Each message identified the writer as a student, about the age of those in Hannah’s first-year class, and each had a “mailing” date of December 20th, 2116. Her menorah burned for eight days and eight nights. This year the miracle was not oil, but a different kind of energy. As in Jewish culture, temples might be destroyed, yet the light of culture burned impossibly onward. She could trust this now. And on the last night of Hanukah, when her computer screen faded out forever and no other postcards came, Hannah took the keys from Women’s Studies and walked across the snowed-in, empty campus to the locked lecture hall B-12. Going in illegally at night, she wrote in giant letters on the board that favorite quote from Sappho that made her students roll their eyes and sigh.
You may forget but
Let me tell you
This: someone in
Some future time
will think of us.
Chapter Twelve
New Year’s Eve
New Year’s Eve was the chief moneymaking event and the biggest party of the calendar year for Sappho’s Bar and Grill. Usually, Isabel booked some current superstar of the lesbian community as the evening’s entertainer and host—an artist everyone really adored at the time, a comedian or blues singer or spoken-word poet (and, one year, a stripper, though unfortunately she had arrived high and fallen off the stage partway into her act.) The flyers for the gala year-end party began to circulate late in November, carrying the promise of yet another opportunity to kiss someone at midnight under the rotating disco ball. Those with homophobic parents and in-laws or other judgmental relatives suffered along through obligatory Christmas and Hanukah gatherings, just waiting to break out their true personalities, and their New Year’s outfits and dance moves, at Sappho’s on December 31st.
Hannah had slow-danced with Gail at midnight, for many lovely years, and before that there had been several hilarious New Year’s dates with other women. Louise, who walked into Sappho’s, bumped into the notorious leather-clad biker they all knew as Minnie, and screamed “Oh! No! Not Margaret!” before running out the door, never to return. And Chantelle, so uptight about the bar’s few remaining smokers (clustered out front in the freezing cold) that she could speak of nothing else, even as Hannah was enthusiastically removing both of their bras in the third stall of the bathroom. New Year’s at Sappho’s was a night of indecent positions in the corduroy depths of the pit furniture, of aphrodisiac sandwiches shaped like labia, of a dance floor crowded to overflowing with couples in tuxes and glitter and scarves. It was therefore a shock when Hannah, having finally dressed in an outfit that more or less shouted Hello, I am available, pulled up to the snow-choked parking lot and saw Isabel’s BAR CLOSED sign in the window of Sappho’s.
There went her evening! was Hannah’s rather selfish first thought. No getting it on with anyone tonight! The possibility of new love—denied! And her outfit so tight she could barely sit down, eat, or breathe. What a waste! Only then did she switch over to practical concern: What had happened? Was there an emergency? Was Isabel all right? She hurried to the door. As her chilled hand hesitated on the knob, the door slowly opened from inside, and there was her old friend obviously in good health, beautifully dressed in purple and green velvet, holding out a golden goblet.
“Good evening,” said Isabel, her eyes sparkling in welcome. “For this first hour, I have invited only you.”
The bar was decorated with dozens and dozens of heart- and diamond-shaped silver frames, strung together in loops of red cord. They covered the walls, the carved posts holding up the bar, the curtains that billowed around furniture. They were portraits of women from history—both the living and the dead. Some were the women Hannah had encountered during the past year’s many unusual incidents. She walked around the warm, familiar room, inspecting each picture: Radclyffe Hall, Granuille, Rose Valland, Sally Hemings. Like baseball trading cards, each image had facts about the woman’s life imprinted on the back of the silver frame. These were the women of history Hannah had taught her students to know and to learn from, year after year after academic year. These were the women Isabel had arranged for her to meet, for fresh immersion in what women’s history really had been.
She turned to Isabel, who had busied herself at the bar. “Are the other party guests going to see this, or do we take it down in an hour?”
“I have the usual decorations for later,” was Isabel’s reply. “Don’t worry—the big party will go on as usual. Everyone else in the community received an invitation with a later start time than what I told you. I thought you and I would celebrate this year, briefly, together.” She pressed the goblet into Hannah’s cold hand, and instantly Hannah felt warmth seep up each one of her frosty fingers, up through her wrist, which pulsed. She took one sip, her throat tingling. They sat together in the pit furniture, with their knees touching.
Isabel quoted the poet Ronna Hammer. “Two women touching, just at the knees, but connected/Extending each other like halves of an oyster’s shell/The seed of a question/What was the truth protected between them?”
“Well, are you going to take me somewhere else tonight?” Hannah blurted, and a bit of her drink spilled over the side of the goblet and made a penny-sized dark spot on Isabel’s knee. “Or just explain to me how you made everything happen this past year? Because I know it was you. I don’t know how it works, or even what it’s called, but you sent me places and showed me things. I know some of it starts from these drinks you mix at the bar, which makes me wonder: Is everyone else also getting a trip into feminist history along with their gin?”
“No,” laughed Isabel. “You’re the only historian here, my friend. Why would I send Letty into the fourteenth century? She just wants to be able to drink gin and breathe at the same time. I make a martini that clears her sinuses.” She sighed, as though it were a physical effort to reveal professional secrets. “I do make the drinks women ask for; that’s a barmaid’s job. But women don’t always hear what it is they’ve asked for. There’s a translation only I can hear. It’s why any woman comes into Sappho’s: for friendship, to feel younger or stronger, to find love, to forget sorrow . . .”
“I’ve wanted all those things since Gail left me,” Hannah interrupted. “But what I usually ask for is a vodka and cranberry juice.”
“You said, at the top of the year, that you wanted women’s history to be your date,” Isabel reminded her. “You were holding my special glass when you toasted to that thought. It put me in service to your dream.” She moved closer, putting an arm around Hannah. “I didn’t frighten you too much, did I? That was never my intention.”
“But how does it work?” Hannah shouted, and the pent-up consternation made her tightly hooked dress belt pop off; it skittered under the pool table and then lay there curled like a snake. “Yes, I teach women’s history—fine. I know how to work in an archive; I could research women’s stories myself. How did I become a candidate for time travel?”
Isabel, having decided that such an answer required mood music, went over to the sound system and cued up “Sentimental Journey.” “Hannah,” she said, “one reason it works is because your name is a palindrome. Look at the spelling of HANNAH; it’s the same back and forth. A person like you can travel back and forth through time.”
“What? That’s ridiculous! Supposing my parents had named me Babs, or Carlene, or Donna,” Hannah protested, spilling the beans about several girl-next-door baby names her assimilated Jewish mother had considered. “I’d still be the same person I am now, right? I’d have grown up to be a women’s history professor anyway, gone to grad school with you anyway. It’s just a chance of name. I’d still be worthy of your grand experiment, right?”
“Wrong,” said Isabel. “You’re Hannah for a reason. The perfect person for the journey. So I waited.” She smiled. “I waited for the right year, after I went to graduate school with you, after I had the bar . . .”
The hair on Hannah’s arms, head, and belly had begun to prickle and then stand up. “What are you
? Some sort of freaking guardian angel? My feminist history avatar? Casper the dykey ghost? You’ve just been there all along watching my progress as a women’s history detective, and that’s why you wouldn’t go to bed with me in grad school? Because you had other plans for my life? But wait a minute. God damn it, you don’t have a palindrome designator name. How come it works for you? This time-tunnel thing. Your parents named you Isabel.”
“No, not really. I’ve got another name,” said her old friend, and she fixed a look on Hannah that said MORE GOES ON THAN MEETS THE EYE, and Hannah had to look away. She sat on the old deep couch, her head bowed between her knees. With the designer belt released from her middle-aged waist, it was possible to bend over and breathe.
Who, after all these years, was Isabel?
Hannah sipped again from the cup Isabel had prepared for her, wondering now what was really in it after all, and she thought of other names that had that quality of palindrome. She thought of how easily she met up with her dead father in dreams, and that she had often called him by the Hebrew word for father, which was abba. In English he’d been dad. Both were palindromes! But this was women’s history, this meeting up with women in the time-traversing spaces of a magical lesbian bar. And Isabel’s real name had to be something symbolic of all rebellious women—something short, symbolic of the one who guided knowledge. Which essential, timeless women’s names were the same spelled backwards and forwards? Ah, the universal names for mother: Mom. Mum. But no, those were sacred and specific kinds of names.
There were so many popular names for girls in every generation, and quite a few were spelled the same, backwards and forwards. Why had she never noticed this before? In fact, her own aunts were Lil and Viv and Ada. Hannah began alphabetically rummaging through palindrome names that might symbolize women’s experience in history, that might hint at Isabel’s real name.
Not Tit. Not Pip. Not Anna. But . . . wait a minute . . . why not . . . and her eye fell once more on her black dress belt, curled like a snake under the pool table. It seemed to undulate, just once. A snake had talked to . . .
“Eve?” she ventured.
“Yes, that’s it,” said Isabel/Eve. “When you move back and forth to all the women of time, remember to start with the first one, or even earlier. In Europe I use a different name, the one for all of us, in French. Can you think of the palindrome in French?”
“Elle,” said Hannah. She understood. Universal women. The woman. The first woman. “But why then have you spent years calling yourself Isabel?”
“Time,” Iz explained. “I spend a lot of my time helping women of our time understand women who lived in another time. And what’s the sound of time, in our time?”
Bewildered, Hannah thought through her life. All she had ever done—participated in—was school, some aspect of school. She had been a schoolgirl, then a student, a graduate student, a young feminist scholar, a professor—devoted to school, never a year away from a campus ever since age five. Was there a sound to that lifespan? From kindergarten to her work as in women’s history, she’d lived by school bells. That first children’s TV show, “Ding-Dong School,” and later “Saved By The Bell,” bells ringing between classes, start of school, end of school, late bell, lunch bell. Then, in college and grad school, alarm clocks. Up. Write. The teaching year, alarm clocks: Up. Teach. Her father, on the day of his retirement, coming home and grandly swinging a hammer at his old bedside radio alarm: Freedom! Time to do as he wished! She understood. There was never enough time, and work time in America went by the clock, and the clock was a bell. Was a bell. Was a bell. Is a bell.
“Time is a bell,” she repeated. “Is-a-bell. Isabel. Isabel.”
As if to bring together illusion and confusion, the clock on the bar suddenly tinged a quarter of twelve, and Hannah saw they had fifteen minutes left in the old year, and what a year it had been, indeed. But—hadn’t Hannah arrived at nine p.m.? Just half an hour ago? Wasn’t the bar supposed to be filled with other guests by now?
Reading her thoughts, Isabel called to her reassuringly, if enigmatically, “Don’t worry, we’ll get back to the real party and have an American midnight with our community here. They’ll arrive soon, and the clock will go back. We’re just cruising ahead a little.” Isabel was moving swiftly back behind the bar, where she kept all the rare lesbian books she’d collected from who knew what mystical source or now-defunct women’s bookstores of the great beyond. She was opening them up and placing them page-upward on the bar.
“You’re going to do Mary Poppins,” said Hannah.
“Yes, very good,” smiled Isabel, rapidly fluttering every book open. They had both loved and discussed P.L. Travers’s lesser-known Mary Poppins stories, including one where all the book characters in the children’s nursery came alive in the five minutes before and after midnight on New Year’s Eve. The trick was that the magic nanny had opened the books a crack before putting Jane and Michael to bed. Based on their own research in graduate school, Hannah and Isabel had also determined that Travers was a lesbian in her day.
“So are all those characters going to come out of your rare book collection and party with us tonight?” asked Hannah, ready for almost anything now.
“They will if you drink this,” Isabel/Eve laughed, handing Hannah a fresh goblet filled to the brim with a sweet brew ringed with tiny flowers. “In a place of radical hospitality, everyone is welcome. All our ghosts, our community’s best characters, are welcome here tonight.” The ice chips in the glass clinked, releasing musical notes—almost a complete bar of music, in fact.
A bar of music. A bar. Of muse-ic. That was the moment when Hannah finally began to figure everything out. The one individual figure in history Isabel had seemed so interested in during graduate school was Hildegard of Bingen. The botanist and composer. The abbess and the nun. Hildegard devoted her life to classifying healing plants and writing music, both of which she saw as acts of prayer; these aspects were a key portion of Hannah’s midterm exam on women mystics of the high Middle Ages. Well, but who had inherited Hildegard’s secret plant studies? There were herbs that healed, but also induced visions, hallucinations, and mystical encounters. For Hildegard, the way of a mystic meant hopefully having an encounter with the Blessed Virgin, the Lady, as close to a Goddess figure as the Church had let survive from ancient worship. Others had to have passed along Hildegard’s recipes. And for a modern Jewish-atheist-lesbo like Hannah, the equivalent of a mystic trance would be to encounter the great women of the past. It was Isabel who had engineered this.
“I have to ask,” said Hannah, looking up and then directly into Isabel’s deep gray eyes. “After you disappeared from grad school, you spent a year in Europe. Were you off somewhere, studying herbology with Hildegard? I mean, these plants and potions in the bar drinks. This mixology—it’s hers! You were always way ahead of me in reading about her life. I think you found a way to go back, and meet her, and learn medieval magic from her garden. It’s certainly what’s kept the bar alive. The whole community’s addicted to these drinks!”
“Do you really need to know?” whispered Isabel, and folded her hands on top of the bar counter as if in prayer, as if in imitation of Hildegard. Then she slowly unfolded left hand from right, and bent her head ever so slightly toward Hannah’s in a way Hannah remembered from graduate school days, but with something new, too. There was an opening there. And Hannah thought of openings, doors and time tunnels, and women’s spaces opening in the body. With one last sip from the green glass between them, Hannah mustered up the courage to ask the one woman she had always loved, “Are you the portal I keep passing through to find what I can learn?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” said Isabel, and held out her long-fingered, expert mixing hand.
Hannah took that hand, and took the dare.
The kiss was everything she had ever wanted.
She could never explain why kissing was so sacred to her, the act she had most missed since Gail. Little oral V
alentines, waiting to be sent. The fat lively shelf of a pouty lower lip suddenly clamped in her gentlest bite. Then perhaps not so gentle, hungry, oral, oral. Driving fast on a soft curve of road on wheels of lip and tongue. The wandering tongue with its playful capacity to roll like an otter in direct pursuit of pleasure. Like origami, the shape of their mouths opening and folding over and over, ab initio ad infinitum. Was she actually thinking in Latin? The comet of lust shooting down from her damp mouth, from lower lip to lowest lip, dew gathering in her vulva. And if all of that in the first kiss, how utterly overpowering to get naked.
But she had tossed off her dress, her dress-up bra, her fragile sea glass necklace, her shoes, her winter tights. Without tights she was indeed quite loose. She felt herself opening up by inches. They fell back into the pit furniture, which had witnessed and supported so much kissing and touching through the years, so much seduction. Isabel’s body was not that of a ghost or a chimera. Its warmth was a realism and an answer, unlocking still more doors in Hannah, who bent upward to cup Isabel’s face in her own hands.
“Tell me: Do you love women, or do you love only women’s history? You have forgotten, haven’t you? Or you cannot decide,” Isabel teased gently. “You teach the history of the female body, yet neglect your own. Do not neglect mine now.” From Isabel’s fingertips, leaves and flowers appeared, and vines grew underneath them, making a bed of branches. As the living bed flowered and branched beneath them, Isabel recited from The Language of Flowers, never removing her eyes from Hannah’s. “Magnificent beauty: Calla Aethiopica. Neglected beauty: Throatwort. Pensive beauty: Laburnum. Bonds of affection: Gillyflower. Consumed by love: Syrian Mallow. Cure for heartache: Swallow-wort. Eloquence: Indian Lagerstroemia. Fire: Fleur-de-Luce. Inspiration: Angelica. Joys to come: Lesser Celandine.” She paused. “Love is dangerous: Carolina Rose. Passion: White Dittany. The witching soul of music: Oats. Win me and wear me: Ladyslipper.”
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