by Betsy Lerner
Only I’m stopped right there. Burglars leave banks empty-handed. Gamblers leave casinos empty-handed. How does a father come home from a hospital empty-handed? My mind is so literal sometimes that I see my father coming home, holding a blanket where a baby should be, and turning his hands over as if to say: see, empty.
“Mom, didn’t you go to the hospital?”
“I had to stay home with you guys.”
My mother keeps reminding me that we were new in town, had only been there a few months. We didn’t even know our neighbors. There was no one nearby to call.
“He went. And when he came home he said, ‘I wish it could have been me.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ There were two little kids to be taken care of. How could I possibly do that on my own?”
“Did you really mean that?”
“I did. Definitely.”
My parents were new to our synagogue and the round chapel with its stained-glass depictions of the Jewish holidays. My mother was thirty-four years old when she buried a daughter, when she stood in the place where so many have come to mourn. Did she steady herself on the row of seats before her? Did my father put his freckled hand over hers? Did she stiffen and pull away? And what of the apricot light falling in shafts through the stained glass with dust motes, like fireflies, suspended there? Did she say the kaddish, mumbling over the Hebrew, as most Jews do, or did she remain silent, her back the target of a hundred eyes: There but for the grace of God go I?
“Did you have a sense of what kind of a child she was?” I ask, barely able to hold back my tears.
“Oh yes. When I dropped you kids off or picked you up from school, she would call out from her car seat ‘my cool, my cool.’ And she was very, very fast. When Dad came home at night, she would reach him first before you two big girls. I never knew how she did that. I felt at two that she ran the house. Now that can’t be true. But I had this sense that she was going to be fantastic. I did.”
This is the most my mother has ever told me. It’s just a few sentences, but it feels like the world. Then she looks down at her manicured nails, the lacquer flawlessly applied, the color changing week to week like a mood ring. I always knew Barbara brought her great sorrow; I didn’t know about the joy from this lively little girl, less turtle more hare.
I no longer want to know anything else. I am willing to end it right here, this lifetime of unanswered questions, of magical thinking. We are close enough to hug in this little reading room, but we won’t. Close enough to apologize for all the things we never did as mother and daughter. We won’t. Where would we start? The room full of books is silent. Stories trapped in type, unable to take wing, sentences marching across the page that cannot explain being born or dying. Infinite Jest, indeed. I was far too young to understand that I had lost my sister. The far greater loss, I realize now, was my mother.
CHAPTER 11
The Finesse
“Have a look.” My mother sends me the newsletter from the Orange Senior Center, which is in the next town over. She’s affixed a Post-it to the flyer with the message in her pretty script with graceful loops. When I call the center and ask about the beginner class I’m told I need a partner. When I relay this to my mother she volunteers without hesitation. I remind her that it’s a beginner class and that she’s been playing for more than fifty years. She insists that there is always more to learn. Yes, I’m sure there is, but this is a beginner class. My mother says she doesn’t mind.
On the drive to the lesson, I ask her what she will say if the teacher asks why she’s come for lessons.
“Do you think he will?” My mother is startled by this possible eventuality.
“It’s usually how teachers start classes.”
She bites her finger to pantomime thinking. “I’ll lie.”
We enter the senior center through a large cafeteria with a bingo game in process. My mother clutches my arm and hurries us out, as if we’ve barged in on a famous chess or tennis match. The place has that cafeteria smell of institutional food, and the seniors look defeated by life and the checkerboard squares before them. We wend our way down a long hall. The walls are papered with flyers about free lunches, movie nights, and lectures. The classroom is depressing, cement block walls, dusty chalkboards, a hodgepodge of tables and chairs. A few women, mostly in their fifties and sixties, and an older couple are milling about. The teacher is late, and everyone is looking at the clock.
The woman in the couple makes it her business to go to the office and inquire after our missing teacher. She has curly white hair and large, black Swifty Lazar–style eyeglass frames. She is slim and dressed in all black. I can tell she is the kind of person who marches into the projection room when the sound goes off in a movie, or reports a carton of milk spilled in the grocery aisle.
When she returns, she tells the group that the teacher got the time wrong and is going to be a half hour late. Then she introduces herself and her husband, Barbara and Bernard Barkin. She has a fabulous New York accent.
“Born and raised in Manhattan,” she says, as if she were part of the Seneca Nation. I like Barbara right away. She has a great laugh, more, a great attitude. She and her husband have moved here after living in Westchester and Greenwich for sixty-two years. She explains that Bernard had an aortic dissection (usually fatal); they moved from their three-story home when it became too much to handle. Their kids had relocated here some time ago and urged them to move closer, and that is how Barbara and Bernard find themselves on a Thursday afternoon in a senior center in Orange, Connecticut. She’s upbeat, allows that the move and sale of many of their things was traumatic, but people here are so friendly. Get to know us.
Barbara proudly informs us that her mother was a master Bridge player. She urged both her daughters to play. Barbara’s sister listened. Today, she’s a terrific player, plays four days a week in Florida. Barbara wasn’t interested. Her mother warned her that she’ll be sorry when she’s older. Barbara freely admits her mother was right.
Finally our teacher arrives, looking somewhat bewildered and apologetic. He introduces himself, but I can’t quite make out his name. Al Cone or Cole. I nickname him Al Capone, though I think he’s an old Jewish guy who I’m fairly certain never mowed anyone down with a Thompson submachine gun. He appears to be in his mid to late eighties. His hair is a victim of hat head and he hasn’t shaved, which makes him look slightly depressed. And his glasses have a light brown tint, the kind that darken in the sun and, once inside, take time to clear. He doesn’t wear a wedding band, and his fingers are slightly bent at the top knuckle. I wonder if he’s single and if he might be a possible man friend for my mother. It becomes clear pretty quickly that he has at least three things going for him (a) he really knows his Bridge, which is hugely impressive, (b) he has a sly sense of humor (which elevates a person in romantic consideration at any age), and (c) he’s standing.
Barbara and I sit across from each other as partners. My mother sits to my left and the table is filled out by a lady named Ruth. She is wearing a fleece the color of oatmeal and matching wide-wale corduroys. Over the course of the lesson, we will learn that Ruth is a bookkeeper, is single “by choice,” and older than she looks. She wasn’t carded until she was thirty!
Barbara’s husband, Bernard, is a terrific player, but he stays off to the side with his Sudoku book. He’s wearing gray sweatpants, a sweater, and sneakers with Velcro straps, standard-issue senior wear. I will learn that he and Barbara do everything together; they say of themselves that they are joined at their hips. It’s not clear to me if it’s out of undying affection or if in the aftermath of Bernard’s illness she is afraid to leave him alone. Bernard comes over to the table from time to time and kisses Barbara’s neck the way you blow raspberries on a baby’s belly. He is more affectionate with her during two hours of Bridge than I have witnessed over a lifetime in my parents’ marriage.
I know my mother finds this inappropriate. In fact, I purposefully avoid looking at her because I know I will crac
k up to see the disapproval scrawled on her face. She doesn’t believe her face betrays any emotion, but it’s not even subtle. Bernard picks up on her uptight disposition and starts to call her Rozzy Baby. This is like calling Queen Elizabeth Queenie or Lizzie. Then he asks a bunch of personal questions: Is her husband still alive? How did he die? How long ago was it? Then with absolutely no information, Bernard remarks that he must have been a wonderful man. Mother is taken aback. The sentiment is nice, but he doesn’t have a clue about my father.
“Yes, he was,” my mother curtly responds, hoping to cut off the conversation, which is way too personal and again totally inappropriate by my mother’s standards.
“Did you have a good marriage?”
My mother looks at Bernard, cocks her head. He’s gone too far.
“I’ll bet you had a good marriage.” Rozzy Baby isn’t pleased, but again, she answers curtly, “Yes, we did.”
Bernard has gotten to my mother in record time. I’m impressed. Then he goes over to Barbara, kisses her on the neck.
“Bernard! Enough!” Over the months getting to know and play Bridge with the Barkins, it will become clear that this is their shtick. Bernard says outrageous things and Barbara hushes him. Only Bernard will always come back for another round. I see the mischief in Bernard’s face and I sense the kindred spirit of a sad clown.
Al Capone doesn’t provide a formal lesson so much as shuffle between the two Bridge tables and dole out advice. We all have enough experience to wing it to some extent. Barbara has brought two books and a bidding guide, which she consults regularly (once a teacher always a teacher). My mother starts to call Al over almost every time she has to lead. I find this baffling, as she has been playing for more than fifty years. The opening lead in Bridge is critical. It’s the first card thrown by the defenders and it impacts the play of the hand. The rule of thumb is to lead either the top of an honor sequence from the same suit (king-queen-jack) or without that, the fourth card from your longest and strongest suit. I’ve memorized this rule, but I have no idea what’s behind the thinking. In fact, that pretty much describes where I am with Bridge. The rules are starting to gel, as Jeff promised, but I don’t exactly understand the logic behind them.
There is another important component to choosing a lead: it is a signal to your partner of what you’d like him to lead back. The first time I learned about this kind of signaling it seemed like the stuff of Morse code and decoder rings. For beginning players, it’s the first taste of understanding how you and your partner work in tandem. By feeding each other hints about suits we are strong in, our partnership can launch a more robust defense. It’s fun to win your contract in Bridge. It’s also really fun to set your opponent.
At one point when I’m confused about what card to play, I wave Al over. He looks at my cards and the cards laid out in the dummy, assesses the situation, and suggests I try the “finesse.”
I’d learned about the finesse at the Manhattan Bridge Club, but I was more taken with the elegance of the term than actually understanding the mechanics of how it works. Barbara, still a great teacher, explains how the finesse is a technique where you attempt to take a trick with a lower card whilst a higher card is still at large. Doing this successfully depends on where the higher card is sitting, either with your right hand or left hand opponent, and thus only works 50 percent of the time.
I point to the seven of Hearts in my hand. Al nods and I play it. My mother, opponent to my left, follows suit and plays low with a four of Hearts (second man plays low—this is another rule of thumb), I take the queen from the dummy (Al nods again that this is right). And the fourth, Ruth, throws the king of Hearts, and wins the trick. Delighted, she bounces around in her seat like a child tasting pudding for the first time.
I’m pissed that I’ve lost the trick and I look to Al for an explanation. “There’s a saying in Bridge,” he says, “‘Give unto Caesar what’s due Caesar,’” then he goes back to the other table, where the women are shouting for him.
In the car on the way home, we estimate the Barkins’ age and we wonder whether this move to our hamlet was a good idea. Staying put, downsizing, and moving into assisted living is a constant source of conversation. Bea and Rhoda moved into their condos when their husbands were still alive and it turned out to be the perfect step for when they became widows. For Bette, Jackie, and my mother, who all live in the same homes they lived in for more than fifty years, there is a lot to consider and manage. When I tell my mother I can convert our garage into a beautiful studio apartment for her, no stairs involved, her own entrance, she graciously replies, “Over my dead body.”
As we get closer to her house, I accuse her of flirting with Al Capone, calling him over for bidding advice as if she were a schoolgirl. She roundly protests.
“Do you think he’s single?”
“Who, Al?”
“Yes, Al. Maybe he’s available.”
“For me?”
“Is there anyone else in the car?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
At this Mother looks out the window, thoroughly irritated with me.
For my entire childhood, she drove us down these same roads to Hebrew school, pottery lessons, and doctors’ appointments. All that time, all those miles of carpooling, I sensed resentment and resignation on her part, or maybe the car had been filling up with my own teenage fumes. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I became so difficult or why. Only now, when we talk about not getting along, my mother says it wasn’t that bad. At least she doesn’t remember it that way. Surely I am exaggerating is her implication.
“Mom,” I say, “do you have amnesia.”
“Maybe I do, I just don’t remember it being that bad.”
“I think you like to whitewash things.”
“If you say so.”
We pull into her driveway. She’s slow getting out of the car. I can see the effort in her back and shoulders as she pulls herself out. I feel the effort in my own back and ask if she needs help.
“No, no, I can do it. Just give me a second.”
Once out, I tell her I had fun.
“Good,” she says, and goes inside.
CHAPTER 12
The Revelation of Self
“There is no man worth dying for,” Bea says as soon as I sit down to join her for breakfast. I sometimes feel with Bea that I’ve entered the film somewhere in the middle.
“It’s what I tell all the girls doing community service who help out at the Soup Kitchen. You know, instead of doing prison time.” Bea says she’d hate to see a good kid wind up in the brink over some loser. When she started volunteering at the Soup Kitchen, she never asked the people doing community service what crime they had committed, only after a time she got more comfortable, more familiar.
“I’ve heard it all,” she says. “Last week, a gal told me the cops found drugs in the trunk of her car, but they weren’t hers. Yeah, right.” I love this tough talk of Bea’s. I can picture her with a detective’s badge interrogating some perp on the set of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Bea talks a good game.
When I asked if I could join her and volunteer at the Soup Kitchen, see her in action, she was delighted. She has been serving on the line twice a week for nearly ten years, since her husband died. She has proudly told me that they serve more than three hundred meals a day, and more toward the end of the month when the checks run out. When she mentions the Soup Kitchen at Bridge, which she often does, no one ever takes it up, asks her what it’s like, or commends her service. “Betsy”—she’s not dropping it—“do you think there is any man worth going to prison for?”
“Probably not,” I wager.
“Probably?”
“Okay, definitely not,” I agree.
“Damn straight.”
After we finish eating, she pulls a pillbox out of her purse. She shakes it and a little white pill goes rolling across the table. She’s fast on the draw and snaps it up before it rolls off. “My birth control pills,”
she says, winking. Then she takes out her lipstick and a small round mirror that fits in the palm of her hand.
“See this?” she says, and hands it to me.
On the back is a black-and-white photo of Bea and her mother. I’ve asked Bea a few times if they were close. “Personalities don’t always mesh” is all she’ll tell me. Still, she carries this novelty mirror from the Catskills with her more than eighty years later. When I hand it back, Bea says, “That was taken a hundred and five years ago,” and then, as an afterthought, “I was a beautiful child.”
When we approach the Soup Kitchen, a few guys in low-slung jeans, doo-rags, dreadlocks, aprons, and work boots as big as loaves of bread are outside smoking. As we approach, they all call out to her like three little birds on a wire: Hey Miss Bea, Hey Miss Bea, Hey Miss Bea. She greets each man by name and introduces me as a helper. Inside, it’s the same. She takes me into the kitchen and introduces me to the cook and dishwashers. She knows everyone by name and what they’re up to. Bea is knitted in here. Before she takes her place on the serving line, she fills the birdbath in the pretty courtyard between the church and the community room. Seconds later the bath is crowded with birds shoving each other out of the way for a drink. Bea looks back, delighted.
She puts on her apron and her plastic gloves and takes her place on the line where she serves dessert. There’s usually a choice of donated cakes, doughnuts, and cookies on a large silver tray, but you better decide quickly. Bea will not have the line held up on account of you being fussy. Nor will you get away with sneaking back in line for a second piece of cake. If you think you will put one over on Bea on account of her age, think again. I may be wrong, but she seems like the center of the whole operation.
Usually a divinity student from Yale comes to lead the assembled in prayer before the meal. The day I was there a young woman led the room in prayers and then she moved from table to table, talking with the clients. Bea explained that most of the pastors leave after they say the prayer. She is impressed with this young woman taking the time to stay.