She paused. “We did think we were doing something special. We did make a time capsule.” She looked up at the ceiling again as if remembering. Then Trale closed her long eyes, and Hannah watched the flick beneath the lids that spoke Trale’s thoughts.
A time capsule! Hannah remembered imagining how cool that would be, musing over what it might contain. When had she thought of that? Wasn’t it just three months ago, on the night of the Passover Seder? She tapped Trale’s arm. “What’s in it? Is it still here?”
“Oh, you know. Old-school stuff. Bottle of apricot brandy, photos of some New Year’s Eve revues, a Sisterhood Is Powerful tank top, a wrench, one dyke’s dishonorable discharge papers from the Air Force, that Lesbian Concentrate album, some poems, a softball glove. I won’t tell you where it is. Isabel knows, though.”
She keeps looking up at the ceiling. I bet it’s in the disco ball. No one would ever think to look there and no one would take it down. It’s in the disco ball! It’s the pride in ordinary lives, just like everyone was saying this morning. Look at Trale; she lived through decade after decade, on the outskirts of the famous, an ordinary dyke. But she’s the one who’s here and who remembers. She’s the pride keeper here, the ordinary hero, good at everything she does. Good at whatever everyone needs. And I’ve been so busy chasing the rude, famous foremothers I’ve never had a drink with Trale.
“I was there at Stonewall, too,” added Trale. “And then at Woodstock. There in the background at all of it. Because I built some stages and tuned pianos.”
“Trale Blazer,” marveled Hannah. “Can I ask you for a dance?”
“I think you already have,” said Trale, but Hannah would not understand what she meant for many more months, and Trale took pity on her now. “Of course you want to dance now; you just drank a Wooden Floor. Okay. But I lead.”
The ghosts gathered around them. That was when the bar’s very old piano, the one Trale had tuned earlier that day, began playing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” although no one—no woman that Hannah could see—was seated on the bench to touch the keys.
Chapter Seven
The Fourth of July
High summer, and the fireflies blinked Morse Code to Hannah as she rested and recovered and researched and wrote. Could there be a better life than this, rising lazily to brew her Hawaiian coffee, playing her women’s music compilations, sketching chapter outlines for her next women’s history book, until the bicycle in the hallway called her to get up and explore her favorite trail? The rain held off. The heat lightning patterns at dusk were dazzling, not threatening. The tomatoes grew, snugly promising bursts of juiciness. Evenings at Sappho’s ranged from pinochle to board games to movies and softball.
There was just one factor keeping the upcoming holiday weekend from being pretty damn serene. Regrettably, the notorious right-wing “Take Back Our United States” conference and rally was once again scheduled for Fourth of July, and Hannah ground her teeth daily as their posters, flyers, and bumper stickers began appearing all over town. HOMOSEXUALS CAN CHANGE, one slogan assured. Less kindly was the ubiquitous broadside TAKE BACK OUR UNITED STATES! FIGHT THE GAY AGENDA!
She wasn’t about to change, thanks. It was her United States, too. Her “gay agenda” was sunbathing and drinking iced coffee, just at the moment. She tried to relax into summer vacation, lying in the hammock in her backyard.
The Kona coffee was so good. The hammock supported her tired bicycling muscles. I earned this. I taught an overload all year. I graded hundreds and hundreds of papers. Pretend I’m in Hawaii. Pretend I’m on vacation by the sea and the hammock is strung between two coconut palms. I’m sipping a Mai Tai.
And I’m not alone, either. If only it were Gail lying beside her. Ah, was that so wrong, to miss her warm ex-partner? She closed her eyes, imagining snuggling into the familiar curves. Being held, holding. Holding. The pleasure of breathing together.
In her fantasy, their reunion didn’t have to be sex. What she really missed were times like these, the body in its state of relaxation, her lover’s nose nuzzling the back of her neck as innocent as a burrowing puppy. And then more. The nuzzling that led to soft lips opening to press against her shoulder. Shivering and taking in that simple love until she couldn’t resist the impulse to shift and turn, to take that face in her two hands and drink deeply of familiar afternoon love. Gail.
The hammock, absolutely still. The coffee in her bloodstream, strong, sweet. Sweat building just at her hairline, behind her ears. Her hand caressing her bare thigh, the alert hawk in the tree high above her that she did not see with her closed eyes.
Gradually Gail became Isabel in her mind. Was that wrong? Was that so surprising? Who knew Hannah’s moods as well as Isabel, now that Gail was gone these years? What was the magic her bartender friend wove in their community, after all? Don’t think. Feel. Let it in. Let somebody in while you can. Isabel was there. Isabel breathed into her back, her hairline, her ear. Isabel’s long nose touched her throat; her warm lips ever so gently met Hannah’s chin. The scent of flowers, already strong in the summer yard, strengthened around the hammock, and suddenly grew more tropical. Plumeria, lilikoi, gardenia.
Hannah became aware of someone else’s breath. From across the garden it came, carrying a strangely female heat. This breath was very warm, then warmer, insistent. Quickly, it had the strength of fire. She flinched. Then, to her alarm, a full steam began to burn her eyes. She sat up, thoughts of Isabel disrupted, fragmented. She heard, rather than felt, the breath of a song. A chunk of rock grazed her shoulder and she jumped out of the hammock, scrambling for cover.
Who was throwing rocks at her as she lay caressing herself in her rainbow hammock on the third of July? Who wanted to disturb her? Was it some homophobe from that conference?
She had been trying to avoid thoughts of that right-wing group, coming into the community to claim and ruin Independence Day with their hellfire and brimstone homophobia. Now hellfire and brimstone was raining into her yard. She bent to look at the rock that had nearly hit her. The grass there had turned black, singed. There it was: just a tiny piece of rock, but burning hot. Like lava.
The daydream had become a message. She knew what she had to do, beginning with putting on shoes. No sense burning her feet off, not when there was work to do. Vacation time would wait. Sighing, Hannah returned to the house.
Moira was cramming for the LSATs, hoping to become a lawyer for other lesbian veterans purged during Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. She had locked herself into Sappho’s Bar and Grill for the long weekend, studying for four or five hours at a stretch, then eating from the small high-energy plates Isabel served her, then napping, then studying again. When Hannah stormed into the bar, Moira was chanting the Constitution. “We the people, of the United States . . .”
“Yeah, I know—except a lot of those ‘people’ were left out of the Founding Fathers’ playbook on full participation in a democracy. Look, I need your help. I’m, ah, I’m heading over to that church on Leroy. The one where they’re having that conference? I’m going to, you know, write about it,” Hannah tried to say casually. Moira raised one dark eyebrow.
“You’re going to crash it, you mean. Is this some sort of protest? Trying to get arrested on Independence Day? Don’t go to jail tonight, asshole. You’ll miss the barbecue, the fireworks . . .”
“The drinks,” Isabel added from behind the bar.
“No,” Hannah fumbled. “I don’t plan to make trouble. But I feel like I need to sit in it and take notes on what they’re up to. As a historian of these times.”
“Know thy enemy, huh? Nice idea, doc; but are you nuts? They’ll spot you as an infiltrator in seconds.” Moira put down her lawbook, amused, and studied Hannah with a critical eye. “I think you’d better have a makeover first.”
“I know. Loan me a dress?”
Letty and Trale, who had up to that moment been engaged in a game of eight-ball, abruptly put down their cue sticks and began to laugh. “This I gotta see,” Le
tty guffawed.
Dog, who styled hair for the Park Hotel salon, lit up like a firefly at the challenge before her. “Let me at you. Oh my God, a first. A first! Get the camera out, Moira. I think our dykademic’s going to have to shave her legs.”
“I’ll go get my John Deere lawnmower then,” from Letty.
“You’ll need to look like a married wife,” Isabel pointed out, coming from around the bar with a plate of fish tacos for Moira. “Here.” She pulled a sparkling ring from one long finger and moved it onto Hannah’s hand. For an instant, Hannah felt the breath of fire again, and the sensation of Isabel’s lips on her throat. “Are we married, now?” she joked bashfully, but Isabel only smiled.
In no time at all, Hannah was pasted into a modest polyester suit skirt and blouse left over from last year’s talent show revue at the bar, and, with a borrowed Bible and hairspray disguising her midsummer mullet, she walked determinedly up to the conference.
Why was she doing this? Maybe to hear exactly what was being said about her community. She was itchy from the sense of being maligned, misrepresented, and mocked during a holiday that celebrated freedom and democracy and independence from oppression. On the other hand, whose freedom did “Independence Day” celebrate? It did not emancipate the thousands of slaves already held in bondage in colonial America. It did not put African women on an equal political footing with the Founding Fathers who bought, owned, and sold them—or, in the case of Thomas Jefferson, also fathered children with them. Women of any race failed to gain rights in the new U.S. Constitution. Native Americans were not helped by the Fourth of July. And yet these questions did not bother the good people gathering at the church on Leroy Street today. Their obsession was the threat women like Hannah posed to America’s stability. Yet, dressed as she was now, passing as “straight,” she was welcomed with broad smiles.
“Pray with me?” beamed an attractive conference host as soon as Hannah pushed open the lobby door, and Hannah found her hand gripped hard by a woman whose plump breasts were held together with a laminated No Gay Agenda pin. They stood together at a table covered with screamingly formatted Homosexuals Can Change pamphlets, Hannah screwing her eyes shut in what she hoped was a convincing imitation of prayer. Pray I get through this.
She took her seat amid hundreds of women, all shapes, sizes, skin colors, hair textures. Ironically, homophobia had succeeded in uniting the diversity of American womanhood where her own feminist community still struggled with outreach and inclusion. There were women of every race, age and ethnicity here, black and white, Latina, Pacific Islander, plus a few obvious lesbians sporting the lapel pins and shirt slogans of ex-gay ministries. Their sad, defensive glances scraped over her now, but no one recognized her personally. It seemed that everyone was from out of town, and just Hannah was local.
The panic that a former lover might be here among the converted continued to send fresh sweat to her belly. What would she do if a woman she’d once loved chose to reject “the lifestyle” and turned professional homophobe? This had already happened to some of Hannah’s friends. Earlier that year, Carol’s ex agreed to meet her for dinner and, excusing herself to use the bathroom, slipped into their old bedroom in order to tuck evangelical pamphlets under Carol’s pillow.
Hannah took her seat in what was evidently a pew, her legs crawling beneath the unfamiliar nylons Moira had forced over her shaven legs. Between the sweat trickling into raw nicks, the binding nylon material, and the summer humidity mushrooming in the non-air-conditioned church hall, her legs felt like two throbbing tree trunks. Could anyone notice?
“I know,” nodded a handsome black woman to her left. “Hot in here. But the flames of hell burn hotter for the unrepentant sinner. Are you saved, sister?”
“Um, sure,” Hannah assented weakly. What was the etiquette? “Since 1979,” she added in sly attribution to the year she had come out.
They can’t tell. I could be anyone. With her hair pressed and the right outfit, a ring twinkling from her finger, she could pass, not only as straight and married but as Christian. As Gentile. How many other women had tried to pass, to survive? Butch women passing as men, Jews passing as not-Jewish during the Holocaust, light-skinned African Americans escaping slavery, Irish Catholic women needing work in Protestant locations. Sojourner Truth, an eloquent speaker, was once accused of being a man in disguise. Her accuser, a pro-slavery minister, demanded that she be examined to prove she was in fact female. She had ripped open her blouse, shouting “I will show my breasts to the entire congregation!” Harriet Tubman had passed as both an old man and an old woman, bound for market, when in fact there were escaping slaves rather than chickens in her retrofitted wagon. And one of Hannah’s favorite class lectures involved Ellen Craft, a light-skinned runaway slave who escaped with her own husband by posing as his white, male owner.
There was power in the act and art of disguise. But it did not feel pleasant to think today of the thousands of gay kids growing up in these fundamentalist homes, pretending to be “normal” until they could get out.
The day’s program unfolded with prayer, song, and several gifted public speakers. Having been to many a badly planned lesbian conference, Hannah had to admire the smooth rhetorical skills and tightly scheduled flow of featured presenters. No pause for a bathroom break or a Fourth of July cupcake interrupted the urgent calls to stop America’s corruption by fiendish homosexuals. One woman after another rose to give her testimony. Yes, Christ’s healing compassion must be shown to those trapped in this tragic and sinful lifestyle, but never forget that the Homosexual Agenda was a form of domestic terror, creeping in to destroy the family life and constitutional foundations of a Christian America. (Was Moira paying attention to this? wondered Hannah.) Homosexuals sought to overturn Western civilization, to deny all babies a mother and a daddy, to corrupt youth with perverse pedophilia instead of sanctified man-woman marriage. AIDS was the vengeance of the Lord. Praised be He.
Behind Hannah, the steady thump of a Bible accompanied each statement from the podium as a well-dressed white woman rhythmically pounded her agreement. Next to Hannah, another woman rose to ask the minister at the lectern, “They make me sick. Just what is it they want, Reverend?”
“They want special rights,” thundered one of the few men in the assembled throng, a sour-faced hate radio personality Hannah had long hoped she would never meet in person. “They cannot ever, ever be a protected class, for their sin is the chosen behavior of the sinner! Never forget that the decadent homosexual is a successful minority in this land, and does not merit a law against discrimination. Why, the homosexual is among the wealthiest special-interest groups in America. Rich in the bank, if morally bankrupt!” he concluded with a flourish, and shouts of “Amen!” filled Hannah’s ears.
It was too much. She thought of her friends at the bar: so many, like Moira, expelled from the military without benefits, thrown out by their own families, beaten, denied custody, institutionalized, queer-bashed, sick, homeless. No history of discrimination? No poverty? Their own churches (and synagogues, and mosques) had rejected them, offering cold comfort, if any. And listen to what’s preached at that microphone. Parental rejection, which surely might count as discrimination, was energetically endorsed. Put that gay child out of the house. She saw this in her own students. No longer welcome at home, but too old for child protective services at eighteen, some had slept in the street until their college financial aid package arrived. Despite increasingly comprehensive gay rights laws, kids were still leaving small towns and taking the Greyhound bus to Greenwich Village and San Francisco for freedom, an invisible migration. Hannah’s thoughts turned to the Great Migration just before and after World War I, when so many southern African Americans left impossible Jim Crow conditions for Northern city work. (And how many had been gay? And how many brought their loosed gay spirits to the Harlem Renaissance?)
“Ours is a Christian America, a beautiful America,” ranted the minister, and the church choir on site launch
ed into a soaring rendition of “America, The Beautiful.”
Behind her, the woman who had thumped her Bible the loudest suddenly reached over the pew and grabbed Hannah’s hand. Hannah felt the emotion in her grasp. The woman’s hand was shaking, damp with perspiration—either with patriotic fervor or religious fervor, or perhaps both. Perhaps it was the political fervor of truly believing she was right and that a Christian America, devoid of nasty homosexuals, was her America. Hannah was singing, too, not only to ward off suspicion but because this was still a great anthem, the one she had always loved singing in elementary school. It saddened her to hear it now, used for such oppressive purpose. She longed to whisper fiercely at the woman gripping her hand, “It’s our America, too!”
It was only after this phrase crossed her mind that Hannah realized she was holding the hand of another lesbian. Had she been dragged, right then, into a court of law or before her God (church and state, she reflected wryly), in no way she could have sworn with truth just how she knew. But the energy had changed. A sister was behind her. And that meant that someone else had infiltrated. Was passing. Who was she?
Before she could turn around and risk grateful, curious eye contact, the woman let go of Hannah and rose up standing, as giant as a tree, and on the last pious notes of “America the Beautiful” she thundered out, “Ladies and gentlemen: If you please, I wrote that song.” Heads turned, mouths gaped, the pianist fell off her stool, and the woman held them all in her burning gaze. “I am Katharine. I am Katharine Lee Bates.”
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