by Betsy Lerner
“Not great,” she says, and then with her characteristic semi-ironic laugh she adds, “and by that I mean terrible.”
We laugh a little, better than crying as my mother would say. I ask Bette if I can bring her some carrot cake I’ve made for a party and she protests mightily. I insist.
“Just a sliver.”
Bette is a sliver, and I fear that she isn’t eating enough. I worry that all the anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Arthur’s medical condition, combined with dealing with the hospital, rehab, and insurance companies is sapping all of her strength.
When Arthur is home for a spell, Bette insists she’d like to talk. Our visits take her mind off things. I hesitate at the front door. The exterior facade of their home is a green-gray brick with the cement, as a design element, oozing out between the bricks like cake frosting. I touch it, half expecting it to be soft. Just as I’m about to ring the bell, Bette opens the door. She looks smaller, her face drained of color. I tell her I can come back. No, no, no.
We are back in her formal living room where we had our first conversation. She apologizes for keeping the phone nearby but she is waiting to hear about a doctor’s appointment. The phone rings twice before we even get started. Bette excuses herself to take the calls: both times telemarketers, as if they weren’t annoying enough, let alone when you’re expecting an important call.
Bette’s agitation is palpable and again I offer to come back at another time. Again, she insists I stay, and I realize she needs to talk. She is the classic woman from her generation, who let the men do everything: make a living, pay bills, take care of the taxes, manage the finances, do the lawn work, clean the gutters, gas up the car. Her sphere was entirely domestic, housekeeping and child rearing. She never imagined the day when her husband’s duties would fall into her lap, even now as the bills begin to pile up inside their envelopes with the glassine windows. Conversely, it was Bette’s own mother who handled the family finances.
“My mother had a budget and she would put the money aside in little envelopes for electricity, gas, this is for the heat, this for food. I thought that was the way to do it, but when we got married Arthur said, ‘No, whatever you want, write a check for it.’ I didn’t have to have the little envelopes.”
Bette was coddled and protected by her mother, and later by Arthur. At the hospital, from his bed, Arthur walks her through every step of how to deal with accountants, lawyers, and lawn men. Still, she feels inadequate to the task and shocked that she has never learned even the basics. Arthur didn’t just make the trains run on time, he was a buffer to every emotion or crisis or simple annoyance that threatened Bette’s equilibrium.
“Last week when I went to see him in rehab,” she says, “I had just received some upsetting news. I was very worried but I counseled myself not to tell Arthur. I didn’t want to burden him. Only the moment I walked into his room, I threw myself on him and started crying. I couldn’t help myself.”
“What did he do?”
“He comforted me, like he always does.”
The phone rings and Bette sees it’s from a friend.
“I won’t take this.”
“Are you sure?”
“Where were we?” she asks with resolve.
“You said you threw yourself down on Arthur.”
Bette laughs at herself as if to say: pathetic.
“Tell me about your marriage,” I feel emboldened to ask.
“If we had five arguments during the sixty years we were married that was a lot. I think a lot of it was Arthur. He was very accepting and very non-confrontational. We were always very happy with each other, very content, very compatible. I always felt safe. We were different personalities, but he sort of adjusted to me. Whatever I wanted was fine, wherever I wanted to go, whatever movie I wanted to see it was fine. When I look around at all the men I know, I got the pick of the litter.”
Each of the ladies uses the word safe at some point during our talks, describing their husbands and marriages. It’s not a word that particularly interested me, especially when I was young. I was drawn to tragic relationships: Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky, Cathy and Heathcliff. I was a freshman at NYU when Sid stabbed and killed Nancy in the Chelsea Hotel; I became obsessed with the case and would skulk past the storied hotel for as long as the story was in the news.
The phone rings again. This time I can tell from Bette’s tone and body language that it’s the doctor. As she disappears into the kitchen, I give her a small wave and let myself out.
Rhoda is late, first five minutes, then ten, and then fifteen. It’s Bea’s turn to host, and instead of going to the Athenian Diner she has selected a Thai restaurant in one of the many nondescript strip malls in the area. There is much speculation. Has Rhoda gone to the wrong one? There is another strip mall close by with another Thai restaurant. A campaign to locate her has begun. My mother embarks on her regular archaeological dig to recover a small spiral address book of important numbers from her bag, its pages rounded and thin with use. Success! Bea whips out her flip phone. My mother calls out the numbers. This whole operation puts me in a bad mood. Rhoda comes the longest distance; she’ll get here.
I don’t know if it’s true for the other ladies or of aging in general, but my mother’s worry meter is off the charts. If there is a flake of snow in the sky she won’t go out. She reviews travel plans over and over, departures, arrivals, directions, as if she were in Winston Churchill’s war room. She wants to know where my now teenage daughter is every minute of the day. Does she have rehearsal? What time does she get home? Will I be home? Am I making dinner? No, I’ll be out pole dancing so she’ll have to fend for herself. And if I so much as sniffle in her presence, she will interrogate me about my health and watch it hawk-like for days. Have you seen a doctor? This is going on, what, two-three days? I don’t like the sound of that!
Moments before we let loose the dogsleds, Rhoda enters the restaurant. Traffic on 95; that’s all. After all that tumult settles, the table goes weirdly quiet. I want to say something about how great it is to see everyone, especially Bette, who won’t have time to play but wanted to come for lunch. She has to get back to Arthur.
I’ve learned by now that their reticence is largely generational. For them, the word share meant splitting a sandwich, not automatically opening up about your life. I also get it that long-term relationships can grow threadbare (as can all relationships, for that matter). Still, I want the ladies to love each other more, to have more fun and be happier to see each other. Even after all this time, knowing their penchant for reserve over ebullience, I’m still surprised at how cautious and circumspect everyone is. Once I asked Bette why the lunches weren’t livelier. She thought about it for a while and finally said, “We’ve become dull to each other and dull to ourselves.”
Before I played, the game looked boring and repetitive. Now, I get it: Bridge is incredibly fun. It’s absorbing, crowds out all other thoughts. You don’t need to be anyone’s best friend; teamwork naturally develops between partners. Plus, winning a hand of Bridge is like shooting the rapids and outwitting a fox at the same time. Maybe it’s the game that keeps them together more than the bonds of friendship. Maybe Bridge itself is the glue that has kept the ladies together for over fifty years. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.
At lunch, it comes out that Bette doesn’t know how to put gas in her car. Arthur always filled her tank. When she confesses this I am more than astonished, I am slightly appalled. It would be like not knowing how to withdraw money from an ATM. I’m not sure if this makes Bette a princess or an invalid. Maybe a little bit of both, only now she is certainly handicapped as a result. Her daughter Amy, who has been coming most weekends to help out, decides it’s time for her mother to learn how to fill her tank. She had already shown Bette how to pump gas a few times, but over the weekend Amy insisted that it was Bette’s turn to actually do it. Amy went inside the convenience store and Bette took out her credit card. She explains that everything
was going fine up to that point. She’s got the door open to the gas tank, swiped her card, entered her zip code, and selected the kind of gas she wanted. She lifted the nozzle and put it into the tank, or so she thinks. Somehow, and she will never know how, the gas started gushing back at her, completely dousing her in gasoline.
“It was like a volcano,” Bette says, lifting her arms as if she’s being doused all over again. In response all she could do was scream, completely frozen and unable to act. Amy and the attendant came running out. Somehow, Amy was able to stop the gushing, only not before she too was covered in gasoline.
“And she was wearing a new outfit,” Bette nearly cried.
Mother and daughter were taking the first afternoon off in weeks from keeping Arthur company at rehab. They had tickets to a play and were determined not to miss it. They raced home and changed clothes. For the entire play, they could tell that people were sniffing and whispering about the smell of gasoline emanating from their direction. Bette and Amy sniffed and whispered as well, to throw their fellow theatergoers off the trail. Bette laughs at their pathetic attempt at subterfuge. Then, also in characteristically droll manner, she concluded by saying, “You know, there was part of me that wished I had a match to end it all right then and there.”
Back at Bea’s for Bridge, she is eager to show off her newly installed chair lift. It goes from her basement to the landing, spanning the length of ten or so steep steps. She loves it, uses it to haul groceries and laundry. If she needs it to haul herself, bad knees, bursitis, or arthritis, she isn’t saying. The women are good at hiding their infirmities. It may be pride, but I sense something else as well, akin to how an animal in the wild will attempt to camouflage an injury lest she be more vulnerable, easily sighted as prey. I hear the ladies comment on other people, noting that one is using a cane, another one a walker. One friend no longer drives. Another has gone into assisted living, another has moved across the country to be closer to their kids. Each marks a step in the wrong direction, an admission of decreased capacity.
Bea volunteers Jackie to try the lift. At first, she is game and scoots herself back into the chair. As Bea starts the lift, it lurches the way a Ferris wheel jolts to pick up passengers or release them. Jackie looks around for something to hold on to, but the arm had been left up. Only a third of the way there and she is visibly terrified; it looks as if she could easily slip off. Bea tells her to hang on, there’s nothing to it. When it reaches the landing, there is a slightly tricky maneuver to get off that involves swiveling the chair. We watch from down below, helpless as Jackie negotiates the distance from chair to landing. There is an audible sigh of relief when she makes it. No other volunteers, the rest of us trudge up the stairs for what looks like a long afternoon of Bridge.
Just as the ladies take their seats a surprise snowfall blankets the road outside Bea’s condo and elicits groans. This is our state with her freakish weather: late snows and Indian summers. A ring of worry emanates from the table, but the snow disappears as quickly as it fell. The ladies make so many mistakes the first game that they decide it’s off the record. This would never fly at the Manhattan Bridge Club or the Orange Senior Center, but this is a breakfast nook in a condo on Forest Road on the border of New Haven and West Haven. No one risks expulsion for dropping the wrong card and blowing the game. A few hands later, Rhoda makes a big mistake when she opens the bidding with four Spades; you need five cards in a major suit to open. Even I know this. This is Bridge 101. Bea is sharp with Rhoda, accusatory. “How could you open a four-card major? Not for forty years have I seen that!”
Sparks flew from the table. Rhoda was flustered, though irritated and possibly embarrassed as well. Bea can sound sharp, only she’s usually right; where disputes are concerned she is the acknowledged authority.
“Okay, let’s move on,” she says. “Let’s see what we can do.”
Bea focuses on whether she can take enough tricks to win the hand. In the end, she does, but it’s a nail-biter.
“You made it, Bea,” Rhoda says with the implication that she was overreacting.
“Just,” Bea returns.
Arthur’s health becomes increasingly precarious. “He’s old,” Bette tells me. “He’s old and the doctors don’t really care. Or if they do there is nothing they can do.” Her voice is a mixture of despair and disgust.
I remember so well how my father tried every newfangled treatment he could find to walk again, one more outlandish than the next, including a protocol where his healthy arm and leg were bound to his body in an attempt to force his limp ones to work, the way a good eye is patched to coerce the other to focus. No one quite knows how it happened, but some aides apparently dropped my father at the facility and he had to be rushed by ambulance to the local hospital and then flown home on a stretcher. That’s when my mother called it quits on these experimental treatments, each one depleting or worsening his condition. Though I also noticed that when my father stopped trying, his depression settled in for good. His eyes looked magnified behind his glasses, which perched crookedly on his face. It was a death knell, but he would live like this for a few more years, receding into himself, giving himself over to a never ending parade of home health care aides, who bathed him and helped him use the toilet, and counted out his pills in a seven-day dispenser.
I had never seen my parents as vulnerable until then. I think my mother felt robbed most of all. Caretaking didn’t come naturally to her, and she seemed to resent my father, his illness, and the whole crappy situation. She vowed never to put him into a nursing home and she would fulfill that promise. Every morning she would set out a bowl of salt-free Cheerios, two prunes, a small glass of juice, and his pills. She had him on a sodium-free diet; it hardly seemed worth living. My mother would take her seat across from him and bite into a quartered orange, sucking all the meat out of it.
One aide after another marched through their lives. Some had to be dismissed right away because they clearly could not lift my father. Others stayed longer until they committed some egregious offense. One heavy-set man with dyed hair the color of orange soda strung a clothesline between two trees on the front lawn and hung a quilt on it. This made my mother apoplectic. She ran out the front door in her bathrobe and pulled the quilt down like a sailor his mainsail heading into a storm. Then she demanded he remove the line. Okay, lady, take it easy.
The same aide sang or whistled constantly as he worked, as if he were one of the seven dwarfs. My mother couldn’t stand it, but how do you tell someone to stop singing without sounding like Mussolini? My mother didn’t fire him until she received a call from the cops one night. He had taken my father’s handicap van out for a spin and was picked up outside an after-hours club in New Haven.
After that, I feared that I would come home to find my parents back-to-back and bound in duct tape, the valuables gone. One lady disappeared with my father and the van for twelve hours. We were frantic. They returned without any explanation apart from saying they got lost. I noticed the crumpled red-and-white-striped detritus of a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal in the backseat.
Mercifully, my father’s last aide was a gentle man who figured out how to slalom between my mother’s moods and quickly learned her precise way of doing things: loading the dishwasher just so, folding the rags. (Yes, folding rags!) And unlike me, snatching permanent press clothing from the dryer before they wrinkle (a technique my mother has elevated to an art form).More amazing, he could anticipate my father’s needs without being intrusive and not take his abrasiveness personally. When I’d come over with my then young daughter he would play Connect Four with her, letting her win, tapping his chip on the table to warn her about making costly mistakes. We would try to get my father to play, but after slipping a chip or two into the plastic slots he’d lose interest.
Whenever I read an article about the unexpected benefits of aging, I groan. It’s not fun, you don’t become wiser, and worse, the world is hurtling away from you. Old age is nothing if not managing losses
: physical ability, appearance, memory, spouses, friends, economic independence, and finally freedom. True, some people hold on to their faculties and abilities longer. Often you will hear the Yiddish term kaynahorah reflexively muttered after a statement like “She’s ninety but she still drives. Kaynahorah.” It’s a Yiddish expression, meant to keep the evil eye away. For my father, there were no reasons to rejoice in the last years of his life, no stretches of time where he got his sense of humor back, when he could finish a crossword puzzle, or play a mean hand of gin. At the end of his life my father went from the hospital to hospice. There, too, he had to endure more pain, holding on for days, mostly unconscious. It was unbearable. We were told he could live for a few days or a few months. We thought hospice would make things easier. During those difficult days, when talking about the question of when you should pull the plug, my mother said, her voice thick with anger, “There is no plug.”
Bette has completely stopped coming to Bridge. The ladies always ask my mother how she’s doing, what’s happening. There isn’t much to tell, and my mother doesn’t like to say much. There is a tacit understanding among the women. All of them have been through it, having lost their husbands of fifty-plus years, except for Jackie. Dick still plays tennis. He still travels the world. Still adds masks to his collection. Kaynahorah! Everyone feels for Bette but there is nothing they can do. I offer to spell Bette so she can get her hair done, her nails. I offer to play cards with Arthur, kibitz the way we do when I run into him at the JCC. Bette declines all offers of help. She says Arthur doesn’t want visitors, doesn’t want to see anyone.
All of the men go first. Men who went to work every day, smoked cigars and wore fedoras, men who might have strayed but didn’t leave their wives, trade them in for younger models. Played ball with their sons and walked their daughters down the aisle at their weddings. These were men who poured tumblers of scotch and read the paper when they got home. Men who golfed on the weekend, played tennis, pinochle, poker, and couples Bridge with their wives. They didn’t read GQ or Esquire, didn’t need to. They knew how to tie a tie, do a push-up, and wax the Cadillac. They took Polaroid pictures at birthday parties and paid the bills. That their wives didn’t have to work was a point of pride, as was putting their children through college, affording a second home in a gated community in Boca or Palm Beach with automatic sprinklers and manicured putting greens. They left nest eggs and continued to take care of their wives from the grave.
