Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League

by Cleo Birdwell

  “In the NHL, that’s where.”

  “The NHL?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “I don’t usually answer the phone.”

  “The National Hockey League. The New York Rangers.”

  “I don’t read the sports pages, Cleo. I don’t know what that means.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You hate hockey anyway.”

  “I do?”

  “You’d rather toss a Frisbee with a dolphin.”

  “I think sports are okay if people don’t infringe on each other’s space.”

  “What about you, Kenny? What do you do when you’re not working?”

  “I don’t separate work time and other time. I don’t divide my life. It’s one life.”

  “Well, I just wondered about your private life.”

  “There’s no public life, private life kind of division. There’s just my life. We don’t think in segments here. It’s all one stretch of time. You can divide it artificially if that’s the mode you’re into, but it’s still a continuum with interchangeable points that we assign names to, like past, present, and future. If people would let their lives become part of the natural time cycle, we’d really see something organic begin to happen.”

  “What is this, Dial-a-Hindu? I want to talk to Kenny Birdwell. I want to ask him a few stupid family questions, that’s all.”

  “Okay, like what?”

  “Do you have a steady girlfriend? Any marriage plans?”

  “Marriage, maybe someday. But kids, definitely not. I’d never bring children into this world.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s self-evident. The atmosphere. The rivers.”

  “Is that any reason not to have kids? The rivers?”

  “What better reason? What about the ice caps? People have already forgotten that. The ice caps. The ozone layer.”

  “Those aren’t exactly day-to-day problems that the average four-year-old is going to be affected by.”

  “What about those sky booms over the Eastern Seaboard?”

  “Sky booms?”

  “See, you’ve already forgotten. Those big noises in the atmosphere that nobody could explain.”

  “What’s that got to do with bringing children into the world, Kenny?”

  “It’s self-evident, isn’t it? There’s just every kind of catastrophe looming around the bend, that’s all. The rivers. The oceans. What about tinted toilet paper?”

  “Children just grow up little by little. These things don’t affect them directly. Even if they did, we’d have to think about continuing the species anyway, wouldn’t we? Don’t we have an obligation?”

  “What about foreign policy? Our foreign policy’s totally chaotic.”

  “I don’t know how to argue with you, Kenny.”

  “Because you know I’m right.”

  “How can you not have a child because you don’t like our foreign policy? That’s such an abstract thing, foreign policy.”

  “Environmental groups have completely forgotten what tinted toilet paper does to the oceans. What about our balance of payments?”

  “What about continental drift?” I said. “North America and Australia are probably going to collide in eighteen million years. What about that?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me,” he said.

  “Won’t that put a crimp in the baby boom.”

  “These are real problems, Cleo. They’re not abstract. They already affect everything we do. What about monosodium glutamate? What about that? You want to tell me that has no effect on children?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What about red dye number two? You don’t think that has practical bearing? What about grade-A beef that’s really horse meat and chicken necks?”

  “Just shut up, all right?”

  “What about Legionnaires’ Disease? How can anyone seriously think about having children with this thing still going around unchecked?”

  “People have babies. That’s all. They don’t think about these things. They just have babies.”

  “Well, it might occur to them to start doing some thinking. What about fossil fuels?”

  “What about black holes?”

  “Black holes?” he said.

  “What about the whole universe disappearing into a black hole? Let’s not have children, Rodney. They might end up getting sucked into a black hole.”

  “Be serious. What about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists?”

  “What about sex orgies?” I said. “Let’s not have children, Rodney. They might grow up to see their older brother taking part in a sex orgy.”

  “Be serious. What about the weather?”

  “Just shut up, okay, Kenny?”

  “There could be another ice age on the way.”

  “All right, it’s getting a little colder.”

  “She finally agrees on something.”

  “Well, so what? You don’t stop having babies because of the weather.”

  “Cleo, do you realize what an ice age would mean? Even a little one? It’s self-evident. There’s no aspect of our daily lives that wouldn’t be affected.”

  “It’s getting colder. I said I agree. But that doesn’t mean a great sheet of ice is going to cover the earth in ten or twenty years.”

  “Would you bring children into an ice age?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What about unemployment?” he said.

  “Sure, millions of children are out of work. Do me a favor. Stick to chicken necks. That’s my favorite.”

  “What about supertankers? Every one of them is an ecological time bomb, slowly ticking.”

  “Look, I’ll be in Los Angeles in five or six days. Maybe we can get together and have a sensible conversation. Where is Sunnyvale, anyway?”

  “Where is Los Angeles?” he said. “Where is anything?”

  I crawled back under the covers. I was exhausted. As I drifted closer to sleep, I could hear the sound of bodies hitting the boards. Heavy checks at both ends of the ice. That big, hollow, booming sound.

  Caribou, Maine. Caribou, Maine. Caribou, Maine.

  11

  Metroplex. That’s what they call the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Imagine telling people you live in Metroplex. In a cement bunker, they’d probably think. Someday there’ll be a Greater Metroplex. People will feel nostalgic for Metroplex. They’ll think back to the days when growth and sprawl had a kind of seedy charm.

  Whenever I hear the word Metroplex, I picture a science-fiction slum. The outskirts of a vast, galactic city, pockmarked by craters, with crumbling skyways in the distance, and the crackle of burnt-out neon, and Ragnor the Sea Snail poking along behind his giant sensors, under two full moons.

  For all I know, the real Metroplex is full of thatched cottages and brambly gardens. In two and a half days, I saw very little of the place, if you can call it a place, and I could never get a fix on what I was seeing.

  I guess Metroplex begins, in spirit, at the airport. The airport is called D-FW, and that’s where I was when Archie Brewster’s plane landed. I watched him come into the arrivals lounge, dressed half sloppily in jeans, a knit shirt, and moccasins, and I was about to fling up an arm in greeting when I spied a familiar figure right behind him. Floss Penrose. I felt a little buckling of the knees. Dear, sweet woman, as Glen way Packer liked to refer to her, but she had a gift for turning up at the wrong time.

  She wore a turban and wraparound dress, and looked quite the sexy minx. I was glad to see her, but I didn’t know how to handle the situation. Do I hide behind a chair or do I sweep her up in a big embrace? As they headed my way through mobs of people, I caught Archie’s eye and he gave me a sheepish grin, and shrugged, and looked a little tense around the mouth. The least forceful of close-fisted blows would have made his nuts scream well into the cocktail hour.

  Floss looked great. Better than I’d ever seen her. She looked fulfilled. She look
ed radiant. Like something out of the pages of Modern Bride Remarried. She positively glowed.

  There was no time to decide what course of action to take. They were on top of me in seconds, and Floss gave a little shriek of joy and we hugged and clutched and made incoherent sounds.

  Eventually we all headed down an endless corridor. Archie, keeping his eyes dead ahead, sneaked around to my left side. He kept me between himself and Floss. He motioned me to keep my suitcase between myself and Floss. Then he mumbled some hurried remarks in the general direction of my left ear. The idea was that he’d told Floss I’d be meeting the plane and there was nothing to worry about.

  I looked straight ahead, talking out of the side of my mouth.

  “When did all this develop?”

  “She caught up to me at four a.m.”

  “Where?”

  “My hotel.”

  “What happened?”

  “We played Monopoly.”

  With all the fuzzy sounds around us—voices, flight announcements, engines revving, planes taking off—it was fairly easy for Archie and me to carry on this side-of-the-mouth conversation without Floss realizing it.

  I kept looking straight ahead.

  “Why am I meeting her plane?”

  “To welcome her to Metroplex,” he said.

  “This is the first time I’ve been here in my life. How could I welcome someone?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Won’t come up.”

  “Well, how did I know what plane she’d be on?”

  “I called and told you.”

  “When?”

  “Won’t come up. No problem.”

  “Well, if you two had your great reconciliation at four in the morning, that wouldn’t have left you much time to call me and tell me to meet the plane. Is there a time difference between Acapulco and Detroit?”

  “She won’t ask. Won’t come up. Forget it.”

  “I’m just trying to get our stories straight.”

  No sooner did I get that sentence out of the side of my mouth than I realized Floss was talking to me out of the side of her mouth. We both looked dead ahead. I switched my suitcase to the other hand.

  “It’s been sheer hell,” she said.

  “Glenway told me you wept on the phone.”

  “I’ve had difficulty swallowing.”

  “Anxiety,” I said.

  “No, tension.”

  “I thought anxiety made it hard for you to swallow.”

  “Anxiety makes me choke.”

  “I thought tension made you choke.”

  “Anxiety. I wake up choking.”

  We looked straight ahead.

  “But it’s over now,” I said. “You’re together again.”

  “He can be so sweet when he wants to.”

  “You look great.”

  “We played Monopoly,” she said.

  We moved through a sliding door onto a sidewalk where a lot of people milled about. I realized I was standing there with my mouth distorted because of the unnatural way I’d been talking. A porter came out with their luggage and we waited for Archie’s car and driver.

  Floss looked straight ahead.

  “It was sweet of you to meet the plane, Cleo.”

  “It’s been so long. We haven’t seen each other. You should have called.”

  “How did you know when we’d be getting in?”

  “Archie called and told me.”

  “He’s such a doll face sometimes.”

  “He wanted you to have a real welcome.”

  “He must have gotten you out of bed. What a shame.”

  “I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “Cleo, you need your sleep.”

  “We all do. Believe me. What a road trip.”

  “Is there a time difference between Acapulco and Detroit?”

  A plane took off. I watched it rise into the dust and haze.

  “There’s certainly a language difference,” I said.

  I didn’t know what I meant by that, so how could she? But we both laughed, looking straight ahead. An old Packard with running boards pulled up. Leave it to Archie to own a block-long 1930s gangster car with a skylight. It was in great shape, too.

  He guided me around to the far door, and as he looked grimly toward the horizon, as if waiting for Amelia Earhart’s plane to come into view, he said with a totally closed mouth, speaking with his teeth, “What are chances of you and me getting together for the second reel of our private movie a little later in the day, when Aunt Glad is sleeping off the effects of her travels?”

  “No chance. None.”

  “Good. Just confirming.”

  “The chances are zero and under.”

  “Very good,” he said with his teeth. “You may get in now, madame.”

  “With that question, you have got us into the negative numbers.”

  It took a long time to get out of the airport and we cruised smoothly over an expressway for a while. I saw tall buildings, a real city, but we veered onto another road and headed deeper into Metroplex. It was a pretty day, in the sixties, and I was lured into thinking winter was something that didn’t happen here.

  Finally we got to Archie’s place. It was a large stone house at the end of a quiet street. Out back were kennels, garages, and tennis courts, and about six Irish setters came leaping onto our lanky hero as he emerged from the car. In and around the garages were nine old cars—Plymouths, Packards, DeSotos, LaSalles etc.

  “Aren’t they a gorgeous sight?” Floss said. “I half expect George Raft to be sitting inside one of them, flipping a coin.”

  Archie’s driver was a large fellow wearing a good-sized Stetson. Floss and I followed him and the luggage inside while Archie rolled around on the grass with his setters.

  It was a rambling house full of recreation rooms or dens or TV rooms, whatever these things are called. Everywhere I looked I saw pinball machines, pool tables, jukeboxes, TV sets, video recorders, movie projectors, bars and barstools, card tables, athletic trophies, movie posters, dart boards, Ping-Pong tables, stacks of Captain Marvel comics, a Moog Synthesizer, and various computer games and puzzles.

  “There’s an indoor pool at the end of that long corridor,” Floss said.

  “Great. I wouldn’t mind.”

  “And he’s extending the basement to build a shooting range. Seems he’s discovered the handgun.”

  “What a place. I think I hate it.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “There’s a fully equipped kitchen, but the rest of the place is strictly Summer Camp in the Catskills of the Mind.”

  “But Archie’s an intelligent guy.”

  “He’s also emotionally and psychologically stunted. We’re both warped. Or I’m warped, he’s thwarted. In any case, it’s mostly my fault, so I can hardly go around making cracks about his house.”

  “At least he has decent taste. I mean the dogs are handsome. And the cars are really stunning.”

  “I can hardly go round referring to his house as an American Boy’s Fantasy of Life After Death.”

  A fully equipped kitchen. That reminded me of Murray Jay and his idea of cooking dinner. I mentioned it to Floss and she said she was sure Archie would be in favor, and so I found a phone, called Murray’s hotel, and told him I’d solved the problem of finding a place to cook and eat his glorious meal. The only catch was that he’d have to cook for four instead of two. He didn’t seem to mind. I told him who the other two people were, and he asked me how to get to Archie’s place. I put down the phone and ran out to find Floss. She was in one of the dens, digging out a swimsuit for me.

  She said she didn’t know how to get to Archie’s place. No one knew except for Archie’s driver and he wasn’t talking. It was virtually the only thing he knew about anything, and he didn’t want to let go.

  She gave me the street name and house number, and wished me luck. I rushed to the phone to tell Murray.

>   He said the address wasn’t much help unless I could either tell him how to get there or give him the name of the township or congressional district or regional planning board, or something. I said I couldn’t. No one could. All we knew was Metroplex.

  He said he’d call his office in New York.

  “Come out early. There’s tennis and swimming.”

  “What else?” he said.

  “Darts, Ping-Pong.”

  “What else?”

  “Pool tables, pinball machines. You shoot pool?”

  “I bowl.”

  “I’ll have to ask,” I told him.

  So Floss and I went to the swimming pool, to be joined by Archie in a raggedy, lopsided pair of trunks that he had to keep hitching up to maintain minimum standards. Floss, meanwhile, was wearing a stunning accompaniment to her turban—a one-and-a-half-piece poolside toga, I guess I’ll call it. Of course she wasn’t wearing the turban with it, but you could easily see there was a relationship. The turban, the dress, the toga were all part of a coordinated outfit that you could keep adding to or subtracting from as your mood changed. It was the kind of stuff you swirl into and out of over the course of a long weekend in some Latin American dictatorship. All the items are infinitely adaptable. I think the toga was the turban, as a matter of fact.

  We had sandwiches and drinks at poolside, served by a thin, elderly man named Wing, who, except for skin color, reminded me a lot of Washington Post. The same string-beany body and small, oblong, henpecked face.

  “Wing used to work for Elvis,” Archie said. “I had to outbid the Bee Gees to get him.”

  “Was he up on a block?” Floss said.

  “I’m glad Elvis died when I was in the States,” Archie said. “I would have hated to miss the coverage. Where were you when he died, Cleo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where were you. Floss?”

  “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

  “I was in my room at the Stanford Court in San Francisco, watching TV when the news came, and eating a steak sandwich, medium well, with french fries and a Budweiser. It was just getting ready to rain.”

  Floss and I sipped our drinks, lazily turning the pages of magazines.

  “Where were you when Jimi Hendrix died?” Archie said.

  “I don’t know,” Floss said. “Not a clue.”