The Womens Bridge Club
by Cordelia Rose Marshall


Ethel Mae had been coming to the Women's Bridge Club weekly play time for nearly 25 years. She was a young married when she first started stepping out on Thursday nights for her bridge game. In the last two decades she had become deeply entwined in the lives and stories of the other players, women close to her age, some of whom she socialized with outside of bridge night and some whom she only knew in the frame of the Thursday night gathering.

There were six of them. Perfect for a rousing, yet not too crowded card game. No one remembers quite how they settled on the number six, though Betty is certain it's because Marge limited it to six since she only had six chairs at the time. Over time, it just stuck. Sometimes someone would ask to bring a friend or a visiting cousin, and though visitors were welcome to come for the odd night, it was frowned upon to attempt to bring another player into the circle. Six was good. No more. It had been settled for years.

On those Thursday night bridge nights Ethel made sure she had supper ready an hour early. She enjoyed cooking for her husband and then later, her children. Even when they were babies and little toddlers she kept up her bridge club.

All kinds of conversations had been indulged in around Marge's table for six. They had gossiped about preachers, swapped information concerning school teachers, gave one another marital advice, cooking tips and mothering strategies. It was, for Ethel and for the other five, a woman's circle of wisdom.

On this particular bridge night, one of the ladies, Connie, was particularly giddy about her new boyfriend. Connie had been divorced for six months. Everyone knew that Connie had endured a bastard of a marriage for the last ten years and they all celebrated when her divorce papers finally arrived. She started dating as soon as the ink was dry and to the Thursday night Women's Bridge Club surprise, Connie was letting loose her inner hussie.

She had taken to flitting about parts of town that she had avoided her entire adult life. That was where the boutique bars and loud taverns were clustered together. She often went alone, even during the week - though she never missed bridge night - sometimes she showed up at bridge with a short dress on and bright make-up. The ladies knew, "Connie is stepping out tonight after our game."

With Connie's new found sexual revolution came all kinds of adventure stories of conquests and being conquested. She relished in making the bridge women giggle with embarrassment or gasp with shock. It was like she was a teenager again, only this time she had her own little love shack in the bungalow she had settled for in the divorce, and she had a car. She had no one to answer to. In her early fifties, Connie looked great and had updated her hairdo. Though some of the bridge women disapproved of her sexual antics, and brazen gloating about it, none could argue that becoming a divorced woman had certainly done wonders for her disposition. She no longer came to Thursday nights with a dark cloud hanging over her like Eeyore from the Winnie Pooh stories. Her step had become lighter. Connie's eyes shined more bright than anyone had seen before. There was a new light about her and for this, the bridge women were willing to indulge her new-found youthful passions.

Ethel came to bridge one night out of sorts. She had not had sex with her husband for three months. That morning he had attempted to get cuddly with her. She tried to do her wifely duty, to fake her way through it for his sake, but her intuitive husband sensed her distance and stopped cuddling. "What's wrong Ethel? Why won't you make it with me anymore?"

Make it with me...that's all it was to him, thought Ethel, just It. Well, not to her. Sex was a profoundly vulnerable act that left her soul feeling as bare as her body. She did not know how to tell her husband that his glib sexual movements toward her were corroding her sense of womanliness. Not having the words to describe this to him, she simply began to avoid the act all together.

So there sat Ethel with a hidden pond of frustration underneath the pleasant chatter of her Thursday night bridge club. And beside her sat a stunning Connie, her sexual energy oozing out of her ample cleavage and spilling onto the cards and table. She radiated. And soon, that inner glow of hers seeped into her conversation.

"I need to watch my time here tonight girls," she said as her manicured red nailed hands dealt out the cards. "I'm meeting a new friend at One-Eyed Jack's. I don't want to keep him waiting." Connie paused, and then added, "at least not at the bar!"

The women giggled nervously. "Oh, Connie, you are such a naughty woman since your divorce," chided Charlene, a sixtyish woman who had been widowed for five summers. Her husband, Hank, died of a heart attack while they were out fishing together. She said he was the only man she ever kissed and she would go to her grave keeping it that way. Out of all the group, Charlene enjoyed Connie's sexcapades. There was a vicarious enjoyment to what she denied herself and Connie indulged.

Ethel felt irritation. Her private marital trouble frayed her nerves. Being around Connie's sexed up presence each week was beginning to wear her thin. She didn't know if she wanted to hit the woman or send her home to service her husband. Ethel felt ashamed at such thoughts in her head. Her inner world was so very different from her outer life.

"I tell you what," said Connie, "the best thing that ever happened to me was getting that dog of a man out of my life. I am having the best sex of my life and I don't care who knows it! I feel young again!"

"Well, honey, I hope you're being safe and taking care of yourself. Don't forget that lying dogs can catch fleas."

Ethel's soft-spoken chide had the lightest touch of a barb to it. All the women at the bridge table shifted uncomfortably, sensing that Ethel was not quite as accepting of Connie's sexual freedom as she had seemed to be.

"Oh, I'm careful," said Connie, who passed out another round of cards. "I'm know lying dog. I'm a woman having fun, and to have that fun means I also need to play it safe. And I do."

A cloud of tension began to materialize around the Thursday night womens bridge club table. Charlene, ever the diplomatic one, swiftly sought to nip the approaching conflict. "Let's talk about something else, ya'll. If we keep this sex talk up I'm gonna have to go home soon and get Earl from in front of that tv to take care of me!"

The women burst into laughter. But instead of steadying off the storm, it seemed to quicken it. "I don't like sex anymore," announced Ethel. "I don't like talking about it, hearing about it, and I certainly don't like doing it. I wish everyone would stop making such a big fuss about it, especially you Connie, carrying on like some kind of nympho teenager with your tight clothes and wearing too much make-up."

"Ethel!" said Lorna, who was sitting across the table from her, "stop it!"

"Well she looks like a hooker! Am I the only one who's gonna say it? It needs to be said. She thinks she looks sexy and pretty, but she don't."

Ethel had stood up by now and was walking across the dining room to the front room of Marge's house. "Connie," she said, "I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but darlin', you look desperate and like a slut the way you are carrying on. Why do you need to have sex with so many different men? Just find one and stick with him!"

Ethel had now picked her purse up off the sofa was fishing her car keys out. The table of five remaining bridge women sat quietly, startled into silence by Ethel's uncharacteristic explosion at Connie, who herself sat quietly looking down at her hand of cards.

"Sex is sacred, Connie, treat it that way. Don't cheapen it into a thrill ride like a carnival attraction. Respect it for the meaningful act of love and care that it is meant to be between two people. And not strangers. You are a woman, not an animal."

Connie looked up from her cards. The two women locked eyes while the rest of the bridge club fidgeted uncomfortably in their seats.

"I mean, you're a woman who deserves to be loved and made love to because you're worthy. You're not some dog in heat looking for any thing to hump. You are an amazing, vivacious woman. Don't give that mystery of your sexual power away to some drunk guy at One-Eyed Jack's. You are worthy of true lovemaking. Not fucking."

A quiet tear slipped down Connie's overly-rouged cheek. "Oh Ethel, that is the most beautiful and wonderful thing that anyone has ever said to me." Connie got up from the table and walked to Ethel. The two women embraced.

"I'm gonna get home everybody. Sorry for my outburst and to leave the game early. I guess I'm out of sorts tonight. I'll see you all next week."

The bridge women bid her a good night and assured Ethel that all was well. They were bewildered by her dramatic scene, yet also strangely grateful for it.

That night, Connie canceled her date at One-Eyed Jack's. Instead, she went home alone and began researching internet matchmaking sites. All the other bridge women went home, too, and all of them made deep, passionate love to their husbands that night, much to their husband's surprise and delight.

Including Ethel and her husband. She arrived home to find him watching the news channel. "We need to talk," said Ethel as she clicked off the remote. For the next hour Ethel confided to her husband all the trouble bound up in her heart about the cold,casual affair their marriage bed had become. He listened, and asked her forgiveness. "I'm sorry, Ethel, I did not know."

From that simple night of cards came the courage to open to her husband, whose kind words of humility warmed the embers in the hearth of their marriage home. By the next Thursday night women's bridge club game, Ethel was glowing with the light of a woman loved. She came through the door wearing brand new lipstick and a frilly forgotten blouse that she had mined out of her closet. "I need to watch my time tonight girls," said Ethel as everyone, including Connie, seated themselves around the card table, "I need to get home to my husband." Ethel paused. She smiled at Connie and winked, "I don't want to keep him waiting."

The Shame in the River

by Cordelia Rose Marshall

The muddy banks of the Red River squished between the old man’s toes. Since his boyhood he had been coming to this spot, just past the bridge between Alexandria and Pineville. He caught his first fish here and had spent many Sunday afternoons getting drunk in this quiet spot. It was here that he had proposed to his late wife.

Today he came to pray here. First time to pray since his wife had passed last spring.

“Lord,” his quiet voice drawled, “it’s been a long time. Do you remember me?”

The old man paused, waiting for heaven to answer his dusty prayer. The river glinted, like a living mirror, beneath the blue sky canopy. A stray crow cut across his view, it’s flight scarring the horizon.

The old man waded into the river, slogging in up to his wrinkled black knees. His faded jeans soaked up the Louisiana water.

“Lord,” he prayed again, “I know you didn’t mean to hurt me when you took Earlene. I'm done blaming you.”

The old man’s voice trailed off as grief paralyzed his words. His wife’s name - filled with memory- decades of memory... her death had left a bullet hole in his spirit.

“I don’t think you were punishing me, “ said the old man as his voice regathered strength. “I don’t think your wrath is on me no more.”

The old man stared down into the river. Murky water swirled around his submerged shins, caressing him like a small child in his mother's comforting baby dance sway.

He remembered swimming in these waters. With her. He remembered their life together, their three children, all grown up now, fishing in these waters. Fighting. He remembered the ugly fight a summer ago and winced at the shame of his drunken nastiness. He didn't know it was to be their last time on this river together. He didn't know that his last memory of her on these muddy banks would be one filled with guilt and soul-eating brokenness. The old man began to cry. Soft tears snaked down his leathered face like the river snaked through the bayous and lowlands.

The old man dipped his cracked hands into the coffeed water and cupped them together. Leaning down he threw the cupped water all over his face, his tears baptized by the river. He cupped and dipped and splashed again, and again and again and again, as if the Red River could wash away all that guilt and shame and wrongdoing of the drunken bastard of a husband he'd been for thirty years to that saint of a woman. Whispered weeping turned to wailing and before long the old man simply flung his entire self into to river. He sank quickly to the shallow bottom. His face submerged into the silt. The river mud oozed between his wailing lips and flooded his tongue like kisses from a lusty tavern whore.

HIs lungs burning for air, the old man finally thrust himself up, gasping for air as the wails of his hidden shame found their way to the clean air of an honest day alive. All that drinking for all them years had kept the wailing locked up. Today the banshees were loosed. Today the old man was sober. For the first time in 35 years.

Today the old man told his dead wife and living God that he loved them without the demon of drink giving him courage to do so. The river gave him strength; the memories that lied under it's muddy banks sent ghosts to walk him down the road to that baptism of tears and water.

His old chest heaved with sighing sorrow. The old man turned toward the shore and sludged through the water to land. Picking up his shoes, he turned his head up to heaven. He was no longer crying. His breathing became even. He stared up high at the sky as if to look beyond the blue to the mansions of glory where Earlene surely was at rest. "Thank ya, honey. And thank ya Lord, " was all he said, as he strolled up the river knoll to the path that would take him home. Tonight he would call his sons to go fishing with him.

Willow Street by Cordelia Rose Marshall

By the time she was nine years old she figured out that blacks and whites had issues. Growing up in the steamy atmosphere of Louisiana, Danielle Faith Beauchamp paid attention to the complex world of black and white kids mingling together on the school playground. She noticed how in the classroom black boys and white girls might be seated side by side working on math together. She'd see white boys and black girls with their chairs drawn together in a reading circle slogging through a story together. But come recess time something unusual would happen, an invisible herding of black children and white children away from one another.

Danielle meditated on this one autumn day at her grade school. She was in the fourth grade. The oldest of three children, all of them girls, Danielle was a shy girl who possessed an old soul way about her. Adults said of her that she was wise beyond her years. Her little girl eyes saw too much and too deeply for her little girl heart to understand. But she saw it just the same, and sometimes the things she saw caused pain in her chest she did not know how to explain to her mama. The black and white thing was one of those kinds of pains.

On that fall day in the fourth grade Danielle was standing against a cinderblock wall of her school, watching all the kids break into little groups like small flocks of doves and crows. She wondered how it was that she had never noticed it before, how white and black kids did not play together on the playground. Her eyes scanned the blacktop. Three black girls were playing jump rope. Another group of white girls were also playing jump rope. But on the other side of the monkey bars....white boys and girls were climbing all over the monkey bars while black kids commandeered the merry-go-round. Danielle looked on. The familiar pain rising in her chest like a flood water on a rainy day.

At the end of the school day, Danielle walked slowly towards her home. One foot lagged behind another as she stared down at the cracks of the sidewalk, dragging her backpack along the way. Suddenly her quiet world was disrupted by shouting.

"Hey, cracker boy, don't be gettin' on my side of the street! You go on over there to your side!"

Danielle saw a large black boy towering over a younger, albeit spunky boy with shaggy blonde hair. Danielle did not know the older black boy, but she recognized the white boy, a kid who she knew named Leon. He was a rough kid who she steered clear of whenever she saw him coming down the hallway, even though she was older than him. She had seen him sass the strictest teachers in school and she even one time witnessed him being scolded by the principal, a very old man who had a booming voice that shook her bones when he roared it.

"Don't tell me what to do!" shouted Leon. "I'll walk on any damn street I please. It's a free country, you stupid fat nig... ."

Before Leon could finish the dreaded insult the big black boy slapped him across the mouth. Lightening fast his hand struck Leon, knocking him back a full cement square on the cracked sidewalk. Other kids began to surround Leon, all of 'em black, while all the white kids stood on the other side of the street. Watching. One white boy called out, "Leon, shut up and get back over here before you get your ass kicked."

But even if Leon would have wanted to cross back over to the white side of the street, he couldn't. A circle of black boys was around him and they were all shouting at him, profanities and names that made Danielle ashamed to even hear it. The pain in her chest grew more urgent now. She feared that Leon brought on to himself the beating that he surely was about to receive. Yet she also pitied him and felt afraid for him, afraid that his scrawny, sassy little face was about to get pummeled by a mob of angry sixth graders.

"Take it back you little punk honkie, 'fore I break my hand on that ugly face of yours," said the black boy Leon had insulted.

"You take back calling me a cracker. You started it. How come you can call me names but I can't call you names back? Don't seem fair to me to take it back 'lest you gonna take it back, too." A defiant Leon stood there with his fists clenched by his side, his freckled little boy face set like flint against the big, black boys that waited for the verdict of whether or not to pound on him.

"I ain't gotta take nuthin' back," yelled the big black boy. "You the one done come over to our side of the street. You know you supposed to stay on your cracker side to get your white ass home to your cracker white ass family. What you think I'm gonna do? Just watch you walk on over to my side of the street and give you a red carpet welcome?"

Danielle and every other white kid on the north side of Willow Street stood there motionless, perfectly quiet as if to will themselves invisible to this power struggle. Danielle thought about the black boy's argument. She silently wondered since when was there a white side and a black side to Willow Street? She tried to remember if she had ever walked on the other side of the street. And just like on the playground when she realized that no black kids or white kids played together, she suddenly saw with perfect vision that she had never once walked on the other side of Willow Street during the four years she had been walking back and forth to school. She had never thought about it until this very moment when the fate of Leon's tightened up freckled white boy face laid in the balance of one very angry black boy.

The pain in her chest grew stronger, like a hurricane warning system upgrading to a category three.

"What you boys doin'? You ain't fightin' are ya? Not on my street...oh no you not. Ain't no fightin' gonna happen in front of my house on my street... . " A large black woman with a larger bosom that swayed as her mammoth frame moved down the sidewalk came barreling into the herd of black boys. They either moved out of her way or were pushed by one of her bulging swinging arms.

"Who's gonna tell me what's goin' on here?" yelled the large woman, her voice ricocheting off the magnolia trees that lined the north and south sides of Willow Street.

"This boy done crossed on over to our side of the street and then he called me a ni....."

"Oh no you don't!" shouted the woman. "You aint' got to tell me something ugly like that. And what you mean by, 'our side of the street?' "

All the kids had become attentive to the afterschool drama unfolding before them. White kids on the north side, black kids on the south. Danielle was riveted by the conflict, something deep in her recognizing that this was not just about what side of the street a kid could walk on, though she could not have told you what more was going on if you had asked her. She just knew, somehow knew, in that old soul that hugged inside of her little girl bones.

"Miss Buelah, everybody knows that white kids stay on that side of the street to get to their houses, and we stay on this side of the street to get to ours. It's always been that way. And this white boy is breaking the rules!" The black boy's voice shook with agitation and aggravation. Leon just stood there, defiantly, his arms now crossed over his chest and his chin stuck out as if there were some kind of power in doing so. It reminded Danielle of a little dog who tries to pick fights with big dogs to prove their viciousness. Leon reminded her of a little dog yelping at the heels of an oversized mutt.

"Willie D., did your mama teach you to think like that? I know she didn't cuz we in the same Sunday school class every Sunday, and your mama too much of a Christian woman to be letting that kind of ugly racism be in her house."

Miss Beaulah said it. She shined the light on the ache that pulled and heaved and grew inside of Danielle's tender heart. The mystery of the schoolyard segregation and Willow Street power struggle was solved by Miss Beaulah's sidewalk sermonette. It was a new word for Danielle, a new idea. Racism. She turned the word over and over in her mind, imagining it to be a coin with black on one side and white on the other. The two could never meet. Racism separated, divided, kept apart. Danielle wondered why no one had ever explained such an important thing to her before.

"You kids listen up to me, especially you two boys," and with that Miss Beaulah placed one pudgy hand on Willie D's shoulder and another on Leon's skinny little shoulder. "I want you all to hear me and hear me now. This side of the street don't belong to black folk and that side does not belong to whites. Willow Street belongs to everyone." She looked around like a seasoned preacher making eye contact with each child within her scope. "There ain't gonna be no more of this black and white ugly racist business on this street. Not on my street. Not on your street."

Miss Buelah looked over towards Danielle. Her brown eyes bored inside of Danielle's sweet little hazel green eyes with all the intensity of a prophetess. The pain in Danielle's chest throbbed.

"You, get on over here," said Miss Beaulah motioning towards Danielle. "Come on over here, sugar, and let's you and me walk down the sidewalk together."

Danielle did not hesitate. Within seconds her little nine year old feet were walking across the asphalt and she soon found her small hand enveloped in the warm large palm of Miss Beaulah. "That's it," said Miss Beaulah, "let's show 'em how white and black folk can walk on Willow Street together."

Danielle followed her lead. Miss Beaulah held her hand and together they began to walk down the south side of Willow Street. "C'mon boys, walk with us. Let's have us a little civil rights parade on Willow Street today. Let's make Martin Luther King smile down upon us today from the gloryland above!" Miss Beulah was gettin' her preach on, not just in her words, but in her feet. With her free hand she gestured for everyone to follow behind her and Danielle. Leon and Willie D. looked at each other and shrugged. They weren't smiling about it, but they started following Miss Beaulah and Danielle down the cracked sidewalk. The white kids on the north side of the street crossed over. Black and white paraded down the south side of Willow Street. When they reached the end of the block, Miss Beaulah boomed out with her beautiful, loud preacher voice, "Ok, the other side now! Let's take this freedom march to the other side of the street!"

The small train of white and black kids crossed over the north side of the street and continued their way back up towards the schoolyard. Miss Beaulah shouted up at the sky, "Free at last, oh yes, these kids gone be free at last. Free from that ugly racism. Free from that lie of black and white side of the street. Free at last, thank you Jesus God Almighty, for making 'em free at last!"

When the small parade came round to where it had started, Miss Beaulah turned towards Danielle and gave her a strong mama bear hug. "Sugar, ya listen to me, I can tell you is an old soul. You got wisdom in you beyond your tender years. So you listen to me real good. Can you do that?"

Danielle nodded her head, her ponytails bobbing up and down as she looked earnestly into the bright eyes of Miss Beaulah's cherub round face. "Walk on both sides of the street the rest of your life. Others will follow, some might not. But you need to always remember to walk on both sides of the street. Do you know what I mean?"

Danielle understood all that was not spoken in Miss Beaulah's wise impartation. She quietly spoke and said, "Yes ma'am. I'll remember. I'll always walk on both sides of the street, any street, for always."

"That's a good girl," said Miss Beaulah, and then she headed towards Leon and Willie D. to give them a talkin' to as well.

Danielle headed back towards walking home. On the south side of Willow Street. Her little girl heart was no longer pained. She walked home in peace.