Sappho's Bar and Grill Read online

  Bywater Books

  Copyright © 2017 Bonnie J. Morris

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61294-097-7

  Bywater Books First Edition: June 2017

  Quote in Chapter 10: Barbara Mayer Wertheimer. We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America. NY: Pantheon, 1977, p. 21.

  E-Book ISBN: 978-1-61294-098-4

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of Bywater Books.

  Cover designer: Ann McMan, TreeHouse Studio

  Bywater Books

  PO Box 3671

  Ann Arbor MI 48106-3671

  www.bywaterbooks.com

  This novel is a work of fiction.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Valentine’s Day

  Chapter Two

  The Passover Seder

  Chapter Three

  Mother’s Day

  Chapter Four

  Birthday Week

  Chapter Five

  Memorial Day

  Chapter Six

  Pride Week

  Chapter Seven

  The Fourth of July

  Chapter Eight

  Labor Day Weekend

  Chapter Nine

  Halloween

  Chapter Ten

  Thanksgiving

  Chapter Eleven

  Final Exams

  Chapter Twelve

  New Year’s Eve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Thirteen O’Clock

  Sappho’s Overhead Projector

  Chapter One

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  for all my friends and loved ones at Herizon, the original Sappho’s Bar;

  for Liz Harter and Jane Collins,

  and for two of our best amazon history travelers, Lillian Faderman and Alison Bechdel.

  Chapter One

  Valentine’s Day

  “Professor Stern. Will this be on the midterm exam?”

  The question came from a young woman Hannah knew hadn’t been to class for the practice test on great women in history: a psych major who always sent e-mails at 1:00 a.m. the night before papers were due, complaining that deadlines were linear and oppressive. Laptops temporarily forgotten, the other 106 first-year women’s history students looked up at their professor like so many blinking barn owls, fingers hovering in suspense. If it wasn’t on the midterm, they wouldn’t write it down.

  Remember, you can watch an old movie tonight, Hannah reminded herself as she outlined, for the fourth time, exactly which text chapters and which famous women the class should review. You can stop by the bar for one drink with Isabel first. Then you can pick up some ice cream or gingerbread. You have a big, unopened jar of Italian lemon honey that Gail left behind. But this passing thought hurt more than it soothed. Leftover honey from her last honey would have the taste of a rebuke, not a reward.

  She folded papers into her leather briefcase as a lingering group of students clustered around her. “Will you grade on a curve? Will attendance count for our final grade? I mean, I come to class even when I’m sick. Like, I actually have mono right now, but I’m here, okay?” In her peripheral vision, Hannah could see the furious face of the exchange student who had publicly charged her with “reinforcing gender binaries”—the ultimate crime. Whatever happened to the good old days when women’s studies students had crushes on tired dyke professors? These days, most students just wanted an easy A. Others seemed to take sadistic pleasure in correcting her, mid-lecture, with facts gleaned from laptop Wikipedia pages: material they preferred to the reading she carefully planned, assigned, and distributed hot from the ancient photocopier in Irwin Hall.

  She grabbed her green suede jacket and headed for the faculty parking lot and the safe sanctuary of her twenty-year-old Honda Civic, a limping animal held together with outdated feminist bumper stickers. Once inside, she sank behind the wheel, ripped off her bra (a ritual indicating the teaching day had officially ended), and cranked up a CD by the cover band called Lez Zeppelin. Strains of “Kashmir” thudded.

  Burned out didn’t come close to describing her state of mind.

  The initials were right, though; take your pick. Boiling Over. Bailing Out. Body Odor. Breaking Off—yes, she was brittle. Time to go see Isabel, to unwind at the coolest bar in the world—and, driving over to the familiar watering hole across town, Hannah freely indulged in shouting colorful insults at every car driver and bike messenger (all men) who got in her way. Toadstool! Slime spore! Lotus blossom! Milkpod! Earth furrow! Moletail! She loved the organic garden-variety slurs that Isabel began using in lieu of fouler language, back when they were in graduate school together and had the opportunity to interview several very old nuns. (At their first appointment in the convent library archive, Hannah had accidentally dropped a priceless medieval Bible onto her big toe and shrieked, “God damn it to fucking shit, that hurt” in resounding alto. She was not invited back.)

  All that seemed a lifetime ago when both of them were so young, hopeful. Isabel had burned out of the academic track first—rather mysteriously resigning from her graduate research assistantship and leaving their Ph.D. program in women’s history to go work in a tough lesbian bar, waiting out the original owners until they retired to Florida, and then buying the bar herself with a loan from the only rich friend they knew. Iz renamed it Sappho’s Bar and Grill, completely repaneling the interior and stocking the shelves with souvenir bottles from the world’s best lesbian clubs. The bottles now gleamed amid rare antiquarian books with lesbian storylines, so that on any given night one could read hot erotica from eighteenth-century France while swirling a bit of cognac pinched from the Paris Katmandu Club or chicory coffee-infused crème de cacao from Charlene’s New Orleans bar. And there amid the history of all women before them who had dared to love one another, Isabel seemed very much at peace, serving delicious mixed drinks found nowhere else and dispensing wisdom and first-edition books to a loyal clientele. The bar had a smoking patio (for women who loved brandy and cigars) and discreet spaces for romantic interludes.

  You didn’t have to love books, gay history, or herbal mixology to find a home at Sappho’s. The regulars included cool women of every race and class from the four surrounding towns. But Isabel had built something there, a radical hospitality, a place that professors and policewomen, artists, and softball coaches all returned to for comfort in times of sorrow or celebration. Hannah was headed to Sappho’s now, hoping a drink with her old friend (they had not been lovers, despite all the flirtatious energy Hannah employed back in the day) would take the edge off her sadly familiar mood: the stymied, dinosauric exhaustion of an aging and underpaid women’s studies professor.

  Anything was better than heading home. Her datebook was full, but not, alas, with dates. The kitchen cupboards were empty, other than the leftover souvenir food: jams and teas and coffees she and Gail had picked up in Wales, Brazil, and Newfoundland. Almost two years since Gail walked out—and now, several additional inches around the waistline into her forties, was Hannah hungry for a curvy woman or a square meal? Or the flat plane of a café table, the familiar dining nook at Sappho’s? Would Hannah ever lean across that table again
to tell Gail bits of university gossip, to regale her with scandals just to see her eyes crinkle with laughter?

  Unlikely. Over and done. Gail had walked out and there was nothing to do but eat the jar of honey and remember the good times. Hannah took a left turn on two wheels, glancing up at the enormous radio tower, which dominated the tier of hills on the south side of the university town. Forever and ever, that radio tower signal would make her think of her failed relationship, the days and nights she lay in bed in a stupor of disbelief that it was over, watching the red light blink atop the distant tower jutting up from the hillside. Funny how girders of steel silhouetted against a dusky sky could instantly make Hannah think of (and miss) a warm, long-legged human being. She tried to opt out of the parade of associations in her mind, scrambling around for a memory that had nothing to do with Gai. There had been other women in her life, many before Gail. But none since.

  On top of everything else, Hannah remembered, her students’ winter midterms fell on the anniversary of her father’s death this year. Yes, that date was coming up again. It seemed that nothing in a professor’s schedule made room for everyday acts of utter devastation: grief, loss, being dumped. When her father died, four Februaries ago, Hannah’s entire apartment was in disarray and covered with smelly drop cloths, as the building management had selected that very month to rewire everyone’s walls. She had wept and made calls and sent cards to relatives while callous electricians buzzed in and out unannounced, flinging dust and grit and duct tape in their wake, a thin layer of dirt caulking her mourning. On the first anniversary of her father’s passing she meant to do something thoughtful and serious, a private ritual at the ocean, and instead had that inconvenient skin rash, as if grief were an allergic reaction or an uninvited flea circus in her flesh. Then came year three without her dad: the year when Gail walked out. And this year, her computer had crashed. Everything she’d ever written, including the one poem she’d finally started for her father, now lay scattered on the floor of her university office in pieces: flash drives, disks, and cables. All she wanted was one week for a sense of love and mourning, for ritual apartness—nothing itching, nothing stalled or broken.

  Well, fuck that—it wasn’t going to happen. She was never going to get that parentheses of focus and feeling in some quiet time tunnel, not in her hectic, pressured life. Fine. She would carry on with a rock for a heart and a thumb drive for a mind, a living axe and adze, an Amazon labrys chopping toward clarity through the woods of women’s history, severed branches and twigs of feminist rage hacked off in trails behind her like some perverse Camp Fire Girl outing. She would carry unfulfilled desire on her back like a camel’s hump of water, sipping incrementally as she plodded over hills. Her lovers would be imaginary, the great heroines of the past, the figures in her women’s history lectures; yes, they would do for now. Yet if her own personal history was turning out to be so painful, how could she believe she was still equipped to translate for 200 freshmen the enormous mammarian battles of women’s past?

  Bullshit, thought Hannah, pulling into the rear parking lot at the bar and switching off her ignition. She was safe, warm, dry; she really had little to complain about. No one was threatening to set her poetry on fire or to torture her at the stake; she was neither enslaved to an abusive master nor bound by laws that named her infidel, criminal pervert, witch. Her mind flicked over the roster of women’s names from the not-yet-xeroxed midterm. She just wished she could talk to the women she daily talked about, and get some hearty personal advice on how they had survived their life trials—trials so much scarier than anything Hannah ever faced in the contained fluorescent world of a well-lit lecture hall. At most, her daily torture was a splinter from that podium in Building B. She marveled at such bravery from the past; it was what had led her, after a youth of suburban middle-class comforts, to major in what her radical feminist classmates called herstory.

  For one minute she sat in the warm car, now silent with the wailing Lez music turned off, her breath just beginning to make faint steam as the outer February air pushed in. She had arrived. Yes, Hannah had a place to go—the local bar—and a tribe she belonged to in her own time: the lesbian community, gaining civil rights strengths every day. She wasn’t isolated socially or politically. Love: well, it might come again. Or not. But somehow, as a teacher, she felt isolated now, with still so much to pass along to students clearly tired of her zeal. Ah, why couldn’t Sappho herself just mystically show up as a substitute teacher in a nice toga and sandals, taking over the next day’s lecture on ancient Lesbos, so that Hannah could lie down and talk to her father’s ghost? And if Hannah’s life mission had always been getting the dead to speak across time through historical interpretation, could she get her father to intercede in the great beyond and shift some lesbian ghosts to bank her fires? Did he have a direct line to Sappho that Hannah herself lacked, being alive and cranky and itchy? And alone?

  She heaved herself out, locked the ungraded papers in her car, and went in.

  The bar was just beginning to fill up: two young Latina women on a butch-femme date; four middle school cafeteria lunch ladies playing eight-ball at the pool table; a labor lawyer who waved at Hannah and then returned to her everlasting argument with the local orchestra conductor. The noise, laughter, and neat click of pool balls filled Hannah with comfort and familiarity. She could close her eyes and know where she was by sound and scent, the voices, the dried herbs and flowers braided around the posts holding up the carved bar awning, and of course Letty in the corner by the heater, pausing mid-cackle to blow her enormous nose, a terrifying bass note blast with the sustained intensity of an island foghorn. Old Letty, the bar’s venerable elder Amazon, was one of just two regulars from the bar’s earliest years, and the only one to protest certain changes under Isabel’s management: specifically, the introduction of live plants. Isabel’s herbal-infused drinks and horticultural bar décor turned out to be an itchy problem for Letty, who suffered from hay fever all year long. But, ever the old-school good sport, she had grudgingly shown up for Grand Reopening night and sneezed like hellfire for two hours, just to taste the rare juniper in the gin. “Well, I’ll say it’s different, all right. It’s got a taste like—Achoo. Whatevah,” she’d hawed and hemmed with afflicted resignation, glass raised high in tribute to Isabel’s fern-topped concoctions. “You sure gotta love the—h’choo! this fancy fungus. Kinda gives ya an extra high, don’t it? It’s just I’m allergic to the whatsit she puts in her booze. But yeah, pour me another, why not? Boy, I’m feeling no pain.” The very next night, Isabel mixed a hot buttered gin just for Letty, and shifted one particular flowering plant from the bar to the terrarium underneath the pool table. And for the first time in her long life Letty stopped sneezing and started winning at pool.

  Now as Hannah waved to Letty, other voices called out to her: “Yo, doc!” “Stern! Get a brew and come over here; we need you for pinochle!” “Hey, professor—where’s Ginger and Mary Ann?” Nobody ever called her Hannah. Absurdly, the theme song from “Cheers” ran through her mind: Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name . . .

  But friendly razzing was just a part of Sappho’s. It had bewildered her when she first arrived in upstate New York, all the teasing and good-natured knocks to pride, so different from her northern California upbringing. When she remained clumsily unsure how to distinguish genuine insult from genuine flirtation, Zak the Animal took pity on her and gave her a lesson—Betty Zakhour, Isabel’s first bouncer, a huge behemoth of a rugby player with an equally big heart. “Look, doc,” growled Zak, “these women? They like you. They’re just busting your chops, just whaling on you.” “Thank you,” Hannah had replied politely, wondering: Busting? Whaling? What does it all mean? How green she was. Now, years later, she knew enough to reply to any tossed barb with timed insouciance: “Yeah, right. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  This was home away from home now. She scraped a bar stool under herself and looked down the freshly buffed counter to find h
er beloved friend, the barkeep, owner, and host.

  “Hi, Iz. What it is.”

  “What it was.”

  “Make me a mocktail that tells the truth.”

  “Do you want absinthe or do you want vermouth?”

  They had kept up their old comedy routine since they were twenty-five, for almost two full decades now. Hannah and Isabel had taken the same women’s history courses in grad school, could cite the same books, reflect back on the same crusty eccentric beloved professors, dish on old classmates who had fled feminist scholarship for law school or software startups or partnered bliss. But for all their shared history, Isabel had a history of her own—a backstory nobody knew and which she only revealed in stray, pearl-like asides. Her parents weren’t alive any more, but she spoke of them reverently. They were—German? Austrian? French? Definitely Catholic. Isabel had briefly been a nun, before grad school—or, depending on the story, a very young novice. Then she’d abandoned the convent or, in another rumor, had been expelled, caught “experimenting” with a sister novice and sent packing. She still maintained all the austerity of her convent years in her loft studio apartment, sleeping alone under a massive portrait of Joan of Arc, rising at 5:00 a.m. to brew her own beer, boil flavored syrups and mixes for cocktails, and then prepare all the food sold at the bar. Everyone loved and wanted her, hearts and yonis alike thudding when she greeted customers. She was famous for gently saying no to every proposition while loving everyone. As far as Hannah knew, in their twenty-year friendship Isabel had never been partnered, yet who knew what went on in the Nook of the bar?