Sappho's Overhead Projector

by Bonnie J. Morris

  Hannah heard the snap of a soft-drink can tab being pulled as the Snerd settled back in her chair at the lab in Oakland. “Well, first of all, you’re more likely to get DNA from something else one of your readers left, and it would depend on the card stock used at the time. You’re talking about a library card? Wouldn’t it just belong to one person at a time?”

  “No, a card in the back of a book that you take out and sign in order to borrow the book. You remember. Dozens of borrowers would handle and sign it over time. And I’m also thinking about a card in a card catalogue that many hundreds of investigators touched, all trying to look up one specific topic. A topic like homosexuality, for instance.”

  Hannah could hear the gears turning in her friend’s mind. “Well! I don’t like the sound of this, but I’ll tell you this much. It’s very hard to build a genetic map from an ancient drop of sweat. But those cards could easily contain other body fluids and matter.

  “How squeamish are you? So, in any group, you have bleeders and shedders. That means individuals who accidentally cut their finger on the item they’re handling, let’s say in your instance getting a paper cut from the card and leaving a bloodstain. Shedders leave a tiny grain of dandruff or spit. You’d be amazed how many adults put almost anything they handle in their mouths or against their lips. Just like babies! That’s how epidemics spread.”

  All of a sudden Hannah remembered the line by Adrienne Rich, from her poem “The Photograph of the Unmade Bed.” A long strand of dark hair in the washbasin is innocent and yet such things have done harm. That day in the Library of Congress bathroom when the phone rang and it was Adrienne Rich’s voice, a long strand of dark hair had appeared on the sink and Hannah had rolled it in a paper towel and tucked it into her briefcase. Was it still there? She knocked over a partly filled wineglass to reach her bag. Yes!

  “Jade, I have a strand of hair, too. It didn’t exactly fall out of the card catalogue, but it’s part of the mystery. Can I send it to you?”

  “Hair! Now you’re talking. You know DNA tests were done on a locket of hair from Mary Tudor in England, to help identify the old skeletons found in the Tower of London? Yes, hair testing is more my area, so go ahead and send it, you nutball. But right now, I’ve got a test tube full of something I can’t talk about, so are we done here?”

  “I know, you have to get back to your experiment. Okay, thanks. Really,” Hannah assured Dr. Wing. “Big love, Snerd, you’re the best. And give my regards to the fiancé. He’s one lucky dude.”

  “His relatives don’t think so,” said the Snerd, and hung up.

  So maybe there are elements of women on those cards. Bloodstains? Why didn’t I think of bloodstains? I get paper cuts all the time. It’s a condition of the scholarly life . . .

  Did she really want to try to reconstitute an army of ghosts? Wide awake now, Hannah sketched out possibilities in her journal. Maybe the strand of hair belonged to a woman of the past with something important to tell her. Maybe far back in the recesses of her confused brain Hannah had already considered this— cloning anew the best lesbian scholars of yester-year so that they’d be available for today’s youth.

  But that was a ridiculous idea. If what Efren had said was true, agents of the House Un-American Activities Committee would also have pawed through the card catalogue to find evidence against the radicals and liberals of the homophile movement. She’d be cloning from a spy’s sweaty fingerprint DNA, too. The image of a J. Edgar Hoover lackey re-forming, spook-like, out of a petri dish in the Snerd’s lab made Hannah release a distressed guffaw.

  She was grateful to fall asleep laughing.

  She dreamed of a river of book dust and human DNA. In her dream, all of the frightened scholars of the McCarthy era who went to the Library of Congress (and any other library, college, community) to find the limited info on gay and lesbian life were hiding in bathroom stalls, reading hungrily, taking notes, where no one could see. No one could see the titles on those books as they propped against anxious human thighs.

  Afterward, almost as if the encounter with that literature had been actual sex, the readers washed their hands so carefully, so thoroughly, and after all, that action was a cover-up, too, for anyone who entered: Me? Not reading! No, just came in to wash my hands, you see!

  Efren’s conversation, and the Snerd’s, tugged and filled the form around her dream. Little bits of paper, magic dust from every banned-book reading, washed into those sinks and to the river; sweat and human blood and drool and dandruff fell into the books, onto the book cards, catalogues. This was the great genetic swap meet of all time, the surface of the literature scraped off in minute wear over the years, replaced by the equivalent buildup of lesbian body effluvia.

  There was no need to “clone” women of the past; they were there, now, built into the paper itself. Cards and book pages were so saturated with the essence of the reader that they became de facto extensions of the lesbian body. She tossed and turned, laughing in her sleep. No, she had not been sentimental or misguided in her feeling that there was something holy, alive, in treasured volumes that shouldn’t be destroyed. Over time, books that had been loved acquired so much of each reader’s DNA that the pages became living laboratories of women, women bound together . . . until recycled, or shredded.

  And the same was happening underground, where, as Efren said, via the bathroom sink all the washed-away corners and dust of books met the washed palm sweat and loose hairs and papercut fingers of the reader. And under the Library, in the Potomac, all that human longing for the right book was somehow reconstituted . . . but reconstituted as what? What came out of the underground waters? Who were the mystical beings made up of knowledge and female essence?

  Naiads, of course. The original bookworms.

  But who was the weaver below, who plucked all those elements from the drains and formed the naiads? Sorting Library flow from other garbage— leaving out the stubs of ball games, flushed-out tissues, watered grasses from the White House lawn, rain spill, day camp apple juice, snowflakes, bike oil, bakery oil dribbles from Georgetown Cupcake? Who siphoned and panned and strained the lesbian bits and book dust?

  A worthy counterpart to the Overhead would be the Underbrewster. She who stirred a witches’ brew of naiad juice. Some fabulous mixologist . . .

  No. No.

  Mixologist?

  Bartender.

  It couldn’t be . . . Isabel?

  Her lover was the Underbrewster.

  When Hannah woke, her eyelids flickered just briefly over the enormous possibility that her now long-distance partner might be the goddess of book juice.

  But she pushed aside the dream and went to work. There was plenty to do. She had her day job. Keeping up with ordinary archival work protected her right to roam around conjuring plans to relocate books. More and more, she was beginning to feel like a spy, planted by the Overhead, of course, but differently purposed than her very decent and caring colleagues in the Library.

  Or was she? It occurred to her that every librarian and archivist might belong to a secret sisterhood none of them could articulate out loud. Every coworker she passed in the corridors, men as well as women in laminated ID badges and forearm-rolled sweaters, might in fact be on a mission from above, all sternly and lovingly engaged in the business of preserving what had been marginalized to the point of scarcity: black literature, lesbian literature, banned and beloved memoirs. Perhaps others were also outraged that duplicate copies of “their” books had been targeted for shredding.

  • • •

  There came a day when Hannah was in the bathroom and it occurred to her that she hadn’t had her period in five or six months. This isn’t perimenopause any more, she thought with a strange pang of regret. I am entering actual menopause. Goddess knows, I am certainly not pregnant.

  She studied herself in the mirror while older and younger women moved busily around her, hastening to rejoin their tour groups or workdays. So, this was aging. Some gray hair, not much. A few w
rinkles. Definitely more facial hair than before— but what counted as “before”?

  She had always identified fully with whatever age she was at the moment: kid, adolescent, underage baby dyke, grad student, middle-aged scholarly warrior. Isabel loved her now, and touched her aging features with wise and affectionate hands: that should be all that mattered. How did the menstrual cycle even connect to vanity? Why had she gone from thinking about her disappearing periods to wondering if her face would disappear? How much had she bought into the beauty myth? What sort of feminist was she? Where were her overalls and bandanna, now that she worked for— oh, no— the government?

  As if to underscore this point, the twenty-two-year-old woman next to her at the bathroom mirror carefully applied a gloss of blood-red lipstick, straightened her tightly clinging yoga pants and sashayed out, leaving Hannah alone in the room. Oh my god, thought Hannah forlornly, I’m a hundred and two.

  At that minute, the phone rang.

  She ran for it, grateful no one else was around. The phone felt sticky. There was almost a sensation of the ringtone throbbing right into her lower belly. And then a rich, thick current of a voice chuckled into her ear: “Missing me already?”

  It sure wasn’t Isabel— or her mother. “Who is this?” gasped Hannah.

  “This is your menstrual cycle calling you to say goodbye. It’s been a great thirty-eight years, but I’m done and you’re free. I left the keys on the sink and you don’t owe me anything, though you might have had a baby, you know, and maybe given me a year off. This whole deal with lesbians is just bewildering, I must say. Any last questions, before I head out?”

  Hannah had hundreds of questions, but couldn’t find her voice. Her cycle? Goodbye? What keys? How could her period talk?

  “Sorry for any hurt I’ve caused,” her period sang. “You always hurt the one you love . . . Did I ever mention my favorite punk band is The Cramps? Say, did you hear the one about the four little kids who don’t have enough money between them for a Saturday outing, and then they decide to pool their two dollars and buy a box of tampons, because the box says if you use tampons you can go skateboarding, waterskiing, swimming . . .”

  Hannah’s period, it seemed, also moonlighted as a stand-up comedian. “I have plenty to ask you if you’ll shut up for a moment,” she shot back. “For instance, what did women do about their periods while living as nuns in the ninth century, or while traveling by covered wagon, or while passing as men in the mines?”

  “Sorry, gotta go,” sang the menstrual caller. “I’m cycling out. It’s been real. Use the keys! My friends will talk. Shalom! Eve sends her regards.” There followed a rude remark in ancient Hebrew, and then the line went dead.

  Hannah stood in the bathroom, unsure what had just happened. One thing was clear: she was unlikely to get her period ever again. Celebrate, or lament? What to do with all those tampons at home? Donate them to a women’s shelter? Bury them and have a mock funeral? No more monthly cravings for chocolate and salt. Actually, she had those cravings every day now. Middle age and menopause were a constant diet struggle.

  Before she could move away from the phone, the bathroom door swung open and three nuns entered, Senate visitors’ passes clipped to soft blue habits. Hannah watched in embarrassment as the youngest of the three reached up calmly to place a coin in the sanitary napkin dispenser. Here was her answer: nuns were like every other woman, making do with whatever materials were available in their era, reminded each month of the possibility of motherhood they chose not to fulfill. Like so many lesbians, thought Hannah. The different path. But a woman all the same. Then she saw the keys.

  “Are those your keys?” asked the eldest nun. “Don’t forget your keys.” She held out a set of small, shiny brass keys on a ring with a fob that said RED SEA. “Oh! Were you recently touring the Holy Land?”

  “Ah, no, Sister,” replied Hannah, thinking fast. “The Red Sea is an Ethiopian restaurant in the Adams Morgan neighborhood.”

  “We ate there last year during the Catholic University symposium,” yelled the third nun from behind a stall. “When Sister Dorothy got her library science degree.”

  Hannah took the keys, and then stopped in her tracks. There was a lock on the sanitary napkin/tampon dispenser, right at eye level on the wall. Someone must come in every so often, unlock the box and refill it. But perhaps the lock would reveal something else. Yes, it was exactly the right shape to fit the brass key in her fist. She’d have to come back later. Much later, when absolutely no one would walk in.

  • • •

  This wasn’t the first time that Hannah had stayed after work and hidden until everyone but the security guards had departed. The question was whether sneaking into the women’s bathroom would set off an alarm. She had prudently wedged the bathroom door open with a wadded paper towel hours earlier, in case there was an automatic lock set to some sort of after-hours timer. She settled into the womblike space beneath her office desk with a banana, a granola bar, and a copy of Lillian Faderman’s To Believe in Women. At 9 p.m. she emerged from her hiding post and entered the women’s room, keys in hand.

  The pay phone regarded her silently. It did not ring or even chirp as, trembling, Hannah fit the first stout little key into the tampon dispenser. All of a sudden she thought of Pandora’s box, the ancient Greek myth. Just what might she be unleashing? Or there might be nothing at all inside. She’d feel like a fool, wasting an uncomfortable evening on a prank . . . a prank call made by whom, exactly?

  Suddenly, with a trill of tropical birds, winged sanitary napkins burst out of the wall dispenser and began flying around the room like swifts, calling to one another. “Whee!” “Yippee!” “Yahooo!” One rode the air in surfer motions, curling into the shape of a Dewey Weber longboard, howling “Cowabunga!”

  They flapped enthusiastically around Hannah. “Much obliged, sister!” “We never get out.” “Stay free! Stay freeeee!” Linking up, the winged pads formed a sort of circle, bobbing and dancing. “And now you get three wishes! Think wisely. But we know what you want!”

  Three wishes? Once liberated, the flying pads turned into genies? How could they know what Hannah wanted? She batted at this battalion of cotton batting. “What am I supposed to ask for?”

  On command, the napkins rearranged to form the shape of a mountain Hannah recognized at once. It was Half Dome in Yosemite National Park.

  Half Dome! Was it the summer between her junior and senior years of high school, when Hannah’s dad had taken her to Yosemite for the climbing trip they’d planned and looked forward to forever? And on the morning of the excursion, she’d awakened with excruciating cramps and heavy bleeding, unable to move. The park ranger shook his head, warning that any malevolent grizzly bear could scent her now, and the whole outing had been canceled. It’s because I’m a girl, Hannah had wept. Why am I being punished? Being born female really is a curse!

  Now these flying menstrual fairies had her number. “One, two, three!” they chorused, and Hannah found herself in sturdy mountain boots, perched on the summit of Half Dome with her father, hale and hearty in his best year, the two of them munching raisins and peanuts from a plastic bag while joyfully overlooking what Ansel Adams had called “the range of light.” Below their swinging boots lay all of Yosemite Valley, clad in gold, clouds and cliffs lit up with sunset glow, and the scent of campfire and pine needle and redwood achingly remembered. She was here. Here, with Dad, triumphant, an ascending Amazon, delivered into the view she had longed for, dusty hiker-climber scratches on her legs. And her legs were those of a seventeen-year-old fem-inist, unshaven as they had been. And, as ever, her father was shaking his head in amusement over that choice of not shaving, saying to her, as he once did, “When we get home, remind me to loan you the lawnmower.”

  Yes. That’s exactly what he said. But look at us. Look at me. I scaled Half Dome! And indeed, other hikers were coming over to congratulate them, in the kinship fashion of climbers, and almost none were women. Just Hannah.
But no: there was one female couple, dressed alike in battered windbreakers. And they looked at Hannah with the recognition that passes between women who love women, and smiled.

  Oh! Yes, that was my second wish, when I was seventeen. Would I ever meet a real lesbian? And how would I know? Would I ever see a real lesbian couple, two women who held hands in public not caring what anyone thought of their love? I did meet a lesbian couple at Yosemite that year. They did smile at me in recognition. They did hold hands on the trail. I never knew their names, or how to thank them.

  “Our names are Barb and Nancy,” said the couple, fading now to sunset mist. “We knew you, and we knew you knew us. Take care, sister . . .”

  Then Hannah was back in the bathroom and no one was there. The box on the wall was closed and locked. No mini-pads flew around the quiet tile, no keys were gripped in Hannah’s shaking hand. There was nothing to show what had just happened. She felt a wave of bitter disappointment that her father was gone and her period was gone, and she was no longer a daughter and had not become a mother. She wanted to be young again and climb alongside her father, who loved mountains. Her life now was so sedentary, and Yosemite was on the opposite coast from D.C., and were her hiking years behind her? Maybe so.

  But curiously, she seemed to have some scrapes along her legs, some pine needles in her socks. And her legs felt soft with hair left growing wild, although surely she had shaved her calves last night?

  The phone rang. And it was a very ordinary voice, the voice of Hannah’s photo lab developer from her drugstore at Dupont Circle, merely saying, “Your portrait is ready.” When she hung up the phone, she saw in the keypad’s shiny metal reflection that something had been placed on the bathroom sink. It was a framed photograph of Hannah and her father, legs swinging over the precipice atop Half Dome, signed in her father’s neat handwriting, Wish you were here. In the background, hiking downward, were two women holding hands.