As always, upon arriving home from two weeks of camping at a lesbian festival, Hannah flopped gratefully across her soft double bed, stretched her back and legs in every direction her pup tent had not allowed, and then plowed through the refrigerator. Holding her overstuffed sandwich in one hand, she examined her face in the bathroom mirror. Tanned, burnished skin and clear eyes gazed back. There were ferns in her hair, several crushed mosquitoes baked into the back of her neck. Her double women’s symbol necklace swung low between sunburnt breasts that had been nowhere near a bra since July. Soon they’d be encased behind a teaching blazer, the recently lived-out fantasy of nude camping in women-only space fading into memory as fall classes began. She’d exchange the tofu-flecked veggie stews and potato soups of festival cuisine for her hastily assembled sandwiches and the heart-recharging coffee of the campus cafeteria. Her topless tan and toughened muscles would go unseen, untouched. She still had no lover in town.
Sighing, Hannah began to pull rain-sodden shorts and sweatshirts from her duffel bag, dividing up the pungent gear into neatly apportioned laundry loads. First laundry. Then a shower and an herbal bath soak. Twigs and spider legs would swirl out of her hair, disappearing forever into the drain as she transformed from forest Medusa to bespectacled dykademic. Then up to campus to lose her cool in the bookstore, wailing about how to replace the out-of-print readings that were never going to arrive. Should she give up asking her students to purchase real books and just go digital, with all her women’s history assignments online, as other professors did nowadays? Why did it feel like such a betrayal to read Virginia Woolf on glass? Could there ever be a cyber equivalent word for bookworm?
But just below the fresh layer of anxiety, there was that glorious fire of recommitment, a feeling she recognized with gratitude and pleasure. The festival had once again fired her up to embrace her chosen work, examining the words of women’s lives. In spite of the enormous workload, she still loved the cycle of the academic year, its curving arc of predictability ingrained since she was four and had started nursery school. The weather obligingly shifted to cool; kneesock weather, her mother used to say, meaning it was time to put away the shorts and bathing suits of summer play and pull on socks and saddle shoes for school. Hannah would beg and plead for just a few more days of running through the sprinkler, shirtless, free, unselfconscious, wearing her favorite pair of orange cutoffs, her threadbare P.F Flyers tennis shoes. But school also meant books when she was young and coming to realize how different she was from other little kids. Hannah’s kickball-playing pals had hated library day, whereas Hannah found it heavenly. Now she was a grownup, and could read all day, every day, and not be considered a freak because it was her job to read. She had earned the freedom to be forever at home in history class, her mental pencil box rattling, her heart and soul engaged.
By Sunday of Labor Day weekend Hannah was giddy with preparedness and back-to-school nostalgia, scuffing new loafers through a few early-turned and scattered leaves. She was on her way to Sappho’s for a last, lazy afternoon of watching baseball on the big screen Isabel had just installed, looking forward to sipping a brew with some of the big gals who were knowledgeable sports fanatics. Too soon, Labor Day weekend would be over and Hannah would be possessed by the demands of new students, by lectures to prepare, by hours spent with her nose in a textbook, deciphering the great women of history—including those figures from the past whom she was somehow starting to run into, in the oddest of ways. Hannah took a long and winding route, walking to Sappho’s instead of driving so that she was free to ponder. What were these women from history trying to tell her, or show her?
“Watch it, jerk face! You’re going to hit that lady!” Hannah jumped off the curb as a worn baseball banged her ankle. It rolled off her shoe, downhill into a side street, and two sheepish-looking little girls who had erred in a game of catch stood mortified but giggling in their front yard, awaiting Hannah’s reaction. The bigger of the two girls, twisting her finger around beaded braids, ventured: “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You missed my soft parts.” They doubled over with hilarity at that. Hannah approached the barefoot pair, hand extended to show she wasn’t mad. “I’m actually on my way to watch a baseball game myself. I love to see girls practicing; keep it up! Either of you know how to pitch a curve ball?”
The bigger girl glanced at her companion, who was white and red-headed and wearing a backwards-turned ball cap. “She thinks I can. My dad says I can’t and never will. See, all we got at my school is slow-pitch softball. No baseball because there’s no one to coach the girls.”
“Well, there ought to be!” Hannah snarled, her feminist avatar uncoiling and rising like a cobra; and the girls involuntarily took a step back. “You know, there’s a law that says girls can do any sport boys do. It’s called—“
“Title IX,” the redhead volunteered. “My mom’s a lawyer.”
Hannah looked at the sharp-featured little face, recognizing the dimples. “Your mom wouldn’t be Elaine Grady, would she?”
“Ha, Susie’s got two moms,” the first girl said. “Now, how fair is that? I don’t even have one. My mama died.”
Susie frowned. “Shut up, Cubby. Yes, Elaine is my mom, but so is—”
“—Denise,” finished Hannah. “Guess what: I know both of them. Okay. Susie, tell your mom Elaine to talk with Cubby’s school principal, and I bet you can get a girls’ baseball team started over there. It’s been done before, you know? Grownup women played hardball once. They were really good, too. In this league during World War II—”
“Yeah, A League of Their Own,” Susie interrupted. “We watched that movie at my ninth birthday party in May.”
“But it had just white girls,” Cubby pointed out. “There was that one lady who could throw a curve and they wouldn’t even let her into that ballpark.”
The three of them stood there awkwardly, until Susie broke the silence. “Can you please go get our baseball for us? I think it rolled downhill behind you. We’re not supposed to leave Cubby’s front yard while her daddy’s napping.”
“Oh. Right.” Hannah hurried after the lost ball, thinking, These kids know more than my own students. They don’t need me to pitch lectures on women’s history; they need female coaches who can pitch them curve balls. I’ll have to get our asshole athletic director at the university to shift money around and bring in a personal trainer for Cubby, ideally someone who knows the history of women in the Negro Leagues—But . . . Then she stopped cold, feeling her bruised ankle throb as her heart sped up. The ball had rolled all the way down the block and vanished into Willow Street. And Hannah had not turned the corner into that street in fourteen years.
She drove past it all the time, mentally chanting Don’t look. Keep going. Everyone had a street, she supposed, where the perfect love affair had played out, the architecture of a house and a street number containing the entire world of a finished relationship. In her own imagination it had never changed, that narrow townhouse, its yellow door opening right onto the old stone street, with a carriage lamp and a window box heavy with zinnias. She had never talked about it with Gail, who didn’t like to know about Hannah’s past with other women. But Isabel knew, and Isabel would remember—that Hannah had once loved a woman on Willow Street. She had loved the visiting scholar named Maud Nora.
It was right after Hannah finished her Ph.D., when she joined the university as a freshly minted young professor. They met over the wine and cheese at a reception for new faculty, talking about their heavy teaching loads and how to tackle it all, at different ages, different professional stages—Hannah with her new place in the world of women’s history and Maud, older, better known, brought in for two years of special seminars on women’s sports and culture. It was the busy expert Maud who introduced Hannah to the history of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. Maud even had an Aunt Marlene, nicknamed “Lumpy” for the bump on her head from a particularly rough game, who briefly played second b
ase for the Grand Rapids Chicks.
And Maud—that had been a romance so all consuming, Hannah barely remembered anything else about her first year of real employment. Yes, it was thrilling to stand at a lectern and watch students take notes, thrilling to take home a paycheck that soon turned into a leather jacket, a mountain bike, a complete set of Fiestaware, but most of that year was lost to kissing and waiting, kissing and waiting to kiss. With their equally demanding schedules, on some days they didn’t see one another at all. On others—magic days, thought Hannah now—Hannah was allowed to spend the night, leaving her grubby first apartment for the luxury of Maud’s rented townhouse. They’d meet in that gold doorway, their leather satchels bumping. With a jingle of her keys, Maud would jab the door open and pour herself a glass of wine and settle on the couch with her half-glasses so charmingly askew, pretending to grade a few more student papers until the sexual tension wound up between them like a spring. Then Hannah had to pounce, to throw herself beseechingly into that waiting lap and bury her lips in Maud’s cable knit sweater, the Celtic wool a fuzzbite in her teeth as Maud’s own breathing quickened. On the sofa they made love while dusk began to gather, kids coming in from street games of baseball then, too, and cats yowling for their evening meal, and the train that rumbled every night at five. Eventually, on those special nights, Hannah would sigh and pull away and start a sauce for pasta in the narrow old kitchen with the butcher block island somehow fitting in between them, and Maud would watch the news while chopping vegetables or stripping husks off corn, and then by eight they’d eat their meal with jazz or blues or Bach—or women’s music. Maud had every album ever made by any feminist musician, crates she’d brought with her from Ann Arbor along with a real stereo turntable and diamond-tipped needle. On such nights she’d raise her glass and say, “To my young scholar,” toasting Hannah with one foot beneath the table stroking hers. That narrow house creaked and listed, groaned in autumn wind and froze them in the winter, so that Maud was often sick and Hannah was always steaming her with pots of tea, with herbal decongestants, though Maud drew the line at “being vaporized,” saying it sounded like a World War I attack. One night they both were bundled up in flannel, grading tests. Hannah had her hair down and her bathrobe loosely tied, and looked up with the feeling Maud was watching, and she was. “Jesus Christ,” said Maud, “you certainly are a beauty,” and then laid her glasses down. They went to bed. But it didn’t last. It never does, thought Hannah bitterly.
It didn’t last because Maud merely went back to her tenured position in Ann Arbor, where she was closer to the archives and living survivors of the League, and while they traveled back and forth to see one another for a few months, eventually Maud made clear with firm regret that she was “done.” Hannah had raged and puzzled and written bad poetry, trying to figure out what could have turned Maud away. The answer eventually proved to be a hunky umpire named Daniel, who was also interested in the history of women’s sports. He apparently owned a complete set of original AAGPBL trading cards and spent his weekends trolling flea markets for rare women’s baseball memorabilia.
Left for a man. Left for a man! “Do you love him, or just his baseball card collection?” were Hannah’s plaintive last words; it still hurt. The humiliation, on top of heartbreak, had ruined the very sight of the turnoff into Willow Street, which once excited her beyond description. She never again entered the street containing “their” house, not even when another faculty friend who lived farther down the block invited her to a holiday eggnog party. Maud’s unexpected bisexuality was probably one reason why Hannah had eventually become involved with Gail, the butchest possible rebound partner; their first date lasted for so many happy years. But then Gail had walked out. Gail was gone, too.
Fuck it. Whatever. Hannah stepped into Willow Street, eyes focused on scooping up the children’s lost ball, eyes blurry now with regret. Her hand shook as she touched the baseball. She wanted to touch Maud. She wanted to touch Gail. She wanted to go back in time and try again, forgive, apologize, be a better lover, anything at all. And as she turned at last to face the past, which was in this instance a townhouse at 307 Willow, another baseball came falling out of the sky and hit her on the head.
“Is she all right?”
“I don’t know. Marlene! Can you get up?”
“Give her air. Come on, Gertie, shove over!”
Hannah opened an eye. For a moment she couldn’t focus. Tense faces hovered over her—all topped with ball caps. She recognized nobody. But she heard a cheer go up, and for some reason scattered applause. “Hot damn, she’s okay! Atta girl. Come on, get back in the game! It’s so close!” Hands reached to lift her to her feet.
“Something hit me,” began Hannah, and then gasped as she looked down at her bare legs. They were covered in bruises and scabs she hadn’t had when she woke up that day. More distressingly, her legs seemed to be emerging from a skirt. A short uniform skirt. One she knew very well.
Hannah was a second basewoman for the Grand Rapids Chicks.
And that meant the year was 1945.
The sun was in the exact same position overhead, and the air had the same end-of-summer scent, but the women now pushing her toward second base had never known an IPad, e-mail, Skype, cell phone, even a television. Their chipped and crooked teeth, unrepaired by modern orthodontics, now smiled at her encouragingly. “Go on, we need you! Doreen’s already out with a sprain. Can you play?”
“Can I play baseball? Hardball? Not well,” Hannah stammered.
“That’s the stuff. If Marlene’s joking again, she can play. Come on! We still have a lead.” Hannah found herself wobbling, on legs with unfamiliar sliding strawberries, toward a spot in a dirt field.
“Hurry up, princess,” jeered an obvious dyke in a different color uniform skirt. “I didn’t bean you that hard.” At the slur princess, which in Hannah’s world had always been the unflattering term for a spoiled Jewish girl, Hannah forgot her dizziness and whirled around, eyes shooting cinders, teeth grinding. She heard one of the players who had helped her up shout, “Yeah! There’s that game face! Come on now, Marlene!”
I’m not Marlene. I’m Hannah. Who’s Marlene? A base hit snapped her to attention as dust flew and a sliding opponent landed with a thud on first. “Son of an ITCH, that stung,” the player moaned, and a shortstop from Hannah’s team snorted in sympathy. “She can’t risk another fine for swearing. The last swear cost her ten dollars, and a third gets her suspended from the League. That’s Gloria—already busted for trying to go into one of those bars. Can’t say as I blame her,” she added, winking.
This is insane, Hannah thought, frantically fielding the next batter and missing the line drive by a country mile as the rival team advanced around the bases. Marlene, Marlene, I know that name. An ancient plane (to Hannah’s eyes) sputtered over the field, dragging a banner that read WELL DONE TROOPS. Wait! Of course. Marlene was the name of Maud’s aunt—the one who had actually played in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. The one who got hit in the head at a game and carried a permanent lump on her temple that Maud had loved to pat as a little girl. Maud, who was much older than Hannah, who remembered and loved the League because she even went to a few games until her aunt finally retired in 1953.
What had Maud told Hannah about her aunt during the days and nights they lived together? Hannah had worked very hard to repress those happy memories, but she sure needed them now. It was on that frosty January night when they made cinnamon popcorn, their hands plunging into a hot-buttered bowl, knuckles bumping, lips salty-sweet and slippery, kernels falling into their laps, and Hannah’s eyes had been on their rented horror movie while Maud reminisced. What had she said, exactly, that night? “My aunt was probably a very gay lady, but they were barely allowed to talk about such things, let alone act on them. Five-dollar first offenses were handed out for cursing, smoking, drinking, wearing hair in too butch a bob, getting off the travel bus without your skirt on, even just wearing slacks in
a public place. Oh, my aunt hated those rules, but she needed to keep every nickel of her earnings to help out the family farm, which was still recovering from the whammo of the Depression years. Marlene could whistle through her teeth—she never got the gap fixed, the way most kids do now—and she had a special whistle for me if she knew I was in the bleachers watching. She’d whistle twice during a lull in the action so I’d know she was thinking of me, and after the game we’d have Cracker Jacks together. Later on I recall that she usually had a woman friend with her, but of course when I was four, five, six, even twelve, I didn’t put two and two together. After all, everyone on the team was a woman. And then they all had nicknames for each other, Slats, Mac, whatever. She was Lumpy, from being beaned with a ball one game. She always said it was her piece of history.”
Hannah tried to clear her throbbing head. The uniform ball cap at least shielded her eyes. She could clearly see the people in the stands, some in military uniforms, others in clean overalls or house dresses—just white people, too, she noticed, and certainly no one was texting or talking on a cell phone. No one had on headphones, ear buds, or Nike swooshes. There were plenty of kids, cheering and waving, mostly young girls—
And one of the little girls was Maud Nora.
Definitely. It was Maud, or rather a pint-sized incarnation of her scholarly ex, who on this last weekend of summer 1945 would have been about to enter first grade. She had on a short-sleeved sweater buttoned up the wrong way, a plaid skirt, and Mary Janes. Her fair hair was pulled back with a yarn ribbon, and Cracker Jack glaze smeared her upper lip. She was screaming. “GO, Aunt Marlene, GO.” Peanuts flew out of her mouth as she cheered.
Hannah parted her lips, afraid to say anything at all that might change the course of both their histories, but suddenly two quick and piercing whistles escaped from between her teeth. Mini-Maud shouted and waved at her. Hannah’s head still throbbed from where she’d been knocked out—or, rather, knocked into the past and, apparently, into someone else’s body, but when she reached up to touch her brow she was surprised to feel a cut and not a bump. Hold on. If I’m “Lumpy,” where’s the lump? Or am I not Maud’s aunt after all?
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