The Bridge Ladies (25 page)

Just as the ladies take their seats a surprise snowfall blankets the road outside Bea's condo and elicits groans. This is our state with her freakish weather: late snows and Indian summers. A ring of worry emanates from the table, but the snow disappears as quickly as it fell. The ladies make so many mistakes the first game that they decide it's off the record. This would never fly at the Manhattan Bridge Club or the Orange Senior Center, but this is a breakfast nook in a condo on Forest Road on the border of New Haven and West Haven. No one risks expulsion for dropping the wrong card and blowing the game. A few hands later, Rhoda makes a big mistake when she opens the bidding with four Spades; you need five cards in a major suit to open. Even I know this. This is Bridge 101. Bea is sharp with Rhoda, accusatory. “How could you open a four-card major? Not for forty years have I seen that!”

Sparks flew from the table. Rhoda was flustered, though irritated and possibly embarrassed as well. Bea can sound sharp, only she's usually right; where disputes are concerned she is the acknowledged authority.

“Okay, let's move on,” she says. “Let's see what we can do.”

Bea focuses on whether she can take enough tricks to win the hand. In the end, she does, but it's a nail-biter.

“You made it, Bea,” Rhoda says with the implication that she was overreacting.

“Just,” Bea returns.

Arthur's health becomes increasingly precarious. “He's old,” Bette tells me. “He's old and the doctors don't really care. Or if they do there is nothing they can do.” Her voice is a mixture of despair and disgust.

I remember so well how my father tried every newfangled treatment he could find to walk again, one more outlandish than the next, including a protocol where his healthy arm and leg were bound to his body in an attempt to force his limp ones to work, the way a good eye is patched to coerce the other to focus. No one quite knows how it happened, but some aides apparently dropped my father at the facility and he had to be rushed by ambulance to the local hospital and then flown home on a stretcher. That's when my mother called it quits on these experimental treatments, each one depleting or worsening his condition. Though I also noticed that when my father stopped trying, his depression settled in for good. His eyes looked magnified behind his glasses, which perched crookedly on his face. It was a death knell, but he would live like this for a few more years, receding into himself, giving himself over to a never ending parade of home health care aides, who bathed him and helped him use the toilet, and counted out his pills in a seven-day dispenser.

I had never seen my parents as vulnerable until then. I think my mother felt robbed most of all. Caretaking didn't come naturally to her, and she seemed to resent my father, his illness, and the whole crappy situation. She vowed never to put him into a nursing home and she would fulfill that promise. Every morning
she would set out a bowl of salt-free Cheerios, two prunes, a small glass of juice, and his pills. She had him on a sodium-free diet; it hardly seemed worth living. My mother would take her seat across from him and bite into a quartered orange, sucking all the meat out of it.

One aide after another marched through their lives. Some had to be dismissed right away because they clearly could not lift my father. Others stayed longer until they committed some egregious offense. One heavy-set man with dyed hair the color of orange soda strung a clothesline between two trees on the front lawn and hung a quilt on it. This made my mother apoplectic. She ran out the front door in her bathrobe and pulled the quilt down like a sailor his mainsail heading into a storm. Then she demanded he remove the line.
Okay, lady
,
take it easy
.

The same aide sang or whistled constantly as he worked, as if he were one of the seven dwarfs. My mother couldn't stand it, but how do you tell someone to stop singing without sounding like Mussolini? My mother didn't fire him until she received a call from the cops one night. He had taken my father's handicap van out for a spin and was picked up outside an after-hours club in New Haven.

After that, I feared that I would come home to find my parents back-to-back and bound in duct tape, the valuables gone. One lady disappeared with my father and the van for twelve hours. We were frantic. They returned without any explanation apart from saying they got lost. I noticed the crumpled red-and-white-striped detritus of a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal in the backseat.

Mercifully, my father's last aide was a gentle man who figured out how to slalom between my mother's moods and quickly learned her precise way of doing things: loading the dishwasher just so, folding the rags. (Yes, folding rags!) And unlike me, snatching permanent press clothing from the dryer before they
wrinkle (a technique my mother has elevated to an art form).More amazing, he could anticipate my father's needs without being intrusive and not take his abrasiveness personally. When I'd come over with my then young daughter he would play Connect Four with her, letting her win, tapping his chip on the table to warn her about making costly mistakes. We would try to get my father to play, but after slipping a chip or two into the plastic slots he'd lose interest.

Whenever I read an article about the unexpected benefits of aging, I groan. It's not fun, you don't become wiser, and worse, the world is hurtling away from you. Old age is nothing if not managing losses: physical ability, appearance, memory, spouses, friends, economic independence, and finally freedom. True, some people hold on to their faculties and abilities longer. Often you will hear the Yiddish term
kaynahorah
reflexively muttered after a statement like “She's ninety but she still drives.
Kaynahorah
.” It's a Yiddish expression, meant to keep the evil eye away. For my father, there were no reasons to rejoice in the last years of his life, no stretches of time where he got his sense of humor back, when he could finish a crossword puzzle, or play a mean hand of gin. At the end of his life my father went from the hospital to hospice. There, too, he had to endure more pain, holding on for days, mostly unconscious. It was unbearable. We were told he could live for a few days or a few months. We thought hospice would make things easier. During those difficult days, when talking about the question of when you should pull the plug, my mother said, her voice thick with anger, “There is no plug.”

Bette has completely stopped coming to Bridge. The ladies always ask my mother how she's doing, what's happening.
There isn't much to tell, and my mother doesn't like to say much. There is a tacit understanding among the women. All of them have been through it, having lost their husbands of fifty-plus years, except for Jackie. Dick still plays tennis. He still travels the world. Still adds masks to his collection.
Kaynahorah!
Everyone feels for Bette but there is nothing they can do. I offer to spell Bette so she can get her hair done, her nails. I offer to play cards with Arthur, kibitz the way we do when I run into him at the JCC. Bette declines all offers of help. She says Arthur doesn't want visitors, doesn't want to see anyone.

All of the men go first. Men who went to work every day, smoked cigars and wore fedoras, men who might have strayed but didn't leave their wives, trade them in for younger models. Played ball with their sons and walked their daughters down the aisle at their weddings. These were men who poured tumblers of scotch and read the paper when they got home. Men who golfed on the weekend, played tennis, pinochle, poker, and couples Bridge with their wives. They didn't read
GQ
or
Esquire
, didn't need to. They knew how to tie a tie, do a push-up, and wax the Cadillac. They took Polaroid pictures at birthday parties and paid the bills. That their wives didn't have to work was a point of pride, as was putting their children through college, affording a second home in a gated community in Boca or Palm Beach with automatic sprinklers and manicured putting greens. They left nest eggs and continued to take care of their wives from the grave.

When Bette comes home every night from the hospital there are at least a dozen messages on her phone; she is too exhausted to answer any. Sometimes my mother or another friend has left a meal on her porch. She doesn't have an appetite. Her refrigerator and freezer are filled with food she hasn't touched.

On the morning my father died I had arrived early at hospice. I didn't have a premonition. I just liked being there alone with him in the early hours, the empty parking lot scored in rows of herringbone. Inside it was so quiet you could hear the wheezing of the breathing machines. I would pick up a Starbucks on the way and just sit quietly in his room before the nurses made their first rounds of the day. That morning, my father was sleeping on his side. Usually he was on his back. I slipped off my shoes, climbed into the bed, and curled around his back the way he did with me when I was little and needed help getting to sleep.

I started to quietly sing all the songs we loved: “Downtown,” “Winchester Cathedral,” and my favorite “If the Rain's Got to Fall,” slipping into our best cockney accents:
Sunday's the day when it's got to be fine, 'cause that's when I'm meeting my girl.
I was my father's girl. We resembled each other physically, were business-minded and social chameleons; we earned money and lent it, we battled the bulge, and we liked to make people laugh. He couldn't say no to me, peeled off a twenty and then another when I was going out with my friends.

When I turned fifteen and sixteen, my father couldn't understand my clothes, my friends, my music, or what was happening to me when depression enveloped itself around my teenage life. He once told a therapist that his other daughters were fine, implying there was something wrong with me. Why couldn't I get with the program? Why did I reek of pot? What had happened to his straight-A girl who used to sail down our front hallway into his arms when he came home from work? Why had I become sullen, uncommunicative; why could he no longer make me laugh?

The Bridge Ladies would say I was spoiled. That my father was a pushover, that there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for his
daughters. In many ways, this was true. Often he would openly defy my mother and approve of things she had vetoed: going to a movie on a school night, buying a treat, or staying up late. Of course what they didn't see, at least with respect to me, was how all that indulgence, all of his generosity, was contingent on my doing what he wanted. Many fights, the worst of them, ended with him saying:
After all I've done for you.

What could you say to that? It was an excruciating double bind: I fiercely disagreed with him and deeply craved his approval. Eventually our differences came to define our relationship: he was disgusted when I moved into an East Village tenement with a friend (“If this is how you want to live”). When he read my first published poem, he threw the small magazine on the floor (“If that's what you want to write”). And he acted as if I were throwing my life and my money away when I pursued an MFA in poetry instead of an MBA. (Okay, he called that one.) My mother had often equated him with King Solomon for his keen and fair decision-making skills, and she deferred to them. We all know how that story ends: the baby is spared. Why did I always feel cut in half?