The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  But there was something else, too. I felt an immediate affinity for the game itself. Not that I would be good at it, but I sensed, even that first night, that Bridge was a metaphor for many things.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Athenian

  When I first sat in on the Bridge Ladies’ games I was hoping to find the remnants of a 1970s encounter group or rap session where the women openly shared details about their lives. I didn’t expect any of them to be inspecting their vaginas with handheld mirrors, mind you, but I thought they would be more forthcoming, more open, and, hopefully, a little gossipy. Instead I discovered that they never trash anyone, never talk about something that bothers them, and never share a deep feeling. Three unspoken commandments are etched in stone:

  Thou shalt not pry.

  Thou shalt not reveal.

  Thou shalt not share.

  “Why is it all such a taboo?” I ask my mother after having observed how taciturn the women are after a few weeks.

  “It is what it is.” Her catchall for life’s conundrums.

  “Why can’t you talk about things that bother you?”

  “We just don’t.”

  “What could happen?”

  My mother shrugs, though some time later Bette will tell me that in the past women had been flushed from the club for failing to adhere to the unspoken decorum. Talking too much or saying the wrong thing could get you booted. The worst offender was a woman who had gotten caught up in the vitamin craze in the 1970s and proselytized their healthy benefits to the girls. Worse, she tried to rope them into selling the vitamins in a pyramid scheme. I ask Bette how they voted her off the island. She’s embarrassed to tell me: they just sort of stop calling.

  Was my presence inhibiting them or were Bridge clubs a lot like long marriages where you learn to keep quiet for the sake of the greater good? No one is going to change, not after fifty-plus years. One of my Bridge teachers told me that she and her husband had to stop playing together for the sake of the marriage. She liked to play by the book, he from the seat of his pants. At first it was exciting; for god’s sake they met cute at a Bridge tournament. But after a time it created more conflict than any partnership can withstand.

  In time, I will observe husbands and wives publicly shaming each other for mistakes. They know they’re in public, but tensions can run that high in Bridge; a single mistake can cost a game and bidding incorrectly puts your partner in jeopardy. The only Bridge table murder on record occurred in Kansas City in 1929. A husband and wife were having a bad night. She overbid. He lost the hand as a result. She called him a bum. He slapped her. She shot him dead.

  The ladies are at no risk of emotional outbursts where Bridge is concerned. They keep their game and themselves in check. Thought bubbles often hang in the air. What would happen if the ladies gave voice to their fears and frustrations, if someone rang a bell and they stepped inside the ring instead of dancing around the ropes?

  When it’s Bea’s turn to host Bridge, she treats the ladies to lunch at the Athenian Diner, then it’s back to her condo for cards. The diner is right out of Saturday Night Fever with purple leatherette booths, mirrored walls, and cut-glass chandeliers. It hasn’t changed much since I went to high school. It was the place where most of the school’s clubs hung out after sports games or debates or choir concerts. After a win, the entire football team and cheerleading squad would take up residence. I half expect to still see them when I arrive to meet Bea. It’s also one of her regular breakfast spots and she tells me to meet her there for our first talk. She is already seated when I arrive. Before saying hi, she points out her booster seat, “I’m shrinking, Betsy, what can I tell you?”

  Bea waves over our waiter, “Omar, my friend would like to order and I’ll have my usual.” Omar winks in response. Maybe he is just playing along, but I get the feeling he cares about Bea; she is probably the only customer in the greater New Haven area who has bothered to learn his name. I guess that he is in his thirties, handsome with jet-black hair, easy in himself. He takes my order and collects the menus. Bea reminds him that she likes her rye bread seedless. “Got it, mama,” he says, clearly not needing reminding, then whispers to me from behind the menu, “Cougar,” and winks again.

  When I ask Bea to tell me about her hometown, she wearily says she can’t remember what she had for lunch the day before, as if bringing up memories is as heavy as the famous green limestone quarried in Bedford, Indiana, where she tells me she is from.

  “They used that stone for the Empire State Building, you can google it,” Bea adds proudly.

  Though she claims she can’t remember, Bea begins to describe the town’s central square, looking upward at the fluorescent lighting, her eyelids fluttering. “There was the courthouse, the hotel, a grocer, a feed store, and a five-and-dime.” Pleased with herself and her powers of recollection, Bea perks up and says, “How do you like that, Betsy?”

  Bea often ends a sentence with a question, but that first day I didn’t know if she was looking for an answer, or just making a point.

  As I sit down with each of the ladies, they also claim they can’t remember anything, as if struck by a case of collective amnesia. Memories don’t flood back exactly so much as dangle like the letters on an eye chart glowing on the wall, some within reach, some still too blurry to make out. For Bea, the dusty town of Bedford turns Technicolor as memories come back to life, like the Bantam rooster that got into the nuns’ chicken coop and fertilized the whole lot!

  “They thanked my father,” Bea says, still amused. “Those nuns never had so many chickens in their lives.”

  A teacher called Craigy Gunn preached that you don’t make fun of people’s names. “And with a name like that you can see why! It’s still good advice,” she says, thumping the table the way a doctor checks a knee for reflexes. And every Friday night during basketball season she cheered on the boys who were invariably defeated by the team from Gary, Indiana.

  “Gary was a town of steelworkers,” Bea tells me. “Those kids were gigantic!”

  A little girl in the next booth, maybe two years old, pops up and stares at us. When Bea waves hello she quickly ducks, then reemerges a few moments later like a periscope in a submarine. The mother looks over at us, apologetic.

  “She’s adorable,” Bea says as the girl nearly hoists herself over into our booth, her mother pulling her back by the ankles. I realize then that Bea has turned the Athenian Diner into Bedford. I would learn that she does this wherever she goes: the Soup Kitchen, the senior center where she plays cards twice a week, the pool at her condo. If there are people around she wants to get to know them, at least to say hello. You want to go where everybody knows your name.

  “We were just one of three Jewish families in Bedford. And with our name: Bernstein! How do you like that, Betsy?” Bea’s parents came to this country as teens through Philadelphia and settled for a time in Cincinnati, where they met, picked up some English, she some sewing skills, and headed west to the limestone capital of the world. Somehow the Romanian immigrant and his young wife with their thick accents and dark curls made a go of it, eventually opening a clothing store off the square, Bernstein’s Ladies Ready to Wear.

  Bea can’t remember how they were able to open a store without a single connection or relation.

  “I don’t know. I was little.”

  I wager that her father might have started selling fabric from a pushcart, as so many immigrants did. Bea says they had the store for as long as she can remember. Her mother dressed the mannequins, like life-size dolls, in the store windows according to the seasons. Her father had carved out a niche selling clothes from New York. The dresses were more expensive than the “schmatas” from the newly opened department store J. C. Penney, and less expensive than the dressmaker’s.

  She’s emphatic that she never experienced any anti-Semitism in Bedford. The only thing that separated her father’s store from the others in town was that they closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when they
headed out to Louisville for High Holiday services. Then she lowers her tone, so as not to appear bragging. “We had a car, Betsy. Not everyone did.”

  “Fifty cents down, fifty cents a week.” Bea thumps her fingers on the table again explaining how her father started a layaway plan. He figured out how to manage cash flow before they called it that and as a result made it through the Depression. He could do no wrong in his young daughter’s eyes. They had a two-story house with hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Bea had a pretty room with balloons on the wallpaper.

  “I had everything, Betsy.”

  The Bernsteins also had live-in household help, and her father treated the young women who worked for them over the years fairly, they were on a first name basis and they lived in the house with the family.

  “It wasn’t The Help, Betsy,” Bea says. “If I eat steak, you eat steak. If I eat cake, you eat cake. That’s how it was in our house.”

  The following Monday it’s Bea’s turn to host. The ladies arrive at the diner and claim their seats. Bea is busy going from table to table greeting nearly everyone who has come in, many on walkers, some in wheelchairs, one with a plastic tube snaking from a portable oxygen tank into his nose. Some are here with home aides, slumped over, or shrunken as gnomes. The Bridge Ladies grow restless, complete with deep sighs and shoulder shrugs, as Bea continues to make the rounds. I get that the ladies are impatient. They want to order lunch and get to Bea’s to start playing. I also get the feeling that they are a bit squeamish about all the infirmity. The ladies are in very good shape. They still drive except for Jackie, who had a fall and is unsteady on her feet. They go to New York for operas, Broadway shows, and museums. My mother traveled to Israel last summer for a wedding and danced the horah in her Ferragamos. Looking over at these less fortunate folks who have been felled by strokes or illness is difficult. You want to empathize, but you also want to distance yourself. Old age isn’t contagious. Still, you don’t want to catch it.

  I’m also beginning to worry about my mother, who is uncharacteristically late. All the ladies remark on it, a collective concern rising around the table. My mother is extremely punctual, always early to appointments and performances. This is because she leaves roughly thirty to forty-five extra minutes to get anywhere, factoring in traffic, a possible restroom stop, time to park, and the outside chance of Armageddon. Choosing a time to meet or leave has become a constant negotiation with her. It took a while for me to realize that she wanted more time because she needed more time. She has always had the energy of ten men. I either couldn’t or didn’t want to fathom her slowing down. Now, I’ve learned to accommodate it, do things on her timeline. I get it. Plus, there is nothing worse than driving with her when she perceives that we might be late. She drums her lacquered nails on the car door and exhales heavily, like a stoner after taking a monster hit off a bong.

  When my mother finally arrives, she doesn’t offer any explanation, but she has a funny look on her face. When I question her later, she says, embarrassed, that she fell asleep on the couch, reading the paper. Once, when she didn’t hear the doorbell, I let myself in and made my way down the long front hallway of our house to discover her on the couch, her head pitched forward. I instantly imagined the worst. I didn’t want to call out “Mom, Mom” and shake her shoulder. I didn’t want her gone. Then, just as I’d gathered the courage to approach, she roused. Trying to shake off the fright, I told myself that this would be the best possible outcome. My mother going gently into that good afternoon with her beloved New York Times, reading a Ben Brantley review for a new play that she’d rush out to see based on his recommendation. My mother talks about Ben Brantley as if she knows him and has been having an ongoing dialogue with him for decades. If she hates a play he touts, she wants to throttle him. “I’d like to throttle that Ben Brantley.” And if she likes one, all is forgiven.

  When the waitress returns with our drinks Rhoda asks for a Splenda, and the waitress takes a limp yellow packet out of her apron. When she leaves, the ladies explain that the customers steal the artificial sweetener, so they no longer keep it on the table. I confess that I steal my Sweet’n Low from Dunkin’ Donuts. After a brief silence, Bette confesses that her husband does, too. I can’t even begin to calculate how many pink packets have been pilfered worldwide.

  “Are you girls ready to order?” The waitress sinks back into her hip.

  Girls?

  After the waitress takes our orders I ask the ladies how they feel about being called girls. My mother doesn’t like it one bit. Bette and Rhoda don’t mind. Jackie says it makes her feel young. Bea doesn’t care. That’s it. No discussion of aging, of how they feel, or what it was like becoming invisible past fifty and now, well into their eighties, infantilized. My question doesn’t go any farther than a flat rock that skims the surface of a lake then sinks.

  The level of intimacy between my friends and me is anathema to the Bridge Ladies. I once asked Bette if she has any idea how open we are with each other, and she imagined it was like Sex and the City. Okay, we’re not that open. We don’t talk about bleaching our assholes, but we talk all the time and about everything. We are obsessed with work, obsessed with our iPhones, obsessed with ourselves. We are obsessed with our kids and our “parenting,” which wasn’t even a verb when our mothers raised us. We talk about meds, moisturizers, and mammograms. We talk about Lena Dunham, a lot. At a recent overnight with three women friends, there was a graphic description of a colonic and a lively conversation about what constitutes cheating. We discuss books and movies and aren’t afraid to disagree. We talk about Hillary and the possibility of having a female president.

  We compare notes about therapy and our “issues” as freely as we would a new restaurant or a yoga studio. Casual conversation at a cocktail party can often begin: “as my therapist said,” or “as I said to my therapist.” When you discover a person has never been to therapy it’s as if they are somehow lacking in self-awareness. I have a friend who once said he never cried in therapy. Well, I smugly countered, I guess you’re not doing the hard work.

  Now, and with more regularity, we talk about the indignities of middle age: back problems and colonoscopies, hair color and the horror of finding brown spots on the back of your hand. We don’t feel bad about our necks yet, but the scarves and turtlenecks aren’t far behind.

  I’ve cried my way through plenty of therapy sessions on the long road to getting my shit together, where I alternately blamed my mother for all my ills, felt compassion for her, judged her, hated her, and accepted her. For the most part, I thought I was done, but moving home reactivated every button and not gradually. It was simultaneous with crossing state lines. I might as well have been the man in the game Operation with his vital organs exposed: the Adam’s apple, the wishbone, the broken heart. Every time you touched the sides trying to fish out an organ, an angry buzzer went off.

  It struck me as more than a little ironic that I was the daughter moving home, the middle, the black sheep. I told myself I could handle it, tried to convince myself it would be good, repeating the plusses like a mantra: It was a great job opportunity for my husband. My father was ailing and I could see him more. It would be good for our daughter! We’d save money!

  No matter what I told myself, I was totally freaked out. I was afraid all those landmarks, like the Athenian, from my difficult teen years would trigger memories of how I slowly fell apart in high school. I couldn’t believe so many of my high school haunts were still there: Claire’s, the one vegetarian restaurant with ostensibly the same menu from the 1970s still chalked in pastels on the blackboard; Group W Bench, a 1960s relic named for Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” and go-to for hippie paraphernalia; and Toad’s, the dive bar where you could get in with a fake ID and make out with a Yalie on the sticky dance floor. Would it all feel like some hideous déjà vu? Would I start to spiral?

  But my biggest concern returning home was the proximity I would now have with my mother. We had never been c
lose and were reliably caught in a classic mother-daughter dynamic: whatever she said I took the wrong way. Every comment she made felt like a referendum on how I lived my life. I wear my jeans on the long side and they tend to fray at the heel. She begs me to get them hemmed, offers to take them into the tailor herself, that’s how badly she wants it done. Likewise, the fringe on a small rug I keep in front of my kitchen sink has frayed. She knows a carpet man who can repair it. Why won’t I let her take it in? Why won’t I? She says she is going to “kidnap” the rug and get it repaired behind my back. She is so upset that I don’t have paper hand towels for guests in my downstairs bathroom that she brings me her own paper towel holder and a few packages of pretty towels to “get me started,” like a box of Kotex pads when I first got my period. When she leaves, I throw the whole lot of it under the cabinet.

  Would there ever come a time when I wouldn’t feel judged? Did everything have to come under scrutiny? My homemaking? My work? She wants to know why I work so hard. She doesn’t think I should work so hard. Do I really need to work this hard? she asks in an accusatory tone, as if I’m creating work for myself. The judgments implicit: first and foremost, if I’m working so hard, how could I be spending enough time with my daughter? Equally important: I shouldn’t have to work. In the rubric of my mother’s life, the man is supposed to be the provider. This is nonnegotiable. When I mention that many of my friends’ husbands are stay-at-home dads, my mother says with a dismissive chill, “Good luck to them.”

  Sometimes I sense envy in her. I work in a field she wanted to be a part of. My mother wanted to write, and once she confided in me that she had selected the pen name Lynn Carter. I made fun of the hypocrisy in choosing a name that disguised her Jewish identity. And I teased her for coming up with it before she wrote a page. I couldn’t see then that her desire to write was something that connected us; instead it struck me as another reason for me to find her lacking.