Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (35 page)

“I don’t think there’s bias,” Mr. Wendelstadt says. “I have no doubt that someday there’ll be a woman umpire in the major leagues; I just hope I’m the one who trains her.” Mr. Wendelstadt sounds O.K. and then he misses a high hanging curveball; he adds, “I don’t know why a young lady would want this job.” They should have this line printed on a T-shirt for men in traditionally male fields, they say it so often. Why does anyone want any job? Because it’s suited to her skills, well paying, interesting. Because it’s there. Hormones have nothing to do with wanting to feed your family or use your talents.

Teresa Cox says that when she first started calling strikes, she was told that her voice was too high, and that when she used a lower register, she was criticized for sounding phony. She says she was told the umpire uniform looked awkward on women; I’ve
seen guys wearing it who look as if they’re in the third trimester. She says that a league supervisor wondered aloud whether she was “queer.” She also says she was told she didn’t need the job because she’d just get married and have kids.

Now, that’s an original line.

“She was told by the supervisors that women in baseball were just a joke,” says Glenda Cochran, her lawyer.

Mr. Wendelstadt says it must be that she wasn’t quite good enough, and in fact we’ve all heard of cases in which women cried sexism when the problem was skill. I always think that’s a little like faking sick with the flu; you can get away with it because there’s so much of the real thing going around.

The glass ceiling gets more attention, but it’s good to remember the cement floor, to remember that there are still places that might as well have signs:
GIRLS KEEP OUT
! It serves to remind you of the bad old days, and of the fact that there’s nothing cute about trying to be treated fairly. Why would a young lady want this job? You’ll just get married and have kids! The reservations are couched more subtly now, but they’re there, like Burma-Shave signs along the highway of equal opportunity. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Some wins. Some losses. Some places where we just keep striking out.

A TEAM DREAM
July 8, 1992

People talk about turning forty as though it were akin to having your wisdom teeth removed—exceedingly painful, the horrid loss of something grown in the bone. The loss of that gilded age called youth, which is wasted on the young and which many grown-ups wouldn’t have on a bet, knowing what they know today.

So far, Day One, forty feels fine. The days of expensive fashion errors, crazed momentary friendships, and 2:00
A.M
. feedings are over. Things are somehow settled. There are those who think set-ted is synonymous with death and stagnation; I’m the kind who thinks setted is synonymous with security.

“It is in the thirties that we want friends,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.” This adds to my collection of things Fitzgerald said that are foolish. If not friendship and love, then what? Insider trading? The real wisdom comes from George Burns, who once said of growing old, “Consider the alternative.” Consider the alternative.
There you are. The only real regret I feel today is that I am not a member of the United States Olympic men’s basketball team. No, this is not a woman/jock/empowerment fantasy, and no, I haven’t yet seen
A League of Their Own
. That’s women and baseball, and I don’t ever have to write about baseball.

Somewhere in the contract of the male columnist it is written that once a year he must wax poetic and philosophic about baseball, making it sound like a cross between the Kirov and Zen Buddhism. This covers the baseball profundity axis more than adequately, which is a good thing. The connection between a base hit and karma eludes me.

But basketball is something different, sweatier and swifter and not likely to be likened to haiku, thank God. And this Olympic basketball team is something different entirely. It is the best sports team ever, the equivalent of rounding up the greatest American writers of the last century or so and watching them collaborate: “O.K., Twain, you do the dialogue and hand off to Faulkner. He’ll do the interior monlogue. Hemingway will edit—no, don’t make that face, you know you overwrite. And be nice to Cheever. He’s young, but he’s got a good ear. Wharton and Cather can’t play—they’re girls.” On television they were running down the lineup: Larry Bird. Patrick Ewing. Michael Jordan. Magic Johnson. When they got to Christian Laettner, the student prince of college basektball, I almost felt sorry for the guy because he was so outclassed, a mere champion among giants. We don’t see giants often, even one at a time, never mind en masse and in skivvies.

Catholic school girls once played intramural basketball all winter long, and though it was with a smaller ball and slacker rules than the boys used—and though I traveled more often than I ever scored—it gave me a visceral feeling for the nonpareil grace, skill, and teamwork of the sport. Not to mention that glow in your chest when the ball leaves your hands, arcs through the air with all eyes following, and falls almost inevitably through the hoop. Yesssss.

Take all that and elevate it to the level of, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, and you have this Olympic team. As good as it gets. There is pure pleasure in thinking about watching them play together. Each is accustomed to being a star; together they’re a firmament. The collaboration is one of the loveliest parts, a metaphor for the friendship whose salvation Fitzgerald so mistakenly denied.

Twenty years ago I wouldn’t have noticed. I liked the figure skaters then, all sequins and spins and solitary splendor, the girls who epitomize the Victorian dictum that men perspire and women glow. I’ve lost my yen for sequins and developed a pure reverence for skill and sweat.

Those guys won’t be out there getting rich or famous; they’re already rich and famous. Every lay-up, every rebound in Barcelona will be saying, “Look at what we know.” Not youth, youth, youth, although some of them are very young. Experience. There’s a moment when the ball arcs perfectly downward to the waiting web of the net—or when the words lie down just right on the page—that makes you feel as if you are going to live forever. The irony is that by the time you are old enough to appreciate the feeling, you’re old enough to know that it’s illusory. Experience. Experience. I never had a jump shot, and I’m no longer a kid. But experience I now have. Consider the alternative.

HEROINE ADDICTION
April 29, 1990

Quick—who is Jo March?

I’ve been taking an unscientific survey. The results: not a single man I know—and we’re talking educated men here—has had the faintest idea. One guessed that Jo March was a second baseman for the Baltimore Orioles.

Every woman I asked got it right. They were a skewed sample, to be sure, the intellectual, the ambitious, even the driven. And every one knew Jo March of
Little Women
, a boyish girl who can never keep her hair up or her gloves clean, who thinks social niceties are a waste of time and spends her happiest hours in the attic plugging away at her writing.

Meg is domestic, Beth sweet and sickly, and Amy is pretty and marries the boy who loved Jo first. Jo is the smart one, and that is why she left an indelible mark. She showed that there was more to life than spinning skeins into gold and marrying a prince.

There weren’t many little women like that in the books we read as girls. Nancy Drew was kind of a wimp. I liked Madeline—“To
the tiger in the zoo/Madeline just said, ‘Pooh-pooh’ ”—and Anne of Green Gables. As I grew older, I began to hope that there would be real women to replace the fictional ones, that out there were strong, determined human beings of my own sex.

On the short list of those women, I always placed Simone de Beauvoir near the top.

I was not alone. At the women’s college I attended it was difficult to find a reading list without
The Second Sex
, that powerful and uncompromising feminist manifesto. Ten years ago, when Deirdre Bair found the lives of women in a jumble because of the competing interests of work, family, and ego, she decided to do a biography of de Beauvoir, that woman whose life seemed to epitomize freedom.

The recently published result is a fine, fine book, and about as depressing a thing as I’ve read since the end of
Little Women
, when Jo inexplicably marries some codger who lives in a rooming house.

It is not that you cannot relate to the great French feminist philosopher. The problem is that women can relate only too well. There was the father who was thrilled that she thought like a man. There was the examining committee torn between giving first place to her or to a male student, finally deciding on him because he was taking his exams for the second time.

And there was that other student himself. His name was Jean-Paul Sartre, and he became a great philosopher. He and de Beauvoir never married, and they have always seemed an example of one of the great egalitarian relationships.

Ha! It was always his comfort that came first. She stooped when she was with him so he wouldn’t seem so short. She brought him leather-bound books in which to write and then used cheap children’s exercise paper for her own work.

Whole sections of the book could be the basis for telephone calls between one smart woman and another over the behavior of a third: “Wait till you hear what that creep has done to her now!” In Sartre’s case, as in so many of such telephone calls, the behavior
was tediously predictable: when he wasn’t practicing the yo-yo or producing brilliant work, he slept with women, many of them women Simone brought home. She said it wasn’t important.

The book could be subtitled as self-help:
Smart Woman, Idiotic Choices, or What I Did for Love
.

Lo, how the Valkyrie has fallen. She sublimated her work to his. “He was so superior,” she told Ms. Bair. “You don’t understand what we had.” She sounds like every woman who thinks some guy is going to give definition to her life. She gave definition to my life by writing
The Second Sex
, a book that made me feel it could be fine to be female.

“I thought if I could just find a woman who made it all work it would help me and everyone else,” says Ms. Bair. “I thought I had found the ideal woman. But she was a real person, like all the rest of us.”

We don’t want real people. We want giants. And the disfranchised want them perfect because we have so few. Perhaps this is one reason African-Americans were unhappy about material in the Ralph David Abernathy book—not news, certainly—on Martin Luther King’s infidelity. I suspect it is why feminists are unhappy with Deirdre Bair.

Do as I say, not as I do—that is one lesson of de Beauvoir’s life. But nothing she did can minimize what she said, that women deserve freedom. She learned the lesson partly from one of the most important fictional characters of her childhood, Jo March.

“I think that somehow even when very young,” de Beauvoir said, “I must have perceived that Jo was always making choices and sometimes they were neither well reasoned nor good. The idea of choice must have frightened me a little, but it was exhilarating as well.”

REBELS WITHOUT A CLUE
September 18, 1991