The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  “Isn’t two years a lot for postpartum?”

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “More sad than frightened, just very sad. I couldn’t pull it together. I withdrew from things. I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t want to do anything. I didn’t want to socialize, just down, very down.”

  “You must have felt robbed,” I say.

  “Yes, well no. I felt very bad that such a thing could happen.”

  “Were you ever afraid to be alone with the baby?”

  “It was so ironic, finally having this longed-for child; it didn’t make sense.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “He was always steady, like I said.”

  “But what did he think?”

  “Well, he didn’t particularly appreciate therapy. He was a pick-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps sort of person.”

  Again, I think about my father, a young husband coming home from the lumberyard to a new baby and a wife barely able to go through the motions. She was the girl whom he had chased, who had been fun and flirty with a full figure, who was an enthusiastic recipient of his affection and audience to his corny jokes. They made out under the boardwalk, he took her to shows he could barely afford and always bought the best seats. They kissed under the chuppah of a Brooklyn shul where he smashed a glass beneath his foot, they moved into their first crappy apartment with a bathroom down the hall, to a garden apartment (which my mother describes as heaven), to their first home in Stamford, and eventually here, to Woodbridge. It was a train only going up a hill, fueled by my father’s hard work and steadfastness.

  “Mom, what aren’t you telling me?”

  She pushes herself away from the table and I know we’re done, the way a doctor stops applying paddles to the chest of a heart attack victim. Only then she juts out her jaw and opens her mouth, as if to speak. I can see her thinking, the battle lines of a lifetime drawn across her face: What is the cost of revealing versus the cost of concealing? I can tell she wants to say something. I suddenly feel frightened even as I have yearned for this moment. My eyes start tearing up at the corners. It already feels like more than I can handle, whatever it is she is about to say.

  Finally, with gravel in her voice, she says, “Are you using the product?”

  “What?”

  “The hair product. The cream first, just a dab, the size of a dime.”

  She recently bought me her hair products, hoping they might do “wonders.”

  “First the cream and then the serum. Are you doing it right?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Then you don’t touch it. You have to let it dry completely.”

  I give up. I have no idea anymore. What do I really want from her?

  “You were an easy baby.” She has always professed this, and it always made me feel good, though I had done nothing to earn it. I imagine what she really meant was that the crippling depression hadn’t returned after I was born; maybe she was an easy mother.

  My mother became pregnant again with her third baby, also a girl. She had clearly gotten the hang of it.

  “First I couldn’t get pregnant and now I’m fertile Myrtle! I couldn’t have been happier.”

  Another girl! People teased my father. After all, what man doesn’t want a son?

  “He loved having girls, loved it,” my mother says, and it strikes me as true: he made fried salami and eggs on Sundays, took us to movies, the circus, Broadway shows. He taught us how to ride bikes and took us skiing, though he didn’t ride a bike or ski himself. He tied our rubber ski boots until his hands nearly bled, then cheered as if we were Olympians as we slowly snowplowed down the mountain.

  Then my father got a sales job at a lumberyard in New Haven. He traded in his work clothes for a sports jacket and tie in the office. They bought our house in Woodbridge. It had been on the market for a long time, but he recognized that the problems were cosmetic, and they bought it cheaply along with an acre of land and a pond in the backyard. Just as my mother saw potential in him, he saw potential in the house at the top of Milan Road. We were a family of five moving from Stamford into a three-bedroom ranch in a suburb known for its excellent school district and active Jewish community. It was everything my mother dreamed of. Now, all she needed was a Bridge game.

  CHAPTER 10

  1964

  This is the part of the story you don’t want to read. It was a November night when the worst thing happened. It started as a cold and developed into pneumonia. Overwhelming pneumonia, they called it. Those were the days of house calls, only this time the doctor didn’t come. He said she didn’t need to go to the hospital, and my parents dutifully listened; doctors were beyond reproach in 1964. An ambulance took my baby sister away in the night. She was two years old.

  The next morning, my mother gathered my older sister and me together on our green couch and told us that Barbara had died. Nina was six. I was four. Was I even listening or climbing, the way I loved to over the spine of the couch, dangling there as if it were a cliff? Two days later, as if nothing unusual had happened, my mother sent us to Sunday school, business as usual. Only our uncle picked us up from the synagogue. Why was he here all the way from New York? Nina remembers coming home to a party, or what she mistook for a party.

  “She was very confused,” my mother says. “She couldn’t understand why we would be having a party.” Why our new home of only a few months would be mysteriously filled with grown-ups in the middle of the day, old Stamford friends, family from Brooklyn, lively the way these gatherings get: people smoking, drinking, and even laughing. My mother is surprised that I have no recollection of this.

  She and I are at my house in a little room lined with books, and furnished with an old walnut table and a blue couch. The table is also covered with piles of books. Many more are stashed under the table. My mother usually comes in here when she babysits for us and inexplicably gravitates toward Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. She’ll read some pages, doze. I always tell her she can borrow it and she always declines. She has more reading than she knows what to do with. Outside the window, the last russet leaves of fall dangle from the branches. I’ve always admired them, not the season’s prettiest leaves, the ones that hang on the longest.

  “I want to talk about Barbara,” I say.

  What is death to a young child? What did it even mean that Barbara had died? The next day every picture of her was swept away. Someone, my mother I guess, folded her little clothes and gave them away. My father must have disassembled her crib, or had she already been in a big-girl bed? Young children don’t really get it. To them, death is more like going to sleep; they believe that people who die will come back, as if they just popped out to buy milk. I think I was even more confused than that: was she ever there?

  Nina, older by just two years, would carry a heavier load. In every way she was like any first grader, with plaid jumpers and Danskin separates, and penny loafers. She had recently gotten glasses I envied: a fashionable cat-eye frame with tiny diamond chips where the corners flared. She believed that she had given our sister the cold that turned into the pneumonia that took her life. She would eventually break down and tell her terrible secret to a trusted teacher who immediately called my mother into school. It’s hard to imagine what my mother was feeling driving there, facing the teacher, and more, facing her daughter, who had shined a light on all her carefully tamped-down pain.

  It’s called magical thinking when a child believes she has caused the death of another. What did my sister look like when our mother arrived? Frightened, guilty? Would she get my mother in trouble, be sent to the principal’s office? When she arrived, my mother reassured her over and over that it was impossible for her to have made Barbara sick. That none of us could have done that. It was nobody’s fault.

  “Did I believe I killed her?” Nina says now. “No. But it happened.”

  Like all the Bridge daughters, my sister’s childhood memories center o
n how the ladies dressed. “The ladies teased their hair and dressed up for Bridge. I loved watching them. It was all so grown-up. What I really loved about it was we got Entenmann’s. It was the only time we had it in the house.”

  Nina remembers that my mother started playing Bridge with the night ladies. They were my mother’s first Bridge club in New Haven, and their monthly appearance when it was our turn to host was like a raft of ducks reliably returning to a lake, plump and noisy. She got recruited by my nursery school teacher, and when it was our turn to host I was excited to see her in our home, as if a celebrity were dropping by. I knew the ritual by heart, my mother reaching up into the corner cabinets for the good coffee cups and saucers, laying out the spoons and napkins on the counter, the cake or Danish or babka set on a platter with a pretty serving knife. And on the card table was a matched set of cards, matching score pad, and a pencil skinny as a swizzle stick.

  The house grew quiet when they played a hand, interrupted by chatter when they’d shuffle the cards and deal a new hand. Sometimes they called it “washing the cards,” and I couldn’t help but think of a soapy sink where the cards were submerged, my mother’s hands in pink latex gloves washing each one and affixing it to a clothesline with a pin. Eventually she got invited to the Monday day game. This, she says, was like cracking the code. These ladies were the New Haven equivalent of Jewish blue bloods—they were born and raised in New Haven, went to Hillhouse High, went away to college, came home and married New Haven boys with college educations and good prospects. It was heady for a girl with a socialist’s heart and a Brooklyn accent.

  Entree into the Monday club was a more gradual process. Shirley, one of the night ladies, was BFF’s with Bette. Bette and Jackie had started the club. Various women came and went until Bea joined, and eventually my mother. At first, my mother was invited to substitute when a regular lady couldn’t play. After a time, she was promoted to regular alternate. None of the ladies can remember when she became a regular, only that she did, like an initiate at a sorority getting pinned. (Rhoda also started as an alternate. Now, with about twenty-six years of play under her belt, she is the newest “regular” member.) My mother was very happy to be promoted to a regular in the Monday Bridge club, only now she had to turn out a meal. “I was very nervous about preparing lunch. I went out and bought the New York Times Cookbook. And for me to have spent that kind of money on a cookbook shows you how nervous I was.” She can no longer remember what she prepared, and when I press she says, “I don’t know; what difference does it make? I made lunch.”

  The Monday ladies were like ghosts. Once in a great while, we caught a glimpse of them just as we were coming home from school. They seemed more formal and primmer than the night ladies, and we always addressed them as we would any adult using the honorific: Mrs. The Bridge Ladies have circled this topic more than once. Rhoda is most adamant; she believes it’s a sign of respect to use Mr. and Mrs., Grandma and Grandpa, Uncle and Aunt. She doesn’t appreciate it when young people call her Rhoda and she doesn’t want her grandchildren calling her by her first name. She was taught to respect adults and teachers, and addressing them as such was a sign of respect.

  My mother can’t stand hearing this. “Respect isn’t automatic. It’s earned,” she nearly growls when the topic comes up. I know that she is thinking about her father first and foremost, but Rhoda doesn’t know this. Rhoda more than respected her father, she worshipped him. Bette often sounds like an anthropologist, asserting that what we call people is all learned and culturally prescribed.

  Bea once mentioned running into the funeral director who orchestrates most of the Jewish burials in town. He addressed her as Mrs. Phillips.

  “I said call me Bea. He said his mother would slap him silly.”

  I asked Jackie what she thinks. She says it doesn’t matter to her. I ask what her grandchildren call her and Dick.

  “Oh.” She brightens. “They call me Geo and they call Dick Puff.”

  It was at the night games where my mother met the one truly great friend of her life, the closest thing to a soul mate. Gloria also had three daughters, and we exactly matched up in age. Her youngest, coincidentally, was called Barbara. Nina thinks it must have been part of what drew my mother to Gloria: this little girl, this double. I refute this theory. Our mother had so completely disappeared our sister, not a single picture to be found, I was convinced that it must have been more painful to see this little girl, same age, same name, that she would be a constant reminder of her loss.

  “But she isn’t. Mom loves her and feels a special connection to her. Always has.”

  I ask my sister how she knows this, and she says she just does. She has other recollections that I have no memory of, such as coming home from Hebrew school, the early evening already dark, the house dark, finding my mother sitting alone in the den.

  “The parent driving the car pool would ask if anyone was home because the house was so dark. I’d say it was okay. I knew she was home.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I’d come in and she’d startle, jump up, and say, ‘Oh, I have to make dinner.’”

  She also remembers my mother being so angry with us that she would sequester herself in her bedroom or drive off in a rage. “It was really scary. You don’t remember that?”

  I remember my mother in glimpses: when she took deep drags on a cigarette, as if she were communing with the universe. When we missed the bus and she drove us to school in her housecoat, her eyes angrily trained on the road. Or looking up words with the intensity of a witch searching for a spell. How do any of us know our mothers? By example? By osmosis? Every child a small sponge? By her smell, the way she looks in the mirror? Applies lipstick. How did I know my mother? All throughout those years growing up, she never spoke of Barbara. She had erected a firewall, and we knew never to ask. And we never did. How do you console someone who doesn’t want to be consoled?

  “We were new in town.” My mother says this over and over, an alibi, a mantra. We had moved to Woodbridge, and Barbara died three months later. She believed that people didn’t know. As much as she adored her Stamford friends, she guiltily admits that she was relieved not to be near them.

  “I didn’t want to be pitied,” my mother says. “I didn’t want her death to define us.”

  For the first time I get it. Her secret would be her salvation. People wouldn’t avoid her in the grocery aisle or knowingly nod a pitying condolence. She could mourn in private, be left alone with her grief. My mother would be like any other mother filling lunch boxes with sandwiches and pieces of fruit. She would pull up to the bank window in our car and the teller would send the cash through in a tube with a Dum Dum lollipop for us, no eyes downturned with sympathy. She would do the marketing, assemble meat loafs, and chauffeur us to our slate of after-school activities and Hebrew school without ever saying a word about her loss. And when she played Bridge she followed suit, making small talk about vacations and summer camp.

  When Bette told me about the death of her sister during one of our first meetings, I asked her if she knew about Barbara.

  “Everyone knew,” Bette tells me. “Of course, we did.”

  “But how?” I ask, suddenly feeling exposed and naïve. Wasn’t Woodbridge our fresh start, our clean slate, and a sanctuary from public scrutiny?

  “Betsy, everyone knew about your sister. Surely your mother knew that, in a town like New Haven.”

  I suspect Bette’s right, but I don’t say anything.

  “I really think she knows that people were aware.” She is being incredibly gentle with me. She would never want to upset me or betray my mother.

  “What about Bridge? My mother never brought it up, no one ever brought it up all these years?”

  “Never,” Bette says, “not once.”

  I want to bury my face in Bette’s couch. It’s too sad to contemplate. My mother putting on this face because any other would have been too hideous, would have scared people, scared herself. Sh
e needed to move forward, and she did. Playing cards, I like to think, helped.

  “It was one of the mistakes I made. I tried not to mourn in front of you, and I didn’t want you guys to mourn. It was just to keep going.” My mother picks at a blue thread in the couch. The back of her hand is maroon with bruises that no longer heal, the tissue paper skin of age. She thinks better than to pull the thread, not knowing where it will end, and pats it down instead.

  Grief counselors and bereavement groups all came too late for my parents. Though I doubt my mother would have participated. When my father was in hospice, she had no interest in sitting in on a support group, frowned on it. She greeted the priest and even the rabbi, when they made their rounds, with tight smiles, dismissing them and their prayers. When one of the angelic nurses caring for my dad came up behind my mother, and put her hands on her shoulders, my mother’s entire body tensed, and she glared at the nurse with a clear message: Do not touch me. Do not soothe me. Shove your empathy.

  An aunt had told me that my mother didn’t go to the cemetery, and from that single misleading piece of information I concluded that she never mourned, had hardened herself to life.

  “Of course I went to the cemetery.” My mother is appalled that my aunt would have said such a thing or that I would have believed something so ludicrous all this time. How could I have possibly known what to believe? No one ever told us. Only now, sitting so close to my mother on my shabby blue couch, close enough to smell her makeup, I can’t ask her. We can’t make eye contact. There is a vast lake between us, black and still. A hawk circles slowly on a wide current of air, wings as big as branches. My mother returns to the blue thread sticking out of the couch like an inchworm, working it between her thumb and forefinger.

  “When your father came home from the hospital empty-handed . . . ,” my mother starts.