The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner

Author:Betsy Lerner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

The Finesse

“Have a look.” My mother sends me the newsletter from the Orange Senior Center, which is in the next town over. She’s affixed a Post-it to the flyer with the message in her pretty script with graceful loops. When I call the center and ask about the beginner class I’m told I need a partner. When I relay this to my mother she volunteers without hesitation. I remind her that it’s a beginner class and that she’s been playing for more than fifty years. She insists that there is always more to learn. Yes, I’m sure there is, but this is a beginner class. My mother says she doesn’t mind.

On the drive to the lesson, I ask her what she will say if the teacher asks why she’s come for lessons.

“Do you think he will?” My mother is startled by this possible eventuality.

“It’s usually how teachers start classes.”

She bites her finger to pantomime thinking. “I’ll lie.”

We enter the senior center through a large cafeteria with a bingo game in process. My mother clutches my arm and hurries us out, as if we’ve barged in on a famous chess or tennis match. The place has that cafeteria smell of institutional food, and the seniors look defeated by life and the checkerboard squares before them. We wend our way down a long hall. The walls are papered with flyers about free lunches, movie nights, and lectures. The classroom is depressing, cement block walls, dusty chalkboards, a hodgepodge of tables and chairs. A few women, mostly in their fifties and sixties, and an older couple are milling about. The teacher is late, and everyone is looking at the clock.

The woman in the couple makes it her business to go to the office and inquire after our missing teacher. She has curly white hair and large, black Swifty Lazar–style eyeglass frames. She is slim and dressed in all black. I can tell she is the kind of person who marches into the projection room when the sound goes off in a movie, or reports a carton of milk spilled in the grocery aisle.

When she returns, she tells the group that the teacher got the time wrong and is going to be a half hour late. Then she introduces herself and her husband, Barbara and Bernard Barkin. She has a fabulous New York accent.

“Born and raised in Manhattan,” she says, as if she were part of the Seneca Nation. I like Barbara right away. She has a great laugh, more, a great attitude. She and her husband have moved here after living in Westchester and Greenwich for sixty-two years. She explains that Bernard had an aortic dissection (usually fatal); they moved from their three-story home when it became too much to handle. Their kids had relocated here some time ago and urged them to move closer, and that is how Barbara and Bernard find themselves on a Thursday afternoon in a senior center in Orange, Connecticut. She’s upbeat, allows that the move and sale of many of their things was traumatic, but people here are so friendly.

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