I hurry downstairs, my hair still wet from taking a shower. I swing by the kitchen to grab a banana and round the corner for the dinner table to tell my grandmother I’m sorry that I’m running a few minutes late and that I’m now ready to take her. The table is empty though. She isn’t sitting in her favorite chair by the TV watching the daytime rebroadcast of Charlie Rose, either. I walk down the stairs to the front door and hastily jam my shoes on without untying them first and notice the door open ajar. I peek outside and see her waiting down on the sidewalk. Sorry I’m a couple minutes late, I say, I’m just locking the top bolt, I’ll be there in a second. When I get to the sidewalk, I realize I’m taking her in the van, not the Prius. Because of street cleaning, the van is parked around the block and I tell her I’ll run grab the car and bring it around to the front of the house. In her eyes, that’ll waste too much time and ends up briskly walking with me to the car. This is San Francisco, and of course the car is on an awkward incline. I help her into the passenger seat, close her door, and run around to the driver’s seat. After checking to make sure her seatbelt is safely fastened, and looking in the mirror to see that there are no cars coming, we are on our way.
As we drive, I contemplate changing the radio from the classical music station to a more trendy top-40 frequency, but Bubs seems to be enjoying the Brahms, so I leave it as is. Mom usually takes Masonic she tells me. I tell her that Divisadero should take about the same amount of time; it might be even a little quicker. I ask Bubs about her morning, and she mentions something she read in the paper. She doesn’t seem too focused on that book review though, as she continues to glance at the clock on the dashboard as it precariously approaches 12:30. I remind her that the clock in the van is a couple minutes fast and that we’re just a few minutes away. I finally turn right onto Post and pull up to the front door of the community center in Japantown. I don’t want Bubs to trip on her way in, especially since she has brought a tin of cookies this week and remind her to take it slow on the stairs. Bubs can get out of the car herself just fine, and once both feet are firmly planted on the sidewalk, and the cookies are securely under her arm, she grabs the car door and gives it a hearty shove to close it shut. She waves to me with her free arm goodbye and says something about how there’s no need for me to be back on time right at 4:30, and how today it might run a little late. Bubs uses her abbreviated form of thank you and shouts “ ‘kyou” as she walks in the building. As I get ready to drive home, the radio host coolly announces that Debussy is up next. Upon hearing that, I impulsively switch the radio to 99.7 and guiltily listen to Uptown Funk on my way home.
Driving my maternal grandmother, Bubs, to play bridge on Friday afternoon in Japantown is not typically my responsibility. While my older brother Cyrus was living in San Francisco, he often was in charge of taking her, and now that he’s in grad school and I’m in undergrad school, my mom takes her. Besides her calligraphy class that meets for an hour once a week on Saturday mornings, bridge is Bubs’ main extracurricular activity.
On the one hand, bridge is really just a card game yes, but it is also a complex game of strategy, finesse and memory. Although not contested at the Olympic Games, bridge is recognized as a sport by the International Olympic Committee, along with a host of others, such as chess, tug of war and sumo wrestling. The rules of the game are hard to explain succinctly, which perhaps says something in and of itself. Bridge requires four people, split into two sets of partners. Using a cryptic language of bidding, partners try to communicate to one another their strengths and weaknesses and project how many tricks they think they could win as a team. After the bidding is complete and one pair wins the contract, the hand is played. Using the bids people made as clues to their respective hands’ strengths and weaknesses, and remembering which cards have been played and which still lay in the opponent’s hand, players try to outsmart one another. Then, depending on the current score, it may be advantageous to bid in a different way, because you may only need forty points below the line instead of sixty and maybe since the other pair just won the last hand, it might be useful to consider the prospective penalty. Bubs started teaching my family to play bridge when I was small, maybe seven or eight, and I am still learning. When we play at home, I often am in charge of keeping score, though I always double check with Bubs to make sure I haven’t shortchanged her or myself of a few valuable points.
Bubs grew in a large family of card sharks and playing bridge after dinner was pretty normal. Bubs often recalls how her dad never needed to organize his cards because he had such a good memory. Bridge was a cornerstone of her adolescence. On boat rides between Vancouver, her hometown, and Tokyo, where she went to college, her bridge playing even got her invitations to fancy dinners. As a smart lady in an era where many of her female peers did not go to college, bridge intellectually excited Bubs, and also served a way to meet people outside her family; you need a full table of four to play. World War II happened while Bubs was in college in Japan, and living in a time of food rations and bombings meant the playing cards did not get taken out very often. Eventually, Bubs returned to Canada, met my grandfather, and moved to Houston where he got a position as a professor. My mom grew up in a home without time for games. Although Bubs herself enjoyed bridge, card games for my grandfather were a waste of time. He was strict and well intentioned, but fun and games were secondary pursuits. Making sure his kids had access to the best education and that his nieces and nephews in Taiwan would be able to come to the U.S. to learn English and study, on top of his own work as a professor used up most of his time. Bubs spent many years of her life raising kids, caring for extended family, editing her husband’s papers, and having grad students over. In this bridge-less period of Bubs’ life, many of her siblings in Canada would continue to quite seriously. A few even earned the designation “life master,” a title conferred by the World Bridge Federation to those who have racked up a certain number of tournament victories.
I guess bridge is kind of like riding a bike, and Bubs never lost her command of the complex rules in her long time off. When Bubs first started teaching my family how to play bridge, my hands were not big enough to hold all thirteen cards at once. My family had gone through a phase of playing hearts after dinner, and Bubs thought we were ready for an upgrade. One night after dinner, my dad encouraged Bubs to start teaching us. My mom rolled her eyes and went to the kitchen to wash the dishes, while Cyrus, my dad, Bubs and I stayed at the table learning the basic mechanics of the game. My dad and Bubs both tried to coax my mom to sit with us and play. After finishing up in the kitchen, my mom came to sit at the table, and went through junk mail. My mom enjoyed spending time with her family, but simply had no interest in what seemed to be an unnecessarily complicated game. Though I grew up in a house of five, when Cyrus went away to college, we would only play when we was home for break; my mom had no interest is playing as a fourth. Now, with both children away, Bubs only plays bridge at home when we’re home for the winter holiday, or a couple scattered weeks in the summer.
Though my mom has no interest in the game, she knew it was something that Bubs enjoyed. Ron and Allen from next door would often have many of the widows in our neighborhood over on Friday afternoons to play bridge and then a Friday night cocktail hour and dinner. After talking with Ron about Bubs’ interest, and a few gentle nudges, Bubs agreed to try it out. It wasn’t a long drive away; she would just be going next door. Ron still came to pick her up at our front door and escorted her down the block. Lillian, another widow who lived two blocks away would drive in her white Toyota Camry to join them. It was a motley group of four, the older gay couple from the South who moved to San Francisco in the sixties, the widow from Hong Kong and the Japanese Canadian transplant, all sitting around bidding, thinking and playing. After a couple hours of playing, Ron and Allen and would gear up for the main event, drinks and dinner. Allen, a talented cook, would put together fancy multicourse meals, while Ron would get Lillian and Bubs aperitif, a martini or whatever else. After dinner, while Allen was cleaning up, Ron would walk Bubs back home to drop her off. Bubs would tell us about how she should maybe have bid a bit more aggressively and how she didn’t have much to drink at cocktail hour this week because she wanted to have a Heineken with dinner.
I never got an invite to the bridge group. Over the last few years, Allen grew ill and passed away, Lillian fell down a flight of stairs and broke her hip and hasn’t been out much. Through a friend, my mom heard about a bridge group that met at the community center in Japantown for four hours on Friday afternoons. There, Bubs would probably meet a few other Japanese seniors my mom explained. Bubs thought it would such a hassle to make her daughter driver her twenty minutes across town, but that was probably just an excuse. Kind of like a shy kid who likes swimming, but would stress out about meeting other kids at the swim lessons, Bubs tried to wiggle her way out. My mom called Alice Moriguchi at the community center and signed Bubs up anyway. My mom reminded Bubs that she was just trying it out. My mom reassured her, and pointed out that there would many people her age who also have played bridge for a long time. Who knows, maybe she would meet make a few new friends.
As it stands now, Bubs now goes to bridge practically every week, thanks to my mom and brother’s efforts driving her. By the landline at home, Bubs has a list of important phone numbers for reference, which include my mom and dad’s cell phone numbers and work numbers, Cyrus’ and my cell phone numbers, her other children’s phone numbers in New York and Houston, her hairdresser Lily’s number and Alice’s number. She calls her occasionally if something comes up and prevents her from making a session.
In the essay, “Joy,” Zadie Smith discusses a distinction she sees between joy and pleasure. Small doses of indulgence, like an impulsive purchase of an egg salad sandwich are forms of pleasure, while joy is something else. While trying to tease these two related, but different, feelings apart, Smith writes, “the thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?” Bridge sits on the precipice of these two phenomena.
For Bubs, a day without indulgence is not a day wasted. Bubs has three different cardigans she rotates through, two heavier ones for the colder foggy days, and one lighter gray one which she wears during San Francisco’s warm fall months. If Bubs wanted, she could treat herself to another sweater or new cute blouse, but Bubs really could not be bothered. For lunch, Bubs will often heat a bowl of left over rice, and then have some carrots and other rabbit food, and maybe a little bit of whatever leftover protein is in the refrigerator. She also went through a long phase of having the same cheese and cucumber sandwich on simple wheat bread for lunch practically everyday. For her, simple Tillamook sharp cheddar and Costco brand Oroweat bread tied her over. My parents offered to get her some different things, but Bubs didn’t see the need. Each morning, Bubs comes down for breakfast and toasts herself one and half slices of bread and makes herself the same decaf Lipton tea. She used to be a coffee drinker, but Dr. Gershengorn has told that coffee is no good with her high blood pressure. Recently, Bubs has stopped putting butter and jam on her toast and just has the toasted bread by itself. A few of her sisters developed diabetes later in life and Bubs figures that cutting sugar out of her diet might be a good way to outsmart diabetes. No doctor really told her to do this.
In her room, the bookshelves are full of heavy classics, which I know she has actually read. The Brothers Karamazov sits next to The Tale of Genji and a collection of Bernard Shaw plays. The shelf opposite her bed is full of dictionaries and other reference books – books about words Shakespeare made up, “geographic” dictionaries, different from an atlas I’m told, dictionaries in Japanese and Chinese used for reference when studying calligraphy and more. Many of these books she used while working as a translator in Japan in the years after World War II before returning to Canada. Under all of these books, neatly labeled manila folders of tax forms and other administrative paperwork fill out the rest of the shelves. At ninety four, Bubs still handles her own taxes and flies by herself. The one anomaly on the book shelf is the small glass jar of bobby pins and two decks of cards, one blue, the other red, that sit next to it. When I’m home and we’re ready to play bridge after dinner, Bubs will ask me to run to her room and grab these two decks. I’ve done this enough times now that I no longer need to turn on light to find them on the bookshelf.
It’s not that Bubs has lived a life of self imposed austerity, it’s just that after growing up living with her, I still do not really know what her guilty pleasures are. Bubs would say that she enjoys shortbread, or maybe unsalted pita chips. Everyone at home knows I’m a sucker for gummy bears, tabloids and reality television. For Bubs, a gluten free oatmeal cookie is like when I buy a big of potato chips just for myself.
Bubs often looks quite strained while playing bridge. Her head tilts slightly to the side, and when she feels like she has loss track of whether two more trumps are still in play, she may even start to bite her lip. When this starts to happen, Cyrus will often look at me and then turn away as we both begin to laugh. Bubs will playfully chide us, reminding us that on Fridays, no talking is allowed. After taking a calculated risk that paid off, Bubs will look up at my dad, Cyrus and I with a satisfied smirk. Bubs usually turns in pretty early, after helping clean up after dinner. For Bubs, bridge is reason to stay up past the bedtime she has set for herself. She’ll often look at the clock and say that it’s getting late and jeez, my dad must be so tired after a long day of work. My dad looks at Bubs, and Cyrus and I know that this means we’ll play for at least another hour.
I arrive back at the community center around 4:15, earlier than Bubs had said. I found street parking just a few doors away and decide to take a peek upstairs at where Bubs plays. The building is quiet, plain and carpeted. I walk softly through the door and see a handful of older bridge players seated around three or four small square tables, thinking and quietly placing tables down on the table. It looks like a few people have enjoyed Bubs’ cookies, which sit on the side table by the door along with hot water boiler and some Celestial Seasonings tea bags. Bubs notices me out of the corner of her eye and seems to make a concerted effort to stay calm. I felt like the parent who shows up too early to pick up a kid from a party, but sit on the side and watch.
Each table finishes at a slightly different time. I see Bubs begin to get up and say goodbye. She motions for me to come over and introduces me to her friends, explaining how I’m home from college and how I’m just curious to see what this bridge group was like. I walk with Bubs down to the sidewalk and tell her I can go run get the car and bring it around. This time, Bubs accepts my offer and sits on the small bench in front of door to the community center. I pull up and since Post is flatter than the streets around our house, Bubs can get in by herself. I make sure Bubs is buckled in and we head off. Bubs is tired but still talkative, explaining how there was one hand earlier where she got a grand slam, but had not bid it, which she really should have. For the first time in a while, her partner was hakujin (the word in Japanese for Caucasian), not Japanese, which was interesting, not a problem at all though, and she learned today that another woman who comes every Friday was also born in 1920 just a few weeks before her. It was a little frustrating though how her partner had made that mistake, but it was okay though because Alice rotates the partners each week. After a few minutes, Bubs trails off and stares happily out the window. Bubs relaxes a bit in the passenger seat, the top button of blouse still buttoned. Bubs looks over at me and tells me how nice it is that I’m home for a bit and how great it is that I finally have my driver’s license.
The radio announcer comes on again, telling us that Mahler is up next. Bubs turns and smiles, reminding me that Mahler is one of her favorites.