“Excuse me, Naomi—”
Kinch’s cough worsened. Within seconds it became a wracking spasm of a cough. Naomi hoped that Sonia would come running to give aid to her invalid-employer but Sonia was feigning deafness perhaps, hiding in a remote room watching TV.
Naomi came to Kinch, hunched now in his wheelchair, white-faced, shaken, the size and heft of a prepubescent boy. With a paper napkin she wiped at his damp face. The hateful cigarette she detached from his fingers and briskly stubbed out in a tray.
Soon then, Kinch recovered. Irritably he said, “Just something I swallowed wrong. It’s nothing, much.”
THE CONSOLATION OF GRIEF:
FEBRUARY 2012
Another time, she flew to the Midwest.
The last time. She promised herself.
AT KENNEDY her flight was delayed so that the plane’s wide wings could be “de-iced”—fascinating if harrowing to watch from her window seat at the rear of the plane. At the airport outside Cleveland, runways were bordered by six-foot banks of plowed-up snow and passengers already exhausted from a turbulent flight and a bumpy landing were made to sit on the plane for forty minutes awaiting an “arrival gate”—telling herself It is your choice that you are here. It is no one else’s but your own.
That evening, at the Cleveland Sports Arena, on a card with a much-promoted middleweight boxing match between two top-ranked (male) contenders, was the title fight for the Midwest Boxing League Women’s Welterweight championship—(title-holder) Siri Aya “Icewoman” vs. D.D. Dunphy “Hammer of Jesus.”
This time Naomi had a better seat: third row, center. A complimentary ticket courtesy of Dayton Fights, Inc.
Since the Cincinnati visit she’d kept in contact with Marika who was under the impression (to a degree, this was not unfounded) that Naomi Matheson was preparing a documentary film on women boxers in which D.D. Dunphy would be prominent.
Each woman believing herself shrewd in “keeping in contact” with the other.
Marika had no doubt that D.D. Dunphy would win the MBL title in February, in Cleveland. The “really big” title fight would be with a boxer named Ilse Kinder who was the WBA champion and a box-office draw—“They can’t ignore us then. They will have to make a TV deal.”
Adding, “This will be a major fight, probably in the summer. Atlantic City at least. Vegas is a long shot but a possibility.”
And, “You might end up making your film all about D.D. Dunphy, Naomi. ‘The First Great Woman Boxer’—‘The First Great American Woman Boxer’—some title like that.”
Difficult not to be caught up in such enthusiasm, such optimism for what’s-to-come, even in one who had grown cautious, if not apprehensive, of peering blithely into the future—as if one could peer into any future and not rather into a kind of distorting reflective surface mirroring one’s own anxious face.
Naomi heard herself say carefully: “That would be a possibility. Yes.”
Vehement and righteous Marika continued: “Jesus! The situation is, sportswriters are all men. You’d think that would be changed by now but essentially it isn’t. Sports photographers are all men. TV sports producers. They don’t give a shit for women boxers, and they don’t give a shit for our boxer because she isn’t ‘photogenic.’ Know what they say? ESPN has said? ‘Dunphy looks too much like an athlete—viewers won’t like that.’ Like, Mike Tyson doesn’t look like an ‘athlete’? What’s Dunphy supposed to look like, a ballet dancer? Ice-skater? Our boxer looks like who she is.”
THIS TIME, Naomi knew to come to the fights late. To avoid the grueling earlier fights, between inexperienced or lesser boxers, that aroused such scorn among the spectators scattered through the arena.
In the clamorous arena Naomi sat alone. Already her nerves were on edge amid such noise.
This time she didn’t feel so self-conscious. It had not been her aloneness after all in Cincinnati that had made her conspicuous but the color of her skin and here in the more attractive Cleveland Sports Arena, at least within the first dozen or so rows, the majority of spectators were white.
White-skinned, and a number of them women. Women in groups, in rows. Rowdy and funny. From comments Naomi had been overhearing these fight fans had come some distance to see “Icewoman” fight.
Siri Aya had defended her title two years before in Cleveland, in this venue, and was a three-to-one favorite tonight.
No one seemed to know much about D.D. Dunphy, or to care.