The Bridge Ladies (24 page)

The last time I visited my father's grave, I was agitated; a work situation was spinning out of control. These were the times I missed him most, as my business mentor. I know how he would have advised me, but I felt like visiting. Once there, the idea seemed forced and I felt self-conscious. Plus the day suddenly turned ugly with a sky the color of cement. I got up to leave after a few minutes and looked around at all the graves of the men my father knew. They are all buried here, the men who attended B'nai Jacob, who financed the building of the JCC, and gave bonds to Israel. All the men my father did business with, golfed with, and played cards with in the men's room of our country club. They're all here: Katz, Kasowitz, and Shapiro. It sounds like a law firm. I give a nod to all of them, this place where the
alter kockers
have come to rest. All their headstones crowded with rocks.

Suddenly I was seized with the need to find Barbara's grave. We had gone once as a family when my father died. My older sister had found out where she was buried from the undertaker and arranged for us to go after the burial. There wasn't a headstone, just a plaque in the ground. Whatever catharsis she hoped for us, for my mother, wasn't forthcoming. She barely got out of the car before she got back in, her body shrunken, hunched over. I don't remember the drive back to my mother's house, only that when we returned it was already filled with people.

There were rows and rows of plaques in long lines like a fallow field. I walked up and down, reading the names, grow
ing increasingly distressed when I couldn't find her. I surveyed the entire cemetery, certain that I had walked down every row. She was gone again. Disappeared.
This is so fucking typical.
Determined to find her, I started to search again, even more methodically this time. Then I saw it, her plaque beside a tree, moss beginning to take the edges. I touched it as if I could touch her. I left three rocks, one from each of us, her sisters. Then one more, for my mother.

It's been months since the Bridge Ladies have gotten together. Their vacation schedules were all over the place, didn't mesh. Winter weather. Worse, Arthur got a bad case of shingles that landed him in the hospital. From there he went back and forth from the hospital to rehab, having been weakened by each hospital stay. Bette was out of commission as a result. She had too much to deal with even to return most phone calls. For the most part, she fills my mother in on Arthur's progress or lack thereof, and my mother relays what little news there is to the Bridge Ladies and a larger circle of their friends. I know my mother does not want to be illness central, the designated bearer of bad news, but she is a devoted friend. I ask her nearly every day about Arthur's health, and she says the same thing: What can I say? Or: a little better. When I see her and ask after him, she tilts her hand back and forth like a flipper, by which she means: so-so. I leave Bette some messages just to say that
I'm thinking of her. I fear they sound hollow, but I hope they are better than nothing.

When I finally reach her, I ask how she's coping and she tries to sound as upbeat as possible, but the strain is there.

“Not great,” she says, and then with her characteristic semi-ironic laugh she adds, “and by that I mean terrible.”

We laugh a little, better than crying as my mother would say. I ask Bette if I can bring her some carrot cake I've made for a party and she protests mightily. I insist.

“Just a sliver.”

Bette is a sliver, and I fear that she isn't eating enough. I worry that all the anxiety and uncertainty surrounding Arthur's medical condition, combined with dealing with the hospital, rehab, and insurance companies is sapping all of her strength.

When Arthur is home for a spell, Bette insists she'd like to talk. Our visits take her mind off things. I hesitate at the front door. The exterior facade of their home is a green-gray brick with the cement, as a design element, oozing out between the bricks like cake frosting. I touch it, half expecting it to be soft. Just as I'm about to ring the bell, Bette opens the door. She looks smaller, her face drained of color. I tell her I can come back. No, no, no.

We are back in her formal living room where we had our first conversation. She apologizes for keeping the phone nearby but she is waiting to hear about a doctor's appointment. The phone rings twice before we even get started. Bette excuses herself to take the calls: both times telemarketers, as if they weren't annoying enough, let alone when you're expecting an important call.

Bette's agitation is palpable and again I offer to come back at another time. Again, she insists I stay, and I realize she needs to talk. She is the classic woman from her generation, who let the men do everything: make a living, pay bills, take care of the
taxes, manage the finances, do the lawn work, clean the gutters, gas up the car. Her sphere was entirely domestic, housekeeping and child rearing. She never imagined the day when her husband's duties would fall into her lap, even now as the bills begin to pile up inside their envelopes with the glassine windows. Conversely, it was Bette's own mother who handled the family finances.

“My mother had a budget and she would put the money aside in little envelopes for electricity, gas, this is for the heat, this for food. I thought that was the way to do it, but when we got married Arthur said, ‘No, whatever you want, write a check for it.' I didn't have to have the little envelopes.”

Bette was coddled and protected by her mother, and later by Arthur. At the hospital, from his bed, Arthur walks her through every step of how to deal with accountants, lawyers, and lawn men. Still, she feels inadequate to the task and shocked that she has never learned even the basics. Arthur didn't just make the trains run on time, he was a buffer to every emotion or crisis or simple annoyance that threatened Bette's equilibrium.

“Last week when I went to see him in rehab,” she says, “I had just received some upsetting news. I was very worried but I counseled myself not to tell Arthur. I didn't want to burden him. Only the moment I walked into his room, I threw myself on him and started crying. I couldn't help myself.”

“What did he do?”

“He comforted me, like he always does.”

The phone rings and Bette sees it's from a friend.

“I won't take this.”

“Are you sure?”

“Where were we?” she asks with resolve.

“You said you threw yourself down on Arthur.”

Bette laughs at herself as if to say: pathetic.

“Tell me about your marriage,” I feel emboldened to ask.

“If we had five arguments during the sixty years we were married that was a lot. I think a lot of it was Arthur. He was very accepting and very non-confrontational. We were always very happy with each other, very content, very compatible. I always felt safe. We were different personalities, but he sort of adjusted to me. Whatever I wanted was fine, wherever I wanted to go, whatever movie I wanted to see it was fine. When I look around at all the men I know, I got the pick of the litter.”

Each of the ladies uses the word
safe
at some point during our talks, describing their husbands and marriages. It's not a word that particularly interested me, especially when I was young. I was drawn to tragic relationships: Anna Karenina and Count Vronsky, Cathy and Heathcliff. I was a freshman at NYU when Sid stabbed and killed Nancy in the Chelsea Hotel; I became obsessed with the case and would skulk past the storied hotel for as long as the story was in the news.

The phone rings again. This time I can tell from Bette's tone and body language that it's the doctor. As she disappears into the kitchen, I give her a small wave and let myself out.

Rhoda is late, first five minutes, then ten, and then fifteen. It's Bea's turn to host, and instead of going to the Athenian Diner she has selected a Thai restaurant in one of the many nondescript strip malls in the area. There is much speculation. Has Rhoda gone to the wrong one? There is another strip mall close by with another Thai restaurant. A campaign to locate her has begun. My mother embarks on her regular archaeological dig to recover a small spiral address book of important numbers from her bag, its pages rounded and thin with use. Success! Bea whips out her
flip phone. My mother calls out the numbers. This whole operation puts me in a bad mood. Rhoda comes the longest distance; she'll get here.

I don't know if it's true for the other ladies or of aging in general, but my mother's worry meter is off the charts. If there is a flake of snow in the sky she won't go out. She reviews travel plans over and over, departures, arrivals, directions, as if she were in Winston Churchill's war room. She wants to know where my now teenage daughter is every minute of the day. Does she have rehearsal? What time does she get home? Will I be home? Am I making dinner?
No
,
I'll be out pole dancing so she'll have to fend for herself.
And if I so much as sniffle in her presence, she will interrogate me about my health and watch it hawk-like for days.
Have you seen a doctor
?
This is going on, what, two-three days? I don't like the sound of that!

Moments before we let loose the dogsleds, Rhoda enters the restaurant. Traffic on 95; that's all. After all that tumult settles, the table goes weirdly quiet. I want to say something about how great it is to see everyone, especially Bette, who won't have time to play but wanted to come for lunch. She has to get back to Arthur.

I've learned by now that their reticence is largely generational. For them, the word
share
meant splitting a sandwich, not automatically opening up about your life. I also get it that long-term relationships can grow threadbare (as can all relationships, for that matter). Still, I want the ladies to love each other more, to have more fun and be happier to see each other. Even after all this time, knowing their penchant for reserve over ebullience, I'm still surprised at how cautious and circumspect everyone is. Once I asked Bette why the lunches weren't livelier. She thought about it for a while and finally said, “We've become dull to each other and dull to ourselves.”

Before I played, the game looked boring and repetitive. Now, I get it: Bridge is incredibly fun. It's absorbing, crowds out all other thoughts. You don't need to be anyone's best friend; teamwork naturally develops between partners. Plus, winning a hand of Bridge is like shooting the rapids and outwitting a fox at the same time. Maybe it's the game that keeps them together more than the bonds of friendship. Maybe Bridge itself is the glue that has kept the ladies together for over fifty years. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade.

At lunch, it comes out that Bette doesn't know how to put gas in her car. Arthur always filled her tank. When she confesses this I am more than astonished, I am slightly appalled. It would be like not knowing how to withdraw money from an ATM. I'm not sure if this makes Bette a princess or an invalid. Maybe a little bit of both, only now she is certainly handicapped as a result. Her daughter Amy, who has been coming most weekends to help out, decides it's time for her mother to learn how to fill her tank. She had already shown Bette how to pump gas a few times, but over the weekend Amy insisted that it was Bette's turn to actually do it. Amy went inside the convenience store and Bette took out her credit card. She explains that everything was going fine up to that point. She's got the door open to the gas tank, swiped her card, entered her zip code, and selected the kind of gas she wanted. She lifted the nozzle and put it into the tank, or so she thinks. Somehow, and she will never know how, the gas started gushing back at her, completely dousing her in gasoline.

“It was like a volcano,” Bette says, lifting her arms as if she's being doused all over again. In response all she could do was scream, completely frozen and unable to act. Amy and the attendant came running out. Somehow, Amy was able to stop the gushing, only not before she too was covered in gasoline.

“And she was wearing a new outfit,” Bette nearly cried.

Mother and daughter were taking the first afternoon off in weeks from keeping Arthur company at rehab. They had tickets to a play and were determined not to miss it. They raced home and changed clothes. For the entire play, they could tell that people were sniffing and whispering about the smell of gasoline emanating from their direction. Bette and Amy sniffed and whispered as well, to throw their fellow theatergoers off the trail. Bette laughs at their pathetic attempt at subterfuge. Then, also in characteristically droll manner, she concluded by saying, “You know, there was part of me that wished I had a match to end it all right then and there.”

Back at Bea's for Bridge, she is eager to show off her newly installed chair lift. It goes from her basement to the landing, spanning the length of ten or so steep steps. She loves it, uses it to haul groceries and laundry. If she needs it to haul herself, bad knees, bursitis, or arthritis, she isn't saying. The women are good at hiding their infirmities. It may be pride, but I sense something else as well, akin to how an animal in the wild will attempt to camouflage an injury lest she be more vulnerable, easily sighted as prey. I hear the ladies comment on other people, noting that one is using a cane, another one a walker. One friend no longer drives. Another has gone into assisted living, another has moved across the country to be closer to their kids. Each marks a step in the wrong direction, an admission of decreased capacity.

Bea volunteers Jackie to try the lift. At first, she is game and scoots herself back into the chair. As Bea starts the lift, it lurches the way a Ferris wheel jolts to pick up passengers
or release them. Jackie looks around for something to hold on to, but the arm had been left up. Only a third of the way there and she is visibly terrified; it looks as if she could easily slip off. Bea tells her to hang on, there's nothing to it. When it reaches the landing, there is a slightly tricky maneuver to get off that involves swiveling the chair. We watch from down below, helpless as Jackie negotiates the distance from chair to landing. There is an audible sigh of relief when she makes it. No other volunteers, the rest of us trudge up the stairs for what looks like a long afternoon of Bridge.