Read The Bridge Ladies for Free Online Page A

Now the Elf looks astonished, as if The Amazing Kreskin had taken her place. How did she know he had Spades?
    I realized soon enough that the teachers were so well acquainted with these teaching boards that they basically knew what each student had in his hand. Still, it was always a little unnerving when a teacher would ask from across the table why we didn’t make a particular bid or drop a particular card, as if they were mind readers. If they could see into our hands, what else could they see?
    I went home that night thoroughly discouraged and completely energized. I could tell right away that this game would not come easily to me: too many numbers and too much memorization. When asked for my phone number I’ll often mistakenly give one from a previous address. I still have to look up my Social Security number when requested. I am password-challenged beyond belief. And I still count on my fingers for the most basic addition. I was more than challenged: I was handicapped. But I also had fun, felt stimulated. I don’t have hobbies. I’ve never dug my hands down into soil. Never took pleasurein reducing a soup stock. I was struck that this was something I might actually enjoy doing now and into my senior years, like the ladies. Plus I had already taken the plunge, and suffered the anxiety of attempting to learn something new.
    But there was something else, too. I felt an immediate affinity for the game itself. Not that I would be good at it, but I sensed, even that first night, that Bridge was a metaphor for many things.

CHAPTER 3
The Athenian
    When I first sat in on the Bridge Ladies’ games I was hoping to find the remnants of a 1970s encounter group or rap session where the women openly shared details about their lives. I didn’t expect any of them to be inspecting their vaginas with handheld mirrors, mind you, but I thought they would be more forthcoming, more open, and, hopefully, a little gossipy. Instead I discovered that they never trash anyone, never talk about something that bothers them, and never share a deep feeling. Three unspoken commandments are etched in stone:
    Thou shalt not pry.
    Thou shalt not reveal.
    Thou shalt not share.
    â€œWhy is it all such a taboo?” I ask my mother after having observed how taciturn the women are after a few weeks.
    â€œIt is what it is.” Her catchall for life’s conundrums.
    â€œWhy can’t you talk about things that bother you?”
    â€œWe just don’t.”
    â€œWhat could happen?”
    My mother shrugs, though some time later Bette will tell me that in the past women had been flushed from the club for failing to adhere to the unspoken decorum. Talking too much or saying the wrong thing could get you booted. The worst offender was a woman who had gotten caught up in the vitamin craze in the 1970s and proselytized their healthy benefits to the girls. Worse, she tried to rope them into selling the vitamins in a pyramid scheme. I ask Bette how they voted her off the island. She’s embarrassed to tell me: they just sort of stop calling.
    Was my presence inhibiting them or were Bridge clubs a lot like long marriages where you learn to keep quiet for the sake of the greater good? No one is going to change, not after fifty-plus years. One of my Bridge teachers told me that she and her husband had to stop playing together for the sake of the marriage. She liked to play by the book, he from the seat of his pants. At first it was exciting; for god’s sake they met cute at a Bridge tournament. But after a time it created more conflict than any partnership can withstand.
    In time, I will observe husbands and wives publicly shaming each other for mistakes. They know they’re in public, but tensions can run that high in Bridge; a single mistake can cost a game and bidding incorrectly puts your partner in jeopardy. The only Bridge table murder on record occurred in Kansas City in 1929. A husband and wife were having a bad