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

by Cleo Birdwell

  “When did peeing become a contact sport?”

  He became practically reverent. Natural functions have that effect on people.

  “Cleo, you’ll need the helmet. The hot water heater is right above the John. It leaks sometimes, and I’m afraid it might even explode. If dripping water was the only problem, we could wear towels or plastic rain-things, but I’m afraid it might really go.”

  “Isn’t there another toilet?”

  “It went.”

  “Give me the damn hat.”

  “It’s on a towel hook,” he whispered.

  I went in there, noting rust spots all over the bottom of the heater. I put on the helmet and sat down. While I was there, I had serious second thoughts about the way Floss and I had reacted to Murray’s book. We’d gone way too far. He’d obviously worked very hard, taken great risks, compiled terrific documentation. We had no right telling him he was guilty of a loss of innocence. The way we’d jumped on him was ridiculous. We resented the fact that someone involved in innocent pleasures should want to tackle tougher subjects. We were telling him he had no right to do that. I was almost in awe of the depths of my own resentment. It was a furious attack we’d launched. We were like winged harpies with snaky hair. I’d surprised myself with the sheer feeling that had come gushing to the surface. It was as though we’d caught Murray tampering with something precious and childlike in all of us.

  I heard a plinking on my head.

  When I got back to the dinner party. Floss and Archie were involved in half-amorous peckings and nibblings. I sat next to Murray and told him I thought we were dead wrong. I said he had not only the right but the duty to expose these things. I explained that Floss and I were reacting as people involved in sports who feel their most precious emotions are being slighted, and he said he understood.

  “Have some more wine,” he said.

  He reached for a gallon bottle. The label had bouncy, green, cartoon lettering that seemed familiar. Of course. It was Jiminy Cricket. Even the wine looked green and bouncy. With Wing’s discovery of this bottle, the party got back into high swing. We were all friends again. The wine was a little oversweet and pulpy, but no one seemed to mind.

  In a short while, Archie got a droll, droll look on his face. I think he was the kind of fellow who got devilish when he was sleepy. There was something about being tired that made him sexually mischievous. It is probably connected to jet lag somehow.

  “I think we ought to play a little game,” he said.

  “What kind of game?” Floss said.

  “You know what kind of game.”

  “No, what kind of game?”

  “Cleo knows what kind of game,” he said. “Cleo, tell her what kind of game.”

  “Do I know what kind of game?” Murray said.

  It went on like that for a while. I kept my eyes on Floss. I knew she’d never agree to play strip Monopoly in mixed company, no matter how much Jiminy Cricket she poured down her gullet. She’d get up and bolt the room, just as she’d done in New York.

  Meanwhile, Archie was getting cuter and droller by the second, and was explaining to Murray that the game was Monopoly but with a difference. I kept watching Floss.

  “All right,” she said. “If that’s the game you want to play, that’s what we’ll play.”

  “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “It’s his house, Cleo. We’ll play his game. These are all his toys. They’re his dogs and his cars. It’s his life.”

  Her face was tightening up into a little, mean, flat-nosed, wrinkled look. She resembled a well-coiffed Chinese dog. It was a spiteful look, among other things. I tried to talk her out of playing while at the same time not saying too much because of Murray’s presence. It was clear Floss didn’t care who said what. She was in a very spiteful mood. Archie was trifling with their Neurotic Obsession and she didn’t like it one bit. She kept darting spiteful looks his way, and her face kept scrunching up. She was determined to do this thing. She would show him once and for all. An incestlike relationship is too delicate, fragile, and rare to be mocked. She would make him sorry.

  “It’s his board,” she told me. “They’re his dice, his green houses and hotels, his play money, his little racing car and top hat and armored personnel carrier. If this is the game he wants to play, I say we play.”

  Murray looked more than agreeable. Archie kept grinning slyly.

  “Floss,” I said, “let’s discuss this.”

  “What’s one more game in a lifetime of games?” she said.

  She looked mean, nasty, pug-nosed, and bitter. We followed Archie down the hall to the Monopoly room.

  What fun, what fun.

  12

  In ancient days, people could be decadent without worrying about the Warsaw Pact. There was a Roman emperor who went bathing in his grotto surrounded by small boys who swam underwater and nibbled at his loins. Fun-loving fellow. And there was a Victorian woman who liked to be served up naked in anchovy sauce at her own dinner parties.

  In high school, I read a paperback history of the orgy that had a lot of stuff in it like that. The book also mentioned secret rites held by torchlight in ancient shrines. That’s what really caught my fancy. Rites. I liked the formality of orgies that had rites. But the book was never clear about exactly what went on. Sure—frenzied dancing, drinking, and sex, but what about the rites? What did they consist of? The secret rites seemed to be the whole point since they were the things that got people into an orgiastic frame of mind. The best the book could do was say that these rites were shrouded in mystery. So I was left to imagine dark-eyed, olive-skinned men whose heads were crowned with myrtle, and lithe, graceful women in clingy tunics, and some vague, solemn, torchlit ceremony that would build the sexual tension to a fever pitch, in a clearing in the woods, as owls hooted and clouds raced across the moon.

  It is all a long way from Metroplex and Jiminy Cricket wine. But that’s where I was, and what I was drinking, as we tossed the dice and moved the little things around the board, buying, selling etc.

  We sat boy-girl, boy-girl. Floss declared herself banker. It was obvious she was out to dominate the game. I’ve never seen anyone take control of something so completely. She was a little buzz saw of activity. She seemed to have three hands—doling out money, buying up land, railroads, utilities, collecting rent, buying houses, making change. Money, dice. Chance cards, all seemed to be passing through her hands simultaneously. She was grim-faced as she played, said little, and was roughly half-naked before the rest of us could remove so much as a single shoe.

  It happened in no time. A little luck with the dice and the two sets of cards, some shrewd and brutal maneuvering, and a fierce determination all combined to give her a controlling position on the board. She had some of the choicest lots and was soon the only player with houses and hotels.

  Every time one of us landed on her property and paid rent, she whipped off an item of clothing.

  The item of clothing a player removes in strip Monopoly is determined by whether the property that player owns is undeveloped or chockful of tidy, middle-class houses. It is sometimes complicated. There are situations in which a player must remove his or her underwear before taking off an outer garment or garments. This is neither here nor there.

  Floss’s dress was long gone—she’d hurled it right out the door into the hall. She sat there wheeling and dealing, and wearing her left shoe, her Givenchy smoke-rose pantyhose, and half a bra—the strap in her mouth to keep the whole thing from falling.

  This is the woman who told me the first time we’d ever met that she couldn’t stand being looked at. Visual scrutiny, she called it. That much did she want to get back at Archie. That much was she willing to forgo in the way of personal dignity.

  Murray landed on Pacific Avenue, which happened to have a hotel on it. He paid rent to Floss, and off came her brassiere. She sent it whizzing past Archie’s ear. Then she glared at him with that mean li
ttle wrinkled look, one eye shut tight.

  It was the most angry display of nudity you’d ever want to see. I was shocked. It was the last thing I’d ever expected from someone like Floss. She was punishing herself to hurt Archie. Several times I tried reasoning with her, but she fixed me with that one-eyed, nasty glare.

  How were the men taking it?

  Archie was getting sleepier by the minute. He would occasionally have a fit of semihysterical laughter—the kind of thing that happens to people who sail boats single-handedly around the world and must stay awake for long, long periods. In Archie’s case, I don’t think it was accompanied by hallucinations.

  Murray went into a smelling frenzy. Keeping a hand full of Monopoly money in front of his face, he’d lean toward Floss as if to check out her title deed cards and would take deep, clandestine breaths, holding them, I noticed, for unusual amounts of time. Getting the full savor, I guess.

  As the game progressed, the rest of us made small inroads into Floss’s dreams of empire. A utility here, an undershirt there. But she continued to hold sway. Her nudity was an aggressive one. She even made a point of keeping her arms away from her body so that her breasts were in the plainest view possible.

  Murray now owned the orange properties and talked optimistically of houses. Archie’s little token landed on Park Place, which made Floss bounce in her chair with fury. Archie bought the property and then began negotiating with me for Boardwalk, which was the only thing I owned. This got Floss in an absolute pet.

  Anyway, he and I made the deal, and Archie Brewster was now a factor on the board.

  Other things went against Floss. Income Tax, Go To Jail, landing on Murray’s property. She just couldn’t seem to get out of her pantyhose, and it was driving her nuts, you could see it. Her revenge on Archie wouldn’t be complete until she was totally, front-ally nude.

  Meanwhile the men began to buy, collect rent, and divest themselves of apparel.

  Aside from Archie’s manic, birdlike, irrational laughter, and the sound of money changing hands and clothes coming off, it was a fairly silent affair. Floss had set the tone, and it was direct, rigid, brisk, and clipped.

  I think Archie wanted to get naked for the sheer, silly hell of it. Just to offset the grimness. I don’t know about Murray. I’m sure he was delighted to find himself in the position of watching a woman or women fling off clothes. But I don’t think he’d faced the possibility that he himself might be nude in his chair. A softish mound, hairy and pale: He kept fingering the ends of his rectangular beard, which may have meant he was getting nervous.

  As for me, I didn’t even have a piece of property I could mortgage. Bankruptcy loomed. Every toss of the dice meant further embarrassment. I was stark dressed.

  The game lasted about forty minutes more. Murray got down to his socks, shorts, shirt, and jacket—in other words, he was minus pants and shoes. Archie, in a wonderfully intuitive and dramatic maneuver reminiscent of his best moments on the tennis court, removed his Jockey shorts by putting both hands inside his pants through the open fly, drawing in his breath, tearing the shorts down the front, sticking his hands much further into his pants and practically doing a somersault in his chair as he managed to rip the shorts up the back as well, and then pulling out the ragged halves through the fly of his trousers with a stunning flourish that had Murray and me whistling and stamping our feet.

  That left Archie with nothing but trousers and boots. In other words, the two men together were one fully dressed person.

  As the balance of power shifted away from Floss, she lost much of her grand, majestic, clothes-flinging anger. Not that she’d mellowed. On the contrary. Her Old Testament sort of wrath was replaced by a sulky, peevish mood, full of little snarlings and carps, which could be a seafood dish.

  She and Archie engaged in lengthy, intricate maneuvers to get the upper hand. They argued over the rules, over interpretations of the rules, over entire philosophies of real estate, power, greed, and domination. Not much wine remained.

  Archie would occasionally have episodes of that brief, shrill, tense laughter, like some high-strung bird in one of those over-warm habitats at the zoo. Floss began addressing the dice, “Come on, you little fuckers.”

  When something went her way, she clapped the heels of her hands together, although not with the girlishness we’d seen in the Pong room. It was a scornful, petty, vindictive clapping we now witnessed.

  During one of their periods of wrangling, Murray moved his chair a few inches closer to me.

  “Cleo, you’re so dressed.”

  “Not my game, I guess.”

  “Are you trying, at least?”

  “Maybe I’m just not orgy-minded.”

  “You have to enter into things. My mother used to say, ‘Mix, mix.’”

  “Is this what she had in mind?”

  “She said everything twice. What about your mother?”

  “My mother would say, ‘I don’t intend to repeat this, so listen carefully.’”

  “Any brothers and sisters?” he said.

  “One brother.”

  “Older or younger?”

  “Older.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Goes to orgies. What about you?”

  “Two sisters. One’s a Buddhist.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “She mixed. She entered into things.”

  “Are you drunk? I’m not drunk, I don’t think.”

  “I was drunker earlier.”

  “Dinner was more fun,” I said.

  “This is fun, too. Except I’ve been waiting all this time to hear the sound of your stockings as you cross your legs.”

  “Listen to Floss’s stockings.”

  “I heard them at dinner.”

  “Murray, do a lot of women ask you if you have sinus trouble?”

  “Asthma, they usually say.”

  Archie had two houses on Boardwalk and a monster hotel on Park Place. It was Murray’s turn to toss the dice. They came up eleven. We all counted inwardly as he moved the top hat token along the board. Eleven was Park Place, and when Floss realized what was going to happen she threw her money into innocent, well-meaning Murray Jay’s face.

  What was going to happen was that Archie Brewster was going to get naked first, if you didn’t count his boots.

  Slowly, sort of cowboylike, he rose from the chair, kind of hitching his pants up, acting a little smug and self-satisfied, unfastening the heavy brass buckle engraved with crossed tennis rackets, opening his pants and with a slight, droll wriggling of the hips letting them drop to the tops of his fancy boots.

  Floss threw her title deed cards in Murray’s face.

  Our nude ranchero sat down and put his head on the table. The game resumed around him. In minutes he was asleep, his mouth open and a sweet, clear, childlike snore rippling from his lips. If you could ever call a snore lovable, this would be the one.

  I moved my chair closer to Murray.

  “What about the other sister?”

  “The non-Buddhist? She’s an expert on germ warfare. She goes to germ-warfare conferences in Switzerland. We’re vaguely embarrassed by her. We call her the non-Buddhist.”

  “Both your parents still alive?”

  “With a vengeance. What about yours?”

  “Thriving,” I said.

  “Do you ever go back?”

  “Sure, but the place has changed. What about you?”

  “My folks are on the Island now. They bought a quarter-acre lot. The lot has a shell on it. They have great hopes for this shell. They water it on weekends. In the meantime, they’re staying with the Buddhist in Valley Stream.”

  “Nephews and nieces?” I said.

  “One of each. What about you?”

  “My brother doesn’t want to bring children into this world.”

  “What does he want to bring?”

  Floss was trying to get Archie’s body
off the table. I think she had the bed in mind. Her naked fury had instantly vanished. She was suddenly very protective of her weary man, and when Murray tried to help she slapped at his hands. I believe this is known as the vicissitudes of love.

  I won’t go into a detailed description of what Floss, in her gleaming pantyhose, looked like as she tried to get Archie, with his pants around his boots and those long, narrow shoulders of his and that lean face and funny mouth and generally poignant, stirring, long-muscled body, off the table. It is enough to say that her petiteness was overwhelmed. She was wrapped in limbs. It was like a classical writhing sculpture. Mermaid Engulfed by Sea Snakes.

  I suggested she put him on a rug and drag him across the floor. Floss looked at me a long time, considering this.

  “Interesting,” she said.

  “It might work.”

  “But what would we use for a rug?”

  “We’d use a rug.”

  “There are no rugs,” she said. “Does a house like this have rugs? You can’t play with a rug. So what good is it?”

  “Then let Murray and me help you. Together we can get him over there.”

  “You help,” she said. “Not him.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s a man.”

  “But what did he do that’s so terrible?”

  “They’re both men. The bastards.”

  I lent a hand, and we got him over there more or less by dragging him like a ship’s anchor, with the gracious volunteer doing her best to avoid any contact with the sleeper’s private parts. I don’t mind saying I felt a twinge of regret just leaving him behind like that. Those hawklike features haunt me still.

  Anyway, hawklike or not, we dumped him down, and I brushed off my hands and turned to see Murray standing in the hall looking back in at me with that tender, sneaky expression of his. He was framed in the doorway, all shirttails and woolly socks.

  Why did I want Murray? Was it because of his competence in the kitchen? He’d impressed me, no doubt about it. People who can do things are so rare that you can’t help being stunned. Skill is an aphrodisiac. I mean individual skills. Things people do that no one else can do quite the same way.