by Betsy Lerner
As I bustled about getting lunch together, I kept thinking about myself growing up as a teenager, the ladies standing for everything I wanted to get away from. Wasn’t I the girl getting high in our high school parking lot with a boy I had an impossible crush on, the girl writing poems and wearing all black, or the girl who won a local Frisbee contest in the distance division. I can still feel the snap of my wrist as the disc released and caught a lucky current of wind that took it a little farther than it should have gone. Only now, setting a graceful table, making a meal, was I not my mother’s daughter? Wasn’t I doing all this for her?
Conversation starts with a rousing discussion of direct deposit and online banking, specifically paying bills online, which are met with universal distrust. The ladies want to know what Tweeting is, are not favorably disposed, and still don’t grasp it after I explain the basics. I take out my smartphone to show them the app, and they rear back. (I make a mental note: stay current with technology.) But the meal goes swimmingly: The ladies loved the swordfish. Bea drained her Coke. Jackie was delighted with the strawberries, and Bette asked for the couscous recipe.
I’m insanely nervous as we head over to play. Until now, I’ve only played Bridge at the Manhattan Bridge Club in a supervised setting where you’re allowed to talk and ask questions. I am drenched in perspiration before the first hand is dealt.
I am partnered with Bea, who is as quick as a snake. Bette and Jackie both take their time bidding and playing the hand. I feel less afraid of making a mistake in front of them. And here’s the thing about Bridge: when you make a mistake in the bidding, it becomes immediately obvious to everyone when the “dummy comes down.” How it works:
One of the partnerships “wins” the auction with the highest bid.
The partner who first introduced the trump suit (or no trump) will play the hand (and is called the declarer).
The declarer’s partner literally lays his cards on the table in four rows, each suit from highest card to lowest (as in Solitaire). This is the dummy. The declarer then plays both his own hand and the dummy’s. (The dummy sits out.)
When the cards are laid out, everyone sees exactly how many points and how many trumps are in the dummy’s hand and if the bidding was accurate.
It’s the Moment of Truth and it is like taking off your clothes for the first time in front of a new lover: What have you got? Hopefully, you have what you advertised in your bids: a promise of so many points and so many trumps.
In big-girl games, there is no talking or commenting on the dummy, but here in Woodbridge, on Mondays, there is no end of debate or comment on the dummy. If it has lots of points and supporting trumps, the ladies admire it, saying things like “Oh that’s beautiful” and “Thank you partner.” If it’s a disappointment, they challenge the player: “How could you make that bid?” Or “Is there a reason you didn’t mention your hearts?” A wrong bid can leave your partner in a precarious situation by not having enough strength to take the number of tricks you’ve committed to winning.
Right away, I start messing up the bidding. Bea is my partner, and when I lay down the dummy she reprimands me. “Betsy, you have to bid no trump with so many points,” or “Betsy, you can’t raise with so few points,” and so on as I bid each and every hand incorrectly. I’ve learned the rules for increasing bids, but I have performance anxiety to the point where I really can’t think straight. Bea isn’t being mean, but she sounds accusatory and a little shrill. I want to go home. I am home!
Only then Bea says, “Okay, let’s see what we can do.”
She settles as quickly as she flares. She knows her way around the four sides of a Bridge table. If the hand can be salvaged, Bea can do it.
When Bette is my partner, she looks at me with big encouraging eyes. All along, she has been the Bridge Lady who most wants me to learn and always suggests I sit in on a hand or two when they play. I always decline, completely intimidated. I bid a little better with Bette as my partner, either that or I’ve calmed down a bit, and we actually win three hands. It could also be that the hands are less complicated. No two hands are exactly alike. Sometimes it’s clear what to bid or whether to pass. Other times, there’s more gray area, such as with an unbalanced hand or when you and your partner can’t find a fit. When Bette tallies the score at the end of the afternoon, unbelievably, I am the big winner. The booty is all of three dollars, which I will take up to my office and pin on my bulletin board, as proudly as a storekeeper framing the dollar from his first sale.
“See,” Bette says, “you know more than you think you do.”
Forgetting that I was serving three women who weigh an average of a ninety-five pounds, I have lots of leftovers, which I pack up in Tupperware. They thank me profusely and promise to return the containers the following Monday and do.
As they are leaving, Jackie looks back. “Your mother would be very proud.”
During the first nervous week of my being a new mom, my in-laws came every day. My father had just had his first stroke and my mother couldn’t leave him. My in-laws would arrive late in the afternoon when the baby would predictably squall for an hour or two and nothing could soothe her. My well-meaning mother-in-law kept making suggestions to calm her, none of which worked and only provoked greater anxiety in me: change her formula, chamomile tea, leave her in her crib, hold her, bounce her. I felt clumsy and uncertain of how to care for this new creature.
I had been terrified that I wouldn’t take to motherhood. I was most paranoid about not being able to hear the baby cry in the night. What if I slept too deeply, or didn’t have that sixth sense, the so-called maternal instinct? While I was pregnant I bought a set of baby monitors and set them up, testing myself to see what noises I could pick up, my ear pressed up to the monitor like a World War II spy hunched over his shortwave radio. Insecurity flooded all other feelings. I was afraid to bathe her in three inches of warm water! Her umbilical cord grossed me out! There was only one thing I wanted, and much to my surprise, it was my mother.
In the middle of week two, my mother showed up at our door, completely put together, hair blown out, nails boldly polished fire truck red. I was never happier to see her, though I also felt confused and overwhelmed. Who was the mother now? She or I? Now that she was here, what did I want?
Before any proper hello, she went directly upstairs and stopped at the entrance of the baby’s room, at the crib. She was sleeping, her butt bunched up. I’d been observing from the day we brought her home how she turned around in her crib like the hands of a clock. I have never seen my mother cry, and she didn’t cry then. Instead, she was quiet for a good long time, the room hushed like a church.
Then she said, with her eyes still on the baby, “Look what you’ve done.”
I could hear the depth of her pleasure in her voice, but I hadn’t really “done” anything. I didn’t have to work for this. What I had finally done was something my mother unequivocally approved of. She has always said that I wouldn’t appreciate motherhood until I became a mother. I’d always rejected the idea that you can’t understand something until you have done it yourself. Do I have to be a quarterback to feel the joy of catching a football that torpedoes down the field? Do I have to be a birch tree in a grove to feel myself keening in the wind? I truly believed that empathy and imagination could transport me into any experience.
I also didn’t think it should have taken having a baby to finally please her. But in those few minutes standing over my daughter’s crib, her tiny body at two o’clock, I realized it was all semantics. The amazing truth is that the thing she most wanted for me would be the best thing in my life.
CHAPTER 16
Jew in a Box
I am leaving the JCC when the call comes. It’s Rhoda, and I know right away something is wrong. She and my mother had been filling in at another Bridge game and my mother had a fall. Rhoda assures me she’s okay but that I should meet her at Saint Raphael’s, where an ambulance has taken her. An ambulance? I call my mother, wh
o on her best day can barely excavate her phone from the depths of her pocketbook, and miraculously she answers. In characteristic self-denial, she tells me she is fine, just a cut on her forehead they need to stitch. I tell her I’ll be right there. “Take your time,” she says, acting as if I have time to do some grocery shopping or get a manicure.
When I meet her at the emergency room, she is chatting up the young Jewish resident as if he were a possible suitor for her granddaughter. As he’s examining her, she’s worrying out loud that she might not be able to host Rosh Hashanah just a few weeks away. She’s already frozen her soup and brisket. This comes as a huge relief to me; if my mother is obsessing about the Jewish holiday she will be okay. Her face is covered with a paper sheet. But when I draw close I can see that the cut in her forehead is a deep gash, and no matter how much the doctor and a nurse try to staunch the flow, it keeps bleeding. Closer, I see that her nose is broken and her eyes are ringed in deep purple. Mommy Raccoon. Her curly hair is matted with blood. And her handbag, like a deflated metallic balloon, is slumped on the visitor’s chair. I take her hand. She brushes off this small gesture. This isn’t our way. Not even here. Not even now.
It’s possible she’s in shock, but she introduces me to the doctor as if we were at a bar mitzvah, providing salient facts from my life, namely that my husband is the director of Yale University Press and I am a literary agent. The doctor is only barely listening. It’s not as if he’s stitching up Christy Turlington. Worse, he is condescending, calling her young lady in a tone reserved for young children and pets. Only today it doesn’t bother her. Instead she wants to know where he’s from, where he did his undergraduate degree. Then she asks him how many years he has been working at Yale. Oh, he tells us, he’s a resident, a first-year resident.
When his pager goes off and he steps out, I beg my mother to let me find a plastic surgeon, this kid is barely out of diapers. But she counters there’s no point. “Now they’re going to make me look beautiful?” she says, with classic Yiddish inflection. Translation: Gimme a break. Then she jokes that maybe she’ll get the nose job she always wanted. How long can my eighty-three-year-old mother keep up the Borscht Belt shtick with half her forehead sliced open?
Just then a woman from the cubicle across the way starts screaming a stream of expletives. “Why won’t anybody fucking help me? Do you know how many fucking hours I’ve been waiting?” I have a partial view of her through a crack in the curtains. Her blond hair has been cheaply colored so many times it’s got a green patina and is flat as a sheet of tin. She could be thirty, could be fifty. The physician’s assistant finally tends to her. She starts wailing as if she’s been shot, then coughs up all the leftover phlegm from the bubonic plague.
The doctor returns and affixes safety goggles and a contraption like a miner’s flashlight that emits a light beam in a narrow blue tube. He wants to get started, but he can’t make a single stitch until they staunch the flow of blood. I overhear him tell the nurse that the gash may be all the way to her skull and sit down for a minute, feeling weak. My mother is still talking up a storm, asking the doctor all kinds of questions. I am ashamed to admit this but I have taken an immediate dislike to him, mostly because he is the kind of professional Jewish man that my mother had always wanted me to marry. I don’t like his tone, his look, or his purple Crocs.
When the doctor’s pager goes off again, he cuts out for the second time. The nurse says she’ll be right back, too.
Across the way, the woman is begging the physician’s assistant, her voice amplified and full of gargle. “I already got cough medicine. I need something stronger.” Then she starts crying and pleading. It’s Oscar worthy.
“What do you think is wrong with her?” my mother whispers.
“She’s a junkie.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you can jump to that conclusion.”
“Whatever.” I don’t feel like defending my extensive street cred with my mother at this moment.
“You don’t know that.”
“Mom, she’s begging for drugs. It’s obvious.”
I take a closer peak at my mother’s forehead under the covering. It’s too awful to think of her going down, face-first into whatever split her forehead like the Red Sea. The nurse returns with a tower of cotton bandages and starts applying them to her forehead. Her work is methodical, applying a fresh one as the saturated bandage comes off, working with both hands. I feel calmed by her steady work and tell my mother I’m going to step outside to call my sisters. She really doesn’t want me to bother them, but I know my older sister would kill me if I didn’t let her know. If she were the brains of this operation, we would have already located a plastic surgeon and left the first-year resident quivering in his scrubs. Nina is the daughter-in-chief and the person you want in any emergency, especially a medical one, but I’m the one who’s here.
A few people are smoking outside in a huddle. A security guard goes in and out of the building and, like a child newly fascinated by the effect of his step, triggers the automatic doors to open again and again. Nina wants to know exactly how it happened and I explain what I know: the hall to the bathroom in the hostess’s house is brick, and on either side are recessed planters. Her heel got caught in one of the planters, and she fell facedown into the brick. The hostess’s husband is a retired dentist and was able to stop the bleeding temporarily. Though my mother could tell she hadn’t broken any bones, she thought it best to go to the hospital in an ambulance. She says she had no idea the cut was that deep, that her nose was broken. “Look,” she’ll later say and more than once, “I’m lucky I didn’t break a hip. I could have lost an eye!”
“Didn’t the hostess offer to go with her?” Nina is shocked and outraged that my mother went alone to the hospital. My mother defended the hostess, explaining that she was extremely unsteady on her feet, and that she didn’t want to inconvenience Rhoda and the other women.
“Inconvenience?”
As I head back into the hospital the alleged junkie comes out, fishing inside her jacket for what turns out to be a pack of Newports.
“I hope you’re feeling better,” I say, watching her light up, knowing full well she’s fleeced St. Raphael’s for opiates.
“Me! What about your mom? She’s tough.”
I nod in agreement.
“She’s got a gash in her head and a broken nose and all she can talk about is her holiday. Brisket! Soup!”
The woman takes a drag that burns down half the cigarette then lets it dangle from the corner of her mouth as she starts rooting around in her pocket.
“God bless her,” she says. “You mother is the salt of the earth. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. Tough lady. Tough old bird.”
Then she pulls something out of her pocket and hands it to me.
I start to decline, but she insists and presses it into my hand.
“God bless,” she says, coughing and smoking all at once before disappearing into the New Haven night. When she flicks her cigarette on the ground, it spits orange sparks for a second before dying.
Going back inside, I look down at my hand. It’s a tattered red poppy on a wire, a forgotten token from Memorial Day.
When I return to my mother’s room, the nurse has finally stopped the bleeding. She is the real hero here, but the doctor takes all the credit, now that he can do the stitching, three layers deep. When he finishes he looks at me and asks how he did. I don’t answer.
“No really, give me a grade.”
“B minus.”
“Aw, really?”
He takes off his plastic gloves with a snap and offers to write my mother a prescription for Percocet, which she refuses.
“Take it, Mom, you might be in a lot of pain later.”
She refuses again. Aspirin will be enough. Then she wants some privacy to pull herself together and asks me to hand her purse to her. I tell her I’ll pull the car around.
&n
bsp; “That’s okay,” she says. “I can walk.”
It was a few weeks later and Bridge is at Bette’s. My mother is almost completely healed. Her broken nose no longer looks like a piece from Mr. Potato Head, and what’s left of her bruises she attempts to camouflage with too much makeup. The ladies express concern, but she sloughs it off. A wrecking ball could land on her head and she’d insist she was fine. Bette implores the girls to eat, and they pass around the basket of rolls, salad, and dressing as if in a game of Wonder Ball.
Bette brings a casserole out from the kitchen. It’s another one of her mother’s recipes, only it’s not come out as firmly as she hoped and she castigates herself while the ladies coo over the buttery smell. She works the spatula like a cranky plow through a field, doling out pieces. Everyone served, Bette kicks off the conversation by decrying the state of the obituaries, which are starting to resemble high school yearbooks, mentioning everything but the kind of pizza toppings preferred by the deceased. An acquaintance has died and she is disgusted by the write-up. “Who cares if she played mahjong?” Apparently, if you croak in New Haven, no detail is too small to be included in your obit.
Rhoda defends the obit, saying it’s what the family wanted.
“What sickens me,” my mother says, “is that they mention the name of the cat. I ask you, is that appropriate?”
Jackie demurely manages to stick up for the cat. “I think it’s okay to mention pets.”
Jackie is the only real pet lover among the women. She once divulged that her cat likes to drink directly from the spigot. My mother will never in a million years understand how you could allow a pet on your countertop; you’d think the cat was taking small sips from a demitasse to hear my mother’s disbelief. Months later when Jackie’s cat dies, she and Dick waste no time adopting another from a shelter.