The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  Since I’ve moved back to New Haven, my mother has been kind enough to point out that I don’t stack the dishwasher efficiently, that I have to run cold water, not hot, when I run the disposal, that I need to iron clothes if I “fail” to pluck them out of the dryer after twenty minutes and hang them up. I waste money on Starbucks and magazines off the rack instead of saving with a subscription. I put too much salt on food, wear bulky clothes that make me look bulkier, my couch needs to be reupholstered, the tablecloth for my dining room table doesn’t precisely fit, and yes, I know, the napkins don’t match.

  If you were to put my mother on the stand and ask her to take an oath, she would swear on a Bible that she doesn’t criticize me (or my sisters), especially where my daughter is concerned. On the contrary, she would say she marvels at how I do it all. Who is telling the truth? In Deborah Tannen’s book about mother-daughter relationships, You’re Wearing THAT?, she reports that the number one complaint grown daughters have of their mothers is that they are always criticizing them. Conversely, as one mother puts it, “I can’t open my mouth, she takes everything as a criticism.” Tannen explains that what mothers see as caring, daughters take as criticism. Or in my case, multiply that by moving back home and living a few miles away from the source.

  Tannen goes on to point out that the smallest comment a mother makes carries with it the ever-present question: Do you see me for who I am? And is who I am okay? One Bridge daughter talks to me for over an hour about how much fun she had growing up. But when we get on the subject of appearance, the tenor of the conversation changes. “My mother is very, very concerned about appearance. She’s more concerned about appearance than substance. Her first question would be, what do they look like? as opposed to, what do they do?” We’re about to say good-bye when I ask her what she wishes from her mother if she could ask for just one thing. “Could you accept me for who I am?”

  Even when my mother was trying to help, we somehow missed. Once, she offered to take me to a special shoe store in Manhattan and treat me to a pair of shoes when I needed heels for some occasion. It was always difficult to find shoes that fit my wide foot. She told me they made fashionable custom shoes for all kinds of feet. They were expensive, and this was a generous offer. When we finally arrived at the store on the East Side, I looked into the window and immediately saw it for what it was: not a shop of fine handmade Italian or British shoes, but a repository for all the world’s freakish feet. It was like the line at Lourdes, people desperate for a miracle for their gigantic bunions. Really, Mom, this place? She urged me to be open-minded, go inside, at least look at the shoes. The salesman was a log of a man in an ill-fitting black suit who grunted his welcome. I watched how he fitted a woman whose feet dangled like flippers. It was classic us: my mother trying to do something nice for me, me feeling like more of a freak because of it.

  Thousands of dollars of therapy were thrown out the window one fall afternoon when my mother arrived at my house with silver polish and rags. I didn’t see it coming, still can’t believe that it was a small pink tub of Gorham Silver Polish that took me down.

  She knew I was having a dinner party and it “killed” her that my serving pieces were tarnished. My mother brought her own apron and was tying the strings at her back in preparation of her work. She enlisted my daughter, who was spreading out newspaper on our kitchen table as instructed by the master polisher. When I came downstairs and saw this project in process, it felt as if I had been stung in the face by a hundred bees.

  Why couldn’t she leave my silver (me) alone? Why did her help feel like a judgment on how I chose to live my entire and apparently tarnished life? Why, when I told her I didn’t want her to come over and polish, didn’t she listen? Why was polishing the silver more important than doing as I wished? Why was polishing the silver more important than anything? More to the point: Why wasn’t I a sparkly daughter who wanted to polish her silver with her mother, who would happily hire a “lady” to do the dishes—something else my mother constantly nagged me about—after all, I was so tired from working too much. She insisted she had a “very good lady” to do the dishes for god’s sakes! She offered to pay for it! Why was I so stubborn? And while we’re at it: Why didn’t I love to shop and decorate? Why didn’t I “do something” with my hair? Why didn’t I wear bright colors and sashay around in Belgian slippers and velvet headbands like you-know-who? And for that matter: Why couldn’t I just be happy? Why was I dark and moody and difficult? Why was everything a battle?

  I grabbed the newspaper my daughter had lined the table with and started balling it up. I think I started screaming then, too, or maybe I had only raised my voice at that point. I saw my mother start to take off her apron but think better of it and just leave as quickly as possible. Now I’m sure I was screaming because she was getting in the car with her apron on and my daughter was crying and I had to go to bed for a while afterward, my whole being exhausted with rage and shame, especially for having exploded in front of my daughter, who adored her grandmother.

  When I told a good friend about the incident, expecting an ally, she said, “God, I wish my mother would polish my silver.”

  The following Monday, I placed a call to a new therapist.

  Anne is tall and dresses monochromatically in neutral colors. Her hair is white and cropped short. She is calm. I like her voice. I like the office, furnished with modern furniture, a gray carpet with thin black lines around the border like Etch A Sketch. There are thick wooden beams and casement windows with brass pulls that look like teardrops. However modern the room, there is no hint of technology, not a computer or phone charger anywhere in sight, which I imagine is deliberate. Though it is against my nature, I trust her almost right away.

  I tell Anne that I need to get along with my mother, now that we live twelve minutes apart. I can’t keep letting her get to me. And more, I say, I don’t want to repeat these patterns with my own daughter, though I already hear myself sounding like my mother: begging her to trim her split ends (It’s healthier! Your hair will grow faster!), and freaking out when all the clothes I’ve laundered and folded are in a heap on the floor. I tell Anne about the silver incident, only now I am trying to entertain her, be funny and ironic about the whole thing. But my efforts are hollow. I am like a comic about to get the hook.

  I am tired of myself and this same tape loop and the inexplicable ways in which it involves my mother. I am tired of therapy, that obligatory first session with a new shrink when you empty the rocks from your pockets. Mine begins when my mother took me to my first shrink when I was fifteen, ostensibly for help, only she seemed angry that I had gone off script; her bright precocious girl turned dark and moody, reeking of pot smoke, grades tumbling. I tell Anne about a major depression in college and complete breakdown in graduate school. And how one psychiatrist after another prescribed whatever new antidepressant was on the market, all leaving me more lethargic, more depressed. I felt there was a scrim between the world and me. Sometimes, in college and later, out of desperation, I would call home and then not be able to speak. I could hear my mother’s voice cycling through worry, distress, and aggravation. Are you there? Are you there? Betsy, are you there?

  I assure Anne that I’ve been well for a long time, stable for over two decades. How I eventually found a doctor who suspected I was manic-depressive and treated me with lithium. I stress to Anne that I never go off my meds. In fact, I’m a model patient, a straight-A student in the school of mental health. I don’t want her to think that a jagged pile of psychiatric shards is sitting in front of her. I still feel a wave of shame admitting my illness, as if I am defective, unreliable, could suddenly bug out. I still resist the label, though the medication has worked for over two decades: I’ve never bottomed out again, never felt my brain on fire. Even though I have come to Anne for help, I don’t want to admit I need it.

  I tell her that more than once my mother has given me all the credit for getting well, for not giving up, for doing it on my own. I kn
ow she means it as great praise, but it makes me angry. Why did I have to do it all on my own? Then guilt sets in: my mother did the best she could, I say. Right?

  Anne doesn’t say anything.

  I describe how I was afraid to have children, especially a daughter. I didn’t think I could tolerate any more mother-daughter drama. My worst fears dissipated when I got pregnant and even more when I found out I was having a girl. Almost overnight, I embraced everything I had rejected, mainly homemaking and domesticity. I took months painting a raw wooden dresser for my daughter’s room with bold colors on the trim, hunting down antique glass pulls decorated with kittens that I had seen in a magazine. When she was little we baked! From scratch! I bought cookie cutters for every holiday. We’d decorate cats and witches for Halloween, wrap them in black and orange tissue paper with ribbons of the same color, and bring them to the neighbors. Maybe I was manic? Sometimes I would stand back and look at my little girl decorating our cookies covered with icing and sprinkles and marvel that she was mine. Or see myself: Where was the girl with the Doc Martens and unquiet mind? Was she in remission or gone forever?

  Only now, I couldn’t understand why things weren’t better with my mother. Would I have stabbed her to death with the fork she was polishing? No. But I thought having my daughter, having our relationship, would reset my compass. Wasn’t I lavishing her with the love I craved? Wasn’t our closeness proof that some cycle had been broken? Hadn’t I gotten anywhere in the mother-daughter wars?

  I start to cry. It comes on suddenly. I have to take off my glasses and reach for a tissue. I tell myself to get a grip, that this is pathetic, only I can’t stop crying. I can’t even look at Anne. Then I feel giddy and nauseated at the same time, as if thrown from a swing.

  Finally, I look up. Anne’s expression remains unchanged. I find this intensely comforting. This will be the beginning of a few years of work. Over the course of our sessions together, I will try every trick in the book to distract, entertain, and antagonize Anne, but she will not flinch. She will not be my mother, much as I throw myself against her walls. She asks if I’d like to come back. I nod that I would. Anne takes out her planner, which looks more like a teacher’s attendance book, and opens it on her lap. We agree on a time for the next session. She marks it with a pencil.

  Like Rhoda’s, Bea’s place is furnished from a previous lifetime. There is a heavy credenza, couch and chairs covered in dark fabric. The ladies play in a breakfast nook in her kitchen with corner windows and a Tiffany-style lamp hanging over the table, decorated with a slot machine’s bright cherries. There’s a small TV off to the side.

  As I’ve observed, talking subsides once they start playing. The game requires total concentration. Rhoda takes a long time to lead and Bea mutters, “Play it. You’re not going to sleep with it.” She rarely needs time to ponder which card to play and flicks it insouciantly into the middle of the table. Her speed is intimidating, dealing quickly and scooping up tricks in one quick motion.

  Between rounds, Bette reports that a good friend had a fall. She has a black eye, a gash on her head, and a sprained wrist. It could have been worse, the ladies say in unison, as if in reading responsively at services. It also comes out that a friend is down to ninety-three pounds and is in so much pain she can’t make it upstairs to her bedroom. They’ve transformed the dining room into her bedroom. I know my mother would rather die than set up camp in a hospital bed in the dining room for all to see.

  Now that the subject of death has been broached, I ask the ladies if they fear death. Rhoda, first, emphatically says no. Jackie and Bette look down, stricken. “Yes, I do,” Bette finally says, and Jackie commiserates. I have pushed them to talk about something difficult and yet I suddenly don’t want the responsibility of holding up an unwanted mirror. Do they think about how many days of glorious sunshine are left? How many more winters will wash through their bones? Just hearing them admit fear scares me. Of course, we all think our mothers will never die, that cord never cut.

  More than death, my mother fears becoming a burden. She’s also concerned about the availability of a good manicurist and electrologist in the nursing home, should it come to that. Bette’s doctor told her if she falls it would be the end of her.

  “You need to get a new doctor,” Rhoda chimes in.

  Then I ask Bea, who has been uncharacteristically quiet, if she is afraid of dying. “You’re dead, you’re dead,” she barks back.

  Bea’s father died when she was eight years old some years before penicillin could have cured him. She cocked her head when she told me this, as if to say: thems the breaks. I figure it’s her way of pushing it off; what else can she do? It was a long time ago. She has been fatherless for many decades. At eight, do you even understand the magnitude of such a loss? And at eighty, do you still long for him?

  I suspect Bea’s life was irrevocably changed when she lost her fun-loving father, an only child left with a mother she never quite connected with.

  “Every year we lost at least one teenager,” Bea told me that first meeting at the diner. She was tired by then and was no longer animated. “The kids were warned not to go swimming in the quarries,” she said, disgusted that the warning wasn’t heeded. Her class lost a beautiful young boy called Millard Fleetwood, age sixteen. The cliffs were as beautiful as they were treacherous; the sheer rock face rose as high as it plunged beneath the blue-green water, irresistible to teenagers who believed themselves impervious to danger, indestructible. It was easy for a swimmer’s arm or leg to get caught between the crags of limestone invisible to the eye. There was nothing abstract about the death of a classmate, a boy you might have danced with or had a crush on, or watched playing basketball among a welter of other beautiful young men whose futures just as easily, cruelly, could have been cut down.

  Much would be left behind in Bedford: the ready-to-wear dress shop owned by a young Jewish family, a yard full of deflowered chickens, and the last bounce of a basketball on a gymnasium floor after a crushing defeat. When I ask Bea where her father is buried, she tells me the Jewish cemetery in Louisville. I ask if she ever visited the grave with her mother. She looks at me and doesn’t answer right away, as she usually does. “No,” she finally says, shaking her head, “we never did.”

  CHAPTER 4

  A Thousand Bette Cohens

  Bette’s perfectly appointed living room could be the set of an Edward Albee play: handsome 1960s-style furnishings, the paintings and knickknacks placed just so. There is no wet bar with carafes of scotch and bourbon, crystal rocks glasses, and a silver ice bucket with claw-shaped tongs, but it’s easy enough to imagine. The room is immaculate; a vacuum cleaner has left a wide wake in the carpet. When I first arrive, Bette leads me into this room once filled with friends and cocktails and hors d’oeuvres being passed on silver platters, but whatever ghosts mingled here have long faded. The room isn’t gloomy, but the house feels lonely with three grown children long gone. A daughter in Hartford practicing law, another in Paris for more than twenty years, and a son in Baltimore, an emergency room doctor.

  Arthur and Bette bought their house in Woodbridge as a young married couple and have lived here for sixty years. “My parents thought we were crazy,” Bette says. “It was like the wilderness. There were no streetlights. No stop signs.” All of New Haven’s suburbs had once been agricultural; Woodbridge was known for dairy farming. In the 1950s and 1960s, most of that farmland would be divided into two-acre plots where young families would raise their kids in ranch houses and colonials.

  The rest of the ladies would also settle in the surrounding suburbs. If White Flight was a national phenomenon in the sixties, New Haven was its poster child. Its policies for public housing and urban renewal were so misguided as to insure a tale of two cities. Racial tensions played out on a national stage when Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was tried for murder in the New Haven courts. Bette’s neighbor prosecuted the case. He and his family had bodyguards for the duration of the trial. “It didn’t
affect us all that much,” she says. “We still lived our lives.”

  The ladies were not oblivious, but they were insulated. Woodbridge had everything they needed: good public schools, country clubs, a synagogue, and the nearby Post Road for shopping. It’s not that they weren’t aggrieved by the world around them, but within it they had constructed their own.

  Outside their kitchen windows, each shared a view of Connecticut’s hardwood trees, which change with the seasons like the set of a Chekhov play. It’s where they’ve washed a million dishes, wiped the counter a million times. This is where you could find them at almost any hour of the day, making a meal, filling the dishwasher, emptying it. And when they were younger, smoking a cigarette while talking on the phone, the curlicue on the cord stretched tight, watching the evening sky as it went from indigo to navy to black, or the red tail lights on a husband’s car, garishly reflected against the asphalt in the New England night.

  Of all the Bridge Ladies, I’ve always felt closest to Bette, in part because of her friendship with my mother. When the weather is good, they walk together on a path, a half-mile loop around a cornfield. Our families also celebrate some of the Jewish holidays together, now that we’ve all got skeleton crews. Her husband, Arthur, is my favorite of the Bridge husbands. He was loyal to my father in the aftermath of his stroke and long past the point when most friends fell away. And after my father died, he’d readily volunteer to help my mom with things around the house, often “fixing” an appliance by just plugging it in, always more amused than chagrined.