The Bridge Ladies by Betsy Lerner Read Free Book Online Page B

a recent overnight with three women friends, there was a graphic description of a colonic and a lively conversation about what constitutes cheating. We discuss books and movies and aren’t afraid to disagree. We talk about Hillary and the possibility of having a female president.
    We compare notes about therapy and our “issues” as freely as we would a new restaurant or a yoga studio. Casual conversation at a cocktail party can often begin: “as my therapist said,” or “as I said to my therapist.” When you discover a person has never been to therapy it’s as if they are somehow lacking in self-awareness. I have a friend who once said he never cried in therapy. Well, I smugly countered, I guess you’re not doing the hard work.
    Now, and with more regularity, we talk about the indignities of middle age: back problems and colonoscopies, hair color and the horror of finding brown spots on the back of your hand. We don’t feel bad about our necks yet, but the scarves and turtlenecks aren’t far behind.
    I’ve cried my way through plenty of therapy sessions on the long road to getting my shit together, where I alternately blamed my mother for all my ills, felt compassion for her, judged her, hated her, and accepted her. For the most part, I thought I was done, but moving home reactivated every button and not gradually. It was simultaneous with crossing state lines. I might as well have been the man in the game Operation with his vital organs exposed: the Adam’s apple, the wishbone, the broken heart. Every time you touched the sides trying to fish out an organ, an angry buzzer went off.
    It struck me as more than a little ironic that I was the daughter moving home, the middle, the black sheep. I told myself I could handle it, tried to convince myself it would be good, repeating the plusses like a mantra: It was a great job opportunity for my husband. My father was ailing and I could see him more. It would be good for our daughter! We’d save money!
    No matter what I told myself, I was totally freaked out. I was afraid all those landmarks, like the Athenian, from my difficult teen years would trigger memories of how I slowly fell apart in high school. I couldn’t believe so many of my high school haunts were still there: Claire’s, the one vegetarian restaurant with ostensibly the same menu from the 1970s still chalked in pastels on the blackboard; Group W Bench, a 1960s relic named for Arlo Guthrie’s song “Alice’s Restaurant” and go-to for hippie paraphernalia; and Toad’s, the dive bar where you could get in with a fake ID and make out with a Yalie on the sticky dance floor. Would it all feel like some hideous déjà vu? Would I start to spiral?
    But my biggest concern returning home was the proximity I would now have with my mother. We had never been close and were reliably caught in a classic mother-daughter dynamic: whatever she said I took the wrong way. Every comment she made felt like a referendum on how I lived my life. I wear my jeans on the long side and they tend to fray at the heel. She begs me to get them hemmed, offers to take them into the tailor herself, that’s how badly she wants it done. Likewise, the fringe on a small rug I keep in front of my kitchen sink has frayed. She knows a carpet man who can repair it. Why won’t I let her take it in? Why won’t I? She says she is going to “kidnap” the rug and get it repaired behind my back. She is so upset that I don’t have paper hand towels for guests in my downstairs bathroom that she brings me her own paper towel holder and a few packages of pretty towels to “get me started,” like a box of Kotex pads whenI first got my period. When she leaves, I throw the whole lot of it under the cabinet.
    Would there ever come a time when I wouldn’t feel judged? Did everything have to come under scrutiny? My homemaking? My work? She wants to know