The Bridge Ladies

by Betsy Lerner

  The women are deep into the afternoon of play. Just as I can no longer concentrate on the game and am about to leave, I feel my phone vibrate in my back pocket. I had forgotten to leave it in the car, and whoever is texting is persistent, two, three, four times in a row. This could only be my daughter.

  Growing concerned, I excuse myself. “Sorry, Raffi’s been texting me.”

  In the hallway, I read the four texts, the first one asking me to bring a book to school that she’d forgotten, each subsequent text growing more indignant that I hadn’t answered:

  Hello?

  Where r u

  Hello

  In fairness, when she doesn’t answer my texts right away I completely overreact and immediately go into worry mode.

  When I return to the table, my mother asks if everything is okay.

  “Everything’s fine. I just worry when she texts me so many times.”

  “Maybe she should learn patience,” Rhoda says, cutting but not inaccurate.

  I wonder how history will judge us, the helicopter parents accused of hovering over our kids well into their twenties? Or how bitterly our kids will complain to their own shrinks about how we overshared, micromanaged, and at the same time were never really there for them, either always working or too busy fulfilling ourselves. When I once boasted at a holiday dinner that I attended all of my daughter’s soccer games, she countered, “But you were always on your BlackBerry.”

  They are on their last hand of the day. I’ve zoned out and am staring at the pretty dish of brightly colored glass candies with ruffled edges like the collars of Dutch masters on Rhoda’s coffee table. Next to the dish is a miniature trio: a frog made of green beads with red eyes that pop like raspberries, an elephant made of green glass, and a crystal seal balancing a ball. Perhaps they come to life at night and play a few jazz standards while Rhoda sleeps. Perhaps the Bridge Ladies come to life when I leave as well, confiding in each other and opening up. It’s true they all have loosened up considerably from where we started. They greet me at the door with less trepidation, more enthusiasm. And they all tell me that our talks have brought back memories that come unbidden. When I ask what they remember, it’s always out of grasp, like a dream that lingers near. Why am I so desperate to imagine hidden depths and secret lives? Perhaps the reason they don’t divulge very much is they don’t actually feel the need to open up. In fact, it goes against their nature. They seem content with the way things are. Bridge may be a tonic for them the way opening up with friends is for me.

  Perhaps in my desperation for something to happen, I have missed what is actually happening.

  CHAPTER 13

  Zig-Zag

  Goats Head Soup was the album cover on which I first witnessed a joint being rolled, the careful separation of leaves from the sticks and seeds, which caromed down the flat surface of the album like silver balls in a pinball machine. Bea’s daughter, Nancy, came to stay with us for two or three days when my parents went away. I was fifteen, Nina was seventeen, and Nancy was probably a college senior home for break. She wore bell-bottom hip huggers with a wide leather belt and had long brown hair. I thought she was a rock star. She had a loud voice, a hearty laugh, and like a hippie version of the Cat in the Hat, she made herself right at home, plopping down on the Rice-A-Roni-colored shag carpet in our den, and told us that we were going to have fun. She spread the pot out on the album cover and picked out the twigs the way Eli Whitney’s cotton gin separated the seeds from the fiber. (Whitney went to Yale, and every schoolchild in New Haven has gone on a field trip to the museum dedicated to his invention.)

  Nancy was a groovy Mary Poppins with her own bag of goodies. When she took out a slim orange packet, I mistook it for gum. On closer inspection, I saw that it said Zig-Zag, and there was a man who looked like a prophet on the cover. These were rolling papers. She expertly licked the edge of one, like the glue on an envelope, and attached it to another. Then she filled it with the freshly cleaned pot and rolled it with élan. Then she put the entire thing in her mouth and pulled it out quickly to seal the seam. Voilà!

  Mick Jagger’s face was swathed in some kind of chiffon bonnet, and at first I mistook him for a woman. I had heard of the band. One of my friend’s older sisters had Sticky Fingers and we went crazy over the fly with the real zipper embedded into the album cover. At a sleepover in her newly created basement rec room, we danced like maniacs to “Brown Sugar.”

  A few of Nancy’s friends came over, and the music got louder. She feverishly worked to assemble a tray of Chex Mix. Happy conspirator, I proudly showed her where my mother kept the baking trays, expediting the preparation of “munchies.” It was a combination of wheat, corn, and rice Chex mixed with peanuts and pretzels and doused with either honey or maple syrup and baked. The operative word: baked. I had already started sneaking cigarettes, and the arrival of Nancy Phillips was like a gateway to everything I wanted in on. She was the first cool person I had met up close. If she had told me to jump off a bridge, I would have leapt.

  The 1960s came to New Haven (in the 1970s), and there was no turning back. At thirteen, I was just beginning to recognize that the pungent smell behind a movie theater or in a parking lot was weed. It was still fairly exotic. I had no idea where to get any or how the older siblings of my friends always seemed to have a nickel bag on hand, or a dime. By the time I was in high school, I was getting high at the bus stop and in the basement and in my car, and my friends and I had many dinners at our parents’ homes stoned out of our minds, devouring the food and laughing hysterically at almost anything, including, for example, the farting sound Tupperware used to make.

  “Everybody was smoking pot, everybody,” Nancy tells me when I reconnect with her and confess how those few days influenced me. The Phillips kids were known for their good looks, they were swimmers, had lean swimmers’ bodies, and they liked to party. “But we never got busted.” Bea found some pot growing in the backyard, and once she found hash in her son’s room. “She thought it was a rock and was about to throw it out. My brother screamed at her, ‘Don’t you dare.’ And she didn’t.” All Bea has to say when it comes to raising three teenagers in the 1970s: “It was the times. Those were tough times.”

  “We loved rock and roll,” Nancy says, filling in the picture. “Loved it. Even my dad, who was a trained musician, loved Hendricks and Led Zeppelin. He didn’t get it all, but he’d say, ‘listen to that guitar.’ He could appreciate it.” When Nancy tells me there was no prejudice in her house, I’m immediately reminded of Bea’s home in Bedford, where the help ate their meals with the family. Nancy is proud of the liberal example her parents set; their only expectation was that the children marry within the faith. When Bea graduated from high school, Bea’s mother left small-town Bedford for Louisville, for the larger Jewish population. No doubt about it, they were husband hunting.

  When I reach Nancy at her home in Florida, we admit we are equally astonished by the sheer longevity of our mothers’ club. I start by asking how much feminism influenced her, and she doesn’t hesitate. “I distinctly remember telling my parents that I would go behind their backs and date non-Jewish boys. I stood up for myself. Women were supposed to be independent. If I don’t get married, I don’t get married. It wasn’t a goal.”

  Nancy knew from day one that she would rather be alone than be in a crummy relationship. She tells me all this laced with laughter. “That’s what we got from feminism, right?” Nancy wanted to work, make money, and have her own apartment. “I know I was supposed to get married, but women got to be independent. Betty Friedan was a total influence.”

  When I ask Nancy if she is close with Bea, she says, “We are now.” Nancy is as frank as Bea is guarded. “Did I tell her I hated her? Sure. Don’t all daughters?”

  Jackie’s father-in-law owned the New Haven Arena, a venue for every concert, circus, entertainment, and sports attraction that came to town. Jackie’s daughter Lisa grew up ringside to every event. She remembers attending her first conc
ert and bumping into this very tall, blonde person backstage, only later realizing when the group took the stage that it was Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary. She was twelve when she saw the infamous concert where Jim Morrison, the first rock star to get arrested in the middle of a show, got hauled off the stage for calling the New Haven police pigs and throwing a mic stand into the audience. She was safe inside the press box with her grandfather, who quickly shuttled her home.

  When Lisa and her friends got older they wanted out of the press box and onto the floor. Lisa admits it was always a little fraught, bringing friends. Discerning real friends from convenient ones brought its own teenage agony, like when Bette Cohen sidled up to Ginger Bailey for Shubert tickets. Still, she saw Chuck Berry open for Jefferson Airplane, Traffic, Leon Russell, and Van Morrison. Dylan played there, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Joan Baez, the Supremes, and Elton John’s farewell tour in 1972. Jackie never went to a single concert, didn’t care for the music. When I mention all the greats who played there, she couldn’t be more dismissive. “No, no, no, never heard of them.”

  “Discipline was out of the question,” Bette says. From the time Amy was three years old, or so the family mythology goes, she took control. I challenge the veracity of a three-year-old having that much power, but Bette insists it’s the case. “We belonged to the Surf Club in East Haven and I thought it was a good place to go every day to occupy her, but Amy said, ‘no, no, no,’ and then she started banging her head on the floor until she knocked herself unconscious.”

  We are in Bette’s kitchen and she points to the very spot where her toddler knocked herself out. “I was on the phone with my mother-in-law and all of a sudden her eyes rolled up, and I start screaming, and my mother-in-law hangs up and calls the neighbor across the street.” By the time the neighbor came, Amy had roused. “Can you believe it?”

  When Amy and Bette’s two younger children were still small, Bette heard that the Jewish Center in downtown New Haven had formed a Theater Guild. She wasn’t exactly April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, the suburban housewife desperate to reignite her failed acting career, but she busted out of Woodbridge to see if she still had it, but not before making dinner. And Arthur, ever accommodating, was always very good about being home in the evening with the kids because the rehearsals were at night.

  Bette landed the lead in the first play she tried out for, The Monkey’s Paw, and every subsequent drama the group mounted. When they put on musicals (Bette couldn’t sing), she’d do makeup, props, work backstage, and stage-manage.

  “I just loved being there. There’s a certain kind of ambience that, to this day, when I walk into a theater, it’s like hearing a song that reminds you of something great in your life and being transported right back there.”

  When I ask Bette if she remembers anyone in particular from that time, she zeroes in right away. “Yeah, there was one guy, studying directing at the Yale drama school who came to direct a play. He was very talented, very good-looking, and I think in my dream world I was in love with him, even though I had three kids and a husband at home. But he became very, very important in my life.”

  “Was it reciprocated?”

  “No. It was a complete fantasy. I’m sure he liked me and thought I had some talent, but that was all. We didn’t have a social thing at all. It was just a fantasy of mine.”

  I look up The Monkey’s Paw when I get home and discover that it’s based on a 1902 British story by W. W. Jacobs about a couple being granted three wishes. Only each wish comes with a hideous twist, punishment for tempting fate. When they wish to see their son who has died in a horrible accident, he comes back to them as he has died, mangled and rotting. Bette had her own three wishes: a part in a play, a dashing young director, and a life in the theater. But she would never tempt fate. The Theater Guild would eventually come apart and then cease to be altogether. Bette tells me she saved every program. “They’re somewhere in the basement.”

  I ask to see them. She laughs at that. “I’m sure my kids will throw them all out when I die.”

  In high school, Amy had a boyfriend with a motorcycle. Was there nothing this girl couldn’t do? Bette would try to keep her home, she had school and exams for god’s sake, but there was no telling her what to do. To hear Bette tell it she was completely outmatched by Amy. When she was a senior, Amy staged her greatest insurrection yet. She ran away from home for three days. Unlike most spoiled suburban kids who run away for an hour or two until the smell of lamb chops on the broiler draws them inside, Amy vanished. I’m impressed. I can’t help it. Amy’s daring and selfish act embodies the kind of rebellious spirit I felt but could never act on. Bette asks me how I would feel if my daughter disappeared for three days, and I get the picture, though somehow I am still on the side of Amy’s insurrection. They called every friend and sought help from the police. Eventually they found her at a friend’s house. To this day Bette doesn’t understand how the parents didn’t call. I know Amy as an adult. She has her own law practice and is a college law professor as well. Like Bette, she is slim and beautiful, and she, too, speaks with crisp enunciation. Everything she says sounds important and authoritative. Bette and Arthur and Amy usually join our family for Rosh Hashanah. Amy is always stunning and usually has her dashing boyfriend with her.

  Bette tells me that boys were “knocking down her door,” many potential husbands over the years, but she didn’t give them “the time of day.” Neither of Bette’s daughters married nor had children. She still feels some piece of their life is missing, and hers by extension. To me, Amy seems complete. Bette had lived to please her mother and did, producing a slate of straight-A report cards, performing in every play where the world could see Sylvia Cohen’s talented and beautiful girl. She married a Jewish man and gave her mother three grandchildren. Is that too much to ask? Bette insists that she just wants her daughters to be happy, but by whose standards?

  When Rhoda’s daughter Beth announced that she was going to marry her high school boyfriend, there should have been an EMS on hand. Forget that he wasn’t Jewish! Of all the shocking things kids were doing to rebel: dropping out of college, dropping acid, and dropping out, Beth had done the least expected thing by wanting to get married. In fact, most kids opted for living together—in and of itself a difficult pill for our parents to swallow. One of my friends’ mothers put it this way, “Why would a man buy the cow if he can get the milk for free?” You might also ask why a woman would buy a car before she had a chance to look under the hood.

  Rhoda and her husband insisted that Beth finish a yearlong business course before she married, hoping that the time might put an end to the idea of this Romeo-and-Juliet-style love. It didn’t, and a wedding was planned at the young man’s home after she graduated. It was a wrenching time, and Rhoda debated whether to attend the wedding. Her own mother was boycotting the affair. Rhoda and Peter brought their anguish to a rabbi for some guidance. Surely the deck was stacked. What rabbi could possibly condone this interfaith marriage? Only he asked them just one question: Do you want to retain a relationship with your daughter? Because if you do, you must go to the wedding.

  “So we did.” Rhoda sounds as if she is still struggling with the decision.

  They didn’t stay for the party, but they did go to the wedding.

  The marriage lasted four years. Beth would get on the roller coaster of her life and not let go for many difficult years. Eventually she would marry again, and have two sons. There’s a Yiddish word, nakhes, which describes the particular mix of pleasure and pride that only a child can give to its parents. There isn’t a word for its opposite: when a child disappoints you. No one talks about that.

  Years later, Beth admitted to her mother that she knew it was a mistake. Beth also agrees to talk with me, though I hear some apprehension in her voice when I call. But she laughs with recognition when I start by saying that her mother is a self-described Victorian. “That’s definitely my mother.”

  Then she asks if I know that she
and her brother are adopted. It’s not exactly clear to me how Beth factors that into her difficult history with Rhoda. What she does say is that her mother, the only child, was the “perfect child, perfect grades, perfect attitudes, behaviors.”

  “That’s a lot of perfection,” I say.

  “I was a rebellious child. I was very difficult. I got married out of rebellion. Everything I did was the opposite of what she was.”

  Rhoda was clear that she was against open adoption. “They were our children. Period. When a woman gives up a child it’s for a damn good reason. She made a decision.” But she also believed in telling her children as soon as possible. She was ahead of her time on that score. She couldn’t fathom waiting until her children were adolescents.

  “We chose you,” she would say. “You’re our chosen child.”

  Within just a few minutes, Beth and I are sharing personal details about our lives: maternal conflicts, low points in our own lives, dealing with it. And there it is again, a willingness to open up that is anathema to the Bridge Ladies. To them, our lives must look like a massive oil spill off the Carolinas.

  I ask Beth how her relationship with her mother is now. “She is the dearest thing to me. I appreciate the tough love. I appreciate her so greatly.”

  I know that Rhoda has not exactly relaxed her standards. When she looks out at the body of water that is her view, I sense that it helps her navigate a world that continues to trample most of her values. There would be many more days when Beth would test her mother and Rhoda would return to the same fork in the road: Do you want to have a relationship with your daughter?