The Bridge Ladies (20 page)

Watching them I long to rush home and hold John's face in my hands. We had become distant in a longer-than-usual stretch of marital ennui. Nothing was wrong; nothing was right. I hoped we would still be together in our eighties, that there would be things to talk about. If we made it, would we draw close, fall back in love the way we did at the beginning? Is this the reward of a long marriage? No one expects to be the couple in the restaurant sitting in silence, having run out of things to say, or unable to muster the energy to say them. Whenever we spotted one of these grim couples, we'd feel sorry for them, convinced that would never happen to us, the arrogance of youth on our side.

“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? And 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.