Bounced from Bunco. Again.

Bunco: a swindle or confidence trick – Oxford Dictionary

For Lois Ann

October 2015       Munhall, Pennsylvania

When I decided to try to live in my hometown of Pittsburgh, as a grown-up, I felt smugly satisfied with the decision.

After decades of living in the center of big cities like Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York, being here meant having the hands-on support of my family for the first time.

The day we arrived in my hometown of Munhall from New York, every one of family members in the area showed up to help us move into our apartment. It felt, at least for a day, like they all wanted us here. Even my sister-in-law who hates me ferried boxes up the three flights of stairs.

So much of my homecoming felt like a dream. We would begin the biggest chapter of our lives as a family on the grounds where the Homestead Works of U.S. Steel once stood.

We would be able to rock our baby to sleep with fewer jackhammers, manhole covers, buses, sirens, and car horns.  In addition to my big family, Pittsburgh also had a bunch of family-friendly upsides. Upsides that I frankly didn’t give a shit about until I was married with a baby and hopefully another one day. Like great public schools. The best doctors for sick kids and bad hearts, probably in the world. And a very reasonable cost of living. We felt like we could finally exhale after two treacherous years.

Then there are the things people brag about to their friends from the Public Ivies. Like how Pittsburgh is the birthplace of Mister Rogers, whose simple approach to public television helped millions of children through complicated times. It is also where Andy Warhol is from, and where his museum resides on its North Side.

And since I’d spent the meat of my career shadow boxing with corporate America and stomping around Capitol Hill fighting with Congress, I thought it was time to do some good in the communities I knew.

At least those were the headlines. And they were true.

But it was the Bunco Bitches (their name, not mine) who gave me my first taste of reality about my idyllic homecoming. They also gave me my first taste of “Italian hoagie dip,” which was freaking amazing.

****

July 2016      Munhall, Pennsylvania

I didn’t even know what Bunco was.

A childhood friend told me to bring twenty bucks, whatever I intended to drink, and a very loosely defined appetizer.  Since I am a longtime fan of drinking, gambling, and snacks, it seemed like a great opportunity to be social.  It was a comforting prospect to be around the girls who knew me when I was a big-haired cheerleader in the1990s.

The theme of the party was superheroes. Because I didn’t have much notice, I dug a Batman T-shirt out of my dresser and headed up the hill.

Straight away I noticed a rhythm to the evening. The ladies spoke and moved about with an ease that only comes about when you have real history together. The kind where you know where the big bowls are for chips without asking. Or where the upstairs bathroom is.

When I sat down to play my first game, I introduced myself to the only person I didn’t recognize at the party. And she replied cryptically, “Oh…I know you.” Like I screwed up and we had freshman biology together and holy shit I’m a dick. All the same, she didn’t tell me her name. It was weird. Eventually I’d find out it was Michelle, Amy, Jennifer, or some derivative of Christina, as was the case with most girls from my hometown. I didn’t make much of it.

In spite of chugging my bottle of wine, I managed to keep conversation light for hours. Although I was not very good at bunco, I was having fun. I definitely lost my twenty dollars.  

At a break in the action, I could have decided to take up smoking again, but instead I did something else very stupid. I engaged the only woman I did not know (but who seemed to “know me”) in a conversation about her husband and my brother, who worked together. Eventually I got around to airing my grievances on behalf of my brother, who in absentia, would be, and was mortified.

First of all, it was a party. More than that, it was fucked up and wildly unfair to her. It wasn’t like she could or should speak to the policies of the agency. Of course she would defensive and feel blind-sided anywhere, let alone at a bunco party where she just came to, you know, play bunco and have fun with her pals.

Everyone knows you don’t bring up serious issues at a party – be it batman, bunco, bachelor, or bar mitzvah. Especially one you were barely invited to.

I didn’t know how to stop being an “advocate” once something didn’t sit right with me. Indignation was practically my resting state.  I didn’t know who to be if I wasn’t fighting injustice.

The whole truth and nothing but the truth of it all was that I didn’t know who to be, period. But that’s no excuse.

She had every right to put me in my place. To tell me I was wrong to take this up with her. To tell me to go fuck myself or any number of things. And she told me quite a bit.

Apologizing to her and to anyone who would listen didn’t make much difference. I may as well have been standing there making a Denver omelette. So I decided to shut the fuck up. Her focus turned. She spun around like a whirling dervish and began shouting. I had no idea to whom or about what. I was genuinely confused as to why it had become everyone else’s problem.

Before I could find my way to someone else’s booze, a fist fight was breaking out – or at least a lot women holding others back from fighting.  I wondered if there was a hidden camera somewhere.

I also wondered if this was also 40.

It was over as quickly as it started and I looked around thinking that everyone must be as shocked as I was. It really didn’t seem like it.

I already glimpsed the social hangover to come, and it would be much worse than I imagined. And it would be entirely my fault.

When I asked the women who were leaders if my sister could come with me next time (because I was scared, and no one fucks with her), the Bunco ladies told me that they were no longer allowing “guests” to attend their parties. This I knew to be a lie. But also knew that my sister would never…in a million years. I wish that I had the sense to know more.

They did say I could color with them at the library if I wanted to see some of them again socially.

So their tribe remained intact, and I was bounced from Bunco.

****

April 2017     Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania

Just as I was about to give birth to my second baby, I got an invitation to my new neighborhood’s Ladies’ Wine Night.

Hold the phone. There was something familiar about this.

Before I even got to party, I was invited to a pre-party to give me the scoop on “wine night.” I was intrigued. Given my experience with the Bunco Bitches, I would take any recognizance I could get. After all, I was summoned from a closely monitored list, to a monthly gathering of women. I was told to bring a beverage and an appetizer. I began to get nervous.

While these women didn’t play dice games, there were plenty of other games. There were power plays with the neighborhood holiday house crawl. And political games that I would come to be most fluent at playing. After all, we did have the wife of a disgraced Congressman as a member.

Maybe the houses were different. Maybe the parties were a lot less creative and the appetizers a lot more fancy – but these ladies were definitely bitches. So I felt like I could play ball. Wink.

As I became a truly entrenched suburban wife and mama, I felt very privileged, of course. I treasured my babies and my precious time with them. But my inner and outer worlds continued to change. With a newborn and a toddler, my days and nights became one. The isolation felt palpable. Everyone I wanted to see and everywhere I needed to be felt so far away. While I loved the autonomy of being an Adjunct Professor, I was a workforce of one.

All of this made me rely more and more on wine night, even just as an outlet to see other adults for something other than work or help. I looked forward to talking more than anything.

And I thought about the Bunco Bitches from time to time. Especially when I found out there was an Upper St. Clair Bunco group. Well…  Perhaps I was quick to judge. Perhaps it wasn’t just a party. Perhaps it was more.

I now know it was more. Many of these groups are more than just a party.

Whether the women in the groups drink wine, square dance, discuss books, eat delicious snacks, watch films, play mahjong, field fantasy football teams, get out the vote, or even dress up like super heroes. It gives them community.

And regardless of the stated purpose, there’s the informal element of just sharing information – something women have needed and wanted to do since we’ve walked this Earth to survive. Maybe now it looks more like giving women a place to share thoughts on pre-schools, local gyms, hormone therapy, or guacamole recipes. Or to gossip about bitchy PTA members, asshole soccer coaches, neighborhood menaces, school board scandals.

A safe space to put your head in your hands if you need to, and figure out how to leave.  

These groups demand that women show up. For themselves. For each other. That women put even a couple of hours a month aside on a calendar. That they send an RSVP and commit to an appetizer. That act somehow feels more official.

But if that’s what needs to happen, then that’s what needs to happen.

Maybe that sounds nuts to some of you. I know it doesn’t to all of you. There have been days, weeks, months…several months (years?) where I can’t remember what I did exclusively for myself.

We are the ones who cancel plans if our husband has to work late and can’t pick up Asher from soccer practice or Marin from her archery lesson.  Some women will hedge their plans with an out, so that they can leave early or come late.

I had a friend who wouldn’t let her husband fix her kids’ dinner. Or maybe she just wanted to stay home.

Others fear they won’t get “enough done” before the event, whether it is in their home, or for their kids, or for a trip, or at the office, so they don’t go.

Women do this with work too. They stay late to finish a proposal, so they don’t go to happy hour. A colleague is on deadline and needs another source, so they help out and don’t make a dinner party. Even when I was the boss, even when I was on my honeymoon, I made my way to the business center to get a funding proposal off for my organization. I know.

Our work, our partners, our families, our kids, our parents. I know. There’s so much to do. There’s so much to love. There’s so much to pay for. There’s so much. There’s so much.

You know why I know this? Because I’ve been trying to make plans with women for 25 years. Because I’ve ducked plans. Because I’ve been trying to make plans for myself. 

And outside of organized monthly groups, I haven’t seen very many of them.  

Being separated and on my way to divorce, I haven’t seen hardly anyone.

Even if it is not the event, it may be the network or the connections made in the organized groups. The friendships. The help. The humanity.

After my daughter Evie was born, my body revolted once again. This time it felt like the blood around my joints had been replaced by magma. My skin erupted into a million sores. I didn’t want to leave my house for anything, much less wine night. A woman I’d only met once delivered Epsom salts, a very fancy skin cream, and a bottle of wine to my door step.

****

1979             Munhall, Pennsylvania

What I remember most is sitting on the stairs, waiting for her so I could go to bed, and the smell of cigarette smoke. I’d listen to them talking. Talk and talk and talk. No music. Nothing fun. I could hear forks and plates. But mostly talking. All that I heard was, “She says…” and “I says…” and “he says…so I says.”

A visible cloud of smoke hung in the air from the general direction of the dining room. My little brain made a mental note that we should stop winning ash trays at the “dime pitch” when we go to Ocean City. My parents didn’t smoke, so my mom would dig them out of the junk drawer for these occasions.

My mom would start baking in the morning. She wanted her “goodies” to be fresh. By the time my brothers and sisters got home from school, the house smelled of lemon pledge and cinnamon. But we weren’t allowed to eat anything she baked. And we had to keep the main floor of the house immaculate. Both were extraordinarily tall orders.

By that point in the day my mom would be practically vibrating. It was her turn to host “card club” and she was a fucking wreck.

After it happened a few times, I knew that all the ladies were coming. They wore skirts or pants with panty hose and everyone brought a something mysterious in a covered dish. Which they took home. Humpf.

Why did this night mean so much to her? My mom never went to lunch or a movie or visited with her girlfriends when we were kids. I don’t even remember her speaking on the phone much at all.

But she never missed card club.

Recently, I asked my mama how it started. She said it was a couple of sisters and sister-in-laws who did actually begin the “club” by playing card games. But the card games quickly got railroaded by the talking.

My mama said that she was the only one who wasn’t related the others and at first it was “a bit of a thing.”

But quickly it wasn’t. I wasn’t so lucky - haha.

And then someone gave her a baby swing.

She then offered something that surprised me,

“Those get-togethers saved my life.”

****

August 2018     Upper St. Clair, Pennsylvania

Going home is a weird dance.  People you know and even love may have been more comfortable with you at a distance.  Friends and family members who routinely laid heavy guilt trips when you left, break even the most basic promises of support and friendship when you return.  Others treat you like a grenade that might blow up their circle of friends, board of directors, regional committee, PTA, or monthly bunco party.

But there are other things you can’t anticipate, like your mom bringing over her own potholders when you host a dinner or a sexist politician calling your dad to complain about you and all your pesky opinions.

None of this matters as much as what’s most important about being home: the love.

Like when I see my 80-year-old dad standing at my stovetop every Thursday cooking piles of bacon for my baby girls. Or my sister Leslie kidnapping my Kate every Sunday afternoon to slop around the park with her dog. And my mama on the floor squealing and kissing my babiest baby as they piece together a wooden giraffe puzzle.

I catch myself holding my breath. I want to make time stop and keep everyone right where they are, forever.