The Bridge Ladies (2 page)

In part, this is a group portrait of the ladies, what they share with each other, but also what they keep to themselves. Like my mother, these women don't openly reveal their feelings. Pain is a private matter. Sometimes, watching the ladies play Bridge, I can see the girls they once were and the cards they were dealt; it's all there in their faces as they open a new hand of cards, each ripe with possibility, rife with disappointment.

In discovering the unsung lives of the Bridge Ladies, I also came to better understand the ragged path that connects me to my mother. This is our story, too.

It was the Monday after the 2013 Academy Awards when I first sat down with the Bridge Ladies. It was Rhoda's turn to host. She lives in a tidy waterfront condo. You can tell that it's decorated with the furniture from her previous home in Orange, a residential suburb of New Haven, where she lived and raised her family for twenty-seven years. The dining room table is a little too big and formal for the space, and the two lamps flanking the couch in the living room are as big as third graders. But she loves it here; it was the perfect downsizing, the best thing she ever did, she says, turning around in her compact kitchen as if she were modeling a new dress. Best of all is the deck overlooking the water, where terns and osprey regularly visit, where the water reflects the light like foil.

Her table is set with linen and china. Napkins are gathered in silver rings, serving pieces are lined up like soldiers, and precut butter pats rest like a row of collapsed dominoes on a pretty dish.
A noodle kugel fills the house with a smell I have long associated with love. On the table, a wooden trough-shaped dish holds a salad. It is hand-painted, and along the rim I notice Rhoda's name and her late husband's in a pretty script.
Peter and Rhoda.
There are reminders of their life as a couple all throughout the house, but I become fixated on this serving dish with the folksy script yoking their names. I wonder if Rhoda sees the inscription, if it makes her sad, or if it is part of the scenery now: his absence nowhere and everywhere.

I don't know what I was expecting, but when the Bridge Ladies arrive at Rhoda's, they don't seem all that happy to see each other, greeting one another with a bit of forced friendliness. Over time, I will witness all manner of lightly veiled forbearance and exasperation among them in the form of eye rolling, sniffing, and dismissive body language. They never kiss or air-kiss hello. No hugging, no body contact whatsoever. I wonder if it has always been thus. As young women were they affectionate, demonstrative? Or were there rivalries and hidden alliances among them? Did they have fun? It's true that I can't stand some of my closest friends; why did I imagine anything different from the ladies?

When my mother sees me she does that thing she always does. If you blink you would miss it: the maternal once-over. Calculated in a few seconds, she inspects my clothes, my waistline, the sheen or lack of sheen in my hair. She will know if I've been getting enough rest, biting my nails, or picking at my face. Doubtless there are some mothers who gaze proudly on their daughters' figures and outfits, but for Roz and me what I wear and how I look have been a battleground from the time I began to dress myself.

Though none openly admit it, the Bridge Ladies, like most women of their day, groomed their daughters for potential mates. Yes, they sent us to college for an education but also
hoping we would meet our husbands there. As recently as this past spring, 2015, my mother voiced her wish that my daughter choose a college with a good ratio, and she wasn't talking about teacher to student. Marriage was essential for our mothers. They feared for us going forward in life without the same protection they believed came with marrying a Jewish man.

One of the Bridge daughters put it this way: “They're from that whole generation of women whose prime focus was not career, but getting a man. So that's your capital.”

I resented this pressure when I was in my twenties. I knew how badly my mother wanted me to marry, and it made me feel defective and unlovable even as I rejected her outdated values. I was pursuing a career; I wanted a soul mate, not a meal ticket. I once asked my mother what she would prefer: if I got married or won a Nobel Prize. “Don't be ridiculous” was all she said in response.

I posed the same questions to each of the ladies:

Did you always know you would get married?

Absolutely.

Did you ever consider marrying a non-Jewish man?

Never.

Did you know you would have children?

Absolutely.

Did you ever want anything else?

No (except for Bette).

Why not?

It never occurred to us.

Was it the cultural expectation or was it what you wanted?

Both.

In just one generation, the world they knew would radically change. Bridge daughters, collectively: some married Jewish men,
some intermarried, some divorced, and some, god-forbid, did not marry. We would not return their serve. We got birth control and advanced degrees, slept with men we never intended to procreate with, moved to big cities, and lived on our own. If anything, I defined myself in fierce opposition to my mother, putting career and personal fulfillment over marriage and children.

I am well aware that for my mother how I appear before her Bridge club is as much a reflection of her as it is of me, and because I want to make a good impression with the women, I don't mind making an effort, though it's never quite enough for her. My mother wishes I would wear some makeup and accessorize with a bracelet, earrings, anything. She has been known to say, with just a hint of desperation in her voice, “Not even a little lipstick?”

I don't have to look at her to know what she is wearing. She could be a senior model for Eileen Fisher, with her wardrobe full of mix-and-match slacks, tops, and jackets. Her ensemble is rounded out with black Mary Jane shoes with fat Velcro straps, earrings, and a matching strand of beads, in all likelihood purchased at a quaint New England crafts fair or from one of the “funky” shops in downtown New Haven where all the jewelry vaguely resembles a model of the solar system. But I give my mother credit for putting on her beads and bracelets, her Bakelite earrings that look like miniature mahjong tiles, or the gold ones that resemble tiny wine casks.

I marvel at how much care all the women put into looking nice for Bridge, especially as they only have each other to impress. But it's not about that: these women do not leave the house unless they are pulled together. Going out without lipstick on was like walking outside naked. When I ask each Bridge daughter what she remembers from the Monday club, the first thing they mention is how the ladies dressed. They
were elegant, grown-up, always wearing hose, heels, skirts, and pearls, their hair teased, curled, straightened, or frosted.

I can tell my mother is relieved when I show up at Rhoda's looking “nice.” In this case: black jeans that aren't too shabby, a loose-fitting cream blouse (“anything but black!”), shoes instead of sneakers, and the only necklace I wear: a gold pocket watch with roman numerals finely etched like scrimshaw on its elegant ivory face. I had admired it since childhood, often hunting for it among my mother's many jewelry boxes. Once, when I was home after graduating from college, which in my case is a euphemism for barely graduating, having been felled by a major depression, my mother happened upon me in her dressing room admiring the watch.

“Take it,” she said.

I was astonished. She couldn't possibly mean it? I felt I had been caught red-handed and declined her offer.

“I'd rather you enjoy it while I'm still alive,” she insisted.

I always thought the gift, given in haste, was my mother's way of telling me something she could never say, something that would always remain unsaid.

“Take it,” she urged. “I want you to have it.”

When the house was quiet on a Monday afternoon, it meant our mothers were out playing Bridge. For all we knew they could have been having an affair with the tennis pro or embezzling the Sisterhood's Scholarship Fund. If someone was murdered in New Haven on a Monday, the ladies had an airtight alibi. What the ladies actually did at the Bridge table was a mystery. Even the score pad divided into two columns was like a riddle out of
Alice in Wonderland
: We and They.
Who were they? Who were we?

It wasn't a game you could learn in an afternoon, like Scrabble or Monopoly. It wasn't even like other card games. No, Bridge was complex and certainly not for children. Still, I loved everything about playing cards: the suits and their symbols, the red Hearts and Diamonds, the black Spades and Clubs one petal short of a lucky clover. I loved the backs of the cards: some with elaborate Spirograph designs, others with animals, flowers, or covered bridges. My favorite had a pair of winged cherubs on bicycles in the center of the card and bare-breasted mermaids in each corner. I was mightily impressed with a deck of cards my dad brought home from a trip. They had the Pan Am logo and he said they were complimentary. How could such treasure be free?

I loved playing War, then Spit, then Gin Rummy with my dad. I loved Spades and Hearts and was the mastermind of an after-hours game of Hearts at sleepaway camp where a small group of us played by flashlight on our counselor's bed behind a partition at the back of the bunk.

Before I was old enough to understand any card games, I invented my own called Card Mountain where I'd throw a blanket in the air and let it fall into whatever shape it would take. I would then set up the cards, by suit, in the folds and nooks of the blanket, creating my happy fiefdom of cold-eyed kings, scornful queens. Jack was the dashing prince, and the number cards their loyal subjects. Sometimes I would have to throw the blanket a few times to achieve maximum ramparts and parapets, and when I was finished I would collect all the cards and tuck them back into their box, the blanket left in a pile like the pale outline of a ruined fortress.

As the ladies head over to Rhoda's dining room table for lunch, Bea makes a straight line to the far end of the table. “We're not
rigid,” she says, “but this is my seat.” Today, decked out all in purple, her metallic tennies and crystal bracelets that throw rainbows when the light hits them just right, Bea could be a poster child for Jenny Joseph's famous poem, “When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple,” which celebrates old age as liberation from traditional conventions and expectations. The poem always grated on me, since the sad fact is that when you are old you are more likely to wear Depends and a Life Alert necklace. But not Bea, she is spry, sharp, funny, and the only lady outrageous enough to occasionally drop the
F
bomb. Bea isn't an old hippie or part of the counterculture, she just does her own thing and in this way stands slightly apart from the others.

Rhoda serves her kugel, and the ladies pass around a salad. She is the only one who has a “gentleman friend,” her generation's term for boyfriend. There are framed pictures of them on the kitchen counters and scattered around the condo: at a benefit, on a cruise, with friends. It was unexpected this late in life, but I'm convinced it's responsible for the spring in her step.

I feel like an interloper. Do I participate or observe? Am I trying to impress them or they me? I am sitting next to my mother and it's as awkward as if we were strangers on a train. We are careful not to accidentally touch or make eye contact. Conversation starts with The Oscars. They all watched at least a part of the ceremony. The ladies are avid moviegoers, even though most movies today are “dreck” by their standards. Those who saw the foreign film
Amour
loved it; others avoided the all-too-real depiction of dementia. In a flush of civic pride, they were annoyed with screenwriter Tony Kushner, who portrayed Connecticut, their state, as voting against the Thirteenth Amendment in his movie
Lincoln
. They hated host Seth
MacFarlane.
Feh!
He didn't hold a candle to Bob Hope. Forget about the dresses!

“Actresses have been dressing like hookers for years,” my mother says, capping the conversation.

Talk turns to a minor scandal at the Jewish Community Center over a zoning issue. As Rhoda tells it, the head of the committee called someone an “asshole” at an open meeting. She puts her hand over her mouth to muffle the expletive.

“Thank god he wasn't a gentile,” Rhoda adds.

I'm confused. “You mean the guy who cursed was Jewish?”