hated host Seth MacFarlane. Feh! He didn’t hold a candle to Bob Hope. Forget about the dresses!

  “Actresses have been dressing like hookers for years,” my mother says, capping the conversation.

  Talk turns to a minor scandal at the Jewish Community Center over a zoning issue. As Rhoda tells it, the head of the committee called someone an “asshole” at an open meeting. She puts her hand over her mouth to muffle the expletive.

  “Thank god he wasn’t a gentile,” Rhoda adds.

  I’m confused. “You mean the guy who cursed was Jewish?”

  All the women know this to be true and nod affirmatively.

  I’m still confused. Isn’t this man’s outburst “bad for the Jews,” as the expression goes.

  No, no, the women explain. If a gentile had cursed, he would be accused of anti-Semitism and that would be far more incendiary. They are willing to take one for the team to avert even worse repercussions. Their logic seems warped to me until I realize that the goal is to draw the least amount of attention as possible, deflecting even the slightest whiff of anti-Semitism. I’m impressed with their diplomatic chops, their nuanced grasp of the issues; if only the Bridge Ladies could be sent to the Middle East. After all, who better understands the art of compromise than a person married for over fifty years. Rhoda concludes the conversation, as I will discover she often does, with her customary disgust of contemporary life: “The whole level of public discourse is in the sewer.”

  The very fact of the Bridge club, its endurance, speaks in some ways to the ladies resisting change or upholding the status quo. If the Bridge Ladies said so, my mother tended to go along. They were like city hall. One Bridge daughter said they were like the Supreme Court. Their decisions were treated as the letter of the law. They were mavens, advising on camps and colleges; they referred doctors and plumbers, mechanics and gynecologists. Where to get your rugs cleaned and dresses hemmed. What the golf course was to men, the Bridge table was to women, the de facto social networking of its time. You would sooner argue with Talmudic scholars than challenge their collective wisdom.

  These days, the ladies shy away from controversy. I know my mother wishes the ladies would mix it up more. She religiously reads the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Nation, and the Atlantic. She attends lectures on politics, Israel, art, and more recently Black Lives Matter. She has strong opinions, they all do, but the ladies hew to the truism that it’s best not to talk about politics or religion. And I suspect for a long time, this suited my mother. After all, it was her great success as a Brooklyn-born socialist that she passed as a suburban matron who learned how to play golf and tennis, joined the Sisterhood and eventually three Bridge clubs.

  Her socialism, her Zionism, all of this was shelved when we moved to Woodbridge, our affluent suburb northwest of New Haven. She traded in her Karl Marx for Emily Post, the high priestess of etiquette, as if adhering to her advice could spare us the kind of social disgrace that in an earlier era would have landed us in the stocks. The landscape appeared as a minefield where she could easily trip up not knowing how people were related, who went to school with whom. She was anxious about nearly every aspect of social life: what were the customs for entertaining, the protocol for extending invitations and reciprocating? Margaret Mead had an easier time in Samoa!

  I didn’t get it. She constantly harped on the fact that she felt like an outsider. Our suburban ranch, two cars, and membership to the synagogue and Jewish Country Club all looked plenty normal to me. Too normal! Her mother had emigrated from Russia without knowing English. How could my mother, coming from Brooklyn, via Stamford, to New Haven feel so alien? Only it wasn’t about distances. I was much older before I realized my mother felt like an outsider because of how inadequate she felt about herself.

  Sitting down for our first “official” talk, she is eager to tell me about her family’s poverty in Jersey City as if it’s a badge of honor. We are in my living room and she’s all dressed up and made up like a Russian Matryoshka doll brightly painted with many shiny layers of varnish. She has always been like the tiniest doll, the one that’s impossible to crack.

  Only now, she enthusiastically recalls having lived in one tenement after another with the buckled linoleum floors and refrigerators cooled by blocks of ice, relatives arguing leftist politics like in a Woody Allen movie except it wasn’t exactly funny.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” she asks, wanting to please me.

  I’m not sure what I want now that we’re here. I feel awkward and embarrassed. Aren’t I already supposed to know my mother?

  “I had one doll,” she proudly remembers, a gift from a wealthy relative, and a favorite red cable stitch “skating” sweater she knitted with her friend Cookie Ginsberg whose mother owned a yarn shop.

  “What kind of a name is Cookie?” I ask.

  “What kind of a name is Cookie?” my mother repeats. Her use of a question to answer a question is right out of the linguistic Yiddish playbook, and I understand immediately that she not only deems the question foolish, but has no intention of answering it.

  “Do you remember that sweater?” she asks hopefully, “with the zipper.”

  I act as if I can’t remember but I know exactly the sweater she’s talking about—only I am ashamed because I never liked it, found its homemade stitches crude, the zipper hard to work. It was the sole artifact from a life I couldn’t fathom, full of import like the red balloon, only I failed to appreciate my mother’s girlhood handiwork.

  “I know I kept it. You children wore it. I don’t know what finally happened to it. Do you remember it, the red sweater with the cable stitch?”

  “Sort of,” I say, “yeah I think I do.” And then I have a sudden longing for it—the embarrassing hand-knitted item of clothing—and I see myself skating as a little girl with a bright red face pushing off toward the middle of the pond in our backyard. But it’s a manufactured memory, more a wish or an image I conjured from having heard a story many times.

  “I remember every coat I ever had,” she proudly tells me, most notably a taupe coat with a Persian lamb collar and cuffs she wore when she was engaged. When I question how she could afford it, she doesn’t hesitate, “If I could only have one coat, I wanted the best and my mother would splurge for me.” She adds, “I’m still like that.”

  She also makes the point that unlike today’s clothes hers lasted for years and years, and more than that: she took care of them. Her veiled accusation/criticism is not lost on me, a citizen of the wasteful generation. “I wore that Persian coat for years, I gave it to my cleaning lady. And it was still in good shape.”

  The only time I glimpsed the residue of her impoverished childhood was when she yelled at my sisters and me for not taking care of our things. Once she found a blouse under my bed with its tag on. I thought her head would explode. We didn’t know the value of a dollar! We could not fathom her life, nor were we especially impressed with her hardships. We were spoiled suburban girls who had multiples of everything.

  “We didn’t feel poor,” my mother says now with a degree of wonder in her voice. “We just didn’t.”

  They were all children of the Depression, the ladies, though they all claim it didn’t affect them. They were too young, and their families were spared complete financial ruin. It wasn’t about the “haves” and “have-nots,” they tell me; everyone was a have-not. To hear the ladies talk about the Depression: no biggie. Still, they knew the value of a dollar and remembered when a loose cigarette cost a penny, a dime for a rid
e on the trolley, and twenty-five cents for a movie.

  “Here,” my mother would say, pushing the phone toward us to say hello to my grandmother. Talking to her mother always seemed like a chore, placed more out of duty than love. I always assumed my mother was embarrassed by my grandmother’s Russian accent and Old World ways. She wore her hair in a bun held together by netting that, turned upside down, could have doubled as a bird’s nest. She colored her hair black with a tube of something that resembled shoe polish. She gripped a sugar cube between her front teeth when she drank tea, and used Vaseline exclusively and liberally on her entire body, and then kept pennies in the empties.

  Only now, she speaks with great pride about the young Russian immigrant who signed up for language lessons as soon as she came through Ellis Island. I suspect my mother is scrubbing her history. When she finally told us about my grandmother’s violent and tragic past, it was impossible to comprehend the magnitude of trauma this sweet, gentle woman had survived. She and her two sisters discovered their parents murdered in their home during the Kiev pogroms of 1919.

  I want to know everything, but all my mother will say is that she had nightmares her whole life and that she would cry out in her sleep.

  “It was very, very traumatic.”

  When I challenge her about keeping all of this secret, she shrugs. “What can I tell you—protect the children. That’s how I was raised. Was it right? I guess not.”

  “Mom, how could you not have told us?”

  “It was the culture, Betsy. Go question culture.”

  “Did she long for Russia?”

  “She loved this country, its ideals, everything it stood for. I was born on Washington’s birthday and my brother was born on election day. My mother took it as a good omen.”

  When she first arrived, my grandmother worked in a millinery factory, but once her English improved enough she landed a job as a saleswoman at Russeks, one of Manhattan’s first upscale department stores.