Bonnie J. Morris
JUST BEFORE LABOR Day, the summer’s morning air changed to sharp autumn gloss. That first feeling of the coming fall was a tang and a tentacle that curled delicately around every dyke professor in town. They all felt their antennae go up: school again. Both drugstores and bars proclaimed Back to School Specials!
Awaiting Hannah on campus were notices in her faculty mailbox: “The campus bookstore regrets to report that the textbook you ordered for Women’s History 001is out of print and unavailable for the fall semester.” And so forth. The distance from freewheeling summer to sheer academic panic was a very fast crossing.
Should she give up asking her students to purchase real books and just go digital, with all her women’s history assignments online, like other professors did nowadays? Why did it feel like such a betrayal to read Virginia Woolf on glass? Could there ever be a cyber equivalent word for bookworm?
But just below the fresh layer of anxiety, there was that glorious fire of recommitment, a feeling she recognized with gratitude and pleasure: her chosen work, examining the words of women’s lives. In spite of the enormous workload, she still loved the cycle of the academic year, its curving arc of predictability ingrained since she was four and started nursery school. The weather obligingly shifted to cool; “kneesock weather,”her mother used to say, meaning it was time to put away the shorts and bathing suits of summer play and pull on socks and saddle shoes for school. Hannah would beg and plead for just a few more days of running through the sprinkler, shirtless, free, unselfconscious, wearing her favorite pair of orange cutoffs, her threadbare PF Flyers tennis shoes. But school also meant books, when she was young and coming to realize how different she was from other little kids. Hannah’s kickball-playing pals had hated library day, whereas Hannah found it heavenly. Now she was a grownup, and could read all day, every day, and not be considered a freak because it was her job to read. She had earned the freedom to be forever at home in history class, her mental pencilbox rattling, her heart and soul engaged.
BY SUNDAY OF Labor Day weekend Hannah was giddy with preparedness and back-to-school nostalgia, scuffing new loafers through a few early-turned and scattered leaves. She was on her way to Sappho’s Bar for a last, lazy afternoon of watching baseball on the big screen Isabel had just installed, looking forward to sipping a brew with some of the big gals who were knowledgeable sports fanatics. Too soon, Labor Day weekend would be over and Hannah would be possessed by the demands of new students, by lectures to prepare, by hours spent with her nose in a textbook, deciphering the great women of history. Hannah took a long and winding route, walking to Sappho’s instead of driving.
“Watch out, jerkface! You’re going to hit that lady!”
Hannah jumped off the curb as a worn baseball banged her ankle. It rolled off her shoe, downhill into a side street; and two sheepish-looking little girls who had erred in a game of catch stood mortified but giggling in their front yard, awaiting Hannah’s reaction. The bigger of the two girls, twisting her finger around beaded braids, ventured, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. You missed my soft parts.” They doubled over with hilarity at that. Hannah approached the barefoot pair, hand extended to show she wasn’t mad. “I’m actually on my way to watch a baseball game myself. I love to see girls practicing; keep it up! Either of you know how to pitch a curve ball?”
The bigger girl glanced at her companion, who was white and red-headed and wearing a backward-turned ball cap. “She thinks I can. My dad says I can’t and never will. See, all we got at my school is slow-pitch softball. No baseball because there’s no one to coach the girls.”
“Well, there ought to be!” Hannah snarled, her feminist avatar uncoiling and rising like a cobra; and the girls involuntarily took a step back. “You know, there’s a law that says girls can do any sport boys do. It’s called—”
“Title IX,” the redhead volunteered. “My mom’s a lawyer.”
Hannah looked at the sharp-featured little face, recognizing the dimples. “Your mom wouldn’t be Elaine Grady, would she?”
“Ha, Susie’s got two moms,” the first girl said. “Now, how fair is that? I don’t even have one. My mama died.”
Susie frowned. “Shut up, Cubby. Yes, Elaine is my mom, but so is—”
“—Denise,” finished Hannah. “Guess what: I know both of them. Okay. Susie, tell your mom Elaine to talk with Cubby’s school principal, and I bet you can get a girls’ baseball team started over there. It’s been done before, you know? Grownup women played hard ball once. They were really good, too. In this league during World War II—”
“Yeah, A League of Their Own,” Susie interrupted. “We watched that movie at my ninth birthday party in May.”
“But it had just white girls,” Cubby pointed out. “There was that one lady who could throw a curve and they wouldn’t even let her into that ballpark.”
The three of them stood there awkwardly, until Susie broke the silence. “Can you please go get our baseball for us? I think it rolled downhill behind you. We’re not supposed to leave Cubby’s front yard while her daddy’s napping.”
“Oh. Right.” Hannah hurried after the lost ball, thinking: these kids know more than my own students. They don’t need me to pitch lectures on women’s history; they need female coaches who can pitch them curve balls. I’ll have to get our athletic director at the university to shift money around and bring in a personal trainer for Cubby, ideally someone who knows the history of women in the Negro Leagues—but then she stopped cold, feeling her bruised ankle throb as her heart sped up. The ball had rolled all the way down the block and vanished into Willow Street. And Hannah had not turned the corner into that street in fourteen years.
She drove past it all the time, mentally chanting, Don’t look. Keep going. Everyone had a street, she supposed, where the perfect love affair had played out, the architecture of a house and a street number containing the entire world of a finished relationship. In her own imagination it had never changed, that narrow townhouse, its yellow door opening right onto the old stone street, with a carriage lamp and a window box heavy with zinnias. Hannah had once loved a woman on Willow Street. She had loved the visiting scholar named Maud Nora.
It was right after Hannah finished her Ph.D., when she joined the university as a freshly minted young professor. They met over the wine and cheese at a reception for new faculty, talking about their heavy teaching loads and how to tackle it all, at different ages, different professional stages; Hannah with her new place in the world of women’s history and Maud, older, better known, brought in for two years of special seminars on women’s sports and culture. It was the busy, expert Maud who introduced Hannah to the history of the All American Girls’ Baseball League. Maud even had an Aunt Marlene, nicknamed “Lumpy” for the bump on her head from a particularly rough game, who briefly played second base for the Grand Rapids Chicks.
And Maud—that had been a romance so all-consuming, Hannah barely remembered anything else about her first year of real employment. Yes, it was thrilling to stand at a lectern and watch students take notes, thrilling to take home a paycheck that soon turned into a leather jacket, a mountain bike, a complete set of Fiestaware, but most of that year was lost to kissing and waiting, kissing and waiting to kiss. With their equally demanding schedules, on some days they didn’t see one another at all. On others—magic days, thought Hannah now—she was allowed to spend the night, leaving her grubby first apartment for the luxury of Maud’s rented townhouse. They’d meet in that gold doorway, their leather satchels bumping. With a jingle of her keys, Maud would jab the door open and pour herself a glass of wine and settle on the couch with her half-glasses so charmingly askew, pretending to grade a few more student papers until the sexual tension wound up between them like a spring. Then Hannah had to pounce, to throw herself beseechingly into that waiting lap and bury her lips in Maud’s cableknit sweater, the Celtic wool a fuzzbite in her teeth as Maud’s own breathing quickened. On the sofa they made love while dusk began to gather, kids coming in from street games of baseball then, too, and cats yowling for their evening meal, and the train that rumbled every night at five. Eventually, on those special nights, Hannah would sigh and pull away and start a sauce for pasta in the narrow old kitchen with the butcher block island somehow fitting in between them, and Maud would watch the news while chopping vegetables or stripping husks off corn, and then by eight they’d eat their meal with jazz or blues or Bach—or women’s music. Maud had every album ever made by any feminist musician, crates she’d brought with her from Ann Arbor along with a real stereo turntable and diamond-tipped needle; on such nights she’d raise her glass and say, “To my young scholar,” toasting Hannah with one foot beneath the table stroking hers. That narrow house creaked and listed, groaned in autumn wind and froze them in the winter, so that Maud was often sick and Hannah always steaming her with pots of tea, with herbal decongestants, though Maud drew the line at “being vaporized,” saying it sounded like a World War I attack. One night they both were bundled up in flannel, grading tests, and Hannah had her hair down and her bathrobe loosely tied, and looked up with the feeling Maud was watching, and she was. “Jesus Christ,” said Maud, “you certainly are a beauty,” and then laid her glasses down. They went to bed. But it didn’t last. It never does, thought Hannah bitterly.
It didn’t last because Maud merely went back to her tenured position in Ann Arbor, where she was closer to the archives and living survivors of the League, and while they travelled back and forth to see one another for a few months, eventually Maud made clear with firm regret that she was “done.” Hannah had raged and puzzled and written bad poetry, trying to figure out what could have turned Maud away. The answer eventually proved to be a hunky umpire named Daniel, who was also interested in the history of women’s sports. He, apparently, owned a complete set of original AAGBL trading cards and spent his weekends trolling flea markets for rare women’s baseball memorabilia.
Left for a man.Left for a man! “Do you love him, or just his baseball card collection?” were Hannah’s plaintive last words; it still hurt. The humiliation, on top of heartbreak, had ruined the very sight of the turnoff into Willow Street, which once excited her beyond description; she never again entered the street containing “their” house, not even when another faculty friend who lived farther down the block invited her to a holiday eggnog party. Maud’s unexpected bisexuality was probably one reason why Hannah had eventually become involved with Gail, the butchest possible rebound partner; their first date lasted for so many happy years. But then Gail had walked out. Gail was gone, too.
Fuck it. Whatever. Hannah stepped into Willow Street, eyes focused on scooping up the children’s lost ball, eyes blurry now with regret. Her hand shook as she touched the baseball. She wanted to touch Maud. She wanted to touch Gail. She wanted to go back in time and try again, forgive, apologize, be a better lover, anything at all. And as she turned at last to face the past, which was in this instance a townhouse at 307 Willow, another baseball came falling out of the sky and hit her on the head.
“IS SHE ALL right?”
“I don’t know. Marlene! Can you get up?”
“Give her air. Come on, Gertie, shove over!”
Hannah opened an eye. For a moment she couldn’t focus. Tense faces hovered over her—all topped with ballcaps. She recognized nobody. But she heard a cheer go up, and, for some reason, scattered applause. “Hot damn, she’s okay! Atta girl. Come on, get back in the game! It’s so close!” Hands reached to lift her to her feet.
“Something hit me,” began Hannah and then gasped as she looked down at her bare legs. They were covered in bruises and scabs she hadn’t had when she woke up that day. More distressingly, her legs seemed to be emerging from a skirt. A short uniform skirt. One she knew very well.
Hannah was a second basewoman for the Grand Rapids Chicks.
And that meant the year was 1945.
THE SUN WAS in the exact same position overhead, and the air had the same end-of-summer scent, but the women now pushing her toward second base had never known an iPad, e-mail, Skype, cell phone, even a television. Their chipped and crooked teeth, unrepaired by modern orthodontics, now smiled at her encouragingly. “Go on, we need you! Doreen’s already out with a sprain. Can you play?”
“Can I play baseball? Hard ball? Not well,” Hannah stammered.
“That’s the stuff; if Marlene’s joking again she can play. Come on! We still have a lead.” Hannah found herself wobbling, on legs with unfamiliar sliding strawberries, toward a spot in a dirt field.
“Hurry up, princess,” jeered an obvious dyke in a different color uniform skirt. “I didn’t bean you that hard.”
At the slur princess, which in Hannah’s world had always been the unflattering term for a spoiled Jewish girl, Hannah forgot her dizziness and whirled around, eyes shooting cinders, teeth grinding.
She heard one of the players who had helped her up shout, “Yeah! There’s that game face! Come on, now, Marlene!”
I’m not Marlene. I’m Hannah. Who’s Marlene? A base hit snapped her to attention as dust flew and a sliding opponent landed with a thud on first.
“Son of an ITCH, that stung,” the player moaned, and a shortstop from Hannah’s team snorted in sympathy. “She can’t risk another fine for swearing. The last swear cost her ten dollars, and a third gets her suspended from the League. That’s Gloria—already busted for trying to go into one of those bars. Can’t say as I blame her,” she added, winking.
This is insane, Hannah thought, frantically fielding the next batter and missing the line drive by a country mile as the rival team advanced around the bases. Marlene, Marlene, I know that name. An ancient plane—to Hannah’s eyes—sputtered over the field, dragging a banner that read, “WELL DONE TROOPS.” Wait! Of course. Marlene was the name of Maud’s aunt—the one who had actually played in the All American Girls’ Baseball League. The one who got hit in the head at a game and carried a permanent lump on her temple that Maud had loved to pat as a little girl . . . Maud, who was much older than Hannah; who remembered and loved the League because she even went to a few games until her aunt finally retired in 1953.
What had Maud told Hannah about her aunt, during the days and nights they lived together? Hannah had worked very hard to repress those happy memories; but she sure needed them now. It was on that frosty January night when they made cinnamon popcorn, their hands plunging into a hot-buttered bowl, knuckles bumping, lips salty-sweet and slippery, kernels falling into their laps, and Hannah’s eyes had been on their rented horror movie while Maud reminisced—what had she said, exactly, that night? “My aunt was probably a very gay lady, but they were barely allowed to talk about such things, let alone act on them . . . five-dollar first offenses were handed out for cursing, smoking, drinking, wearing hair in too butch a bob, getting off the travel bus without your skirt on, even just wearing slacks in a public place. Oh, my aunt hated those rules, but she needed to keep every nickel of her earnings to help out the family farm, which was still recovering from the whammo of the Depression years. Marlene could whistle through her teeth—she never got the gap fixed, the way most kids do now—and she had a special whistle for me, if she knew I was in the bleachers watching. She’d whistle twice during a lull in the action so I’d know she was thinking of me, and after the game we’d have Cracker Jacks together. Later on I recall that she usually had a woman friend with her, but of course when I was four, five, six, even twelve, I didn’t put two and two together. After all, everyone on the team was a woman. And then they all had nicknames for each other, Slats, Mac, whatever; she was Lumpy, from being beaned with a ball, one game. She always said it was her piece of history.”
Hannah tried to clear her throbbing head. The uniform ball cap at least shielded her eyes. She could clearly see the people in the stands, some in military uniforms, others in clean overalls or house dresses . . . just white people, too, she noticed, and certainly no one was texting or talking on a cell phone. No one had on headphones, ear buds, or Nike swooshes. There were plenty of kids, cheering and waving; mostly young girls—
And one of the little girls was Maud Nora.
DEFINITELY. IT WAS Maud, or rather a pint-sized incarnation of her scholarly ex, who on this last weekend of summer 1945 would have been about to enter first grade. She had on a short-sleeved sweater buttoned up the wrong way, a plaid skirt and Mary Janes. Her fair hair was pulled back with a yarn ribbon, and Cracker Jack glaze smeared her upper lip. She was screaming, “GO, Aunt Marlene, GO.” Peanuts flew out of her mouth as she cheered.
Hannah parted her lips, afraid to say anything at all that might change the course of both their histories; and suddenly two quick and piercing whistles escaped from between her teeth. Mini-Maud shouted and waved at her. Hannah’s head still throbbed from where she’d been knocked out—or, rather, knocked into the past and, apparently, into someone else’s body; but when she reached up to touch her brow she was surprised to feel a cut and not a bump. Hold on. If I’m “Lumpy,” where’s the lump? Or am I not Maud’s aunt after all?
“That’s the game! We won! So long, Daisies!” shouted a player, and teammates from the Grand Rapids Chicks poured into the infield, whooping and cheering, while sullen Fort Wayne Daisies picked up their gloves and moved toward the waiting buses. In the bleachers, a little girl was waving, waiting. On legs that felt watery, yet real—there was no denying that she was alive and walking—Hannah approached young Maud.
The kid was five and a half. Not even a loose tooth yet. Probably couldn’t read either. Her life was ahead of her: school, high school, college, graduate school, peace marches, feminism, coming out, scholarship on women’s sports, tenure at Ann Arbor, a fling with a younger woman named Hannah, partnering with an umpire named Daniel with a good baseball card collection. There was no reason to approach such a tiny figure with resentment, or to horrify her by spilling the beans about a future she had yet to live. Hannah was mindful that anything she said or did now that deviated in any way from Maud Nora’s precise recollections would change history, and probably wreak havoc with Hannah’s own life somewhere out there—if she ever got back to it. She stood awkwardly on one leg, pulling her uniform bloomers down an inch, saying nothing.
“I saved you my Cracker Jack prize,” babbled Maud. “I almost swallowed it. Then I didn’t.” It was a very tiny silver baseball glove. “Perfect for you, huh?” And she held it out.
Hannah took it from the sticky hand, thinking: this is a child; thinking: I am touching the hand that once held mine forty-five years later in time; thinking: how I loved that hand. Could she say to little Maud what grown-up Maud had meant to her? “I love you, pal,” was what Hannah used to say in the dark; and that phrase came out easy now. And little Maud responded: “I love you! You’re my best!” The very thing older Maud had told Hannah in the dark.
Maybe that was all she had ever hoped to hear again, one more time, because Hannah/Marlene’s body flooded with nostalgia and she felt a grin crinkle all the way up to her cut forehead. In seconds, their meeting was over. A teammate pulled Hannah from the stands, saying, “Come on, we gotta go,” and little Maud was shouting, “I’ll see ya, Aunt Marlene! I’ll see ya! I’ll see ya next game!” and out in the parking lot, safely hidden behind the idling team bus, Hannah sank to her knees in the soft dirt and wept.
THE NEXT THING she knew she was dozing on the bus, its leather seats, cracked and slippery, giving off a rank smell of linament, cheap perfume, hair spray, and stale Coca-Cola. Someone was whispering in her ear, “When we stop for dinner, we can try to find that bar I heard about. We got maybe an hour. I really want to get a drink, but we’ll have to be super careful or there’s hell to pay, you know. So are you with me? Are you in?”
Up ahead, a truck stop parking lot, half-filled with very old farm Fords and pickups, beckoned with lights spelling out “DON’S EATS” in sputtering aqua neon. Twenty tired, victorious Chicks tugged on clean uniform skirts and filed off the bus toward the diner, but Hannah’s companion shouted, “I’ll be back in a bit, I’m gonna take old Marlene to the restroom to touch up that bruise!” She guided Hannah toward the side of the parking lot, then hustled past the freestanding bathroom toward a street glistening with trolley tracks.
“Where are you taking me?” wailed Hannah, desperate to fall asleep and wake up back on her way to Sappho’s, in her own time and in her own body; but her teammate had other plans. They passed houses with sagging porches, then crossed the tracks to an unpaved side street. Shapes of women and bawdy laughter drew them on toward one faintly lit brick house, its shades drawn.
“Just a bar, just a party Gina heard about,” hissed her companion; and just as they reached the bottom step of the house, the front door opened and two beautifully dressed women reeled out. One had on a silk dress, pastel stockings well-seamed up the back, and a twisted pearl necklace. The other woman was in a pinstriped suit and sharp-brimmed fedora.
“Awesome,” Hannah heard herself exclaim, before she remembered that was an expression very much from the future, marking her an alien. At the very same moment her seatmate from the bus yelled out, “Marlene, come back! Gina made a mistake! Goddamn it, that’s a colored bar!”
The women on the porch were black.
“WHO YOU CALLING Goddamn colored?” said the butch in the fedora, casually but steadily taking the porch steps toward the rapidly receding Grand Rapids Chicks. “You too pretty to drink with us?” She looked at Hannah. “You two in that lily league? The white girls’ ball league?”
The woman in the silk dress pointed a perfectly manicured middle finger at Hannah. “Pico’s a better player than any of you. Think she could get on a League team? Uh uh. So why don’t you go find some lily house party, and leave us our own spot?”
“It’s so wrong,” said Hannah.
The butch was in her face now. “What? You saying she’s wrong?”
“No,” said Hannah. “It’s wrong that the League stayed white. I know all about that. I hate that about it. I wish it were a different story. I know how good you are.”
The elegant femme gasped at this last remark, and Hannah realized how it sounded. Several other bar patrons had spilled out by now, and Hannah’s teammate had completely disappeared, running noisily back to the truck stop. She was alone.
Fedora woman had not moved an inch away from Hannah’s sweaty face. “You don’t know me from Adam. You looking for a beat down, you come to the right place. You looking for a beer, your money’s no good here. You looking for a woman, you not welcome.”
All of a sudden, Hannah knew why she was there. “No beat down, no beer, no woman, unfortunately,” she spoke as evenly as possible. “I’m just here for one hour, and now that’s half gone. Me, I’m looking for your good curve ball, to pass along to girls who want to learn.”
Gusts of laughter greeted this declaration, but the woman in the fedora narrowed her eyes. “You serious?”
“Pretty much,” said Hannah, who had just realized who she was dealing with. “You’re Pico Blue, aren’t you? From the Negro League team. You got turned away from the all-white League and offered a spot playing with the Negro League men for one season when a couple of players were sent overseas. But the men won’t let you pitch even though you have a better curve ball, because you’re still a woman. I know about that. Well, I’m here to say I respect you. I tell kids about you. And I think I still have twenty minutes. Teach me everything you know.”
Pico looked at her for a moment, considering, and then turned to her date. “Carlotta, get me my ballbag and glove. They’re in the car.”
“For real? We’re supposed to be dancing!”
“Just do it,” said Pico Blue, and Hannah thought: there’s a slogan someone waited to use in my time.
They moved into the alley. Pico wound up, and Hannah was flat on her back in seconds, with the real lump on her head rising. That’s why she was called Lumpy! That’s why she called it her piece of history! She couldn’t tell anyone she’d gone to a dyke bar and practiced with black players. It was all forbidden; she would have been suspended! The AAGBL thought she got the lump on her head from that game against the Daisies!
“Sorry,” said Pico. “You got to shift sideways to catch me. Or didn’t your friends tell you I’m a southpaw?” She wound up again, and Hannah, who had improvised a bat out of an old broom leaning against the house, managed to avoid being beaned yet again by chipping wildly at the pitch. The ball clunked up over their heads and landed in the gutter.
“Shit,” said Pico. “I’m not climbing up there in this suit. You go up there and get me my ball. Ladder’s just beyond that back window.”
Hannah moved unsteadily along the house wall. Through the back window she could see women in butch-femme finery caressing, drinking beer, dancing to jazz, kissing in deep armchairs. Someone was serving up bowls of food from a big iron stewpot. Hearts and stars made from painted cardboard were strung across the bar, spelling out the names of a couple celebrating their anniversary. Ivy plants drooped from a high shelf. It looked startlingly like a night at Sappho’s Bar—a place to go, to belong, to celebrate and kiss, eat comfort food and talk. This was the parallel world of segregation. This was separate and unequal, a site not written into the record of women’s history . . . yet. We couldn’t even go into each other’s bars, Hannah thought. But could anyone in the backroads of Grand Rapids in 1945 guess that thirty-one years into the future, the largest lesbian festival in the world would set up on a spot up less than two hours’ drive from there? With black and white lesbians boldly out and proud onstage?
“Are you getting that ball?” shouted Pico. “I got a lady waiting on me.”
Hannah could not take her eyes from the window. What was the name of this Michigan bar?
“Are you getting that ball?” the voice came again. And the voice grew higher. Then younger. “I got this lady waiting for me!”
STUPIDLY, HANNAH LOOKED at the baseball she was holding. It was Sunday afternoon on Willow Street. Two little girls, one black, one white, were standing in the front yard up the road and calling to her. Hannah felt her head: no bumps. Just her own springy Jewish hair. She was back in her own body, her own time!
She walked out of Willow Street, which would never again haunt her as it had. There were bigger ghosts to serve. “Here you go.” She tossed the ball to Cubby. “But who’s the lady waiting for you?”
“Miss Angie, my coach,” the kid replied. “We’ve got practice up at school in an hour.”
“For the new girls’ baseball team,” Susie explained. “Cubby’s the pitcher! And coach is putting her in against the boys next weekend!”
“Miss Angie taught me a mean curve ball,” Cubby admitted.
IF SHE EVER really needed a stiff drink at Sappho’s, it was now. Hannah burst into the club just as Denise, Elaine, Vera, Mandy, and Jo were cheering the Yankees game. Bets had obviously been placed; Isabel was putting silver trays of snacks in front of everyone as they gathered under the new big-screen TV, and wads of cash shifted discreetly between trays.
“Elaine, Denise, I just met your kid,” Hannah announced. “Nice little redhead. And her friend Cubby.”
“Oh, Cubby’s fantastic,” Elaine confirmed. “We set her up with a personal trainer, Angela, the new athletic director just hired on campus. You know Angela’s aunt once pitched in the Negro Leagues? Her nickname was Paco or Pico or something. Cubby’s going to be just like her, maybe a pro someday!”
Hannah had put down a five dollar bill for a beer. Isabel brought and uncapped the beer, then pushed some coins and a small bowl of Cracker Jack toward Hannah. It wasn’t until she had taken four good swallows and removed her eyes from the TV screen that Hannah saw what was mixed in with her change: a tiny silver baseball glove, Maud Nora’s Cracker Jack prize from 1945. She vaguely recalled it falling out of her uniform skirt pocket as she stood on tiptoe to peek into the window of the black lesbian bar in Grand Rapids . . . How had it ended up at Sappho’s?
She looked at Isabel, who smiled back at her over the coins, and said quietly, “Yes; this is your change, the little change you asked for,” and then went back to wiping down the bar.
~
Bonnie J. Morris is a women’s studies professor and the author of fourteen books, including three Lambda Literary Awards and most recently The Disappearing L: Erasure of Lesbian Spaces and Culture. Her time travel novel Sappho’s Bar and Grill will be published in 2017. When not teaching women’s history for Georgetown University and George Washington, Dr. Morris is a consultant for Disney, an occasional lecturer for Olivia Cruises, and is working on a women’s music archive for the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.