They didnt talk about aging or warn us younger ones about what was coming. I don’t even remember
hearing that word, “aging,” back on those humid summer afternoons in
Connecticut when I visited my mother and father for ten days every year after
I’d run off to California to make my new life.
The “They” that didn’t mention aging were my mother’s pals who came over
for drinks and bridge, stretching the afternoon out until dinner.
They laughed and cackled while I watched them
from a chair drawn up to the side of their card table, loving every minute of
their gossip and jokes, each one of them drawing deeply on their filter-tip
cigarettes, twisting their heads in a quick gesture to let the smoke out.We
didn’t know then that smoking wasn’t so hot, health-wise.
They were all good
players at a game I just couldn’t be bothered with, except that I was pleased
when I was asked to sit in for a hand. Then I got to take a seat at the card
table and eat the bridge mix from the fancy glass bowls at the four corners of
the table. Next to the ashtrays filled up with lipstick-edged butts. The
women were good-natured about my gaffes, my timid bids, wrapping up a bum hand
by going over all the bidding and remembering every card that had been
played. This ability of theirs impressed
me.
I only
remembered them, their pastel Ship
‘n’ Shore blouses, their quick hands, their freckles just a shade darker than
the tans, the curly-by-perms hairdos, the earrings that pinched their lobes,
since only Gypsies had pierced ears as far as they were concerned. They had some wrinkles at the sides of their
eyes, and a few of them had those lines around their mouths, from all that
pursing of lips that occurred while smoking, I guess.
The women were all tanned because they
practically lived on the shore and spent any waking moments when they were not
playing bridge or cooking their family suppers or going to the Stop ‘n’ Shop
for groceries, lolling on big, striped beach towels getting their summer
tans. When I visited, my mother and I
would go down to the beach and I’d slather myself with some sweetish-smelling
tanning lotion and settle down next to my mother to chat and doze.
In conversations, we’d dip gingerly around
delicate family-slanted topics. My time
in Connecticut was rare and short and I wanted to leave all the sleeping dogs
lying. The air was salty and cool, the
sun hot, the sand itchy—it was perfect.
I could return to Berkeley with a tan and look good for a couple of
weeks.
At the bridge
table, the women talked and smoked and laughed and drank their drinks, ice
cubes musical in the squat, heavy glasses.
They were only a little plump by then, only in their fifties. Aging hadn’t really come to call. No one was dying in their circle of
pals. The one who had died was very young when it happened, and it was a long time
ago, from cancer.
I suppose that’s the
first time, then, when you know it can actually happen. And no one was in line for Alzheimer’s; no
one even talked about that. None of this
came up. Later, one of these women would
be diagnosed with it, would drive around in neighborhoods near her house but
not know how to get back home. But at
this particular time, these days of bridge and drinks and snacks and suntan and
great old jokes, this was prime time. Aging was for the in-laws and it was called “getting damned old.”
It was delicious, in all kinds
of ways.
In those
years, I was playing a different game that took all my concentration. Playing a solo, even though I was only a Mom
in the middle of a family. Just like my
own mother—a Mom in the middle of a family, juggling the things she wanted to
do with the things she had to do.
Finding, often, that there was only room for the had-to, not the
want-to. Bridge was her way; reading was
mine.
And aging was nothing to us. That was a long way off.