The plants in Isabel’s hands dissolved into tingling forest tinctures. She rubbed a line across Hannah’s left quadriceps, which heated and flushed, oily steam curling upward and singing toward the open secret of her yoni. And Hannah begged her, “Open me up slowly; it’s been so long.”
“Time is just compression,” said Isabel, placing the green goblet between her own legs. It whirled with mystery, and Hannah looked into it and saw a wishing well. Coins lay in the bottom, winking brightly.
“Sip it out of me and toast the year,” Isabel ordered, her thighs gripping the goblet.
Hannah bent her face down to drink deep and then pulled back, caught in one final instant of hesitation. “No. This can’t be happening,” she moaned. “I’ve wanted you for so long, and I can’t, not now that I know who you are. I can’t fuck with time!”
“Sure you can,” smiled Isabel. “I have.” And as the two of them spread open to one another, the books on the bar top also spread, and fluttered. And light streamed from the pages, and the characters came out. And the bar filled up with every lesbian from time.
This was why Isabel had invited no one else, so that this secret list of guests could dine and dance. Now couples rotated about them in costumes long outdated, yet fresh and crisp and perfumed, sharp or sweet. There were cigars and ebony cigarette holders, for no twenty-first century law banning them from bars had ever been enacted. The prewar dykes were freely drinking absinthe, the twenties butches sharing bathtub gin from flasks. The flavors of the lesbian past passed between them as they made love on the old furniture, seemingly on an island in the bar, unnoticed by their foremothers in lust. Hannah tasted drinks in every kiss, old brandy, absinthe, honey mead, ouzo fresh from Lesbos. She was under Sappho, drinking Sappho, seawater in her mouth, alpha, beta, lambda. She was in World War II and Rosie had her riveted to the couch while a band played, Tiny and Ruby swinging jazz with the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. The bold WASPs, Women’s Air Service Pilots, buzzed the air, sexy in leather, hair afloat on the winds of time. They tipped up glasses in toast to one another. Drag kings of every era adjusted their ties, reaching with blunted fingernails to stroke the nape of Hannah’s neck.
She was making love to the past.
“Not only the past of others,” Isabel breathed in her ear, and then Hannah was flying over her own life. Not the span of every woman’s history. Her own history. She saw herself at seven, a young Velma in nappy Scooby-Doo pajamas, writing a love letter to her favorite babysitter. She saw herself at nine, crooked teeth large as surfboards as she bit her lower lip in nervous delight, delivering a crushed-out Valentine to the desk of her classmate and idol, Riane. She saw herself reading her first lesbian book, Rubyfruit Jungle, eyes wide, the paperback balanced on her knees—one hand shoved deep in a box of Jordan Almonds, and the other hand . . . the other hand . . .
Then Hannah saw the side-street studio apartment where she had first made love with a woman, an older woman, at eighteen. An overcast, blossom-heavy spring afternoon, that room with its open window and pale curtains caught in the breeze. Outside that window the tree branches dropped their sexy, pungent blossoms, leaf and petal, onto the tiny garden patio with its two chairs, a table, a candle melted down in an old Mateus bottle, a pottery bowl full of sea glass. They had left afternoon wine and cheese in that secret patio for the studio with its mattress, the cover already thrown off, sheets eager for their love. Hannah saw this as if sitting in a movie director’s chair, a cinematographer’s crane, coming forward at low angle.
I am looking into the body of the first woman I really loved.
Her lover then was Sal, age twenty-five, firmly dedicated to the principles of lesbian politics, an athlete. She had long hair, pulled back in a long loose braid with a blue sweatband across her forehead, long legs in old cut-off jeans. She was a dyke, they both were then, no reckoning with or room for bullshit, no dresses in their chests of drawers, no bitter on their breath. That passion had been timeless.
She re-entered the scene as it had played out years before, lying on that bed, adoringly under Sal. She entered her own past as easily as a hand into warm water.
Hair flowing over arm, lips on the beating vein of her own soft neck, the pillow scattered below her. Sal was on one knee, her tongue inside Hannah’s navel. Hannah knew again the images and sounds that stayed with her to this day: five drops in a wineglass, the distant crunch of car wheels passing somewhere, birdsong trilling, sheets of paper flapping on an end table, empty pizza boxes, wooden floorboards creaking with a snap as Sal stood up and pulled her thin tank top over her head. Hannah said again the words she’d stammered on that afternoon: Hold me. Tell me something. Tell me what to do.
Her fingernails softly touching Sal’s breasts, breasts that never lived in bras. She was groaning with the beauty of Sal’s profile. And the gray day bloomed in violet and rose.
Rose. She rose. She rose upward and over to that open window and the hours had passed to nighttime, coming in with urgency and voices.
“Moonlight,” Isabel called out. And then she was with Isabel again, and they were standing up in dark woods more modern than Sappho’s time. It was not wartime either. This was still Hannah’s early past, and it had to be a women’s music festival because Hannah could hear guitars and owls and kitchen-refrigerator generators turning on and off. Isabel reached out to her face. It was Hannah’s first festival kiss all over again, she was nineteen again, the first tentative flesh of mouths so gently open, electric heat in seconds. Branches snapped underfoot as they shifted in clinch, their hips adjusting, pelvis-to-pelvis. The sweet green scent of a crushed fern filled Hannah’s nose. Then her nose was sideways under Isabel’s nose and her top lip in Isabel’s teeth. Then Isabel’s teeth were biting off Hannah’s buttons. Yes, that was how it had happened, so long ago in her own life.
There was drumming in the distance; it intensified. “Go ahead, now,” Hannah heard herself groan. But Isabel paused and in a low voice commanded, “No, not yet. Not ahead. Back, earlier,” and the earth underfoot became soggy, mossy, the moonlight interrupted by tall figures. Women were meeting at a water source nearby. One figure, clad in mail, came toward them.
“Vous?” whispered somebody young and strong, and then “Elle?,” and Isabel was Joan of Arc. Her short hair brushed against Hannah’s exposed breasts. She raised her face and laughed “Ne, je ne regrette rien.” Her warrior hands dripped spring water onto Hannah’s nipples. Hannah threw out her arm and her open hand found a stump. It throbbed like a heartbeat under her damp palm. It was alive.
“I will fight,” said Joan. “Do not fight me.” And Hannah gave in, gave in, did not fight. Her hand flat on the beating stump, spring water beading on her backward arching neck. “Into battle now,” Joan breathed, peeling off chainmail. “I will command you. Ride.”
She felt walls at her back. Ancient walls, walls of every texture across time, walls other lovers, other women had leaned against. The jagged roughness of a limestone cave, the smoother but cold masonry of castles and fortresses. Locked towers, watch towers, rooms with rusted locks and latticed windows. Corrugated iron walls, blazing hot in summer, palm-thatched walls, scratching her with tropical scented heat. Flocked wallpaper, gilded upholstered walls, curtains, all at her back as Isabel pushed, leaned, locked thighs with her across time in a geography of desire. A timeline of desire.
She had been up against a wall for so long, her mind open to the past, yet keeping her back to her own present, to the possibilities in her own lifetime. Her own now. She had always liked making love standing, but finally at year’s end this wall at her back was no longer the dead end of a finished relationship she could not return to and redecorate, fix up. She was making love standing because she was eye to eye with all that, level, anchored. Anchored in herself. Anchored in permission to explore desire again.
Her body relaxed. She let herself move forward and lean in. She felt her writing hand rise up like a door latch giving way to openings, to acces
s, and her hand touched strands of hair on Isabel’s long neck. It was Isabel, again, Isabel after all. They swayed. The back walls vanished. The light around them was a perfect circle, the motion particular to just one function: a disco ball. They were on their way through history back to a lesbian bar. It was the 1970s.
She saw Trale, Trale at a younger age, Hannah’s own age, holding another woman close with dapper-clothed arms. She heard a familiar sneeze and saw Letty, her gray hair now sharp black, as sharp as her suit coat and tie, cracking a pool ball and laughing, big as life in the center of a trio of admirers. But the musicians onstage were women no longer alive in Hannah’s present-day time. They were the musicians of the early women’s music movement, Kay Gardner, Maxine Feldman, Gwen Avery, Therese Edell, Janet Small, Ginni Clemmens. Pat Parker was reading poetry at the mic. The air reeked of patchouli and marijuana and unshaven armpits and sex.
Pushed forward by some unnameable urge, Hannah moved toward Trale and said, “May I cut in?” ignoring the glare from Trale’s elegant partner. She placed one hand around the older woman’s waist. Except Hannah was the older woman now, or perhaps their ages were exactly even just for this one moment, and there was no “firmly” in Hannah’s gesture. Objects and limbs had a wavery quality. She had the feeling that her body had passed right through Trale’s date. But they had both seen her, had shifted to accommodate her, and Trale was smiling, saying “Hmm. Have we met? I don’t think I’ve seen you here yet.”
“I’m from . . .” Hannah began, thinking, the future of the bar, and settling on “California.” It sounded ridiculous. Then she realized Trale had said, “I haven’t seen you here yet,” not the standard “I haven’t seen you here before.” She had forgotten that Trale was able to see figures past and present. She was recognizing Hannah from the future.
“You’re thinking too much,” Trale interrupted. “This is a trip you should be enjoying. It’s okay; I think we’ve been friends before, probably in an earlier life. Plus, it’s New Year’s Eve.” She led easily, moving Hannah around and around the floor as the band played set after set of classic 1970s women’s music. Overhead, the disco ball swayed, sparkling from that same square of air in which it swayed in Hannah’s own time. A square of air overlooking love and community for four or five decades. This was where the time capsule was hidden, she suddenly remembered: hidden in the disco ball for someone long after the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, or Hannah’s own bar years to discover anew. History, lesbian history, twirled and sparkled overhead. But, obeying Trale, she stopped thinking. Her body relaxed. Sisterhood felt good. She was linked to the past through Trale’s broad shoulder, and now they were the same age, the same era, the same feeling in their hearts. The movement would go on forever, Amazon women rising, and they would never age. Creators and inheritors of women’s culture were one and the same. And the bar would always be there, with both of them caretakers of its time capsule.
Slowly, they danced together. They turned together. And time turned around them. Then Trale said, “Okay, Doc. Catch you later down the road,” and she went back to her real date for that particular New Year’s Eve—leaving Hannah wondering how, if they had yet to meet in some time-distant lesbian future, Trale could know in 1974 to address her as Doc. For certainly, during their fleeting mystery dance, Hannah had not told Trale her name.
Then, hours or years later, it was once again Isabel against Hannah’s neck, and the bar was empty of 1970s revelers. Isabel whispered, “We’re heading back now. Flying fast on that secret airplane, my darling, and when we land, I promise you everything will be as we left it, with one full hour before everyone else comes into the bar for the regular New Year’s Eve party.” When Hannah opened her eyes again, they were back in the pit furniture, Isabel’s legs still entwined crisscross with Hannah’s. The double X. The bar was lined with delicious dishes of food from every culture and city, all of it palindrome-named food: Indian na’an, Hawaiian ono, Lebanese shish ’bab, American soda pop.
Hannah reached up and touched the soft point at the end of Isabel’s Gallic nose, tracing the slightly bumpy runway up to the open space between her eyes. Those eyes crinkled and closed with pleasure. Once more Hannah murmured, “Are you real?”
“I’m real wherever I am, blood, tissue, menstrual issue, everything,” Isabel avowed. “It’s just that I’m able to move around. And now you can, too.” She reached under the couch and picked up a painted toy airplane, a glider probably hidden and forgotten by Susie or another child during last week’s family Christmas party.
“I can move around, too? You mean—there’s more to come?”
“There may very well be,” and Isabel moved the toy airplane through the air, humming, moving it, Hannah understood, through time. This was Isabel’s way of saying that they would move through time together. Did that mean partnership—or visits with other women of the past? She didn’t care. It was all good. Bring it on. She parted Isabel’s thighs with her own, whispering, “I’ll choose the place this time. Take me there again.”
Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen O’Clock
Much later still, when the tumble of time finally released them in a tangle of damp hair and honey mead dribbled on their skins, Hannah raised her head to find she was sprawled right on top of the bar, and the digital clock by the cash register was, impossibly, blinking thirteen. Isabel removed her lips from Hannah’s long enough to say “Happy New Year.”
“Not yet,” Hannah replied.
Isabel brushed Hannah’s hair back over each ear. “I’ve waited twenty years to say these words to you—but if I do, they will change everything, and you will have to trust me and believe what I am saying. And we’ll journey from there. ” Hannah’s legs were trembling for the words she hoped to hear. Would it be a declaration of love? Now she will say “I love you,” Hannah willed, her entire body drawn toward that phrase, those three words, that new beginning. She tried to keep her eyes on something ordinary: the brown, scuffed floor of Sappho’s Bar and Grill. For some reason the little toy airplane had vanished.
Isabel followed her gaze, and what she said was fully unexpected. “Yes, I know, the plane has disappeared. But, listen, Hannah,” she breathed urgently. “It’s fine. That’s the place we have to go next, in the New Year. Things are going to change. Because I know where Amelia is.”
A peek into
Sappho’s Overhead Projector
Chapter One
Hannah left the meeting in the dean’s eighth-floor suite determined not to cry. No, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Her face stonily composed, she walked to her office and began to yank pushpins out of the walls, sending her framed art posters crashing onto the worn industrial carpet.
No tenure for Dr. Stern. Her position was going to be terminated.
The entire history program had apparently been targeted for “strategic downsizing.” Just two tenured professors—both male—would remain, folded into a hallway behind the study-abroad unit. Women’s history would be eliminated as a major. “It has been a bold experiment here,” the dean purred. And Hannah’s former office? Her beloved townhouse building was going to be turned into a new subway stop.
Goodbye and good luck. Hope you find work somewhere else, sister.
At 6:00 p.m., worn out from a lonely day of packing up her office, Hannah sank back into the bathtub, adding Lux until a foam of argan-scented bubbles covered her breasts. But no fragrant oil could soothe her skin; no alcohol in the house came close to numbing her panic. She’d have to go over to Sappho’s Bar and Grill later on, let Isabel make her a potion. Food, though, seemed to whet her appetite for rage and revenge. Chipotle chocolates in particular. She nibbled one now, smashing another with wet fingers and smearing it into a bronze-hued women’s symbol on the tile wall. Then she shut her eyes and visualized, again, the line of urban Metro representatives who had swarmed so importantly through her office the other day. Plucking blueprints from crisp folios, they had measured her office shelves and walls for imm
inent destruction even as she sat there tapping final grades into her computer with all the concentration she could summon. Erasure. Erasure of her time there, twenty years of grading in that space.
The next day, as Hannah grimly piled her art and syllabi into old watermelon crates and boxed up textbooks she’d taught for years, she worried that she might leave something valuable behind by accident. Could a class outline get stuck on a nail, in a crack in the wall, or slide under the old tacked rug? And if so, when the snug egg of her old existence cracked under phallic drill bits of subway renovation, would the underground workers far below find evidence of her teaching life, trickling down like cave moisture? Jutting out of the underground walls like jagged gems of feminism in a diamond mine? Would fragments of her old class notes be discovered years or centuries later, lost bits and pieces preserved and entombed like those amber-trapped insect bodies in the Jurassic Park movie, holding within the DNA of women’s studies as it was once taught? Would her lesson plans be discovered one day like the Dead Sea Scrolls, like Sappho’s poetry, like cave art on a Neolithic wall, as the Venus of Willendorf statue herself had been found? Only this time it would be not archaeologists, but Metrorail workmen in scratched hardhats, marching through a dirty tunnel space with pickaxes under their arms like the Seven Dwarves?
And then the light bulb came on full beam above her head.
What if all that Neolithic art, those goddess statues, the evidence of women’s sacred feminine past that male explorers found in caves, was just the left-behind teaching material of an even more ancient women’s studies professor? Someone whose office . . . UP THERE . . . was shut down and destroyed? Like mine?
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