Choosing Sophie

by Leslie Carroll

  I hate MaryAnne.

  My problem is that I don’t hate Tom. I love him. And of course he has a right to meet someone new. I just wish he hadn’t. I’d still marry him in a heartbeat, if only. Shit! I wanted to be angry with Sophie for showing up and throwing a monkey wrench into my life, and with old Augie for dropping dead and saddling me with a crop of postadolescents wielding baseball bats.

  I threw Tom’s letter and his card in the trash basket. Silly me for having hoped he wouldn’t move on. In my imagination, he’d come to visit me in New York—just because he missed me—arriving with a bouquet of calla lilies and purply-blue anemone; I’d introduce him to Sophie and they’d immediately get along like gangbusters; she’d think he was the coolest man in the world, and that we were perfect together and that it would be totally “awesome” for her to have a place to visit in Colorado; and Tom had realized that it wouldn’t be so bad to have a part-time pied-à-terre in Manhattan after all, and admitted that he’d been a total fool to have been so hasty to end things between us, when I was the woman he was meant to spend the rest of his life with.

  Not.

  MaryAnne, huh?

  I had nothing to do now but allow myself a huge crying jag and prepare to become a baseball club owner.

  Oh, goody.

  The mood in Cap Gaines’s conference room was more festive the day old Augie deMarley’s will was read. Which isn’t saying much.

  Surrounded by a sea of glum faces, and one jubilant one, I signed several documents officially giving me the controlling interest in the minor league ball club. Barry Weed and the two limited partners looked homicidal; Marty deMarley looked suicidal; Linda, mechanically stroking Rosebud, looked sedated; and Dusty Fredericks looked like he’d just lost his best friend.

  Sophie was all for breaking open the champagne.

  It was quite a momentous occasion. Too bad Dad hadn’t been around to see it.

  After the meeting, Sophie and I took a walk in Battery Park, grabbing lunch from a hot dog vendor and watching the tour boats tootle around the Statue of Liberty. The weather, mild and breezy, couldn’t have been more obliging.

  “It’s a good day for baseball, don’t you think?” Sophie said rhetorically, leaning against the park bench and stretching her legs.

  “Yup, it certainly is.” The magnitude of my new responsibilities began to seep into my consciousness. Although I’d worked my butt off to earn the team, it was rather overwhelming, actually. I laughed and glanced over at Sophie, who’d begun to sun herself. “Yup,” I muttered, “world—you’re looking at the new owner of the Bronx Cheers!” I turned to Sophie, and with a panic-stricken look, added, “Now what?”

  Top of the Sixth

  “I don’t suppose we can do anything about the flight pattern?” It was my first official day on the job. Dusty and I stared skyward at the continual stream of jets that had just taken off from or were approaching the runway out at LaGuardia Airport. “The noise is pretty deafening. How do the fans hear the announcers? How do the announcers hear themselves?”

  “Can’t do nothing about air traffic, Venus. I think you—well, anyone’s—gotta have a lot more power than you or me, to be able to change something like that. You’re talking about the feds—the FAA, or whatever they call ’em these days. Hell, old Augie was a billionaire, and he couldn’t do nothing about them airplanes.”

  We walked deMarley Field together. The place could definitely use some sprucing up. I could see where Dad’s money hadn’t been spent. The seats in the bleacher section were splintered, the paint cracked and peeling. Damage from City Island’s briny air had taken its toll. So had something else. Dusty and I gazed at the sky again, and I said, “I don’t suppose there’s anything we can do about the seagulls?” That wasn’t white paint spattered all over the bleachers.

  “We could make ’em our mascot.”

  “That wasn’t the kind of solution I was looking for.”

  “I was kidding you, Livy. We can’t, anyways.” Dusty shrugged. “The Brooklyn Cyclones thought of it first.”

  “Do we have a mascot?” I asked him.

  Dusty gave me a sour look. “He looks kind of like Mr. Met, with a giant baseball for a head, but he’s dressed up like an aviator, with the leather bomber jacket, goggles, and a white silk scarf with the team logo on it.” I knew that the logo was a baseball being dropped, like a bomb, out of a barnstormer, an image that had zero to do with a team called the Bronx Cheers.

  “I want to change the mascot,” I said decisively. “We need something fresh, something unexpected. The team’s got a new owner, we need a whole new look, a whole new—ethos.”

  “A whole new what?” Dusty looked perplexed. “Hey, we need a winning ball club here, not window dressing. Who the fuck’s going to care what the mascot looks like if no one comes to the park to watch the kids play.”

  We turned our gaze to the field where the players were limbering up with a calisthenics routine, under the indifferent aegis of the team’s assistant hitting coach and part-time spark plug salesman, Mikey Fuller. I found myself pointing to the guys who weren’t in shape. “That sort of exercise isn’t cutting it, Dusty. Spot Baldo looks fifteen pounds heavier than he did a few weeks ago.”

  “Aanh, catchers are supposed to be sturdy,” Dusty countered. “So’s a pitch won’t knock ’em over into the dirt.”

  I located the center fielder. “And Suzuki looks like he entered Nathan’s Fourth of July hot dog eating contest—and won! What’s up with these guys? I thought they worked out every day.”

  “A lot of them switched their diets. For the season.”

  “Shouldn’t they be losing their winter weight? They’re heavier than they were during tryouts. What are they eating? Beer and pizza?”

  I walked around the field to home plate and watched the boys continue to go through their paces. “They definitely need to jazz it up a bit,” I said to Dusty.

  He looked at me quizzically. “What d’you have in mind?”

  “Send Mikey to the hardware store for two dozen broomsticks.”

  “Broomsticks?”

  “Aww, for the love of Jesus, talk about getting written up in the papers for all the wrong reasons.”

  “I heard that groan, Barry. But the Cheers’ workout was stale. I warned you I would shake things up a little.”

  The GM brought his hand to his forehead, as if to stave off a killer migraine. “I should have known you’d mean it literally.”

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” I grinned. “I’ve got a routine to teach.”

  I took a deep breath, and donning my Venus persona, I stowed my shyness and stepped onto the infield. Most of the team looked angry or flummoxed or both, with the exception of the aptly named first baseman, Romeo Hicks—who made Casanova look like a celibate—and the equally aptly named second baseman, Hollis (variously nicknamed Holly or Hollywood or Holly Woodlawn) Golightly.

  “Okay! Your girlfriends and dance partners, assuming you go clubbing, are going to thank me for this! I want you to hold your broomstick out in front of you—no, Spot, watch me demonstrate it first—and I want you to roll your hips to the right, and swivel them clockwise all the way around in a circle. Jicama, va la manera incorrecta. You’re going counterclockwise. Ése es contador a la derecha. We’ll go the opposite way in a minute. I want everyone going in the same direction. There is no I in team, gentlemen.”

  Jicama Flores beamed and shouted something at me, very excited.

  “What does ‘ju spee spani’ mean?” Barry Weed whispered in my ear.

  I rolled my eyes. I’d always thought Weed was a moron, and he’d just confirmed it for me. “Jicama’s amazed that I speak Spanish.”

  “You understood his Spanish just now?”

  “No,” you dimwit, “I understood his accent.”

  After a couple of minutes I had them gyrate their hips to the left. “Looking good, fellas. Let’s loosen up those hips. Okay, now, hold onto the broomsticks for balance—we’re going
to learn to bump and grind.”

  I was greeted with a collective blush. “This is lame!” exclaimed Ahab Slocum, my right fielder. “You’re makin’ us do strip routines?”

  “Burlesque routines. If you were stripping, you’d all be shirtless by now.” I walked over to him and got right up in his face. “And you’re going to be lame if you sass-mouth the owner of the team, Ahab.”

  “Damn…bitch!” I heard him mutter as I walked away.

  I wasn’t about to let the players get over on me, especially this early in my tenure. It would be a hole I might never be able to dig myself out of.

  “Okay, Ahab, I’m fining you for that remark,” I shouted, loud enough for everyone on the team to hear. “One week’s salary.” I leaned over and murmured in Barry Weed’s ear, “How much is that, exactly?

  “You’re kidding me!” I said, appalled at the reply, having expected an exponentially higher number. “That wouldn’t even buy a week’s worth of groceries! Jeez—now I do feel like a bitch.”

  “Ya gotta maintain discipline, though. Or ya lose them,” Dusty said, joining the discussion. “Trust me: in the long run, they’ll respect you more if you don’t take shit from them.”

  “I feel bad fining Ahab, now that I know how little he makes,” I said. “Still, maybe years from now, when he’s in the majors, making more money than God, he’ll appreciate having learned early on that having an attitude is unacceptable.”

  Barry Weed laughed so hard he almost choked. “Yeah, tell that to Barry Bonds. Or Albert Belle.”

  “Or Ted Williams,” Dusty guffawed. He scruffed his hand over the top of my head in a gesture that might have been read as mildly affectionate if his attitude hadn’t been just slightly patronizing. “Kiddo, you got a lot to learn about baseball.”

  “Ahab’s mother is on public assistance,” I said. “I’ll send his fine to her, as an anonymous contribution to the family. And if he doesn’t get with the program and bump and grind like the rest of them, he’ll lose another week’s pay.”

  Little had I known that our conversation had been in earshot of the sports writers. The headline of the next day’s New York Post read HEAVENLY BODIES; and the entire back cover of the next morning’s Daily News was a photo of me standing in front of the Cheers and their broomsticks, with the guys in mid-gyration, and the headline: MOUND OF VENUS. Columnist Mike Lupica had interviewed just about everyone on the team and in the front office—except me. Basically, the gist of the article was that no one thought I could cut it, nor did they expect me to survive the season.

  “She’s a dish I could eat with a spoon,” Romeo Hicks had remarked. “Hell, I’d like to bang her, but I can’t say I respect her as an owner. And her setting curfews when we’re on road trips, dude? That’s too much. I mean, we’re not Little Leaguers. And nobody likes the surprise drug tests she springs on us. It’s like when you have a crush on your second-grade teacher, but then it all comes true, man. And believe me, dude, the fantasy’s not as good as it seems when you’re seven.”

  I made a note to have a word with young Romeo about speaking to the press. Didn’t the Cheers have a media relations manager to run interference? And if so, he or she was asleep on the job. I’ve never failed at anything, as long as I put my mind to it, and I wasn’t about to screw up my legacy. I’d make old Augie proud, even if it killed me. But like Ol’ Blue Eyes, I was going to do it my way.

  Opening day was scheduled for a Tuesday night in late June. DeMarley Field was festooned with blue and white buntings for the occasion. The cheap seats in the bleachers—though the choice seats, at fifteen dollars apiece wouldn’t break too many banks—had been sanded and repainted. The groundskeepers had also erected metal stanchions topped with owls—a time-honored ploy to scare away the seagulls. However, it quickly became apparent that the gulls were savvy enough not to be gulled into thinking that owls were indigenous to City Island. Bronx bombers of the avian sort, Jonathan Livingston and his less literary brethren continued to do what gulls do, especially after a dinner of local seafood.

  I stood in the dugout with Dusty during batting practice. Distracted by a bleacher-hovering seagull with particularly accurate aim, he grumbled, “I wish DuPree had such good control. Your cousin Marty loves him, though. You’d think they were related. And he’s managed to convert Barry Weed on the subject. But if Tommy’s got any better-than-average stuff, I haven’t seen any of it yet.”

  Speaking of related, it had been Sophie who’d urged me to take Tommy DuPree. Barry Weed couldn’t have convinced me to eat ice chips during a heat wave. It was Sophie’s insistence that the right-hander was an ace in the rough that clinched my decision to sign him. And I didn’t know how to tell her how much I’d begun to second-guess myself, even before Dusty weighed in with his vote of no confidence. I feared it would break her heart—as well as our fragile trust in each other.

  I’d like to be able to say that by opening day I had won the hearts and minds of my limited partners, my GM, and my manager, as well as those of the players and the fans.

  Hah!

  I craved a cocktail to quell the butterflies in my stomach. In the past few weeks since I’d inherited the team, I’d endured an endless battery of snide comments from my own staff. Snarky New York City sportswriters and editors ran headlines like VENUS’S EXERCISE REGIMEN IS FROM MARS, and EXTRATERRESTRIAL EARNS CHEERS. Even Variety, whose Las Vegas stringers had occasionally written about my exotic revues, got into the act with CAN HIPS, NIPS, AND LIPS CURE CHEERS’ SLIPS, DIPS, AND TRIPS? The emcee of a local news channel’s SportsOn1 show challenged me to prove that a former showgirl could turn the hapless Bronx “Jeers” into a winning club. This was it. Crunch time.

  Before the game, first baseman Romeo Hicks posed for pictures with every pretty girl who asked him, dispensing baseball cards with his phone number on them like they were free samples of detergent. The national anthem was sung by a City Island native, a local Bronx girl who’d made it to the final twelve on American Idol. My pal, Congresswoman Tessa Craig, threw the ceremonial first pitch.

  From there on, it was all downhill.

  Though he was expected to mow down the Long Island Sound’s righties, Tommy DuPree had utterly fallen apart by the second inning.

  “Oh, Christ,” Dusty muttered after DuPree walked the first three hitters to load the bases. “An air traffic controller couldn’t help that kid find the strike zone!” But Dusty gave Tommy the benefit of the doubt and left him in the game, figuring it was just a case of opening night jitters and that he’d settle down as soon as his nerves did.

  By the middle of the fourth inning, we were down, 8 to 1. Our only run had been scored on a high fastball by Grand Slammy Santiago, who attributed it to his newfound born-again beliefs. Evidently, God had visited him in the locker room just before the game and told him to wait for a high fastball.

  “Sammy, you always wait for high fastballs,” a bemused Dusty reminded him. “You never hit anything else.”

  Dusty finally took Tommy out, but Baptista Minola, the right-handed middle reliever, didn’t do us any favors. The Sound couldn’t have appreciated his pitches any more if he’d delivered them with candy and flowers. Dusty replaced Baptista with Debrett Peerage, but by then the damage had been done. In the bottom of the seventh, though we’d scored again, thanks to some surprisingly stellar base stealing by Jicama Flores and a stand-up double by left fielder Anton Anton, we were down by twelve runs.

  “Where’s the Beef?!” the fans began to chant, demanding our closer, Wayne deBoeuf. It was a tremendous relief to the management that the reliever did his job, albeit barefoot, shutting down the Sound for the next two innings, but it didn’t change the final score: 14 to 2.

  I was not a happy camper. In fact, I could feel the heat rising on my body until steam was ready to blow out of my ears. Storming into the Cheers locker room, I announced, “You guys really need to think about whether you want to keep your day jobs!”

  Some of the players made a gr
ab for their towels, shocked and embarrassed that a woman (who was their boss, to boot) had dared to penetrate their masculine sphere. Ahab Slocum tried to duck behind the door to his locker, which was about half his width. Shoji threw his towel over his head. Sammy ran around the benches like a flustered turkey with his butt hanging out. Romeo ostentatiously dropped his towel and stood in front of his locker with one foot on the bench, as if he was daring me to say something. I made a point of ignoring him.

  “Many of you have seen me mostly naked,” I said, referring to the photos in my now-ancient calendars, most of which somehow ended up on the Internet. “Now we’re even.”

  I stood in the center of the locker room demanding their full attention. Suffice it to say that for some of the guys their attention was fuller than others, but I wasn’t interested in the literal extent of their interest in me.

  “That was pretty pathetic out there tonight, kids. Is that how you would have played for Augie? Because even if he were standing here right now instead of me, as much as he loved this ball club, he would have been brokenhearted by your performance—with very few exceptions—on that field this evening. And so am I. You posing for a life drawing class, Romeo? You guys want to ‘punish’ me for being your boss—go ahead. But don’t be so unfathomably stupid that you punish yourselves by playing the game like it’s the first time you’ve seen the equipment. When you step into a stadium—at home or away—act like you’ve been there before. Because if you kids continue to play as poorly as you did tonight, you’re not dashing my dreams; you’re pissing on your own.” I strode toward the door, and turning back to the players, I added, “Think about it.”