Sappho's Overhead Projector

by Bonnie J. Morris

  Then, as Hannah reached out with one trembling hand to pick out three books, it was the distinct voice of Virginia Woolf she heard saying, “More.” More books to save? Another box? Where?

  The rumbling start of an engine gave the answer. It must already be loaded on a truck! Still holding three books, Hannah ran to the back loading dock area. There! The off-site storage truck! Its sliding back door still raised, it yawned carelessly open, revealing the many stacked boxes all labeled and destined for remote storage. Too remote! the books in her hand cried thinly. Burial. Get us back!

  The two or three men working nearby all had their backs to her, distracted and busy, moving a splintered desktop to a side wall. No time to feel guilt, betrayal of her position at the Library, disloyalty to her boss; no time to feel anything but action in service to the Overhead and the world of girls. Without any further plan, Hannah jumped into the truck.

  • • •

  There were so many boxes it was hard to focus her eyes. The truck’s interior was humid and close after the climate-controlled Library. She fingered and read the edges of labels until she found what she was looking for. Aha! Donation, J.M. Off-site. At least fifty of the best books from the donor’s collection had been culled, thankfully not for destruction, but instead designated for exile at the Landover facility.

  Hannah crouched down, marveling that such jewels of rare lesbian literature would now be hidden from public view until requested by a lone, persistent scholar such as herself, or some future graduate student curious to look at a paperback original. No young people, pre-credentialed, would ever enter that facility to browse and fondle and select and breathe in the books, or encounter them accidentally in a life-changing moment.

  The vintage paperbacks would rot, unloved, in a digital age. It felt eerily like that final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones locating the Ark of the Covenant containing the dust of the Ten Commandments tablets, nobly handing it off to a wartime U.S. government for study by federal scientists only to have the Ark vanish forgotten into an infinite secret warehouse.

  Hannah’s covenant was with The Overhead. She wanted these books placed in the hands of women and girls now. That was one of Her commandments. There were urgent needs of readers now, now, and not only now but then, then. Hannah was tasked with getting these books back to the past. But how was that arrangement supposed to unfold? No time to feel anything. The clock was ticking.

  The slamming of the truck’s rear door sent her heart pounding anew. “Okay, Al,” shouted a masculine voice. And the engine roared to life. The wheels turned, and with lurching forward movement they pulled away from the Library of Congress. She was shut tight in the cargo van, buried inside with the locked books, all of them bound for remote storage in Maryland.

  • • •

  Hannah’s first thought was that she was about to lose another job: first she’d be missed at work, then discovered stealing. Or could she spin this ridiculous moment into a complaint of kidnapping and emerge heroic? No, not likely. Should she bang on the truck wall and alert the driver to her predicament? What if that startled “Al” into driving right up a tree?

  Lunch hour. Lunch hour: that was her only hope. Maybe, just maybe, Al had tossed back a strong coffee or two, necessitating a bathroom stop before they pulled onto the Beltway and the point of no return. Maybe a strong brew . . . And the mere word, brew, sent a vision of Isabel into her head. Her lover, the mixologist, the brewster.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. In her mind she saw Isabel at the bar, capably sifting the named and unnameable herbs and ingredients into their drinks, serving just what each customer needed on a Friday night at Sappho’s Bar and Grill. She saw Isabel reach for the golden coffeemaker under the counter, where it was always ready to treat the sober or the sleepy who preferred caffeine to gin, and now Isabel pulled from her canvas apron pocket a little bag of magic beans— beans that somehow laughed at the limitations of ordinary time and space, first ground to finest powder at Sappho’s, and earlier today showing up in the coffeepot of a loading dock in Washington.

  Al, honest and hardworking, his daily drives back and forth to the Landover warehouse to deposit or fetch books made bearable with crime books on tape and strong coffee. Al, his mind soothed to the point of bliss on magic bean coffee, cheerfully forgetting to lock the back of the truck after closing it shut; Al turning the wheel to leave Capitol Hill and going no further than a block or two before the coffee in his veins dove for an exit; Al realizing a bathroom break was in order, now pulling sharply to a stop at the first gas station on the right, and, after locking the cab of the van, heading into the men’s room, keys jingling faintly on his belt.

  When she could no longer hear that jingle, Hannah pulled the crate of books onto one of several upright dollies leaning against the truck’s interior wall and crouched at the back door, frantically surveying it for the handle to open the back. It did open! He had forgotten to lock it! Now she had, what, four minutes to escape? If Al were the constipated sort . . . but what if several people saw, and reported, the dyke emerging from a library van with a crate on a dolly and racing into the adjacent neighborhood?

  But no one saw. And no one ever reported what was surely one of the odder moments, that hour, at a gas station that had seen many an oddity through the Watergate years, the Iran-Contra scandals, the protest marches on Washington.

  Because as Hannah pushed open the van’s back doors and dumped out a crate and a dolly, then heaved herself out and locked the van doors again securely, the Overhead’s Projector beamed down a cloud of light that briefly blinded everyone but Hannah. And when she had pulled the crate on the dolly around the corner and out of sight, racing toward the nearest Metro stop, the light faded at the gas station in time for a pleasant-faced man to step out of the restroom, and get back in his truck, noticing nothing amiss, never reporting one missing box and one lost dolly. The magic coffee beans were purged and flushed to the Potomac.

  • • •

  Gasping, the sweat of adrenalin plastering her bangs to her forehead, Hannah pulled the treasure-crate of books behind her until she reached Eighth Street SE. There, silent behind its screen of obscuring plywood frontage, was the oldest continually operating lesbian bar in America— even older than Sappho’s, and now about to close— Phase One.

  Here, generations of lesbians had lifted a brew to the love that dared not speak its name. Olivia Records had been planned nearby, too, and over the years other lesbian arts bloomed here, from poetry slams to drag king shows. It was empty now, readying for closure and then sale, its glory days past. Though the Phase was typically locked at midday, Hannah knew one barkeep who might be there. The counterpart to Isabel in D.C. was Miss Luna.

  She pressed the bell now, calling, “Luna! Help. I need you. Can you open up?” And Luna yelled, “We’re closed; this Phase is over,” but she came clumping to the door, towering and mighty in her Fluevog shoes. She saw Hannah standing there in rumpled, van-streaked work clothes, clenching a book dolly, and burst into wise laughter. “What the hell?”

  “Hi. I can’t explain now, but can I stow these books behind the bar for two hours? I’ll come get them at five, when I’m off work.” Hannah’s eyes were pleading. “Can you stay here until five, and let me in?”

  Luna stood with hands on hips, considering.

  “I’ve got a vintage vampire doll for you,” was Hannah’s bribe.

  “Hmmm.” Smiling eyes granted assent, a hand seized the dolly, and the door bolted shut again. No passerby paused or even indicated they had seen the exchange. Too many deals, both drug and political, had been sealed on that long block in days and years gone by. Too many men had learned it was best not to acknowledge anything that went on at the doorway to Phase One.

  • • •

  Hannah ran eight blocks back to the Library, panting and laughing simultaneously, and then pulled up behind a tree to reassemble herself. With face blank and work ID clipped forward, she went right back to work in
the Jefferson Building, nodding to Aurora as she returned the files she had been sent to go retrieve an hour ago. “Got lost, did you?” snapped Aurora, busy with accounts now, failing to notice that Hannah’s entire rear end was coated with shipping sawdust. Hannah apologized and sat down quickly, her mind racing. Okay. I’ll get those books home, and then . . . then wait for instructions. I’ll keep them under my bed until spring. That’s what I’ll do. And not tell anyone.

  So it was that on a pleasant weeknight, the first Tuesday in October, as Capitol Hill law clerks and staff interns excitedly argued the new cases on the Supreme Court’s docket, no one paid much attention to a middle-aged lesbian pulling a box onto the Metro with a dolly. Half of the commuters boarding at Capitol South similarly dragged law files or locked plastic organizers on small rolling baggage carts. Everyone took work home here; there was no such thing as a night off in Washington. It was, in that way, like graduate school, another subculture permanently stamping its participants with the ethic that all-time-is-work-time and there’s no-such-thing-as-a-weekend. Of course, the worker bees here in Washington were charged with running the nation. Academics doing scholarship 24/7 were rarely credited with any mission beyond radicalizing campus.

  Anyway, Hannah knew the Metro ride home might be the only “free” time anyone had between workday and an evening bent over government files. She looked with interest as bureaucrats’ personalities emerged in the shared anonymity of underground transportation. Women bent down, exchanging fashion heels for padded athletic shoes, sighing with relief; others plugged in headphones or attacked a crossword puzzle. Books emerged from shoulder bags: The Handmaid’s Tale, the Bible, the Koran. Some passengers were praying with closed eyes; others were playing Bejeweled on cell phones. No one spared a glance for Hannah’s crate of iconic lesbian lit. Everyone had their own eccentricity here, shaking off a day’s toil at the Department of Agriculture.

  How many commuters also led secret lives, like Hannah? What was really in all those other rolling files? What if the Metro suddenly ground to a halt— in fact, it often did— and they lived out the rest of their lives as a group? Who would emerge as a startling hero or villain in that story? As Hannah smiled at the woman beside her, she wondered who among these companions journeying underground might also be a Sappho, or The Overhead, in disguise.

  Chapter Three

  Bibliophilia

  Halloween weekend found Hannah back in her old university town, reunited with her lover and her old pals at Sappho’s Bar and Grill. Though painfully aware she was no longer a professor at the local university, which had been her employer and home for so many years, Hannah grinned in pleasure as gentle banter greeted her from all sides when she arrived at the bar on Friday, October 30. “Yo! It’s Dr. Stern! The bureaucrat!” “Not too fancy to drink with us, now, I hope?” “Got any Beltway insider tips? Can you please fix the government?” “What about that hot new dyke senator, what’s-her-name? Have you had a two-martini lunch with her yet? Aw, why not?”

  Oh, old friends! My bar, my gang, my tribe! Her heart melted. Was there anything better in the world than old dyke pals of long standing, the ones whose teasing was like the rough caress of a cat’s tongue, every bristle an intimate familiarity, a stroke of trust and love? What ingredients coalesced into such perfect/imperfect community? She looked around, taking note of the simple elements: bar stools, pool table, decorations, sound booth.

  But at the center, the mystic who made it possible: Isabel, her lover, whose drinks could free the bonds of time and space, or cure your cold, or make you face the fears of a past era. They had so little time together, now that Hannah was in Washington for a year, yet their time was fluid. They had known one another as friends since graduate school days. They had become lovers only last New Year’s Eve, when events strange and wondrous had revealed Isabel to be a time traveler and manifester of time travel for Hannah. That recent winter and spring, when they were finally intimate partners, had included lovemaking so breathless and tender that now Hannah was startled into spontaneous moans when she looked back on their first months.

  Isabel had made love to her while murmuring in Latin, in Greek, in Aramaic. On those nights (and afternoons), beads of syllables clung like moisture to the ornate mirror in Isabel’s bedroom and dripped back onto them. Isabel wrote love letters with fingers wet from Hannah’s arousal and those letters somehow stayed fully formed in the air, stiffening into sugar icing and then breaking apart to fall into their mouths like parachutes of candy.

  Tonight, Isabel said little as she apportioned the magic beverages that kept women coming back for the taste of womanspace, the flavor of community. Just now she stood behind the bar, smiling and pouring drinks from the particular witches’ cauldron she utilized only at Halloween. The first round was free to the first thirteen bar regulars. But, Hannah noted with perplexed admiration, the drinks were all completely different in appearance as they flowed into each valued patron’s glass. Silver, cider, foaming, wine-red, green. No one remarked on this, having long ago accepted that their bartender trafficked in the unusual— that they, themselves, might be unusual too, a charmed and charming circle of lesbian lives that had landed here, at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, for this historical time frame. However, after a few sips, as blue-jeaned bottoms settled back on leather-topped stools, Moira chose to speak.

  “Mmm. Wasn’t it that first Mary Poppins book where the kids took their evening medicine in different colors and flavors from the same bottle? And then it turned into rum punch for Poppins? I always loved those books.” Isabel said nothing, but used the ice tongs in her hand to point out a faded Mary Poppins volume on the glass-encased bookshelf behind the bar.

  They each sipped their drinks and sighed in private, separate satisfaction. “What was your favorite book as a kid, Letty?” Hannah asked, and the bar butch who proudly claimed the longest association with Sappho’s released a startled sneeze. Everyone waited expectantly. “Why, I don’t know. Yeah, I do know. It was about the life of Helen Keller. We had a deaf-blind cousin my age, stuck away up at the state institution. Probably smart as a whip, but it was the Depression, her mama had no money and no child support and nobody knew anything about anything. That kid had absolutely no rights, let me tell you. They took her away right after her eighth birthday.

  “Well, I got this book and taught myself finger spelling and went up to the Institute on the nickel trolley and told Maggie I’d take care of the doll family, and I smuggled one doll into her mattress. But after that . . . shit. Don’t even know what happened to her, where she is now, and she was my own flesh and blood.” Letty blew her giant nose.

  “Jeez, Letty,” Moira objected. “Thanks for the real cheerer-upper. Although who knew you taught yourself sign language as a kid? You’ve been holding out on us. What else don’t we know about you? There’s obviously more to you than your secret ability to win at pool every time.” Letty finger-spelled, “Tough titty. Not telling.”

  “Um,” began Hannah, already woozy from the effect of one of Isabel’s “special” potions, “I guess I’ve been hoping to ask all of you this question. What was the first book any of you took out from a library? And did a librarian help you? Or treat you badly?”

  “Treat me badly? Hell, no. I was in love with my school librarian,” Trale asserted, jiggling her long legs against the floorboards. “Miss Diane. I took out every book they had just to see her over and over: nature books, bugs, maps and atlases. She’d say, ‘Why, it’s you, my little bookworm!’ and I’d just be crazy with love. Later on, I figured, huh. She was well over thirty and not married. Probably spotted a kindred spirit there, but who knows? She was nice.” Trale sighed.

  “I know what you’re getting at, Hannah,” Yvette added. “Isabel told me you got obsessed with those libraries that refused to lend books to black children. Well, that didn’t happen to me. I grew up in Brooklyn. But it was a different kind of racism— a race pride focus, with well-meaning folks discouraging your taste for anyt
hing else, anything they found frivolous. My youth leader tried to get us to take out books on Africa and Malcolm X and I was interested in, ah, well, becoming a Broadway actress . . .”

  “You?” everyone screamed. Yvette was now the grants and fundraising manager for the public television station, famous for never once appearing on the air throughout many years of holiday membership drives.

  “. . . but the book that changed me, if y’all will just shut up, was The Snowy Day. It had a black child in the snow in the city and hardly any words. I could read it, and that child looked like my brothers, and like me. I know that later, when I started at WSRP, I wanted to be damn sure that other black kids saw kids like themselves on TV, in formats that pushed them to read early. So I figured, hell, I’ll fundraise for shows like Sesame Street that were mixed racially. I mean, I grew up with Morgan Freeman on The Electric Company teaching kids word skills!”

  Tongues loosened. More women arrived and were offered the Halloween special (though no longer for free.) Certain couples had broken up and re-formed in new ways since Hannah left town, but all seemed cheerful and civil to one another, and the freshly aligned sweethearts pounded Hannah on the back, grabbed an autumn-hued beer or two, and joined in the conversation.