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

by Cleo Birdwell

  She got up to look at Shaver. I had some more soup. It was fair to good, I thought.

  “Is Archie past tense?” I said.

  “He is Swahili.”

  “Do I believe it this time?”

  “You’ll notice I haven’t cut my hair. Nor do I look like Return of the Cat People.”

  “I have noticed.”

  “I’m making great advances. This summer I take a long vacation and I travel absolutely alone. No tennis player, no Monopoly board, nothing.”

  “Great. Where?”

  “I’m bicycling through the soup country of France.”

  “The soup country?”

  “I have to learn to ride a bike first. I’m having someone come over to give me lessons. And I’ve ordered four books on bicycles and bicycling. And I have to get lots and lots of biking clothes. I’m really looking forward to it, Cleo. Fresh air, exercise and soup.”

  She got up again and looked at Shaver.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “The beard’s coming in a little darker than the hair on his head. I think it’s going to look quite, quite intriguing.”

  “The tube in his nose is less distracting than one would expect a tube in someone’s nose to be.”

  “It adds to his drama, I think.”

  “Does he talk in his sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Total silence. Interesting.”

  “Nothing nasal, even.”

  “What is that doctor’s name?”

  “Dr. Glass,” I said.

  “If I talk to Dr. Glass, will he give me one?”

  “I don’t think they’re his to give.”

  “What do I have to do to get one?”

  “Floss, there are only nineteen Kramers in the world.”

  “I want an adult male. Sensitive, wryly humorous, nonsmoking. Likes movies, being spontaneous in the Hamptons, doing things with soup. Not too tall. The longer his sleep period, the better. Indefinite sleep would be best of all. Deep, silent, continuous sleep.”

  “I know this is a dumb question, but if he’s asleep, what’s the point of all those things?”

  “Just to know something about him. To be secure within myself that I’m involved with someone compatible. I forgot vibrant, financially independent.”

  “How vibrant can he be in a Kramer?”

  “That’s not the point. You miss the point.”

  She sat down and ladled more soup into her plate. She looked at it absently, then got up and went over to gaze at Shaver some more.

  “Interesting. An alternate lifestyle.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it.”

  “You ought to get him different pajamas.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “These are too middle class. We don’t want stripes or checks or piping.”

  “What do we want?”

  “Something very basic. Something almost brutally simple. I can’t quite describe what I mean. Something a little coarse to the touch, and utterly bare of decoration, and a little bit brownish. To set off his glow.”

  She sat down again. We talked about this and that. I imagined her peddling a bike through huge puddles of soup somewhere in France.

  In Detroit, we lost the second play-off game of the opening round. Jeep told us not to worry, the puck wasn’t bouncing right, we would get them at home the following night. On the bus to the airport, he kept directing deeply meaningful looks my way. I pretended to read, although I had nothing in my hands but a gum wrapper.

  Murray Jay sat next to me on the flight back to New York. I couldn’t help noticing he wasn’t carrying his Work in Progress.

  “I’m going through a period of agonizing reappraisal,” he said. “First my editor gets fired for stealing office supplies. Then the editorial board refuses to comment on the manuscript because they can’t read my handwriting. It costs me a fortune to get the thing typed. Okay, the thing is typed. They read it. They tell me it doesn’t work as fiction the way it’s presently put together. I tell them it’s not supposed to work as fiction. It’s nonfiction. They say, ‘Oh really?’”

  “Then what?”

  “They tell me to make it work as fiction. They like the research on the Mafia, all the details, all the bloodshed, although they think the bloodshed is too funny as presently put together. Guess what they don’t like?”

  “The snowmobiles.”

  “Snowmobiles are small, noisy, silly objects, they say. Readers will not identify with snowmobiles. They want me to use intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

  “It makes a crazy kind of sense, Murray.”

  “They say they’ll double my advance. They also say two movie studios are interested in the idea.”

  “You’ll need a main character.”

  “Brad Carruthers, a reporter for Megatonnage Weekly. My non-Buddhist sister, the germ-warfare consultant, knows a lot about the Pentagon, so I can get stuff about the inner corridors of power from her. I want the Mafia to put a man on the moon, but I don’t know how to justify it fictionally.”

  “What’s Brad Carruthers like?”

  “I’m basing him on myself,” Murray said, giving me one of his velvety looks. “Tall, lean, blond, square jawed, intelligent, graceful, attractive, self-assured, warmhearted, charming, and oral.”

  “You’re in there somewhere, Murray.”

  “The editors say this is how fiction is made.”

  Before the game in New York, about a half-dozen players reported that their homes had been broken into. The only things missing belonged to their wives. Bikini swimsuits, bikini underwear, cosmetics, suntan lotion, birth control pills, IUDs, and diaphragms.

  This news gave us tremendous confidence as we took the ice.

  The game was scoreless through three periods. About a minute and a half into overtime, one of their Czech defectors fired a blazing slap shot from the left point. The puck caromed off both our Swedish defensemen and skipped into the net.

  The red light went on. Dead silence at the Garden. For a moment, no one moved. The Rangers on the ice didn’t want to make eye contact with each other or with the rest of us on the bench. From the corner of my eye, I saw Jeep rubbing the back of his neck. A piece of paper drifted down.

  Then the Red Wings started coming over the boards to pound their teammates and hug their goaltender. The crowd applauded both teams. We all went out and formed two lines and shook hands.

  Our season was over. It wasn’t real. We couldn’t believe it. In the locker room, we walked around saying what happened, did anyone see it, where was the puck.

  “Let’s go back and do that all over.”

  “In my own mind, the game’s still on.”

  “Where was the puck, where was the puck?”

  Dougie White said, “Why did they steal our wives’ underwear if it wouldn’t make us win?”

  At least we could forget about the bed checks and the break-ins. It took this defeat to make us realize there was nothing mystical about the Rangers’ late season play. We’d won on our own, we’d lost on our own. We’d showered, dressed, combed our hair, made our phone calls, walked a little swaggeringly out into the night, our night, full of schizy voices and white-hot neon.

  “I still don’t think it happened.”

  “I keep thinking if we don’t undress, the goal won’t count. They’ll bring us out for another overtime.”

  “Where was the puck, where was the puck?”

  So it was back to the suburbs, back to the towns, back to Parry Sound and Swift Current and Oshawa and Flin Flon.

  “Did anyone see it go in?”

  Before leaving, I cornered Sanders Meade and made him promise that I wouldn’t have to listen to any more nonsense about wearing the veil when next season rolled around. He said there was nothing to worry about.

  “Do I believe you?”

  “Cleo, I need your belief and support if I’m going to function
effectively in this job,”

  “They own my building.”

  “They own my building, too.”

  “Well, what’s next?”

  “Farouky says there’ll be one change next season, and one change only. The pregame meal. No more pick and choose. Everybody eats the same thing. Sheep eyes.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “With liver and brains.”

  “I hate liver.”

  “We’re negotiating intestines.”

  Sanders asked me to join him for a drink at the top of the World Trade Center. I told him I had to sit up with a sick friend. The jerk believed me.

  That week I went down to the Lower East Side and rummaged through dozens of boxes in the dusty back rooms of old shops before I found a suitable pair of pajamas for Shaver.

  It was a one-piece, gownlike thing. No piping, no stitching, no collar, no pockets, no buttons, no clips, no fly. It wasn’t any color you could easily name. Let’s say it had a dark yellowish stainlike hue and let it go at that.

  I knew Floss would be pleased. I kind of liked it myself. It would set off his glow, and make him seem dramatic and stark and a little doomed, too. A little doom can be interesting. I went home and got him into the pajamas. Very, very haunting. I lowered the sheet from his chest to his waist. Looked good. And the beard was filling in nicely.

  We had a quiet dinner together. Then I read a while and went to bed. I woke up sweating and mumbling, and went out to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Back in bed, I realized what it was that had been gnawing at me these past few days, and it had nothing to do with being eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs.

  It was a question, a simple question, but it reverberated in my mind like distant noises in the sky on one of those hot, still, haunting summer days when the streets of your town are dead quiet, and the air is heavy and dense, and you know the thunder won’t bring rain, and the bikes and wagons sit on the lawns, and the dogs are all inside.

  Do I want him to wake up?

  16

  I went to Badger for a few days to see the family. Floss stayed with Shaver. She moved right in. I left her a chart with feeding times, cloudy fluid removal, and all the other data. When I got back, everything was checked off and filled in and initialed. She’d initialed all the appropriate places on the chart. The work she does with contracts has made her initial-crazy. I’ve seen her initial dollar bills she leaves as tips in restaurants. I think she initials light bulbs before she screws them in.

  She’d buffed Shaver’s fingernails and brushed his teeth. She also used dental floss on his teeth, although I don’t know what could have gotten stuck in there since he was intravenously fed. With her ultradelicate grooming scissors, she’d trimmed the hair between his eyebrows and in his nostrils.

  I kept waiting for her to go home, but instead she made coffee and we drank it in the bedroom.

  “How was your visit?”

  “Very nice,” I said. “But I’m glad to be back.”

  “Sure, you have something to come back to.”

  “Well, you’ve obviously done a splendid job around here.”

  “I’m going to miss him, Cleo.”

  “Visit often.”

  “Sure, but it’s not the same.”

  I tried to change the subject several times, but Floss kept coming back to the Kramer.

  “It might be best for all concerned if I didn’t see him for a while,” she said.

  “Oh, come on.”

  “I’m serious, Cleo.”

  “You’re being silly and I don’t want to hear any more.”

  She held the coffee cup in both hands, staring into it. It was like a scene in a TV soap. Our dialogue was full of long pauses. There was something solemn about the way we spoke and moved and listened.

  “I have a confession,” she said.

  I looked at her significantly.

  “While you were away, I came very close to taking Shaver to my place. I don’t want to think about how close I came. I went over it in my mind many times. I weighed all the factors. I planned, I schemed, I plotted. How to get him out of here, how to get him over there. It’s awful to have to confess this, Cleo, but I feel you ought to know if we’re to go on being friends.”

  I stared into my coffee cup. Then I looked at her.

  “What would you do once you got him there?” I said. “Obviously that’s the first place I’d look.”

  “I know that. I do know that. It was stupid of me even to consider doing it.”

  “It was stupid of you.”

  “I know. I see how stupid.”

  “If stupidity was measured on seismographs, you’d be an eight point two.”

  I don’t think she liked that. There’s not much sarcasm on daytime TV. It was all right for me to be stunned, bewildered, and angry as long as I was solemn about it. Wisecracking insults were out of bounds.

  “Of course,” she said, “there’s a precedent in our lives for this kind of betrayal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She passed the sugar.

  “Don’t think I don’t know about you and Archie. That little prick.”

  “What about me and Archie?”

  Slowly she lifted the pot to pour more coffee for herself. We watched the coffee come pouring out.

  “You two had sex in my guest room.”

  “When?” I said.

  “That’s not much of a defense, Cleo. ‘When?’ You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “Archie told you this?”

  “Down to the smallest detail.”

  “That little prick.”

  “You were a guest in my house, Cleo, and you saw nothing wrong in having sex with my lover. You were my guest in my house and he was my lover.”

  “Are you sure? When? Did he mention a date and time?”

  “Sad, sad, sad, sad,” she said. “How very sad for all of us.”

  True, my defense was pitiful. But I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Who had expected something like this to come up? It had happened months ago. I’d forgiven myself.

  Floss and I looked into each other’s coffee cup. All the words had been spoken. The exchange had worn us out. Betrayal is tiring, I guess.

  After a while, she got up, patted the Kramer, rinsed her cup in the kitchen sink, and walked back to her building in the setting sun.

  The editors of the magazine Success had been after me for months to do a picture story. Floss told them about sixteen times to come back when the season was over.

  The season was over. They called and said a preinterview researcher was coming over. I’d seen the magazine a hundred times on newsstands. It was a big, showy thing with the name success in gold bars and with a line of type under the name that read: The Magazine of Fame, Power, Money and Sex.

  Everything we crave except Regular Bowel Movements. Anyway, I didn’t know what kind of person to expect. Someone in rhinestone pinstripes, I thought.

  It turned out to be a pleasant, straightforward young woman who wore her hair in a no-nonsense bun. We sat in the living room chatting about my life and times. Her name was Jane W. Schroeder, Jr.

  She explained that the editors would evaluate this background stuff and then send out a story team. I pictured about six people in Softball uniforms carrying tape recorders, camera equipment, lie detectors, devices to measure and weigh me, and a tongue depressor for a quick physical.

  After a lot of note-taking, Jane suggested a stroll around the apartment. Maybe she thought there was a six-acre garden just off the toilet, with tree names in Latin. She said that readers liked to see famous, powerful, and wealthy people photographed in their houses, apartments, hunting lodges etc., and she would have to make out a report on my living quarters.

  “There isn’t much to see and it’s pretty routine,” I said.

  “Let’s start with the bedroom, shall we?”

  It hadn’t occurred to me
that I’d have to show her the Kramer. But in she went, without waiting for a footman to lead the way. I scurried behind. She stopped a few feet from the Kramer, edged forward, stopped, went bravely on.

  I sort of hovered in the area like a terrifically unobtrusive salesperson, ready to advise, to caution, to answer any question. Someone quietly proud of the merchandise she sold.

  After a long time, Jane said, “Are you two married?”

  “No.”

  “Good. We like nonmarrieds.”

  “I don’t think we want to include Shaver in this story, do we?”

  “Cleo, he is fantastic.”

  “I know, but it’s just too, too complicated.”

  “Is it an open relationship?”

  “We’ve never discussed that,” I said a little frostily. “Besides, I don’t think he’s in any shape to be playing around.”

  “What about you?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the Kramer.

  “I feel everything I want or need is right here.”

  “I believe it. I absolutely one hundred percent hear and believe every word of it.”

  “It would cause chaos and heartbreak and misunderstanding if we included him in this story. It wouldn’t be fair to him, to me, to you, or to them.”

  “Did you know him before he was in this thing?”

  “Slightly,” I told her.

  “That’s the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I love those pajamas.”

  “Orchard Street. Go down on a Sunday.”

  I had the feeling she was losing interest in the magazine story, with or without Shaver.

  “You ought to get some kind of pendant for around his neck,” she said. “I don’t know, something spiritual. A dove or whale.”

  “It might clash with the tube in his nose.”

  “I see what you mean.”

  “The tube is so powerful it would overwhelm anything in the vicinity.”

  “Silly question. Do you take care of him yourself?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “I’d love to see his eyes. Can we?”

  “I don’t think we ought to, Jane.”

  “Just lift one lid a teensy bit?”