Did you ever think that you lived in a cage?
Did you ever think that you lived in a cage?
Well, they’re calling you a “chick,”
And the name just seems to stick,
And you still don’t think you’re living in a cage?
Have you heard, have you heard,
There’s a migration happening:
Going where the thinking is free.
Only you can decide,
Take yourself for a glide;
You’re a free-flying woman
A high-flying woman.
“You became a high-flying woman that night. Yes. But then what happened? Is there more?” Isabel probed. And Sappho cupped Hannah’s head.
“What else about Jordan Matthews?” Isabel asked. “Mrs. Matthews’ daughter. Your classmate. Probably not easy for her, to be the child of book-banning campaigners.”
“I don’t know. She had no part in their activism. Jordan was quiet at school, mostly involved with team sports— actually, captain of everything. She always had a splinted sports injury, rushing from one practice to another, wore athletic clothes every day, at a time and place where most girls were either sexy, hippie, or square in style. She walked like a jock. God, I never thought about it before, but Jordan, well, wasn’t exactly girlish. You never saw her in a dress, though her parents were these well-known conservative fundamentalists.”
Such familiar details, insignificant until now, blazed along Hannah’s neurons in an instant. And Hannah recognized her. Recognized a sister. Jordan was going to grow up and be gay.
That was Jordan in my memory of going to the library and searching for gay books. That was Jordan in the other aisle, apart from me and also hiding there. That was Jordan I saw when I let myself go back and remember— and what I saw was Jordan lifting books. Stealing what she needed to find out about herself.
“What if your parents had been the ones to suppress gay-sympathetic books in school? Wouldn’t your adolescent rebellion take the form of reading those books under the covers by flashlight? Or maybe there would be no way, in those days before ordering online, to get the books you needed. If you grew up gay in that household, wouldn’t you be likely to amass the world’s best collection of lesbian books as an adult? And in your better days as an aging adult, might you not take steps to pass those books back into another school library?” As Isabel spoke, Sappho turned off the projector. The light of the Overhead Herself withdrew, leaving shimmering scales as slides of Hannah’s past faded. It was past midnight; in Washington, D.C., the lights of the National Cathedral also blinked out, leaving an absence that almost pulsed. Hannah sat in total darkness, feeling the trajectory of life that had taken her to Isabel, from campaigning for books in ninth grade to saving books at the Library of Congress.
“You don’t need me to facilitate time travel,” Isabel spoke softly. “You carry your own timeline in your heart. And you know what to do. You can make that phone call to the donor, now. But make it from the bad girl bathroom, if you follow what I mean. Good night, my dear one.”
And as Isabel’s voice faded out on the cell phone, every hair stood up on Hannah’s flesh. She knew who the Library’s mystery book donor was. The donor was Jordan Matthews.
Chapter Seven
The Donor’s Legacy
That spring was filled with work, projects and exhibits that demanded attention, leaving no time or privacy for sleuthing around the donation of books. Hannah was now desperate on two fronts. Her job would end in May, and she had one crate of books under the bed of her rented apartment, books stolen from a Library of Congress van and intended for readers out there somewhere. She also had to get back to the loading dock area and rescue the other box of books, hidden under the old glue machine— the box of paperbacks from the donor that someone on staff had separated out to be shredded.
When Hannah finally had a free moment to retrieve the original donation paperwork, she discovered that the entire file had been moved to a different department. With the help of a box of Godiva chocolates from the Union Station galleria, she bribed two different library employees in order to get one more glance at the donation cover sheet.
No, there was no contact phone number or e-mail. Yes, the donor’s initials were J.M. no, the donor was not deceased. This was a living legacy.
Jordan was still alive. And, quite possibly, not dying or even ill, just willing to place a great collection where it might reach the maximum number of patrons . . . or so Jordan had thought. How could Hannah tell her that there was, in fact, no solid plan to make those books available to needy readers? How to find the generous Jordan in the first place? What was Hannah supposed to do?
By Thursday, Hannah had a range of archival tasks that permitted one long break in the afternoon. She worked steadily with head bowed, shrinking into herself as if to will inconspicuousness. She had dressed deliberately, that day, in a mild beige sweater with no flashy scarf, no jingling jewelry. Willing herself into relative invisibility, she began her break time by walking on tiptoe through the Great North Hall where the artistic portrait of Sappho appeared on the ceiling, one lone woman among the many male authors depicted. Sappho. Point the way. Project the Overhead’s way for me.
And the way became clearer. She saw, thanks to Sappho, a strange little scene that had taken place months before: a stoic warehouse worker named Gordon falling more and more under the influence of a local megachurch pastor whose homophobic sermons were legendary in northern Virginia.
She saw Gordon, assigned the task of readying two crates of rare lesbian books for off-site storage, balking at the idea of helping circulate such filth. Gordon, on his own coffee break time, tossing what he found to be the “worst” of such sinful sex material into one of the send-to-the-shredder boxes. Gordon, caught in the act, confronted by Al, the kindly driver of the van Hannah had been in. She saw Al, a defender of books, a First Amendment T-shirt tucked tight over his belly, gently moving the terrified paperbacks to a safe spot and then marching Gordon down to Human Resources and having him fired, with the recycling pickup representative arriving just at that minute and starting to load the condemned books onto a flatbed meant for the shredder. Jay, a concerned coworker of Al’s, was yelling, “No! Not that one,” and grabbing the box off the flatbed, locking it up somewhere.
Oh, no! Moved? Where? Locked? How? Hannah sped up her steps. She made a mental note to send both Al and Jay thank-you letters and candy at some future moment, much buoyed by this peek into the heroism of male colleagues protecting lesbian literature. Where would a guy hide lesbian paperbacks?
She didn’t dare ask them. Everything now depended on her anonymity, on not attracting attention. Maybe not in the loading dock area itself. Maybe he tucked that box into his own office and has since forgotten all about it. Or what if he took it home? Like I did?
But when Hannah peered through the open door into the loading dock area, she encountered a familiar scent. Coffee. Isabel’s beans! The little table area where the workers took their coffee break was crowded with large, belt-wearing men just now, all hoisting coffee cups or stirring in cream and sugar. Piles of unwashed mugs and baskets of sugar substitute covered one end of the table, and an open box of doughnuts commanded attention at the table’s opposite end.
As men swarmed around their snacks and then walked away, Hannah caught one clear glimpse of something pushed partway under the table. There, in the shadows, long neglected, was the controversial box of donated books that Jay had thought to hide. It had not been destroyed, or lost, or shredded after all!
But as Hannah began to rise from her crouched position, she abruptly recoiled. Only at ground level could one see what thoughtful Jay had done to keep the books from being seized by other fundamentalists. He had secured the crate of books to a post under the table with an old combination lock.
Hannah slumped to the floor, never minding that other librarians might pass by any minute and ask her what she was doing there. Foiled. This was an i
mpossibility. What had she been thinking— that she would just waltz in one evening after hours and pry open a locked crate? How would she ever break that lock or, at best, plunder an opened crate to “rescue” the books? Exactly where would she be moving them to?
This notion— that there existed some mystical plain of needy young lesbian readers, into whose outstretched hands she might place appropriate banned literature— this notion existed only in her mind. There was no such assembled, physical audience in the present day, and gay teens of the past were unreachable. This was the wrong library for her sentimental, idealistic activism. And there on the cold floor of an otherwise very good library, Hannah wept for the loss of feminist bookstores, for the digitizing of literature that made once-priceless paperbacks mere pulp.
Sudden footsteps approaching from the next corridor reminded her that she wasn’t truly alone and had better exit the shipping area. With a last peek at the locked crate, Hannah rose from the scholarly dust and headed to her sanctuary: the visitors’ bathroom and pay phone. That space would tell her what to do.
She walked numbly to the front hall of the Jefferson Building and the familiar door to that well-tiled restroom. Her palm hit the surface. But what opened to her eyes when she entered was not the Library of Congress ladies’ room, at all.
It was the bad-girl bathroom of her old junior high.
• • •
The pay phone was still there, in its half-enclosed wall booth, yet behind it Hannah saw the graffiti-scrawled stalls and ash-sopped paper towels of her ninth-grade school building. Defiant cigarette butts and marijuana roaches peeped from cracks in the floor tile, and smoke lingered in the air, but there was something else. A peculiar, adult smell of what young Hannah had always thought of as “old lady” perfume.
Her first panicked reaction was to think that one of her old teachers, too, had blundered into this most off-limits of student hideaways. But that never would have happened; teachers had their own bathroom in the faculty lounge. Hannah poked her head inside the nearest stall to see if any living human were inside.
As she did, fascinated to see that the same graffiti she remembered from 1975 was still on the back wall, she heard two toilets flush; two pairs of heels clicked toward the exit, and she heard the familiar, heart-stopping words: “Those two little girls stick together like flypaper.”
Hannah burst out of the stall. Was she really back in 1975, humiliated in this same bathroom after that rancorous PTA meeting? She looked down at her body, afraid it might be her younger teenage self, clad in the faded Levis she had worn that night so long ago. But there, so reassuring now, were her plain work pants of adulthood, and her Library of Congress ID was still clipped to the belt. She ran her tongue over her teeth; no retainer, thank god, another good sign. She rolled up her left shirt sleeve; yes, the tattoo from her fortieth birthday was still there. She was grown Hannah, modern Hannah, transported to this restroom nightmare of her past.
And then the pay phone rang. The haunted pay phone, also nailed against this daydream. She grabbed for it, dry-mouthed, her unbuttoned shirt sleeve flapping. “Hello.”
“This is Jordan,” said the donor. “You need to save those books.”
“It’s Jordan,” the voice told her again, and now they were back in the regular women’s room of the Library of Congress, with one or two visitors innocently coming and going, straightening hairclips or stepping into stalls as Hannah bent into the phone’s receiver. “I remember you.”
“I remember you, too,” Hannah managed to say.
“You can figure out the combination on that crate— it’s not hard. And there’s a way to shelve those books where anyone can get them. Will you do that?”
“Jordan, where are you?” Hannah asked her. “Are you— are you well? Are you in Washington? Could we meet, can you tell me more about what happened in your life? After— after you came out?”
“Oh, I’m very much alive, but not in Washington. Just off the grid, you know, living in a cabin that I built. I’m happy,” Jordan affirmed, with a voice radiating grit and triumph, untroubled by the past.
“I found the love I wanted, and can return the books I had to have before. Did you ever take a book out of the library and keep it, long overdue? Then lie and tell the librarian you lost it, just so you could have it for yourself? I did that many times. I paid the fines at twenty-five libraries, every time we moved, and then in college. It wasn’t much money; I had two jobs, and didn’t mind the payments. But later I thought, my god. Who else needed all the books I hoarded? So. This donation is action overdue. You get my meaning? I’m overdue with everyone. I’m overdue with God.”
“The Overhead,” Hannah heard herself say. “She placed me here.”
“And She’ll set up the shelf you need for putting back my books. You are going to do a Grand Reshelving, friend. Every book back in its place, available for other kids in that kind of private, desperate, coming-out search.
“On the right night, you need to be at work ready to do that reshelving. Then I’ll really be at peace, and I can’t tell you how I know this, but I can pretty much guarantee the books will be checked out immediately, each to the best owner, and the whole shelf will vanish again without a trace. You won’t be in trouble.” She actually laughed. “There won’t be a paper trail.”
“But how, Jordan? When?” Hannah looked over her shoulder at her favorite security guard, who had just stepped into the bathroom to splash water on her face. “How is this going to work? Can’t you explain?”
“I always thought you were kinda nice,” Jordan told her, playful now, and fading out in voice. “I wasn’t wrong. I liked you. My parents had their demons. Most of mine are gone. Just save the books and shelve them!” And the line went dead.
• • •
That night, Hannah called Isabel at Sappho’s Bar and Grill, knowing it would be packed there on a Friday night with the regular crowd— the same women she had talked to on Halloween weekend. Isabel answered immediately, “Sappho’s. Is this my sweetheart calling?”
“Yes. Hi, honey. Um, can you do me a favor? If you’re not busy.”
The ringing of a cash register, shouts of laughter, the beat of “We Are Family.” She could so easily picture it all. “I’m busy, but I’m glad to do you a favor,” Isabel answered, calling out bar orders. “Genny Cream Light. Two Labatt Blues. Seven and Seven. Black Russian. Moira, can you take over? Hannah, what’s your question?”
Hannah had to smile at Isabel’s swift understanding that she had one final query for the bar. “Please ask anyone within earshot if they ever stole a book, a library book, or kept it long past overdue, because they had to have a lesbian book in their possession.”
It took a few minutes for this message to circulate around the bar, and Hannah fixed herself a drink of her own in the tiny kitchen of her D.C. rental while her ear soaked up the sounds of happy hour at Sappho’s. Then:
“Sure, I did it,” rasped the bold voice of Letty. “I kept back that one, I think it was Gertrude Stein. No one else had ever checked it out in all the years of our town library— I don’t know how they ever ordered it in the first place. But since mine was the only scrawl on the checkout card in the back of the book I didn’t dare return it, ’cause then everyone would know I was the town dyke. I kept it under my bed in a shoebox with my cigs and a movie-star picture of Sophia Loren.”
“Give me that phone.” This was Trale. “We kept some of what wasn’t ours but it was ours; we needed it like oxygen. Can I tell you a line from Mary Daly? ‘We righteously plunder what has been stolen from women.’ I heard her say that at a rally and she meant that we had to steal back our history, or herstory. I stole two books, the one on women in carpentry— it was called Against the Grain— and the one by Judy Grahn, The Work of a Common Woman. I put them back, though, when I turned sixty and downsized all my stuff.”
Then, Dog. “I was busted for shoplifting, but a library book? Huh. You know, I think I did keep an overdue one— O
ranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I remember because my dad whaled me for the fine that showed up on his account. I was using his card for my homework. I lied and said it was all a mistake. I gave him the cost of the book for the library, from my babysitting money . . .”
She heard shrieks of derision. “You were a baby-sitter?” “Can you imagine Dog as your babysitter? I would have loved that!” “I wouldn’t leave my kid with Dog!”
But she had her answer, or answers. Almost every woman had secretly ripped off a lending library in sheer desperate need to have a baby-dyke book. There had been in these women’s lives local feminist bookstores, even mail-order catalogues, in those years before the Internet. But few had had cars or, more likely the nerve, at fifteen and sixteen and seventeen, to get to a lesbian bookshop if they were fortunate enough to live near one. Borrowing became owning. “We were all criminals anyway,” Yvette told Hannah, now. “I mean, what was one more entry on the outlaw resume?”
“I was a felon in Virginia,” Carol grabbed the phone. “Standing to lose custody, job, housing, due to those damn sodomy laws. Add unpaid library fines, and you see why I left the state altogether.”
“Okay. I just wondered. But can any of you tell me,” Hannah wound up her long-distance interrogation, “where all those overdue books are now?”
“Garage sales?” “The Lesbian Herstory Archives?” “Attic of my parents’ summer house?” Many were the guesses shouted toward the phone; yet no one was quite sure.
“But you felt you had to have those books, to survive?” Isabel finished for Hannah. And hundreds of miles away, through the receiver of her phone, Hannah heard the great response in unison, “Yes.”
• • •
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