by Emily Nemens
They were married for a scant two seasons. Official word was mutual consent, the split called amicable, but to most baseball wives, it seemed too clean a break. Was he having an affair? Trouble in bed? The media pushed hypotheses—this was one of People’s sexiest people of 2009, after all, of course there would be gossip—but the ex-couple stayed mum. The baseball wives were stuck in the same dark room as the Enquirer. The wives knew Jason moved out and that Liana had kept the Arizona house; Maggie’d run into Liana at the shopping center and gleaned as much. Liana told Maggie she didn’t know where Jason was staying for the spring. Don’t care, she added with a toss of her blond hair, like that line could hold any water at all. And for some inexplicable reason, she’d gone back to work. First grade, she said, smiling as if she liked all those snot-nosed kids and their germs climbing on her five days a week. And public school! When Maggie told Melissa that, the older woman gasped.
She took him to the cleaners, the women whisper, and he gladly consented to be scrubbed, soaped, and tumble-dried, conceding much more than their prenup had outlined. By the second week of spring rumor had it he was broke, as impossible as that seems. Where could all of that money have gone? None of the wives can get any more information out of their husbands; if they broach the subject the men get stern-faced and say, Leave him be. It’s like they all caught the outfielder’s stiff-lippedness, his reticence.
Over weekday mimosas (without children around, the wives enjoy day drinking), they continue to weigh the possibilities: that he is gay, that she is gay, that they realized they are distant cousins. It is complicated by the fact that no one really knows Goodyear. On the field, in the dugout, he’s the strong, silent type, more desperado than amigo, his entire game day replete with routine and superstitious traditions that no one dare interrupt. And he’d never once been out with Liana, never had them to his home. Being private is one thing, but the baseball wives—they’re practically family. Is he too good for them? Lisa mentions the wives’ reputation for opulence, for having wild nights; maybe, she gingerly suggests, he is trying to stay away from compromising situations. There are commercials to consider. Shoe deals. “I heard he just signed with Nike.”
Melissa glares across the table. “There’s more than one reason a man will keep his nose clean,” she says. “Sponsorship opportunities, sure.” Her husband, surly on the mound and haggard-looking even after a good night’s rest, has done very few corporate promotions over the years, while Jason’s face is plastered everywhere. If she’s being honest with herself, Melissa will admit it is brilliant brand-building—Herb Allison has always been good at that. For now she holds up a pinkie. “But maybe he has a little something to hide? That’d explain his holier-than-thou behavior—and the divorce.”
The women cackle at that.
* * *
After Christmas break, in a classroom across town, Liana—she kept Goodyear, of course, what baseball wife wouldn’t take and keep her husband’s famous name?—drilled her students on subtraction and looked forward to the spring arrivals, promising herself she would try doubly hard to reconnect, to preserve all those meaningful friendships she’d built with cheerleaders and waitresses and art historians, women who have nothing in common except for their men.
Jason had preferred she socialize out of the house, so an appropriate fuck-you was to throw a welcome-back cocktail party the first Saturday of the spring season in their home. Her home. And the baseball wives came in droves, the Lions’ but some other teams’, too, even a few other exes, a pair of retirees (skinnier than ever, their faces stiff with Botox), and, somehow, two women who both claimed to be Jimmy Cardozo’s recently exed girlfriend. Hillary Oliveira worried there would be a catfight between them, but Melissa sized up the two women, watching how they watched each other, and shook her head. Nah, they’ll be fine.
It was a stellar party—Liana’d invited a midlevel celebrity chef to make the finger foods, a locally revered mixologist to man the bar—and everyone was excited to catch up. The wives doted on Liana. How are you doing? She was fine, she said with the tone of an aggrieved and regal widow. She was getting by. If anything, Melissa noticed, Liana was more beautiful than when she’d first appeared in the family section, her blond ponytail pulled through the back of one of those snap-back ball caps; more beautiful than when she and Jason were married in a secret ceremony in Hawaii. (Melissa bought Star that week and examined the grainy clandestine photos in her bathtub.)
Are you dating again? Hillary asked.
Liana shrugged, bare shoulders as wide and polished as a wooden coatrack. She’d played beach volleyball for Arizona State; apparently got as far as the Olympic trials for 2004. Oh, you know.
Melissa, overhearing this conversation from the charcuterie station, did not know, but she clutched her drink tighter, letting it slosh around the rim. She would never admit it, not to anyone (the Star went into the recycling before the tub had emptied), but Liana’s casual laugh, her shrug: it scared her. She knew she should feel sorry for this woman, but she saw only a threat. Melissa drained her Cosmo and went in search of another.
The next day, the wives were at Pilates, inverted and scheming a lingerie party. Should we invite Liana? Hillary asked, her head between her knees, her ass wrapped in hot-pink spandex.
Melissa has a formula, a computation for how often the still-pretty exes should be invited to things with the active baseball wives. She did the math in her head, then reached for her toes. This was before she’d seen the news, his picture plastered on the local paper—Bad night for Goodyear. Her phone was on silent; she hooked her fingers around her toes. Mmm, let’s not.
* * *
The current wives sit together in the family section, behind the Lions dugout. Week one they all observed the men, swinging in the on-deck circle, thinking about how much weight the athletes had gained, how much time it might take to work it off. They remarked on the bachelors, the untaken ones, guessing at who would be the next to go. They examined their own husbands, wondered if they still appeared hunky in those stirruped pants. And, surreptitiously, they watched one another, to see who had puffed up or slimmed down, who had surgery or dye jobs or gotten prominent new jewelry. Hillary Oliveira’s boobs kept getting bigger, and Maggie Monterrey was wearing diamond earrings, each bauble the size of a baby’s fist. Melissa Moyers’s forehead was stiff, the telltale sign of a recent injection.
Week two all anyone could talk about was Jason Goodyear. Not the divorce, though everyone had thoughts on Liana and her show-off party. No, the wives were abuzz about Jason’s arrest, the cleat chaser who nearly got him thrown in jail, her harebrained scheme to break into Taliesin West. What was he thinking? It just sounded too crazy. The wives watched the other men play, of course, but whenever a ball sailed into the outfield, whenever Jason was on deck or on base or even watching play over the lip of the dugout, they were observing him, scanning for cracks or mars, tics or troubles. Did they spot anything? Hard to say: He dropped a fly ball on the warning track—not the sort of mistake he made—but it was an impossibly hot afternoon game, the angle of the sun all wrong. He struck out swinging twice—also unlike him—but maybe he was just rusty. He threw a rocket from deep left to second, and instead of reaching Putney standing on base, it beaned the runner, who cursed so loud it could be heard on the radio broadcast. Each mistake was, on its own, tiny—not necessarily even an error—but did it add up to something more?
Week three there is a new girl, the young Dominican pitcher’s wife, sitting in the row behind them. Vásquez, that’s his name. Victor Vásquez. She has the smooth face of a teenager, and beautiful amber eyes, giant like a kewpie’s. A small child sits on her lap—presumably the pitcher’s son—and his round face makes their mouths water and coo. They all love babies, the fat little limbs and gurgling lips, the peach-fuzz hair and plum-dust skin. But Melissa Moyers does not coo. Instead her eyes go back to the woman—the girl; she looks younger than Melissa’s oldest, and may well be. Her small body is somehow tig
ht and curvy all at once; it is hard to imagine this butterball emerging from her belly just eight or nine months ago. The only point Melissa sees to the contrary: the girl’s milk-swollen breasts are huge, bigger than Hillary’s, bigger than Melissa’s and Lisa’s combined. Her chest might topple her were she to forget her continued effort at uprightness, her determination to keep her shoulders up and back. Melissa gives her a tight-lipped smile.
When the baseball wives are not looking, the squirming baby reaches down for the bright chains around the women’s necks, for strands of their shiny hair, for their smooth shoulders.
“Hijo, no.” The girl pulls her child’s hand back. “No toques.” The fatness of the baby, versus the slightness, the wide-eyed naïveté of the girl in her artfully distressed jeans and bright sneakers and brand-new Lions T-shirt: the two seem evenly matched, like the baby might even win.
Who brings their children out? the baseball wives wonder, whisper among themselves when the girl excuses herself to go feed the fussy child. The baseball wives miss their children, but they know better than to bring them here. The baby’s mewling is a distraction, unnecessary, and they think of the girl in the dingy stadium restroom, swaying with her child at her breast. How hard it would be to attend to their husbands’ needs—never mind going out with the other wives—if they had children on their hips. Doesn’t she know about nannies? Mothers-in-law?
Vásquez, the team’s young prospect, has thrown four innings with two hits, two walks, and seven strikeouts. Another batter swings through three. The young woman, back from wherever she went, claps the baby’s hands within her own, and the baby squeals. “Mira, tu padre,” she says into the child’s ear.
Really, Melissa thinks. She has borne three children, had them each weaned by nine months and in a nanny’s arms at nine months and a day. The oldest is away at college, the younger two, a boy and a girl, each have a driver to get them to and from their many activities. Baseball for the boy, of course; Japanese lessons, too, in case he’s not good enough to make it in the majors (it was the boy’s idea to be so pragmatic). Soccer and violin for the girl, a quiet child who doesn’t seem to like Melissa very much. We’re too old for nannies, they’d complained when they started middle school, and she’d agreed, at least to such an extent that she hired male nannies who didn’t mind wearing a driver’s coat and hat. The boy is now old enough to drive himself but says he prefers their current arrangement.
* * *
The wives are gathered on the patio of the place they eat lunch on Wednesdays in spring, a nouveau Italian joint in Old Town, when one of the wives, Eliza Summers—wife of Nick, middle relief—encourages them to “do something.” They do plenty, they say, swirling their white wines. Their calendars are full, they add, thumbing through their annotated phones as proof. Charity luncheons. Museum fundraisers. The PTA (even if they miss a few meetings). They join their husbands at charity events, go to others in their husbands’ steads, have philanthropic causes of their own. Not in Arizona, mind. This is a break, a whole state free of benefit committees and donation envelopes.
But Eliza, a former staffer for Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (she met her husband at a golf fund-raiser), has brochures, has mailing lists, has buttons with the tiny, laminated face of Candice “Candy” Hill, a candidate for Phoenix mayor. Eliza fans literature over the white tablecloth, plunks down a button by each woman’s spoon. I WANT CANDY! the buttons proclaim. The wives frown, the wives scrunch their noses.
“Really?” Melissa arches her eyebrows up (the Botox has loosened).
“She’s for women,” Eliza explains. “And the incumbent is a real—”
“But we don’t even vote in Arizona,” Maggie points out. “We don’t live here, remember?”
Eliza doesn’t care. “California is as blue as the Dodgers, and Antonio has our interests in mind. He doesn’t need our help. Arizona does. Candy does.”
She says each woman can contribute up to $2,500.
“Twenty-five!” Maggie squawks, sloshing her sauvignon. “That’s a fur coat.” All year, the women look forward to visiting Evans Furs & Leathers. Better stock, more colors and cuts, lower prices than anywhere in L.A.
Melissa fumes. It is an unwritten rule: this place is off-limits to the shilling they are so accustomed to in the rest of their lives, the wives swapping thousand-dollar-a-head dinner tickets like so many trading cards. She spends what feels like sixty weeks a year doing philanthropic work in Los Angeles: underprivileged boys, at-risk girls, public education, and landscape preservation. She can’t, she won’t, break the seal on this, an untainted place, a place where money is still hers to spend as she pleases. She stabs at her lettuce. She will not get involved.
“It’s eighty degrees,” Eliza says. “Ethical considerations aside, once global warming kicks in we won’t need furs. We’ll need rights, as women. We need the right to choose, to decent child care, to reproductive health, to—”
“It gets cold at night,” Melissa counters, thinking about how Eliza’s husband pitches middle relief, how he’s not even that good. “You have to be prepared for that, too.”
“Just take the brochure, okay?”
The baseball wives slip the brochures and buttons into their handbags and finish their meal in strained silence. At the end of the lunch, everyone takes one bite of the shared tiramisu and then they drive, all in a row, toward the stadium. Their husbands are playing at 1:35, and they’ll be fashionably late.
* * *
It’s part of the life: baseball wives get traded away, to seasons in Baltimore or Chicago, to springs in the Grapefruit League, Sarasota or Clearwater or Vero Beach. These women are like friends from summer camp—rambunctious, beautiful girls who were briefly the most important people in the world but are now remembered in dull colors and with vague edges. With some cajoling, two come to visit—one wife now with the Phillies, one a Devil Ray. The women hitch a ride from Tampa in a chartered jet, and the Sky Harbor reunion is a swirl of squealing, the excited tap-tap of stiletto sandals, and the whoosh of billowy fabrics going in for bear hugs. The visitors will stay with Melissa; her house is the biggest by a long shot.
The Floridians have scant interest in the Thursday-night interleague matchup, so the baseball wives skip their husbands’ game and go to Old Town. A nice sushi dinner, plenty of sake, and then they sway over to Bloom. The wives stay out until three, flirting with the handsome strangers who slide in and out of their expansive booth. The ladies, in their ad hoc batting order—and with plenty of champagne to fuel their night—swing in turn. Maggie gets the number of a heart surgeon, Melissa lectures a recent grad on his career prospects in the field of physical therapy (she is an expert, as her husband underwent shoulder surgery two winters ago and has made a complete recovery), and Hillary puts her hand on a stranger’s thigh. When they are done, the bill for the champagne is approximately $2,000. Feeling generous after a washroom encounter with a retired point guard from the Phoenix Suns, the visiting, soon-to-be-ex-wife of the Rays’ third baseman picks up the check, leaving, with gratuity, $2,400.
Elsewhere, Cecilia Vásquez watches her husband throw against the Giants. Her baby, swaddled in blankets and more blankets against the desert evening’s chill, sleeps soundly in his carrier, occupying a seat just below her. That row, usually reserved for the more senior baseball wives, a line of skinny white women with too much makeup and fake-looking hair, is empty.
“C’mon, Jimmy!” Another girl moves down from somewhere higher in the stadium to occupy one of these empty seats. She seems to be clapping for the catcher, who, with no one on base, is lazily returning the ball to the mound with a loose, arcing lob. The girl eyes the baby. “Cute kid,” she says and glances back at Cecilia. “Is it yours?”
* * *
Even though the lingerie party was Melissa’s idea, Maggie will host it—she is eager to show off her new twelve-person sectional. They pick March 19, the Saturday of the weekend the team is down in Tucson. Don’t bother coming, t
he wives know their husbands would say. Long drive for nothing much. The wives also know that part: it’s a town where you’re lucky to find a Starbucks, much less a decent kale Caesar. But it’s near enough to the end of the spring season—twelve more days—that the wives stand a fair chance of seeing their husbands relatively soon, and the lingerie could be useful. Even if it’s just for an hour or two between the end of spring training and the start of the regular season: they want to be prepared.
Melissa and Maggie talk to the buyer from Neiman’s and arrange for teddies and push-up bras and panties in bright silks. A trunk show, of sorts.
“Sizes?” the buyer asks.
Maggie and Melissa consider the question. “On the top, we’ve got everything from As to double Ds.” They are thinking about voluptuous Hillary. What comes next … F? G?
The buyer makes a note. “And what about teddies?”
“Small, definitely,” says Melissa. Like a cheerleader at the start of her season—gain 5 pounds or lose 5 pounds, you’re on probation—she has stayed 107 since 1998, when her last child was born. “Some medium.” Then she remembers Brenda George, the third baseman’s wife, who must’ve gained 20 pounds since September, not that she was skinny then. “A few larges, too.”
