“Make me one, too,” Cindy asked.
“It keeps tearing.”
Tracy had settled into a complaining tone, which made Fanny push her into Cindy. The two of them regarded Fanny critically. “She wants to be the only one with a crown,” said Tracy. “Queen of the May.”
“She’s not wearing a crown,” said Cindy. “She looks like she’s got antennae.”
Irini was laughing, but she wasn’t sure why. Fanny turned her back and began to sing again. “I love Paris in the springtime.”
“Queen of the bees.” Tracy finished her crown and put it on.
It did look nice. Her hair waved out over her shoulders, dark clouds of hair. “How soon would you let a boy kiss you?” she asked Irini. “Third date? Fourth date?” They’d had this conversation before many times. She knew Irini meant to hold out until the fourth date, at least. The question had become embarrassingly hypothetical. It must be on Tracy’s mind again because of Thomas Holcrow.
“Learn to react without thinking,” Fanny advised. “Don’t make plans. Make a chain.” Irini took Cindy’s other hand, the one with no fingers. It was hard to grip; she moved her own fingers upward, circled the wrist. Tracy caught Irini’s spare hand in her own cold, wet one. “Here we go dancing in May, in May,” Fanny said.
She led off, skipping over the dead leaves and pine needles of last year. She made sharp little turns, crack-the-whip turns, so that Irini’s arms were pulled at the shoulders and Tracy stumbled and lost her footing. Fanny was usually quite nice to Irini, but never so nice as when she was not being nice to Tracy. There was something familiar about this, therefore. Fanny and Tracy quarreling with Irini’s body between them.
“Are you going to play on Walter’s baseball team?” Tracy asked Irini, panting slightly.
“I am not,” said Fanny. “I don’t like baseball. And I think this girls’ team idea is just a little undignified.” Her face was flushed. One of her ferns bent over like a dog’s ear.
“It’s not ice hockey,” said Tracy. “I don’t think it’ll be undignified.”
“Oh, it’s fine for you.” Fanny cracked the whip so sharply that both Irini and Tracy went sprawling. Because Irini was holding Cindy with her strong arm, she yanked Cindy down as well. The ground was soft with water, but they hit it hard. Only Fanny remained standing. “But I’m an adult,” she said.
Irini couldn’t get to her feet again and this made her laugh. She lay on the wet ground, with a slug feeding near one of her hands, and the sky spinning. Now she was the May pole, the trees circled around her. “Here you go dancing in May, in May,” she told them. In the middle of those greens and all the buds it was impossible not to believe that something good, something exciting was just about to happen. Right there in Magrit. Any minute now.
“Look.” Cindy reached an arm over her. Her wrist where Irini had held it was red with fingerprints. Cindy lowered it until it was in front of Irini’s eyes.
“Fanny!” Tracy complained. Her voice was a small irritation, like the whine of a distant, summer mosquito. Irini could hardly hear it. She worked to keep this illusion. She brought up the sounds of the birds and the wind and the insects. She tamped down the sounds of the Mays.
“You did that on purpose, Fanny,” said Tracy. “What does that have to do with spring?”
“No, that was great,” said Cindy. She got to her feet and began to spin again. “We should dance more often. That’s my belief.” She raised her voice, opened her arms. “Don’t forget to dance, world. Leave time for the dancing.”
Irini watched her fondly. She was so precocious. So good-natured. So easy to please. It came from being the youngest of three sisters.
“I don’t call what we just did dancing,” said Tracy. “Do you, Fanny?”
“I call it, Falling on Buttocks,” Fanny said. “It’s my masterpiece.”
“Did you write that letter for Maggie?” Irini asked. Her own voice came out very loud. The sky tipped lazily and slid toward her open mouth.
“Who me? Maggie writes her own letters. Put some money in the pig, Irini.”
"She already said she didn’t." Irini hadn’t heard Fanny say this, but Tracy’s voice was sharp with the impatience of repetition. "Are you calling my sister a liar?"
“My sister doesn’t lie,” said Cindy.
“She runs the whole Kitchen,” said Tracy. “I’d like to see you try. I wonder how you’d like it if everyone was suspecting you?”
“Anyway, what harm did the column do?” Cindy asked. “I even agreed with it.”
“Sorry,” said Irini.
She had gotten the information she wanted. She could tell that both Tracy and Cindy thought Fanny had written it. It was enough to satisfy her.
Fanny slid to the ground beside her. “Say, Irini,” she said. “Say, Tracy.” There was a pause. The pause interested Irini. Fanny was having trouble getting to the point. “What about Maggie’s last column?” Fanny asked. “Did anyone but me see a problem there?”
“Which column was that?” Irini wasn’t in the mood for problems. She could just begin to feel the cold moisture of the ground soaking through her jacket and into her nightgown. Time to get up. But she wasn’t in the mood for that either.
“Jack-Be-Nimble Salad.”
In the thirties Maggie had been an enthusiastic proponent of fun foods. She made open-faced sandwiches with olive eyes, she made those little rabbit salads out of canned pears and marshmallows. She thumbed her nose at the Great Depression by suggesting a dinner party where the guests dressed as hobos and took dessert home in their bandannas-on-sticks. Such frivolity was out of place during the war. But not now. If Irini had thought anything about Maggie Collins’s Jack-Be-Nimble Salad, it was that this was a return to form.
“I thought that was cute,” said Cindy.
“Adorable. I can’t find out who sent it in.”
“I thought it was cute,” Tracy repeated. “I bet Mr. Henry won’t have a problem with it. What harm can it do?”
“If it’s not a problem, why won’t anyone admit to it?”
“Maybe Mr. Henry did it himself. Maybe Mrs. Ada. She’s real artistic.”
“I can’t ask him, you know,” said Fanny. “He’ll know I think it’s a problem, if I ask him. If he doesn’t think it’s a problem, I don’t want him to know I think it’s a problem.”
“Why is it a problem?” asked Irini. “Maggie’s done lots of these salads before. Remember Valentine’s Day? Heart-shaped peaches and pickle spears?”
“Fine. It’s not a problem,” said Fanny. “I think Maggie’s getting a little out of hand. But just forget I said anything.”
Everyone forgot it. Irini put a sudden end to the Maying by being sick twice. She noted that she had never thrown up so effortlessly, but this was just a matter of trying to find the bright side. She would never, never, never drink again.
There was another bright side, which she only thought to appreciate later. This was that none of the neighbors were up yet. No one saw Irini reeling down Brief Street with the Mays, on a Sunday morning with violets and fiddleheads in their hair, and all of them dressed for a slumber party in the snow. No one except Sissy Tarken, who looked out from her porch, and they didn’t see her, but she asked Irini about it later. No need for the Mays to ever know this. And absolutely no one else except the very first robin of the season, and he kept quiet for two more days.
MAGGIE COLLINS’S JACK-BE-NIMBLE SALAD
Here’s an easy way to dress up a humdrum lunch for the girls. Set one pineapple ring per person on a decorative lettuce leaf. Fasten a peeled banana upright inside the ring to resemble a candle. Complete the illusion with a pimiento flame and mayonnaise drips. A great ice-breaker. No one can be too stuffy while eating this!
13
I have warned you of my mother’s generous and sunny nature. Here’s an illustration. This is her version of an old standard:
Two teenagers are parked on a secluded road. The radio is on. The music is int
errupted by a bulletin. A maniacal murderer has escaped from the local mental institution. He can be easily identified by the hook he has in place of his right hand.
A noise startles the teenagers into leaving. The car is just a little slow to respond, just a little sluggish. The boy has to push the pedal into the floor. When they arrive home, they discover a hook, stuck in the door handle on the girl’s side.
The next day the man comes looking for his hook. He’s traced them through the license plate. Turns out he wasn’t the escapee at all. He’s a war hero, decorated three times. He just wanted directions. They all have a good laugh about the misunderstanding.
Many things were in short supply during the war—butter, baseball players, body parts. One of the first things the War Production Board did was to outlaw zoot suits and the female equivalent, juke coats. The ostensible reason for the ban was that they required too much material. For the duration of the war, no one would look smoother than anyone else, by government decree. No doubt this had its effect on morale. Good for some.
The national speed limit was thirty-five miles per hour, otherwise known as the victory speed; the gas ration for an ordinary person with an A windshield sticker was three gallons per week, which hardly mattered since you couldn’t get tires and then later you couldn’t get cars. Nor new bicycles, stoves, household appliances, or anything else made of metal. Paper, including toilet paper, was in short supply. Let’s not even think about this.
First sugar, then coffee, finally every food but fruits and vegetables was rationed. You could buy one pair of shoes every six months. There was the black market, and there was also an aggressive advertising campaign against it. “Did you drown a sailor today because YOU bought a lamb chop without giving up the required coupons?” a wartime ad asked. Go live with yourself.
But it was the expressed desire of President Roosevelt that baseball continue to be played during the war. While the Japanese Empire was abolishing baseball, America was saving it. What were we fighting for, after all? Baseball is a protected monopoly. What says America faster than that?
The game was not, however, untouched. There was a war on. Naturally, standards had to be relaxed. Those same shortages that made tires so hard to come by also affected the manufacture of baseballs. For the duration, the balls were made, like wartime pennies, of inferior materials. You could call them victory balls, though they lacked zip.
And the best players were in khaki.
Even so, baseball is in more trouble now than then. You don’t need me to tell you this. For the first time since 1904 we skipped a World Series and—this is the real kicker—nobody younger than forty gives a damn. Someone has finally dropped the ball that was handed down carefully from father to son for generation after generation. It looks like it was us. Pretty tacky for the guys who grew up with Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente.
You could blame the owners. You could blame the players. I blame Sesame Street. The Sesame Street generation morphed directly into MTV. They’re a generation evolutionarily adapted to the remote control, which is itself the next chapter in the story of the opposable thumb. Every entertainment ever planned for this group has tried to work within the limits of their tiny little attention spans.
This is a classic confusion of cause and effect. The effect is our children, uniquely capable of watching several games at once, with a movie thrown in for flavor. They’ve lost the narrative and gained the highlights film. They’ve lost baseball and picked up hockey.
If Sesame Street had felt any responsibility toward baseball, it wouldn’t have been an hourlong show. Instead, you would have never known when it was going to end. One day it might be two hours long, the next, three hours and seventeen minutes. If Sesame Street had cared about baseball it would have been a leisurely show with a lot of chatting on the mound, like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Margaret Mill applied some flexible standards in order to field a women’s team. The starting line-up included Cindy May, who played baseball by imitating Pete Gray—trying to catch, shed the glove, transfer the ball, and throw it back as quickly as he did. Pete Gray was a one-armed outfielder for the Browns. Gray was not a casualty of the war; he’d lost his hand in a childhood accident, but he made it to the majors. In fact, men’s baseball has a long tradition of one-armed men. It starts with pitcher Hugh Daily and continues through outfielders Jesse Alexander and Pete Gray straight on to Jim Abbott’s no-hitter.
No one-armed woman ever played in the women’s leagues. Perhaps this was because, however gifted, a one-armed player still carries the taint of the sideshow, and women’s baseball was already a sideshow. Perhaps the same people whose hearts were warmed by the sight of a talented one-armed man would have found an ambitious one-armed woman preposterous. Or perhaps the pool of women ballplayers has always been so small, and the pool of one-armed women so much smaller still, that an overlap was statistically unthinkable.
No one said Cindy shouldn’t play baseball. No one even thought it. Cindy did everything her sisters did. She’d always taken her turn at the dishes, same as her sisters. She made her bed, she did the ironing. She’d taken piano lessons, learning to play a baseline of a single note. Chopping and mincing were difficult for her; she didn’t work in the Kitchen, but served as Magrit’s telephone operator, right from her own home. Norma Baldish had ingeniously modified the control panel so that Cindy could work it one-handed. When Cindy was out for any reason, there was no telephone service in Magrit.
She rarely seemed to think about her missing fingers and neither did her sisters. Irini followed their example. When Irini was twelve or so, Mrs. Baldish asked her once at a recital if she didn’t think Cindy was awfully brave to take piano lessons and Irini thought she was referring to Mrs. Gilbertsen’s teaching methods. Mrs. Gilbertsen was the sort of woman who would have liked to use a metronome for all of life’s activities. “Tempo, tempo,” she said sometimes when she saw Irini on the street and this meant that Irini was walking too fast.
Irini had never taken piano herself. Her father said the scales were fascistic when really he just hadn’t wanted to have to listen to them. But Mrs. Gilbertsen came to school to teach the girls in Magrit deportment and manners, with a lot of emphasis on gloves and curtsies, so Irini had personal experience.
The boys had never had to go to deportment, back when they’d had boys in Magrit. Boys couldn’t grasp the intricacies of good manners. They went outside and worked on blocking and tackling while the girls curtsied and learned to sit with their legs crossed at the ankles and to stand in a position Mrs. Gilbertsen called the Right Hesitation. You teach a girl to hesitate and she’ll have a lesson she’ll remember all her life.
The concession the Sweetwheat Sweethearts made to Cindy’s missing fingers was to play her at first.
This was the starting lineup: Tracy May pitching, Norma Baldish catching, Cindy at first, Claire Kinser at second, Margo Törngren at third, and Arlys Fossum at short.
The outfield consisted of my mother in center, Helen Leggett in right, and Sissy Tarken in left. Sissy Tarken would have been better in the infield, but Walter had lived in Magrit long enough to know that it was best to keep the Tarkens and the Mays as far apart as possible. The Mays, the Leggetts, and the Kinsers were Upper Magrit. The Tarkens and Baldishes were Lower. It was a risk teaming Tracy as pitcher with Norma behind the plate, but there were no options. Arlys, Margo, and Irini were not identified with either faction and could swing both ways. Walter never complained about the added difficulties of coaching a team in which half the lineup didn’t speak to the other half. He just worked within the historical context.
“But it’s all the same team,” Henry said. “Same mill.” As the man responsible, Henry had always maintained that the Troubles in Magrit were temporary.
He was firmly blind to these distinctions when hiring. Actually neither Sissy nor Norma nor Cindy worked at the mill, but they could have if they’d wanted to, Henry said, which made it close enough to being
a mill team. “Advertising true,” my mother used to say sometimes in reference to some of my stories. This was to distinguish them from the actually untrue, of which I’ve lived long enough now to notice hardly anything is.
My mother could make the throw all the way to home. She was the only outfielder who could do this. Walter called her his grenade launcher. Initially, there was no bench.
The Sweethearts barnstormed all over the small towns of the neighboring states, but they stayed away from the big cities. Partly this was practical. In a small town, the Sweethearts’ arrival was a big event.
Partly it was sentimental. Henry had a particular affection for the small-town Midwest. The cereal bowl of America, Henry called it.
Partly it was political. Ada Collins’s admiration for the proletariat was more than matched by her horror of the lumpen proletariat. She didn’t think good husbands were as likely to be found in the corrupted cities.
Partly it was prudent. There had been race riots in several cities during the last years of the war. The Germans were sometimes blamed. Spies and subversives had convinced the Negroes there were things to be unhappy about. On Hitler’s instructions these subversives fanned the flames of discontent. It was all too hot for Magrit.
Naturally none of the small towns had women’s baseball. The Sweethearts played friendly games in neighborhood parks against local pickup teams. Henry bought an old school bus and painted it in wheat tones. He paid Norma Baldish to drive and Fanny May went along as chaperone. Fanny was good at this. She performed her function primarily by diversion. Men were so busy sending her flowers, buying her drinks, and bribing desk clerks for her room number that they left the other Sweethearts pretty much alone.
The lack of a bench really hurt the team. Walter had hoped that in a pinch, Fanny might pitch in, but she said there was no chance of that. Henry had bought the Sweethearts’ equipment at bargain, because it was war surplus. “That’ll be the day when you find me playing with zipless balls,” Fanny said.