All in the Cards

This is the story of my sister Georgie, the story from which all others stem.

You know me as Madeline Brooklyn Bridges, and yes, I know it’s a funny name. My big sister’s is funny, too: GeorgeAnn Tappan Zee Bridges. Naming us after New York City bridges was my mother’s attempt at humor, which is ironic since Mother is not known for her levity.

This story sits on the map of my life like a bruise, where I can press my finger down and say, “Right there. Everything that happened prior to this was before. All else, after.”

I am not unusual. Lots of people have told me of similar patterns in their lives. Something jolted us as we meandered down our paths, and instead of growing up gently and slowly like plants, we have pivoted on one event which now serves as the fulcrum on which the rest of our lives balance.

In those days, there was less of a to-do over car seats. When I was a kid, if you were anywhere north of three years old, you were freed from it, plopped into a booster seat in the back. Then, once you weighed enough, or maybe it was when you were tall enough, I forget, but at some point, you were finally allowed to sit up front with the driver.

On the day I was emancipated from the back seat, all hell broke loose.

You know how it is. Everyone wants that view from the front seat. Plus, the front-seat kid got to drive the radio. And at our ages, eight and twelve, Georgie and I also wanted the driver’s full attention.

From the moment we both qualified for the coveted seat, my mother referred to the passenger side of the car as “that damned front seat,” which made Georgie and me giggle even if were mad at each other. Swear words were funny.

For a while, we tried the “call it” game: On the way out to the car, whoever first called “Shotgun!” won it. When that game became an all-out catfight, Mother installed a giant whiteboard in our playroom, the kind you used to see in conference rooms and lecture halls before technology took over our lives.

 The whiteboard originally had us on a simple alternating schedule, so every other day I’d get the front. That solution died a fast death because some days we never even left the house, while other days it seemed like all we did was drive around.

After that came the mileage log. The whiteboard became a chicken-scratched mess of how many miles each of us had under our belts, so to speak. Every ten miles, Georgie and I switched seats. Looking back, I suppose I should feel some sort of sympathy for our mother; that phase must have been maddening.

The day before, the truly before, Georgie had her Friday ballet lesson, which meant that after Mother and I dropped her off and got her all settled into her foo-foo Tutu Land, I got the front seat by default because I was the only kid in the car. “Alone in the car? You get to be star,” that’s what Dad always said.

I knew Georgie was her favorite, but when we were alone together, back then, that is, Mother and I found lots to talk about. We shared a love of all things natural: plants, herbs that she used for cooking, and concoctions from the Earth that she used as medicinal remedies. The two of us collected wildflowers to dry and arrange, and we worked together in our garden beds that sprawled around our house.

Georgie was impatient with nature. She wanted to go to stores or skating rinks or movies. She pretended to sneeze a lot when she had had enough of the outdoors, claiming she had seasonal allergies, so she didn’t know half the stuff I did about the Earth and what it offers up to us.

For instance, on hiking days, days that found Georgie with friends at a mall or a bowling alley, Mother and I would gather up fallen leaves, touch their trees’ trunks, and repeat their names in reverence, almost like prayers. I kept a scrapbook that housed hundreds of flattened leaves that I studied in my bedroom so that I could impress Mother later in the car.

We cruised away from Georgie’s dance studio that day, and Mother drove nice and slow so that we could take up our long-running game of Name that Tree, pointing and shouting out the names we had memorized.

It was magical but much harder at this wintry time of year; without their leaves, most of the trees had only their skeletons and bark to help us identify them. We shouted out species’ names and called each other’s bluffs the whole way to our favorite store, Nature’s Cure.

“Red Oak!”

“White Oak!”

“No way, that’s another Red.”

“Sycamore!”

“Balding Cypress!”

“Weeping Alaskan Cedar!”

Filled with the mysteries of plants and the Earth’s natural healing remedies, Nature’s Cure was another yawner for Georgie, but for Mother and me, it was the best place you could be if you had to be indoors. When we got inside, we swapped out our tree game to take turns reading the labels on little bottles of tinctures and pouches of exotic herbs.

There are hundreds of ways to use plants and oils that come straight from the Earth, and to her credit, my mother loved indulging my curiosity. We bought teas, supplements, and all kinds of tincture drops, methodically testing them on ourselves and Dad and Georgie. Mother kept track of any changes in our bodies or our mental outlooks in her journal.

This was, mind you, back in the late ‘90s, when the alternative medicine entrepreneurs were still new enough to be considered “quacks”, but maybe that’s why the two of us were so enamored; Mother and I also shared a love of all things quirky.

We gulped facts down, reading labels to each other from opposite sides of the store. We didn’t care what people thought of us. Some things are too exciting to keep quiet. Astounding, to learn the magic of lavender, that it calms you, can even regulate your heartbeat when you rub its oils into your palms. Or to learn that vanilla helps to prevent acne. Or that ginger, when added to tea, acts as an anti-inflammatory.

Mother had just gotten a paper cut that morning, and she was in search of a wound-healing salve. In her “office,” the room where she “worked,” Mother had stacks and stacks of books, and in those days, they were mostly on gardening. She hadn’t yet started her passion for all things African.

“Origanum dictamnus,” she chanted to the wrinkled lady at Nature’s Cure, and I giggled a little. For Christmas, Georgie and I had gotten a book that Mother was reading out loud to us at night because I still wasn’t reading big thick books on my own. It was about this kid Harry Potter, who got to go to a school to become a wizard. Harry had to learn all kinds of spells while he pointed his new wand. “Origanum dictamnus” sounded like something Harry would say when he wanted a room to light up.

“Hmmm,” said the lady behind the shop’s counter. “I don’t think I’m familiar with that one. Organic whatus?” She leaned over with her hand up to her ear.

“Origanum dictamnus,” my mother said again, only this time really, really slowly, like she was talking to a stupid person. “It usually comes in a tincture? But I’m looking for the salve. It’s for wounds.” She blinked once, then leaned onto the counter to show the lady. “See? I got a nasty paper cut this morning, and Origanum dictamnus­––hey, you know what? Maybe you know it by its common name. Dittany?” She brightened up a bit, hoping her translation might shed some light.

“Dittany? Ha!” said the shopkeeper, taking off her glasses and breathing onto the lenses with her exclamation. She looked out the window, rubbing her pilled-up green sweater onto the glasses to clean them. “Sounds like some Brit!”

“Excuse me?” my mother asked, tap-tap-tapping her manicured fingernails on the counter. I examined them in wonder. Not one chip in the polish, ever.

“You know how those Brits talk,” said the lady. “Went to ‘er shop taday, ditt-ne? Had on ‘is green britches again, ditt-ne?” She gave a weird cackle, and I cringed at the sound of the phlegm in the back of her throat.

Mouth noises always raised my hackles.

Mother gave her what I’m sure the woman thought was a smile, but it looked like the grimace she made that used to warn Georgie and me to get the heck out of her way.

“Mom’s gonna blow,” Georgie would stage whisper, and we would snort with forbidden laughter, the same kind of laugh you get in church, as we ran to one of our rooms, even as we felt the thrill of terror that Mother might come after us in a rage.

Now, she took a deep yoga breath, the kind she taught us would save lots of hurt feelings as we got older, and then she stood a little taller.

“Let me tell you the story of dit-tan-y of Crete,” she said to the lady, brushing several of her long black braids over her shoulder. Their little pink beads hit against each other with satisfying clicks. “Legend has it that Origanum dictamnus was what the goddess Venus used to heal her beloved son, Aeneas, when he was wounded in battle.

“And if you aren’t a legend kind of person,” Mother went on, lowering her eyelids just a hair, “maybe you’ll recognize the name Aristotle? Ancient Greek philosopher? Aristotle wrote a famous piece on wild animal behavior that detailed how he himself experimented with goats who had been wounded with arrows. After the goats ate dittany, their wounds were miraculously closed! And that’s not all.” Mother put her perfect manicure inches away from the shop lady’s open mouth. “Hippocrates? You know him, I’m sure. He prescribed dittany of Crete for all manner of ailments. Wound healing was just one of them.”

She leaned back, and I hoped she would catch her breath. You didn’t have to do or say much to get my mother up on her lectern.

At this point, cashier lady had pulled out a field guide from under the register and was flipping through it.

“Ah, here we are!” she read. “Says here the number one use for dittany of Crete has historically been … wait for it … as an aphrodisiac!” She looked up at my mother and made her eyebrows bounce up and down, like they were sharing a very special secret or something. “Need a little extra action, do ya?” And here she took on that weird accent again. “Needs a lit-al bump between the shates? Ditt-ne?”

I was eight. I didn’t have a clue what sheets that lady was talking about. All I knew is that once you made my mother mad, almost nothing, not even pralines and cream ice cream, could bring her back.

When you’re with a grumpy person, nothing is fun. Even before, I sensed that there was something edgy about my mother. She was always ready to pounce or point her finger or send somebody into their room, so unless we were gardening or talking trees, I usually kept my distance.

After the missed dittany connection, I knew Mother was smoldering and indignant, silent as she slammed her way into the car. I decided to settle into the back seat even though I could have stayed up there with her and her simmering resentment toward that lady. It would have been my third trip in a row up there, something I could easily have rubbed Georgie’s face in later, but I didn’t need to be near that kind of tension.

She didn’t seem to care either way. Where her youngest kid sat in the car that day has probably never even crossed her mind.

But it crosses mine even today.