We Are Still Married

by Garrison Keillor

  Arnie (The Old Gardener) Brixius mentioned it ever so gently in his “Hot Box” column the next day:It’s only this scribe’s opinion, but isn’t it about time baseball cleaned up its act and left the tobacco in the locker? Surely big leaguers can go two hours without nicotine. Many a fan has turned away in disgust at the sight of grown men (and now a member of the fair sex) with a faceful, spitting gobs of the stuff in full view of paying customers. Would Frank Sinatra do this onstage? Or Anne Murray? Nuff said.

  End of April, Annie was batting 278, with twelve RBIs, which for the miserable Sparrows was stupendous, and at second base she was surprising a number of people, including base runners who thought she’d be a pushover on the double play. A runner heading for second quickly found out that Annie had knees like ball-peen hammers and if he tried to eliminate her from the play she might eliminate him from the rest of the week. One night, up at bat against the Orioles, she took a step toward the mound after an inside pitch and yelled some things, and when the dugouts emptied she was in the thick of it with men who had never been walloped by a woman before. The home-plate ump hauled her off a guy she was pounding the cookies out of, and a moment later he threw her out of the game for saying things to him, he said, that he had never heard in his nineteen years of umping. (“Like what, for example?” writers asked. “Just tell us one thing.” But he couldn’t; he was too upset.)

  The next week, the United Baseball Office Workers local passed a resolution in support of Annie, as did the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Softball Caucus, which stated, “Szemanski is a model for all women who are made to suffer guilt for their aggressiveness, and we declare our solidarity with her heads-up approach to the game. While we feel she is holding the bat too high and should bring her hips into her swing more, we’re behind her one hundred percent. ”

  Then, May 4, at home against Oakland—seventh inning, two outs, bases loaded—she dropped an easy pop-up and three runs came across home plate. The fans sent a few light boos her way to let her know they were paying attention, nothing serious or overtly political, just some folks grumbling, but she took a few steps toward the box seats and yelled something at them that sounded like—well, like something she shouldn’t have said—and after the game she said some more things to the writers that Gentleman Jim pleaded with them not to print. One of them was Monica Lamarr, of the Press, who just laughed. She said, “Look. I spent two years in the Lifestyles section writing about motherhood vs. career and the biological clock. Sports is my way out of the gynecology ghetto, so don’t ask me to eat this story. It’s a hanging curve and I’m going for it. I’m never going to write about day care again.” And she wrote it:SZEMANSKI RAPS FANS AS “SMALL PEOPLE”

  AFTER DUMB ERROR GIVES GAME TO A’S

  FIRST WOMAN ATTRIBUTES BOOS

  To SEXUAL INADEQUACY IN STANDS

  Jim made some phone calls and the story was yanked and only one truckload of papers went out with it, but word got around, and the next night, though Annie went three for four, the crowd was depressed, and even when she did great the rest of the home stand and became the first woman to hit a major-league triple, the atmosphere at the ballpark was one of moodiness and hurt. Jim went to the men’s room one night and found guys standing in line there, looking thoughtful and sad. One of them said, “She’s a helluva ballplayer,” and other guys murmured that yes, she was, and they wouldn’t take anything away from her, she was great and it was wonderful that she had opened up baseball to women, and then they changed the subject to gardening, books, music, aesthetics, anything but baseball. They looked like men who had been stood up.

  Gentleman Jim knocked on her door that night. She wore a blue chenille bathrobe flecked with brown tobacco-juice stains, and her black hair hung down in wet strands over her face. She spat into a Dixie cup she was carrying. “Hey! How the Fritos are you? I haven’t seen your Big Mac for a while,” she said, sort of. He told her she was a great person and a great ballplayer and that he loved her and wanted only the best for her, and he begged her to apologize to the fans.

  “Make a gesture—anything. They want to like you. Give them a chance to like you.”

  She blew her nose into a towel. She said that she wasn’t there to be liked, she was there to play ball.

  It was a good road trip. The Sparrows won five out of ten, lifting their heads off the canvas, and Annie raised her average to .291 and hit the first major-league home run ever by a woman, up into the left-field screen at Fenway. Sox fans stood and cheered for fifteen minutes. They whistled, they stamped, they pleaded, the Sparrows pleaded, umpires pleaded, but she refused to come out and tip her hat until the public-address announcer said, “No. 18, please come out of the dugout and take a bow. No. 18, the applause is for you and is not intended as patronizing in any way,” and then she stuck her head out for 1.5 seconds and did not tip but only touched the brim. Later, she told the writers that just because people had expectations didn’t mean she had to fulfill them—she used other words to explain this, but her general drift was that she didn’t care very much about living up to anyone else’s image of her, and if anyone thought she should, they could go watch wrist wrestling.

  The forty thousand who packed Cold Spring Stadium June 6 to see the Sparrows play the Yankees didn’t come for a look at Ron Guidry. Banners hung from the second deck: “WHAT DID WE DO WRONG?” and “ANNIE COME HOME” and “WE LOVE YOU, WHY DO YOU TREAT US THIS WAY” and “IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THIS IN A NONCONFRONTATIONAL, MUTUALLY RESPECTFUL WAY, MEET US AFTER THE GAME AT GATE C.” It was Snapshot Day, and all the Sparrows appeared on the field for photos with the fans except you know who. Hemmie begged her to go. “You owe it to them,” he said.

  “Owe?” she said. “Owe?”

  “Sorry, wrong word,” he said. “What if I put it this way: it’s a sort of tradition.”

  “Tradition?” she said. “I’m supposed to worry about tradition?”

  That day, she became the first woman to hit .300. A double in the fifth inning. The scoreboard flashed the message, and the crowd gave her a nice hand. A few people stood and cheered, but the fans around them told them to sit down. “She’s not that kind of person,” they said. “Cool it. Back off.” The fans were trying to give her plenty of space. After the game, Guidry said, “I really have to respect her. She’s got that small strike zone and she protects it well, so she makes you pitch to her.” She said, “Guidry? Was that his name? I didn’t know. Anyway, he didn’t show me much. He throws funny, don’t you think? He reminded me a little bit of a southpaw I saw down in Nicaragua, except she threw inside more.”

  All the writers were there, kneeling around her. One of them asked if Guidry had thrown her a lot of sliders.

  She gave him a long, baleful look. “Jeez, you guys are out of shape,” she said. “You’re wheezing and panting and sucking air, and you just took the elevator down from the press box. You guys want to write about sports, you ought to go into training. And then you ought to learn how to recognize a slider. Jeez, if you were writing about agriculture, would you have to ask someone if those were Holsteins?”

  Tears came to the writer’s eyes. “I’m trying to help,” he said. “Can’t you see that? We’re all on your side. Don’t you know how much we care about you? Sometimes I think you put up this tough exterior to hide your own insecurity.”

  She laughed and brushed the wet hair back from her forehead. “It’s no exterior,” she said as she unbuttoned her jersey. “It’s who I am.” She peeled off her socks and stepped out of her cubicle a moment later, sweaty and stark naked. The towel hung from her hand. She walked slowly around them. “You guys learned all you know about women thirty years ago. That wasn’t me back then, that was my mother.” The writers bent over their notepads, writing down every word she said and punctuating carefully. Gentleman Jim took off his glasses. “My mother was a nice lady, but she couldn’t hit a curveball to save her Creamettes,” she went on. “And now, gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to
take my insecurity and put it under a hot shower.” They pored over their notes until she was gone, and then they piled out into the hallway and hurried back to the press elevator.

  Arnie stopped at the Shortstop for a load of Martinis before he went to the office to write the “Hot Box,” which turned out to be about love:Baseball is a game but it’s more than a game, baseball is people, damn it, and if you are around people you can’t help but get involved in their lives and care about them and then you don’t know how to talk to them or tell them how much you care and how come we know so much about pitching and we don’t know squat about how to communicate? I guess that is the question.

  The next afternoon, Arnie leaned against the batting cage before the game, hung over, and watched her hit line drives, fifteen straight, and each one made his head hurt. As she left the cage, he called over to her. “Later,” she said. She also declined a pregame interview with Joe Garagiola, who had just told his NBC “Game of the Week” television audience, “This is a city in love with a little girl named Annie Szemanski,” when he saw her in the dugout doing deep knee bends. “Annie! Annie!” he yelled over the air. “Let’s see if we can’t get her up here,” he told the home audience. “Annie! Joe Garagiola!” She turned her back to him and went down into the dugout.

  That afternoon, she became the first woman to steal two bases in one inning. She reached first on a base on balls, stole second, went to third on a sacrifice fly, and headed for home on the next pitch. The catcher came out to make the tag, she caught him with her elbow under the chin, and when the dust cleared she was grinning at the ump, the catcher was sprawled in the grass trying to inhale, and the ball was halfway to the backstop.

  The TV camera zoomed in on her, head down, trotting toward the dugout steps, when suddenly she looked up. Some out-of-town fan had yelled at her from the box seats. (“A profanity which also refers to a female dog,” the News said.) She smiled and, just before she stepped out of view beneath the dugout roof, millions observed her right hand uplifted in a familiar gesture. In bars around the country, men looked at each other and said, “Did she do what I think I saw her do? She didn’t do that, did she?” In the booth, Joe Garagiola was observing that it was a clean play, that the runner has a right to the base path, but when her hand appeared on the screen he stopped. At home, it sounded as if he had been hit in the chest by a rock. The screen went blank, then went to a lite sausage commercial. When the show resumed, it was the middle of the next inning.

  On Monday, for “actions detrimental to the best interests of baseball,” Annie was fined a thousand dollars by the Commissioner and suspended for two games. He deeply regretted the decision, etc. “I count myself among her most ardent fans. She is good for baseball, good for the cause of equal rights, good for America.” He said he would be happy to suspend the suspension if she would make a public apology, which would make him the happiest man in America.

  Gentleman Jim went to the bank Monday afternoon and got the money, a thousand dollars, in a cashier’s check. All afternoon, he called Annie’s number over and over, waiting thirty or forty rings, then trying again. He called from a pay phone at the Stop ‘N’ Shop, next door to the Cityview Apartments, where she lived, and between calls he sat in his car and watched the entrance, waiting for her to come out. Other men were parked there, too, in front, and some in back—men with Sparrows bumper stickers. After midnight, about eleven of them were left. “Care to share some onion chips and clam dip?” one guy said to another guy. Pretty soon all of them were standing around the trunk of the clam-dip guy’s car, where he also had a case of beer.

  “Here, let me pay you something for this beer,” said a guy who had brought a giant box of pretzels.

  “Hey, no. Really. It’s just good to have other guys to talk to tonight,” said the clam-dip owner.

  “She changed a lot of very basic things about the whole way that I look at myself as a man,” the pretzel guy said quietly.

  “I’m in public relations,” said Jim. “But even I don’t understand all that she has meant to people.”

  “How can she do this to us?” said a potato-chip man. “All the love of the fans, how can she throw it away? Why can’t she just play ball?”

  Annie didn’t look at it that way. “Pall Mall! I’m not going to crawl just because some Tootsie Roll says crawl, and if they don’t like it, then bull shit, they can go butter their Hostess Twinkies,” she told the writers as she cleaned out her locker on Tuesday morning. They had never seen the inside of her locker before. It was stuffed with dirty socks, half-unwrapped gifts from admiring fans, a set of ankle weights, and a small silver-plated pistol. “No way I’m going to pay a thousand dollars, and if they expect an apology—well, they better send out for lunch, because it’s going to be a long wait. Gentlemen, goodbye and hang on to your valuable coupons.” And she smiled her most winning smile and sprinted up the stairs to collect her paycheck. They waited for her outside the Sparrows office, twenty-six men, and then followed her down the ramp and out of Gate C. She broke into a run and disappeared into the lunchtime crowd on West Providence Avenue, and that was the last they saw of her—the woman of their dreams, the love of their lives, carrying a red gym bag, running easily away from them.

  YON

  MY NAME IS YON YONSON, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. But actually I left Wisconsin last fall and came to New York to visit my sister Yvonne and her husband, Don Swanson, in the Bronx. She wrote, “Come on out here and visit us, Bro, we got plenty of room, stay as long as you like.” I sold my shack and came east with one cardboard suitcase. Lumbering can get awfully thin in those Wisconsin woods; sometimes a tree falls and you wish you weren’t there to hear it. I hitched a ride out with a dummy named Carlson and his two dogs, neither of whom cared for me, and got to New York smelling like a dog, took a Yellow Cab to Yvonne’s place hoping for a big lunch of pot roast and spuds and lemon-meringue pie and I find out the reason she has plenty of room is that she and Don Swanson got divorced last year, that she has an actor boyfriend named Gary Chalet, her hair is bright crimson, she wears three big brass rings on each wrist and has dropped forty pounds on a diet of melon and bulgur wheat and is a painter of paintings that look like they collided with the paint truck and is in college studying real estate, and Don Swanson is a gay Lutheran bishop on Nantucket. I tell you, New York is full of amazing things, any one of which if it happened in Wisconsin would stop your heart, but here it’s only a news item. “Tell me about yourself. How’ve you been?” she asks, pouring me a root beer. I say, “Compared to you and Don, there frankly ain’t all that much to tell,” and I think to myself, “There frankly ain’t and I am going to stay here until there is and then go back home and tell them.” We talked until 3:00 A.M. and I woke up at 6:00 and went out for a breath of air; it was hot in her tiny place and her aquarium hummed and kept me awake. I walked for blocks. I saw a little lady in tight black pants walking fifteen little dogs on fifteen leashes, saw a man arguing with another man in some language like Greek that sounded fierce and furious but then they laughed, I bought a Korean pear (very good), walked past a store that sold seashells (nothing else, just shells) and another selling bouquets of grass (hundreds of different types) and firewood for four dollars a pair, dropped in at a lunch counter and sat next to a black man. The waitress called me Love. She said, “What’re we having, Love?” I had a cup of coffee and two slices of rye toast. “Anything else, Love?” she asks, so I got eggs, too. “Want half of this newspaper?” asks the b
lack man, so I take half and look at the want ads and go down to Grant S. Pierce Flowers on 52nd Street, who needed a man to deliver full-time, $300/week. “I can see you are an honest man,” said the owner, G.S.P., so I start right away, learning the ropes from the other deliveryman, Elayne, and go home with forty dollars, and Yvonne has just woke up and dressed and is hungry, so we go around the corner to an Ethiopian restaurant where you eat food off a pancake with your fingers. We ate three beef pancakes and one bulgur and she informed me it was all over with Gary Chalet, she had met a sculptor. It didn’t surprise me a bit.

  It surprised me that I didn’t miss home, except a little bit on Sunday during a Redskins-Giants game, somehow a note in Brent Musburger’s voice recalled the cozy Sunday afternoons we lumbermen piled in together around Butch Butcherson’s color TV. Billy and Butch and Pete and Tom. We’d crank up the kerosene heater and pop popcorn and sit in that steamy room in the frozen woods, watching the Vikes, and now Brent’s voice at halftime made me think of things I never said to those guys, like “Maybe we ought to get out of here and go someplace else. Maybe life can be better.” Third quarter, the game got lopsided. I fell asleep. When I awoke it was 6:00 A.M. The subway was peaceful so early, people sleeping on old No. K as she banged downtown, I even squeezed in some Zs myself.

  It was my job to open up Grant S. Pierce at 7:30 and get the overnight orders off the answering machine. Previously, the addresses had gotten goofed up due to someone’s dyslexia and Elayne got mad and threw the flowers in a ditch (which, if you know how far you got to drive to find one of those in this town, tells you how lost he was), so the day I started was the day they started to make a profit. The voices on the machine were guys phoning in at 3:00 and 4:00 A.M. and the only flower they could remember was the rose. We ordered six bales of roses every morning. Fluffed them up into bouquets and I ran around Manhattan laying them on the desks of tall wary women, not all of whom were bowled over by the gesture. “Take your lousy flowers back to that pitiful degenerate and stick them in his lap” was not such an unusual response. I drove the big green van around narrow streets as bumpy as dirt roads, not that you ever went so fast that you actually bumped, they were packed solid with traffic, so I learned to do what I had to do, to be nasty with the horn and to shove the next car aside and horn in and then—this is hard for a nice Wisconsin man to do—to park the van in the middle of the street in front of cars I had just horned in in front of and walk into a building and deliver flowers and not rush although as I wait for Miss Meyers in the thirty-first-floor reception room I can hear them calling to me from below, the forlorn long toots and anxious beeps of abandoned children, and I look out a window and see them bunched up behind the green van like ducks trying to scoot through a hole in the fence, but it’s too small to squeeze through, I think, watching a black limo try to get around me, followed by a station wagon, an ambulance, a garbage truck. They look like toys. It’s interesting to watch. A man gets out of the limo and walks twice around the van, fast, pounding on it with a tire iron. Furious, like Miss Meyers stabbing at the bouquet with a pencil. “I’m not even going to touch the paper around these,” she says. I tell her that Mr. Tom Tucker didn’t wrap the roses, I did, but she makes a face. “I loathe and despise him and anything he paid for whether he touched it or not.” Her face brightens. “Do you sell thistles?” she asks. Honk honk, beep beep, braaaagh. “Do you sell and deliver bouquets of seaweed or big gobs of algae—would you deliver a bucket of green slime for me?” So much anger. It’s hard for a Wisconsin man to deal with. Even in the sleepy jungle afternoons in the Grant S. Pierce greenhouse, hosing down rubber trees, pinching aphids, listening to Broadway stars reveal their thrilling lives on the “Midday Cavalcade with Adrian Adams Live from the Blue Room of the Hotel Hart High Above Eighth Avenue” and watching June bend over the tulips, there is anxiety. Angry phone calls from men wondering why the women didn’t call to say thanks. A New York voice like a ratchet-tooth hacksaw: “Whaddaya mean she didn’t accept the roses? You’re telling me that my girl wouldn’t take my roses? Is that what you’re telling me? You’re telling me that she doesn’t think that I’m the best thing that ever happened to her? Is that it? That’s what she told me two days ago. You’re sayin’ I’m deaf? Or stupid? Listen to me, you—” I never liked roses. Tulips beat roses anytime in my book. Once I took an armful of American Beauties to Vanelle Montage at the Hotel Hart prior to broadcast and wished it had been soft pink tulips, roses are so hard and cold. She was little and pink and talked in a tiny jewel-like voice. I whipped right past Adrian Adams and handed her the bouquet, sitting at a table for two with a clear crystal microphone, and him—he gave me the fish eye, but Miss Montage looked up and smiled a small perfect smile. “You have the kindest face, I wish that I knew you as a person and that it were possible to see you every afternoon, it would give me courage. God bless you,” she whispered. She gave me a ticket to her show (she was in Play Ball! at the Henry James) and was unable to draw her small cold hand immediately from mine but let it rest a second. I felt a pulse beat as rapid as a bird’s in her little finger; then her producer Raoul Cassette put his big paw on my shoulder. “Beat eet,” he said in his fake French accent, “vi haff beezness to dô so ... eef yeu vil be so kindt.” His nose was two inches from mine and I could see that nothing in the man’s face was real. I turned away. Something in Miss Montage’s eyes said, Help me please; she blinked and again it said Help me please. I was triple-parked on Eighth and 43rd, the van sticking halfway into the intersection, I could hear screams and honks and glass breaking. I said, “Some other time, my dear. Goodbye.” This is hard for a Wisconsin man to do: turn away from the desperate pleas of a fine woman enslaved by a vicious creep. But I was in love with June, darling June, my little Junebug, her arms full of tulips, looking at me over the ferns in the mist from the greenhouse mister, her beautiful eyes and nose and arms and legs and all of her wanting me and me wanting her, it’s that way when you’re around flowers constantly.