The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  “So what if she has an earring in her nose,” and by this Bea didn’t mean a demure diamond stud in one of her nostrils but a thick septum ring with balls at the end.

  “I think she does a good job, she can have whatever chazerai in her nose for all I care.”

  The people who come to the Soup Kitchen have obviously hit hard times. It’s the mothers with small children who get to Bea. She always gives a small child two desserts and calls them “sweetie” or “cutie” and encourages them to take their time and choose whatever they like. Some of the men look threatening to me, either because of their size or body language. Only then they say, “Hey Miss Bea” and give her a big smile. I wish the Bridge Ladies could see her. Most people on the line thank Bea by saying, Bless you, and God bless you, and Have a blessed day.

  “I bet you’ve never been so blessed in your life, have you, Betsy?” Bea says as we leave.

  Heading back to our car, Bea takes my arm as we cross the street, our aprons rolled beneath our arms, the sign of a good day’s work.

  The light in Rhoda’s condo is snuffed out under a ceiling of gray sky. It’s been raining on and off for days. The ladies always show up in exactly the proper outerwear, some in rain bonnets, rain boots, others toting umbrellas with Monet lilies from the Met, NPR giveaways. When I arrive and my mother sees that I don’t have a coat, she predictably quizzes, “No coat?”

  I don’t believe I have ever, in her judgment, left the house properly dressed. She is a coat stickler. No, she is the Inspector General of Outer Wear, the Commissar of Coats. Not only do I have to wear one, but I should also have a coat for every kind of weather. For a girl who only had one coat, my mother now has a closet full because in her view: all jackets are not created equal. No longer able to get me to comply, Inspector General has turned her hawk-eye on my daughter. It makes her “crazy” the way I “let her out of the house” without a coat. When I buy my daughter what I think of as a three-season coat, my mother investigates the fabric and says with absolute authority, “Two. At best.”

  Instead of pushing all my buttons, this conversation almost amuses me, as if we are in an off-Broadway play reciting tired dialogue. Only then she escalates the inquisition. “Did it come with a lining?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Don’t lie to me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I see that you are.”

  “Okay, I’ll go get it.”

  “Will you really? Do you want me to get it? You have to get the lining. When will you have time to get it? You never have any time.”

  The worst thing about this insane conversation is that I have similar ones with my daughter. I bug her nearly every morning as she leaves for school. Are you going to be warm enough? Do you want your boots? Don’t you want any breakfast? Like a lot of my friends, I swore I would be nothing like my mother. Only there it is, all the warnings and criticisms tumbling forth from my mouth in what must be an invisible strain of maternal DNA.

  Still, women of my generation are fairly well convinced that we are doing a better job raising our kids, are more connected and attuned than our parents were with us. After all, we use the same technology and we share the same music, went to the same colleges, and experimented with the same drugs. My daughter and I share clothes. The idea of ever borrowing anything from my mother’s grown-up wardrobe was out of the question. The woman wore girdles and bras with cups the shape of funnels.

  We’re even a little ambivalent about being adults ourselves. Dude dads wear Arctic Monkey T-shirts and Converse sneakers to work. I know a mom who surfs!

  My daughter and I watched Girls together and binge-watched the entire series of The Office when she was in tenth grade. Sometimes I’d plead for one more episode, but she’d beg off claiming she had homework! I was so proud when she borrowed my Doc Martens for a concert! I didn’t even mind that she hadn’t asked me.

  When she said she wanted to get a nose ring, I said go for it. My mother was horrified to learn that I encouraged her. Didn’t I know that nose rings lead to heroin addiction, poverty, and death? I wasn’t sure if my mother was more appalled with her or with me. The fact is I’ve always loved blue hair, mohawks, and tattoos, no doubt because my mother finds them so offensive. I never had the moxie to stand out like that, but I gave her enough tsuris in my army pants and collection of T-shirts with band names that either stymied or frightened her: The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and the Grateful Dead. Why on earth would you wear a shirt with a skull on it? What was this ghastly uniform I had adopted? Wearing it to the country club and freaking out my mother was my idea of civil disobedience circa 1975. When my daughter finds a long-retired Jerry Garcia T-shirt from my former collection, she’s thrilled. It’s the coolest thing ever.

  Rhoda serves sardines. I wonder if I can hide them under the salad. I know I can’t spirit them away to the bathroom and flush them down the toilet the way I used to when my mother served cod. I gather myself and politely decline when they come my way.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, thank you so much. I’m fine.”

  Everyone starts eating when Rhoda lays her hands flat on the table, stands up, and clears her throat for an announcement. She easily commands the table. She is the only seasoned leader among them, having been executive director at the synagogue for sixteen years. Though Rhoda claims to have nearly fallen over when they offered her the position, but she was a leader waiting to happen: a confident only child, a graduate of Russell Sage, a proud women’s college whose motto was “To Be, To Know, To Do.”

  It was the highest administrative position in the congregation; she supervised a staff of five and was in charge of everything from baby naming ceremonies to building maintenance. Plus it came with a salary.

  She tells me about walking into a boardroom of all men for the first time.

  “Like Peggy in Mad Men?” I ask, but Rhoda looks at me blankly. (Ladies, watch cable, it won’t bite you!)

  “The first conference I went to, I took notes the whole time and barely breathed. One of the other executives came up to me and said ‘Rhoda, relax!’” She traveled alone to conferences. “I got on a plane all by myself and navigated new cities; that was really something.”

  A six-month trial basis turned into sixteen years. Her mother had moved to the area and helped out with the kids. Rhoda wouldn’t have said she had it all, or leaned in, but her life was multidimensional, always challenging. Peter was completely supportive. Sometimes he would join her at conferences. When the spouses started an association, they elected Peter president; he was pretty much the only guy and he loved it. Peter was crazy like that, up for anything, a total goof. One Passover, he taped the Afikomen to his stomach.

  Today, Rhoda is excited to let everyone know that Fran Kay, her longtime friend from high school and maid of honor, has produced a revival of Pippin on Broadway. Rhoda and her gentleman friend, George, saw it over the weekend, and she reports back that it’s marvelous, sure to win Fran another Tony.

  Fran Kay came to town during Rhoda’s high school years. There was something intoxicating about her; when Rhoda speaks of her you can still hear the infatuation in her voice.

  “Francis Kay was a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and long gorgeous black hair. Gorgeous.” According to Rhoda, she could choose an outfit that anyone else would have passed over and turn it into something stunning. She always had a boyfriend, with one in the wings. “When she wasn’t on the phone with one of her beaus, she was on the phone confiding in me.”

  Rhoda followed Fran all the way to the Poconos where she had a job at a Jewish summer camp called With-a-Wind. She convinced her parents to let her work there, and took the bus by herself. Rhoda would have followed Fran to the ends of the earth, which With-a-Wind pretty much was.

  Here, at the Bridge table, you can sense Rhoda’s pride. With all that charisma, Rhoda isn’t surprised that Fran’s made it big on Broadway. Pip
pin wasn’t her first hit either. Rhoda reminds the ladies that Fran, with her husband, produced Chicago along with other countless successful shows and have won six Tony Awards. And, at eighty-six, she has another show headed for Broadway. The reaction at the table is underwhelming. Maybe they’ve already heard about Fran, maybe a hundred times. Still, the woman is the real deal; her list of successes is staggering.

  Sometimes I think a meteor could strike earth and destroy everything in its wake with the sole exception of these five ladies, this luncheon of silvery fish, two decks of cards, and scoring pad nearby. I wish one of the ladies would jump on the table and start tap-dancing, share a piece of unseemly gossip, or open up about her life.

  One afternoon on Bette’s pretty screened-in porch, I asked her what the girls talked about when they were young.

  “Why can’t I remember anything?” she asks. “We must have talked about something.”

  “Did you gossip?” I ask, hoping to prompt her for something juicy.

  “Kids!” she finally says, pleased to have produced an answer.

  “We talked a lot about the kids. My Amy and Jackie’s Lisa were born on the same day. We all had kids around the same age.” It all starts to come back to her like slides flashing through a projector: pregnancies, doctors, schools, teachers, and preparing trays of hors d’oeuvres for parties.

  “We talked a lot about entertaining, we’d plan parties for weeks, we’d prepare like crazy, clean our best silver, plan menus, and swap recipes. Parties were a big deal, whoo.”

  Bette was warmed up then: beach clubs, summer camps. Some shared ski houses, took Christmas vacations together. The more Bette thinks about it she admits that, yes, the Bridge club did form a kind of support group.

  “Well, as you kids got older and things became more difficult, we talked about that, too.” Bette tells me that the Bridge Ladies came to each other’s rescue when the 1970s ushered in a terrifying time and an atmosphere of disrespect from their kids they would have never dared level at their own parents. It’s when all their values were swept aside in a tidal wave of premarital sex, illegal drugs, and music that freaked them out. Even the Beatles were too way-out! Our mothers thought pot caused brain damage and acid schizophrenia. I thought they were square; talking to them now I realize they were rightfully terrified. There hasn’t been a radical change or cultural shift between my generation and my daughter’s. Her world doesn’t look all that different from mine. When my daughter found a joint and a couple of buds in a plastic bag in my night table, she waved it in front of me. “Mom, seriously?”

  Rhoda replenishes beverages and conversation cycles through the weather, weekend activities, medical reports, movie reviews, and book reports. Most of the ladies watch The Good Wife on Sunday night. Everyone loves Alicia Florrick, the main character in the show. She speaks to their gen. The stand-by-your-man wives, the look-the-other-way wives. Women of their generation largely stayed married out of financial necessity coupled with the fear of social stigma. If any of the Bridge Ladies cheated on their husbands or were cheated on by them, they will go to their graves with it.

  I’ve learned that bragging is permissible, but only up to a point. College acceptances, getting engaged, having babies, getting jobs are all on the preapproved list. To listen to the ladies, none of their adult children has ever stumbled, gotten divorced, lost a job, or lost their way.

  Bette has been granted special dispensation in the bragging department. She became a grandmother at eighty, “the oldest living grandmother on earth,” she says. One Monday, when Bridge was at her house, the ladies filed into her office and watched a video on her computer of the boys standing in their crib and acted as if they should receive Heisman Trophies. Today she announces with glee and relief, “the twins are walking!” Everyone whoops. Sometimes I feel that for Bette the glass is half empty, but with the arrival of those boys her cup runneth over. “I have this feeling the boys are a part of me, they have crawled into my soul.”

  The ladies discuss obituaries of both local friends, public figures, and movie stars, especially if they are Jewish, like Bess Myerson, the first Jewish Miss America, and Lauren “Betty” Bacall, who downplayed her Jewishness as her Hollywood star was rising and later acquiesced when Humphrey Bogart wanted their children baptized. The ladies would make a killing on a Jewish-themed game of Jeopardy. Alex, I’ll take Jewish Beauties for $100.

  Last spring they were all glued to their televisions, watching the manhunt following the Boston Marathon bombings. They couldn’t understand how a young man with friends and good at school could turn into a killer. The world makes no sense. They are pained for the people who have lost lives and limbs. This is the world today: a pendulum swinging from bad to worse, from random acts of negligence to premeditated acts of terror. Or maybe things are worse. Bette once commented that she stopped believing in God after 9/11, which shocked me after all she and her generation had already lived through. I suggest other factors that may make things seem worse today: the twenty-four-hour news cycle, a media that turns events like the Boston Marathon bombing into made-for-TV movies, and all of the social media and its reach. No, the ladies were adamant: things are worse now. They are united in their chorus that the world was never this dangerous. Their indignation is keen. Didn’t they live through worse? I wonder if aging makes you more fearful, more vulnerable. Or are new problems scarier? How do the bad old days become the good old days? Is the devil you know, as my mother says, better than the devil you don’t?

  Rhoda’s made blondies. They are cut in perfect squares and arranged like a checkerboard on a china plate. Dessert plates have been set out, and Rhoda is poised to refill teacups and coffee. Everyone compliments the dessert. Rhoda loves to cook and bake; she mentions that George loves her cooking. I can’t imagine my mother cooking for another man; she hung up her spatula when my father died.

  Rhoda has lucked out with George. She didn’t expect it, wasn’t looking for it.

  “I never thought about dating. I was busy. I have a lot of friends, my subscriptions,” she told me during one of our talks.

  “How did you meet? JDate? A bar?”

  Rhoda knows I’m joking but she still protests, “No! A friend set us up.”

  “Did you go out to dinner?”

  “She invited us to her house for dinner.”

  We were on Rhoda’s couch, and she was transferring shells from one dish to another. I’m not sure, but I think she had some seasonal decorating scheme in mind.

  “Were you terrified?”

  “No. Why would I be terrified?”

  “I don’t know, not having dated for so long, possibly getting rejected, taking off your clothes, stuff like that.”

  Rhoda levels her eyes at my impertinence.

  “Not even a little nervous?”

  “I guess I was a little nervous.”

  “What did you wear?” I’m sort of kidding, but Rhoda answers right away. I gather she had put some thought into it: black silk pants and a pale pink sweater.

  “What was your first impression?”

  Then Rhoda remembers something: she had arrived at her friend’s house first, was just about to get out of her car, when she saw George pull up and park. She stayed inside her car then, and watched as he carried a cake box to the house, and continued to watch as he was greeted by the hosts and welcomed inside. She took a moment before getting out of her car, walking up to her friend’s house, and ringing the bell. It’s was an Alice Munro moment; a short story capturing a woman who quietly hesitates on the cusp of something, the past and future merging. Did she think of Peter just then, the only man she had ever known, did she ask his permission to move on, or was she only gathering herself for an evening out, nothing lost, nothing gained, or so she told herself?

  “What did you think?”

  “I thought he was very nice-looking.”

  “How did the evening go?”

  “It went very well.”

  “Did you wonder if you would
hear from him?”

  “I hoped I would.”

  The ladies ooh and aah over the blondies.

  “Sorry, Betsy, they have nuts.” Rhoda remembers my nut allergy, though at a previous lunch she commented on how so many more people have allergies than ever before, nuts, lactose, gluten, you name it. She sounded dubious, as if I were making it up. In fact, the ladies are generally dubious of a whole host of conditions and maladies that seemingly didn’t exist, or at least were not as widespread, in their day such as autism, PTSD, ADD, and dyslexia. Only today, Rhoda brings out a box of ginger cookies she bought especially for me. “I read every single ingredient on the package! No nuts!”

  She likes me, she really likes me.

  Rhoda wraps the leftover blondies in plastic wrap as carefully as a mummy and sets them to the side. The ladies root around in their pocketbooks and drop their dollars on the table. Early on there are some flare-ups over wrong bids. Bridge brings out the best and worst in a person: how competitive you are, how generous, how petty, and how kind. A person’s sense of decorum or lack thereof is immediately on display. How patient you are or how easily annoyed. How much of a show-off, or how cool. Your essential self comes out when you are challenged, when your partner makes a costly mistake, when you go down, or are victorious. A friend’s mother and longtime Bridge player called it “the revelation of self.” This game, I think, is intimate. You can’t be anything but yourself.

  After an hour or so, I watch a few hands, sit back with my pad, and sketch the ladies’ accessories. How do they choose what to wear, their bureaus crowded with a lifetime of rings, pins, bracelets, and necklaces? How do hands no longer flexible work a clasp? Thread an earring? How do they still care? If these beads could talk.

  When my mother wins the first contract, meaning she will play the hand, she mutters the entire time, counting her trump in a stage whisper. After she wins a trick, she looks at the four cards again and starts to make noises about how she won’t be able to make it. The more she complains, the more likely she will win. And when she does, in keeping with this grand charade, she exclaims, “Phew! Thought we weren’t going to make it,” as if she has just hauled up a dozen children from an abandoned mine.