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

by Cleo Birdwell

  “What about you, Cleo?”

  “I don’t remember, Archie.”

  “I was in Sarasota, Florida, playing tennis with my uncle J.R. when we heard it on somebody’s transistor. It was the first set and J.R. was ahead three games to two. I was wearing cut-off jeans. Where were you when Janis Joplin died?”

  “We don’t remember,” Floss said.

  “Let Cleo speak for herself.”

  “I don’t remember,” I said.

  “I was in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with my mother and father and my cousin J.R. Junior. We drove up to watch the leaves change color. We heard it on the car radio. We were doing forty-five in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. There was a green Toyota in front of us. My mother was cleaning her sunglasses.”

  We ate and drank a while.

  “Where were you when Jim Morrison died?” he said.

  “I give up,” Floss said. “Where was I?”

  “Where were you, Cleo?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Archie finished his drink and dove into the water without telling us where he’d been or what he’d been wearing. He came up clutching his trunks and hung on to the edge of the pool.

  “It would have been awful to be out of the country when Elvis died,” he said. “I don’t think I could have survived that. I would have felt as though I forfeited my citizenship. Not to be here when something of that magnitude takes place. I would have felt unbelievably lonely out there in Europe or Asia, totally frigging alone and depressed. That plus the media coverage. Imagine not being able to enjoy the media coverage. What’s the point of being American if you’re going to be out of the country for a thing of that magnitude?”

  I said, “You sound to me like someone who’s thinking about changing his life.”

  “Maybe it’s time.”

  “Settling down,” I said.

  “I’ll give you an idea how out of touch I’ve gotten. I didn’t even know about the Panasonic five-foot screen.”

  “Good detail, I hear,” Floss said.

  I looked from one to the other.

  “I didn’t even know,” he said.

  “What is it?” I said. “Know what?”

  “There’s a TV set with a five-foot screen on the market,” Floss said. “Good detail, they say.”

  “That’s how out of touch,” Archie said.

  He hoisted himself up and came flopping over the edge. I watched him crawl over to the bourbon bottle and start pouring little trickles all over Floss’s toes. Time to think about leaving. I dove in, swam a few lengths, toweled off, and went down the hall to my den. On the way, I walked past seven or eight open doorways. I couldn’t help pausing at the last of these. Beneath a Tiffany lamp stood two chairs and a table with a green felt top. Set up on the table was a Monopoly board. The Chance cards and Community Chest cards were face down in the allotted places. Monopoly money was stacked neatly in three piles—two for the players, one for the bank. The title deed cards were in one neat stack. The houses and hotels were in a little Chinese box—an Aunt Glad contribution, no doubt. The weird little tokens all sat in the corner marked GO. The dice were at the center of the board, showing snake eyes.

  Beyond the table and chairs was a pretty little brass bed.

  About three hours later, I was in the kitchen checking out the herbs and spices when the dogs started up a fearful yowling. I stuck my head out the window and saw Murray plodding across the lawn with shopping bags in both hands and all kinds of implements, silverware, and other stuff hanging out of his pockets.

  He moved sideways through the leaping dogs and made it to the door. I let him in and he just dropped everything on the floor and sort of collapsed standing up against a wall.

  “I’ll get you a drink, Murray.”

  “A small, neat Scotch in a clean glass.”

  “Coming up.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  “What’s the story there?”

  “She’s his agent.”

  “She’s your agent, too. You don’t take naps together.”

  I gave him the drink and he started taking things out of the bags.

  “I took cabs, buses, and hitchhiked. You don’t want to hear about it.”

  I watched him haul his massive, shaggy manuscript out of the bottom of the second shopping bag.

  “What are we eating?” I said.

  “I’m aiming for a brilliant simplicity. It’s not easy finding the right ingredients in these retired aircraft carriers they use for supermarkets, but I did my best. Not that I’m complaining. I happen to be a Brooklyn boy who loves the idea of America. These travels out of the solar system are what make my job tolerable. I’ve had a love affair with America ever since my father took me to the funeral of an old friend of his in Waterbury, Connecticut. He wanted me to see death in a natural setting. To him, Waterbury was the country. To me, too. He dragged me around the streets, saying, ‘Go ahead, look for kosher.’ That funeral was like summer camp for me. ‘Find me a knish,’ he’d say, and we’d both laugh.”

  He was putting things in the refrigerator, taking other things out of cabinets, checking drawers for the right implements, inspecting pans and bowls, finding a lemon press, reading the small print on the unfamiliar packages of butter, cream, sugar, and so on. He took a knife out of his inside jacket pocket. He called it his four-inch Wüsthof. A utility knife. He said he carried it everywhere.

  In a side pocket was his Peugeot pepper grinder.

  He got all this stuff out of his jacket, then threw the jacket over a chair and began washing his hands, turning them slowly over each other under hot water, like the head of surgery at the Mayo Clinic.

  “Veal piccata, Cleo. To answer your question.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I managed to find some white peppercorns. I don’t like black pepper because it distracts from the golden whiteness of the finished scallops. Fortunately, I picked up some fine-crystal French sea salt when we were in Boston. And I never leave New York without a quart tin of extra-virgin, cold-pressed olive oil stashed somewhere.”

  He looked at me through his little round glasses. Then we both got down to serious work. Naturally I let Murray call the shots. We worked pretty well as a team.

  Using his Wüsthof deftly, he quickly reduced a pile of parsley to exactly four teaspoons.

  He watched me dust the zucchini blossoms in a snowy haze of flour.

  He opened a bottle of soave, saying that an authentic veal piccata should be made with a good Italian white wine—very dry, and light, and good.

  I rolled a lemon on the counter because Murray wanted to bring its juices to the surface. After I cut it in half, we put first one half, then the other into Archie’s German-made lemon press, and out came four teaspoons of lemon juice.

  The whole experience was kind of impressionistic. Murray was doing veal with one hand, cheesecake with the other, and at the same time he’d guide me calmly through a tense moment with the crème de Crécy, and follow this with a discussion of the difference between an unripe brie on Bremner wafers and a brie with more character on a Carr’s water biscuit.

  (Better mouth texture with the former.)

  “Cleo, you’re bruising the arugula. Kindly let it rest in that bowl of water. When I’m finished here, we’ll dry it in a special bath towel I use for drying the more delicate salad greens.”

  “Can I do it?”

  “Of course.”

  “How do I do it?”

  “Arugula is fragile. It has to be rocked back and forth very, very gently in a fluffy bath towel. Watercress, endive, Bibb or Boston lettuce I spin-dry in my Swiss Roti green-dryer. Iceberg, we don’t even talk about. Coarse. And noisy.”

  “I like noisy food.”

  “Food sounds are interesting. Some are tacky, some are subtle. Listen to butter melting on a warm croissant. You can hear it, I swear.”

  �
��You ought to write an article.”

  “No time. First things first.”

  I thought I saw him glance at his manuscript, which was sitting on the refrigerator.

  “What kind of cheesecake is that?”

  “Lindy’s original,” he said. “I want you to beat in the sour cream and half-and-half.”

  “Will do.”

  We were having fun. Murray was sloppy and methodical at the same. It is an ability that flourishes in kitchens, I’ve noticed. He would throw things around and create enormously chaotic little instances of panic in various parts of the kitchen, but there was thought, practice, and professionalism behind all the seeming disorder. In the midst of buttering a cake pan and applying a mallet to the veal, he made me a Scotch on the rocks, got another Scotch neat for himself, used his elbow to nudge the pulse button on the blender, and fondled my bottom with his hand in a plaid mitten potholder.

  “Are they really taking a nap, those two?”

  “First we all went swimming,” I said. “Then I got some badly needed rest while they played chess or checkers or something. I think they like to nap after checkers.”

  I felt like a total fool giving him this censored version of events. I even avoided the word Monopoly because of the erotic, incestlike quality that I had gradually come to associate with it. But I didn’t think it would be very gracious for a houseguest to reveal the intimate secrets of her host, on the one hand, and her friend and agent, on the other.

  Murray gave me a skeptical look as he broke an egg with one hand and held a handful of dill up to his nose with the other. He seemed to take great pleasure in smelling things. He took deep, thoughtful sniffs of practically everything that passed through his hands and he even stuck his head in the refrigerator, the oven, the pots, and the mixing bowl to reconnoiter for strange, familiar, or alarming aromas. I realized, thinking about it, that on at least one occasion, when I had a drink with Murray and Sanders Meade in Los Angeles, Murray had seemed to be sniffing the women who passed our table. At the time I’d thought it was just my imagination, but as I watched him in the kitchen, lifting handfuls of produce to his nose, I recognized the look on his face as the expression he’d had in that lounge as waitresses and other females drifted by, and his head sort of fell to his shoulders, and his eyes narrowed, and he took swift, deep breaths through his nose. Sinus, I’d thought at the time. But he was smelling the women walking past.

  I tried to recall the difference between sensual and sensuous. I’m not sure why exactly. There is just something about being in the presence of a man who sniffs women that made me feel I ought to know.

  “Have you met Floss and Archie?” I said.

  “Neither one.”

  “Never covered tennis?”

  “I hate tennis. Of all the sports I hate, it’s the only one I’ve never covered. Tennis is in my pantheon of all-time thumb-sucking, jerk-off sports, second only to golf. Golf is the puritan ethic, landscaped. It’s eighteen anal openings with waving flags. I don’t even want to talk about it.”

  Three twists of the Peugeot pepper grinder. He never left New York without his pepper grinder, he said.

  “Are there any sports you like?”

  “The animal sports,” he said. “Boxing, roller derby, cockfights. That’s the real world and that’s what I’d like to cover. Puerto Rican cockfights.”

  I jerked a thumb toward the refrigerator.

  “What’s in that manuscript?”

  “I don’t talk about that.”

  “You carry it everywhere.”

  “I work on it all the time.”

  “Has anyone read it?”

  “I send copies to my editor. I have a contract.”

  “What’s the big secret?”

  “The book touches on some sensitive areas.”

  “In what field?”

  “Can’t tell you, Cleo.”

  I began to clear a space so I could get ready to sauté the zucchini blossoms.

  “Give me a hint,” I said.

  “It’s not sports.”

  “Is it politics?”

  “It’s not sports. That’s all I’m saying. It’s the real world. It’s animal. It’s Darwinian. It’s not a bunch of boys rolling in the mud.”

  “What’s wrong with boys rolling in the mud?”

  “This book is my personal liberation, Cleo. These are adult matters. Things that have a real impact on the world.”

  He was chopping garlic with the Wüsthof.

  “I’ll say this about sports,” he said. “Athletes have bodies. That’s the bottom line on athletes. They’re people with bodies. I envy that in a person.”

  The plaid, mittened hand made a grab that I easily evaded. We concentrated on the task before us, although not without a few learned asides from Murray, including demonstrations of knife grips, dicing techniques etc.

  “You really like that knife.”

  “A gift from my ex-wife. She had excellent taste in cutlery. I mean it. She taught me a lot. If you’re serious about cooking, you have to surround yourself with precision tools.”

  “What happened?”

  “I surrounded myself with Wüsthofs.”

  “No, what happened to your marriage?”

  “Well, that’s a long, complicated, deeply personal, very boring story. She’s a terrific lady and we had a lot going for us, I think. But these things happen.”

  “What things?”

  “Things happen, Cleo. It’s so hard to maintain a relationship today. You relate for a while. Then you have trouble relating. Then you don’t relate at all.”

  “What do you mean, relate? Can you be specific?”

  “Bernice and I related. We talked the same language. We wanted the same thing.”

  “What did you want?”

  “A relationship. Someone to relate to.”

  “Well, what happened specifically when you stopped relating?”

  “How specific do you want me to be?”

  “Go the limit, Murray.”

  “She became a lesbian. They were all doing it. It started because there were so many novels about women who go to bed with men they can’t stand. It began to depress the female readership. Some of them became lesbians as a result. Then they wrote books. This was the second wave of novels, and this is where Bernice started reading. But I think she’s since gone back to the first wave, to sort of cement her convictions.”

  “Who is she a lesbian with?”

  “Paine, Webber, Jackson and Curtis. She’s a financial analyst.”

  “No, no, I mean was there a particular woman she got interested in?”

  “She was always hazy about that. I never understood exactly what was happening there. I even suspected it might be a man.”

  “Would that have been better or worse from your viewpoint?”

  “Cleo, I spent hours and hours thinking about that very thing. Do I want it to be a man, or do I leave well enough alone and believe it’s a woman? A terrific, modern, thumb-sucking dilemma.”

  “Why would she tell you it was a woman if it wasn’t?”

  “Either to hurt me more or to hurt me less. She could have gone either way. Who knows?”

  A fleeting thought as I stirred the soup. Maybe there was no other person at all. Bernice left him because she got tired of being sniffed.

  “Anyway, Cleo, I like to think the whole experience has made me seem unprotected in an interesting way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive.”

  He looked at me with those soft, dark, heavy-lidded eyes. They were the eyes of a man who tries to charm people by being frankly conniving. And yet I thought I detected a certain genuine unprotectedness. There was a melancholy depth behind Murray’s various attempts to gain a sexual advantage. He was sincere in spite of himself.

  “Is this the way the soup is supposed to look?”<
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  “Perfect, Cleo. Peach-velvety. We’ll dust it with fresh, snipped dill.”

  “Should I wake the others?”

  “Give them a few more minutes. And adjust the gauge on that mixer, please. Low speed.”

  I did that, and together we dried the arugula in the bath towel he’d brought, neatly folded, in one of the shopping bags. He showed me how to cradle the arugula in the towel and then delicately remove the excess moisture, virtually drop by drop. It was like drying a broken leg.

  “I use white towels only, for aesthetics, or color contrast. And they have to be one hundred percent cotton. Not a trace, not a whisper of polyester. No polyester. Never.”

  “Do you get these ideas out of cookbooks?”

  “Absolutely not. It’s strictly instinct, practice, personal style. I don’t associate food with literacy at all. Different parts of the brain completely. I’m very, very oral. I learn by tasting.”

  The mixer came to a stop. Murray finished his Scotch, rinsing his teeth with the last mouthful.

  “Tell me one thing, Murray.”

  “Anything at all. The more personal, the better. Ask me something intimate, Cleo. I love having intimate talks with women. Warm, frank, intimate, revealing exchanges. Huddled together over a drink. A man and woman in a dark, quiet spot at four-thirty on a rainy afternoon. Sounds of swishing tires outside. Some old, old ballad on the jukebox. He nods sympathetically as she reveals deep, candid, moist intimacies about herself. The blurry panes of glass. The sound of her stockings as she crosses her legs.”

  “Why did you want the mixer at low speed?”

  Deflated. But I think he knew more or less what was coming. He’d set it up himself.

  “You’re a wicked woman, Cleo. You’re full of womanly wiles in reverse. You seduce by being wholesome, practical, ordinary, and down to earth.”

  “Ordinary?”

  “The most disarming weapon in the female arsenal. Ordinary. Give me more. I love it a lot.”

  “Murray, I’d really like to know why you wanted the mixer at low speed.”

  “You add the heavy cream and sugar at low speed because you want a heavy cheesecake. The original Lindy’s is heavy. If you beat at high speed, you get air pockets and that gives you a feathery cheesecake, which is the last thing you want. If you beat at moderate speed, you get a well-balanced, mid western cheesecake. We want to be extremist here. So we go low speed. The best cheesecake sits in your stomach like a gold bar. Cheesecake has to hurt a little. That means it cares.”