Sappho's Overhead Projector
Page 4
Time for a doughnut. For sure. Not caring that a few rainbow sprinkles fell in a shower onto the folder’s cover, Hannah opened the paperwork Aurora had just delivered. It seemed to be a will, or rather a deed of donation. This donor was still living; that usually made things easier. Ah, a list of books. Then Hannah’s doughnut fell out of her mouth and rolled away, coming to rest under an old heating unit, where much later it would provide a party for a couple of library mice.
This deed was for two hundred lesbian books. And not just any collection of lesbian books, but a list of nearly every book Hannah herself had read when she was first coming out. How familiar these titles and authors were! There were Naiad Press novels and Rita Mae Brown novels, books by Colette and Karla Jay, Radclyffe Hall and Natalie Barney, Cherie Moraga and Audre Lorde, Bertha Harris and Djuna Barnes, Patricia Highsmith and Christa Winsloe, Lisa Alther and Elsa Gidlow, Monique Wittig and Pat Parker, Judy Grahn and Violette Leduc. And— Hannah gulped— Virginia Woolf! It was like looking at her own rare lesbian bookshelf, some of which she’d brought with her to Washington, and some of which was stored at Isabel’s— but with the addition of many unique volumes Hannah had long coveted. This collector also had a goodly range of pulp paperbacks from the 1950s, Perfume and Pain, That Kind of Love, and signed editions by children’s book author R.R. Knudson. Why would anyone part with such a delicious collection?
The paper deed, itself, felt strangely alive in her hands. And yet she realized with sorrow that this might be a legacy intended for donation because the owner sensed the ending of her life. It might even be someone Hannah’s own age, Hannah’s generation, now terminally ill but boldly choosing to settle her affairs and secure a place for what she’d valued most: these eye-opening books, the companions of a lifetime.
Was that it? Maybe. Unclear. With a lump in her throat, Hannah realized she had reached the age where her still-young peer group was starting to lose numbers. She already had friends dying of cancer, even battling the warning signs of dementia . . . And it could be me. I could be next. What am I going to do with my stuff, my hundreds of books? Where would they do the most good? Have I thought about that? Taken steps to finish writing my will? But now that I’m with Isabel, what’s mine is hers . . .
She ran to the bathroom and flung herself into a stall. Hot flashes, cold hands. Carefully she palpated each breast. Was that a lump? What about her blood pressure? Heartbeat? She tried to breathe evenly, slowly. Death. Death was a monster and no one got out of here alive. She would soon be dyke dust. Hannah readjusted her sweater and strode to the mirror. Okay, had that mole always been there? Was there more gray hair than usual? How much time did she have? What was her purpose here? Damn it. Focus.
Then the pay phone rang. Hannah jumped. There was one other woman in the bathroom, an older security guard, applying fresh makeup; she turned and looked at Hannah, laughing. “Made me jump, too. I didn’t even know that old phone worked!”
Thinking fast, Hannah explained, “Oh, right, I told my mother to call me back at this number,” and lunged for the phone. The receiver felt icy in her already chilled hands. “Hi, Mom,” Hannah croaked, wondering who (or what) had placed this call. Not Mom!
“Listen, this is important,” barked a voice. “Get those books and save ’em. Save them! Are you listening to me? Will you get back to work? And stop staring into the mirror. You look fine; you have decades left. We don’t have much time. They’re going to—” The line went dead.
• • •
Hannah worked all morning, through lunch, and by late afternoon was able to collect her thoughts and offer her boss some preliminary suggestions. “Aurora, this is a terrific collection. It practically narrates itself— sort of an arc of coming-out literature. It could easily be a reading list or syllabus from the first generation of lesbian studies in universities and colleges. So, you said that some of these books are already in the Library’s archives? If in fact we’ll now have doubles, I’d like to propose that we do an exhibit with the duplicates. I can organize that for sure.” Hannah was glowing. This must be what she was supposed to do— display the grand range of what publisher Barbara Grier once called Lesbiana to a public in need of that history. She was tremblingly certain that had been Grier’s own voice on the pay phone, having once phoned the living Grier with a question about the history of women’s presses, only to shrink from the barked demand: “Are you kidding? Do you know who you’re talking to?”
But now Aurora raised her penciled eyebrows. “Oh, no, I’m afraid not. No displays with anonymous donations, or with this sort of mixed material. It’s a good collection, I’ll grant you that, but after you catalogue it we have to truck it off-site to our remote storage warehouse in Fort Meade, Maryland. We’re that full here. Now, the duplicates we give away, for the Friends of the Library sale.”
Off-site? Remote storage? Warehouse in Maryland? Give the duplicates away?
“Oh, dear,” said Aurora, realizing Hannah’s distress and offering a somewhat patronizing smile. “You didn’t think we kept everything here, did you? We have a copy of every book published in the United States. Did you believe all that was shelved right here in the Jefferson and Adams Buildings, in the general collections?”
“Then— where?”
“Oh, shipped from the loading dock to either of our climate-controlled warehouses. There are two remote storage facilities: one at Fort Meade, and one in Landover, Maryland. When researchers want a particular text, they put in a request to the Book Service desk, and we can have it brought in through the twice-daily deliveries from off-site. All perfectly safe and ordinary, and never more than half a day’s wait unless a scholar asks very late on Friday night. Of course, more and more we’ll be digitizing print, using digital files, and then, thank goodness, we won’t need all that space.”
“But,” Hannah heard herself fumbling for words, “don’t those books, kept out there where no visitors ever go, get lonely? Unseen . . . sort of waiting . . . you know. What if no one ever requests them? A lifetime in confinement, in Landover.” And maybe that was it. Buried alive in a warehouse, waiting to be loved again. Woolf?
Aurora sat down. “I may be a bit less attached than you, after all these years of cataloguing, but I assure you: the point of both a public library and a research library is to give readers what they seek, even if it’s distasteful to us,” and she glanced at the donor’s list of lesbian pulp paperbacks, featuring titles like The Evil of Friendship and Call Me Pet! “We don’t keep books to be merely decorative. Each imparts knowledge. However, in any library, there is what is called ‘weeding,’ or taking a book out of circulation. For example, a public library may order twenty copies of a current bestseller when patrons are making a run on that title, and then after some time there are eighteen copies never touched again. Some books may never have been checked out by any reader at all. At a certain point, these unused duplicates are taken out of circulation and crated for a Friends of the Library book sale, and what’s left from that sold to a third-party book distributor, or donated to prison libraries.” Again, she glanced disdainfully at the donor sheet, and added, “Of course, most prisons would not accept these books. The content is too sexual, and some of it boldly felonious, no?”
Great. Forget about getting lesbian literature to lesbians behind bars. Hannah’s bitter response was, “So libraries would throw out rare paperbacks rather than donate them to women who want them?” She pointed to one title. “One person’s pornography is another’s breakthrough novel about being different.”
Aurora sighed, tucking a lock of hair into her sweeping updo. “You’re quite right. But brace yourself for many difficult decisions of, ah, separation. When books come in that are damaged, we have to make certain decisions. If a damaged cover is made of old materials that can be sewn, that goes to Cataloguing for repair. But books that can’t be mended, or have obvious mold, are recycled.” She took in Hannah’s blank look. “Sent to the shredder,” she emphasized, and then stood up and qu
ickly walked away.
• • •
She couldn’t relax. Watching the evening news from the Supreme Court docket didn’t help: homophobia still the official rule of law in so many states, gay kids jumping off bridges, idiot school superintendents forbidding LGBT sensitivity training or curricula on diversity. Heather Has Two Mommies had just been banned for the umpteenth time. Impulsively, Hannah walked over to where her own copy of that book lay atop her redwood bookshelf and gave the cover a kiss. “Kiss where it hurts,” she murmured. She was almost certain the book had kissed back, and was about to pour herself a stiff drink, when Isabel called.
It was the usual time they had agreed to call each other every night. But when Isabel sang into the phone, “What time is it?” she meant something else. Hannah shivered with pleasurable anticipation. This was an invitation to phone sex. In any century she liked.
And how it was possible, how Isabel sent both of them to such places on command, she did not know. She had promised to stop asking after last year’s many miracles of time travel. Isabel had introduced her, had sent her, to the great and the everyday women of the past: one unexpected journey every month. Hannah would be at the bar celebrating some holiday event with the women of her own community and suddenly be in ancient Israel, in ancient Lesbos, in the castle of a pirate queen, on the Underground Railroad, or in World War II or a cavewoman’s birthing chamber. Thus Hannah learned that in loving Isabel, she was dating a witch. But how does it work?
Never mind. It had been a long day. She lay down on the couch, barefoot and topless, just a warm towel wrapped around her midsection, and closed her eyes. “Hello, babe,” she murmured into the phone. “Take me back to England, seventeenth or eighteenth century. I’m a buxom serving wench and you’re the clever pastry cook at the castle.” She heard Isabel laugh; even better, she began to feel Isabel’s time-travel magic warming up. “Here we go,” Hannah urged. “Please, Isabel. Take me there. And feed me.”
• • •
The next day, her inner fire restored by hours of excellent phone sex and time travel, Hannah confronted her supervisor over the fate of the book donation. “Look, Aurora— why would this donor’s books be sent off-site to very remote storage? I know so many women in the community who would love to see them on exhibit.” Or read them, or reread them, or discover them anew . . . and then there are all those schoolkids whose libraries banned Heather Has Two Mommies . . . their only chance of seeing a book like that is if they come here and see an exhibit!
“My dear romantic, we simply don’t have room anymore. This donor has willed us what appear to be additional copies of, yes, certain worthy originals we already do have somewhere in our LGBT collection. We’re bursting at the seams. It’s not, ah, personal.” Aurora sniffed.
More kindly she explained, “If you investigate any of the LGBT archives now well past their early years, they too are victims of their own success. How many early editions of Judy Grahn can your Lesbian Herstory Archives fit on its limited shelf space in Brooklyn? Yes, of course I know about that archive, and support its mission. So many donors have left disorganized collections that every archive has to use a storage unit until the gold can be sorted from the mold,” and she smiled, well pleased with her little joke. Noticing that Hannah’s expression did not change, she added, “I know everything on this list may seem like gold to you.”
“It’s not just that— it seems a tragic waste that duplicate first edition copies are given away. You told me that extras are designated for sales or institutions. Can’t I take them? Put them in the right hands?”
“I’m afraid not. We checked this list against what we already have, and packed the best books for temporary storage off-site. They’d already be in the loading dock. We culled some others meant for our annual sale, but that won’t happen until spring, and that carton is secured for now. Your job is cataloguing what we’ll store off-site, no more, no less.” A pause. Then Aurora looked over her glasses and said, “Again, I can promise that these works are gradually being digitized. And I assure you, both present and future generations will have the same access to them that you and your . . . friends have enjoyed and, I am well aware, valued. But we must make space for that digital age by downsizing our actual collections, especially,” she chuckled to herself again, “when the gold acquires mold. So, out with paper, and onto Kindle, yes? You just can’t hold on to everything, my dear.”
Yes, I can! Yes, I have to!
Hannah sat at her desk through lunch, fuming through mouthfuls of sandwich and mercilessly tearing apart a soft pumpkin spice muffin. She could actually feel her molecular structure shift and change, superimposing the wits and stance of fictional girl detective characters over her body. She was Velma. She was Nancy Drew. She had to get to that loading dock and stop that donation from being tagged for very remote storage. But as she chewed her way into a possible plan of action, Hannah paused to consider her own words. Aurora calls it “remote storage.” I keep saying “very” remote storage. How come?
What would “very” remote storage be?
The afterlife? Where our memories go?
• • •
It was another week before Hannah found time in her afternoon break to seek out the loading dock. By then, she had catalogued a list of the rare lesbian books the donor intended for Capitol Hill visitors, books that were instead going into exile in Landover. With no plan beyond a vague idea of rescue, she headed out and inward, taking sideways passages up and down floors, over and through the different “cores” of the Library, into and out of elevators, greeting no one, her face buried in a brochure on presidential cookbooks. In this manner she reached the back loading dock, where crates of books waited in stoic silence, destined either for careful off-site shipment— or the shredder.
It was a noisy, masculine space. Men in protective support belts lifted and shoved book crates into cargo vans that backed up to the doors. Other workers were moving what looked like broken furniture, dented files, and other materials long past their prime to an area marked for trash pickup and recycling. Damaged and old books were visible on both sides: some destined for donation, others for garbage.
Out with the old, the unusable, the extra, the past. Huh. That’s how my community is starting to feel . . . remaindered in the bin of culture. Trying to look like she had every right to be there on official Library business, her ID clipped front and center on her goddess necklace, Hannah wandered over to the aisles of old equipment marked for recycling— and froze.
A glue machine! She’d worked on one during that terrible second year of graduate school, when the teaching assistants were rotated into library service at the university. For complicated reasons of budget and personnel, Hannah was assigned to glue card holders onto the backs of incoming books. It was a winter of hot glue, burns, her fingers sticking together, and the smell of paste. Unavoidably sniffing library paste and hot glue all day, she’d reel home, high, and try to read history.
Here was the old machine itself, or an elaborate cousinly version, slated for permanent vacation— no longer gluing cards for readers’ names. Where are all those old cards? What if someone has them? I bet there are some pretty famous names— authors, scholars, politicians who came in to do research here— if those cards could talk! She was about to give the machine an affectionate pat when she noticed the long open box of books nestled underneath it.
Someone had lodged part of the donor’s lesbian paperback collection here— designating the perfectly good books for shredding, not even off-site storage or sale. These books were now on death row with other trash materials. How? Why? Tears filled Hannah’s eyes at the thought: what crime had they committed? What if their generous donor could see their undignified fate?
And the oddest thing happened next. Hannah’s ears heated up. She clutched at the flaming hot left side of her head, sending her woman’s symbol earring flying. Was she having an allergic reaction to the dust of ages— something here in the cavernous space?
Save us! the books cried, a chorus of thin papery voices. We’re being digitized out of existence! Don’t let them shred us! Don’t send us to Shreddy, the Evil One! Get us to new owners, the ones who never knew us, never had us. Let us start anew, relationships of promise, mutual love. We’re becoming unglued just when we yearn to be checked out by young dykes!
Hannah whipped around to see if someone was behind her, playing some prank, or watching her at this peculiar emotional moment. No; she was alone. Quite a few of the Library workmen had just left for lunch. She dropped to her knees, hands over her ears.
Save us!
It hurt. It hurt to hear, to feel the pain in that flat cry of anguish. This was a rescue mission now, she was certain: she had to save these books. And how would that work? Stuff them under her blouse, two at a time, and hide them somewhere else? She knew from her weeks of work that all visitors and staff submitted their bags to be searched before leaving the Library itself. There was no way to smuggle the donor’s valuable collection into Hannah’s apartment. She’d have to move these books somewhere else within the building, at least until she figured out what in hell she was supposed to do. She’d have to get them out a few at a time when workmen weren’t paying attention.
Shreddy, the Evil One! What could that mean? Books separated out to be shredded went to some local recycling facility, along with, most likely, various government documents. That shredder would be a nightmare figure for any aging book longing to be held and read rather than destroyed. For authors, too, aging out— or dead. What could be more of a foe than the cold machinery of government tearing into a woman’s literary opus, rendering it unreadable? It would be a second death. And suddenly Hannah, too, could see that big, indifferent mechanical body, the eight-armed machine chewing up books and drooling ink. Shreddy was an octopus, a monster who leaked ink when poked, a rare book at the end of every tentacle, hungry for more. . . . More . . .