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

by Cleo Birdwell

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question.”

  I was surprised by the amount of somber authority I was able to put into this remark. I sounded like the Dean of Discipline telling some sophomore she couldn’t have an on-campus abortion.

  “What is this thing called?”

  “A Kramer.”

  “Will he be in there forever?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “If he were mine, I’d keep him in there as long as I could. I’d do whatever it takes. Court orders, forged documents, anything. I guess that sounds selfish and cruel, doesn’t it? I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, Jane.”

  “What about life beyond the Kramer, if it’s not permanent?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s something we’ll have to work out.”

  “Can it last, Cleo?”

  “We’ll just have to see.”

  “These bottles are impressive. What are they called?”

  “Bottles,” I told her.

  She said she wouldn’t mention Shaver in her report. I thanked her extravagantly. She suggested I hide him well from the story team. Story teams were notorious for turning houses upside down, looking for just such things as people in Kramer cubes.

  I thanked her again.

  In return, she asked if she might spend a moment alone with the Kramer. Quietly, I left the room.

  Hard to believe it was already June. A new month. Time to take stock.

  Take stock of what?

  I detached and cleaned all the tubes. I scrubbed the metal undercarriage of the Kramer. I trimmed Shaver’s sideburns and beard, and then lifted his head and ran the vacuum nozzle along the pillow to get the little blond hairs off. I washed his privates with a soapy cloth.

  A gorgeous day presented itself. A Saturday. Hard, blue sky and pleasant breeze. I grabbed the phone and called Dr. Glass. He said it couldn’t hurt to remove a patient from a Kramer and place him in the fresh air for a while.

  Patients need “to breathe,” he said, like cotton goods.

  “He mustn’t exert himself, of course. And he shouldn’t be kept out for more than a couple of hours. The sun will do him good. Let him sit in the sun. There is nothing better than sitting in the sun. I’m always astonished to see people sitting in the shade. It’s just as easy to sit in the sun and a great deal healthier. The sun is life-enhancing. What is the shade? What did the shade ever enhance? The sun is the source of all life in our solar system. Life didn’t begin in the shade, did it? So why sit there?”

  “Is there any risk at all in taking him out?”

  “It depends on how you define risk,” he said. “There is always risk. But I encourage risk. Risk can cure a person faster than medicine. A relative or concerned friend caring for a patient in an American home takes a risk every minute of every day. It is literally a life-and-death risk. I encourage this. It brings people closer together. Remember, Ms. Birdwell. ‘I am a jumper, I am a jumper.’”

  “I am a jumper,” I said.

  “Just be sure to keep him out of the shade.”

  I asked Dr. Glass where I could rent a wheelchair. Sick Wheels, he told me. And he was nice enough to look up the number for me.

  Half an hour later, Washington Post buzzed to say a package had arrived. He didn’t like to identify objects. He was paid to announce.

  I asked if it had wheels and a seat. He grudgingly said yes. After a lot of begging and pleading, I talked him into bringing it up himself. I disconnected Shaver from the Kramer. The doorman came in with the wheelchair and he helped me get Shaver out of the cube and into the chair. It took some doing. Droplets of sweat appeared above Mr. Willie’s upper lip and he gave me a put-upon look I would have to rank among the classics in that field.

  I put a plaid coverlet over Shaver’s legs and wheeled him out the door.

  I see the rest of that day from various distances and angles.

  I see myself pushing Shaver up Park Avenue. I have to stop now and then to straighten his upper body or move his head back or keep his rear end from sliding along the seat. I feel a rising excitement as I walk. I am elated and scared. It is like the first time on water skis and I want to go faster. I always go faster when I’m scared.

  People on the street pay no attention. I guess they assume I am pushing a sleeping invalid or a dead man. Park Avenue runs slightly uphill here and this means I don’t have to worry about Shaver pitching forward onto the pavement. This would cause people to notice. It is not true that New Yorkers walk right past victims of cardiac arrest and other misfortunes. They will inspect to see if it is someone they know. If he is dead and has a nice apartment, they will try to sublet his apartment until the lease expires and the rent goes up.

  I walk right past the doorman in Floss’s building and take the elevator to her floor. I’m happy to note her face brightens when she sees who it is. She is wearing black leotards. There’s a bicycle propped against the wall.

  “How are you two? Come in. I’m so glad to see you.”

  “We’re going for a walk and want you to come along. Put some clothes on. What are you doing in leotards?”

  “I feel nauseous,” she says.

  “You feel nauseous. That makes sense.”

  “If I’m going to vomit, I don’t want to do it on my made-to-order silk taffeta drawstring pants, do I, with matching two-hundred-dollar spinnaker shirt. Have a drink while I change.”

  “All right. But why are you nauseous?”

  “I took my bike to the park. This is the first time I’ve ridden it outside the apartment. Two Hispanic roller skaters followed me everywhere I went. Then I was nearly run down by a horse.”

  “Where?”

  “On the bridal path. I had to get off the road because of the European bicyclists in their padded helmets and short pants. They ride hunched way over, like bullets. It was very unnerving. I rushed back here and got into my leotards.”

  She changes into her drawstring pants and spinnaker shirt.

  whatever that is, and we have a quick drink standing up by the door.

  “This is my fourth since the park,” she says. “Settles my stomach.”

  She runs into the living room, returning with a fancy-looking cane. She removes the little oblong handle and shows me the inside of the cane. The cane is hollow.

  We fill it with Scotch and soda. Ice cubes won’t fit. We decide not to wait around until the ice cubes melt to the fitting point.

  Floss says, “If they don’t melt evenly on all sides, they won’t fit anyway.”

  We look at each other.

  “That makes sense,” I tell her.

  In a hazy long shot, you can see us pushing Shaver west toward the park. We are careful to walk on the sunny side of the street. We decide to save the park for the trip back and we swing south on Fifth Avenue.

  As we turn the corner, we crash into another wheelchair. It is a self-propelled model. In the chair is an angry little man with small, wrinkled, midgety features.

  “What do you think this is, a fucking supermarket?” he says.

  “We don’t understand that remark,” Floss says. “And it was you who ran into us.”

  “Take him back to the frozen foods,” the man says.

  “We’re just learning,” I say. “Don’t be so excitable. You shouldn’t be using four-letter words in your condition.”

  “That’s right,” Floss says. “We can’t imagine someone in a wheelchair saying fuck. It’s disgusting. You’re a disgrace to your condition. It’s because of people like you that the American public doesn’t contribute to telethons anymore.”

  The man curses us in a high-pitched, irate voice. He sounds a little like a dolphin talking to a scientist. We watch his face go pink. He issues a string of obscenities that sound like towns in Illinois. Waukegan, Kankakee, Effingham, Rockford and Skokie.

  “Decatur,” I reply.

  We wheel around him and hea
d down Fifth. Floss slips into an embassy doorway and takes a drink from the cane. I put on the wheelchair brake and join her. We look both ways, then emerge.

  Shaver has been slipping this way and that. We agree we have to fasten him. Floss runs into the street and hails a cab. The driver screeches to a stop. She asks him for some twine.

  “I know you people sometimes carry twine in your boot. Boot is British for trunk.”

  The man tries to come up with a remark that will capture the flavor of the moment. Perhaps some towns in Kentucky. Floss gets tired of waiting and comes back to the sidewalk.

  We drink from the cane. I can tell Floss is exhilarated by the five or six drinks she has had since coming out of the park with her bike. It is the gay stage of inebriation. You become fixed on something that you must do or make or steal or climb. In this case, it is twine to fasten Shaver. You feel wily and daring. Nothing can impede your search. The more unlikely and stupid the object, like twine on Fifth Avenue, the more determined you are to find it.

  She goes over to the doorman of a distinguished, old, granite-faced building. I watch them converse. Floss, in her glossy outfit, looks younger than her forty-five years, but not by much. I wonder if she is going through a mid-life crisis. I drink from the cane.

  When she comes back, I see she has no twine.

  “No twine,” I say.

  She holds her hand to her chin and narrows her eyes in concentration.

  “Twine, twine, twine, twine,” she says.

  She stops people going by. Then she looks at me and snaps her fingers. The drawstring. She whips the drawstring off her pants. It doesn’t fit all the way around Shaver’s puck-blocking chest, but we can tie each end to one of the slats at the back of the chair.

  It’s not as good as having found twine, but we are willing to settle. We head down Fifth Avenue. The day shimmers with milky blue light. When we stop for a light, I look at Shaver. He looks good. He seems to have a little color already. Floss and I drink from the cane and then I wet my index finger with Scotch and put it to Shaver’s lips. It can’t hurt, a drop or two.

  Floss wants to push. I let her. We walk all the way down to the south rim of the park and sit on a bench there, facing into the sun. Floss buys two crabmeat sundaes at one of the gourmet pushcarts that are always down there, and we wash them down with Scotch and soda.

  It feels good to sit. The sun feels good. It is good to satisfy our hunger and thirst.

  Floss says, “What’s next for you two?”

  Jane W. Schroeder, Jr., had asked pretty much the same question.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought beyond the Kramer. The Kramer is now.”

  “You’re taking the days as they come. I like that.”

  “I wouldn’t even say days. I would say minutes, seconds. Our life has been very intense since this started. I think in minutes, seconds.”

  “We finished the cane,” Floss says.

  She turns it upside down and shakes it. We sit in the sun. People going by, women especially, take long, slow, unconcealed looks at Shaver. He is a striking figure in his wheelchair in the sun. Young and strong, yet a victim of some terrible affliction. The sun makes the hair on his head glow almost white at the same time as it deepens the darkish tint of his flaxen beard. It is the beard of a man who has been at sea, living on biscuits and water, with only a cat for company. A rough, salty, weathered beard. The beard of a man who has matured in solitude and hardship.

  I briefly regret the plaid coverlet, but I didn’t have one in a solid color.

  “Floss, you were the first person to mention Wadi Assad to me. Do you think his books are pseudo profound?”

  “This is the whole point,” she says. “This is the man’s charm.”

  “Did you ever want to write?”

  “Beyond initialing contracts, no.”

  “Lately I’ve been getting little urges to write down some of the things that have been happening these past months.”

  “I think you should, Cleo.”

  “Maybe if I write these things down, I’ll understand them.”

  “I can get you a book contract in a minute.”

  “Wadi Assad makes sense, even when he sounds Like a fortune cookie. I like the way he compresses things.”

  “That’s the essence of pseudo profundity.”

  “I wonder if I could do that with hockey.”

  “Hockey isn’t important enough,” Floss says. “It’s only the large subjects and the big, sweeping themes that make cheap sentiment possible. That’s what Glenway’s mother says.”

  We get up and walk south on Fifth. The avenue is full of amateur performers. The good weather brings them out. We see a West Indian playing steel drums and a young fellow in a cutaway doing a magic act. People watch and listen. Further on there is a chamber quartet sitting outside a shoe store. Two women, two men. People toss money into a cello case. Across the street we see a white-faced mime. He seems to be imitating a man climbing a ladder that is missing a rung. His confederate passes among the spectators with a derby hat for contributions.

  The people who watch these acts never get too close. There is a Zone of Contagion. Even in the midst of lively entertainment on a pleasant day, people observe the rule of fear and dread. They are always ready to move away. They are ready to draw back gasping. It is as though mimes and cellists are secret carriers of typhoid.

  The Zone of Contagion is almost always a semicircle and it varies in size, depending on the performer and how typhoidal, criminal or potentially obscene he or she looks.

  The Zone is absolutely huge, it is vast, for the solo performer we come upon in the shadow of St. Thomas’s church. She is a violinist, about fifty years old, ruddy faced, wearing layers of cast-off garments. Next to her is a supermarket cart full of her possessions. Clothes, bath mats, pots and pans, shopping bags full of junk. I see a ball of twine, but I don’t tell Floss.

  The woman is playing some wildly romantic violin piece. Her bow is flying over the instrument. Her head is down, eyes shut. People come and go, but her audience never numbers more than eight. We give her plenty of room. She has dirty fingernails and swollen ankles. She wears slippers that are torn and shredded.

  Her hair is long and stringy and full of debris.

  “Wait a minute,” Floss says. “I know that woman. That’s Helen Hoffman. She used to be with the William Morris Agency. She represented a lot of Watergate authors. She was always telling me she wanted to develop deeper skills, become truly self-sufficient. One day she walked out on her husband, her boss, her job, her home, and her children.”

  There are scabs and bruises all over her forehead and legs. She is probably mugged regularly by other derelicts. A roach crawls out of her coat pocket and moves along her sleeve. She is totally absorbed, playing emotionally, with tremendous, head-wagging flourishes.

  A true story of women’s liberation.

  “I wonder if I should say hello,” Floss says.

  Instead she wads up a dollar bill and tosses it into the cigar box on Helen Hoffman’s supermarket cart. Then we go looking for a place to have a drink.

  We find a bar just off Sixth Avenue. It takes us a while to get the wheelchair inside. The place is dark and semideserted. There is a program featuring celebrity pole-vaulting on the TV set.

  We decide to sit in a corner of the bar. The bartender comes over. He is a short, compact, beefy man. He is quite, quite densely put together. He barely fits back there. His head is growing out of his chest. I can hardly see his eyes amid all the flesh in his face. They are like little, puckered upholstery buttons.

  “What’ll it be?”

  Floss says, “One cane, please. Cutty Sark and soda. Ice on the side. We’ll suck it.”

  She unscrews the handle and gives the man the hollow cane. He looks inside.

  “Do we need the soda?” I say.

  “It’s ballast,” she says.

  “That makes sense.”
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  The bartender regards the cane.

  “Why don’t I give you two glasses worth? I don’t think we fill personal objects.”

  His voice is a hoarse croak.

  Floss says, “Where’s your wheelchair ramp? It took us five minutes to push this poor man in here. That high step is a menace.”

  “I only do this to pay for my acting lessons,” the bartender says.

  He gives us two Scotches with soda. I look at Floss to see whether she will drink hers or pour it into the cane. She drinks. I get the fellow to put ice in mine. Then I put my finger in the glass and touch some Scotch to Shaver’s lips. He definitely has color.

  We sit there drinking quietly. At the other end of the bar, two deaf-mutes are having an argument. A man and woman. Their hands move rapidly and they glare at each other.

  Floss and I trade disgusted looks. We expect afflicted people to be above this sort of thing. They’re supposed to go quietly through life impressing the rest of us with their courage and perseverance. Besides, what are they doing in a bar?

  We order two more drinks.

  “So you’ve been getting little urges to write,” Floss says.

  “I want to do something that cuts right to the heart of this whole experience. The first woman. The road. The Kramer.”

  “Do you see it as a movie?”

  “I don’t even see it as a book. I see it as some scribbling I might do in my bedroom, sitting by the window at sunset after Nutrient Injection.”

  “I envy you that,” she says.

  “You’ll have France.”

  “I’d trade in a minute.”

  “Where is the soup country?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve ordered some lavishly illustrated books.”

  The TV set is practically over our heads. We’re about to tell the bartender to turn it off when a commercial comes on and we see a trim, smallish young woman in jeans and a turtleneck come skating across an Iowa-type pond.

  “Hi, I’m Olympic figure skater Karen Lee Mickie and this is what I’ve come home to. The good, the simple things.”

  Floss clutches my arm. I slap her hand. Karen Lee Mickie talks about the loneliness and anxiety of the Olympic trials. Sharing her tiny room with a tobogganer and a giant slalomist.