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

by Cleo Birdwell

  That’s the romantic motor in my skull, running amuck. The image-making machine.

  “Toby, you’d best go. This is how they speak in polite households. You’d really best leave. I am giving you every chance, which is a lot more than you deserve.”

  “What if we get into bed without touching?”

  “I’m already in bed. I’m in bed. We’re not touching now. Why would I want someone not touching me in bed if we’re not touching now?”

  “Well, I’m freezing over here.”

  “You should have worn clothes.”

  “It wouldn’t have been the same.”

  “You can move away from the window, but only as far as the warm-air vent.”

  “I appreciate that, Cleo. The Birdwells are Christians. Everybody knows that.”

  I could spy his slouched form kind of skulking sideways toward the heating unit. Toby was no sooner settled than he commenced a forty-five-minute monologue on his life and times. I don’t know what brought it on. The heat, maybe, or my Christian gesture in letting him move over there. It was a boring story. I’d call it a rambling monologue except there wasn’t enough material in his life to cause him to ramble very far. It was straightforward, direct, and dull. I catnapped two or three times in the course of it. By the time he was finished, the sun was up and there was enough light in the room to make him out, round-shouldered and sunken-chested and paunchy, the warm air flow causing a little cowlick to stand up at the top of his head.

  A thought occurred to me.

  “Have you ever done this before?” I said.

  “Never.”

  “Never? Are you sure?”

  “That’s a sickening thing to ask.”

  “Never is a long time.”

  “What are you implying, Cleo?”

  “Toby, never? At no time whatsoever?”

  “Twice before,” he said.

  “How many times?”

  “You really sicken me, Cleo.”

  “How many times?” I said.

  “Eleven.”

  “Eleven times.”

  “This is the first time I’ve been caught.”

  “Where have you done it?”

  “The road. Always on the road.”

  “And what do you do once you’re in the person’s room?”

  “I squat in the dark.”

  “You squat in the dark.”

  “I always leave before they wake up. I slip quietly in and quietly out. I let myself in by inserting a credit card under the latch bolt.”

  “What do you do with the credit card afterward?”

  “I secrete it on my person.”

  “Oh, God, no. You secrete it on your person? That could only be one place.”

  “You keep repeating what I say, Cleo.”

  I sank down into the soft pillow.

  “Have you ever been in my room before?”

  “No,” he said. “I always pick out a single woman in the hotel lobby and sort of follow her around or make discreet inquiries. Once I learn the room number, the rest is easy.”

  “Why me, this time?”

  “I couldn’t find another woman who seemed to be traveling alone. Believe me, I didn’t like the idea of entering the room of someone I know. If you think I looked forward to it, you’re way off base.”

  “What was all that business about tearing off a piece?”

  “Well, you brought it on by waking up. You’re the first one who ever woke up while I was squatting in the dark.”

  “With a credit card up your ass.”

  “I thought since I was caught, I might as well try for the brass ring. I thought if you were off guard enough, I might be able to turn the whole thing around.”

  “Look at you, Toby. And you’re only about thirty years old.”

  “My muscle tone is going all to hell.”

  “You look like a panda, except not as cute.”

  “Bad body or not, I was able to slip in and out of rooms without getting caught until tonight. That comes from all the years in the crease, learning how to move like a cat. Goaltenders all have bad bodies, in one form or another, but we all learn how to be cat-quick. That’s how a goaltender makes his living, with catlike moves, and that’s how I was able to slip in and out of rooms until tonight. I guess I never really accepted the fact that I was all through as an athlete until I made enough noise to wake you up tonight. So you did me a favor, Cleo. I now accept. If you weren’t an athlete yourself, you probably wouldn’t have been alert enough to hear me. That’s something I didn’t include in my calculations. The athlete’s hair-trigger sense of sight and sound.”

  His cowlick fluttered in the breeze.

  “I hope you won’t be judgmental, Cleo. This is my last squat. I promise.”

  “Why do you do it, do you think, Toby?”

  “I guess I’m overflowing with the Spirit. I never did it until Christ came into my life. The Spirit is just so strong in me, Cleo, that I have to manifest it somehow. Especially on the road.”

  He got up and walked to the door. The early light caught his face in a poignant way as he turned toward me, raven haired.

  “I’m getting together a Bible-study group, Cleo. Some of the players are interested. So is Mr. Chicken. I thought we’d get together before and after each game and take turns reading the Bible and telling about how our lives got turned around once we let Christ come into our hearts.”

  “All I want to do is play hockey. That’s all I want to do.”

  “You’ll feel different after you come to one of our meetings. All the Birdwells I’ve ever known have turned their lives around. Your Bird well is a real good Christian.”

  He went naked into the hall, softly closing the door behind him. There was a brief silence. Then I heard a chambermaid, right outside my door, saying matter-of-factly, “You better get to your room, mister. This ain’t no Motel in the Woods. Keep your hands at your sides. I don’t want to get involved, so as long as you keep moving and keep your hands at your sides at all times, I never saw a thing.”

  Early light poured softly into my room. Soon, everything was silent again.

  The four seasons in Badger.

  My mother made sure I knew the names of plants and flowers growing around the yard and climbing up the house. Lilac bushes, forsythia, wisteria, hydrangea, and the one I could never remember, which is spirea. This is an old-fashioned, small-town kind of bush—very large, with small, lacy, white flowers that come out in late spring and into early summer.

  You knew it was midspring when you heard birdsong at dusk. The light at that hour had a soft, rosy glow that was especially pretty because most of the houses in Badger are red brick, and I would walk down the street hearing sparrows and thrushes and blue jays and seeing the rich, pink glow on the buildings and sidewalks, and it sometimes gave me almost a sad feeling, a feeling of longing and regret and separation. It made me feel I was missing something. Missing the whole point of something. But isn’t this what spring usually does, the fragrances it carries on the breeze, the old maples coming into green, the way the river current, the Ohio, is noticeably swifter? It makes you feel a longing for something. You are home and safe, and the air is sweet, but there is something, some important thing, that is missing, and you never find out what it is.

  Easter was pretty big in Badger. Forget Good Friday. That’s not a Badger kind of day. Badger doesn’t have the kind of temperament that really digs in and enjoys a day like that.

  After I got out of bed on Easter Sunday morning, I roamed all over the house looking for my Easter basket, which my father usually hid in a fairly predictable place to spare himself the tension of my wandering off in the wrong direction. Inside the basket I’d find jelly beans, yellow marshmallow chickens, a dark chocolate bunny, and odds and ends.

  I never ate black jelly beans. Nobody liked black jelly beans. As I recall, licorice was not generally liked in Badger.

  Yes, and we
dyed Easter eggs, my mother and I, Saturday night before Easter morning, boiling water and vinegar and using only primary colors—red, yellow and blue. The Easter eggs.

  I almost forgot pussy willows. It was important to find the first pussy willows in bloom and steal them off whatever bush they were on and hide them in your bedroom. Don’t ask me why.

  And violets. They grew down by the river, in a big field. I always picked a bunch for Dorothy on Mother’s Day morning. Holidays. Holidays were signposts of the seasons and carefully observed. (We’ve already seen Decoration Day.)

  Basically, Badger was a lilac, pussy willow, violet, forsythia, maple tree town in spring. Nothing fancy.

  Summer was heat, stillness, and shade. The peaceful look of the wide streets and wide sidewalks, and the wonderful smell of sweet grass up in the woods in the hills back of town. And swimming every day in Buck’s Run or Snowy Owl Glen. And eating onion sandwiches—sliced onions on white bread with butter and salt and pepper, day after day.

  Almost every house had a front porch, and people sat on rockers or swings or gliders, talking. As small kids, we used to put those polly noses (maple tree wings) on our noses, and we also ate sour grass, which might have been sorrel.

  What broke the stillness and peace were gigantic thunderstorms. About once a week, the sky would get dark, and then turn flat yellow and foreboding, and you’d see lightning shoot across the sky, and you’d hear loud thunder—great, whomping cracks of thunder. Everybody stayed away from windows, radios, telephones, TVs etc. But at the same time, it was safe. Assuming you were sitting in the middle of the house and the storm wasn’t too violent, you felt the safety and security of a summer storm, a sweet-smelling familiar thing after all, which would stir up the air even before the heavens opened and which meant summer every bit as much as potato salad picnics on the Fourth.

  The river was green in summer and flowed gently, with hardly any current to it. Hollyhocks were blooming, showy spikes of flowers. And the bumblebees were everywhere, buzzing around your head and walking on your onion sandwich.

  On the Fourth, it would always be about a hundred degrees, and there were firecrackers and cap pistols and potato salad and bees, and people would start talking about summer being practically over, because Badger people were always early in that regard.

  When summer was really over was when you heard locusts humming in the afternoon. This definitely meant the end of summer, even though they weren’t locusts but cicadas and even though there were still plenty of hot, hot days ahead. It was a safe sound, the wonderful, hot buzzing of the so-called locusts, but it was also a little sad because it meant summer was ending and because the locusts sometimes fell out of trees onto your head.

  Locusts buzzed loudest when it was hottest. We believed this and knew it to be true. It was one of about seven thousand things we knew to be true and which made Badger the beautiful, sad place that it was.

  Labor Day was the saddest of all holidays. The end of summer. The last picnic. The final weekend before school. The last chance to swim in Buck’s Run.

  Sad picnics. All over Badger and the surrounding countryside, you saw groups of sad picnickers on Labor Day. Dorothy would get up very early, about 6:00 a.m., in order to get things really right, traditionally and totally and precisely right. By nine, we’d all be in the car waiting for my brother Kenny, who would be standing off on the edge of the lawn doing “walk the dog” with his yo-yo.

  Then we’d go driving around, amid a lot of squabbling, looking for the Perfect Last Picnic Place. It was always ninety degrees on Labor Day. It was one of the things we all knew about Labor Day. It would be ninety degrees.

  This was the holiday that led us into fall, when the light was soft and gold, and the leaves turned red, yellow, rust, winy dark, and amber. Not to get competitive about it, but it did out-Vermont Vermont, and the colors lasted longer than New England colors.

  The cider mill up Cider Mill Road was turning out cold, fresh cider every day. All the stupid bumblebees were dead. And people raked leaves and burned them right in the gutter in front of their houses. My father raked our leaves into big piles and I would jump into each pile about up to my waist and then stand off to the side as he and my brother lighted the piles of leaves.

  The smell of burning leaves would hang over the town. A lovely, safe, haunting smell. The leaves.

  Football was very big in Badger. It outdrew the churches, the schools, the cemeteries. Days were still pretty warm, hazy-golden in the afternoon, and nights were crisp and cool.

  The buckeyes had fallen by now and opened, and we collected the glossy brown nuts for luck. There were many vegetable gardens in town, so we’d see pumpkins growing right in people’s yards. Halloween.

  Sometimes fog rolled up from the river and was so thick you couldn’t see across the street. Cars went by slowly, with headlights on, and mothers walked their children to school.

  I could tell you about Indian summer in Badger, but maybe it’s enough just to say the words, and they’re the two words my mother always said were the most beautiful in the language when put one after the other. Indian summer.

  Then one grayish day you’d get up and smell snow in the air. Sure enough, about 2:15 in the afternoon, the first big, feathery flakes would come dancing down. At night, snow sparkled on the lawns and porch steps.

  I think we can say Thanksgiving was properly part of winter, especially if we consider Groundhog Day the first chilly glimpse of spring.

  In Badger, Thanksgiving was a gray day with a yellowish sky in the afternoon. Always. My mother had already made the stuffing the day before, as well as the cranberry relish and the mince pie and the pumpkin pie. The turkey was big, about twenty pounds, and the stuffing was bread and sage and parsley and onions and butter. No fancy chestnut or sausage stuff. Small-town stuffing.

  And the traditional dinner. Fruit cocktail, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, celery and olives, brussels sprouts, creamed onions, cranberry relish, and the pies.

  White meat was very important. There is never enough white meat. During Tom Spencer Birdwell’s carving of the turkey, there were earnest discussions about thigh versus leg, how many slices of white meat, who gets the outside slice with the skin. Unlike our squabbling over picnic sites in the car, there was a lot of self-sacrifice here. Maybe this was because my Christian Science uncle and aunt were usually there, and Kenny and I associated that whole religion, and them with it, with pure, weird, silent suffering.

  That night we ate turkey sandwiches with lettuce and mayonnaise, and started planning for Christmas.

  Our plane circled Logan Airport for about forty-five minutes. We found out later that a man had wired himself with dynamite and gone out on the runway to dramatize the fact that his dime hadn’t been returned even though he’d gotten a busy signal in a public phone booth.

  I spent the afternoon roaming the streets of Boston. It was gray and slushy. I kept running into my teammates, traveling in small, morose bands.

  I went back to the hotel. I tried to sleep. I tried to read. I tried to watch TV.

  The game against the Bruins was what they call a lackluster affair. We lost, but no one cared. From my cubicle, I heard J.P. tell the press, “We don’t play defensive. We take the body, no way that puck goes in the net seven times. What is worse, I left my cigarettes on the bench.”

  I went back to the hotel, where I called Shaver from deep under the covers.

  “Cleo, you ought to start wearing a helmet.”

  “Why?”

  “I read about last night’s game. More than half the players wear helmets now. You don’t have to feel a helmet means you’re a sissy.”

  “Shaver, I know that. Don’t you think I know that? I just go through phases. I’ve worn helmets four or five times in my career. I’m in a bareheaded phase, that’s all.”

  “Is it vanity?”

  “A little maybe.”

  “Is it bravado?”

>   “Sure, some of that, too.”

  “Is it stupidity?”

  “Now you’ve hit on it.”

  We both laughed.

  “Any mail?” I said.

  “Nope.”

  “Did you talk to Dr. Glass?”

  “Nope.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Lonely and depressed.”

  “That’s the Human Condition,” I told him. “Only proves you’re human.”

  “Sure, be funny, but if something happened to me, I could be lying here dead or dying for two weeks, until you got back and opened the door. You’ll spend the rest of your life paralyzed with guilt because you didn’t call. A simple phone call.”

  “I’ll call. I will call.”

  “No one would miss me if anything happened. No one would care. No one would know.”

  “The doorman would know. Mr. Willie. He’d know.”

  “He’s not here day and night.”

  “He’s a twenty-four-hour doorman.”

  “That’s an expression. The man has to go home and sleep.”

  “He sleeps right there. In the little office. He sleeps while you sleep. There’s no overlapping. It’s in the lease.”

  “Go ahead, Cleo, be funny.”

  “I’ll definitely call.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “I will.”

  “You’ll forget. And in two weeks you’ll come home and call my name and there’ll be no answer. You’ll walk into the bedroom, white with fear.”

  “Shaver, I’m telling you I’ll call.”

  “Why would you want to call someone like me? I wouldn’t. I’d be too busy living a normal, happy, productive life.”

  On the plane to Buffalo next day, my stomach made funny little buzzing sounds like two cartoon characters talking to each other. Usually I hear these sounds when I’ve had too light a dinner and am lying hungry in bed hoping I’ll fall asleep right away. It always happens on the road. Everything does.

  Naturally there was a blizzard in Buffalo. The plane was like the scene of an airborne earthquake. Things kept flying out of the galley, and coats and blankets bounced down from the overhead compartments and filled the aisles. A spot of heavy weather. Players shot white-lipped looks at each other. To be accurate, it wasn’t a case of shooting looks; it was a situation where you accidentally caught each other’s eye. People never purposely look at each other in this kind of turbulence. You only look at members of the crew, hoping for some indication that the aircraft is supposed to be flying sideways. You look at people with eagles on their breasts.