“That’s the game! We won! So long, Daisies!” shouted a player, and teammates from the Grand Rapids Chicks poured into the infield, whooping and cheering, while sullen Fort Wayne Daisies picked up their gloves and moved toward the waiting buses. In the bleachers, a little girl was waving, waiting. On legs that felt watery, yet real—there was no denying that she was alive and walking—Hannah approached young Maud.
The kid was five and a half. Not even a loose tooth yet. Probably couldn’t read, either. Her life was ahead of her: school, high school, college, graduate school, peace marches, feminism, coming out, scholarship on women’s sports, tenure at Ann Arbor, a fling with a younger woman named Hannah, partnering with an umpire named Daniel with a good baseball card collection. There was no reason to approach such a tiny figure with resentment, or to horrify her by spilling the beans about a future she had yet to live. Hannah was mindful that anything she said or did now that deviated in any way from Maud Nora’s precise recollections would change history, and probably wreak havoc with Hannah’s own life somewhere out there—if she ever got back to it. She stood awkwardly on one leg, pulling her uniform bloomers down an inch, saying nothing.
“I saved you my Cracker Jack prize,” babbled Maud. “I almost swallowed it. Then I didn’t.” It was a very tiny silver baseball glove. “Perfect for you, huh?” And she held it out.
Hannah took it from the sticky hand, thinking, This is a child, thinking, I am touching the hand that once held mine forty-five years later in time, thinking, How I loved that hand. Could she say to little Maud what grown-up Maud had meant to her? “I love you, pal,” was what Hannah used to say in the dark; and that phrase came out easy now. And little Maud responded: “I love you! You’re my best!”, the very thing older Maud had told Hannah in the dark.
Maybe that was all she had ever hoped to hear again, one more time, because Hannah/Marlene’s body flooded with nostalgia, and she felt a grin crinkle all the way up to her cut forehead. In seconds, their meeting was over. A teammate pulled Hannah from the stands, saying “Come on, we gotta go,” and little Maud was shouting, “I’ll see ya, Aunt Marlene! I’ll see ya! I’ll see ya next game!” And out in the parking lot, safely hidden behind the idling team bus, Hannah sank to her knees in the soft dirt and wept.
The next thing she knew she was dozing on the bus, its leather seats cracked and slippery, giving off a rank smell of liniment, cheap perfume, hair spray, and stale Coca-Cola. Someone was whispering in her ear: “When we stop for dinner, we can try to find that bar I heard about. We got maybe an hour. I really want to get a drink, but we’ll have to be super careful or there’s hell to pay, you know. So are you with me? Are you in?”
Up ahead, a truck stop parking lot, half-filled with very old farm Fords and pickups, beckoned with lights spelling out DON’S EATS in sputtering aqua neon. Twenty tired, victorious Chicks tugged on clean uniform skirts and filed off the bus toward the diner, but Hannah’s companion shouted, “I’ll be back in a bit. I’m gonna take old Marlene to the restroom to touch up that bruise!” She guided Hannah toward the side of the parking lot, then hustled past the freestanding bathroom toward a street glistening with trolley tracks.
“Where are you taking me?” wailed Hannah, desperate to fall asleep and wake up back on her way to Sappho’s, in her own time and in her own body, but her teammate had other plans. They passed houses with sagging porches, and then crossed the tracks to an unpaved side street. Shapes of women and bawdy laughter drew them on toward one faintly lit brick house, its shades drawn.
“Just a bar, just a party Gina heard about,” hissed her companion. Then as they reached the bottom step of the house, the front door opened and two beautifully dressed women reeled out. One had on a silk dress, pastel stockings well-seamed up the back, and a twisted pearl necklace. The other woman was in a pinstriped suit and sharp-brimmed fedora.
“Awesome,” Hannah heard herself exclaim, before she remembered that was an expression very much from the future, marking her an alien. At the very same moment her seatmate from the bus yelled out, “Marlene, come back! Gina made a mistake! God damn it, that’s a colored bar!”
The women on the porch were black.
“Who you calling God-damn colored?” said the butch in the fedora, casually but steadily taking the porch steps toward the rapidly receding Grand Rapids Chicks. “You too pretty to drink with us?” She looked at Hannah. “You two in that lily league? The white girls’ ball league?”
The woman in the silk dress pointed a perfectly manicured middle finger at Hannah. “Pico’s a better player than any of you. Think she could get on a League team? Uh uh. So why don’t you go find some lily house party, and leave us our own spot?”
“It’s so wrong,” said Hannah.
The butch was in her face now. “What? You saying she’s wrong?”
“No,” said Hannah. “It’s wrong that the League stayed white. I know all about that. I hate that about it. I wish it were a different story. I know how good you are.”
The elegant femme gasped at this last remark, and Hannah realized how it sounded. Several other bar patrons had spilled out by now, and Hannah’s teammate had completely disappeared, running noisily back to the truck stop. She was alone.
Fedora woman had not moved an inch away from Hannah’s sweaty face. “You don’t know me from Adam. You looking for a beat down, you come to the right place. You looking for a beer, your money’s no good here. You looking for a woman, you not welcome.”
All of a sudden, Hannah knew why she was there. “No beat down, no beer, no woman unfortunately,” she spoke as evenly as possible. “I’m just here for one hour, and now that’s half gone. Me, I’m looking for your good curve ball, to pass along to girls who want to learn.”
Gusts of laughter greeted this declaration, but the woman in the fedora narrowed her eyes. “You serious?”
“Pretty much,” said Hannah, who had just realized who she was dealing with. “You’re Pico Blue, aren’t you? From the Negro League team. You got turned away from the all-white league and offered a spot playing with the Negro League men for one season when a couple of players were sent overseas. But the men won’t let you pitch even though you have a better curve ball, because you’re still a woman. I know about that. Well, I’m here to say I respect you. I tell kids about you. And I think I still have twenty minutes. Teach me everything you know.”
Pico looked at her for a moment, considering, and then turned to her date. “Carlotta, get me my ball bag and glove. They’re in the car.”
“For real? We’re supposed to be dancing!”
“Just do it,” said Pico Blue, and Hannah thought, There’s a slogan someone waited to use in my time.
They moved into the alley. Pico wound up, and Hannah was flat on her back in seconds, with the real lump on her head rising. That’s why she was called Lumpy! That’s why she called it her piece of history! She couldn’t tell anyone she’d gone to a dyke bar and practiced with black players! It was all forbidden; she would have been suspended! The AAGPBL thought she got the lump on her head from that game against the Daisies!
“Sorry,” said Pico. “You got to shift sideways to catch me. Or didn’t your friends tell you I’m a southpaw?” She wound up again, and Hannah, who had improvised a bat out of an old broom leaning against the house, managed to avoid being beaned yet again by chipping wildly at the pitch. The ball clunked up over their heads and landed in the gutter.
“Shit,” said Pico. “I’m not climbing up there in this suit. You go up there and get me my ball. Ladder’s just beyond that back window.”
Hannah moved unsteadily along the house wall. Through the back window she could see women in butch-femme finery caressing, drinking beer, dancing to jazz, kissing in deep armchairs. Someone was serving up bowls of food from a big iron stewpot. Hearts and stars made from painted cardboard were strung across the bar, spelling out the names of a couple celebrating their anniversary. Ivy plants drooped from a high shelf. It looked startl
ingly like a night at Sappho’s Bar and Grill—a place to go, to belong, to celebrate and kiss, eat comfort food and talk. This was the parallel world of segregation. This was separate and unequal, a site not written into the record of women’s history—yet. We couldn’t even go into each other’s bars, Hannah thought. But could anyone in the backroads of Grand Rapids in 1945 guess that thirty-one years into the future, the largest lesbian festival in the world would set up on a spot less than two hours’ drive from there? With black and white lesbians boldly out and proud onstage?
“Are you getting that ball?” shouted Pico. “I got a lady waiting on me.”
Hannah could not take her eyes from the window. What was the name of this Michigan bar?
“Are you getting that ball?” the voice came again. And the voice grew higher. Then younger. “I got this lady waiting for me!”
Stupidly, Hannah looked at the baseball she was holding. It was Sunday afternoon on Willow Street. Two little girls, one black, one white, were standing in the front yard up the road and calling to her. Hannah felt her head: no bumps. Just her own springy Jewish hair. She was back in her own body, her own time!
She walked out of Willow Street, which would never again haunt her as it had. There were bigger ghosts to serve. “Here you go,” she tossed the ball to Cubby. “But who’s the lady waiting for you?”
“Miss Angie, my coach,” the kid replied. “We’ve got practice up at school in an hour.”
“For the new girls’ baseball team,” Susie explained. “Cubby’s the pitcher! And coach is putting her in against the boys next weekend!”
“Miss Angie taught me a mean curve ball,” Cubby admitted.
If she ever really needed a stiff drink at Sappho’s, it was now. Hannah burst into the club just as Denise, Elaine, Vera, Mandy, and Jo were cheering the Yankees game. Bets had obviously been placed. Isabel was putting silver trays of snacks in front of everyone as they gathered under the new big-screen TV, and wads of cash shifted discreetly between trays.
“Elaine, Denise, I just met your kid,” Hannah announced. “Nice little redhead. And her friend Cubby.”
“Oh, Cubby’s fantastic,” Elaine confirmed. “We set her up with a personal trainer, Angela, the new athletic director just hired on campus. You know Angela’s aunt once pitched in the Negro Leagues? Her nickname was Paco or Pico or something. Cubby’s going to be just like her, maybe a pro someday!”
Hannah had put down a five-dollar bill for a beer. Isabel brought and uncapped the beer, then pushed some coins and a small bowl of Cracker Jack toward Hannah. It wasn’t until she had taken four good swallows, and removed her eyes from the TV screen, that Hannah saw what was mixed in with her change: a tiny silver baseball glove, Maud Nora’s Cracker Jack prize from 1945. She vaguely recalled it falling out of her uniform skirt pocket as she stood on tiptoe to peek into the window of the black lesbian bar in Grand Rapids. How had it ended up at Sappho’s?
She looked at Isabel, who smiled back at her over the coins, saying quietly, “Yes, this is your change, the little change you asked for,” and then went back to wiping down the bar.
Chapter Nine
Halloween
The morning of October 31st found Hannah standing at her splintered podium in classroom B-12, giving her standard “scary” Halloween lecture: a grim hour she nonetheless enjoyed, observing its impact on those students new to women’s history. Dressed in her conical witch’s hat over academic robes, she brandished what she hoped looked like a giant labrys (probably intended to be a medieval axe, and, like the hat, left over from last year’s discount Halloween sale.) Dimming the overhead lights, Hannah began with the reminder that once upon a time this holiday was called Samhain, a part of the annual calendar in pagan Europe. With the coming of Christianity and religious orthodoxy, such practices began to be banned as devil worship and heresy, and a not incidental consequence was the Inquisition torture directed at midwives, whose wisdom and “potions” raised heretical alarm. Midwives, elders, the unmarried spinster who supported herself as an abortionist, all burned at the stake, millions of women and children. Some, Hannah added, were charged merely because they bore marks of physical difference: moles, an extra finger, and superfluous nipples called “witches’ teats.” “My grandmother Ruthie, herself, was born with six nipples,” Hannah informed her shaken audience of first-years and sophomores, all of whom had shown up to class in commercial holiday outfits, the costumes of familiar female archetypes: princess, nun, call girl, bar wench, witch. “Witches’ teats are more common than you think.” Her eye fell on one student, dressed as a perfect Snow White, who flinched and shook her head: Not me!
The projector flared on, screening the film Hannah saved for Halloween every year: The Burning Times. Onscreen, medieval artists’ paintings of peasant women being burned alive as witches alternated with actual photographs of torture implements from European museums. Stocks. Pillories. The iron maiden. The rack. Thumbscrews. Two students in different rows rose from their seats and, gagging, ran out of the lecture hall.
“Most of their names are lost to us now,” Hannah added as the soundtrack faded slowly and the regular classroom lights flickered on. “We can remember these from New England. Anne Hutchinson, burned in the colonies. Elizabeth ‘Goody’ Knapp, hanged from a tree in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1653, charged with having witches’ teats.”
“My great-great-something grandmother,” a student chimed in. “In Texas.”
“Some of my relatives in Scotland,” a male student added.
“It’s going on right now in some African villages. And, you know, before I came here I was home-schooled as a kid, because my parents didn’t want me experiencing Halloween parties at the local elementary school, where I might be exposed to devil worship in class,” said the head of the Feminist Student Union.
“Who is the scariest figure in our time? Is it still a witch?” Hannah asked the class. “Have we overcome our fear of the dark, at last? Or do we yet fear the witches amongst us?”
Silence. Then: “It’s middle-aged radical feminists,” a voice in the back contributed. “The scary women today are like you.”
She was still thinking about that comment hours later as the sun went down in a flaming orange slice.
Hannah’s plans for the evening included, first, helping to decorate Sappho’s Bar for the big Halloween party, then taking Cubby and Susie trick-or-treating while their moms partied at the bar, and later returning herself for a nightcap with Isabel and the gang. She left a large plastic pumpkin filled with candy on her front stoop, hoping the first trick-or-treaters wouldn’t take all of it, and then stepped off her porch with her witch robes swirling jauntily. Autumn dusk and leaf and wood smoke scent. The days were shorter now, the evening a last luxury of warm, lingering light. The moon would rise later, a round, portentous globe, and the whole of the night lay ahead in haunted mystery.
Everything felt like a treat. But now it was time to pull her annual trick. Hannah’s first task was the mild mischief of putting a hex on someone, and this year that meant leaving a rotten egg in the driveway of the town’s most notorious homophobe, a man whose perpetual letters to the editor demanded the death penalty for “sodomites.” No lights were on at his well-known house, and Hannah swiftly crouched to tuck the foul eggs under his parked car wheel, avoiding eye contact with bumper stickers that snarled ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE and IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK THE DOCTOR WHO DIDN’T ABORT YOU. Had anyone seen her? Was she being watched? Not yet. Time to cover the front bumper of his Buick with a sticker of her own, WITCHES HEAL. She ran back to the sidewalk and lowered her eyes, smiling.
Shadows gathered and moved across the street—halfway to darkness now, but the fading light still liquid enough to outline fresh Halloween decorations on porches. This block, Garfield Street, was one long swish of magic broom décor, with porch ghosts and animatronic spiders and laugh boxes and black cats aplenty, and the famous “haunted house” she knew Cubby and Susie would
beg to visit. Bagged entirely inside a billowing sack—probably rented from Hannah’s one-night-stand Flick, the pest control contractor—this house resembled a giant head with an open, screaming mouth for a doorway, barely covered by a thin flap of cheesecloth each child had to pass through for treats. The vagina dentata, thought Hannah, hurrying to get to Sappho’s on foot and on time, but inexorably drawn to the warmly lit houses she passed by.
She wasn’t a twenty-something any more. Neither child nor parent, just a dangerous ghost, a remnant of lesbian feminism, here to haunt everyone with her theories of women’s history and her scolding about honoring the past. Well, the autumn and the night in her own life were fast approaching and her own house was dark. No lover, no partner kept that home fire burning as she wandered out in search of a social life tonight. Hannah scuffed through leaves and twigs and pods, gazing into other peoples’ households, all so tenderly normal in appearance despite the macabre outerwear of pumpkin light and phony webs and skulls. Framed in basement kitchen windows, newlywed yuppies chopped vegetables on Ikea cutting boards, mixed martinis in blenders.
I am haunted by every woman I have ever loved. I am haunted by Gail, the one ex who won’t talk to me. Isn’t there a word for that, when they act like you’re dead to them? Yes, and it’s called ghosting. Wasn’t she supposed to be settled, married, partnered by now? Had she blown it? Would she sail through the rest of her adult life like a leaf skittering over sidewalk, examining lives of the past while her own went undeveloped? Who was waiting for Hannah with a martini?
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