The Bridge Ladies (12 page)

My mother won't budge on the subject of my father's fidelity.

“C'mon, what's the big deal?”

“Why do you want to know so badly?”

“I just want to know.”

“Let's just say,” my mother says, tossing her dish towel over her shoulder to both conclude our conversation and make an insouciant point, “I don't think he needed to.”

Of the Bridge husbands, my father was the biggest gamble. He didn't have a college degree and started out as a truck driver in a cousin's lumberyard when my parents met and married. My mother recognized a hard worker; plus he was ambitious. And maybe more than that: he was decent. He hired the first black truck driver at the lumberyard. It wasn't as dramatic as
the Dodgers hiring Jackie Robinson, but my father didn't back down even though it was an unpopular decision.

“It showed character,” my mother is proud to add.

“How did you know he would be a good provider?”

“Because he was a hard worker.”

I never saw them kiss or hold hands. Sometimes they seemed as chaste as Lucy and Ricky to me, though they didn't sleep in twin beds. Once in a great while they would do a little dance in our long hallway before going out or coming home from a party, a Lindy or a swing. These small bursts of affection, their bodies moving in rhythm together, excited me so much. It was living proof that they loved each other, a certain private energy passing between them.

After everyone had gone to bed on the night before my wedding, in a rare moment of vulnerability, I took my mother into my confidence and confessed that I didn't know if the marriage would last. Was I making a mistake going forward if I had these doubts? She knew that the off-again, on-again relationship with John over many years was the source of much happiness as well as heartbreak. We were sitting on the sectional couch in our den, with one section between us. The moment I confided in her, I regretted it. I was certain she would answer with one of her truisms, either “it is what it is” or my noncommittal favorite, “it will either work out or it won't.” I wanted something more from her, something real.

She had knocked herself out making our wedding and I acted put upon the entire time. When she'd call me at the office and ask what color linens I wanted, I behaved as if I were the chairman of the board and she was interrupting me in the middle of a shareholder's meeting. When I called her back and said I wanted white on white tablecloths, she said she preferred color.
I told her do what she wanted; I didn't care. I refused to let her shop with me for my dress, crushing another mother-daughter ritual underfoot. And when she arranged for a stylist to come to our house the morning of the wedding to do everyone's hair and makeup, I refused to let the perfectly nice woman with her “tool belt” of makeup brushes touch my hair, or apply so much as a dab of rouge to my cheeks. It was my wedding day and I was still acting like a petulant child where my mother was concerned.

“What can I tell you, Shayna,” my mother said. It was pet name, a Yiddish word for
beautiful
. “I think the marriage will last.”

My mother, the most practical person on the planet, cast her vote on the side of love. While we were growing up, whenever my sisters and I would say we wanted to marry someone who was funny, she would say, “Good! Marry a clown.” When I wanted to go Vermont with a boyfriend and run a B&B, she said, “I hope you'll enjoy scrubbing toilets for the rest of your life!”

When I asked her why she thought it would work, she said she believed that being married was different from being single. Marriage would change things. It would change us. Normally, I would have argued with her; the divorce rate itself was something like 50 percent. I would have discounted her advice, whatever it was, and written her off with it. What could she possibly know about my chances? About me? About John? She got up from the couch and said she was turning in, and urged me to follow suit.

“We have a big day,” she said, not a hint of resentment at my immaturity over the last few months. Whatever I was trying to prove, that I was too cool to have the traditional wedding she planned, too indifferent to care about floral arrangements and
place cards, hadn't stopped my mother from making a wedding Emily Post would have applauded. “You'll see,” she said, and then kissed me good night on the top of my head.

Back at Jackie's, the ladies settle in for Bridge. A large brown stinkbug grazes the screen inside the windows. It is slow moving, almost drunk in its staggered effort to evade getting squished in Jackie's paper towel. The den, where the ladies play Bridge, could double as an ethnographic gallery. The room is wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling masks from around the world decorated with horns, beaks, and raffia beards. Some are as large as canoes; others are as small as coconuts. There are shadow puppets, marionettes, masks with tongues, helmets, some with huge bulging eyes, and some with downcast eyes. Others are terrifying, comic, or ferocious. They could form a small army. Jackie and her husband have built this small museum-quality collection from their travels around the world. What are they doing here in Bethany, a million miles away from New Zealand and Papua New Guinea?

The ladies play at a table made of burl wood with a pretty inlay pattern of curlicues on the corners. Above, an eave with twelve masks, each bearing a different expression: mournful, fearful, sardonic, and so forth, watches over the game—benign gods. Jackie usually wears a three-pronged ring, two of the branches end in garnets, one in a pearl. I've never seen anything like it, and though it's bigger than anything I would wear, I find myself drawn to it and Jackie's ability to pull it off on her small hands always perfectly manicured with a creamy opalescent polish. She also accessorizes with the jewelry she and her husband have bought on their many trips around the world, including a silver cuff with large beads running down the center like balls
of mercury that knocks against the Bridge table like a spirit at a séance.

The ladies drop their dollars and the game commences along with the familiar patter. The dealer always bids first, and usually, after they are done arranging their cards, one will ask “Who did this?,” meaning who dealt. Only it always sounds more accusatory to me, as in “Who left the mayonnaise on the counter?” I've learned enough about Bridge by now to pull up a chair and observe the game, taking an actual interest in it, though I'm still baffled when the women make certain bids. I'd like to ask what they mean, but it would be wrong to talk and interrupt the bidding. I've started to learn about the most basic Bridge “conventions,” which are used to either describe unusual hands or to enable more sophisticated communication between partners. My favorite conventions have names that sound like CIA special operations: The Puppet Stayman, The Jacoby Transfer.

I have also observed various tells among the ladies: Jackie quietly taps her fingernail on the table when she has a lot of points and is eager to bid. The more nervous Rhoda becomes the louder and more emphatically she snaps her tricks along the border of the table, like a schoolgirl snapping gum. Bette gets very quiet when she's anxious, and my mother more voluble. And Bea picks up speed as she collects her tricks, like a schoolboy racing around a playground. An hour into the game Jackie sets a plate of chocolates on the table. The ladies rear back as if they've been bitten by a snake.

When I tire of observing, I settle into Jackie's couch, her cat snuggles in beside me. Jackie says this is highly unusual; the cat doesn't like anyone besides her and Dick. Honestly, I don't have a way with animals, but I'm glad for any advantage it confers. Eventually I rouse myself and take my leave. I say good-bye to the ladies and thank Jackie again for lunch. “Bye, dear,” my
mother says, again in that formal tone, as if we are passengers on the
QE2
strolling on the deck, getting some air after supper.

Rhoda reminds me that next week's game is at Bea's. She is the secretary of the group. “Don't forget, Bridge is at Bea's,” she says, and I think they've actually gotten used to having me around, maybe even like it.

Periods of heavy rainfall hit the skylights with an explosive sound like a round of unexpected gunfire. My mother and I are in her living room today on the huge overstuffed corner couch with giant pink accent pillows. Her glass coffee table is massive, and the side chairs are stuffed and cinched so tightly they look like balloon animals. A chandelier over the dining room table is made up of vertically hanging crystal rods. It alternately looks like a huge spaceship or a tiny earring depending on which end of the telescope you're looking through.

“So, what's on the agenda?” My mother settles into the couch.

My mother is always eager to talk when I come over, as if she were a famous actress and I am Diane Sawyer. We have never really talked like this.

“I want to know about your infertility problems. When did you start trying?”

I've always known my mother had difficulty getting pregnant. On the rare occasion when she'd mention how long it took, it was only to emphasize how fortunate she felt to have us. It's one thing to get something you want, she'd say, another to get something you think you can't have. The way she explains it now: she didn't wait to get pregnant; rather she endured not getting pregnant.

“We never even thought about trying.” My mother is emphatic. “It's what you did. Having a family was all part of the package.” She looks at me, her famous eyebrow raised. Do I comprehend? I get it: no one was wondering about readiness, about completing a degree or climbing a mountain. If you were married, you were ready.

My mother tried for seven years. All her friends were getting pregnant, some having second and third children during those years.

“It was terrible for me. It was just awful. Everybody was having kids.”

There was another woman in town named Marion who was also having trouble conceiving. They weren't particularly close, but her infertility problems also became known through the grapevine. When my mother heard that Marion got pregnant it came as a blow and a wake-up call. The following week my parents started the adoption process, filing papers with the Jewish Adoption Agency.

The truism “if you bring an umbrella it won't rain” worked its backward logic over my mother's womb. Once the adoption papers were filed, it happened. She missed three periods before it occurred to her that she might be pregnant. When she went to the doctor her suspicions were confirmed.

“I went sailing into the lumberyard to tell your father. I couldn't wait until he got home. And I was thrilled to have
morning sickness,” my mother says. “It confirmed the good news.”

My mother loved shopping for maternity clothes and treated herself to the best. “I never felt better than when I was pregnant. End of story.” Her contractions began a day before her father's birthday. She called him to say that she was trying to give him a birthday gift.

“He told me not to bother.”
Classic.

Her first child, a girl, arrived the next day, May 12, 1958. It was her father's birthday, and the day after Mother's Day.

Rhoda also had trouble getting pregnant. She and Peter moved twice when he was called back from the reserves during the Korean conflict. In Philadelphia, Rhoda first went to see an expert in the brand-new field of infertility. She discovered she had fibroids and that the only treatment was surgery. In Pittsburgh they consulted another doctor and tried artificial insemination, but they would leave the city childless. It's a small detail, but Rhoda still remembers the marble windowsills of Pittsburgh coated with a fine layer of coal dust. Like chalk off a blackboard, they were easier to clean; her disappointment more difficult to erase.

The young couple would finally land in New Haven, where Rhoda was happily within driving distance of her parents. She sought the help of yet another doctor, who recommended having the fibroids removed. Hopes up, hopes dashed. The doctor told Rhoda that she would need a hysterectomy in five years.

“So we began to actively pursue adoption,” Rhoda says, trying to stay upbeat.

“We started with the Jewish Family Service. They told us quite clearly that they average a baby a year. So that was devastating.”

Eventually Peter and Rhoda were able to make arrangements through her doctor. She is sure to add that they had an attorney and followed all the protocol.

“And that is how we had our Beth.” Then, like many new mothers, Rhoda confesses, “I had never handled a baby in my entire life. I was so frightened. I didn't even know how to hold her. Peter was better at it than I. He took to it right away. I was frightened out of my wits. Really frightened.”

Eighteen months later, Peter heard about another newborn that was going to be given up for adoption. Rhoda was floored. She didn't think she could handle another child so soon. Beth was an extremely active little girl, and the thought of two children seemed overwhelming.

Peter said, “We already have one child, what difference does it make?”

Rhoda's voice fills with a blend of disbelief mixed with a tinge of indignation, “I'll never forget that response.”

As Rhoda suspected, the responsibility and work of having a newborn and an eighteen-month-old were overwhelming. “I still remember leaving the dishes in the sink and staggering up the stairs to bed, completely worn out.”

Rhoda's mother had set the table every night, served a home-cooked meal, and wiped down every last dish. The same for her relatives in New Haven. Her aunt was a fastidious homemaker and gracious hostess. Her way of doing things became famous as “The Sosner Way.” Rhoda adored her aunt, was happy to adopt the Sosner Way, which she considered the gold standard, and expected no less from herself. Knowing Rhoda, I can only imagine the defeat she felt going to bed with those dishes in the sink, knowing she would have to face them, and her own shortcomings as a new mother, come morning.

“We never planned anything.” Bette insists that none of their three babies were planned. “I know couples plan for their future now, when they're going to have a family, they plan for retirement. We never really planned anything.” This is not to say that Arthur and Bette were free spirits, dropping acid and space dancing at Grateful Dead concerts. From the moment they moved into their town house as newlyweds they fully expected to start a family. Following weeks of a cold, Bette went to the doctor and discovered she was pregnant. She stopped at a drugstore on the way home and called Arthur from a pay phone. She picked out beautiful fabrics from the store and had maternity clothes made. Like all the ladies, Bette was on a need-to-know basis with her doctor. He asked her and Arthur to come into the office during her seventh month and showed them pictures. “This is stage one of giving birth, this is stage two, this is how you look and feel in stage four and five.” When Bette's water broke, she called her doctor and said, “You know that picture of stage three? I'm in it.”

The young couple moved into their first home in November and their oldest daughter was born in December. Two more children, another daughter and a son, would follow in succession. Bette was happily cast in her new role: mother.

A red cardinal pops up from the bushes like a jack-in-the-box and hits the window with a thump like a small cry for help. He's been here for a week already, and Jackie can't figure out what he wants or if he's hurt. I flinch every time he crashes against the glass. When I visit with Jackie now, we no longer sit in the living room. We've moved into the mask-filled den and share the same couch. We're not curling up under a blanket and watching
Gilmore Girls
, but I think Jackie has gotten more comfortable with me and me with her.

I can hear Dick rattling around in the kitchen.

The bird suddenly crashes into the window with more force, and I startle.

“Oh, it's that stupid bird! What does he want?” Jackie loves all animals, but now she sounds annoyed.

Jackie didn't get pregnant for a while, almost as long as my mother, but she doesn't recall getting upset.
Concerned
is the word she uses. She and Dick got checked out and everything was okay. Jackie was twenty-eight when she got pregnant with her first child, a girl born on December 7, and a boy followed soon after. I ask Jackie what she remembers from her pregnancy.

“Well, I didn't have to wear maternity clothes until my sixth month. So I was really only in maternity clothes for three months.”

“Oh, were you a tiny little thing?”

“I suppose.”

“You didn't show until the end?

“I guess.”

“Barely gained any weight?”

“No, I didn't gain much.”

“You bitch!”

Jackie looks at me askance.

Too soon?

A few minutes later, two lamps set on automatic timers pop on as if to say time's up.

When Bea told Carl that they should have children, he said, “Why?”

It's not clear if Carl was joking, but Bea provides the punch line regardless: “I should have listened, Betsy.”

They waited until Carl finished medical school and finally had a “few pennies to rub together.” Because Bea is the most frank of the women, I asked what she used for birth control.

“Diaphragm.”

Bea was a sophomore at the University of Louisville when she met Carl at a party. He was an ambitious medical student who was putting himself through school playing piano at clubs and weddings. He asked for her number. When he phoned a few days later and said “Hi, this is Carl Phillips from the other night,” Bea asked him if he was the blond. He wasn't.
Awkward!
Then he asked her out for Saturday night, but before Bea could answer he said, “If you don't want to go out it's all right.”

Bea wasn't husband hunting. Fort Knox was thirty miles away and supplying a steady stream of soldiers. “I just wanted to dance, and we had a good time. The war was very far away. It's a dreadful thing to say, but we had a good time.”

“Any crushes?”

“I imagine I did.”

“Necking? That stuff?”

“Oh, sometimes, sure.”

Bea can't recall what she and Carl did on their first date. “Isn't that funny?”

“Sparks?”

“I don't know. It wasn't instantaneous, no.”

But he called her again. After a time, he'd come over on a Sunday. Bea would make supper while Carl studied. I asked Bea if her mother approved. “At first she wasn't quite sure he was Jewish, with a name like Phillips. Remember, I was a Bernstein. But then she did like him. Carl was very likable. More so than I.”

Bea got pregnant right away.

“When I walked into the office, I told the gynecologist that I was pregnant. And he said, ‘No you're not.' Then he examined me and said, ‘By god, you're pregnant.'”

“How did you know?”

“The same way everybody does, Betsy.”

“You missed your period?”

“That's right,” Bea says, as if I were the dumbest kid in sex ed.

Bea and Carl had three children: Nancy, their first, followed by two boys. When I asked Bea about the deliveries, she laughs and points her finger at me, her crystal bracelets scattering up and down her thin wrist. “I delivered those babies in twenty minutes.”

“What about when Nancy was a newborn, were you scared of taking care of her?”

Bea says she loved getting up at three in the morning to feed the baby. “The phone didn't ring, there was no one around. You're just alone with the baby, and you know what—I liked it.”

“Did you feel the maternal instinct kick in?”

Usually Bea is quick on the draw, but she takes a moment before answering. “What is a maternal instinct?”

Bridge is back at the Athenian. The first order of business today is who is making seder. The ladies want to know if my mother and Bette are cooking fish this year; they may be the last two Jewish grandmothers in the tri-state area who still make homemade gefilte fish. I'm scandalized when Bette admits she no longer makes the fish, hasn't made it for a few years. Worse: she buys it at Costco and doctors it with boiled carrots!! She insists no one knows except her mother in heaven.

How this tan and gray mixture the shape of a miniature meteor has been promoted to delicacy status is something I will never understand. All throughout our lives, my mother would first serve the fish to my father. No one would take a bite until he sampled it like El Exigente in the Savarin coffee commercials. All eyes would be on him as he swallowed, his eyes bulging
from the sharp horseradish he slathered on the fish. When he pronounced that it was good, the people would dance in the streets, widows waved white handkerchiefs from balconies.

The ladies say I should learn how to make the fish from my mom.
Not happening
. She is now the last of the Bridge Ladies to make it from scratch. In fact, she uses Bette's mother's recipe, which calls for three kinds of freshwater fish: carp, whitefish, and pike. They all need to be special ordered, and according to my mother no one knows how to properly fillet fish any longer. She often curses the men and women who, over the years, have poorly filleted her fish. “I'd like to cut his hands off,” she'd say with the same gusto reserved only for hairdressers who “butcher” her. When the ladies repeat that I should cook with my mother and learn the ropes, the subtext is not lost on me: she won't be here forever.