part0021

“That strawberry you got there is a real peach,” Peggy remarks, admiring the rouge bruise I’m sporting on the outside of my left thigh. “And you said playing ball in a dress was fruitless.”

“At least I didn’t say it was painless,” I retort, watching my face contort at the contusion as I turn sideways in the full-length mirror to get a better view.

“That’s right—show it off.”

“What, you want me to model my mottle?”

“Sure do! It’s our lesions that have won us legions of fans, you know.”

“You know it all, don’t you?”

Peggy blinks at me, a counterfeit Gracie Allen with Kewpie doll eyes.

I roll mine. “I had no idea these injuries were so popular. In that case, they can’t possibly hurt the League.”

“Nah, just the players.” Having successfully lobbed insult at injury, Peggy laughs. There’s nothing specifically spectacular about the sound. It’s just your basic homerun-of-the-mill pitch-perfect titter. Nothing special. “Now come on, Lynette, make like Ruth and be a babe.”

I lift my skirt to show some leg , like some of the spectators hooted last year, the first time they experienced the spectacle of women playing a man’s game. We still get guff sometimes, but I’m not bothered by it. It’s not like they’re saying that stuff to me. They mean it for the other girls: the dames, the dollies. That’s not me, although I got to say—on the field, when I’m a ballplayer, I feel…well, I feel womanly, I guess. Off the field, when I’m just a plain old person, I might as well change my name to Bob Hopeless or maybe something a little more feminine, like Irene Dunderhead. If I were a pin-up girl, they’d pull the pin on me.

I’m surprised Peggy hasn’t. I guess she likes a little oddball with her baseball. “Just wait ‘til the transformation starts,” she enthuses, adjusting to a more comfortable cross-legged position on the floor, which is the color of a catcher’s mitt and almost as hard. “Then I can serenade you with that Sinatra song, ‘In the Blue of Evening,’ and it’ll match your uniform.”

“From batter’s box to mailbox. The next time we go downtown, make sure I don’t stand in any one place for too long. And make sure I don’t open my mouth if I do?someone might put something in it.”

“Like a tongue?”

“How about a letter, knucklehead?”

“Your guess wasn’t nearly as good as mine,” Peggy opines, and reclines on her elbows. “By the way, I like you in blue. I also like you in lavender, which is why I think you should wear your new blouse when we take those publicity shots tomorrow.”

“The photos won’t be in color, so why should I?” Having posed the question, I pause mid-pose. In the mirror is a bugbear—a jitterbugbear, to be factual, its arms and legs akimbo, a disgrace to grace. “Whose brainchild was it to include me in publicity pictures?” I mumble, returning my arms to my sides and my feet to the floor.

“You mean you’ve never wanted to be in pictures?” Peggy rags, and pats my knee. Then she gets up on both of her own and chugs over to the dresser in our room.

Well, it isn’t our room, really. It belongs to the daughters of the Holbrooks, our host family here in South Bend, Indiana, where our team the Blue Sox is based. Like us, the girls are doing their part for the war effort: one’s a WAVE, the other’s a WASP.

Their room is real nice—all coral and floral and sunlight—and their parents are even nicer. They dote on us, wait on us, cheer us on. And even though we’re only twenty, they treat us like we’re much more mature. They say they’re glad we’re here, that we remind them of their girls because of the “sisterly spirit” of our relationship.

But I would never kiss my sis the way I want to kiss Peggy. Not that I would, or could, because if I did, I’m sure I can kiss my spot on this team goodbye. It’s unlikely that the League would consider such behavior feminine, much less all-American. Worse, kissing would divest us of our lip paint, which would taint not only our image, but the League’s as well.

If the team chaperone suspected there was something untoward going on, she would not have approved of us living together this season. It wouldn’t have mattered that Peggy and I are compatible in other ways: we’re both from Chicago, both early risers, both teetotalers (now that the League loves). We’re also two of few girls who don’t have a loved one stationed overseas. The only person I have to worry will come back to me is Peggy.

When she does return, she’s accompanied by a bottle of iodine, a couple of cotton balls, a fresh patch of gauze, first aid tape, and lastly, something pointy. What on earth?

“Is that an eyebrow pencil?”

“You’re sharp,” Peggy quips, pressing a soggy clump of cotton to the wound.

“Is there such a thing as a sore winner?” I wince.

“Yes, and her name is Lynette, although her teammates call her—”

“She knows what her teammates call her, thank you.”

A diamond in the rough who gets rough on the diamond: Masculynette, that’s what they call her. Me. That’s what they call me. Behind my back. Inside their heads. Or maybe it’s all in my head.

I hope it’s not in hers. Her head, with its hair the color of buttered popcorn and its tresses folded into bony braids—the only thing scrawny about her—is at my hip.

From there, her face forms a frown. “They call you The Bat’s Meow,” she informs me.

“Since I told them that’s what you are.”

If I were some dopey sap, my insides would be mushier than a rained-out field right about now. But I’m not, so they aren’t.

Besides, it’s not as though she thinks I’m…pleasing to look at or some such gobbledygook. I’m as flat as a paper doll, my nose belongs on an A-20 bomber plane, and while I don’t exactly put the man in sportsmanship —I wouldn’t have made the team if I did—unlike Peggy, I’m…well, I’ll be kind to myself for once: I’m batting average.

The looker in this room is Peggy: a cross between Alice Faye and Fay Wray, with a little Eve Arden to harden the bold mold she’s cut from. But she’s more than pretty. She’s also witty and gritty and the most proficient professional I’ve ever had the privilege of playing with.

I’d better stop spewing my guts out or I might say something I shouldn’t. Heck, I’ve said too much already. Thank goodness she didn’t hear any of that. She might think I was…strange or…or queer or…I don’t know. I don’t normally feel this way about girls.

No, that’s a lie. Sheesh, I’m more underhanded off the field than I am when I’m on the pitcher’s mound. These feelings didn’t come right out of left field and smack me in the kisser. But I don’t normally feel this way about girls this strongly. That’s the truth. When the feelings are…weaker, I can conceal them easier. I just yank the blackout curtains closed, like we’re supposed to do during an air raid, to avoid detection by enemies and traitors—people who can hurt me.

“Ouch!” I exclaim, at the same time she claims, “Oops!”

Peggy peers around the corner of my freshly bandaged thigh. “Sorry,” she simpers. “It’s hard to stay straight.”

“Are you writing on me?”

“I’m tracing the seams on your stockings,” she states, and waits for me to stop scowling.

“Is that a League-sanctioned use of an eyebrow pencil?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. That’s one of many bases they neglected to cover in the Rules of Conduct.”

“But I’m not wearing stockings,” I protest, more relieved than aggrieved. I own them, because League management wants us to. But I’ll never forget the day that I delightfully deposited my old ones inside the collection bin in the unmentionables department of Marshall Field’s. It wasn’t long after our country entered the War, and the rationing of nylon was one sacrifice I was eager to make. If the parachutes want them, the parachutes can have them. And anyway, “You’re the one who wants to leave a legacy in the vein of Betty Grable, don’t you, Leggy Peggy?”

“The only cracks you ought to be making are of the bat,” Peggy huffs, but it’s in vain. However, when I don’t slide the smirk off my face, she smacks the back of my thigh. “Coach gave me that nickname the first time I legged out a triple,” she insists. “It’s got nothing to do with my gams. You of all people know for a fact that my eyelashes are not the only thing I can bat. And who even needs million-dollar legs when you’re batting a thousand-watt smile?” she gloats, and flashes one.

It really is a miracle that Peggy got recruited instead of discovered. She could have gone straight from the sandlot to the studio lot, just like Carole Lombard did. Instead, she’s here in South Bend, knocking the Blue Sox right off my feet.

“—you’ve got a killer-diller figure too,” Peggy is telling me.

After one and a half seasons together, I’ve finally gotten the hang of all the slang she uses, so I’m confident that’s a compliment. “I guess my looks aren’t…completely crummy,” I concede.

“Atta girl. Now you’re cooking with gas.” She whacks my buttocks. “Get a load of those bases.”

I don’t know whether to turn red or drop dead from embarrassment.

In our doubleheader of a reflection, I see Peggy press her thumb to her lips, right between them, as if she’s just stabbed her thumb with a sewing needle. And then the moisture from her mouth is on my skin, on the back of my thigh, in place of the possibly inappropriately-used eyebrow pencil. Her thumb circles near the bases but doesn’t round them, thank goodness.

Please, underpants , I implore, don’t make like a pop fly and fall straight down . Thanks to rubber rationing, my girlie garments have no elastic at the waist. Instead, they’re tied in place with a string not unlike that found on a yo-yo.

Mercifully, my underwear goes nowhere. Neither does Peggy’s hand, which is now splayed across the back of my thigh. I can feel the length and strength of every finger, and I feel myself cracking open like the shell of a peanut.

Peggy has me sauced. Bonkers. She makes my ticker flicker, sparks all these sloppy soppy sensations in me.

I feel like I’m not supposed to have these feelings for her, but they’re the only kinds of feelings I’ve ever had, and it takes ball kinds to make a world, doesn’t it?

I should just lay it on the baseline. After all, who knows how long this freedom will last? If we win the War, will we lose the game? Each other?

But I’m no brave WAVE. Of course, you don’t have to be in the Navy to experience women’s reserve. And as reserved as this woman is, I’m sure I’ll hit a grounder and flounder, probably spook her too. So I shouldn’t say anything. They taught us in charm school that the eyes bespeak our innermost thoughts . Maybe I should simply—

“Let me take a crack at it, Lynette.”

Peggy has lifted herself off the floor and shifted to my side. She turns me toward her. One hand moves to the base of my spine, the other to the base of my neck.

My hands take the same base paths.

“Instead of publicity photos,” Peggy says, her voice pleasingly low, like the etiquette expert says it should be, “I wish we could take one of those paper moon portraits. My folks had one made on their honeymoon.”

I picture Peggy and me, cradled carefully by a cardboard crescent, and smile. “Is there somebody you’re mooning over?” I tease.

“Some teammate of mine, but just once in a blue moon. You?”

“Perhaps, Peg o’ my heart,” I reply, and she moves nearer to it.

“I like being the leadoff batter,” Peggy murmurs, “but I’d like you to be the contact hitter, Lynette. So I’ll be looking at the gal who hung the moon, but I’ll be seeing you shooting your snoot to me for a smooch.”

“Okay,” I say, and line up our lips until they’re closer than the spikes on our cleats and the dirt on our skirts.

I make contact, our mouths connecting like a bat with a ball—but with a smack instead of a crack. The kiss, more seamless than my stockings, hurtles my heart right out of the park and over the rainbow. I feel like a Blue star shining bright, a picture-perfect moonstruck patriot.

Afterward, dizzy with a dame, I blink blankly at her.

“You look like Little Orphan Annie,” Peggy needles. “What’s the matter? Does the batter taste bitter?”

My head moves from side to side, like a pennant flapping in the breeze. When I joined the League, I got my first taste of freedom, my first taste of independence. But no taste can compare to or compete with the taste of my first kiss. “No,” I assure her. “No, I just feel like I’ve been hit with a beanball is all.”

“So do I, Lynette,” she commiserates, and grins at me. Then she hides her smug mug in a hug, nestling against me like a ball in the pocket of a glove. “That’s what happens when a gal experiences a change of base. Now come on, we’ve got a game to get ready for. Because when the boys are away, the girls will play ball, and we’ll have a gay old time doing it.”

Peggy makes her way from the dugout to the batter’s box, swishing past me in her Sonja Henie hemline. “You know I’ll South Bend over backward for you, Lynette!” she shouts over her shoulder.

I feel my face turn redder than the seams on a baseball, but I just roll my eyes and clap my hands.

A flare of fanfare follows Peggy all the way to home base. My gal’s got more than enough brass for that bugle. She’s wearing the same visage of victory she put on after our first kiss two weeks ago, only it’s even more dazzling on the field than it is off, if you can believe that.

Peggy steps up to the plate. Even from the dugout, I can make out the ferocious focus on her face. She treats each period of play not as an inning but as a femininning, and thanks to her, I now know what it really means to be feminine.

It doesn’t mean being gentle or genteel. It doesn’t mean adherence to an appearance that’s pleasing to men. It means that when those cleats go on, our clout comes out. It means we vaunt our valor and flaunt our curveballs, and we don’t let anything daunt our dedication. It means making great strides—and even greater slides—with ballplayers who have pride of place and pride of base.

And there’s no base like home, where Peggy waits at the plate—like Goldilocks, until the pitch is just right: not too low, not too high, not too wide.

When it comes, her stoic stamina cracks along with the bat and it’s a hit.

Leggy Peggy catapults across Bendix Field like a batter out of hell, her legs churning with yearning, inevitably earning her safety on first base.

The stadium bursts into cheers. Who’s on first is what it’s about. Peggy exemplifies everything that’s best about baseball: the skill, the will, the thrill. The fans know it just as well as I do.

Speaking of me, I’m next in the lineup.

I swing into action—well actually, for Peggy’s benefit so she can move into scoring position, I bunt, but the sentiment is the same.

And pretty soon, the game itself is in full swing. We put each other on the bases and through the paces. I’m not Peggy’s bat girl. She can hold her own and so can I. We’re teammates, we’re equals, we’re…sweethearts.

But I can’t dwell on the swell stuff right now. I’ve got to keep my eye on the ball, not the ballplayer. Swifter than my feet, I switch gears. It’s a good thing, too, or I would’ve gotten tagged out.

With a firm grip on my feelings and, when necessary, my bat, I play the rest of the game with a fighting chance, a sturdy stance, and the occasional stolen glance to complement a stolen base.

Confident in our competence and in each other, we—all of us Blue Sox— through every out and run and inning, never lose steam or team spirit or that gleam in our eye.

Even with the elements—the heat, the wind, the dirt—there’s nothing elementary about the way we play the game.

We’re in our element.

And when we win, we’re in all our glory.

Peggy flings her arms around me, and I press her to my body like a chest protector. I pretend we’re also wearing catcher’s masks, because if I let myself forget there’s nothing between us, I’ll kiss her right here on the field. Then the cheering will turn to jeering and something will come between us.

“You’ve got a real nice swing, you know that?” I remark, as we embark on our walk off to the locker room.

“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that,” Peggy hoots. “But were you referring to my bat or my hips?”

“You’re batty. Your bat.”

“You flatter the batter so.” Peggy swoons in time with her rhyme, and it’s clear that I’m rubbing off on her even more than the dirt on my uniform is. “You deserve a grandstanding ovation yourself,” she declares, clapping me on the back in a fraternal fashion, “especially for the way you were busting the ump’s chops out there.”

“Got to keep the home umpires burning.”

“I have to hand it to you, Lynette,” Peggy says, and hands me a towel for the showers, “you play cornball better than any woman in this country.” She sighs, a dramatic performance that rivals the one she’s just given on the field. “Sadly, you are the one ham I just can’t can.”

I wind the towel around my hands until I’ve practically coiled it into a pin curl. “So I’m safe?” I venture.

Beside me, in the sweater section of Robertson’s Department Store—fitting, given the perspiration that’s presenting an exhibition game on my forehead—Peggy pivots on her kitten heels and gives me her full attention.

So, too, do two teen-aged female fans.

Actually, they’re aiming their fountain pens at both of us. “Would you sign our magazine?” the taller one implores.

The smaller one giggles and goggles, her eyes rounder than canteens.

“You’re so pretty in person,” her elder companion comments. “Up close, I mean.”

By the time I figure out that she’s speaking to me, Loretta Young can no longer claim the accuracy of her surname.

I hold the magazine at one end and Peggy holds it at the other. It’s opened to an article about the League, entitled “Dames on the Diamond,” and with only a modicum of mortification, I recognize Peggy and me in the publicity photos.

In one picture, my teammates and I are masquerading as manicurists. The League managers delight in letting the public know they’ve given their players polish.

In the foreground of the photo, Peggy is painting my nails. I remember the delicate way she held my hand, as if at any moment she would lift it to her lips and kiss it. I must admit, I do look mildly enchanting in that picture—my lovely lavender blouse photographs beautifully in black-and-white.

In another photo, players are playing beauty parlor. I’m shown sitting between Peggy’s knees while she puts thingamabobs in my hair, the result of which was a Victory Roll. That day, my hair experienced more winding-up than my pitching arm ever has, and I enjoyed—endured—several hours of having a great big blob thicker than my bat hover over my hairline like the bill of a ball cap.

Needless to say, this is not my favorite photo. That honor is bestowed upon the image of our team engaged in batting practice, and shared with the team picture next to it. Even in the latter, Peggy and I are together. I’m down on South Bended knee and she’s seated on a bench behind me, her hands touching—clutching—my shoulders. On top of my uniform, I’m wearing a winning smile. In fact, with those chipper choppers I’m flashing, I’m surprised the Blue Sox haven’t traded me to Pepsodent.

I sign my name across my knees with the inspiring inscription: You’re aces on bases! Peggy writes across her chest the equally edifying: Don’t play the field —play on it! We return the magazine to our fans.

Each young lady thanks us by seizing the sides of her skirt and executing a pinch-perfect Shirley Temple curtsy from before their time.

“Did you notice they got our team name right in the article?” I inquire, having no desire to return to the conversation I initiated. “Remember when Time did that story on us at the start of the first season? Perhaps one day we’ll get to play against the always-instructive Rockford Teachers and the happy-go-lucky Kenosha Shamrocks. I’m surprised they didn’t call us the South Bend Goulash or something equally distasteful.”

“Yep,” Peggy concurs, and laughs. Almost immediately, her smile crimps like piecrust and she turns bobby pin-brown eyes on me. “You said you wanted to touch base with me about something,” she reminds me.

I couldn’t feel more uncomfortable if I were wearing a wool sweater, but there aren’t too many of those, I don’t think, because wool fabric is rationed, isn’t it? I can’t remember just now. But just because we have to ration our fabrics and our food and our fun doesn’t mean we also have to ration our happiness, or, for that matter, rationalize our unhappiness.

I’m rambling—I realize that. And even though I’m not rambling out loud, I know Peggy can read my mindless meandering because she’s looking at me like I’m one pitch short of a shutout.

Okay, Lynette, The Bat’s Meow, take a deep breath and then it’s off to the bases .

Mind you, slow and steady may not win the base, but maybe, just maybe, it’ll win the winsome woman who’s on it.

I open my mouth, breathe in, breathe out, then snap my lips shut like a compact mirror. What if she thinks I’m lousy with lunacy? What if she makes like a shortstop and stops me short?

Try to Ty Cobble together some courage, would you? Jeez, why the heck do I have a man on my mind at a time like this?

“You’re more riveting than Rosie,” I blurt.

“And you’re more joltin’ than Joe,” she flirts.

I could go on—tell her she’s got more steel than a mill, more sand than an hourglass, more craft than an airplane factory; tell her how I admire everything about her, from her stride to her slide; tell her I love her when she’s scrappy, when she’s snappy, even when she’s just a little bit yappy. We could toss the ball around all day. But if I don’t get a homerun today, I’ll end up running home tomorrow.

And so, finally, I fold like a spectator seat. “I don’t want to just play with you. I want to stay with you this year—here, when the season’s over. We don’t know how long the League or the War will last. We’ve only played two seasons, but the War could end and send the men—”

“Men don’t send me,” Peggy cuts in. “They can pitch woo all they like, but they’ll score a no-hitter every time. So if you’re asking me to stick around, then right off the bat my answer is yes, because I’m not just rooting for our team; I’m rooting for us.”

And then, right there between the stacks of sweaters, she stacks our hands together. As part of our beauty routine, every All-American Girl is exhorted to exercise practical good sense in preserving the hands that serve her so faithfully and well in her activities . Let it never be said that Peggy and I don’t play by the rulebook.

“Maybe we can stay together with the Holbrooks,” I suggest, “if they’ll let us stay on. We can get jobs in town—selling concessions at the Palace, where we can wear slacks to work! I would even be willing to work here, at Robertson’s, but please—not at the Leg Make-up Bar downstairs.”

Peggy chuckles, then chucks me under the chin. “I don’t think ours is the sort of war bond the government had in mind, so we’ll have to exercise the utmost discretion,” she advises, and surprises me with a kiss on the cheek. “But then, if it were going to be easy, they’d have to call it something other than hardball.”

“You know me—I never take the base path of least resistance.”

Being with Peggy, it…well, it will be laborious and glorious, I bet, just like playing ball. I’ll have a base to call home, and someone to come home to.

“You think it’ll last through the War?” I ask, with only a minimum of reserve.

“I think it’ll outlast it,” Peggy answers, with a maximum of certainty. “No matter what, I’ll always go to bat for you.”

We can do it , I tell myself, getting cozy with words of encouragement from Rosie.

After all, it’s a woman’s patriotic prerogative to embrace a man’s job.

But right now, I’d rather hug Peggy, so I do.

It’s brief, but it’s also a relief—because while I’m wrapped around my sweetheart like foil on a stick of chewing gum, I realize there’s a pastime and a place for everything.