Isabel looked up and looked at the older Isabel, and vanished with a puff of smoke. Puff! Puff! Puff! All of the girls were disappearing, only to be replaced by other girls— of every race and ethnicity and religion, of every nationality where LGBT books were still banned. Though the ice cream parlor barstools were soon overflowing with young women from Iran and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, there were girls from Brunei, Chechnya, the Congo, Zanzibar, North Korea. Their hands trembled as they opened the banned writings penned by lesbians, ancient or contemporary, from their own culture and language. Delicate foods replaced Western sodas and snack bags. The same silvery current of discovery and love surged afresh.
“This is the only place they can come to read,” Isabel was explaining now. “And it’s almost impossible to schedule, between Ramadan and all the other holidays. But a night or two here will keep these girls going for a year or more, until something changes. A revolution, a new education system, I don’t know. I don’t see that far ahead.”
“Isabel.” Hannah took a deep breath. “What is this place?”
And her lover smiled, and she too looked just a bit silvery and shimmering around the edges as she shrugged “Just another Overhead projection. But we’ll need a Grand Reshelving, soon.”
• • •
Then they were back at the bar. The real bar, Sappho’s Bar and Grill, where the Halloween costume party was in full blast at half past twelve. Midnight had come and gone, and Hannah was holding two bottles of very old Welsh cider from the wine cellar, and wearing a dazed expression along with a cobweb.
Trale was on the dance floor, still a lithe tomboy at age eighty-six, swinging Moira round her back as strains of Madonna thudded. Yvette was break dancing as Dog hooted approval, and the pool tournament had ended with prizes of ghost-shaped cupcakes and Sappho’s Bar T-shirts handed out to the winners. Several women had simply abandoned their cumbersome Halloween costumes and were dancing in bras and jeans, and then no bras, and then everyone had pulled off their tops and the dance floor bobbed with breasts.
I sure was born in the right time, thought Hannah, jumping up and down like a manic pogo stick in her circle of friends. Literate. And loved.
• • •
The Halloween weekend continued to haunt her mind once Hannah was back in Washington, alone and unsure of her purpose. The crate of rescued books sat in her city apartment as the days ticked toward Thanksgiving. The dolly from the truck, stamped LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, was stashed in the closet underneath her now-unused academic robes. Sometimes Hannah thought she heard the books moaning in the night, or speaking to one another. She’d sit bolt upright, wondering if she had accidentally left the radio on, and the spooky cliterati murmurs would fade out. It’s just NPR, just NPR, she told herself on those nights. But her radio button was always turned to “Off.”
Isabel had spoken of a Grand Reshelving. In time, these books would be used for that purpose. In time. But as she washed her face, made her lunch, scuffed toward the Metro with her briefcase, dragged home at night and flipped on the evening news, Hannah heard that plaintive cry tingle right through her bones: “I miss my bookworm. My bookworm.”
• • •
As holiday decorations and shopping madness descended on Washington, Hannah did think of a new question to pose to her friends at the bar. She spent a short, sweet Thanksgiving weekend with her own family this year, her mother and aunts, her grinning nephews, charades and card games played in the den next to her old bedroom in the house where she had been young. Before everything happened . . . grad school, teaching, women’s bars, time travel.
Hannah could hardly wait until the real luxury of her two-week Christmas break, which would bring her back to Sappho’s in time for the solstice ritual Isabel always prepared.
Solstice Night served as a bridge across the complications of religion, and allowed everyone at the bar an opportunity to relax with chosen family— before some regulars drove over the river and through the woods to tense Christmas and Hanukah gatherings at homophobic homes.
Though it wasn’t required, many women at the bar exchanged gifts and kisses at the frisky Solstice celebration, and everyone ate their weight in cookies and latkes. Best of all, Hannah was going back to Isabel, Isabel— those long lovemaking nights with Isabel that spun webs across place and space.
Hannah woke up on December 21 buried in the warmth of cranberry-hued flannel sheets, Isabel’s arms around her waist. “Happy Solstice.” Their knees and noses touched.
“Here’s my little gift for you.” Isabel handed Hannah a small, flat package wrapped in lavender tissue paper, flecked with gold. It was a signed first edition of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. “Where did you find this?” Hannah gasped, cupping it reverently between her palms, and hoping this book, at least, would sit on her shelf in silence. Or is it meant to speak to me back in Washington?
“Where did I find it? In England,” Isabel demurred casually. “I do have a few connections there. And I know how you like Woolf. But I might become jealous.”
In answer, Hannah straddled Isabel’s left knee, then pulled a jewelry box from the pocket of the bathrobe she’d flung off rather late last night. “Check this out.” She presented her lover with an unusual wristwatch she’d had designed in Washington: no numbers, no hands, but instead the four directions of a compass, with a tiny woman’s symbol that ticked clockwise around North, East, South and West. As Isabel strapped it around her wrist, laughing in delight, snowflakes began to flutter against the windowpane. Yes, winter.
“Winter already— and yet I have so many months left in Washington,” sighed Hannah. “You will wait for me, won’t you? And if I never find another academic job, and just come back here and live with you and write, that would be all right?”
“That would be better than all right— although I can think of plenty of work we might both do, together, and not just at the bar.” Isabel slid her long legs into striped winter tights. “Look. I thought I might be a candy cane, tonight. Will you help me shred potatoes and onions for latkes?”
“After kisses.”
“Then kisses first.”
“After backrubs.”
“Oh, Hannah. Come here.”
By 5 p.m. they had cooked and stirred and baked and fried and decorated, and the bar was packed with holiday revelers, some clad in characteristically revealing fancy dress. Letty, of course, played Santa, holding court at the back of the bar with one woman after another on her lap being interrogated with jolly scrutiny: “Have you been a good girl?”
Moira, dressed as an advent calendar, rotated around the room inviting women to open the cardboard-cutout doors taped over her breasts and remove chocolates. Dog was a queer elf, accompanied by Yvette, the Black Madonna. And assorted Hanukah Maccabees, solstice Wiccans and evergreen-bush ecofeminists clustered around the pool table, throwing back golden eggnog from the ornate shot glasses Isabel had set out.
Before the night grew too drunken, Cubby, the young daughter of two regular members, played some holiday tunes and pagan rounds on her recorder, and Isabel sang a haunting medieval carol accompanied by Trale on lute. Then gift wrap flew and sheets of tissue paper skidded across the old wood floor as friends exchanged presents. The biggest surprise of the night came when Isabel unveiled her holiday gift to the community: an electric fireplace. “No more of that old gas heater that smelled like hell,” marveled Carol.
During the first pause after gift-giving merriment, Hannah emerged from behind the softly burning Hanukah menorah to launch her survey. “What’s the best or worst book anyone ever gave you as a present?” she asked. “Did anyone ever get a lesbian-themed book as a gift, maybe from your own family?”
Hoots of sarcasm greeted this idea. “Not bloody likely,” Moira laughed. “I got the lives of saints.” “I got a subscription to Bride magazine,” added Yvette. “And a makeover.”
“Why don’t the people closest to us, who recognize the signs of our so-called ‘lifestyle,’ think
to show their acceptance with a gift book?” Hannah probed. “Did any one of us ever dare to ask Santa for a dyke volume? Or would that request have made you unwelcome for the holidays?”
“I was already unwelcome,” called out at least eight different voices. Some were very young voices. Hannah’s former students. She reached out to touch Dez’s hand for a moment.
But Yvette grew bold. “Hannah, I did ask my aunt, the one who never married, for a book by Audre Lorde, and she obliged. It came wrapped in silver paper, on Christmas when I was twenty-one and celebrating all alone in my first apartment.”
“I liked A Wrinkle in Time and got a complete set of every book ever written by Madeline L’Engle, and guess what: there’s lesbian characters in them there books!” chuckled Dog. “But you have to read all of them to get to A House Like a Lotus. Anyway, Hannah, the answer is yes: a book with a dyke character actually showed up under my Christmas tree because my folks hoped if I liked science fiction, I’d become a scientist.”
“I got Nancy Drews, but I also got some other books about camping and scouting, and that led me to sleepaway Girl Scout camp and my first crushes,” offered Hannah’s graduate student Dez. “And skills from Girl Scout camp helped me at my first women’s music festival . . .”
“What kinda skills we talkin’, honey? Fire building or making out with older girls?” Letty wanted to know, pulling off her fake Santa beard to reveal her wispy actual beard. “They give any badges for that? This old butch would have made Eagle. Hand me one of them potato pancakes, kid.”
Hannah had one final, very nervous question. “Anyone ever feel like a book wanted you?”
“Whoa,” Shoni put in. “Yes. You mean, when the book chooses the owner? I’ve seen it happen. I’ve even seen books move across a table to get attention. The spirit world is powerful. And its medicine is very real here.” She smiled at Isabel, who was suddenly busy washing shot glasses.
“It is real here. We all know that. This space is the best gift anyone ever gave me,” said Trale. “This bar started as an escape for some of us, and turned into a homecoming.” She raised her glass to Isabel. “Well, my dears, I’ll say it. To the maker of magic, our solstice queen!”
And from behind the bar— very far behind the bar, where Hannah knew the secret cellar lay— there was the faintest sound of books sighing, an earthy fluttering that transcended every language but clearly was Amen.
The door blew open, and Winter came in.
Chapter Five
The Card Catalogue
After the holidays, when she was back in D.C., Hannah wasn’t sure what to do. Removed again from Isabel and their community of boisterous bar dykes, she needed a good ear in the capital city. Were there any other federal Amazons open to talking about the supernatural?
She knew one: her counterpart at the Smithsonian, Efren, a handsome woman who handled some of the museum’s own growing LGBT collection. Did Efren hear voices while trying to salvage and catalogue rare materials? On a snowy afternoon early in January, Hannah picked up her phone— the ordinary, land-line phone on her desk, though nothing felt ordinary any more— and called to see if her colleague might be free for a quick drink after work.
They met at Busboys and Poets, a center of black arts, spoken word, queer youth poetry slams and sumptuous soul food that paid homage to multiple cultures. “What I wanted to ask,” Hannah yelled above the open mic going on in the Langston Room, “is if you ever get the sense that the objects themselves have feelings? Are more than inanimate? Does Eleanor Roosevelt’s gown ever move around by itself after dark? Do you get spooked being in there alone with all that historic material?”
“Oh, you bet,” was Efren’s casual reply. “It’s not just the gay ephemera, for sure. The kachinas we have definitely seem alive. I wouldn’t spend a night in that storage cabinet with them; no way. And at least four people have reported seeing Julia Child cooking in that model of her original kitchen. I actually smelled duck a l’orange when I arrived early a few weeks ago, and let me tell you, that was no schoolkid’s brown bag lunch left overnight. Haunting? Sure. Comes with the territory.” Efren took a sip of her Foggy Bottom and looked at Hannah with bright blue eyes. “Are you having some close encounters, my friend?”
“I think just with the lesbian past,” Hannah ventured, “although who knows. I think I’m meant to do something with a rare book collection that’s been donated— maybe get it into the hands of girls who never had a lesbian book, acting fast before the era of digitalization changes the reading experience as we know it.
“Of course, I have such a personal relationship to this book collection. It more or less covers the whole of my own coming-out reading list. The donor has to be someone my age, maybe even someone I know; and that’s another whole Scooby-Doo mystery. I know I’m here to do archive work but it feels so wasteful to have such books coldly warehoused off-site, out of sight, forgotten. And even if a lot of kids today can look up and order these books online from the safety and comfort of their damn mobile phones, that’s not the same as encountering them in a real circulating library . . .”
“You mean like we had, where first you had to negotiate a homophobic librarian who played cards with your parents or a dyke librarian who gave you that look along with the book. Face it, kid, times have changed. Young queers don’t browse the library shelves for After You’re Out or Our Right to Love or titles with the L word, like we did. The past is past. We archive it; we don’t perpetuate it.” Efren leaned forward. “But as long as we’re sharing, it’s the card catalogue that gets me.”
Hannah felt her antennae go up. “Card catalogue?”
“Sure, the giant old one at your LOC before it was replaced by the modern system. When every researcher had to go and thumb through the old cards, then sign out a book with their real name. Now imagine the guts of the research babes in that era, who had to put a name on a federal card to get lesbian literature. I once worked on a project where I had to access that card catalogue and it blew my mind, the sweaty fingerprints on the corners of the most-requested books.
“I’m sure there were closeted scholars in the McCarthy era as well as actual agents looking at those books. When they checked out their choices, some researchers used obviously fake names— there are quite a few John Smiths and Mary Joneses, and in one hilarious case, a ‘Miss Llangollen,’ in homage to the eighteenth-century couple she was looking up.
“But there are also many borrowers whose names I recognize, who later became authors, politicians, activists, poets, professors like you.” Hannah winced at this; she was no longer a professor, this year anyway. “Like you,” Efren repeated firmly. “Anyway, it’s a huge find, the signatures of the dead captured in this way, on their queer research pilgrimage.”
Hannah’s heart pounded. “If those cards could talk . . .”
“Oh, they do, they do,” said the unflappable Efren. “And the atmosphere in that room where they’re stored is an accumulated atmosphere, full of feeling. Panic, hope, discovery, triumph, fear. It’s enough to knock you down. You work in that collection, you have to take a long cool shower afterward, the sweat of ages washing down your knees and into the Potomac.
“The Potomac River is full of museum DNA, by the way, since you’re obviously interested in magic dust. Many were the museum staff secretly reading rare books in the bathroom while on break and then carefully washing their hands, sending tiny bits of book binding and ink down the drain and through the pipes.” Hannah thought of the hours she herself had already spent in the Library of Congress bathroom. Why hadn’t she thought of the haunted bathroom’s sinks, carrying the dust of books into an underground river of memory? Did the underground complement the Overhead? Where did it all end up? Under the ocean? Back to Lesbos?
“Eat your corned beef on rye, will you?” Efren poked her. “Let me tell you about the objects that came in yesterday . . .”
• • •
Hannah couldn’t sleep. Catalogue cards danced before her ey
es, alive with names, fingerprints, the long-ago hunt for lesbian tribal history. What else might lie inside that fingerprint code? She grabbed her phone and dialed up the Snerd, her college roommate.
Snerd was short for “The Science Nerd,” a nickname they’d bestowed on the only one of their friends to major in a STEM field; and the Snerd cheerfully conceded that it suited her better than her birth name, Jade Wing. “That was a bird too weighted with precious stones to fly,” she often joked.
Please, please, let her be working in her lab tonight, prayed Hannah, and to her relief the call was answered right away in typical Snerd style. “You? Now what?”
“Great to hear your voice, too. Look, I’m sorry to interrupt your research, but—”
“—but you have some sort of weird-ass lesbo problem only I can solve,” the Snerd cut in. “Aren’t there other straight women in lab coats right there in Washington, D.C. that you could bother at midnight? Why pick on me? You’re not still in love with me, are you? I told you, I finally landed the nice Chinese boyfriend. My parents are ecstatic.”
“Shut up. Listen. Could you, ah, hypothetically speaking, of course, but— is it possible to clone a person from sweaty fingerprints left on a library card?”
Long silence. Then: “I’m trying to win a grant just now, so I can’t be involved in anything illegal. Just who are you trying to bring back to life?”
“Nobody! In particular . . . it’s just an idea. What if there were dozens of fingerprints left on an object over time? Whose would be the dominant one?”
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