Sappho's Bar and Grill

by Bonnie J. Morris

  Well, Isabel was. Isabel had always been there. Maybe . . . could it be that Isabel was the one Hannah had been waiting for?

  The inside of Sappho’s was an orange nightmare. Candy corn had spilled from a bucket and was sticky underfoot, and crepe paper flecked with toy spiders dangled from every bar stool. “Boooo,” Hannah howled cheerfully as she entered, scaring nobody.

  “It’s Doc! We’re just about to—HACHOO!” Letty sneezed in greeting, jabbing a resentful thumb at the simmering smoke from Isabel’s pot of brew. The scent was not unpleasant, but its smoky haze tickled even Hannah’s nose. “Sorry, Letty,” Isabel called, hastening from behind the bar to contain the spreading fumes. With a practiced flick of her wrist she slid a heavy lid over the stewpot. Immediately, the smoke disappeared. The scent changed to fresh-baked pastry, redolent of cloves. Now both Hannah and Letty found their mouths watering instead of their eyes.

  “She’s a witch,” Letty nodded toward Isabel, not without admiration, and Hannah thought, I am starting to arrive at that conclusion myself. But Isabel was summoning everyone: “It’s ready now.” And they gathered around the cauldron, where Isabel had set out thirteen shot glasses embossed with a spiderweb pattern. Each woman took a glass, and carefully Isabel ladled out a bit of the pastry-scented liqueur. Dressed as ghosts, as Pacific Northwest saloon madams, furry rabbits, satanic rock stars and Star Trek characters, the regulars and old-timers of Sappho’s Bar and Grill raised their glasses high and looked expectantly toward Isabel. But Isabel nudged Hannah.

  “Oh. Right,” Hannah fumbled. “Well, then. A toast. ‘Round about the cauldron go,’” she quoted Shakespeare. She cleared her throat and closed her eyes.

  “Once again we gather on a night known in the past as a women’s holiday. Even as we dress in mock witch clothing, we remember.

  “We remember the Salem witch trials. The accused children locked in Puritan prisons by well-fed magistrates. Ursula Kemp, hanged in England in 1582 for curing. Susanna Edwards, who probably suffered from Parkinson’s disease, charged as a witch and executed in 1683. The widow Katharina Kepler, accused by neighbors of turning herself into a cat in 1611 in Germany. We remember all those who were tortured to confess until the Witchcraft Act of 1735.

  “We drink sweetness to these women charged as witches, the known and unnamed nine million. The victims of the purges. The midwives, the warlock men called faggots, the elders mocked as grannies. Witches, healers, rise and fly tonight.” They all sipped in unison. Hannah heard Letty swallow and gasp, “Damn.” The liqueur burned her throat, too, in a strangely stimulating way. She felt, rather than thought, that if she spoke now it would be in a foreign language. And just at that moment, a woman screamed.

  “Shit!” Moira spit out her mouthful of brew, soaking the front of her Irish banshee costume.

  “It’s just me—I’m so sorry—I saw those spiders, and then I realized they’re fake! They’re all fake,” Denise apologized. She and her partner, Elaine, dressed as bowling balls, filled the doorway, their roundly costumed bodies partially blocking two nine-year-olds from heading further into the bar. Susie and Cubby peeked around Elaine’s legs and waved at Hannah. “It’s her, that lady who got our baseball,” Cubby announced.

  “That’s no lady; that’s Dr. Stern,” Elaine laughed. “She’s going to take the two of you trick-or-treating on Garfield Street.”

  “YEAH!” the girls rejoiced. “Can we go to the spook house that looks like a giant head? And the one that’s haunted? And the one with the crazy woman who gives out silver money?”

  “Do not go to any door without Hannah, and let her look over any treats handed to you,” ordered Denise, plopping her bowling-body onto a barstool and waving a ten-dollar bill for a Halloween beer. Then she noticed the circle of women standing solemnly around Isabel’s chef cauldron. “Oh. Right. The witch thing.”

  “Sorry,” added Elaine. “We stepped in it again. We’re never on time, and we’re never politically correct.” Then she pulled her hand from the doorjamb, startled. “I know that’s a fake spider, but . . . it bit me!”

  The mood broken, Hannah threw back the rest of her tribute cup and wiped her mouth on a party napkin. “Come on, kids. One hour. I’ll walk you back through time, and guard your candy.”

  The sober rituals of history now gave way to the sheer fun Hannah remembered from her own 1960s childhood: time to hit up houses for chocolate caramels. She clutched Susie and Cubby’s sweaty palms firmly in her own as they wound away from Sappho’s and back to the start of the suburbs, on foot through temporarily blocked-off streets. The years peeled off Hannah like curls of lemon zest as they scurried, giggling, into the melee of the town’s most beloved trick-or-treating strip. Monsters, firefighters and baby ballerinas fought for position in front of the haunted house, each child trembling, then determinedly moving forward into the grotesquely chortling “mouth.” A public address system blasted forth howls of doom as the cheesecloth door flapped, but every kid came out eaming, triumphant, clutching a bag of candy. Puddles of brightly wrapped bars littered the lawn. Hannah bent down and inspected a fresh, unwrapped packet dropped by some fleeing child.

  “Mallo Cups! I haven’t seen those since I was twelve,” Hannah marveled.

  “I’ve never seen them at all,” Susie shuddered. “They look gross. I like ‘Nerds.’”

  “You would,” Cubby shoved her.

  Hannah shoved both of them to the front of the line, then leaned back against a parked car, enjoying the scene before her. Costumed college students lurched by in packs, already drunk. A few police officers were keeping an eye on things, shaking their heads at a pack of fraternity pledges costumed in blackface. Hannah thought about confronting and educating these frat brothers. Two were obviously her own students, recognizable by their high-top sneakers. Just then a fundamentalist preacher approached several young trick-or-treaters, brandishing anti-Halloween literature. The garishly illustrated pamphlets showed Satan pulling the puppet strings of innocent kids, and wealthy homosexuals falling into the flaming pits of hell. “Thanks, I’ll take those!” she snarled, shoving the literature into her backpack pocket for later shredding. “We hope to clean up this decadent devil holiday,” the evangelist told her, and Hannah responded “So do I!,” whisking out her toy witch broom and sweeping the sidewalk with it, much to the delight of three gay men dressed as Fruit Loops.

  “Read your palm, darling?” called the fortuneteller, whose real origins were unknown but who sat in the same cane-bottomed chair at the same corner every Halloween, speaking only to women. Hannah pulled out a five-dollar bill and opened her hand. But as she scrutinized the palm before her, the fortune-teller’s all-knowing eyes widened and then shut. “What in the world?” she groaned, shoving Hannah’s money into her ample cleavage, then shaking her head. “I can’t tell you what I’m seeing here, darling, for you would not believe it and they would arrest me for lying,” she whispered. “So please—how about, maybe, just a handwriting analysis?”

  Wondering what fresh madness lay in store for her, predictable only by a palm reader who now refused to divulge any information, Hannah sighed and wrote out her name on a candy wrapper. Then she blinked.

  “You see,” the fortuneteller murmured.

  It was Hannah’s handwriting, all right. But not the cursive script that she used now. Her name had somehow turned into the block letters of her second-grade signature—the way she might have written her name as a child out trick-or-treating. All of a sudden she remembered school penmanship lessons. It had been easy and fun for her to learn to write her name, as Hannah was exactly the same whether written backwards or forwards.

  “You are that person who goes backwards and forwards,” said the fortuneteller, reading her mind as well as her palm, then picking up her chair and running from Hannah, who was left to stand there in confusion, looking at her name on a Mallo Cup wrapper.

  Susie materialized at Hannah’s side, drooling chocolate from a mouthful of Raisinettes. �
�Hey, how come people tortured witches long ago?” she asked. “We heard you. At the club.”

  “What kind of torture?” Cubby demanded. “Like what they did to black people in slavery times?”

  Oh, man, thought Hannah. There is nowhere to turn without hitting the great historical wall of human suffering built here on planet Earth. How do I break it down for nine-year-olds tonight? Cubby was watching her. “The church leaders thought witches were women who used too much power, in a time when only the Christian priests were allowed to have power,” she offered. “Old women who seemed too smart, too good at healing, scared the new believers. And Cubby, you’re right that slavery was torture. The way that women were tortured when someone accused them of witchcraft was different. It involved tools we thankfully don’t use today. I don’t know how much you need to know. Okay, stretching people on a rack. Hurting their fingers with harsh pinchers called thumb screws.”

  “Gross!” Susie was fascinated.

  Hannah was just about to pat herself on the back for her PG-rated version of The Burning Times when, unexpectedly, Cubby started to cry. “My fingers, my fingers,” she wept.

  “That scared you? It scares me, too,” Hannah apologized, hugging her close. “Because I’m a writer. The thumbscrews always scared me most.” She thought briefly of a night she’d spent in handcuffs, long ago when she was twenty-three, after a nonviolent sit-in and peace protest at a nuclear missile plant. She’d gone to jail for ten hours with four friends from her antiwar group, and during those long hours, left in a cell in the new plastic handcuffs used on the demonstrators, her hands had gone completely numb. She remembered the terror when she could no longer feel her own fingers. “And of course, Cubby, you have these extra magic hands to protect—you’re a pitcher. Look, no one’s going to hurt your hands like that. I promise.”

  “But they could. I had my arm broken in second grade by a bully. He teased me all year because I was smarter and bigger and I pitched better than him. Plus he said stuff like I’m black, I don’t have a mom, my best friend has two moms so I must be a queer too. He called me every bad word I’m not allowed to say. Coon. Lesbo. The n-word. He broke my arm, and I had to wear a sling and miss six weeks of practice. They made him go to that special school, but I hear he shoved another girl there. Then she got her fingers hurt.” Cubby sniffled. Susie stood on one foot and then the other, embarrassed, rustling through her pumpkin bag full of treats for something soothing. “Here.” She offered Cubby a Powerhouse bar. “Because you’re my friend. You’re a powerhouse!”

  What in the hell? Hannah thought. First Mallo Cups, now a Powerhouse bar? This stuff isn’t made anymore. You can’t get these around here—unless someone’s been hoarding retro candy bars just to hand them out at Halloween. Unless . . . She hugged the two girls again for a long minute, and they moved on.

  And the parked cars changed. The license plates showed earlier years. At the next house, they received more time-warp treats. Cubby and Susie screamed “TRICK OR TREAT” and a tanned arm dropped Milkshake and Butternut bars into their bags. Two doors down, the take included Clark bars, Zagnuts, Sugar Mamas, Marathon Bars. At the next houses the girls collected Brach’s Chocolate Stars, Charms, Beeman’s Teaberry gum, Turkish Taffy, and wax bottles, as Hannah’s teeth started to chatter. They were heading farther back in time at every house on Garfield Street. “Is this crack?” Cubby asked anxiously, holding out a crystallized gob of rock candy.

  “You guys almost ready to go?” Hannah barked, feeling the mist of spookdom rising in her chest. “Got enough candy?” Other children around her were probing the contents of their Halloween buckets with similar confusion.

  “Are you kidding? We still haven’t been to the crazy woman’s house!” shouted Cubby, who had apparently forgotten all about witches, torture, and schoolyard backlash and, along with Susie, was now riding high on sugary time-travel candy bars. “Check this out—black candy!” She offered Hannah a selection from her bag: indeed, Black Cow bars, Blackjack gum. They approached the bent fencing of a home everyone usually avoided: the residence of town eccentric Misty Romanoff, an elder who wore her old figure-skating outfit and pancake makeup to the Safeway. Both warmhearted and harmless, she really did give out money on Halloween. One year, greeting a little girl at the door who also hoped to become a champion skater, she had given away her Olympic medal. Children were lined up three deep on her front walk, watched by anxious parents.

  As Cubby and Susie took their places in line for silver dollars, Hannah watched sugar-wired children fight over candy, trade, boast, jostle, and throw up. Two girls were fighting over a candy necklace that definitely looked vintage 1950s. Another child had retreated from the fray and was playing hopscotch by herself, solemnly adorable in a 1920s sailor suit costume. She gave a grunt of exasperation as she tossed her hopscotch marker and it rolled toward the curb. As Hannah bent down and rescued it from the gutter, their eyes met, and the old framed photo on Hannah’s living room mantel sprang to life. This little girl was Hannah’s grandmother, the one born with six nipples. Witches teats. Ruthie.

  Somewhere behind them, a front door banged and Susie and Cubby raced toward Hannah, panting, waving their hands. “We got silver dollars!” they shouted. “Can we go now?” Then they stopped, for Hannah was talking to someone. Someone they could not see.

  Stuffed with old-time candy, the girls were safely back at Sappho’s by nine p.m., and Hannah stayed for a quick drink and a game of pool. Yet she felt a strange depression she could not name. Perhaps it was the annual return to the topic of witch persecution, expanded upon by the evening’s reminders of racist bullying and homophobia. So much to confront. So much that a feminist historian could never forget. What she really wanted was simply to be at home, by herself, eating those mystically apparitional Mallo Cups and watching Dracula’s Daughter. She bade everyone a Happy Halloween and walked home, looping through neighborhoods still bristling with costumed children.

  Thumbscrews. Handcuffs. How had she held up under torture? Badly. She thought back to that night in the holding cell, absurdly arrested for peace, a threat to nobody, yet shackled for “criminal trespass.” All of them, the women in her peace brigade, were kept in tight plastic handcuffs overnight until their release (charges dropped) at dawn. Through that night her fingers swelled, her hands went numb, and cold sweat trickled between her breasts as she pondered the possibility of real nerve damage. What if she never wrote again? Could she survive and complete grad school? How would she type her dissertation? Her nose itched; her hands were cuffed behind her back. She’d leaned her head against Isabel’s chest for one moment just to scratch her nose on a shirt button. A tall security officer shouted “None of that, dykes,” and had them separated. Hannah was dragged roughly to a different cell, her shoulder nearly dislocated. Because they were pacifists. Because they were lesbians. Because they were feminists. Because they were—

  Witches, hissed a voice. Like your granny. Driven from the Old Country, wasn’t she? And good riddance. Show us if ye have the witch marks too. Unbind thy breasts.

  Hannah whirled around; no one was there. Then, to her horror, she felt unseen hands start to unhook her teaching bra. She dropped to the ground and rolled into the protective fetal position she recalled from the old days of nonviolent demonstrations. Civil disobedience. “I disobey you!” she shouted in the empty, dark street. The bra flapped limp against her cold shoulder blades. No one was there.

  Then Hannah stood alone, and flashed her breasts upward, toward the tree branches where she heard the faintest hissing whispers fading, fading. “If normal tits, still a wild witch at heart,” she whispered, wiggling all ten fingers. “No thumbscrews on these hands tonight. I write the witches into history.”

  When Hannah arrived home thirteen blocks later, her front porch still held a bucket of candy, but not the treats she’d left for the neighborhood kids earlier. These were candy brands that had not been manufactured for fifty years or more, with a stick of half-used hopsc
otch chalk across the top. She brought it all in, put it on the coffee table, turned on her movie, and laid her conical hat next to her old landline phone. The answering machine was blinking furiously, with the first three messages from graduate students wishing her a happy Halloween but in actuality wanting her notes on their dissertation chapters. It wasn’t until she turned down the TV volume to hear the very quiet fourth message that she recognized the voice: her own dead father, saying “Well. Hello.” It wouldn’t play again, though she sat there, wide-eyed, pushing and pushing REPLAY until dawn.

  Chapter Ten

  Thanksgiving

  That November was memorable for its day after day of glorious autumn leaf and swirl, blazing leaves first limp and then crisp underfoot, leaves that caught under her windshield wipers, in her backpack straps, her bicycle gears and wheel spokes, even in her mailbox. The insistent whisper and whisk and scratch and crunch of ever more beautiful hand-shaped leaves began to feel to Hannah like letters, sent express mail to her on rare winds from somewhere, tugging, insistent. Look at me. Pay attention. What about me? Me, too. Am I not as beautiful? Soon I will fade. Don’t you want to collect me, too? But were these spirits the spirits of her own students, who, now peaking in their attachment to what she taught, would soon enough leave the tree of learning and graduate into a still-unfeminist world? Or were these leaves the spirits of women past, the women she taught about—perhaps some she had skipped, failed to mention altogether? To how many, exactly, did she owe allegiance?

  Best not to think about it too much, Hannah mused in leaf-kicking pleasure, running through piles of mulch and acorns like a kid. I’ll think about it later, she told herself as sunlight on hayfields tempted her to visit country farm markets each Saturday in November. She’d come home at day’s end with her Women and Children First Bookshop bag bulging with local honey, cherry jam, cinnamon cider, turnips, parsnips, syrup, arugula, yellow carrots, beets. The rising passion in her heart on such outings was for root vegetables, not for women, or one particular woman, or the arc of women’s history. Something in her Jewish genes always stirred, just before Thanksgiving, remembering life in the Old Country. There, forbidden to own land, Jews did the best they could with kitchen gardens and root cellars, emerging not only with sturdy foods for soups but with an entire enraged language of Yiddish curses based around root vegetables. These curses had always helped Hannah cheerfully negotiate the perpetual small annoyances of academic life: “Beets should grow from your belly!” she shrieked at the university garage employee who ticketed her car despite its clearly displayed parking permit. “Zol vaksen tsibiles fond a pupik—May onions sprout from your navel!” she hurled at the broken copy machine. It was late autumn, the roadside stands beckoned with pre-Thanksgiving produce, the leaves stuck to her sleeves, and she couldn’t get anything done. She was foraging, devouring, packing on the calories for winter when, bear-like, the urge to feast would fade. In a month, she would crave only hibernation and sleep—just as final exam time struck. For now, she couldn’t keep her backside in a chair to read a book, not with leaf-mapped trails calling to her bike.