The Bridge Ladies (8 page)

This is my first lunch at Bette's, and I feel a little faint or nauseated. Her dining room has that darkly quiet, unused look, the table only set for holidays and special occasions.
Does anyone ever open a window around here?
Everything that might be needed is anticipated and already on the table: a pitcher of water, a tidy dish for Sweet'n Low packets and another for a selection of teas, condiments, and serving pieces for every dish. Bette has delicate bone-white dessert plates with round depressions for the matching teacups to nestle in. They put me in mind of a dollhouse tea party. Leaf-shaped dishes, smaller than actual leaves, are set out for the used tea bags, later to be choked to death by their own strings. A kettle quietly chugs along on the stove. Of the ladies who still prepare lunch, Bette, Rhoda, and my mother, none has relaxed their standards. This is most evident in the parade of napkin rings I've come to witness gracing their tables: silver, porcelain, tortoiseshell, bamboo, and Bakelite. I marvel at the
care taken. Bette's table could be on display at the Smithsonian:
MID-CENTURY NORTH AMERICAN DINING ROOM, CIRCA 1958.

The ladies tell me they are likely the last bridge club in the area that serves lunch, the last bastion of civilization. And it might be. Everyone is punctual, everyone is dressed, and no one checks her phone throughout the meal or, god forbid, during Bridge. Most of them never use their phones (flip phones), and I don't think any of them know how to pick up voice mail either. All of the Bridge Ladies have computers, only they are a greater source of consternation than information (except for Bea, who loves to google, send e-mails, and play Bridge on it). Bette and Arthur's computer is at least a decade old, but they don't see the point in getting a new one. “One minute it's working, the next not,” Bette says, frustrated, as if it were a toaster you could smack to get going again. (Of course, my teenage daughter mocks me for not knowing how to write on someone's wall or for using hashtags incorrectly.)

Every generation has a technology threshold. The ladies have missed out on a lot of developments, only they believe they are better off. They abhor the sight of people bowed over their phones. Rhoda saw an attractive couple over the weekend at a very nice restaurant. She claims they were on their phones the
entire
time, not a word exchanged between them.

“Why don't they just stay home?” Rhoda asks the women, her voice laced with a mix of disgust and indignation.

Everyone agrees. The ladies can't stand iPhones. They see progress as negative. I have a low tolerance for conversations that glorify the past. At no point in history have people had more freedom and access to information. The world is still a violent and dangerous place, but it's not the Middle Ages when a third of the population was killed, or World War II (a so-called good war, their war) when more than sixty million people were
killed. Was childhood ever innocent? Not too long ago children were born to work the fields and clean the chimneys. All these thoughts race through my mind when the ladies decry iPhones and the Internet and the horrible manners of people today. I want to blow a thick stream of pot smoke into the face of anyone that thinks the days of wine and roses were preferable to today. But I stay silent. This isn't my lunch and these aren't my battles. For the ladies, the last innovation they embraced, as far as I can tell, is the Cuisinart, introduced in the 1970s, virtually cutting in half the time it takes to make latkes, which isn't nothing.

Bea's been to the movies. She goes with the same friends most weekends and refers to them as the “flicks.” She's outspoken about liking or disliking a flick, though she doesn't get into it. She'll tell you to see it for yourself. Rhoda loved
42
, the Jackie Robinson story. It was about her era and it was a good old-fashioned story where justice prevailed. My mother found it too sentimental, and they “agree to disagree.”

“That's what makes horse racing,” my mother says, a slightly more polite version of “there's no accounting for taste.”

Jackie's husband doesn't like going to the movies, but they've happily discovered On Demand. She mentions that they watched
Les Miz
in bed. I imagine them propped up in their bed of sixty years, Fantine's melody washing over them. I've always felt that shy of unbridled passion, having someone to watch
The Wire
with is about as good as it gets.

Over the weekend my husband and I ran into Bette and Arthur coming out of the movies. We had all seen Woody Allen's
Blue Jasmine.
Bette was electrified by Cate Blanchett's performance. Jasmine was the role of a lifetime. Another couple hovered nearby. They looked tiny and infirm, the man pulling an oxygen tank behind him. As they came closer, I realized they were
with
Bette
and Arthur. Of course I know that Bette and Arthur go out with couples all the time, but I felt a sudden pang for my mother, who often joins them for a movie. They insist she's not a third wheel, though she can never shake that feeling. Seeing the two couples made it tangible to me that my mother's life in the coupled lane was over. She always said of my dad that he was a great date, and a big part of losing him has been ending that era of their social life and adjusting to going solo. John and I don't mind going to the movies alone. We've taken separate vacations when our schedules didn't mesh. My mother wouldn't have dreamed of going it alone, or breaking ranks if she didn't like my father's choices. She thinks all of this independence is bad, her judgment unveiled when she says things like “if that's how you want to live.” For her generation, all of these activities required a companion.

When my father first died, there was a swarm of widows for my mother to fall in with, but she hoped to find a man friend. She went on a date or two, but nothing ever panned out. My mother, all the women, are highly aware that the male-to-female ratio in their age range wildly favors the men; women generally live longer than men by five years or more. So that when a man becomes a widower, he's usually snapped up pretty quickly. After a successful businessman in town lost his wife to cancer, the women speculated how long it would take before he was remarried. Bette: a year. Roz: six months. Bea: a New York minute.

In fact, if a man isn't snapped up right away, my mother suspects something “pretty bad” must be wrong with him.

“Like what?” I once asked her.

“Like anything.”

“No really, like what?”

“I don't know.” Her voice was weary and wanting me to stop this line of questions.

“Come on, like what, you must mean something.”

“Who the hell knows,” she said, exasperated with me. It was a familiar exchange. When I was little I'd ruthlessly question my mother, hounding her for answers, as if she were in the witness box and I could get her to crack by hammering her nonstop.
Why were we having a late dinner? Why did I have to go to Hebrew School? Why did my older sister get to watch the entire Oscars? Why! Why! Why!
My mother's answers were weak and unsatisfying:
just because
,
because I said so
,
everything doesn't have to have an answer.
And the one that infuriated me most of all:
Who said life was fair?
I was a child and as such still believed in justice, even if it only meant my sister and I getting the same size portion of ziti. Not so for my mother. She had known for a long time that the world wasn't fair. She had to live in it whether she wanted to or not.

When it's time to play cards we move into Bette's bright kitchen. The table is next to sliding glass windows, beyond which a weeping cherry's long tentacles stir in the wind. Outside, there's a picnic table with an umbrella cinched at the hips. The deck is bleached from years of sun. I can easily imagine Bette bringing a tray of hamburgers out to her husband to grill, her legs strong and tanned beneath a tennis skirt or crisp culottes and her three kids playing in the yard.

A large painting dominates one wall. It's of a woman in a flowery dress and floppy hat. Her eyes are somewhat vacant, and I can't tell if she is bored or sad, or if I'm projecting. My mother deals. Each lady picks up her thirteen cards and arranges them by suit except for Bette who sits this one out, loading her dishwasher. You get the feeling no dish has the chance to get comfortable in her pristine sink or on the clutter-free counter.

In lieu of the women opening up, I become convinced that the way each one arranges her cards betrays an aspect of charac
ter. Bette makes a tight fan of her cards, evidence of her mania for order. Rhoda holds her cards like a prayer book. Bea quickly snaps up one card at a time more like Blackjack than Bridge. Jackie remains impassive as she organizers her cards. If she had a pair of Wayfarers, she'd be cooler than Bob Dylan. My mother makes a wide fan of her cards and loudly grouses if she doesn't like them. Sometimes I think this is a big act on her part; but with my mother you can never tell. Her lack of poker face
is
her poker face. She has hidden her scars well. I imagine they all have.

I ask Bette why she didn't pursue acting after her big success senior year and go to New York to audition.

“Well,” she said, crossing one slim leg over the other, “I didn't have the guts, I suppose.” I remind her that she had the guts when she pleaded with the director for the part. “I guess I did,” she says, suddenly weary. “Where would I have lived? I didn't have any money. I wouldn't have known how to go about it.”

Jackie also harbored a fantasy of being an actress, but she was more practical than Bette. A season or two of summer stock in New Hampshire was enough to satisfy her. After graduation, she won a radio contest and the prize was getting to be on a radio show with Zero Mostel. The show was broadcast from Sardi's, the famous New York restaurant known for its celebrity clientele and wall-to-wall framed caricatures of the greats. It must have been overwhelming for Jackie, her own nascent dreams of joining the theater already shelved. As she was leaving the restaurant, Mostel called out, “You find some guy to get married. Don't, don't go into this business.” Doubtless, he would forget having said it no sooner than the words left his lips. Jackie, however, had already taken them to heart.

Bette mentions that she still looks at the audition notices in the paper.

“Really?” I can't believe it.

“I would never do anything about it.” She waves off the admission.

“But you still look. Why?”

“I don't know. I just like to see what's out there.”

“Bette,” I say, “you must be looking for something.”

“No,” she says. Everything gets stony. Fun at first, talking about her youthful career now seems full of sorrow.

Finally Bette breaks the silence, she is curious if Julia Jacobs, too, had aspirations as an actress. Were they crushed all at once, or chipped away at slowly, over time, until she finally gave up, opened the studio, and proceeded to instruct a ragtag group of students how to open their mouths and speak? Bette would never find out how far Julia Jacobs had gotten, how far she had fallen. Did she sacrifice marriage for her art? Was she single because she missed the boat or because she was the captain of her own ship?

Bette looks at me. “I guess we'll never know.”

Jeff Bayone, I learn, is the owner of the Manhattan Bridge Club. I'd seen him around. You can't really miss him. He is well over six feet tall, has a slouch as good as any detective on
Law & Order
, and a mustache from the 1970s. About this man I think you could safely say: he's been there and done that. I imagine that if he calculated all the time he has spent waiting for beginners to discard he could easily add a few months to the end of his life. He's filling in for Barbara and the level of intimidation is intense. He has no time for pleasantries and can seemingly size up a person with or without any Bridge potential. I fear he already has me pegged.

He tosses a duplicate board on the table.

“Let's get started, yeah?”

The Brit and the Elf are back, plus a new woman has joined us. She looks like a banker, wearing a navy-blue suit, the skirt pleated after a long day trading derivatives. When she unravels her turquoise Pashmina, I notice she's wearing a double strand
of pearls with a diamond clasp in the shape of a butterfly. Stunning. She says she used to play, claims to have forgotten everything, the usual blather from returning students. Jeff has instructed her to join our lesson and take it from there. She can always move up to Beginner Two or Intermediate if she's more advanced than she gives herself credit.

It's been a few weeks of lessons and by now we should be able to grasp the basic concepts:

How many points and how many cards do we need to open a bid in a major suit?

How many points and cards to open in a minor suit?

How many points to open a “one no trump” hand?

How many points to respond to your partner's opening bid at the one level?

What does it mean when we bid “up the ladder”?

Folks, I am clinging to the first rung. Memorizing all of these numbers is beyond me. You are looking at a girl who sometimes confuses the number of states in America with the number of cards in a deck.
They are pretty close.
I once took a class with a woman who was so completely frustrated by all this bidding mumbo-jumbo that she whined, “Why can't we just say what we have in our hands?”

It's not that I didn't sympathize, but that would be like taking off all your clothes before you started a game of strip poker.

Jeff is staring at me.

“Are you the dealer?” He knows I'm the dealer. “Did you want to bid?”

I have thirteen points, but I don't have a five-card major.

“Pass?”

“Are you passing?” asks Jeff, and I immediately suspect I should have bid.

“I think so.” My voice quavers. I half expect Jeff to tell me to drop and give him fifty for my mealymouthed response.

“Do you have four Clubs?”

“I do.”

“So bid one Club.”

“I thought you had to open with a major suit.”

I've forgotten that we can also open the bidding in a minor suit; apparently we learned this during our second class. Jeff explains that the cheapest bid is one Club. Like at Sotheby's, you can't underbid someone. If you want to get involved in the bidding, you must bid higher than your partner, or outbid your opponent. Until now, my greatest accomplishment in the world of games was using a
Q
on a triple-word score in Scrabble.

Pashmina is my partner, and when it's her turn to bid she says, “One Heart.”

I am supposed to know what her bid means, what she is trying to tell me. Jeff cocks his head toward my direction. I stare so hard at the cards they melt into each other like a cubist painting. The clock is ticking. The banker stares at me, perhaps she thinks I've had a small stroke. The Brit nibbles the salt off a pretzel log. (Take a bite for god's sake!) The Elf looks at me with big encouraging eyes and I kind of want to slap him.

I feel Jeff's impatience.

“You know,” he says, “they play Bingo on Forty-Second Street.”

It will take some time, if not an entire lifetime, to shake off the insult. Only instead of more humiliation, he pulls his chair in closer and looks each of us in the eye. His tone changes, his voice lowers. He is interested in imparting the idea that Bridge goes beyond rote memorization. There is a kind of beauty in deciphering the language of bidding and mastering the play of the hand. Though still numb from the insult, I detect a spark
in him. “It seems like you're not getting anywhere, and then it gels,” he says, his encouragement sincere. I see that he loves the game beneath his world-weary demeanor. He may even love us.

Pashmina has to leave early and makes a huge show of winding her scarf around her torso like a sari. Jeff tells her she should probably skip to Intermediate. This doesn't come as a surprise; she was obviously ahead of us. She smiles and nods knowingly, annoying as a teacher's pet. Jeff takes her place at the table. He seems like a magician so deft is his handling of the cards, the deck disappearing in his large hands.

“Okay,” he says, “who can tell me what the finesse is?”

I don't dare open my mouth. Like a mother who sees her toddler heading for the corner of a table, Jeff sees every mistake long before we do.

The Brit jumps in. “Isn't it when you win a trick with a lower card whilst a higher card is still out there?”
Whilst?

Jeff won't go so far as to say “good job” or offer a compliment of any kind, but he looks pleased, and the Brit glows. Oh, to get a nod from Jeff!

What I lack in skill, however, I make up for with enthusiasm. I get right away how complex Bridge is, how competitive and addictive. By my fourth lesson, I've bought two books on bidding and a Bridge app called Bridge Baron. Instead of doing my work reading manuscripts on the train, I've taken to playing hand after hand.
Just one more
, I tell myself. For the first time, I understand how the game has kept the ladies coming back over all these years. Yes, the comradeship, yes, the de facto support system, but I realize they also really love to play Bridge. It's incredibly fun.

People talk about how Bridge keeps the mind sharp, and I get this, too. You cannot play Bridge frivolously, yapping the whole time, or like my friend's poker game where the men get stoned and play half-baked into the night. Total concentration
is required. This absorption may be the most intoxicating thing about Bridge: when you are playing you can't think about anything else. Hours pass imperceptibly. The known world slips away: work hassles, marital dry spells, my daughter's college applications.

Lesson over, I gather my things, still smarting from the bingo sling. Jeff must sense my bruised ego and says not to worry, keep coming back.

“I'm terrible at math,” I say, offering this flimsy excuse.

“It isn't really math,” he says, “it's logic.”

Now I'm really fucked.

“You might want to repeat Beginner One. It's not a bad idea.”

I get it. I need to repeat the grade. No child likes to hear it, but sometimes it's for his own good. The only thing I had been successful at was staying away from the snacks, but I took a fistful of Mike and Ikes on the way out that night and chewed the sweet gummy capsules to the exclusion of all other feeling as I made my way to the subway through the cold, dark night.