The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  “Well,” she said, crossing one slim leg over the other, “I didn’t have the guts, I suppose.” I remind her that she had the guts when she pleaded with the director for the part. “I guess I did,” she says, suddenly weary. “Where would I have lived? I didn’t have any money. I wouldn’t have known how to go about it.”

  Jackie also harbored a fantasy of being an actress, but she was more practical than Bette. A season or two of summer stock in New Hampshire was enough to satisfy her. After graduation, she won a radio contest and the prize was getting to be on a radio show with Zero Mostel. The show was broadcast from Sardi’s, the famous New York restaurant known for its celebrity clientele and wall-to-wall framed caricatures of the greats. It must have been overwhelming for Jackie, her own nascent dreams of joining the theater already shelved. As she was leaving the restaurant, Mostel called out, “You find some guy to get married. Don’t, don’t go into this business.” Doubtless, he would forget having said it no sooner than the words left his lips. Jackie, however, had already taken them to heart.

  Bette mentions that she still looks at the audition notices in the paper.

  “Really?” I can’t believe it.

  “I would never do anything about it.” She waves off the admission.

  “But you still look. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I just like to see what’s out there.”

  “Bette,” I say, “you must be looking for something.”

  “No,” she says. Everything gets stony. Fun at first, talking about her youthful career now seems full of sorrow.

  Finally Bette breaks the silence, she is curious if Julia Jacobs, too, had aspirations as an actress. Were they crushed all at once, or chipped away at slowly, over time, until she finally gave up, opened the studio, and proceeded to instruct a ragtag group of students how to open their mouths and speak? Bette would never find out how far Julia Jacobs had gotten, how far she had fallen. Did she sacrifice marriage for her art? Was she single because she missed the boat or because she was the captain of her own ship?

  Bette looks at me. “I guess we’ll never know.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Bingo

  Jeff Bayone, I learn, is the owner of the Manhattan Bridge Club. I’d seen him around. You can’t really miss him. He is well over six feet tall, has a slouch as good as any detective on Law & Order, and a mustache from the 1970s. About this man I think you could safely say: he’s been there and done that. I imagine that if he calculated all the time he has spent waiting for beginners to discard he could easily add a few months to the end of his life. He’s filling in for Barbara and the level of intimidation is intense. He has no time for pleasantries and can seemingly size up a person with or without any Bridge potential. I fear he already has me pegged.

  He tosses a duplicate board on the table.

  “Let’s get started, yeah?”

  The Brit and the Elf are back, plus a new woman has joined us. She looks like a banker, wearing a navy-blue suit, the skirt pleated after a long day trading derivatives. When she unravels her turquoise Pashmina, I notice she’s wearing a double strand of pearls with a diamond clasp in the shape of a butterfly. Stunning. She says she used to play, claims to have forgotten everything, the usual blather from returning students. Jeff has instructed her to join our lesson and take it from there. She can always move up to Beginner Two or Intermediate if she’s more advanced than she gives herself credit.

  It’s been a few weeks of lessons and by now we should be able to grasp the basic concepts:

  How many points and how many cards do we need to open a bid in a major suit?

  How many points and cards to open in a minor suit?

  How many points to open a “one no trump” hand?

  How many points to respond to your partner’s opening bid at the one level?

  What does it mean when we bid “up the ladder”?

  Folks, I am clinging to the first rung. Memorizing all of these numbers is beyond me. You are looking at a girl who sometimes confuses the number of states in America with the number of cards in a deck. They are pretty close. I once took a class with a woman who was so completely frustrated by all this bidding mumbo-jumbo that she whined, “Why can’t we just say what we have in our hands?”

  It’s not that I didn’t sympathize, but that would be like taking off all your clothes before you started a game of strip poker.

  Jeff is staring at me.

  “Are you the dealer?” He knows I’m the dealer. “Did you want to bid?”

  I have thirteen points, but I don’t have a five-card major.

  “Pass?”

  “Are you passing?” asks Jeff, and I immediately suspect I should have bid.

  “I think so.” My voice quavers. I half expect Jeff to tell me to drop and give him fifty for my mealymouthed response.

  “Do you have four Clubs?”

  “I do.”

  “So bid one Club.”

  “I thought you had to open with a major suit.”

  I’ve forgotten that we can also open the bidding in a minor suit; apparently we learned this during our second class. Jeff explains that the cheapest bid is one Club. Like at Sotheby’s, you can’t underbid someone. If you want to get involved in the bidding, you must bid higher than your partner, or outbid your opponent. Until now, my greatest accomplishment in the world of games was using a Q on a triple-word score in Scrabble.

  Pashmina is my partner, and when it’s her turn to bid she says, “One Heart.”

  I am supposed to know what her bid means, what she is trying to tell me. Jeff cocks his head toward my direction. I stare so hard at the cards they melt into each other like a cubist painting. The clock is ticking. The banker stares at me, perhaps she thinks I’ve had a small stroke. The Brit nibbles the salt off a pretzel log. (Take a bite for god’s sake!) The Elf looks at me with big encouraging eyes and I kind of want to slap him.

  I feel Jeff’s impatience.

  “You know,” he says, “they play Bingo on Forty-Second Street.”

  It will take some time, if not an entire lifetime, to shake off the insult. Only instead of more humiliation, he pulls his chair in closer and looks each of us in the eye. His tone changes, his voice lowers. He is interested in imparting the idea that Bridge goes beyond rote memorization. There is a kind of beauty in deciphering the language of bidding and mastering the play of the hand. Though still numb from the insult, I detect a spark in him. “It seems like you’re not getting anywhere, and then it gels,” he says, his encouragement sincere. I see that he loves the game beneath his world-weary demeanor. He may even love us.

  Pashmina has to leave early and makes a huge show of winding her scarf around her torso like a sari. Jeff tells her she should probably skip to Intermediate. This doesn’t come as a surprise; she was obviously ahead of us. She smiles and nods knowingly, annoying as a teacher’s pet. Jeff takes her place at the table. He seems like a magician so deft is his handling of the cards, the deck disappearing in his large hands.

  “Okay,” he says, “who can tell me what the finesse is?”

  I don’t dare open my mouth. Like a mother who sees her toddler heading for the corner of a table, Jeff sees every mistake long before we do.

  The Brit jumps in. “Isn’t it when you win a trick with a lower card whilst a higher card is still out there?” Whilst?

  Jeff won’t go so far as to say “good job” or offer a compliment of any kind, but he looks pleased, and the Brit glows. Oh, to get a nod from Jeff!

  What I lack in skill, however, I make up for with enthusiasm. I get right away how complex Bridge is, how competitive and addictive. By my fourth lesson, I’ve bought two books on bidding and a Bridge app called Bridge Baron. Instead of doing my work reading manuscripts on the train, I’ve taken to playing hand after hand. Just one more, I tell myself. For the first time, I understand how the game has kept the ladies coming back over all these years. Yes, the comradeship, yes, the de facto support system, but I realize they also r
eally love to play Bridge. It’s incredibly fun.

  People talk about how Bridge keeps the mind sharp, and I get this, too. You cannot play Bridge frivolously, yapping the whole time, or like my friend’s poker game where the men get stoned and play half-baked into the night. Total concentration is required. This absorption may be the most intoxicating thing about Bridge: when you are playing you can’t think about anything else. Hours pass imperceptibly. The known world slips away: work hassles, marital dry spells, my daughter’s college applications.

  Lesson over, I gather my things, still smarting from the bingo sling. Jeff must sense my bruised ego and says not to worry, keep coming back.

  “I’m terrible at math,” I say, offering this flimsy excuse.

  “It isn’t really math,” he says, “it’s logic.”

  Now I’m really fucked.

  “You might want to repeat Beginner One. It’s not a bad idea.”

  I get it. I need to repeat the grade. No child likes to hear it, but sometimes it’s for his own good. The only thing I had been successful at was staying away from the snacks, but I took a fistful of Mike and Ikes on the way out that night and chewed the sweet gummy capsules to the exclusion of all other feeling as I made my way to the subway through the cold, dark night.

  CHAPTER 6

  How I Met Your Father

  “Gosh, there were so many. I can’t remember them.” Jackie is referring to all the boys who hoped for a date with her: the girl with the size-four figure, wide-set eyes, and porcelain skin, alluring as a portrait of a nineteenth-century noblewoman, and almost as aloof. There was never a shortage of young men who called the Brody household in hope of a date.

  This is our first visit, and Jackie has led me into her formal living room. It’s beautifully furnished with exquisite antiques, but it also has a ghostly quality, not Havisham-esque, but long untouched. It’s a great room and has likely seen its share of lavish parties; today it’s more of a museum without the velvet cordons and security guard shuffling in the doorway.

  Jackie grew up in Morris Cove, a spit of land on the Connecticut shoreline. As a girl, she and her classmates visited the Morris House, one of the oldest homes in the area, built around 1750. For some children, it was just an old house filled with a lot of old stuff, a butter churn, a chamber pot, and a fireplace big enough to roast small children. Jackie admired the austere yet elegant furnishings, the many-paned windows with rippled glass, and the shiny black hansom cab in the garage. She comes by her love of all things colonial honestly. “It’s where my love of eighteenth-century furniture started,” she tells me, and I can see her taste on display all around me. The house, Jackie tells me, is still there.

  I offer to take Jackie for a “field trip” to the Morris House and also to her childhood home, hoping to jog some memories. She agrees, and a few weeks later on a cold April morning, we set out. Townsend Avenue is a wide boulevard where ordinary houses are washed out in the weak sun and American flags, once symbolic of this proud Revolutionary battleground, now hang slack and tattered. The first place Jackie spots is her grammar school, named for Connecticut war hero Nathan Hale. (“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”) She and her brother walked a mile to and from school every day and again in the middle of the day for lunch. I marvel that they had time. More astonishing, her mother prepared a hot meal every day: pot roast, roast chicken, sometimes liver.

  “No Hot Pockets? Lunchables?”

  “No,” Jackie says, a small smile.

  It’s the same brick building she remembers except for a new wing off to the side that probably houses the gym and cafeteria. It’s a huge modern thing, and predictably Jackie doesn’t like it.

  We pass the Morris House. I pull into the driveway, closed for the season. It looks more like a farmhouse than the grand mansion I expected. It takes some backtracking then, but we finally find Jackie’s house. She is shocked to see the yard covered in lawn ornaments and junk, all of it coated in some white material that looks like asbestos or the fallout of a nuclear holocaust. An awning hangs off the house, sneering in a malevolent grin. Jackie remains silent. When I ask her if she wants to leave, she nods yes.

  This excursion was a bad idea. What was I expecting? That we would bond on our little adventure, that she would open up and show me where she smoked her first cigarette or made out with a cute boy? And what about Jackie? Had she expected to see her home as if preserved in a Norman Rockwell painting? Maybe that’s how we all remember our childhood homes.

  She wants to go home, but I push to see the famous carousel at Lighthouse Point Park. Originally built in 1916, it has been restored to its former grandeur. Jackie remembers riding on it as a girl on special occasions. Only now there are stand-alone barricades blocking the entrance. The road down to the carousel is too far for her to walk. No one is around, and I take a wide turn around the fences.

  “You can’t do that,” Jackie says, alarmed, her hand pressed up against the window.

  “It’s okay, just for a minute.”

  “No, please, turn around.” I can tell she’s upset, but I’m sure that when she sees the carousel it will be worth it.

  “No one’s here. It’s fine.” I try to reassure her, but her eyes are wide with fear.

  I’m not sure what emboldened me. Usually I follow rules like a Girl Scout. I’m also not sure why I disregarded Jackie’s wishes; was I that desperate to make her happy, convinced I could? Jackie is the most difficult of the Bridge Ladies to get to know. I can’t tell if she’s shy and reserved, or just shy and reserved around me. She is also the most alluring, her allure born in part from her reticence, a quality I have never managed, though wished, to cultivate. I’ve even nicknamed her The Sphinx. She had been clear about not wanting me to bypass the gates and I crashed right through anyway. I realized later it was no longer about Jackie. My need trumped hers. I don’t know what I expected to happen: that the sight of the mighty carousel would bring Jackie’s childhood back in a warm bath of nostalgia? That I would make her happy? Was I trying to do this with all of the ladies, my mother most of all, the Uber-Sphinx?

  I pull up to the octagonal structure that houses the great carousel, keeping it safe from the elements and vandals alike. I jump out of the car and press my face against the Plexiglass. Inside, dragons with scales dipped in gold, horses set four abreast brightly painted to a high gloss, at the top a frieze of the Connecticut seashore, and a Wurlitzer that pumps garish waltzes from the core. Jackie stays inside the car, staring straight ahead. I open the car door and ask if she wants to take a look, even though I know she isn’t going to budge. I take one last peek again through the Plexiglass; the huge flared nostril of a horse and its angry eye black as a marble stares back at me.

  Pulling out of the parking lot, I ask if she’d like to get an ice-cream cone.

  “That would be fine.”

  I flash on Jackie as a young girl just then, atop her favorite horse, her mother waving as she came around, her father digging in his pocket for loose change as the bells on an ice cream truck tinkle in the distance.

  When Jackie hosts Bridge she also treats the ladies to a meal out in a diner near her home in Bethany. It’s the most rural of New Haven’s suburbs, a place where farms unfold like quilts, and horses stand still as plastic toys. The only signs of spring are the garish forsythia bushes, their buds exploding yellow like movie-theater popcorn, and early tulip shoots peeking up out of the earth like hungry beaks looking for food. The sky is overcast with gray bunting; the roads are bleached from salting.

  When I pull into the parking lot, I see Jackie getting out of her ancient station wagon with wooden trim and side panels. She no longer drives and her freedom is hugely curtailed. Dick, who doubles as a chauffeur, does a three-point turn in the parking lot, slowly maneuvering the wide car like a yacht in a harbor. Jackie takes small, worried steps toward the entrance. She is bundled up, her pocketbook resting in the crook of her arm. From a distance, she looks like a doll, h
er hair coiffed and her lips painted coral. When I bound up to her in the parking lot, she looks frightened at first, as if startled by a deer. Then she recognizes me, “Oh, hi.”

  As we walk up the ramp into the diner, Jackie says, “I have to tell you something. I didn’t like that trip at all. It depressed me.” I open the door for her and we go inside. I feel terrible but I don’t know what to say. I decide to shelve the other field trips I had started to contemplate.

  The Country Corner Diner is a lot less “jazzy” than the Athenian. More homespun. A handwritten white board announces the specials: chicken and rice for soup, roast beef and mashed potatoes for a main. Goulash!! The ladies arrive and find their usual spot at the table. When my mother greets me, she says, “Well, hello there,” as if we are casual acquaintances instead of mother and daughter. She likes to keep up this charade as if she were just another Bridge Lady.

  A beautiful young woman gives us our menus and will be back for our order. She is slim, has high cheekbones, and her shiny brown hair is pulled back into a ponytail. She is a source of speculation among the women. Supposedly she has an advanced degree and at one time had a high-paying job in Boston or New York. Now, she works here, in an ordinary diner, on an ordinary country road. What is the story here? The ladies can’t fathom how a girl this beautiful and educated is waiting tables. I speculate that she embezzled funds to support a cocaine addiction. The ladies do not brook such foolishness; my imagination is too vivid for them. Still, the ladies feel sorry for her. Didn’t she have any options? Was there no one to catch her? Waitressing is not streetwalking, but the ladies’ pity suggests as much.

  For them, marrying and staying married kept dangerous waters at bay. None of the Bridge Ladies fell through the cracks like Lily Bart. None wound up in a polyester dress and white wedgies. Whatever opportunities they missed out on by not working, they were also protected from working. Why hadn’t our lovely young waitress been protected thus? No one says it, but it’s in the air: this wouldn’t happen to a Jewish girl. Though of course it could and does.