“No, you can’t. Not yet. We still have time; this is our night. And you have something for our guest, don’t you? Come sit. Come sit, my sisters,” Miriam beckoned, and the stars were twinkling, dazzling, and then apples fell out of Eve’s robe, one after the other. They looked startlingly like the lump of crystal Miriam had extracted from the split rock.
“I saved this women’s knowledge,” Eve explained. “From the tree no one remembers. Eat. Later they will make the apple a symbol of teachers. Tonight it’s a meal for you, who came back to learn,” and Lilith stood guard over them as Hannah feasted on apples.
“The first thing is that you have to push back against what men will say and do. Push back. Then push out what is real and true. I am the midwife; they have called me Puah, which means breath,” said Miriam, “because I blow words of truth into the mother and the child is brought from her womb. The mother and I push together with breath and words. You have not had children but you have raised a thousand, with your breath,” she smiled at Hannah, who thought: Yes, my countless lectures. I’ve taught so many students women’s history, breathing words across the aisles. And they called me pushy, blowhard, all those slurs for feminist. Am I a midwife, too?
“Push back,” said Miriam, and once again her voice was loud as thunder, and three stars twinkled out. “Push back against the patriarchs to come.”
“Amen!” The table rocked against Hannah’s knees; her eyes flew open; a square of matzah fell out of her mouth as she gasped. She was back at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, surrounded by tipsy yet reverent friends on their fourth glass of wine at a lesbian Seder in her own time. Where was Rima? The mystery guest was gone. But at her place, an apple-shaped lump of crystal. “That’s yours,” nodded Isabel, bustling out of the kitchen annex with a tray of macaroons. “You found the afikoman yet again.”
Chapter Three
Mother’s Day
“Okay, Mom. I love you too. Call me after you see the podiatrist, okay? And please, go easy on the marijuana.” Hannah held the phone—warm from being clenched to her left ear—for a few more seconds, wiggling her toes and grinning. Her mother, frustrated by arthritic foot pain after many years as a modern dance instructor, was now enjoying a medical marijuana prescription.
Well, that had not been a typical Mother’s Day phone call, but was anything in Hannah’s life normal this year? There was that first encounter, at the bar, with Sappho—if, indeed, that had really happened—and then a desert night with Miriam, too, during the most unforgettable Seder Hannah had ever attended. She had not told her mother about these incidents, dreading questions about her own sanity. She didn’t want to speculate, analyze, break it down into Yes, It Happened or No, It’s Not Possible. If her academic life had become sticky enough to pick up some magic dust, fine. Let it be.
Her thoughts turned from the pleasure of the Sunday morning conversation with her mom to the elaborate Sunday afternoon ahead: the graduation ceremony she had to attend on campus.
First, brunch. Knowing that her stingy university would serve just wine and cheese after the three-hour-long ritual, Hannah poured pancake batter onto the griddle and added spoonfuls of sliced banana and slivered almonds. She settled on Alaskan coffee to fortify her spirits. This should be a day of absolute matriarchy, she mused, with all rituals and events celebrating Woman, capital W. It was highly unusual for the university to schedule graduation on Mother’s Day, an accident of calendar and convenience, and local business owners were ecstatic with double and triple orders for flowers. Every restaurant was booked either for Mother’s Day lunch or graduation dinner, there were no balloons left to buy anywhere in town, and table centerpieces were going for a hefty markup. Hannah hoped that every graduate would take extra care to thank Mom throughout the afternoon ceremonies. And yet . . . of the hundreds of college students receiving their diplomas later that day, how many had studied the history of their own foremothers, whose lives were conveniently not included in “the canon” of required learning?
Hannah shoveled in pancakes and coffee as she looked over the list of young women “commencing” from her own academic department. Only sixteen students were graduating with women’s history degrees this May. Bowing to pressure from right-wing alumni and trustees, the university had dropped a requirement that all humanities students take at least one women’s history class during their four years of study. Instead, they were encouraged (but not asked) to try a “gender” elective, such as Masculinities or Queering Fatherhood. Despite multiple waves of feminism, one could still earn a B.A. with no exposure whatsoever to women’s history.
And even the women’s studies majors received bachelor’s degrees as proof of graduation.
Before she showered and dressed, Hannah cued up layers of feminist music to match her mood: Ova’s “Who Gave Birth to the Universe?,” Mosa Baczewska’s “It’s a Very Long Song That We Can Sing to Celebrate the Women of the World,” Faith Nolan’s “I, Black Woman,” Ronnie Gilbert’s “Mother’s Day,” Bitch and Animal’s “Pussy Manifesto.” The mother. The body. She rubbed some of her own mother’s favorite lavender lotion on her arms and legs, still pale from the winter months of being shut inside a classroom. Soon, there would be picnics, biking, Pride parades. She’d regain her Jewish tan, be olive-skinned again. For now, shaking off the academic hibernation of a school year was like stepping out of a cave and blinking at the promise of spring.
Now, what to wear? It hardly mattered, hidden under flowing black regalia; but Hannah felt her dykedom rising up, rebellious sap. Yes, she owned a dress. But she didn’t have to wear it. Not today.
Her thoughts flickered unhappily to that day in the classroom when, as a younger professor in her third year of teaching, she vowed never again to wear a dress in front of students. It was during a disastrous, experimental first-year course inviting new students to write about the body and to debate reproductive rights. What a melee! Several male students assigned to the course by well-intentioned advisors were restless and rude, laughing at terms like “femicide,” and swapping AIDS jokes. One young man, eventually expelled for acts of violence against women in his residence hall, scrawled an obscene drawing of Hannah on the attendance sheet she’d passed around. His crude sketch showed her in her favorite dress, being walked like a dog on a leash, her breasts spilling out and dragging on the ground. Hannah returned the next day in combat boots and trousers: survival gear, symbolically characterizing the rest of that challenging semester.
But, she reminded herself, one angry young man did not sum up a career teaching women’s history. This was a day to celebrate her own devoted graduates, the ones who had daringly majored and minored in women’s studies, whose loyalty and written work affirmed her purpose here on earth. Childless herself, Hannah had made these students her own children, pouring maternal energy into academic relationships. She brought cookies to class, worried about sick or absent students, sent little gifts and cards when someone won an internship or a job.
School and school and school again. No, she had not paused to have or raise children. She had, instead, raised activists. Graduation served as Hannah’s own Mother’s Day. This was her day of pride in her young feminist progeny. (Hadn’t Miriam said so? But did that really happen?)
Now, standing in front of her own long mirror—which, unlike the one at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, did not reflect strange ghosts of women past—she considered graduation day jewelry. Definitely, the Venus of Willendorf pendant. Hannah plucked it on its long, light chain from the surface of her polished cedar dresser. This had been her own graduation gift, from her own mother, on the day she finally earned her Ph.D. The voluptuous Venus figure was shiny from having been rubbed and fondled absent-mindedly whenever Hannah wore it, the full belly of the ancient, faceless goddess now as smooth as glass.
Was it so much to want her students—hell, all students—to know that once upon a time, everyone worshipped a female deity?
As Hannah drove across town, she mentally reviewed the simple r
ealities of pre-Christian goddess worship. The Venus of Willendorf! Someone had blundered into a cave in Austria in 1908 and discovered that limestone goddess “figurine,” all breasts and hips and belly. No face; the artist, taking up chisel and rock back in 25,000 BCE, hadn’t considered that feature important. Not in a time when children breastfed until they were five, when every human born looked to the mother as the creator of life, the feeder, the one who produced children and immediately provided them with sustenance. How had that association changed so permanently to a male God, the Father figure creating woman, and not only that, but creating her as the second sex? How had a female’s ponderous flesh and belly, her reproductive enormity, come to be shamed as mere fat instead of sacred fertility? Why were so many of her students wracked by eating disorders, afraid of appetite, disdainful of curves?
Don’t get angry. Don’t get angry. It’s Mother’s Day. It’s Graduation Day.
Hannah peeled off her hard folding chair as the final row of graduated seniors exited the stage, holding aloft diplomas and beaming. Three hours of speeches by male provosts and deans, three hours of “God, He” invocations by campus ministry! A stiff drink at Sappho’s Bar and Grill would be her reward in just about forty-five minutes. She did love hearing the names of her own hard-working students announced over the public address speakers: Terry Wong, Women’s Studies. Emerald Granger, Women’s History. Elena Gonzalez, Women’s History. Those students would now come up to her with hugs, with thanks and gladness. It was the parents who were so unpredictable at these occasions.
Hannah didn’t know who might yank her chain this time, but there was always some uptight parent, usually a father, who felt compelled and authorized to mock her field. “Well, we tried to talk her out of it, but she chose women’s history,” this father would say, right to Hannah’s face. “Now she’ll never get a job. Can you find her one?” Or: “We didn’t have, you know, women’s history classes when I was here. We had real subjects: econ, philosophy . . .” “A waste of tuition in my opinion, this gender thing, but I know she had fun in your classes. Well, now she’ll have to get serious.” Even the kinder or empathetic remarks were psychologically draining and stressful. There was the mother who had whispered to Hannah at a parents’ brunch that winter: “In my time we knew about feminism, but we couldn’t bring it into the sorority house. No women’s studies books on the table, especially not when gentlemen came to call. I read about Emma Goldman in the bathroom.”
She needed the bathroom herself. The nearest one was in the Science building, but Hannah automatically vetoed that comfort station, knowing its history. When the university was constructed, no women’s bathrooms were added to the math, science, or engineering halls, on the assumption that no women would ever be admitted or, if grudgingly admitted, would never major in the “hard” sciences. When the 1960s brought in women, when the 1970s brought in feminism, when the 1980s and ’90s brought in computer science and women demanding access to STEM fields, the embarrassed university contrived a ladies’ room out of an old broom closet in the Science wing. Hannah preferred to avoid an environment of second-class citizenship on this day.
But here came a dad. She sensed the blossoming confrontation, like a person allergic to cats involuntarily responding to that first hint of dander floating spore-like in the air. He strode up in his pressed chinos, nodded, and indicated her faculty robes. “So. You’re a professor here. What do you teach?”
Here it comes, Hannah thought, scrambling for her academic party manners. “Well, sir, happy graduation day to you. I teach several women’s studies courses here at the university. For instance—”
He interrupted her, swirling the chardonnay in his plastic wineglass. “There’s women’s studies here? How come there’s no men’s studies?”
Hannah, practiced at this sort of opening salvo, chirped, “Sir, every other subject taught here, every other major, is men’s studies, you see.” She was calm, but the heat of being once again forced to defend her life’s work—on what should be a day of scholarly triumph, closure, culmination—was bringing on yet another hot flash. She pulled off her academic robe, flinging it over her left arm. It caught on her Venus of Willendorf necklace, and she could feel the chain tug and then break, slipping down the back of her blouse.
Now the dad was taking in Hannah’s pinstripe pants, vest and silk shirt, which were a marked contrast to the sleek, shoulder-revealing dresses worn by nearly every other female at the event. “So I guess your favorite woman in history is Joan of Arc,” he sneered.
Hannah thought of that moment in February when she was sipping one of Isabel’s drinks at Sappho’s, and briefly saw burnt Joan seated beside her at the bar in the mirror’s dim reflection. Refusing to take the bait—the man clearly knew Joan was a cross-dresser—she answered truthfully, “Yes, I teach Joan and Sappho, Alice Paul, the Irish pirate Grace O’Malley, Sojourner Truth, and of course the Venus of Willendorf, whose image I wore today at graduation. I also teach the history of the All American Girls Baseball League—”
“Yeah. That lasted for what, a year?”
“No, sir; the league extended from 1943 all the way through 1954.”
For ten minutes, it went on like that, like a torturous badminton rally. He tested and tested her with sarcastic but educated bait, looking for a crack in her armor. She remained as dignified as possible, feeling the sweat trickle down her breasts and the Venus necklace slipping, slipping down her back, past her underwear, probably falling all the way down onto the ground. She didn’t dare move, lest she trample on or lose her own graduation necklace. He had metaphorically yanked her chain, and her chain was literally underfoot now, being trampled.
And finally he was through with her. With a half-smile, he raised his glass and said, “Well, some feminists are very pushy, and I don’t like that. But . . . I guess we needed feminism.” As Hannah took in his intentional use of the past tense, needed, he added one parting shot: “I am an obstetrician.” Then he walked away to join his wife and son.
She stood there, reeling. So he’d earned his son’s tuition by “helping” women give birth yet it never occurred to him that women created life, and thus the world? Or that women’s storylines as mothers had shaped all living people? Or that the history of how and when women’s fertility might have been celebrated in an era before his own could be compelling knowledge, taught to thinking minds?
She squatted down, angry hands seeking her broken Venus of Willendorf necklace. She’d go right to the jeweler now, before stopping in at Sappho’s, and have the chain repaired. No, wait; it was Sunday. Mother’s Day. Everything was closed. Damn it.
The ground was moist and warm. She could smell mud where thousands of elegantly and not-so-elegantly shod feet had crushed the neatly mown grass as families raced for good seats from which to cheer their graduates. She pushed her hand through the damp grass stubble—ah, there!—and closed her fingers around her silver chain. But as she pulled it up toward her hot neck, someone, or something, just underneath that earth pulled just as hard. With an oof! of surprise, Hannah fell facedown onto the ground and melted through it to the other side.
She was in a cave. That much was clear. Very little light afforded much more information, but the stone walls, dripping moisture, streaked with recent painted images, pressed in around her. An overwhelming smell of animal life, and human life as well, filled her nose and eyes—a scent of wet hair, sweat, warm milk, fresh blood, old urine, matted wool, babies, and something else more fecund. Hannah was not alone.
There was a woman there. Lying on her side on an animal skin, heaving with the grip of labor pains, a giant body pushed and moaned and shuddered. Hannah approached, terrified, yet drawn to this great stranger. No matter which angle she approached from, she could not see a face. But all around her on the walls were drawings of women’s bodies. Pregnant. Nursing. Holding infants. Dancing.
And now, just beyond the cave entrance, Hannah could see dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of
eyes, watching. Waiting. It looked like the vigil of an entire community, an entire tribe, awaiting the birth. Some of the half-clad figures were holding small statues of pregnant women, of mothers, of mothers breastfeeding. She heard low chanting.
There is more respect for the motherline here than in my own time.
I am in the birthing chamber of the Venus of Willendorf.
Something was wrong, or stalled, or difficult with this birth. Yet everything depended on the birth of a daughter, who represented the future of the tribe; Hannah understood this. There was something she was supposed to do. There was a reason she was here. Water trickled down the cave wall, and Hannah suddenly thought of water in a desert: Miriam. I am Miriam’s well. I am the traveler with Miriam’s knowledge. Miriam is still in the future, but I am from the future too. There is no time. There is no time to waste. This is the midwifing of the world, the daughter-naming hour.
The baby would be the next mother goddess to this nascent civilization. If she emerged, if she lived. Tentatively, Hannah approached the fiercely puffing mother. “Push,” she said. “Push.” What language was right for such urgent instruction? English? Hebrew? German? Which words did Miriam breathe to the laboring women? Would song be better? Hannah thought of the composer Kay Gardner, who had suggested there was an elemental female sound, a note, an opening of vowels—that the ancient word for God was simply voices breathing a-e-i-o-u. A woman in labor would howl in any alphabet as she herself became God, the creator and giver of life.
“Just keep pushing!” Hannah shrieked, and the sh of push became a wind, and the wind a hammock of breath blown forward, and the infant crowned, the very beginning of a new daughter’s hair emerging from the now-open yoni. And now the mothering woman half-rose from her posture of contraction, and to Hannah’s terror she was faceless, though wild-haired and live and breathing. And from the blurred non-face came this blurred answer: “You. Also. Push.”
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