Sappho's Overhead Projector Page 7

“Dog, I’m sure that various publishers, authors, librarians and bookshop managers themselves would be ever so thrilled to hear you reduce all of Amazonia to ‘that shit,’” Carol observed. “But yes, that’s an important piece of it. My life was saved by a women’s bookstore. Thing is— you had to live in a city where there was one, have the nerve to enter it, and have a few precious lavender dollars to spend, too . . .”

  “You didn’t have to live in the city with a women’s bookstore,” argued Theodora. “I played both field hockey and lacrosse in college, and we were on the road all the time, sometimes for two-day conferences in other towns. All the dykes would sneak off to the women’s bars after a game, but I’d get a lift to the feminist bookshop on my free hour.”

  “I drove for four hours in an ice storm to hear Mary Daly and get a signed copy of Gyn/Ecology . . .”

  “I moved my ex-lover’s fucking piano in exchange for borrowing her car to go to some mega-event at Sisterhood Bookstore when we lived in L.A . . .”

  “I figured out the underground T system to get to New Words Books in Cambridge, but you needed a lift to go to Crone’s Harvest, so I missed Lesléa Newman that time.”

  “Here’s my question, Hannah,” Carol called over the competing waves of memory. “How much time elapsed between that first sweaty encounter trying to check out a lesbian book at a library, and later realizing you could own the book via your local feminist bookshop?”

  This deliciously inviting math problem silenced the entire bar. Isabel refilled drinks from her cauldron as nostalgic bookworms sipped, scribbled dates on wet bar napkins, and assessed the timelines of their own awakening. “So much candy for bookworms,” smiled Isabel. The scent of smoky pumpkin spice wreathed their heads.

  “Got it. I win!” roared Letty, signifying triumph with an earsplitting sneeze. “Took me sixteen damn years, you young ones, you baby dykes, you privileged little snots.”

  Dog hung her head. “Yeah. It was all in the same week for me.”

  “Three years,” Hannah mused aloud. “Wow. I lived in the zip code for a great feminist bookstore, but I actually lacked the nerve. Can you believe that?”

  “Of course we believe it. You went into a women’s bookstore, you were announcing to the neighborhood, hello, I Am Queer.” Moira sighed. “I dealt with that in Boston, and it wasn’t pretty. Yeah, I got a black eye, pushed around by some punks in the neighborhood. Had to tell my mom I got the shiner bumping into a post. But I went back. I went back and I browsed in my Catholic schoolgirl uniform, underage in the erotica section, eating a saved peanut butter sandwich from my school satchel, dropping crumbs into that carpet, and they let me be. The woman’s name was Jody. I called her Jody Putup because she put up with me every Saturday until I graduated from St. Ann’s . . .”

  “Wait. Here it is. Five years. We moved, just before Women and Children First Books opened, and it took me until college to live in another city with a lesbian bookstore . . .”

  “I still haven’t been to one. Because they’re all gone, damn it.”

  “Not gone! I know one. Yvette, back me up on this, will you? Get over here.”

  “Yeah, gone, as in scarce, damn it.” Yvette had her public relations notepad in her back pocket, obscured as usual by her spank-me scarf. “Look at this statistic. Mid-’90s, there were 140 feminist bookstores in America alone. And that was down by half ten years later. And today? We have, maybe, a dozen? Ten? What’s up with that? Where are today’s young ones going to go, to meet the rad poets and get signed copies of their manifesta?”

  “Oh, gals, get global and look beyond the USA,” Carol scolded. “There’s a gay bookshop in London, one in Costa Rica, one in Paris, another in Barcelona, and one in Berlin, plus Savannah Bay in the Netherlands. And two in Australia and two in Canada. Don’t forget those international lesbian archives. Isabel, aren’t those some of the places you’ve been to?”

  “Been to all of them, indeed, and beyond,” was all Isabel would confirm, as she wrestled ghost-shaped cocktail umbrellas into a martini for Dora.

  Hannah listened, head spinning pleasantly, as the regulars bantered and mocked one another, passed around snacks, danced, made out, and loudly criticized Congress. Her eyes wandered to the rare lesbian books Isabel had collected from trips abroad, shelved behind the bar in a beveled glass case about two feet wide. These books, at least, were safe from being lost, or forgotten, or given away, or shredded. Culled from both library sales and the best women’s bookshops abroad, they were a signature fixture of Sappho’s Bar and Grill.

  One night last year Isabel had opened some of those books for Hannah and the characters had actually come out and danced with them.

  No. No. She couldn’t prove, ever, that this had ever happened. She had understood enough not to tell anyone about it. She hadn’t even described it in her diary. There was no record. No proof. But what if she cajoled Isabel into opening just one book, again? Maybe tonight? Now? In this atmosphere of Halloween magic, what might happen?

  Her hand reached over. The hinged corner of the bookshelf was near enough to tap. Yes, the shiny door popped open. And to her horror, an early copy of Katherine Forrest’s Curious Wine fell out, landing with a thump at Isabel’s feet.

  Her bartender lover turned, smiling but steely. “You spilled wine on the floor? I pour the drinks here. Come back here, my little bog myrtle. Come back here and pick it up.”

  “Uh-oh,” someone cooed. “Hannah, you know Isabel’s a keeper— don’t mess with her collection!”

  Did she mean Isabel’s a keeper because she collects rare dyke books and won’t throw them away? Or did she mean to warn me to pay attention to the relationship— that Isabel’s the best partner I’ll ever get, the one I better keep? Whose voice was that?

  Confused, her ears pounding both from bending over to pick up the novel and the accumulation of several enhanced drinks, Hannah turned to look back at the sassing bar patrons. There was no one there. The barstools were, impossibly, empty all of a sudden. But on each seat lay the favorite lesbian book each woman had remembered from her journey into pride. As if on cue, the books flapped open to lie exposed and flat, split plummily, beckoning like paper vulvas. She was staring at them, just starting to say, “Wha . . .?” when the bookshelf behind the bar opened up like a dragon’s mouth and swallowed her whole.

  Chapter Four

  Candy for Bookworms

  She was behind the bar. Beneath the bar. In Isabel’s secret wine cellar, the space she’d built herself and referred to obliquely as “the root cellar,” so that no one but Hannah now knew it was a place for the really valuable and special vintages and liqueurs acquired across a lifetime (or times.) Racks of labeled bottles rose on either side of her, and the scent of dried juniper berries filled her nose. It was a true root cellar, too, after a fashion: knots of mushrooms and herbs askew on twine, sweet potatoes and potatoes for making vodka, and in the center of the very small room a carved wooden table where Isabel mixed ingredients or carefully decanted bottles. But on and around that table now were books.

  They were the lesbian books of their rambling conversation, the ones she’d just glimpsed flopped open on her companions’ barstools. Beloved early discoveries, well-thumbed novels, stolen and hidden stories by expatriate amazons of the interwar era in Paris. The books were perched upright on their spines, shifting and waving animatedly— and they were talking. Laughing. They were alive.

  “She put me under her jacket, this pea jacket she always wore that year, and ran out of the drugstore,” chortled one, a peeling volume of That Kind of Love. “Left her change on the counter, left her Coca-Cola, left her bike parked on its kickstand outside, and just ran! Later she had to come back for that Schwinn. She read me and read me all afternoon, all afternoon . . .”

  “I had the girl who ate the sunflower seeds,” mourned a pale copy of Colette’s Claudine trilogy. “Those shells got into my spine and cut me. It was a whole s/m relationship—”

  “Oh, you wish,”
snapped Colette’s more explicit memoir, The Pure and the Impure. “You’re just jealous because my readers were more likely to make love to themselves in front of me. I can’t help it if not everyone found me before they got to college.”

  “I can name hundreds of girls who swooned and caressed when they read Claudine Married! Her whole affair with Rezi? Come on. You know it’s true.”

  “Ah, to be caressed again!” sighed You Are the Rain. “Almost no one remembers me . . .”

  “That woman tonight. She named you as her first.”

  “Yes, her first, her first!” crowed Rain. “I was somebody’s first! Me!”

  “Get over yourself. It is I they touch, touch, touch, looking for what is not theirs to have,” said The Well of Loneliness, leather-bound and haughty. “I am assured of handling, of passing between women, between libraries.”

  “Will someone please shut her up?” demanded Rubyfruit Jungle. “There’s about as much action in you to tickle a goat. I’m the one with the normal range of girlfriends— and survival. Hardly anyone comes out from a mansion, darlin’.”

  “You think you are so tough, my little American,” sneered Tereska Torrès’s Women’s Barracks. “I have seen war. Caressing was a luxury for us.”

  Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde twirled provocatively. “I may not be explicit enough for some, too explicit for others, but for many I was juuust right. ‘She was stroking the place where the buttocks touch. There were guitars quivering in my legs.’ You can see where my binding is broken, where they only went to those pages. Ah, how the questioning adolescents love boarding school literature!”

  The books Olivia, Mädchen in Uniform, and Madeleine L’Engle’s rarely celebrated early work Prelude, all preened. L’Engle’s later paperback A House Like a Lotus added, “I was pretty liberal for my time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Liberal, yes, and sexless,” complained Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.

  “Oh, right. Like we need a book by a male author to be the authority here.” The other books flared their pages. “I thought we agreed that one wouldn’t be invited.”

  “Back off, separatists. This is Halloween: warlocks welcome as well as witches. Besides, this is about what the readers chose. Plenty of them chose me first! And face it: my pages have far more vagina-positive material and description than all of you combined. How many of you have the phrasing folded labia, hooded clitorises, jaws aglisten, she smiled at your quiverings as she parted your asshole? Top that. I can’t help it if I came out of the swinging 1970s.” Tom Robbins’s Cowgirls had spoken.

  “I had anal sex, if that’s your litmus test,” objected Kinflicks. “And my sex scene ended in ‘a breathtaking series of multiple orgasms.’ Do you know how many women wrote to my author? So there! Yes, I was important to many.”

  “Plus, I’m sorry, Cowgirl, but you’re not a writer our readers could date,” and Barbara Grier’s The Lesbian in Literature was delighted to have the last word. “You’re no lesbian role model, m’boy.”

  Hannah saw that the medical textbooks, scientific studies and surveys, and books like Lesbian Love, The Grapevine, The Lesbian in Society (all written by men) were self-segregated, smoking cigars together. “I still think it’s dangerous, smoking so close to paper,” complained Patience and Sarah. The Price of Salt replied, “Live a little, my dear.”

  It was impossible. Impossible. But the books were talking. They were reminiscing just as Hannah’s friends had been reminiscing— about the first time someone loved them. About feeling loved, needed, important to someone. Inanimate objects, they were alive just for now, just this night, their spirits released by the nostalgic talk at the bar. They did not appear to notice Hannah, who stood motionless behind a post.

  “But don’t you feel,” said Karla Jay’s After You’re Out, “kind of ripped off by the computer revolution? I hardly ever get touched now. They read me on their laptops, if at all. That’s me, but not really me. Not like the early days when kids really felt up a paperback, jammed it in the back of a jeans pocket.”

  “To be held in the sweaty palms of a young woman coming of age was all I ever wanted,” sighed Beginning With O, and The Women of Brewster Place shook her pages a little, and put in, “But we scared them.”

  We Too Are Drifting drifted over. “I have tea stains, avocado stains, jam stains, egg stains. Whoever owned me only read me at breakfast.”

  In Her Day began to sob. “I miss my bookworm. My bookworm,” she wept.

  And to Hannah’s amazed eyes, each of the books straightened her spine and shook, and from each fell a shower of snapshots. Old Kodak Brownie photographs with scalloped edges, Polaroid glossies, school poses in little wallet squares. They piled on the table, making a tower that eventually reached the cool cellar ceiling. These were stolen images of the girls who had most loved and treasured these books— read them over and over, scrawled notes in the margins with pencil, underlined passages in Bic pen or hot orange highlighter, had hidden the book from parents, babysitters, nosy aunts, bratty little sisters, house-keepers, anyone who might put their adolescent search in peril.

  There were photos, too, of women well past college age, women who came out later in life and made the same trip to library or bookstore on older legs, on married legs, on legs that balanced a child in the curve of a mature hip. Such women had to hide their lesbian books from angry husbands, divorce lawyers, in-laws, sad-faced children. But these were readers who had an advantage of maturity. Already experienced in life, perhaps glib with pen or working in the editorial world, women coming out at midlife were often quick to make that leap from bookworm to author themselves.

  Whatever each woman’s journey had been, the books had been companion, witness, guide, instruction manual, warning light, welcome kit, oracle, miracle. Why wouldn’t the books have loved, in turn, their owners, who reached for them with so much desperate hope when no other information was available, anywhere else? And if, somehow, late at night when the bookworms were sleeping, the books moved inch by inch to capture a school photo left on the edge of a desk, and absorbed it deep within thick pages . . . a keepsake of the owner . . . These, too, were relationships, love affairs, a meeting of minds that dispelled loneliness. This was a Halloween for books to conjure bookworms back to hold them once again.

  Hold me. Hold me one more time. Wasn’t I good to you? Didn’t I help? Why’d you leave me? Please, just one more night. Hold me one more night. This night. Touch me. Gently . . .

  And as the photos fluttered above the table and the books linked in a circle and howled for lost love, the wall behind Hannah shimmered again. She fell back into the bar.

  But not the same bar. Sappho’s Bar and Grill had become . . . an ice cream parlor?

  Isabel’s bar was now a way station for teenage dykes. On a long set of brightly padded stools that seemed to stretch toward infinity, schoolgirls and schoolgirl dropouts sat, each with a soda or milkshake or favorite snack of her own time, each with her nose in the best book of her own self-discovery. Isabel herself was there, not paying attention to Hannah yet, setting out root beer floats, Yoo-Hoo, ginger ale, Mountain Dew, moon pies, cherry and vanilla Cokes. Each girl took her treat without removing her eyes from the page she was reading. Several girls were simultaneously sipping their ice cream sodas and popping bubble gum. At different times, they each sighed and turned pages. A few were discreetly rocking their legs back and forth, thighs rubbing.

  “Trick or treat,” said Isabel, now noticing Hannah and smiling. Of a sudden the girls in front of them were their friends, the regulars at Sappho’s Bar and Grill. Hannah saw Letty, Trale, Moira, Yvette, Shoni, Dog, Theodora and several others as they once were as teenagers— each wearing the clothes she might have worn, reading the book that changed her life, drinking sweetness into her body, the body about to act on liking girls. Letty wore the blazer of a Louisiana parish vocational high school over pegged jeans, scuffed saddle shoes dangling; Yvette sported an Afro that filled the space around her head as she
snacked from a bag of Funyuns; Dora was in her basketball uniform and early-model Adidas, drinking an Arby’s Jamocha shake. In their hands were the books they had mentioned with such love: The Color Purple, Rubyfruit Jungle, Sappho Was a Right-on Woman, Beebo Brinker.

  The books seemed to shiver with pleasure as they were held and paged over, like cats releasing deepest purrs, nearly melting into the hands that clutched them. She could see the connection between the reader and the read, the bookworm and the book, a silvery electric current sparking along the bar.

  Then one young reader glanced up, just an instant’s glance away from her book, and Hannah gasped. It was her. This was Hannah at sixteen, reading Ruth Falk’s book Women Loving from the Intimate Bookshop. She had borrowed a multispeed bike she didn’t know how to gearshift and lurched six miles from her high school to this bookstore to spend her birthday money on a book she knew was about lesbians.

  There she was in her painter’s pants and purple bandanna and Birkenstocks, wearing a mood ring and a woman’s symbol necklace, drinking a coffee milkshake (I used to get those at Baskin-Robbins; this was years before there was a Starbucks anywhere . . .) and reading about women who made love to other women. This was the last moment of innocence before everything began to happen. The last days of unformed consciousness.

  Where were those painter’s pants now? Had life turned out the way Hannah expected? How many women had she learned to love? Would the number surprise her earlier teenage self?

  “Whuh . . . hawchoo!” sneezed the teenage Letty, and all the other readers raised their heads and scolded, “Shhhhh!” The floating soda bar had all the sanctity of an archive. Brows furrowed (or raised) as readers came to particularly explicit or poignant pages. “No way,” breathed Dog, sucking on a Jolt Cola, riveted by Dykes to Watch Out For. “Shhhhhhhh!” came from the girls on either side of her.

  Then Isabel put her arms around the real and grown-up Hannah, and whispered in her ear, “Now look.” And there was Isabel. Isabel, the barkeeper and mystic, whose past was never really fixed, but who evidently had one of her own. For she too was sitting at the bar for just an instant, a fifteen-year-old in a knit poncho and long skirt and hippie sandals, drinking herbal tea and absorbed in A Woman Appeared to Me.