by Betsy Lerner
Every time Bette and Donald had broken up, Bette became more and more distraught, but after two months of near constant fighting, she finally broke it off for good. “I finally realized that there was no future with the doctor. I knew it was over.” All the gray area cleared. Bette saw a future with Arthur and she knew she’d be a fool not to try again.
“Okay, I think it’s time for me to marry Arthur Horowitz. I went down to the store on a Saturday, which was the busiest day, and I remember walking into the store and saying, ‘If you’d still like to marry me, let’s go to New York—leave the store right now—and buy an engagement ring, and get married.’”
Arthur dropped everything, and they went to the city to buy a ring.
“I bought this ring—he bought this ring.”
Bette also admitted that she would have never married a poor man, couldn’t fall in love with one. She remembers buying furniture as a newlywed in New York, Arthur writing a check for the couch, the chairs, and the dining room table. This was amazing to Bette, having grown up under her father’s constant penny-pinching. Suddenly, here was a man who could write a check for anything she picked out. “I wasn’t grabby. I was amazed, and grateful.” Bette’s father, upon first coming to his daughter’s spacious three-bedroom house in Woodbridge, broke down in tears standing in the living room. “It was the first and only time I saw him cry.”
Betty twists her engagement ring around her finger to show me the diamond. “I’ve worn it to this day.”
“I’ve told you about Eugene.”
Yes, my mother has told me about Eugene Genovese a hundred times, the Italian boy she had a huge crush on. It’s her West Side Story without the snapping. He was smart, outspoken, and a leader in the socialist movement American Youth for Democracy.
“Do you know what a Red Diaper baby is?” my mother asks in a pointed, accusatory way. She always assumes that a “young person” can’t possibly know anything about the world pre-the-year-they-were-born.
“Yes, I know what a Red Diaper baby is,” I say, full of annoyance.
“Okay, I didn’t know. Just asking.”
When Carl Bernstein published Loyalties, his memoir about being a red diaper baby, my mother, nearly sixty at the time, first divulged her youthful allegiances.
“I felt if a journalist of his stature could divulge his background, why couldn’t I?”
There has always been some version of this war going on inside my mother: should she do what she really wants or conform, say what she really thinks or keep quiet, not risk offending anyone?
Of course, by then no one really cared.
I like to imagine my mother handing out leaflets like Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were. Or eschewing marriage and going to work on a kibbutz in Israel as she once dreamed, picking oranges from high up on a ladder in khaki pants and a cotton blouse tied in a knot at her midriff.
Like all of the Bridge Ladies, she would marry a Jewish boy—not a Chava among them, Tevye’s youngest daughter in Fiddler on the Roof, who defies her father and marries a gentile. The first time I saw the musical I was stunned when Tevye refused his last chance to say good-bye to his beloved youngest daughter when they were forced to flee Anatevka. What kind of father would do that to his daughter? The Bridge Ladies would not test this. (Predictably, I would.)
Eugene Genovese went on to become a highly respected historian known for his Marxist perspective. My mother would sequester herself away with the reviews whenever he published a new book, nursing what I imagined must have been the delicious, unanswerable question: what if? But my mother is pure pragmatist, never once indulging my fantastical childhood questions: What if you married Eugene? What if you didn’t marry Daddy? What if I wasn’t born! No matter how much I begged her to wager an answer, contemplate an alternate scenario, to make believe just one time, she was unwavering, refused to play along, was wholly dismissive of the enterprise. Now, she shows me his picture in her high school yearbook, small as a postage stamp, and remarks on how handsome he was. All I see is a boy with an exceedingly high forehead and a tiara of curly hair. His inscription was deflating at best: Dear Roz, You better come to more meetings. Best, Eugene.
“Mom, were you hurt?”
“I can’t remember.”
“What do you mean you can’t remember?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“It’s not exactly a nice message. He’s scolding you for not going to more meetings.”
“What do you want me to say?”
We are different, my mother and I. She’s not interested in the past, while I’ve nursed every romantic disappointment since the third grade when a boy raced by my desk and dropped a tiny, promotional bottle of Shalimar on it, only later confessing that he meant it for the girl sitting at the desk next to me and wanted it back.
Years later, when my mother discovered that Genovese returned to his Catholic roots, she was bitterly disappointed. He was no longer the man she remembered. My mother, down to her core, is a socialist and atheist, no matter how bourgeois she appears or how many tennis bracelets she wears.
We’re in the kitchen, finishing our turkey sandwiches, when I ask my mother if she was a virgin when she married. She puts down what’s left of her sandwich, disgusted, the crust like a crude smile.
“Why do you have to know that?”
“I want to know.”
“Do you ask the other ladies?”
“Not directly.”
“Then why me?”
“C’mon, Mom,” I whine, my finely honed reportorial skills in full force. She clams up.
I had lost my virginity in high school on a summer trip to Israel with a youth group. I was sort of in love, but more I craved experience in ways I didn’t fully understand, not realizing how much I wanted to separate and distance myself from my parents, especially my mother—no longer her little girl, no longer a little girl at all.
Most of the ladies admit to necking and some petting. Though I will later learn (please cover your ears if you don’t want to be scandalized) that some of the ladies were sleeping with their intendeds before their wedding night. Once you were engaged, I discover, the ban was quasi-lifted though that was never spoken of. Engagement, it turns out, was the gateway to sex.
“Did your mother ever talk to you about sex?” I continue, trying another tack.
“No, never. It was a private thing.”
Only then my mother pauses, “Well, I knew my parents were hot stuff.”
“Hot stuff?”
She remembers her father coming up from behind her mother and embracing her. “She would scream, ‘Murray, Murray!’ meaning: not in front of the children.” My mother gleaned two things from this: sex is private and that sex is hot stuff.
She learned about sex from reading Studs Lonigan, who sounds to me like the protagonist of a Harlequin romance, but the book turns out to be a Depression-era drama about an Irish boy on the South Side of Chicago who goes from being a good kid to a downtrodden alcoholic. When I remind my mother of this after having looked it up, she replies, “Well, it had sexy parts in it. What can I tell you?”
“So you slept with Dad before you married.”
“Why are you obsessed with this?”
“Because this whole one-man thing, this saving-yourself business, I just can’t fathom it.”
By the time the boomers came of age, the sexual landscape had completely changed. There were girls in my high school who were waiting for their wedding night. We, the mighty experienced, looked down on them as if they were pitiable. Some girls wanted to be in love, others were looking to get it over with. I knew a few who were planning to lose their virginity on prom night. Some wanted to lose it before college but didn’t manage to make it happen. They hoped no one in their freshmen dorm would detect their inexperience, and if asked point-blank they’d lie and take a sophisticated puff off a cigarette. I remember one girl who was so determined to lose her virginity before going to college that she steadied her sig
hts on a hapless sophomore who thought he was just going out to the movies.
“The Pill changed everything,” Bea once said, and she was right about that. She proudly told her kids that when she walked down the aisle, she deserved her white dress.
“Ma,” they said. “That’s too bad.”
“C’mon, Mom. Just tell me,” I whine again, shocked at my own childishness. When I sit down to talk with the other ladies, I act like an adult. When they clam up, I respect them. My mother picks at the frayed ends of a dishcloth, “Dad was just wonderful. I’ve told you before I liked everything about him and he always remained a great date his whole life. It was great going places with him. He always wanted the best seat, the best table. I just loved it. I loved the attention. I loved being chased, and he truthfully was the only one I ever had sex with. That is true.”
Okay then.
“Do you think Dad was faithful?”
“Betsy, now you’re really going too far.”
For as long as I could recall, my mother would make the pronouncement that women who didn’t know if their husbands were cheating didn’t want to know. They couldn’t afford to know is more like it. They didn’t bury their heads in the sand so much as look the other way. What else could they do, with small children to care for and no means of support?
Apparently there were a lot of affairs in our town, including a much-gossiped-about, high-profile case where a woman hired a hit man to kill her husband’s girlfriend. It’s as if her violent and dramatic act was fueled, at least in part, by the tamped-down anger of every desperate housewife of Woodbridge. This woman wasn’t a hero, but she wasn’t a victim either. According to Bette, she went to prison and remarried when she came out, as if that’s the moral of the story.
My mother won’t budge on the subject of my father’s fidelity.
“C’mon, what’s the big deal?”
“Why do you want to know so badly?”
“I just want to know.”
“Let’s just say,” my mother says, tossing her dish towel over her shoulder to both conclude our conversation and make an insouciant point, “I don’t think he needed to.”
Of the Bridge husbands, my father was the biggest gamble. He didn’t have a college degree and started out as a truck driver in a cousin’s lumberyard when my parents met and married. My mother recognized a hard worker; plus he was ambitious. And maybe more than that: he was decent. He hired the first black truck driver at the lumberyard. It wasn’t as dramatic as the Dodgers hiring Jackie Robinson, but my father didn’t back down even though it was an unpopular decision.
“It showed character,” my mother is proud to add.
“How did you know he would be a good provider?”
“Because he was a hard worker.”
I never saw them kiss or hold hands. Sometimes they seemed as chaste as Lucy and Ricky to me, though they didn’t sleep in twin beds. Once in a great while they would do a little dance in our long hallway before going out or coming home from a party, a Lindy or a swing. These small bursts of affection, their bodies moving in rhythm together, excited me so much. It was living proof that they loved each other, a certain private energy passing between them.
After everyone had gone to bed on the night before my wedding, in a rare moment of vulnerability, I took my mother into my confidence and confessed that I didn’t know if the marriage would last. Was I making a mistake going forward if I had these doubts? She knew that the off-again, on-again relationship with John over many years was the source of much happiness as well as heartbreak. We were sitting on the sectional couch in our den, with one section between us. The moment I confided in her, I regretted it. I was certain she would answer with one of her truisms, either “it is what it is” or my noncommittal favorite, “it will either work out or it won’t.” I wanted something more from her, something real.
She had knocked herself out making our wedding and I acted put upon the entire time. When she’d call me at the office and ask what color linens I wanted, I behaved as if I were the chairman of the board and she was interrupting me in the middle of a shareholder’s meeting. When I called her back and said I wanted white on white tablecloths, she said she preferred color. I told her do what she wanted; I didn’t care. I refused to let her shop with me for my dress, crushing another mother-daughter ritual underfoot. And when she arranged for a stylist to come to our house the morning of the wedding to do everyone’s hair and makeup, I refused to let the perfectly nice woman with her “tool belt” of makeup brushes touch my hair, or apply so much as a dab of rouge to my cheeks. It was my wedding day and I was still acting like a petulant child where my mother was concerned.
“What can I tell you, Shayna,” my mother said. It was pet name, a Yiddish word for beautiful. “I think the marriage will last.”
My mother, the most practical person on the planet, cast her vote on the side of love. While we were growing up, whenever my sisters and I would say we wanted to marry someone who was funny, she would say, “Good! Marry a clown.” When I wanted to go Vermont with a boyfriend and run a B&B, she said, “I hope you’ll enjoy scrubbing toilets for the rest of your life!”
When I asked her why she thought it would work, she said she believed that being married was different from being single. Marriage would change things. It would change us. Normally, I would have argued with her; the divorce rate itself was something like 50 percent. I would have discounted her advice, whatever it was, and written her off with it. What could she possibly know about my chances? About me? About John? She got up from the couch and said she was turning in, and urged me to follow suit.
“We have a big day,” she said, not a hint of resentment at my immaturity over the last few months. Whatever I was trying to prove, that I was too cool to have the traditional wedding she planned, too indifferent to care about floral arrangements and place cards, hadn’t stopped my mother from making a wedding Emily Post would have applauded. “You’ll see,” she said, and then kissed me good night on the top of my head.
Back at Jackie’s, the ladies settle in for Bridge. A large brown stinkbug grazes the screen inside the windows. It is slow moving, almost drunk in its staggered effort to evade getting squished in Jackie’s paper towel. The den, where the ladies play Bridge, could double as an ethnographic gallery. The room is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling masks from around the world decorated with horns, beaks, and raffia beards. Some are as large as canoes; others are as small as coconuts. There are shadow puppets, marionettes, masks with tongues, helmets, some with huge bulging eyes, and some with downcast eyes. Others are terrifying, comic, or ferocious. They could form a small army. Jackie and her husband have built this small museum-quality collection from their travels around the world. What are they doing here in Bethany, a million miles away from New Zealand and Papua New Guinea?
The ladies play at a table made of burl wood with a pretty inlay pattern of curlicues on the corners. Above, an eave with twelve masks, each bearing a different expression: mournful, fearful, sardonic, and so forth, watches over the game—benign gods. Jackie usually wears a three-pronged ring, two of the branches end in garnets, one in a pearl. I’ve never seen anything like it, and though it’s bigger than anything I would wear, I find myself drawn to it and Jackie’s ability to pull it off on her small hands always perfectly manicured with a creamy opalescent polish. She also accessorizes with the jewelry she and her husband have bought on their many trips around the world, including a silver cuff with large beads running down the center like balls of mercury that knocks against the Bridge table like a spirit at a séance.
The ladies drop their dollars and the game commences along with the familiar patter. The dealer always bids first, and usually, after they are done arranging their cards, one will ask “Who did this?,” meaning who dealt. Only it always sounds more accusatory to me, as in “Who left the mayonnaise on the counter?” I’ve learned enough about Bridge by now to pull up a chair and observe the game, taking an actual interest in it, though
I’m still baffled when the women make certain bids. I’d like to ask what they mean, but it would be wrong to talk and interrupt the bidding. I’ve started to learn about the most basic Bridge “conventions,” which are used to either describe unusual hands or to enable more sophisticated communication between partners. My favorite conventions have names that sound like CIA special operations: The Puppet Stayman, The Jacoby Transfer.
I have also observed various tells among the ladies: Jackie quietly taps her fingernail on the table when she has a lot of points and is eager to bid. The more nervous Rhoda becomes the louder and more emphatically she snaps her tricks along the border of the table, like a schoolgirl snapping gum. Bette gets very quiet when she’s anxious, and my mother more voluble. And Bea picks up speed as she collects her tricks, like a schoolboy racing around a playground. An hour into the game Jackie sets a plate of chocolates on the table. The ladies rear back as if they’ve been bitten by a snake.
When I tire of observing, I settle into Jackie’s couch, her cat snuggles in beside me. Jackie says this is highly unusual; the cat doesn’t like anyone besides her and Dick. Honestly, I don’t have a way with animals, but I’m glad for any advantage it confers. Eventually I rouse myself and take my leave. I say good-bye to the ladies and thank Jackie again for lunch. “Bye, dear,” my mother says, again in that formal tone, as if we are passengers on the QE2 strolling on the deck, getting some air after supper.
Rhoda reminds me that next week’s game is at Bea’s. She is the secretary of the group. “Don’t forget, Bridge is at Bea’s,” she says, and I think they’ve actually gotten used to having me around, maybe even like it.
CHAPTER 7
What to Expect
