We Are Still Married (42 page)

Jim made some phone calls and the story was yanked and only one truckload of papers went out with it, but word got around, and the next night, though Annie went three for four, the crowd was depressed, and even when she did great the rest of the home stand and became the first woman to hit a major-league triple, the atmosphere at the ballpark was one of moodiness and hurt. Jim went to the men's room one night and found guys standing in line there, looking thoughtful and sad. One of them said, “She's a helluva ballplayer,” and other guys murmured that yes, she was, and they wouldn't take anything away from her, she was great and it was wonderful that she had opened up baseball to women, and then they changed the subject to gardening, books, music, aesthetics, anything but baseball. They looked like men who had been stood up.

Gentleman Jim knocked on her door that night. She wore a blue chenille bathrobe flecked with brown tobacco-juice stains, and her black hair hung down in wet strands over her face. She spat into a Dixie cup she was carrying. “Hey! How the Fritos are you? I haven't seen your Big Mac for a while,” she said, sort of. He told her she was a great person and a great ballplayer and that he loved her and wanted only the best for her, and he begged her to apologize to the fans.

“Make a gesture—
anything.
They
want
to like you. Give them a chance to like you.”

She blew her nose into a towel. She said that she wasn't there to be liked, she was there to play ball.

It was a good road trip. The Sparrows won five out of ten, lifting their heads off the canvas, and Annie raised her average to .291 and hit the first major-league home run ever by a woman, up into the left-field screen at Fenway. Sox fans stood and cheered for fifteen minutes. They whistled, they stamped, they pleaded, the Sparrows pleaded, umpires pleaded, but she refused to come out and tip her hat until the public-address announcer said, “No. 18, please come out of the dugout and take a bow. No. 18, the applause is for you and is not intended as patronizing in any way,” and then she stuck her head out for 1.5 seconds and did not tip but only touched the brim. Later, she told the writers that just because people had expectations didn't mean she had to fulfill them—she used other words to explain this, but her general drift was that she didn't care very much about living up to anyone else's image of her, and if anyone thought she should, they could go watch wrist wrestling.

The forty thousand who packed Cold Spring Stadium June 6 to see the Sparrows play the Yankees didn't come for a look at Ron Guidry. Banners hung from the second deck: “WHAT DID WE DO WRONG?” and “ANNIE COME HOME” and “WE LOVE YOU, WHY DO YOU TREAT US THIS WAY” and “IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS THIS IN A NONCONFRONTATIONAL, MUTUALLY RESPECTFUL WAY, MEET US AFTER THE GAME AT GATE C.” It was Snapshot Day, and all the Sparrows appeared on the field for photos with the fans except you know who. Hemmie begged her to go. “You owe it to them,” he said.

“Owe?” she said.
“Owe?”

“Sorry, wrong word,” he said. “What if I put it this way: it's a sort of tradition.”

“Tradition?”
she said. “I'm supposed to worry about
tradition?”

That day, she became the first woman to hit .300. A double in the fifth inning. The scoreboard flashed the message, and the crowd gave her a nice hand. A few people stood and cheered, but the fans around them told them to sit down. “She's not that kind of person,” they said. “Cool it. Back off.” The fans were trying to give her plenty of space. After the game, Guidry said, “I really have to respect her. She's got that small strike zone and she protects it well, so she makes you pitch to her.” She said, “Guidry? Was that his name? I didn't know. Anyway, he didn't show me much. He throws funny, don't you think? He reminded me a little bit of a southpaw I saw down in Nicaragua, except she threw inside more.”

All the writers were there, kneeling around her. One of them asked if Guidry had thrown her a lot of sliders.

She gave him a long, baleful look. “Jeez, you guys are out of shape,” she said. “You're wheezing and panting and sucking air, and you just took the elevator
down
from the press box. You guys want to write about sports, you ought to go into training. And then you ought to learn how to recognize a slider. Jeez, if you were writing about agriculture, would you have to ask someone if those were Holsteins?”

Tears came to the writer's eyes. “I'm trying to help,” he said. “Can't you see that? We're all on your side. Don't you know how much we care about you? Sometimes I think you put up this tough exterior to hide your own insecurity.”

She laughed and brushed the wet hair back from her forehead. “It's no exterior,” she said as she unbuttoned her jersey. “It's who I am.” She peeled off her socks and stepped out of her cubicle a moment later, sweaty and stark naked. The towel hung from her hand. She walked slowly around them. “You guys learned all you know about women thirty years ago. That wasn't me back then, that was my mother.” The writers bent over their notepads, writing down every word she said and punctuating carefully. Gentleman Jim took off his glasses. “My mother was a nice lady, but she couldn't hit a curveball to save her Creamettes,” she went on. “And now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to take my insecurity and put it under a hot shower.” They pored over their notes until she was gone, and then they piled out into the hallway and hurried back to the press elevator.

Arnie stopped at the Shortstop for a load of Martinis before he went to the office to write the “Hot Box,” which turned out to be about love:

The next afternoon, Arnie leaned against the batting cage before the game, hung over, and watched her hit line drives, fifteen straight, and each one made his head hurt. As she left the cage, he called over to her. “Later,” she said. She also declined a pregame interview with Joe Garagiola, who had just told his NBC “Game of the Week” television audience, “This is a city in love with a little girl named Annie Szemanski,” when he saw her in the dugout doing deep knee bends. “Annie! Annie!” he yelled over the air. “Let's see if we can't get her up here,” he told the home audience. “Annie! Joe Garagiola!” She turned her back to him and went down into the dugout.

That afternoon, she became the first woman to steal two bases in one inning. She reached first on a base on balls, stole second, went to third on a sacrifice fly, and headed for home on the next pitch. The catcher came out to make the tag, she caught him with her elbow under the chin, and when the dust cleared she was grinning at the ump, the catcher was sprawled in the grass trying to inhale, and the ball was halfway to the backstop.

The TV camera zoomed in on her, head down, trotting toward the dugout steps, when suddenly she looked up. Some out-of-town fan had yelled at her from the box seats. (“A profanity which also refers to a female dog,” the
News
said.) She smiled and, just before she stepped out of view beneath the dugout roof, millions observed her right hand uplifted in a familiar gesture. In bars around the country, men looked at each other and said, “Did she do what I think I saw her do? She didn't do that, did she?” In the booth, Joe Garagiola was observing that it was a clean play, that the runner has a right to the base path, but when her hand appeared on the screen he stopped. At home, it sounded as if he had been hit in the chest by a rock. The screen went blank, then went to a lite sausage commercial. When the show resumed, it was the middle of the next inning.

On Monday, for “actions detrimental to the best interests of baseball,” Annie was fined a thousand dollars by the Commissioner and suspended for two games. He deeply regretted the decision, etc. “I count myself among her most ardent fans. She is good for baseball, good for the cause of equal rights, good for America.” He said he would be happy to suspend the suspension if she would make a public apology, which would make him the happiest man in America.

Gentleman Jim went to the bank Monday afternoon and got the money, a thousand dollars, in a cashier's check. All afternoon, he called Annie's number over and over, waiting thirty or forty rings, then trying again. He called from a pay phone at the Stop ‘N' Shop, next door to the Cityview Apartments, where she lived, and between calls he sat in his car and watched the entrance, waiting for her to come out. Other men were parked there, too, in front, and some in back—men with Sparrows bumper stickers. After midnight, about eleven of them were left. “Care to share some onion chips and clam dip?” one guy said to another guy. Pretty soon all of them were standing around the trunk of the clam-dip guy's car, where he also had a case of beer.

“Here, let me pay you something for this beer,” said a guy who had brought a giant box of pretzels.

“Hey, no. Really. It's just good to have other guys to talk to tonight,” said the clam-dip owner.

“She changed a lot of very basic things about the whole way that I look at myself as a man,” the pretzel guy said quietly.

“I'm in public relations,” said Jim. “But even I don't understand all that she has meant to people.”

“How can she do this to us?” said a potato-chip man. “All the love of the fans, how can she throw it away? Why can't she just play ball?”

Annie didn't look at it that way. “Pall Mall! I'm not going to crawl just because some Tootsie Roll says crawl, and if they don't like it, then bull shit, they can go butter their Hostess Twinkies,” she told the writers as she cleaned out her locker on Tuesday morning. They had never seen the inside of her locker before. It was stuffed with dirty socks, half-unwrapped gifts from admiring fans, a set of ankle weights, and a small silver-plated pistol. “No way I'm going to pay a thousand dollars, and if they expect an apology—well, they better send out for lunch, because it's going to be a long wait. Gentlemen, goodbye and hang on to your valuable coupons.” And she smiled her most winning smile and sprinted up the stairs to collect her paycheck. They waited for her outside the Sparrows office, twenty-six men, and then followed her down the ramp and out of Gate C. She broke into a run and disappeared into the lunchtime crowd on West Providence Avenue, and that was the last they saw of her—the woman of their dreams, the love of their lives, carrying a red gym bag, running easily away from them.

M
Y NAME IS YON YONSON, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. When I walk down the street, all the people I meet, they say, “Tell us what your name is.” I say: My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin, I work in a lumber mill there. But actually I left Wisconsin last fall and came to New York to visit my sister Yvonne and her husband, Don Swanson, in the Bronx. She wrote, “Come on out here and visit us, Bro, we got plenty of room, stay as long as you like.” I sold my shack and came east with one cardboard suitcase. Lumbering can get awfully thin in those Wisconsin woods; sometimes a tree falls and you wish you weren't there to hear it. I hitched a ride out with a dummy named Carlson and his two dogs, neither of whom cared for me, and got to New York smelling like a dog, took a Yellow Cab to Yvonne's place hoping for a big lunch of pot roast and spuds and lemon-meringue pie and I find out the reason she has plenty of room is that she and Don Swanson got divorced last year, that she has an actor boyfriend named Gary Chalet, her hair is bright crimson, she wears three big brass rings on each wrist and has dropped forty pounds on a diet of melon and bulgur wheat and is a painter of paintings that look like they collided with the paint truck and is in college studying real estate, and Don Swanson is a gay Lutheran bishop on Nantucket. I tell you, New York is full of amazing things, any one of which if it happened in Wisconsin would stop your heart, but here it's only a news item. “Tell me about yourself. How've you been?” she asks, pouring me a root beer. I say, “Compared to you and Don, there frankly ain't all that much to tell,” and I think to myself, “There frankly
ain't
and I am going to stay here until there is and then go back home and tell
them.”
We talked until 3:00 A.M. and I woke up at 6:00 and went out for a breath of air; it was hot in her tiny place and her aquarium hummed and kept me awake. I walked for blocks. I saw a little lady in tight black pants walking fifteen little dogs on fifteen leashes, saw a man arguing with another man in some language like Greek that sounded fierce and furious but then they laughed, I bought a Korean pear (very good), walked past a store that sold seashells (nothing else, just shells) and another selling bouquets of grass (hundreds of different types) and firewood for four dollars a pair, dropped in at a lunch counter and sat next to a black man. The waitress called me Love. She said, “What're we having, Love?” I had a cup of coffee and two slices of rye toast. “Anything else, Love?” she asks, so I got eggs, too. “Want half of this newspaper?” asks the black man, so I take half and look at the want ads and go down to Grant S. Pierce Flowers on 52nd Street, who needed a man to deliver full-time, $300/week. “I can see you are an honest man,” said the owner, G.S.P., so I start right away, learning the ropes from the other deliveryman, Elayne, and go home with forty dollars, and Yvonne has just woke up and dressed and is hungry, so we go around the corner to an Ethiopian restaurant where you eat food off a pancake with your fingers. We ate three beef pancakes and one bulgur and she informed me it was all over with Gary Chalet, she had met a sculptor. It didn't surprise me a bit.