The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner Read Free Book Online

reemerges a few moments later like a periscope in a submarine. The mother looks over at us, apologetic.
    â€œShe’s adorable,” Bea says as the girl nearly hoists herself over into our booth, her mother pulling her back by the ankles. I realize then that Bea has turned the Athenian Diner into Bedford. I would learn that she does this wherever she goes: the Soup Kitchen, the senior center where she plays cards twice a week, the pool at her condo. If there are people around she wants to get to know them, at least to say hello. You want to go where everybody knows your name.
    â€œWe were just one of three Jewish families in Bedford. And with our name: Bernstein! How do you like that, Betsy?” Bea’s parents came to this country as teens through Philadelphia and settled for a time in Cincinnati, where they met, picked up some English, she some sewing skills, and headed west to the limestone capital of the world. Somehow the Romanian immigrant and his young wife with their thick accents and dark curls made a go of it, eventually opening a clothing store off the square, Bernstein’s Ladies Ready to Wear.
    Bea can’t remember how they were able to open a store without a single connection or relation.
    â€œI don’t know. I was little.”
    I wager that her father might have started selling fabric from a pushcart, as so many immigrants did. Bea says they had the store for as long as she can remember. Her mother dressed the mannequins, like life-size dolls, in the store windows according to the seasons. Her father had carved out a niche selling clothes from New York. The dresses were more expensive than the “ schmatas ” from the newly opened department store J. C. Penney, and less expensive than the dressmaker’s.
    She’s emphatic that she never experienced any anti-Semitism in Bedford. The only thing that separated her father’s store from the others in town was that they closed on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, when they headed out to Louisville forHigh Holiday services. Then she lowers her tone, so as not to appear bragging. “We had a car, Betsy. Not everyone did.”
    â€œFifty cents down, fifty cents a week.” Bea thumps her fingers on the table again explaining how her father started a layaway plan. He figured out how to manage cash flow before they called it that and as a result made it through the Depression. He could do no wrong in his young daughter’s eyes. They had a two-story house with hardwood floors and Oriental rugs. Bea had a pretty room with balloons on the wallpaper.
    â€œI had everything, Betsy.”
    The Bernsteins also had live-in household help, and her father treated the young women who worked for them over the years fairly, they were on a first name basis and they lived in the house with the family.
    â€œIt wasn’t The Help, Betsy,” Bea says. “If I eat steak, you eat steak. If I eat cake, you eat cake. That’s how it was in our house.”

    The following Monday it’s Bea’s turn to host. The ladies arrive at the diner and claim their seats. Bea is busy going from table to table greeting nearly everyone who has come in, many on walkers, some in wheelchairs, one with a plastic tube snaking from a portable oxygen tank into his nose. Some are here with home aides, slumped over, or shrunken as gnomes. The Bridge Ladies grow restless, complete with deep sighs and shoulder shrugs, as Bea continues to make the rounds. I get that the ladies are impatient. They want to order lunch and get to Bea’s to start playing. I also get the feeling that they are a bit squeamish about all the infirmity. The ladies are in very good shape. They still drive except for Jackie, who had a fall and is unsteady on her feet. They go to New York for operas, Broadway shows, and museums. Mymother traveled to Israel last summer for a wedding and danced the horah in her Ferragamos. Looking over at these less fortunate folks who have