shifts, and short dresses, wide patent leather belts, and big wooden beads. We inhaled the strong scent of Maxwell House percolating in a silver pot, the coffee burbling in dark waves against the glass knob and making a sound we could hear three rooms away.
I was twelve or thirteen, and to me, their trilling laughter was like nothing I’d ever heard, this layered and multioctave mirth that seemed rich enough to tell its own story. I wondered why my young friends had never laughed in that way, what could be so funny to these “old” women who had to be way into their thirties. I’d strain to hear their whispers and to smell their Kents and Salems as the tobacco smoke mixed with the perfume de jour—Estee Lauder’s Youth Dew.
On bridge nights after the biddies had finished a couple of Bloody Marys, I heard stories I knew I wasn’t supposed to ever know. Stories of divorce and cheating, stories of gambling, debts, other women, children gone astray, and the message that stuck with me most—that if you get fat and let yourself go to pot, your husband will likely run around on you.
I learned there were times in these other mothers’ lives when they didn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning and doing the day, putting on makeup and superficial fronts. I learned about nervous breakdowns and people falling apart—how that for a woman of a certain age and circumstance, it was as expected as a man’s midlife crisis. He gets the red convertible and home-wrecking mistress; she gets the feeling of fleeting beauty, lost time, and finds herself in a corner unable to do much more than mutter and wonder how to coax her spirit into seeing reasons to rise each day and put another pound of ground round on the right front burner.
Bridge nights rekindled lots of spirits. And most of Mama’s bridge ladies found comfort and escape through each other, through chocolate, caffeine, nicotine, and moderate intakes of alcohol.
“Proud Mary and Jesus are my drugs,” Mama used to say, speaking of the song by Ike and Tina she liked to dance to on Saturday nights followed by the Sunday mornings she’d plant her long narrow bones on a church pew if her stockings didn’t have a run.
My daddy was in charge on Mama’s bridge nights. He’d let us eat junk food, skip baths, and go to bed with candy in our molars. He made up stories instead of reading them from books and didn’t mind when we climbed onto his back as he galloped through the house on all fours. With him, it was like having a sleepover because he pretended the rules didn’t apply. We ate Swanson’s chicken potpies and drank Cokes instead of milk.
I loved it best though when it was Mama’s turn to host bridge, those nights I never knew what I was going to hear as the blood rushed to my head, upside down in spy position on the staircase, and their voices and stories filled my mind.
These were nights my mother became more than a two-dimensional figure, when she transformed from her alternations of loving and nagging, into an exciting woman living life beyond the borders of her daughters’ whims and husband’s desires.
I’ll never forget the evening I overheard her talking about her first day on the “job” as a volunteer at the local nursing home. She was trying to become a housewife who did charitable works so as to help define her when the working mothers were always asking, “What exactly do you do all day long?” a question that really irked her.
If she’d been a mean-spirited woman, she could have answered honestly, “I cart your children to and from school, to ballet and Girl Scouts, and keep them while you’re working.” But Mama’s not mean-spirited so she kept her mouth shut.
On this night she was on fire with the adrenaline of a hostess who’d mixed the Bloodys with a heavy hand and whose cards were quite possibly the best of the deal. She held her friends spellbound with her words and pacing, and my sister and I were afraid to breathe, scared we’d miss a part of this story.
“I quit volunteering after only two hours on the job,” Mama announced with precise timing and pitch. “I’m telling you, it was something else.” She paused for effect, her nail tapping an ace of diamonds. “The men patients were on one wing and the women on another. The head nurse told me to go fetch the men and wheel them back to their rooms for a nap.”
As Mama told her story, the cards ceased motion. None of the ladies could move, except to drag nicotine or sip drinks.
“After I carted a few of them to their rooms, I went up to this man in a wheelchair with his back facing the wall. I turned that little withery fellow around and Lord have mercy all of a sudden his hand jumped away from his exposed…his shining…penis.”
The laughter reaching the top of the stairs was as explosive as fireworks on the Fourth. “I was mortified,” Mama said. “I ran to tell the head nurse what had just happened, and she said, ‘Oh, well now, he does that all the time.’” Pause. Sip. Tap. “You know what else the nurse said?” The women shook their heads and waited, their eyes huge and expectant. “That nurse had the nerve to laugh at me and ask, ‘Well, do you have one that looks that good at home?’”
By now the bridge ladies were all but rolling on the green carpet, and my sister and I were about to tinkle in our pants. We had never heard our mama saying such things. We didn’t think she knew what a penis was, actually.
“I swannee,” Mama said. “I looked at that nurse with my eyebrows shot up real high and my eyes as wide as they could be and she said, ‘I sure don’t have one at home that looks as good as his.’
“I have to tell y’all, it was a fine-looking thing for his age. It was about the only thing healthy on him.”
I knew the lady telling this story had my mother’s face and voice, but someone else had occupied her body for the night. She was no longer the Baptist Sunday-school-teaching prim and proper etiquette maven. She was a woman set free, the ropes of properness slashed with friendship and chocolate, Chex Mix, and two Bloody Marys. She was a real person with feelings and emotions, not just the lady who made spaghetti and taught me how to set a table, the woman who delegated chores and discipline.
When the cards flapped and fluttered to the table, the coffee mugs clinked in their saucers and ice tinged in glasses, when no husband was around to put a damper on her spirit or children nearby to disappoint her, Mama grew as bold and lively as a fabulous character in a book.
When life got hard she played bridge and sat with seven other women in living rooms all over the small towns in which we lived in Georgia and South Carolina, talking of things I would finally understand after the birth of my own children.
It was soon after my first child arrived, I discovered the world of Mama’s bridge biddies, the feeling of being a nervous wreck and riding the waves of hormone havoc. The more children, pressure, and commitments, the more a nervous breakdown threatened to consume me. It seemed a gracious woman’s due, her rite of midlife passage.
These breakdowns—also known as hissy fits, conniptions, and meltdowns—were as expected as replacing spark plugs and transmission fluid in cars with sixty thousand miles. Every month at bridge, I heard Mama and the ladies mentioning the latest to succumb. And now I was one of them, only I had no bridge club to commiserate with and lighten my load by spreading it around and coating it with Maxwell House, vodka, and chocolate-covered nuts.
I wanted a bridge club, a circle of close friends to share the pain and joys of life with, but there never seemed enough hours in the day for deep and connecting friendships, particularly in the early years of working and motherhood. It was hard enough to find fifteen minutes to cook a real dinner once a week. When I did get together with women, it was with other “mom” friends and we’d end up at play parks and school events, chatting mostly about kids and parenting travails and how one day we would finally fall victim to a good
