Sappho's Overhead Projector Page 6
“Harriet the Spy,” a group of women decreed. “Best baby-dyke book ever.”
“Sure, if you identified with living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, going to an exclusive prep school, and having a live-in nanny and a cook,” Dog argued. “Same with Eloise. I liked Little House on the Prairie. Everyone worked hard in that house.”
“But it was so hostile to the Native Americans— how could I relate to it? Or to any of that genre of pioneer books white girls loved? Caddie Woodlawn, Bread-and-Butter Journey, ay,” Shoni protested. “I had to make do with the tiresome Sacajawea and Pocahontas biographies. Not even my nation!”
“What about books that made it okay just to be eccentric? Or sorta independent? Or just a girl getting in trouble? Pippi Longstocking, Amelia Bedelia, Madeline.”
“Here’s what confuses me,” Yvette interjected. “By the time you’re like, fourteen, or even twelve, you got the vague idea that some characters seemed kinda gay, and maybe some authors were kinda gay because they kept introducing these tomboy chicks. Nancy Drew had that pal named George, and then there was Peppermint Patty and her sidekick Marcie in all the Peanuts collections I owned. But what started the stereotype that librarians are gay? Not all of them are, you know.”
“Just all the ones I’ve ever met,” from Trale.
Letty slammed down her glass, sending foam onto Hannah’s eyelashes. “My sister and I were on this just the other night. She said, the one career that shouts out queer whether you’re a man or a woman is librarian. Now why is that?”
Instant responses from all over the bar, at the pool table, and from someone apparently already lying down under the pool table. “Because you like books better than sports, if you’re a dude!” “Because it’s a sissy thing to be a boy bookworm!” “Because real men play football after school— they don’t go home and read Jane Eyre.”
“And,” Trale added quietly, “if you’re a woman, it’s the idea that you prefer a book to a man. You’d rather take a book to a restaurant than a male date. You’re an educated woman so you don’t need a husband. In fact, what man would have you? You probably smell like library paste.”
“No, you smell like books, which is a totally different vibe,” argued Dog. “You have that great leather and paper and ink huff going on.” She leaned over and sniffed Hannah’s neck. “Like you. This,” and she swooned.
“Watch it,” warned Isabel, sweeping Dog’s tips off the bar with a capable forearm. Then the door banged open, and all eyes turned as Theodora walked in— one dark eyebrow slightly raised, legs that seemed to glide rather than ambulate. Her athletic spectacularness only mildly compromised by the bag of ice plastic-wrapped around one lean thigh, she pulled off the lanyard holding her Fox 40 whistle and officiating ID and tossed it on the bar. “Well, that sucked. I had to stop the game and call a foul on my ex tonight. Yep, held up a red card right in her pert little face!”
“Hannah wants to know, what was your favorite book as a kid, and did some librarian ever mess you up?” yelled Letty, now standing in line for the bathroom.
Theodora looked puzzled. “Can’t a referee get drunk first?”
“Try drinking before the match, your officiating might improve,” and Dog, a veteran of many local tournaments, beat it out the door just in time to avoid a firm swat on her behind. Trale went up to the sound booth and put on dance music as several women, feeling the heat of pre-Halloween libations on a Friday night, suddenly needed to cut loose. But Theodora saw Hannah and smiled, then limped over to sit beside her, ice bag dripping. “Are you back? Just here for the weekend? Taking a survey for your job in D.C.?”
“No, just— interested,” Hannah shouted over strains of Poly Styrene and Annie Lennox. “Dora, did you have jock books as a girl?”
“Babe Didrikson, Girl Athlete,” recited the community’s beloved referee. “That subtitle made it seem like she was this exotic plant or disease. A living peculiarity, like Girl Lamp Post. And it was illustrated in sickly industrial green, a color not found in nature. I gave up and read horse books.”
Isabel was taking a quick break from serving, allowing Moira to run the cash register, and joined the conversation at the bar. “Hannah, anyone who grew up in our time was unlikely to get a children’s book with a lesbian character or a gay family. We invented what we needed. Most of us found our first ‘gay’ book when we were in junior high or high school, and it was usually a book meant for adults, not young adults. Thankfully all that’s changing now. You can get Heather Has Two Mommies, Annie on My Mind.”
“Yeah, right— through mail order!” Shoni disagreed. “My boarding school banned anything like that. We had censorship at the town library, too— some group called ‘Parents Aware’ decreed that if they had a gay book display, there had to be an exhibit representing the other side of the ‘issue.’ We knew that was a crock of shit. If you put out civil rights lit, were you obliged to put a Klan reading list next to it for ‘balance’ of viewpoint? But rather than be ‘balanced’ they put all the gay literature behind the counter, and you had to have your parents’ permission. Of course, all the Native kids at boarding school were far away from our parents. We pooled our money and paid off one white girl to take out Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. That had a part-Siwash character and a great lesbian sex scene, and we passed that around the dorm.”
Everyone who had ever owned a smuggled copy of Cowgirls in their coming-out years now sighed and began reciting from various passages. “Teeth of foam, lips of pie.” “O why is it always so difficult between women?” “Long, thick tongues painted each other . . .”
“You know,” Hannah mused, “I really learned to be a lesbian from books. I didn’t know anyone like me, or so I thought. I didn’t have a clue what women did, or how it might work, or what it ought to feel like.”
“Weren’t you ever on a softball team?” Theodora inquired sympathetically.
“. . . and some books just plain aroused me,” Hannah continued, ignoring Dora’s usual dig at her lack of athletic pedigree. “I mean, come on. Colette, Anais Nin . . .”
“Oh, all that, the soft soft soft porn Europeans,” Yvette snorted. “Show me where in those works there’s any real fucking going on!”
“But if you’re just awakening and not even ready for it? Colette made my head spin. Then my other parts. ‘I listened for a long time to what her mouth told mine.’ That was enough, to start. It worked, for me,” Hannah argued. “I wanted to be a writer and have a female lover. The interwar Europeans showed me a world where women chose both, even before my time.”
“We had to make do with peeking at medical textbooks,” said Letty, puffing as she came off the dance floor to rejoin the conversation.
“Jane Rule did it for me. That look into lesbian identity, without much explicit sex description,” Dora agreed with Hannah. “Those were books you didn’t have to worry about leaving around, because if you had snoopy friends or parents, they’d have to flip through many a page to find actual censor-worthy passages. Yet there are such great lines, great lines there. But just when you think you’re going to learn what lesbians do in private, the next page is all about conflict and morality and anguished relationship drama.”
“That is what lesbians do,” Moira put in.
They all began quoting from various Jane Rule novels. “Talk to desire, make it come to you.” “So that breasts do not forget what thighs open for now.” “Her mouth came down hard on mine as if to answer.” “After that night . . . which had no sequel . . .” Laughter and toasts followed each quote, each memory.
“I don’t know,” sighed Letty, chin on fist. “I was more in sync with that Jill Johnston, who says in Lesbian Nation that when she was out in Greenwich Village in the late ’50s, ‘There was no lesbian identity. There was lesbian activity.’ All those lesbian publishers and presses came after I paid my dues. Y’all were real lucky.” She poked Hannah with her beer.
“We loved anything that made us real,” Trale added, getting up aga
in to dance. “We always do. The question is whether what we love, loves us back in kind, whether those books felt the heat that came off our sweating palms. The heat of first discovery, then homecoming, then genre.” Hannah picked up her pen to write this down, and Isabel knocked it out of her hand, and ordered her to dance.
• • •
The next day Hannah thought about those conversations as she and Isabel swept the bar and readied it with decorations and treats for the real Halloween party and dance that night.
There was so much love for the books that had, in whatever large or limited way, helped them find a lesbian identity, a validation. Too many women had to make do with “banned” lesbian books or scary medical encyclopedia entries on homosexuality.
And then along came Hannah’s students, who could download everything ever written about gay and lesbian books at the touch of a computer button, their own treasure hunts (whether personal or academic) for books and images about kids like themselves supported by search engines, databases, social media, gay and lesbian archives. Hannah felt most at home with those in her age group, last of the baby boomers, who had come out in the heady days of the lesbian cultural movement when women’s bookstores filled the aching gap, providing discovery and delight on shelves stacked with both classic and recent lesbian volumes that called out: This is where we are. Hiya, kid. We were waiting for you.
The biggest generation chasm was between women like Letty, who grew up poor with no opportunity to go to college in an era when no one said the word lesbian, and Hannah’s most recent students, who had always inhabited a world of gay rights and gay books online, and who were starting to regard Hannah’s generation of woman-only bookshops as transphobic quaintness.
Competing ideas and generational conflicts swirled through Hannah’s mind as she pinned up crepe paper, polished Isabel’s witch cauldrons, and cleaned sticky shot glasses left over from the previous night. Those early, odd books that different women had stumbled across in their search for identity— was it possible that those books knew how important a role they’d played in so many young women’s awakening? Your book saved my life. I thought I was the only one.
Hannah winced and shrugged as she recalled she’d written a few letters like that herself, to authors who had made an impact on her life, her self-awareness. Now she occasionally received such letters herself, carefully preserving them in bound folios.
But did the anxiously thumbed, hungrily read, sometimes even stolen life-changing books, themselves, know they were so loved? Could cloth and paper feel the urgent sweating palms of teenage bookworms? Was there an accumulated deposit of need and angst and relief built up between the lines from every baby dyke who ever checked out or pawed through that one copy of Rita Mae Brown in the midsized town library? What if those books could speak of what they’d seen? Aha, Hannah grinned, setting decks of tarot cards out on the bar and positioning the lavender Ouija board near the make-out sofa. There’s a good title. “If these books could talk.” She saw herself at fourteen, hovering in front of the 301 section of the Little Falls Library, confused and embarrassed because her family phone number area code then was also 301, and she’d felt marked. The lesbian-feminist books two local librarians had enthusiastically stocked in those late 1970s years seemed to leer at her: We know where you live, kid! Yeah, 301 is your neighborhood, isn’t it? We got your number, all right. Start reading us now, you’ll be writing us later! Ahahahaha!
She closed her eyes, remembering. As she saw herself at fourteen, nervously looking for books about “tomboys,” one of her classmates appeared just one aisle over, in that very library. It was— it was— could that actually be Jordan Matthews, who once wrote in everyone’s yearbook, “Have a great summer, and don’t go queer like Hannah Stern!,” caught in the act of lifting a copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves? Wait a minute— what was she, so smug and religious, doing in the 301 section? Could it be that Jordan, too, had been like Hannah? And if so, was—
“It looks great in here, my love,” Isabel broke into Hannah’s daydream. “You can go back to my place now and rest up for tonight, or get some work done, or try on your costume: anything you like. I’ll be busy here for one more hour, then home to cook you dinner. Witches’ brew.”
• • •
Hannah waited in Isabel’s apartment, weak with longing. Would it be like her last visit? Lovemaking as a musical score, bars of music replacing the bedspread beneath them, sex in double time, quarter time, all the time they conjured? Time. With the change in Hannah’s work, they made do with these weekends and holidays, and inevitably it would be Sunday afternoon closing in on Sunday evening, and the long drive away or trip to the regional airport loomed.
Hannah would stand weeping against Isabel’s breasts, raging: “There’s not enough time.”
Like now: the weekend half over and much of it spent working at the bar. Well, she was involved with a bar owner. What did she expect? And not just any bar. And Halloween, not just any night.
Hannah sat down in what she already thought of as “their” bedroom, clean and ready for the party that night, too restless to work on her Library of Congress notes, and gradually dozed in the velvet armchair Isabel kept at the window facing west. The sun, sinking by inches, warmed the sill at her fingertips. She smiled, despite impatiently awaiting her lover’s return for dinner. Maybe if she focused, she could conjure Isabel that much faster.
Could one woman’s desire speed the feet of her beloved? Could Hannah’s breath blow wind behind Isabel’s car, whisk autumn leaves into a flying carpet under wheels, float her lover through the bedroom window? Come on, honey. I want you now. I want you now. I am haunted by you. I am haunted in your house. Come take me on this night of spirit chasing.
• • •
Later, when the sun had disappeared and Halloween night proper began, lesbian ghosts and lesbian witches floated toward Sappho’s Bar and Grill in the leafy light of dusk, the perfection of their assumed and practiced spookiness somewhat marred by the awkwardness of getting out of a Toyota in a flowing robe with a staff, or balancing a platter of vegan sugar skulls under an old sheet.
That night the bar talk turned again to favorite library books, though now the participants were dressed as their historical avatars: Eleanor Roosevelt, Annie Oakley, Sojourner Truth, flappers, Arctic explorers, Disney princesses. The question they were nibbling on, along with beer nuts and chocolate stars, was a new one Hannah had posed: Do you remember the first time you tried to find out information about gay people, at the library?
“We-ell,” began Kim, who originally hailed from Texas and was now costumed as a rodeo clown, “I was in my li’l cowgirl hat ’n’ boots, cute as a rose, and my aunt Min caught me red-handed with my fingers in the H drawer of the card catalogue, trying to look up Homo. I thought just as fast as I could on my feet, and told her I was aiming to join the Four-H!” Everyone roared.
“I looked up the word ‘tomboy,’ because I was sick of being called that,” said Trale, whose real name was not Trale and who enjoyed keeping everyone guessing. “Also looked up ‘sissy’ for my friend Frank. I liked my definition— he hated his. Then we looked up ‘pervert.’ That scared us. We never ate lunch together again after that, though it might have made more sense for us to fake being boyfriend-girlfriend, keep the talk at bay.”
“I took out the book by Shere Hite— The Hite Report,” said Moira, who was about Hannah’s age. “Talk about graphic! Whoa! But it didn’t shout out gay, if you were pretending to check it out of the library as a research text. It was a national survey, supposedly of straight women.”
This made Hannah remember one of her most ridiculous moments from early teenhood— or had she been twelve? Sipping one of Isabel’s signature brews, the Witch Teat, she confessed, “There was a fairly progressive independent bookstore near us that had a big coffee-table volume on display one summer, The Sex Book. My best friend and I walked by it four or five times before she dared me to open it up to the pages with two
women caressing. Then we fled, giggling, and hid behind a wall of comics to see how other customers reacted . . .”
“. . . and she was probably holding your hand the whole time!” Yvette finished. “Me, I waited until my parents were away at their black fraternity-sorority reunion weekend, when we had our favorite baby-sitter, who let me do anything. I hightailed it to the library and took out The Color Purple. I wasn’t allowed to see the movie so I knew there had to be something there. When I got to that line where Celie describes sleeping with Shug, ‘It feel like heaven,’ I was sold. Sold!”
“You know the publisher of Naiad Books, Barbara Grier— she said that when she was growing up she loved going into libraries and bookstores, flat-out asking if they had subject matter on homosexuality,” marveled Dog. “And that was as a teenager in the 1950s! But it worked for her— that’s how she met her first partner, a librarian, right? She thought she’d shock this lady by asking if the library had a copy of The Well of Loneliness. She got more than she bargained for in reply!”
“What about The Happy Hooker? That thing started with the writer seducing her childhood pal. Wasn’t in any library I ever knew of, though. I found a beat-up copy of that when I inherited my granddaddy Bo’s old Buick, and I learned a thing or two.” Letty nodded, adjusting her Colonel Sanders outfit. “And I wasn’t chicken to try, either. Haw! Haw . . .”
“Still trying— even if you’re not exactly a spring chicken, now,” Letty’s partner teased.
“Oh! Oh! Women’s bookstores,” shouted Dog. “Where you could buy that shit. What about those? They put those books right into our hands, and now they’re vanishing like some freaking extinct species.”
“Not just the bookstores,” Trale amended quietly. “We too are vanishing.”