by Betsy Lerner
CHAPTER 15
The Hands of a Clock
“I didn’t have to give up Bridge,” Bette says. “That was the best part.” We are sitting in her enclosed porch, her favorite room in the house, the sun diffused through the dark mesh screen. Three years after her youngest went to college, Bette went back to work part-time as a camp consultant. She had heard about a franchise business out of Boston, and while she didn’t have any experience per se, it sounded like something she would be good at. It turned out to be the perfect fit, her first year alone more than doubling her projected earnings. Plus, she could make her own hours. The same was true for Jackie, who went to work at Triple A, also in an advisory capacity. An experienced traveler herself, she liked plotting trips for the clients, walking them through the particulars of their journey. Bea went to work for two and half days a week in Carl’s office handling the paperwork. She liked the other gals in the office and enjoyed having lunch with them. She, too, kept Monday free. Work was great, but Bridge was sacred.
“I was liberated.” Bette laughs when I ask her about the “empty nest.” Arthur set up an office for her, and Bette went about writing away for brochures, visiting camps, and interviewing the kids and their parents, determining their interests. In no time she was known and highly regarded throughout the area as the “Camp Lady.” She wouldn’t have called it multitasking, but Bette like most women had mastered the art of juggling responsibilities and fulfilling the needs of others. And then there was the paycheck. “I put a lot of time into it because I enjoyed it. I really did like it, and I made a lot of money. It turned out to be really lucrative for me.”
Bette got special dispensation from the head office to check out camps with Arthur instead of traveling with a pack of other consultants. “At that point I was the top salesperson, and they didn’t want to let me go.” Arthur loved navigating. Together they would explore the boondocks of Maine, New Hampshire, and upstate New York. He would drop Bette off at a camp then scout for a place to set up a picnic lunch. Later, they’d find a nice little place for dinner. “It made all the difference, going with Arthur. I loved going with him.” Things were good.
Then: not so good. Bette was diagnosed with uterine cancer. Scary as it was, it didn’t compare with her first bout with cancer. Bette was in her midforties when she discovered she had breast cancer. The kids were still young and all she could think about was what would happen to them if she died. It was terrifying and the lack of information was staggering. Bette was of the generation of women who went into surgery and woke up with anything from a partial to double mastectomy. Her surgeon instructed her to return in six weeks for a follow-up and then he summarily dismissed her. “When my surgeon said good-bye that was the end of my relationship with him. It was frightening. There was no support.”
In 1976, journalist Betty Rollins broke the national silence surrounding breast cancer in her book First, You Cry, at a time when no one used the word cancer and no one said the word breast. “For all I know,” she writes, “I was surrounded by one-breasted women, but we didn’t talk to each other because we were all in hiding.”
It was a convergence of three events that brought Bette’s days as the Camp Lady to an end: the uterine cancer (which she would also beat), internecine wars among the camp franchises, and the advent of the computer age. Initially, Bette composed all of her correspondence on a manual typewriter. When she eventually upgraded to an electric, she thought she had joined the twentieth century. “Hoo-wee, am I advanced.” Once computers entered the workplace, Bette withdrew. “I thought oh my god what is this all about. I didn’t understand computers, and I didn’t want to understand computers. And I knew that the future of the job would be with computers.” Same for Jackie; she also opted out when databases came to dominate the travel industry.
It was Rhoda who had left her nest before her kids left home and bridged the technology gap. She supervised the networking of the synagogue during her tenure as executive director. She researched, installed, and had implemented the first software system, basically taking B’nai Jacob from biblical times into the twentieth century.
The ladies still reach for the Yellow Pages before they google. When anything goes wrong with their computers, they are rendered helpless and are further convinced that computers are more trouble than they are worth. I’m my mother’s tech support. I can usually remedy any problem within seconds, and she marvels at my skill and thanks me profusely for having saved her from “hours” talking to someone at the Apple Help Line.
“Heaven help the person who fields your call,” I say.
“They’re terrifically patient,” she says. “The other day one spent over an hour on the phone with me.”
I imagine the poor techie somewhere hanging from a rafter with a computer cord around his neck.
By 1970, my mother’s biological clock had long stopped ticking. She had also started a part-time teaching job at a local Hebrew day school that she was thrilled with. The school was just a few miles from our house and it was just a few mornings a week. Then the unthinkable happened: she got pregnant. She was thirty-nine, Sarah by biblical standards. She and my father took my older sister and me into their room, and we gathered on their bed for a “family meeting.” Nina was twelve and I was ten. This was a new concept, and I wasn’t sure I liked it, though I also remember the sensation of the bed as a raft. Our parents asked what we would most like to have: another TV for sure, a swimming pool, a foosball table. Were we warm?
A baby girl arrived in February, just a few days after my mother’s birthday. She hadn’t been born with the blue-tinged skin of an Indian god, or the shimmering veil of a caul, yet it seemed she had arrived from a magical place with magical powers. Our flowers bloomed and our rivers ran. New life had brought life with it. This little girl would quickly become everyone’s pet. We were better with her; we got along better, our family brighter. She brought out the best in us. She brought out the best in my mother.
Once Nina and I left for college, Gail became an only child with all the privileges of that vaunted position. My mother was easier, lighter, more relaxed. She left little notes in her lunch box, valentines, and silly gifts. Gail made it easy, too. She was pretty and smart and funny with blond ringlets and blue eyes. She was a good student; she didn’t shoplift, never smoked pot or gave blow jobs in our basement, or engage in any other high-risk teenage behaviors.
The first time I talk to Gail about the Bridge Ladies we are in our grown nephew’s long abandoned room, the bookcases filled with paperback series of fantasy and science fiction. The rest of the family is downstairs getting ready for our annual Hanukah gathering.
When I ask her if she thought the ladies were square, antithetical to feminism, she shakes her head no. “I didn’t judge them. They just seemed like glamorous adults.” She remembers Bea always wearing scarves and thinking that was tremendously sophisticated and Bette impeccably dressed in slacks and ribbed turtlenecks.
“A bone or off-white turtleneck. She could rock the hell out of that,” Gail said.
“I really did think smoking was glamorous. I loved those embroidered cigarette cases. I loved looking at the special things to eat and nicer plates. I remember getting up on the counter, pushing myself up and being on my knees and handing the good plates down to Mom, and feeling like I was taking the Torah out of the Ark.”
I want to know when she found out about Barbara.
She doesn’t have to search her memory or think about it. She tells me that our mother had gone out on a weeknight, which was highly irregular, and she wanted to know where she had gone.
“I asked Dad where she was and he said Bridge, but I knew it wasn’t a Bridge night.”
She asked him again, and this time he answered that she was at the movies.
She knew our mother would never go to the movies alone.
Gail didn’t let it go at that, either.
“He said, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ and by then I was like, where is she? An
d it was then he sat me down and explained that she had gone to synagogue for yahrzeit.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven.”
My father told her that there was a baby who died before she was born. He told her that it really upsets our mother to talk about it and that she goes to say this prayer on the anniversary of her death.
“And I said, ‘Well why don’t we go with her?’ And he said, ‘I don’t think she wants us to go with her.’”
Then he went to their bedroom and opened the top drawer of his green dresser. Inside was a framed picture of Barbara, maybe a year old, in a white dress with a dark bib and frilly collar. “He showed it to me and then said, ‘Don’t tell Mom that I told you.’”
Did you ask Mom?
“No. I never said anything about it.”
Bette, during a walk with my mother, once mentioned that her own mother was able to get over the death of her daughter after Bette was born. Did my mother feel that way about having Gail? Was she able to stop mourning Barbara?
“I’ll never get over Barbara,” my mother answered, and Bette never brought it up again.
I always thought Gail was protected from the tragedy that embraced our family. I realized too late that no one was unscathed. It didn’t matter that she came later, after Barbara died. She was a part of us, my parents, my poor mother and father, and all of us had gotten lost in all the silence, secrets, and shame. When she was little Nina thought she was responsible for Barbara’s death. Gail thinks she replaced her. What if she had smashed those fancy plates when she took them from the Ark, what if all the commandments we lived by were shattered and some truth was allowed to filter in.
Recently, in a rare and unexpected moment driving past our synagogue, taking my mother home, she told me that she loves Thanksgiving but that it’s always tinged in sadness. At first I can’t think why and look at her for a reason.
“Barbara died in November,” she says.
The utterance of her name on my mother’s lips is startling. I want to reach out, reach over to her, but I stay on my side.
They say you’re supposed to tell the people you love that you love them every day. My mother and I never say those words. Sometimes, when she stalls for a moment before getting out of the car, I think she’s going to say it, but it never comes. And I’m relieved. Saying it at this point feels scarier than not saying it. I always watch as she punches in the code to her garage, turns to wave, and disappears inside the house. I see the light in the front hall pop on.
“Mom,” I’ve often asked, “why don’t you leave lights on?”
“Why should I leave lights burning?”
“So you can see.”
“I can see plenty.”
I’ve always imagined that my mother doesn’t say I love you as a hedge against further tragedy, the same way the Israelites marked their front doors to keep their firstborns from being slaughtered in the Passover story. With their doors marked, their houses would be passed over. Our house had not been passed over. The Jewish practices surrounding death are specifically designed to help a person gradually move through the stages of grief. Instead, she went it alone: driving herself to yahrzeit on a cold, dark November night.
“Nancy Pelosi called,” Bea announces. Bridge is at Jackie’s.
“I won a trip to Bermuda,” says Jackie, amused at such nonsense.
“People still call the house looking for Peter,” Rhoda says. This seems particularly cruel, as if a call from a solicitor isn’t bad enough. And what are you supposed to say: “Sorry, he’s dead.”
Everyone nods with recognition. They are all targeted for contributions by every possible organization. Their phones constantly ring with solicitors, telemarketers, pollsters, and scammers.
Once, when my mother answered the phone, a young, female voice on the other end said, “Grandma?”
She wasn’t sure which granddaughter it was and took a guess. “Freddie?”
“Hi, Grandma, it’s me, Freddie.”
“Hi, honey, is everything okay?”
The caller said she was in Mexico on spring break from college and lost her wallet. Could my mother wire some money right away? Freddie was still in high school.
“I hung up on her then and there,” my mother says. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”
“They think we’re idiots,” Bea adds.
When they sit down to play, a dispute over what to lead turns fiery. My mother had led trump, which is generally not done, Bea jumped down her throat. My mother looked both chastened and pissed.
“Why would you do that?” Bea wants an explanation.
“I was sleeping.”
The next hand, Rhoda makes a mistake, putting an ace on a trick her partner has already trumped. My mother and I exchange glances. We both saw it right away, a costly mistake in a hand of Bridge. It’s a small thing, but the recognition between us feels conspiratorial.
Rhoda scolds herself, “Dumb, dumb, dumb, dummy.” It sounds like duck, duck, duck, goose.
“It happens,” Bea says, forgiving when you least expect it.
When they go down, Bea doesn’t make a big deal of it, but I can tell she’s annoyed. “Betsy,” she says. “It’s the beautiful hands that can screw you.” The ladies settle down. Twice in a row, none of them have enough points to bid and the dealer has to go again. This constitutes some excitement as they show each other how few points they have.
Before we leave, Rhoda brings out her calendar to set the next week’s game. It’s my mother’s turn to host, but she realizes she will be out of town. Impulsively, I volunteer. The ladies glance at each other: why not. It’s been a year of free lunches and seems like the least I can do for the ladies. Later, my mother calls me and launches into a barrage of reasons why I shouldn’t trouble myself, only then she also admits that she’d like the ladies to see my house, show it off. The mixed messages mount. She offers to make lunch or cater lunch. I resist all offers of help; isn’t the point that I make the lunch? She knows better than to offer to polish a single serving piece, though I know it’s probably killing her. Thanks to Anne, I’ve been able to hang on to some semblance of adult behavior around my mother. The Richter scale is nowhere near registering anything like the earthquakes that erupted under our feet when I first moved back. It’s more like a game of tug-of-war, only it’s not clear how you define winning in this scenario: holding tight or letting go.
I never shop at Whole Foods. I resent the prices, and the varieties of kale make me anxious. But I find myself in the produce section, convinced the meal will turn out better if I shop here. I put ingredients in my basket and take them out. I’m not much of a cook, and while I’ve been standoffish with my mother, I have been in a tailspin all week trying to think of what I could make, rather what I could pull off. I am staring at a bin of brightly colored miniature peppers small enough to string a necklace with. I’m drawn to them and tiny yellow squash in the next bin. At the end of the row is a single ostrich egg you’d need two hands to hold. Its shell is veined and mottled like aging skin. What recipe could possibly call for this prehistoric egg? I’m tempted to buy it just for the sake of absurdity. Maybe I’ll sit on it until it hatches, and give birth so some slick creature, its neck curved like a clef, its feathers like the quills on a porcupine. Are you my mother?
I’ve been here for nearly a half hour and I’m still in the produce section. I have cold feet about the meal I’ve planned. This is all taking too much time. I check my phone. E-mails are piling up. Stick with the plan. I head over to the fish section. The tuna and salmon gleam. Shrimp is piled high into a pyramid. I could get a cashmere sweater for the cost of the swordfish. The man behind the counter is improbably cheery. When I ask for the swordfish, he flatters me. “Great choice.” When I choose one in the shape of Vermont and another Massachussetts, he again validates my choice. Overkill, I think, walking away with the fish wrapped in paper, heavy as a full diaper.
Last minute, Rhoda can’t make it. I’m disapp
ointed. The Jewish touches were mainly to impress her. I even considered running out and buying napkin rings but got hold of myself. Rhoda and I have made a connection I hadn’t expected. The Rhodas of my life have always put me on edge, women who are unbending in their opinions. Early on when Rhoda announced she was Victorian in her ways, she was unapologetic. I know that had I been her daughter we would have been at each other’s throats. Or perhaps she would have sent me away to Miss Porter’s School for girls, where I might have become a world leader or an equestrienne. Her absence means I will have to fill in for her. Look at it another way: I was about to become a Bridge Lady.
Monday morning, I start getting ready the minute I wake up, like a parody of a 1950s housewife anxiously preparing a meal for her husband’s boss. Of course, I’ve made many dinner parties over the years and set the table exactly the way my mother has taught me: cutlery flanking the dinner plate just so, glasses placed above the knife in descending order. Emily Post via Roz Lerner has filtered down and taught me well. Though it wasn’t just by rote. As a child, I loved helping her set the table, opening the mahogany box that housed her silver, lined with purple satin and velvet dividers, the forks, spoons, and knives, all facing in the same direction, snug in their slots. That gleaming world contained all the pageantry and order that my small being desired. In another life I might have been a soldier in the Queen’s Guard.
I bought Bea her favorite Coke (“the real thing, not that diet dreck”), brewed coffee for Jackie, boiled water for Bette’s tea. I had set out the cards and score pad the way the ladies do, prewashed the grapes and set them on the counter. In the nervous minutes waiting for their arrival, I glimpsed my reflection in the kitchen window: Betsy Lerner, former Dead Head, poet, and pothead standing over the sink, staring down a stick of butter and contemplating whether to slice it into pats.