Tracy May’s pitching was also a major weakness. The Sweethearts were to play against men, so they played baseball, not softball, and no one at the mill could do much with the overarm delivery. Tracy was the only one who even thought she could learn to pitch. Walter decided that pitching was largely a matter of self-confidence anyway, which made Tracy the obvious choice. Halfway there already. She and Walter worked out a sort of modified side arm; my mother called it the rug-beating stroke.
The Sweethearts played a tune-up game against their mothers and fathers, and it went three hours and two innings because Tracy couldn’t find the plate. The infield was full of dandelions, all in bloom, which meant they were past good eating. The surrounding hills had been painted with large, bright strokes of lupine and hawkweed and buttercups. The air was charged with pollen and very fragrant. It was making Tracy sneeze. Partway through the second inning, seven batters in, she started to cry. She cried and sneezed, cried and sneezed, until her nose went red, white, and blue. Walter had been standing out in right, coaching Helen. He started toward the mound, but Irini ran in to intercept him at second.
“Don’t you dare, Walter Collins,” she said. She spoke softly so Tracy wouldn’t hear. “When she wants to come out, she’ll tell you.”
“But she’s crying. I think that means she wants to come out.”
“I think it means she’s mad. You’ll undermine her confidence if you pull her when she hasn’t asked.”
“She’s walked seven consecutive batters and her confidence hasn’t been undermined yet. This is Tracy we’re talking about.”
“No one else wants to pitch. Leave her alone.”
Tracy sneezed three times, one right after another. Each sneeze contained a high and desperate sound.
“This is not working. And these are our parents. They’d be swinging if she were coming within a mile of the plate. What if she beans her mother? What’s that going to do to her confidence?” Walter asked.
“She’s not coming within a mile of the plate. How can anyone get hurt? Leave her alone. I’ll see you in Hoboken before I’ll let you pull her.”
Walter returned to the outfield. Tracy bounced the next pitch in the dirt. Mr. Fossum tried to hit it on the bounce. He took his base with four balls, one strike. It was the best count Tracy had gotten this inning.
She walked one parent after another. By now everyone was coaching her. All the batters, all the fielders. “Calm down, honey.” “Loosen up your shoulder.” “You’re doing fine.” “You’re doing fine.” “Watch the ball all the way into the glove. Give her a target, Norma.”
The sun set. A barred owl swooped overhead. Chiggers attacked the outfielders. The game was called for darkness. Tracy May went home and sobbed herself to sleep. In the morning she could hardly lift her arm. But the next time she pitched she only walked eight batters and she went six innings.
The worst player on the team was Helen Leggett, who shouldn’t have been on the squad, much less in the starting lineup. Helen was chosen for box office, in lieu of and until Henry could organize the ape. She was chosen for the way she filled out the wheat laurel pocket on the uniform, chosen for her incredible strike zone.
Helen was not an especially pretty girl. Her face was ordinary, but pleasant with a beautiful wide smile she didn’t use very often. Her hair was a nondescript brown and wouldn’t take curl. It was so thin you could usually see her ears through it. She couldn’t bat and she couldn’t throw and she couldn’t knock down a grounder and she always came in too far on a fly, which was good for at least one extra base. All the same if there’d been cards with their pictures and their stats, she’d have been the card the fans would all have traded to get. One of her would have been worth all the rest of them.
She consistently got on base—walked to first, because the men wanted to see her run to second. She was aware of this. It made her slow and awkward. There was no dignified way to run the bases when she knew all the men in the stands and all the men in the field were waiting to see her try.
The other Sweethearts were protective of Helen. She had developed all at once, over the course of a few months, so fast that Dr. Gilbertsen had had to give her painkillers so that she could sleep at night. It left her with stretch marks and made her shy around men. She never looked at their faces, for fear that they were not looking at hers.
Among the Sweethearts, Helen was loud and well liked. She was a bit like Fanny in that she had a sharp and witty tongue—but not as bawdy. She could keep a secret, not as well as Fanny could, but good by Sweetheart standards. Irini took to playing over toward right when she felt there was a need; and Sissy adjusted when Irini did. Helen was good-natured about this.
After the Sweethearts’ first and only season, Helen married a man she’d met on a goodwill tour the Sweethearts made to a rehab center for amputees in Gary, Indiana. He had the Purple Heart. In 1944 he’d been sent on a detail to remove a nest of undetonated shells from a farmer’s field in northern England. One of the shells exploded and blew away both of his hands.
14
The week before the Sweethearts’ first game Henry tried to keep them busy and loose. He released the fish-stick team temporarily to work on the annual problem of hard-boiled eggs. Easter had come and gone, but it had brought the issue of green egg yolks to Maggie’s attention once again. Every year Maggie asked herself why some yolks responded to the boiling process by turning a sad, soggy green color. How could you guarantee the bright, yellow yolk your kids expected every time?
And while they were at it, there must be a way to keep the boiling eggs from cracking. Maggie had discovered that a teaspoon of salt in the cooking water would prevent the contents from leaking even if the shell cracked. This was good for any occasion except Easter, when you must not only keep the contents in, but also keep the dye out. In past years the Kitchen had tried puncturing the shells with tiny pinholes. They had soaked the eggs in vinegar first. They had tried bringing the eggs slowly up to a boil. They had cooked them in salted water. They had dropped room-temperature eggs directly into the boiling water. It was a chemical problem, but it was too much for Irini’s father. Nothing guaranteed the hundred percent success rate Maggie had set her heart on.
Two years ago at Eastertime Maggie had created a sensation by blowing eggs out of their shells through a pinhole and then washing, drying, and oiling the shell, and filling it with flavored gelatin. Refrigerate and then peel. Eggs had never been so bright and sweet before.
But she was not the sort to dwell on past triumphs. Maggie Collins would not rest until Easter could go forward without the loss of a single egg.
For the rest of the girls it was muffin day in the Scientific Kitchen. Paradoxically, because she was such a poor cook Irini was much in demand when recipes were tested. If Irini could cook it, well, that said something.
Irini had drawn the recipe card this morning for lemon ice muffins. She put the red kerchief that was part of the Kitchen uniform over her hair and tied on the checked apron. Dinah Shore was on the radio with her comfortable, warm-kitchen voice. “You know what would be nice?” Irini said, measuring the flour. “Muffins that sang as they cooked. Wouldn’t it be lovely to come into a sunny kitchen in the morning and hear the voices of six little muffins all singing together? Why doesn’t Mr. Henry have us working on that?”
Irini had a fondness for action foods. All her life she craved dishes like jubilees and soufflés and fondues, dishes that flamed or puffed or bubbled.
“Mr. Henry neglects the aural,” Helen agreed. “It’s because he can’t hear.” Her own ear stuck out through her limp brown hair like a mushroom in the forest.
“He hears well enough when he wants to. You know what annoys me?” said Fanny. She was wiping down the counters. They glistened whitely behind her sponge as if they’d been glazed. “How every recipe gives you enough for eight muffins, but every muffin tin has six cups. Why is that?”
Fanny was in a bad mood. She had told Margo to pick up Maggie’s p
rivate correspondence, but she had done it in the presence of Henry Collins, who made her drop a quarter into the blue pig. Fanny had not actually said that Maggie didn’t exist. She had merely told Margo to answer Maggie’s mail. She felt this constituted a gray area. As soon as Henry left the Kitchen, Fanny fished her quarter out again. “Notice,” she told the girls, “that I am merely recovering my own money. I am not taking anything that belongs to Maggie.”
“Because the recipes all call for one egg,” said Irini. “You reduce the recipe, you have to work in fractions of eggs.” She broke an egg into the bowl, one-handed, lots of wrist. “Of course, they could make the muffin tins with eight cups. I don’t know why they don’t do that.”
“Your average family can’t eat eight muffins at a sitting,” said Helen. “Your average family consists of a dad, a mom, a son, and a daughter. Two muffins apiece for the dad and the son. One muffin each for the mother and the daughter. Six muffins.”
“Show me the girl who can’t eat two muffins.”
“But she’s having eggs, too. And bacon. And toast and coffee.”
“And Sweetwheats,” said Irini. “Notice how you always forget the Sweetwheats? A cereal that sang while you ate would be nice, too, come to think of it. Pour in the milk and it sings. ‘Good morning to you. Good morning to you.’ ”
Irini’s father often sang this same song the morning after a particularly grueling night at Bumps. “We’re all in our places, with egg on our faces.” It was intended as an apology for whatever he’d done and now couldn’t remember.
Danny Kaye came on the radio. They sifted in rhythmic accompaniment, the flour rising in clouds around their hands, red scarves tight over their hair, and sang along until they came to the part where he went too fast, even for Arlys, and they had to stop.
They were waiting for Wheat Theater, the weekly radio show sponsored by Margaret Mill. Wheat Theater followed the adventures and misadventures of Miss Anna Peal. Anna Peal was a sort of blend of Little Orphan Annie and Fanny Farmer. She lived abroad; her parents were missionaries in an unidentified country whose borders gave her easy access to snowy, Swisslike mountains, humid jungles, the chaparral, and the sands of both beaches and deserts.
In the last episode, Anna had strayed into the jungle, again, and been captured by natives. Naturally they turned out to be cannibals. When we left our heroine last, the cooking water was just coming to a boil.
In today’s episode, little Anna took charge of the situation. She convinced the entire tribe to delay her own stewing long enough for her to whip up a squash flambé. The seasonings were so exquisite the entire tribe converted to vegetarianism on the spot. In halting and charmingly garbled English the chief told Anna he had never known that he liked vegetables, because never before had anyone prepared them for him properly. He gave her a necklace of beads. “Steaming, instead of boiling, that’s the ticket,” Anna told him. “Vegetables have really quite a sweet taste.” Listeners learned that a recipe for the squash flambé would be found on the back of any Sweetwheats box.
You mustn’t get the idea that Anna was a prissy kind of girl. Her cooking expertise had given her a real feel for backyard chemistry. Tie her up with ropes; she could free herself with a homemade corrosive. Make her walk on hot coals; she would cook up a salve for the bottoms of her feet that would last just long enough. And she would do it all with products you could find in your very own kitchen.
She specialized in explosives. She could make a sort of Molotov cocktail and she could make it fast and she could make it out of ordinary household items. The problem came when it was time to light it. Anna was not allowed to play with matches.
Every week the show was packed with useful information. Never run from a wolf nor stare directly into its eyes. If you are made to walk the plank, slip a hollow reed into your sleeve beforehand. You can breathe through the reed for as long as it takes to convince the pirates you have drowned. Contrary to popular wisdom, puffballs are not poisonous. If the alternative is starvation, go ahead and eat them. Properly prepared, they taste a bit like cattails.
Many of Anna’s recipes appeared on the back of Sweetwheats cereal. An exception was the Molotov cocktail. Although instructions would have undoubtedly boosted sales, Henry would not consider it. He had a strong sense of civic responsibility, even beyond Magrit, and lucky for us he did. If Henry Collins had put the recipe for Molotov cocktails on the back of Sweetwheats cereal, we might have skipped the fifties altogether and gone straight into the sixties and how unpleasant would that have been?
Anna’s parents never worried much about her weekly brushes with death, because they didn’t believe in them. The show’s writer, a man who lived in Chicago near the radio station, had a penchant for the it-was-all-a-dream… or-was-it? ending. Week after week, he managed to walk the knife-edge to the satisfaction of his younger audience. When the girls were ten, they used to argue about it next day at recess. If her adventures were real, then they all wanted to be Anna Peal. But not if she was making them up.
To the fourteen-year-olds, it was obvious the adventures were imaginary. “Anna Banana-peel,” they called her, and the writer should have anticipated this bon mot.
As a little girl my mother loved Wheat Theater. Later, when The Avengers came on television, my mother claimed to see Anna Peal all grown up and to like what she saw.
On this occasion Mrs. Peal tucked Anna into bed. “What an imagination you have,” she said fondly. “Now go to sleep and chase some more of those big dreams.” She kissed her daughter. But there was the telltale bead necklace, lying on the night stand. “Why Anna, where did you get this?” her mother asked. “Is this your grandmother’s bead necklace?”
After each adventure, Anna made an initial attempt to come clean. She never tried more than once and she never tried when she had actual physical evidence to support her story. It gave credence to the Anna Banana-peel camp.
“May I have Sweetwheats for breakfast tomorrow?” little Anna asked instead. “It wouldn’t be breakfast without Sweetwheats,” Anna and her mother said in unison. Followed by the Sweetwheats’ jingle:
Every mother’s day starts
With Sweetwheats for her sweethearts….
“Sweetwheats have an appeal,” Anna Peal said at the finish of each show. Followed by assorted announcements.
Maggie Collins had come out with a new book, 20 Ways to Cook a Goose. “Tell your mothers,” Anna instructed the little Wheat Theater listeners. “Every recipe has been pretested in the kitchens at Margaret Mill.”
Free copies had already been given to all the Margaret Mill girls to provide more ammunition in their hunt for husbands. But Irini had no intention of cooking geese. She took the book home and gave it to her father, who amended the title with a ballpoint pen to 20 Ways to Cook Your Goose.
It was a thin, tasteful volume, conveniently organized by body part. There was a small section entitled “Necks!” and a large section entitled “Breasts!” It was lost eventually in one of our moves, but I do remember seeing it.
There was a second announcement: On Saturday afternoon, Maggie Collins’s own baseball team, the Sweetwheat Sweethearts, would be playing their first game ever and they would be playing it right over in Yawkey. Balloons would be given to anyone under five. “They’re all girls,” the announcement said. “And they’re all girl.”
“Well, that’s that,” said Irini. “Now the fat is in the fire.”
“Is it possible we’ll win?” Helen asked.
“We’ll be annihilated,” Irini assured her. “We’ll be humiliated. It will be the most awful day of your life.”
“We might meet some swell guys over in Yawkey,” Tracy said. “Isn’t that the point? That we meet some swell guy and get married? Who cares about baseball?”
Maggie Collins writes: “To peel a hard-cooked egg, roll it on a hard surface until the egg is cracked all over.
“Never attempt to peel a warm egg.”
15
Henry was
dickering with a Señora Lagunas over an ape at the Lagunas estate in Havana. He locked himself in the mill office and shouted long distance over the phone. The ape was named Topsy and Señora Lagunas, who professed to love her passionately, was perhaps going to send her to the Chicago zoo to mate with an ape there whose name was Buddy. Señora Lagunas was putting together a trousseau for Topsy, in case she did decide to send her to Chicago. The señora had purchased Topsy in Paris several years ago. Topsy had been an infant at the time, so Parisian fashions had apparently imprinted her. The trousseau was mostly imported and it was taking a long time to assemble it.
Or else something entirely different. Between his hearing problems, the long distance, and the language barrier, Henry Collins frequently couldn’t follow the drift. “Si, si,” the girls in the Kitchen could hear him shouting. Followed by “No, no!”
Perhaps, if Topsy were to be mated, Señora Lagunas would also agree to let Topsy stop in Magrit first. But perhaps not. She did not see Topsy as the sort of ape one experimented on. She did not really see Topsy as the sort of ape who mated with someone named Buddy. Negotiations went forward and backward and round and round. But there was always the chance they would reach a successful conclusion. Then someone would have to fly down and pick Topsy up. This would be Norma Baldish. Norma was the person you sent for if your car wouldn’t start, or your pipes had frozen, or you were wiring the back bedroom or you were plagued with raccoons or you needed a stump taken out. Norma was the only person in Magrit capable of going to Cuba and picking up an ape.
The Dodgers were in Cuba in the spring of 1947, and so was the entire women’s league, sponsored largely by Philip Wrigley. There must have been more money in gum than in breakfast cereal. The Sweethearts trained right there in Magrit. There was no gym, no locker room, but they did get to get off work early. They brought their equipment to the mill, changed in the Kitchen, and hiked together over to the high school field.
The Sweetheart Season Page 12