The Bridge Ladies (17 page)

“There is no man worth dying for,” Bea says as soon as I sit down to join her for breakfast. I sometimes feel with Bea that I've entered the film somewhere in the middle.

“It's what I tell all the girls doing community service who help out at the Soup Kitchen. You know, instead of doing prison time.” Bea says she'd hate to see a good kid wind up in the brink over some loser. When she started volunteering at the Soup Kitchen, she never asked the people doing community service what crime they had committed, only after a time she got more comfortable, more familiar.

“I've heard it all,” she says. “Last week, a gal told me the cops found drugs in the trunk of her car, but they weren't hers. Yeah, right.” I love this tough talk of Bea's. I can picture her with a detective's badge interrogating some perp on the set of
Law & Order: Criminal Intent
. Bea talks a good game.

When I asked if I could join her and volunteer at the Soup
Kitchen, see her in action, she was delighted. She has been serving on the line twice a week for nearly ten years, since her husband died. She has proudly told me that they serve more than three hundred meals a day, and more toward the end of the month when the checks run out. When she mentions the Soup Kitchen at Bridge, which she often does, no one ever takes it up, asks her what it's like, or commends her service. “Betsy”—she's not dropping it—“do you think there is any man worth going to prison for?”

“Probably not,” I wager.

“Probably?”

“Okay, definitely not,” I agree.

“Damn straight.”

After we finish eating, she pulls a pillbox out of her purse. She shakes it and a little white pill goes rolling across the table. She's fast on the draw and snaps it up before it rolls off. “My birth control pills,” she says, winking. Then she takes out her lipstick and a small round mirror that fits in the palm of her hand.

“See this?” she says, and hands it to me.

On the back is a black-and-white photo of Bea and her mother. I've asked Bea a few times if they were close. “Personalities don't always mesh” is all she'll tell me. Still, she carries this novelty mirror from the Catskills with her more than eighty years later. When I hand it back, Bea says, “That was taken a hundred and five years ago,” and then, as an afterthought, “I was a beautiful child.”

When we approach the Soup Kitchen, a few guys in low-slung jeans, doo-rags, dreadlocks, aprons, and work boots as big as loaves of bread are outside smoking. As we approach, they all call out to her like three little birds on a wire: Hey Miss Bea, Hey Miss Bea, Hey Miss Bea. She greets each man by name and
introduces me as a helper. Inside, it's the same. She takes me into the kitchen and introduces me to the cook and dishwashers. She knows everyone by name and what they're up to. Bea is knitted in here. Before she takes her place on the serving line, she fills the birdbath in the pretty courtyard between the church and the community room. Seconds later the bath is crowded with birds shoving each other out of the way for a drink. Bea looks back, delighted.

She puts on her apron and her plastic gloves and takes her place on the line where she serves dessert. There's usually a choice of donated cakes, doughnuts, and cookies on a large silver tray, but you better decide quickly. Bea will not have the line held up on account of you being fussy. Nor will you get away with sneaking back in line for a second piece of cake. If you think you will put one over on Bea on account of her age, think again. I may be wrong, but she seems like the center of the whole operation.

Usually a divinity student from Yale comes to lead the assembled in prayer before the meal. The day I was there a young woman led the room in prayers and then she moved from table to table, talking with the clients. Bea explained that most of the pastors leave after they say the prayer. She is impressed with this young woman taking the time to stay.

“So what if she has an earring in her nose,” and by this Bea didn't mean a demure diamond stud in one of her nostrils but a thick septum ring with balls at the end.

“I think she does a good job, she can have whatever
chazerai
in her nose for all I care.”

The people who come to the Soup Kitchen have obviously hit hard times. It's the mothers with small children who get to Bea. She always gives a small child two desserts and calls them “sweetie” or “cutie” and encourages them to take their time
and choose whatever they like. Some of the men look threatening to me, either because of their size or body language. Only then they say, “Hey Miss Bea” and give her a big smile. I wish the Bridge Ladies could see her. Most people on the line thank Bea by saying,
Bless you
, and
God bless
you
, and
Have a blessed day.

“I bet you've never been so blessed in your life, have you, Betsy?” Bea says as we leave.

Heading back to our car, Bea takes my arm as we cross the street, our aprons rolled beneath our arms, the sign of a good day's work.

The light in Rhoda's condo is snuffed out under a ceiling of gray sky. It's been raining on and off for days. The ladies always show up in exactly the proper outerwear, some in rain bonnets, rain boots, others toting umbrellas with Monet lilies from the Met, NPR giveaways. When I arrive and my mother sees that I don't have a coat, she predictably quizzes, “No coat?”

I don't believe I have ever, in her judgment, left the house properly dressed. She is a coat stickler. No, she is the Inspector General of Outer Wear, the Commissar of Coats. Not only do I have to wear one, but I should also have a coat for every kind of weather. For a girl who only had one coat, my mother now has a closet full because in her view: all jackets are not created equal. No longer able to get me to comply, Inspector General has turned her hawk-eye on my daughter. It makes her “crazy” the way I “let her out of the house” without a coat. When I buy my daughter what I think of as a three-season coat, my mother investigates the fabric and says with absolute authority, “Two. At best.”

Instead of pushing all my buttons, this conversation almost amuses me, as if we are in an off-Broadway play reciting tired dialogue. Only then she escalates the inquisition. “Did it come with a lining?”

“Yes.”

“Did you buy it?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Don't lie to me.”

“I'm not.”

“I see that you are.”

“Okay, I'll go get it.”

“Will you really? Do you want me to get it? You
have
to get the lining. When will you have time to get it? You never have any time.”

The worst thing about this insane conversation is that I have similar ones with my daughter. I bug her nearly every morning as she leaves for school.
Are you going to be warm enough? Do you want your boots? Don't you want any breakfast?
Like a lot of my friends, I swore I would be nothing like my mother. Only there it is, all the warnings and criticisms tumbling forth from my mouth in what must be an invisible strain of maternal DNA.

Still, women of my generation are fairly well convinced that we are doing a better job raising our kids, are more connected and attuned than our parents were with us. After all, we use the same technology and we share the same music, went to the same colleges, and experimented with the same drugs. My daughter and I share clothes. The idea of ever borrowing anything from my mother's grown-up wardrobe was out of the question. The woman wore girdles and bras with cups the shape of funnels.

We're even a little ambivalent about being adults ourselves. Dude dads wear Arctic Monkey T-shirts and Converse sneakers to work. I know a mom who surfs!

My daughter and I watched
Girls
together and binge-watched the entire series of
The Office
when she was in tenth grade. Sometimes I'd plead for one more episode, but she'd beg off claiming she had homework! I was so proud when she borrowed my Doc Martens for a concert! I didn't even mind that she hadn't asked me.

When she said she wanted to get a nose ring, I said go for it. My mother was horrified to learn that I encouraged her. Didn't I know that nose rings lead to heroin addiction, poverty, and death? I wasn't sure if my mother was more appalled with her or with me. The fact is I've always loved blue hair, mohawks, and tattoos, no doubt because my mother finds them so offensive. I never had the moxie to stand out like that, but I gave her enough tsuris in my army pants and collection of T-shirts with band names that either stymied or frightened her: The Clash, The Sex Pistols, and the Grateful Dead. Why on earth would you wear a shirt with a skull on it? What was this ghastly uniform I had adopted? Wearing it to the country club and freaking out my mother was my idea of civil disobedience circa 1975. When my daughter finds a long-retired Jerry Garcia T-shirt from my former collection, she's thrilled. It's the coolest thing ever.

Rhoda serves sardines. I wonder if I can hide them under the salad. I know I can't spirit them away to the bathroom and flush them down the toilet the way I used to when my mother served cod. I gather myself and politely decline when they come my way.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, thank you so much. I'm fine.”

Everyone starts eating when Rhoda lays her hands flat on the table, stands up, and clears her throat for an announcement.
She easily commands the table. She is the only seasoned leader among them, having been executive director at the synagogue for sixteen years. Though Rhoda claims to have nearly fallen over when they offered her the position, but she was a leader waiting to happen: a confident only child, a graduate of Russell Sage, a proud women's college whose motto was “To Be, To Know, To Do.”

It was the highest administrative position in the congregation; she supervised a staff of five and was in charge of everything from baby naming ceremonies to building maintenance. Plus it came with a salary.

She tells me about walking into a boardroom of all men for the first time.

“Like Peggy in
Mad Men
?” I ask, but Rhoda looks at me blankly. (Ladies, watch cable, it won't bite you!)

“The first conference I went to, I took notes the whole time and barely breathed. One of the other executives came up to me and said ‘Rhoda, relax!'” She traveled alone to conferences. “I got on a plane all by myself and navigated new cities; that was really something.”

A six-month trial basis turned into sixteen years. Her mother had moved to the area and helped out with the kids. Rhoda wouldn't have said she had it all, or leaned in, but her life was multidimensional, always challenging. Peter was completely supportive. Sometimes he would join her at conferences. When the spouses started an association, they elected Peter president; he was pretty much the only guy and he loved it. Peter was crazy like that, up for anything, a total goof. One Passover, he taped the
Afikomen
to his stomach.

Today, Rhoda is excited to let everyone know that Fran Kay, her longtime friend from high school and maid of honor, has produced a revival of
Pippin
on Broadway. Rhoda and her
gentleman friend, George, saw it over the weekend, and she reports back that it's marvelous, sure to win Fran another Tony.

Fran Kay came to town during Rhoda's high school years. There was something intoxicating about her; when Rhoda speaks of her you can still hear the infatuation in her voice.

“Francis Kay was a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and long gorgeous black hair. Gorgeous.” According to Rhoda, she could choose an outfit that anyone else would have passed over and turn it into something stunning. She always had a boyfriend, with one in the wings. “When she wasn't on the phone with one of her beaus, she was on the phone confiding in me.”

Rhoda followed Fran all the way to the Poconos where she had a job at a Jewish summer camp called With-a-Wind. She convinced her parents to let her work there, and took the bus by herself. Rhoda would have followed Fran to the ends of the earth, which With-a-Wind pretty much was.