The Bridge Ladies (14 page)

The most annoying duo I played with was a mother-son team. The mom was corporate in her tailored suit, patent leather pumps, and Hermès scarf. She had an armload of stacked bracelets that could rival Nefertiti and stackable rings, too, bands of diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. The boy looked about fourteen, with Bieber bangs, braces, and a faded Dartmouth T-shirt. I pegged him for a STEM genius, friendless, bored with advanced
physics, and slightly aggressive. I figured his mother was looking for activities that could hold his interest. I wasn't fooled by the kid's pimples or braces. He was a killer and he was obnoxious. He openly yawned when I took a long time to bid and laughed every time I made a mistake. And when he won, he fist-pumped as if he'd made a big point at Wimbledon. No wonder he didn't have any friends.

You can feel it: everyone at the Manhattan Bridge Club has a reason for coming. There are widows, divorcées, retired people, people between jobs. It's a game that attracts people in transition, looking for something to fill the time. It's for geniuses on the spectrum, savants, nerds. Accountants take to the game! It's for moms, empty nesters, and the chronically underemployed. It's for people who like the quasi-sociability of the game, or like me have an addictive personality. Something else I've observed: Bridge players are deeply competitive, no matter how much they protest. Ellen is fond of saying that people cheat even when no money is involved!

“You have to play and play and play,” Ellen says on the night of our last lesson. I know it's true. It's the only way to remember, for the knowledge to accrue and stick. On the last hand of the night, it's my turn to bid, and I freeze. Ellen asks me what I need to overcall. This is when you bid after one of the opponents has made an opening bid.
Overcall
,
overcall
. I know what it is, I even know there's a nifty trick for remembering it, but I can't call it up.

“Five-and-dime,” she says. “Five of a suit and ten points.”

“What is wrong with me?” I say in disgust.

“I wish I were a better teacher,” Ellen says, defeated.

“Oh my god it's not you,” I say. “I smoked way too much weed in high school.”

Ellen laughs at this. But I still feel terrible.

Ellen asks if Matty is going to continue with lessons. He says he'll think about it. Emily is talking to her pocketbook. Me, I'm not sure what to do. I think I should try to find some lessons closer to home. Observing the ladies play on Mondays is good, but I need to play. I need a game.

In the Jewish tradition, part-custom, part-superstition, you don't buy clothes or the crib until the baby is born. I don't get it. Isn't it better to expect that things will go right? To bring a baby home to a pretty room with a crib already assembled? I've asked my mother to explain many times over the years, perplexed why Jews maintain this tradition.

“Jewish people. What can I tell you?”

My mother remembers running around like a “lunatic” furnishing the nursery after my sister was born, mostly fueled by intense anxiety. This longed-for child whose arrival was as miraculous as finding a babe amid the reeds, wasn't thriving. She was projectile vomiting, losing weight, and constantly crying. “It was really hard and really exhausting,” my mother says apologetically.

“Finally, it was diagnosed as something called pyloric stenosis, some kind of blockage to the intestines.”

I had always been fascinated by my older sister's scar, a horizontal line above her belly button that folds in on itself like pursed lips. No one ever talked about it and she always kept it hidden, never wore two-piece bathing suits, dressed and undressed modestly to keep it from view. When I was in a brief preteen UFO abduction phase, I imagined it might be an alien implant and then eventually I forgot all about it. Now, when I ask my mother exactly what happened, she looks shocked.

“You really don't know?”

“Not really.”

“I just can't believe that.”

My sister needed surgery, and the doctor reassured my parents that it was as simple as an appendectomy. Still, it was surgery on an infant, and my mother admits that she fled. “It was Dad who went for hours and hours and fed her in the hospital. I'm sure I went once a day, but I'm telling you I can remember running around.”

After the surgery, when they brought Nina home from the hospital, it was a Polish cleaning lady who appeared as an oracle to my mother: “This little chicken come September she
vay
ten pounds.” And just as she predicted, September came and the baby weighed ten pounds. She was thriving. Disaster averted. My mother had a healthy baby, a devoted husband, and the life she always dreamed of.

Then my mother stops talking. A brass letter opener is on the table, and she turns it over and over. I sort of know what comes next, though over the years I have only been privy to a few details; only under duress has she shared with me a highly selective version of her postpartum depression.

“Mom, can you tell me about it?”

Now she takes the letter opener and brushes it back and forth in her palm, as if buttering toast.

“I couldn't understand what was happening, how it could happen.”

How could her dream of seven years come to this? A little baby was just beginning to thrive, a ten-pound chicken just starting to squawk? My mother couldn't have possibly known that a book she'd loved in high school
,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
The Yellow Wallpaper
, would be a cruel prophecy of her own postpartum depression. Only my mother wasn't locked into a yellow room. She got up every day, fed the baby, took her on walks. She functioned, but the world was yellow, the yellow of Van Gogh, the yellow of illness.

The sun slips below the tops of the trees. The kitchen became gloomy, but neither of us moves to turn on the light. I stare at the enormous ceramic bowl on the kitchen table filled with mail: bills, subscriptions, bulletins from the synagogue and senior center and thank-you notes (no one is held in higher esteem in my mother's eyes than the author of a well-crafted thank-you note). It's her pyre, which she lovingly tends to year after year, never throwing anything away. I suppose my sisters and I will weed through it someday. Though it, too, will only tell the partial story of a woman who lived in a house for fifty years and was good and kind, generous and furious, who would sooner implode than say one word about the depression that put her on a long dark wave and nearly killed her.

“I was very, very alone. Having my baby, I was very much alone. It was tedious. It was tiring. Your father did everything, bathing her, feeding her.”

I see my father then, working all day, coming home and bathing the baby, still in his clothes from the lumberyard, his hunter green slacks and matching shirt, the white patch with his name stitched in red thread, his sleeves rolled to keep them from getting wet.

For all the years of trying to crack my mother open, I now feel clumsy and sad. I get up and look inside the refrigerator, though I know well its grim contents: sodium-free, fat-free cottage cheese, lactose-free milk, a bag of oranges, a half-filled bottle of white wine from Passover, a bag of hardened Craisins, and in the door a bottle of Diet Coke.

“Oh, you have Diet Coke,” I say, delighted, as if finding a stash of pot from my youth.

My mother puts the letter opener back on her pile, looks at her nails, then at me.

I sit down with my flat Coke and try again.

“Did it happen all at once or little by little?”

“I don't know. Maybe it was little by little.”

“Was it a blackness, or numbness? Did you have a lot of dark thoughts?”

“I withdrew from things. I didn't want to see anybody, I didn't want to do anything.”

“Did you talk to your mother about it?”

“No, not really. She was very worried and upset, I know she was, but she didn't talk about it or ask about it.”

“Were you hiding it from her?”

“No, I don't think I was able to hide it. I really don't remember that much about it. I really don't.”

“Did Dad try to draw you out?”

“He was very, very supportive and helpful, he really was. I'm sure he was scared, but he always soldiered on.”

As I've grown more comfortable talking with the ladies, knowing them better and finding an affinity, the sessions grow more difficult with my mother. She is always eager to talk at first, often knitting her fingers like a grade schooler attentive at her desk. Often, I don't know where to start or what to say.One time I completely forgot that we had an appointment, and when
she called me, I kind of brushed it off. I'd have been mortified if I did that with Jackie or Rhoda, Bea or Bette. I find myself putting off our talks. No matter what we say, it always feels as if the most important thing remains unsaid. Whenever I leave her house, I find myself in tears, sometimes just a little, sometimes convulsively crying. This welter of emotions always locates itself there, at the end of her driveway.

Once, after doing some errands, I inexplicably drove to my mother's house instead of my own home and found myself in her driveway, confused for a few moments. Where was I? Did I live here? Was this my home? Was my unconscious that powerful? I should have checked if my mother was home and said hi. But I left feeling pathetic and small. If she asked why I had come, what would I have said, that I came here by mistake, that I want my mommy?

Therapy is like the sound of one hand clapping. The next time I see Anne I tell her about driving to my mother's house on automatic pilot. I'm shocked I've done this and start to cry. She doesn't say anything. I tell her that getting close to my mother is unbelievably painful; instead of being grateful for this opportunity, I am overwhelmed by feelings of sorrow and regret. She doesn't say anything.

I confess that it is my father whom I loved the most, who made me laugh, who indulged me, and whom I respected. A shrink I saw in college was adamant that if I didn't make peace with my mother before she died I would never be my own person, that I would be controlled by these unresolved feelings. My mother herself has invoked the long arm of death and how her expectations and directives will haunt me from the grave. When I was a teenager I just wanted my mother to be real, to be real with me. I sensed she was hiding or faking or blindly following
protocol and I constantly tried to chip away at her, challenge her, and call her out. Still, no matter how bad I tried to make her feel, I had no idea someone had gotten there first.
You have always been stupid, you are stupid, and you always will be stupid.

I want to know what Anne thinks, but she just looks at me. In the past, I'd feel angry and frustrated with shrinks who barely spoke as if trapped in some game of psychological chicken; sometimes I'd remain silent just to show them that two could play their game. Only I'm soothed by Anne's silences. I go into something of a fugue state, staring at the rug between us with such intensity that eventually I can make out every fiber.

I tell Anne about my mother's accident, an event that has loomed large in my personal mythology. It's a story I've told to various shrinks over the years, each time embellishing it a little bit more; eventually, I could no longer tell the facts from my fantasy. This much is true: My mother had been driving and smoking. When she tossed her cigarette out of the window, an ember flew back in, nestled in her coat, and caught fire. A man saw her, helped her out of the car, and somehow got her to roll on the ground. She woke up in Stamford Hospital, her arms grafted with skin from her thighs. She was in the hospital for nine weeks recuperating. That mysterious man saved her life.

Over time I had convinced myself that the fire wasn't an accident. That my mother was on a bridge when it happened, a bridge from which she planned to jump. And I believed one more thing: that she was pregnant with me.

“Where did you get that?” My mother was taken aback when I asked about the accident during one of our talks. “I was newly married. None of you were born. I was happy as could be.” Later she will recant, remembering that she had just discovered she wasn't pregnant after getting her hopes up.

Still, where
did
I get that? The two of us dying tragically
and dramatically together, mother and unborn child engulfed in flames. I feel so ashamed telling Anne; my fantasy so florid and obvious: wanting so desperately to fuse with my mother as if she were one of the confessional poets whose tragic lives I worshipped. Only my mother is not Anne Sexton and I am not her string bean. However extravagant my imagination, there is nothing poetic, cathartic, or liberating about it. Even after so many years of therapy, I am like a blindfolded child grasping in the dark with outstretched arms: Am I hot? Am I cold?

“Is it time?” My inner clock exactly attuned to fifty minutes.

Anne frowns and glances at the clock in response.

Driving home from therapy, I look at all the young Yalies crossing Prospect Street, so bright and vibrant, and want to mow them down.

The following Monday Bridge is back at my mom's. I bring a home-baked bread wrapped in a white cloth that my father-in-law baked for Easter. On the way over, I pride myself on how thoughtful I am. I look over at the bread sitting on the passenger seat; it's so big I feel like buckling it in. I'm sure the ladies will be impressed with my father-in-law's baking. Plus, the Pogacha is a lot like challah bread; they're going to love it.

I come inside holding the bread like a swaddled infant. When my mother folds back the towel and sees it, she rears back, as if staring into the yellow eyes of Rosemary's baby. “Don't you know it's still Passover! Take that in the kitchen!” She gestures for me to get it out of there, and I spirit away the prohibited bread, feeling both foolish and annoyed.

I have no idea why my mother feels the need to put on this Passover charade for the ladies. She is the first to admit that she
isn't observant, more a cultural Jew. I've often teased her about what I call her à la carte approach to religion. I once asked her when she became an atheist. She answered adamantly, “I was born an atheist!” Who would be offended by serving this gorgeous home-baked bread? Maybe Rhoda? As past executive director of the temple, she is the most observant among the ladies. My mother and Rhoda were the only ones to have gone to Hebrew school. In Rhoda's hometown of Salem, better known for covens than minyans, she attended classes in a makeshift Jewish Center where a stocky teacher named Mrs. Kekst threw a stink eye over the young Rhoda for preferring fantasy books to the teachings of Hillel. My mother proudly recalls walking her mother to synagogue on the high holidays, their arms linked at the elbow, European style.

Still, did my mother really need to make me feel like a war criminal for bringing the bread? She can't explain it, won't explain it, sometimes she even throws up her hands and says, “Does everything have to make sense?”

I see my mother has already set the kettle to boil for tea, fresh coffee dripping into a pot. Her dessert, dessert plates, and pretty matching dessert knife are on the counter. I know exactly which dishes and which serving pieces my mother likes to use for every occasion. Every single platter is assigned a purpose from which we never veer. She has made her signature chicken salad with cranberries and celery.

The ladies arrive within minutes of each other. Bea is wearing jeans and a lime-green shirt today with a cream vest with tiny seed pearls sewn in the shape of amoeba. Rhoda sports a creamy white necklace made of many strands and a matching pinky ring that looks like a piece of Godiva chocolate. My mother is wearing a length of black twine with a piece of stone hanging from it that could have been chipped off the Wailing
Wall. Jackie is wearing a piece from her tribal art collection, this one with a cowry shell affixed to the center that may ward off evil. Bette wears a piece I haven't seen before, a wire choker from which dangles a small metal piece, maybe enamel, that looks like a miniature Braque or Picasso, and her pearl earrings, her staple, simple and elegant.