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

by Cleo Birdwell

  What happens just as I’m falling into a deep, warm sleep but another phone call. I go padding in my pajamas to the nearest telephone, which was in the living room under a big, gorgeous painting of stags, hunters, and gathering clouds.

  Who is it but Shaver Stevens.

  “I owe you a large apology,” he said.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Sanders Meade. Twisted his arm.”

  “So what’s doing?”

  “I promised you a book next home game, which was tonight, but I just couldn’t get over to the Garden. I had an appointment that ran way, way over. These things happen. I want you to know I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s the book?”

  “Right here.”

  “So bring it over,” I said.

  I called down to the doorman, told him I was expecting company, told him Ms. Penrose was asleep and not to do any buzzing or bell-ringing, put on my robe, and twenty minutes later there was a light tap on the door and in walks Shaver Stevens.

  “You’d like some beer? A Scotch? Cookies and milk?”

  “What kind of cookies?” he said, and I studied him carefully before deciding he was serious.

  I found some oatmeal cookies and some week-old milk, and we sat at the table in the large kitchen, which was done up to resemble a Brittany farmhouse.

  “Well, here’s the book,” he said. “The Mystic Prince I. I hope that’s not the book you already have.”

  “I have The Immortal Peacock.”

  “That’s a good one. I read that one straight through after the Rangers outrighted me to Tulsa.”

  “All the guys are reading Wadi Assad. I’ve been noticing.”

  “They picked it up from the Bruins. One of the Bruins started it. Now it’s catching on all over the league. It’s the travel. It’s the road. You need something out there.”

  He was talking and munching. He’d dunk a cookie in his glass of milk, wait until it was just about ready to break apart with sogginess, and then swoop down and take the whole thing in one bite. He was very unselfconscious about it, and I thought he’d probably been doing it that way since he was two and a half.

  “Shaver, I feel kind of bad about the fact I ended up with your jersey number.”

  “I never liked the number.”

  “How long did you stay with Tulsa?”

  “Four days and three nights.”

  “And that was it?”

  “Into the real world,” he said. “Except I’m beginning to think hockey’s the real world and this is the fantasy.”

  “What are you doing in New York? You’re from way out west somewhere, aren’t you?”

  “Red Deer.”

  “Manitoba?”

  “Alberta,” he said.

  “Red Deer, Alberta. I like that. That’s pretty.”

  “I won’t be in New York much longer.”

  “And your dad played in the NHL.”

  “He raises horses now.”

  “And you couldn’t make it to the Garden because of some late, late date.”

  “Just an appointment.”

  “What kind?”

  “You don’t want to know about it,” he said.

  He reached for another cookie.

  “This may be stupid. Shaver, and maybe I’m meddling, but you don’t resent your dad’s success as a hockey player, do you?”

  He dunked, paused, swooped.

  “You’ve been talking to Jeep. Jeep tells everybody I couldn’t carry my dad’s skates. Jeep thinks my dad is Chucker Stevens. My dad is Trooper Stevens. My dad was in the NHL for a total of about seventeen days and sixteen nights. But that’s Jeep for you. Too many batterings from maniac fans. He’s been out to lunch since 1964.”

  “Want to go inside?”

  “What’s inside?”

  “A room with a bed. I think it’s called the bedroom.”

  He did a strange thing. He stood up, lifted one leg back behind him, and took a look at the bottom of his shoe. Then he took a stick of gum out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. We went to my room. I took off my robe and pajama tops. He stood against the wall, watching and chewing. I moved toward him. He offered me some gum, which I refused.

  He had thick, blond brows and the palest green eyes I’ve ever seen. His neck was short and broad. He had a smallish nose and full mouth. He was blinking a little.

  With my knees first and then my breasts and then my full body, I pushed him against the wall. We kissed clingingly. I was a little taller than he was, and he held me by the pelvis, pulling in and down as though to equalize our height. I started pulling off his sweater. When I got the back of it over his head, I realized I had him effectively pinned, like a player in a hockey fight. At first he struggled instinctively, but then he remained more or less motionless as I undid part of his shirt and then his belt and zipper.

  With the sweater over his head, his upper body hunched over, and his arms trapped up around his ears with his elbows bowed outward, and his pants down around his ankles, he looked like a big, white monkey in some vaudeville routine.

  I looked over at the door. Floss was standing there in a black nightdress with her sleep mask up on her forehead. She looked from Shaver to me and back to him.

  His erection was struggling around inside his boxer shorts and I reached over and parted the fly just enough to get the whole thing catapulting out into the open.

  “I am speechless,” Floss said. “I never thought when I bought this apartment six years ago that I would ever witness a scene like this. The whole point of living in a safe, expensive part of town is to avoid this kind of thing. Do you know how many apartments I looked at? Sixty-two apartments. I chose this one. It is secure. The whole building is secure. The street is patrolled by private security men. This is a street of Jewish doctors. Walk up and down this street. Every window has a Jewish doctor’s sign in it. This is one of the things a prospective tenant looks for when she is out apartment-hunting. She looks for delivery boys without needle tracks in their arms and she looks for Jewish doctors. I spent enough money furnishing this apartment to finance a manned flight to Jupiter, and then I get rid of the painters and spacklers and sanders, and I get the furniture moved in, and I walk in the door, and I get settled, and the place begins to acquire a pleasant, lived-in look, and what sort of scene do I witness?”

  Shaver, with the sweater still over his head and his arms akimbo at ear level, was smart enough to remain absolutely still. For a moment, Floss and I watched his erection deteriorate.

  “Never mind what it cost me to furnish the place,” she said. “Do you know what I paid for the apartment itself? Do you know what I would have to pay if I bought it today? When you’re dealing with sums of money at this rarefied level, I think you have the right to ask questions. For example, who is he and what is he doing here?”

  “You won’t believe this,” I said. “I found him like this outside Bloomingdale’s four days ago. I thought he might be hungry and I brought him up here on the freight elevator. He’s been standing in that spot ever since. I feed him honey and cashews. They seem like such terrific staples.”

  “That is not funny, miss.”

  “Floss, come on, we’re sorry if we woke you, but we’re only having a little whatchmacallit. You’re not really mad, are you?”

  “I told you. I am speechless.”

  “Well, I’ll be finding my own place soon.”

  “When is soon?”

  “Can we talk about it in the morning?”

  “How soon is soon?” she said.

  With that, she walked out, slamming the door. When she got into her bedroom, I heard her slam that door, too. Right after that, she must have gone into the bathroom that’s off the bedroom because there was one more horrific slam.

  I went over to Shaver and pulled the sweater off. Going around on tiptoe, we undressed, keeping our voices very low. I thought if we disturbed Floss again
, she’d make a citizen’s arrest.

  Shaver was rock hard top to bottom. A defenseman. Slow-skating, tough, direct, shot-blocking, fearless. The signs were all over him. Bruises, dents, nicks, scars, knots, bumps and gashes.

  We hopped into bed. The sight of Shaver’s well-marked body made me think this would be like wartime sex with a fellow who was due to hit the beaches at dawn. I’d feel a sympathy, a loyalty, a sisterliness, a grief, a duty, a sense of loss, and a horror at the waste of it all. That is a heavy burden for one sex act to bear.

  I reminded myself his wounds were hockey related. They were entertainment wounds, and nothing to get emotional about. There is enough awe in sex without bringing grief and duty into it.

  I groped for the three-way bulb. This is the second straight chapter that ends with sex and intimate lighting. There is a huge tradition behind this, but I’m not sure I want to be part of it. There are other ways to end chapters and I'm determined to find some of them before too long. Not that there isn’t something right about a chapter that ends with sex. There is something right. Sex is the thing that nothing can follow. It asks for blank space. We wish for a silence that will last at least for the turning of a page.

  In the midst of our heavy breathing. Shaver took the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the wall near his head. For later, I guess.

  3

  In my new apartment near Central Park, our twenty-four-hour doorman, Washington Post, let me borrow his bayonet so I could slit open a couple of giant cartons just shipped from home. Inside were my accumulated belongings, including about seven albums of family photographs. Once I start looking at those things, I’m hooked for about a good hour and a half, I am totally lost in time, and the only trouble with that is that you have to look up eventually, and when you do, you see a room, a street, a city so starkly different from the world inside the pictures, with all their warm memories and associations, that you’re liable to get a little sad and misty.

  I guess technically I was too young to be thinking warm thoughts of home. But when you’ve traveled as much as I have, through the night, across hundreds of miles of prairieland, in a ramshackle bus, or puddle-jumping in single-engine pisspots, or being bounced over the continental divide in your sleek 707 from one storm front to the next, or whatever, you might find yourself feeling kind of affectionate toward a town like Badger, Ohio.

  Badger was a literal-minded place. The school was on School Street, the bank was on Bank Street, the river ran by River Road. Looks a little silly set down on the page like that, but growing up in a town that works and thinks this way has its comforts and its safeties. That was the thing about Badger. Safety. I mean safe in the way that hot oatmeal is safe, oatmeal on a snowy day. Or people shoveling snow—the sound of shovels on a brick sidewalk. This is the kind of safe I mean.

  I more or less grew up on skates. There’s a dammed-up creek in a place called Snowy Owl Glen, and my mother took me over there one day and fitted on some double-runner skates and then just patted me on the rear and sent me on my way. I remember bigger kids skating hand in hand and playing crack the whip, which must have struck me as pretty daredevil, and my mom doing figure eights.

  The sides were banked with hard snow. I have pictures in which I am weighed down by many layers of sweaters, mittens, socks, coats, and a big, long stocking cap that my father called my moron hat. I wear white skates.

  A lot of my childhood was a shuttle between the pond at Snowy Owl Glen and the old, now demolished public library. This was a one-room library with floor-to-ceiling shelves, and it was dark, empty, and quiet, with maple trees outside and dusty gold light filtering in through the tall windows. I liked the place so much I not only went there to borrow books, but I’d pick out a chair and sit down and start reading then and there, in that mysterious, soft sunlight. An old, red brick building. The library.

  They put a stick in my hands when I was five or six. I became your typical sleepy-eyed rink rat. The rink was about twenty miles out of town and you had to reserve ice time well in advance. My poor dad had to get up at 5:30 on Saturdays and take me on over there. The place was swarming all winter long with so-called midgets, peewees etc. Kids all yawning while we waited our turns on the ice. Parents asleep standing up.

  Hockey was the only exception in my life to a strict observance of the seasons. I played hockey when and where I could, on or off skates, in one form or another. In general, though, we did certain things only in certain seasons. Seasons were strictly marked off and adhered to. More literal-mindedness. And we were always early in Badger. We started thinking about spring on Groundhog Day, probably because we weren’t too far from Punxsutawney, Pa., which is where the groundhog comes out of his hole and either sees his shadow (six more weeks of winter) or doesn’t (spring is practically here).

  The official end of spring was Decoration Day. Holidays were important events, and also strictly observed, and made you feel safe, and Decoration Day, which is known as Memorial Day in most places, was terrific fun, if you can say that about a day in which people go around decorating the graves of dead soldiers.

  The days were getting warmer and longer. All the trees had big, new green leaves. The buckeye trees were flowering. The air was full of bumblebees, the grass spotted with dandelions.

  Everybody’s lawn had dandelions. Nobody in Badger was out to create the perfect, manicured suburban lawn. I don’t want to be militant about it, but these were smalltown lawns, and they were full of clover and dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans and weeds of all kinds. The lawns.

  But what about Decoration Day? Well, I’d wake up to the sound of my brother mowing the lawn. We’re talking about a hand mower, making those little, rhythmic, chugging sounds. A nice noise to wake up to. It made me feel safe and comfortable. Like shovels on brick sidewalks in winter.

  A flag hung on every front porch. All up and down our street, you’d see flags hanging down off the tops of porches.

  There’d be a parade up Third Street in the morning. The American Legion, the high school band, the fire engine, and a whole lot of kids. You know how kids march. They don’t just march. They tramp their feet, swing their arms, and bob their heads to such a degree you almost think they’re making fun of the elders. Veterans handed out poppies on the street corners, and everybody followed the parade to the cemetery, where one of the veterans made a speech.

  It was a terrific cemetery. All the graves were decorated with flags and planted with geraniums and pansies and dusty miller. Big old trees provided a lot of shade. There were tombstones from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. People used to go to the cemetery on Sundays just to go to the cemetery. That custom began vanishing when I was still pretty young.

  After the speech, we’d hear the noon whistle blow at the fire-house. Then my family would get in the car and go on a picnic, and this picnic marked the end of spring and the beginning of summer. The parade was still spring. Once we saw and heard the bumblebees flying around our food, we knew it was summer.

  My mother always baked a ham, fried some chicken, made potato salad, deviled some eggs, pickled some beets, and made a chocolate cake. We drove around back in the hills, looking for the Perfect Picnic Place. This always brought on squabbling. To me, the best place of all was near the Pennsylvania state line, where the woods were thick and a stream ran down through a gorge with waterfalls here and there, and big, dark, flat rocks along the bank.

  Everything smelled so good. The food. The homemade lemonade and iced tea. The sweet, dry grass. Definitely summer smells. And we’d hear the drone of bees and the water rushing over smooth stones.

  Safe. Very safe.

  As I got older and taller, I began to get serious about my hockey. I worked hard on speed skating, stick handling, shooting, and even played defense now and then because I liked skating backward. People didn’t fail to notice there was something a l
ittle bit tremendous about my ability. I seemed to see everything that was happening on the ice. I had excellent anticipation. As you’ve heard four hundred times on TV: “These are things you can’t teach, Merle.” “You either have it or you don’t, eh, Toby?” And I could skate stride for stride with boys two or three years older—big, pimply, hulking, pubescent, moody kids.

  I played with them, I fought with them, I shared their locker rooms, I drove them half-mad with sweaty, aching, voice-changing, male lust. After a while, they began to accept me.

  What could they do, take me to the walls of the city and stone me?

  We are in the Garden—why do they call it the Garden?—and some toothless, crooked-faced Penguin is trying to maul hell out of me in the corners. My wings, Fergie and Gord, show no interest in helping out this particular snowy eve.

  Near the end of the second period, I butt-ended the son of a bitch and then dropped my stick and gloves and started punching. He hit back, hard, and melees developed, and the benches emptied.

  When it was nearly over, I stood in a corner and saw the ice strewn with gloves and sticks, and all the players on both teams paired off, just clutching now, and I felt good. I felt a white hot elation. I’d started it, throwing my first NHL punch, and they’d come to my aid, my teammates, my mates, come swarming off the bench like legionnaires.

  What could they do, avert their eyes and pretend it was tennis?

  In Chicago, I bumped into our GM Sanders Meade in the hotel lobby, and he asked me if I wanted to go to dinner along with the announcers Merle Halverson and Toby Scott.

  We went to a Polynesian restaurant where certain drinks are so devastating the management limits the number you can order.

  Merle kept talking about the new kidney-shaped swimming pool he was having installed on his Westchester property. It turned out he also had a swimming-pool-shaped kidney. He hadn’t been feeling well, and recent scans and X rays showed that one of his kidneys was practically rectangular. He said further tests were in the works.