by Betsy Lerner
Jess painted a picture for me that I hadn’t grasped in the year I had been taking lessons. I’ll never really get mathematical concepts; I can barely remember my own phone number. This was language from my world. When the student is ready. . .
On a rain-filled morning I arrive early and boldly plop down at a table where two chairs are draped with coats. I’m sick of being such a pisher. When the two women return to claim their chairs they are friendly enough and introduce themselves. Yolanda, an elegant woman with a European accent, was someone I had played with before, but she doesn’t recognize me (so much for making an impression). Esther, a woman who could easily be one of the Bridge Ladies, somewhere in her eighties, has bright red hair pulled back severely in a tiny ponytail, like the tip of a paintbrush. Then a woman who looks like she runs a Fortune 500 company barrels up to the table, claims a seat, and introduces herself as Bailey. She is a vision in camel with gold accents everywhere: the buttons on her blazer, earrings, four or five gold bangle bracelets, and a necklace with gold links that are nearly as big as belt buckles.
It appears after a deal or two that Bailey, Yolanda, Esther, and I are basically on the same level. Deal after deal, Yolanda gets all the good hands, full of honors or high-card points, and suits with six or more cards. Esther grows frustrated.
She and I continue to get garbage, all low cards, can’t get into the bidding. We tease Yolanda that she is stacking the deck, not shuffling the cards.
“Watch,” Esther says. “Next time she’ll get all four aces.”
When Yolanda gets her fourth great hand in a row, Esther throws up her hands.
In response, Yolanda says, “Chance en jeu, malheureux en amour.”
I ask her to translate.
“‘Lucky in cards, unlucky in love.’ I would rather be unlucky in cards,” she says.
I look at her quizzically.
Yolanda explains that her husband had died not too long ago. She says this so quietly I think I may be the only one at the table who hears her.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“So you see why I would rather not have the cards.”
“Would you say it again?”
“What?”
“The French.”
Now she pronounces it even more slowly, sadly, “Chance en jeu, malherueux en amour.”
The next deal, I miraculously draw a big hand, lots of honor cards and points. I win the auction and become declarer. This is where the rubber meets the road. Winning the auction thrusts you into the spotlight. This is Wimbledon Centre Court, Fischer vs. Spassky. You are Shaun White and the table is your half-pipe. It’s your moment to command the board, to finesse for kings, turn losers into winners, trump your opponents, and watch a lowly two of Diamonds take an ace of Spades if you play your cards right.
The contract is for four Spades, which means we must win ten out of thirteen tricks with Spades as trump. When my partner lays down the dummy, I see the strength of our combined hands; we have more than enough trump and high-card points to control the hand. I take two quick tricks (sure winners like the ace and king of a suit), and then start pulling trump. I know I need to try the finesse, but for the life of me I can’t remember how to do that. Am I trying to force out a higher card or win a trick by ducking a higher card from swallowing mine? Jess happens to wander over just then and looks at my cards. I point to the one I think I should play and he lifts an eyebrow in approval. Have I ever felt this smart in my entire life? The teacher appears . . .
Jess announces that we should be wrapping up. Bailey is changing out of her shoes in favor of big rubber boots. Esther takes out her phone, flips it open like a Zippo. No one seems to care about the rest of the hand. In part, I suppose, because it’s sure to win, the dummy filled with so many kings and queens. Then other tables start breaking up, people heading out. I move quickly, picking off the last few tricks like a rifle at a carnival game, and win the hand with two bonus tricks. There isn’t time for praise or pats on the back. No “good job” or “well done,” the way we usually flatter each other after we make our contract. The session is over, everyone dispersing. In truth, a monkey could have won the hand. I don’t care. I head home a few inches off the ground.
And then I proudly call my mother.
CHAPTER 19
Ash
End of June, and still no Bette. Jackie is early as usual, sitting at our regular table at the Country Corner Diner. The stout water glasses are already beading with condensation. Jackie looks regal, hair newly done, wearing a great tribal piece made of bone or ivory plaques and tubes held together with black raffia string. I notice she’s wearing her signature ring with three prongs. When I compliment her on it she says, “I’ll leave it to you in my will.” I’m mortified. Of course it was a joke, but had I been coveting it? What exactly do I want from the ladies? What have I taken?
A new waitress drops off menus. I wonder where the waitress is whose beauty provided so much mystery in this plain country diner.
Bea and Rhoda arrive at the same time.
“I’m on time!” Rhoda announces, pleased with herself. Bea asks if she wants a gold star. Then my mother arrives, and the table is complete. It’s hard not to wonder: Will this be me in thirty years? Is that a long time or no time at all? Will my hands be mottled, my face a walnut? Will I bury my husband or will he bury me? Will I wear purple, and resolve every year to be a better person, volunteer like Bea? Or will I run to concerts and lectures and Broadway shows like my mother, read the New Yorker cover to cover? Will I have any friends left?
Of all of the women, it’s Rhoda who’s kept up the largest network of friends. The first time we met, she had her high school yearbook already waiting on the kitchen counter. The cover embossed with a witch riding on a broom and named “The Witch” for Salem’s famous trials.
“There I am,” Rhoda said pointing to herself in this sacred high school relic.
Before Fran Kay, there was Rudie. Rhoda pointed to the picture of the girl next to her in the yearbook. Two girls appear nearly identical gazing out, heads tilted up, alabaster skin, and hairdos inspired by the film stars of the day. Not conjoined but nearly fused at the hip, the two girls with the same last name and the same spelling would go all the way from grade school through high school and then on to Russell Sage. Rhoda Belle Freedman and Ruth Helen Freedman: Rudie and Rho, Rho and Rudie.
“We’d walk from school to the beach, making up stories and singing songs the entire time.”
“Are you still close?” I’d asked.
“Not as much as we once were,” Rhoda admitted but proudly mentions that they still exchange birthday cards to this day.
“In fact, I have one right here I need to get in the mail.” And sure enough there was a blue envelope on her counter with Rudy’s name and address written in Rhoda’s perfect script, a stamp already affixed.
Bette will tell me about Barbara, her roommate at Skidmore for all four years. She worshipped her bright and confident friend from exotic Brooklyn. It was Barbara who listened when Bette cried about Donald and set them up on dates with Dartmouth boys. And Barbara who encouraged Bette when she was distraught about not getting parts, her dream dissipating before her. “I love her to this day.”
My mother hung out at the roller rink and boardwalk with Vivian and Sylvia, the other two points of a classic girl triangle. Vivian was the quintessential mean girl, the great beauty who ditched the girls when a fella came around. Sylvie was the loveable schlub, and my mother somewhere in between. They would each marry, go their own way. Bea had lots of friends, no one in particular to mention. Jackie was the president of her sorority though she won’t admit to being popular. (That is for other people to say.)
I know my mother will order turkey dry on seedless rye. I know she won’t have anything to drink. I know a few crumbs from her sandwich will fall on her chest and as she brushes them off she will scold herself for being messy. She looks lovely today, her hair recently cut and colored, just the right amo
unt of makeup, and she’s wearing some of her spring separates with a necklace made of tortoiseshell links I haven’t seen before. She seems more relaxed today than usual.
When my father first died, I thought my mother was manically filling her time. Maybe she was. I hadn’t understood how circumscribed her life had become, tethered to him and his disability. I said I gave her credit for taking care of him, but did I? Wasn’t I always annoyed with her for not being nicer, or gentler, or just easing up a little on the sodium-free meals? How could I have not helped her more, how could I have been so judgmental? So shitty? In her eighth decade, she has taken up Hebrew lessons and fallen in love with opera. She has even taken herself several times to the Met. Maybe there some of her sorrow dissipates as notes in air.
Bea is quieter than usual. I notice she is wearing an oval-shaped gold ring with a dark green stone, a man’s ring that swims on her finger. When I ask her where it’s from, she says, having read my mind, “Sorry to disappoint you. There is no wonderful romantic story behind it.” When I ask Bea where she got it, she perks up a bit, “Carl used to love to go to the antique stores on State Street. He loved picking up all kinds of odd things.” Bea, I think, was his greatest find.
Today’s headlines: a boy has killed his mother in Orange, a nearby town. It is the second matricide in this small town, which is coincidental, but sounds ominous, the premise for a Stephen King novel. In Milford, where Rhoda lives, a boy stabbed a girl to death after she turned him down for the prom. The ladies will never understand it.
Another friend has gone into the Whitney Center, an upscale assisted living facility in town, following a car accident. A New Haven widow who moved to Florida and swore she would never date now has a man friend! A neighbor no less!
Back at Jackie’s, Bea and my mother are partners. Bea opens with a Club. It could mean that she has five Clubs or as few as three. I’m impressed with myself for knowing this. If my mother passes, it could leave Bea in the lurch if she is short on Clubs. My mother passes. The opponents also pass, so Bea is stuck with the bid. When my mother lays down the dummy, Bea threatens her, “You better have less than five points.”
With more than five points my mother would have been forced to bid. However, she only has three points and has bid correctly. Bea is aggravated even though there was nothing my mother could do with that hand. “Sometimes you can’t save your partner,” a saying my mother is fond of.
Halfway into the hand, Bea makes an uncharacteristic mistake that costs them the game.
“I have the memory of a soda cracker,” she says when she realizes her mistake, failing to keep track of trumps. When they go down, she shrugs it off. “What can I say, Betsy, we got squished.”
After watching for a couple of hours, I start to drift as usual, yearn for my iPhone. I can feel my work in-box filing up with e-mails from the writers I represent, editors I work with, unsolicited query letters from people who hope I will take them on as clients. Many get in touch with memoirs about depression, eating disorders, mental illness, addiction, and suicide. When I was a young editor, I couldn’t get enough of these personal stories and began to get something of a reputation for publishing them. A colleague once dubbed me the pain and suffering editor.
I knew that Jackie spent years volunteering at Clifford Beers, the first mental health organization in the country named for its founder, a man whose own suicide attempt and institutionalization led him to become a reformer in the field of mental health at the turn of the century. She volunteered and would eventually become the secretary, then the president, and finally a long-standing board member raising money, contributing, organizing benefits. When I once posited to Jackie that many people in the “helping” professions are seeking some sort of help themselves, much like Beers, she scoffed. I hypothesize that perhaps someone close to her needed help. Again, she rebuffs the suggestion. Surely, something fueled Jackie’s passion for her work with the mentally ill. She insists there is no connection. I’m sure much is random in the universe, but I came to see the pattern in nearly all the books I worked on as an extension of myself: what I concealed, what I feared, and what I hoped for.
One night, when my husband was away and my daughter off with her friends, I invited my mother to dinner and a movie. It was a little awkward at first, like a first date, as we are so rarely alone. But we’re doing better. She attempts to stop herself from criticizing me (or offering suggestions, as she would say). I try not to let her get to me. When a zinger gets through, I feel like a catcher waiting for the pitch; will she throw her fastball or her curveball? Only now I’m ready for it, even looking forward to it, knowing I can handle it. I am also trying to be more attentive, more inclusive. I call my mother nearly every day. Whenever we hang up, she always says the same thing, “Talk to you next week.”
“Mom,” I say, thoroughly exasperated. “I call you every day! Why do you say ‘talk to you next week’?”
I want the credit for calling as much as I do. How many people call their mom every day? Come on!
Spontaneity isn’t my mother’s strong suit either, and when we first moved back, it irritated her whenever I invited her for dinner at the last minute.
“Well, if I had known, I would have put it on the calendar,” she would say. Or “I’m not dressed,” or “I’m already undressed,” and we would both get off the phone annoyed. Still, I kept inviting her same day or the day before, and sometimes last minute. Eventually she started saying “sure why not” or “yes, that would be lovely.” Often she’d wind up treating us to dinner. If she already had plans, that would be okay, too. We’d get together another time. We’ve actually gotten good at it. Invitations tendered and accepted are more casual, less fraught. Sometimes she’ll even show up in sweats and no makeup, apologize for looking like a mess but wanting to come. We don’t care! It’s just us! She still finds it unfathomable that we can throw dinner together at the last minute. “I don’t understand how you people live,” she’ll say, as if we are Inuit, so strange are our customs.
At dinner she told me about a friend who had gone to the Whitney Center and swore by it. The people who love it become evangelical and want everyone to move there. Then she adds that the Whitney Center is having a 20 percent off sale. My mother had checked out the facility some months ago; she thinks about it a lot, but has yet to pull the trigger. I’ve never been and I’m curious if it’s right for her. No matter how many people say they love it, no one really wants to go. Of all the Bridge Ladies, Bette is the most vocal. She has two reasons: the first is she doesn’t want to be around old people exclusively. She wants to see middle-aged people, and children, and be in the mix of life. Once, Bette remarked how painful it was to see Maureen O’Hara accepting her lifetime achievement award at the Oscars.
“Why did she have to come out like that in her wheelchair?”
I thought O’Hara looked great and triumphant receiving the award at ninety-three. But Bette wants to remember her as the great beauty that she was. I imagine it’s how she wants to remember herself.
Another reason Bette doesn’t want to move is the move itself, dealing with sixty years of accumulation. “If I die in this house, the kids will have to clean it out. They’ll throw it all away.”
Originally, the Whitney Center had a very low percentage of Jewish occupants. The numbers have gone up considerably, and as a result it’s where my mother now imagines she eventually might go. Plus, more and more of her friends are there. The apartments are spacious, the services extensive, the nursing care five-star. She continues to use the upkeep of the house as her excuse for considering the move.
“I can’t take it anymore,” she says, “this house is costing me a frickin’ fortune.” She never mentions health, mobility, or safety. She’s just not there yet.
The movie was dark and slow. We both fell asleep early on and were awakened by a gunshot in the film. She leaned in and loudly whispered, “Should we leave?”
Driving home she told me to go slow multiple
times. She instructed me to keep both hands on the wheel. She said aloud the name of almost every store we passed where she’d had a less than satisfying shopping experience, relaying stories about bad service and know-nothing salespeople.
“It’s a good thing I save my receipts,” my mother said, regularly returning a third of what she buys. And I know this to be true, as her pocketbook is home to receipts that date back to the Carter administration. She is always beseeching me to hold on to receipts, which may explain why I never do. When she accuses me of not returning things, like a shirt that doesn’t fit or a bag of grapes that’s half bad, it’s like an indictment on my entire generation: the wasteful, the spoiled, the disposable.
I was about to make a left turn when my mother instructed me to make it wide.
“You never know when a curb or divider is going to pop up.”
Then she confided that one night after making one of her trademark wide left turns, a cop pulled her over. “A big tall lady cop. Big!”
The cop asked her if she knew she had made a very wide turn.
“Oh, yes.”
Then she asked her if she had been drinking.
“Oh, no, officer.”
“Were you playing the age card?” I ask.
“So what if I did.”
“Had you been drinking?” I know my mother occasionally likes a Stoli on the rocks.
“No, not that night. Thank goodness.”
Hard to imagine the cop pulling my mother out of the car and making her walk a straight line if they still do that.
“You know who doesn’t drive?” she asked rhetorically.
I never answer these statements, nor do I need to.
“Millie Klarik. She’s in her nineties. I always give her a ride. She says I’m the worst driver she’s ever driven with. But she still let’s me take her. What do you make of that?”
