The Bridge Ladies (6 page)

When the waitress returns with our drinks Rhoda asks for a Splenda, and the waitress takes a limp yellow packet out of her apron. When she leaves, the ladies explain that the customers steal the artificial sweetener, so they no longer keep it on the table. I confess that I steal my Sweet'n Low from Dunkin' Donuts. After a brief silence, Bette confesses that her husband does, too. I can't even begin to calculate how many pink packets have been pilfered worldwide.

“Are you girls ready to order?” The waitress sinks back into her hip.

Girls?

After the waitress takes our orders I ask the ladies how they feel about being called girls. My mother doesn't like it one bit. Bette and Rhoda don't mind. Jackie says it makes her feel young. Bea doesn't care. That's it. No discussion of aging, of how they feel, or what it was like becoming invisible past fifty and now, well into their eighties, infantilized. My question doesn't go any farther than a flat rock that skims the surface of a lake then sinks.

The level of intimacy between my friends and me is anathema to the Bridge Ladies. I once asked Bette if she has any idea how open we are with each other, and she imagined it was like
Sex and the City
. Okay, we're not
that
open. We don't talk about
bleaching our assholes, but we talk all the time and about everything. We are obsessed with work, obsessed with our iPhones, obsessed with ourselves. We are obsessed with our kids and our “parenting,” which wasn't even a verb when our mothers raised us. We talk about meds, moisturizers, and mammograms. We talk about Lena Dunham, a lot. At a recent overnight with three women friends, there was a graphic description of a colonic and a lively conversation about what constitutes cheating. We discuss books and movies and aren't afraid to disagree. We talk about Hillary and the possibility of having a female president.

We compare notes about therapy and our “issues” as freely as we would a new restaurant or a yoga studio. Casual conversation at a cocktail party can often begin: “as my therapist said,” or “as I said to my therapist.” When you discover a person has never been to therapy it's as if they are somehow lacking in self-awareness. I have a friend who once said he never cried in therapy. Well, I smugly countered, I guess you're not doing the hard work.

Now, and with more regularity, we talk about the indignities of middle age: back problems and colonoscopies, hair color and the horror of finding brown spots on the back of your hand. We don't feel bad about our necks yet, but the scarves and turtlenecks aren't far behind.

I've cried my way through plenty of therapy sessions on the long road to getting my shit together, where I alternately blamed my mother for all my ills, felt compassion for her, judged her, hated her, and accepted her. For the most part, I thought I was done, but moving home reactivated every button and not gradually. It was simultaneous with crossing state lines. I might as well have been the man in the game Operation with his vital organs exposed: the Adam's apple, the wishbone, the broken heart. Every time you touched the sides trying to fish out an organ, an angry buzzer went off.

It struck me as more than a little ironic that I was the daughter moving home, the middle, the black sheep. I told myself I could handle it, tried to convince myself it would be good, repeating the plusses like a mantra: It was a great job opportunity for my husband. My father was ailing and I could see him more. It would be good for our daughter! We'd save money!

No matter what I told myself, I was totally freaked out. I was afraid all those landmarks, like the Athenian, from my difficult teen years would trigger memories of how I slowly fell apart in high school. I couldn't believe so many of my high school haunts were still there: Claire's, the one vegetarian restaurant with ostensibly the same menu from the 1970s still chalked in pastels on the blackboard; Group W Bench, a 1960s relic named for Arlo Guthrie's song “Alice's Restaurant” and go-to for hippie paraphernalia; and Toad's, the dive bar where you could get in with a fake ID and make out with a Yalie on the sticky dance floor. Would it all feel like some hideous déjà vu? Would I start to spiral?

But my biggest concern returning home was the proximity I would now have with my mother. We had never been close and were reliably caught in a classic mother-daughter dynamic: whatever she said I took the wrong way. Every comment she made felt like a referendum on how I lived my life. I wear my jeans on the long side and they tend to fray at the heel. She begs me to get them hemmed, offers to take them into the tailor herself, that's how badly she wants it done. Likewise, the fringe on a small rug I keep in front of my kitchen sink has frayed. She knows a carpet man who can repair it. Why won't I let her take it in?
Why won't I?
She says she is going to “kidnap” the rug and get it repaired behind my back. She is so upset that I don't have paper hand towels for guests in my downstairs bathroom that she brings me her own paper towel holder and a few packages of pretty towels to “get me started,” like a box of Kotex pads when
I first got my period. When she leaves, I throw the whole lot of it under the cabinet.

Would there ever come a time when I wouldn't feel judged? Did everything have to come under scrutiny? My homemaking? My work? She wants to know why I work so hard. She doesn't think I
should
work so hard. Do I really
need
to work this hard? she asks in an accusatory tone, as if I'm
creating
work for myself. The judgments implicit: first and foremost, if I'm working so hard, how could I be spending enough time with my daughter? Equally important: I shouldn't
have
to work. In the rubric of my mother's life, the man is supposed to be the provider. This is nonnegotiable. When I mention that many of my friends' husbands are stay-at-home dads, my mother says with a dismissive chill, “Good luck to them.”

Sometimes I sense envy in her. I work in a field she wanted to be a part of. My mother wanted to write, and once she confided in me that she had selected the pen name Lynn Carter. I made fun of the hypocrisy in choosing a name that disguised her Jewish identity. And I teased her for coming up with it before she wrote a page. I couldn't see then that her desire to write was something that connected us; instead it struck me as another reason for me to find her lacking.

Since I've moved back to New Haven, my mother has been kind enough to point out that I don't stack the dishwasher efficiently, that I have to run cold water, not hot, when I run the disposal, that I need to iron clothes if I “fail” to pluck them out of the dryer after twenty minutes and hang them up. I waste money on Starbucks and magazines off the rack instead of saving with a subscription. I put too much salt on food, wear bulky clothes that make me look bulkier, my couch needs to be reupholstered, the tablecloth for my dining room table doesn't precisely fit, and yes, I know, the napkins don't match.

If you were to put my mother on the stand and ask her to take an oath, she would swear on a Bible that she doesn't criticize me (or my sisters), especially where my daughter is concerned. On the contrary, she would say she marvels at how I do it all. Who is telling the truth? In Deborah Tannen's book about mother-daughter relationships,
You're Wearing THAT?
, she reports that the number one complaint grown daughters have of their mothers is that they are always criticizing them. Conversely, as one mother puts it, “I can't open my mouth, she takes everything as a criticism.” Tannen explains that what mothers see as caring, daughters take as criticism. Or in my case, multiply that by moving back home and living a few miles away from the source.

Tannen goes on to point out that the smallest comment a mother makes carries with it the ever-present question: Do you see me for who I am? And is who I am okay? One Bridge daughter talks to me for over an hour about how much fun she had growing up. But when we get on the subject of appearance, the tenor of the conversation changes. “My mother is very, very concerned about appearance. She's more concerned about appearance than substance. Her first question would be, what do they look like? as opposed to, what do they do?” We're about to say good-bye when I ask her what she wishes from her mother if she could ask for just one thing. “Could you accept me for who I am?”

Even when my mother was trying to help, we somehow missed. Once, she offered to take me to a special shoe store in Manhattan and treat me to a pair of shoes when I needed heels for some occasion. It was always difficult to find shoes that fit my wide foot. She told me they made fashionable custom shoes for all kinds of feet. They were expensive, and this was a generous offer. When we finally arrived at the store on the East Side,
I looked into the window and immediately saw it for what it was: not a shop of fine handmade Italian or British shoes, but a repository for all the world's freakish feet. It was like the line at Lourdes, people desperate for a miracle for their gigantic bunions.
Really
,
Mom
,
this place?
She urged me to be open-minded, go inside, at least look at the shoes. The salesman was a log of a man in an ill-fitting black suit who grunted his welcome. I watched how he fitted a woman whose feet dangled like flippers. It was classic us: my mother trying to do something nice for me, me feeling like more of a freak because of it.

Thousands of dollars of therapy were thrown out the window one fall afternoon when my mother arrived at my house with silver polish and rags. I didn't see it coming, still can't believe that it was a small pink tub of Gorham Silver Polish that took me down.

She knew I was having a dinner party and it “killed” her that my serving pieces were tarnished. My mother brought her own apron and was tying the strings at her back in preparation of her work. She enlisted my daughter, who was spreading out newspaper on our kitchen table as instructed by the master polisher. When I came downstairs and saw this project in process, it felt as if I had been stung in the face by a hundred bees.

Why couldn't she leave my silver (me) alone? Why did her help feel like a judgment on how I chose to live my entire and apparently tarnished life? Why, when I told her I didn't want her to come over and polish, didn't she listen? Why was polishing the silver more important than doing as I wished? Why was polishing the silver more important than anything? More to the point: Why wasn't I a sparkly daughter who
wanted
to polish her silver with her mother, who would happily hire a “lady” to do the dishes—something else my mother constantly nagged me about—after all,
I was so tired from working too much. She insisted she had a “very good lady” to do the dishes for god's sakes! She offered to pay for it! Why was I so stubborn? And while we're at it: Why didn't I love to shop and decorate? Why didn't I “do something” with my hair? Why didn't I wear bright colors and sashay around in Belgian slippers and velvet headbands like you-know-who? And for that matter: Why couldn't I just be happy? Why was I dark and moody and difficult? Why was everything a battle?

I grabbed the newspaper my daughter had lined the table with and started balling it up. I think I started screaming then, too, or maybe I had only raised my voice at that point. I saw my mother start to take off her apron but think better of it and just leave as quickly as possible. Now I'm sure I was screaming because she was getting in the car with her apron on and my daughter was crying and I had to go to bed for a while afterward, my whole being exhausted with rage and shame, especially for having exploded in front of my daughter, who adored her grandmother.

When I told a good friend about the incident, expecting an ally, she said, “God, I wish my mother would polish my silver.”

The following Monday, I placed a call to a new therapist.

Anne is tall and dresses monochromatically in neutral colors. Her hair is white and cropped short. She is calm. I like her voice. I like the office, furnished with modern furniture, a gray carpet with thin black lines around the border like Etch A Sketch. There are thick wooden beams and casement windows with brass pulls that look like teardrops. However modern the room, there is no hint of technology, not a computer or phone charger anywhere in sight, which I imagine is deliberate. Though it is against my nature, I trust her almost right away.