Читать книгу Pulp - Robin Talley - Страница 12

“Welcome to the Soda Shoppe, your top spot for a refreshing drink and a bite to eat. I’ll be your carhop this afternoon.”

“Hi there, honey. Could I get a cheese sandwich and a Summer Freeze?”

“Righty-o.” Janet suppressed a yawn as she scribbled down the order from the bald man in the station wagon.

Someone whispered loudly over her shoulder. “Janet? Janet! Over here!”

Janet didn’t let her smile slip as she delivered the next line in her script—“Back in a jiff!”—and trotted away from the station wagon to see Shirley, one of her fellow carhops, looking anxious.

“Could you cover car nine for me?” Shirley shifted from one foot to the other. “I haven’t had my break yet and I’m about to burst.”

Janet glanced over her shoulder. “Sure. You’d better hurry or Mr. Pritchard will see.”

“Thanks, Janet. You’re a star.”

Janet waved her on and trotted to space nine. Carhops were permitted to trot across the parking lot, but never to run. Mr. Pritchard, who watched over the staff with an unyielding expression and a blue vinyl apron tied snugly around his middle, was even stricter about running on shift than he was about break schedules.

Janet took down car nine’s order and trotted inside to the food counter. The Soda Shoppe had started out as a regular restaurant, with tables inside and waitresses to serve them, before Mr. Pritchard realized he could make a lot more money sending high school girls out to the parking lot while the customers sat in their Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets. Now the shiny lunch counter inside sat empty while Janet, Shirley and the other girls wore out their saddle shoes trotting from car to car in their too-hot-for-summer-in-Washington cotton uniforms.

As she lifted her tray, Janet gazed at the empty phone booth that sat at the edge of the parking lot, the cars on M Street whizzing past.

Soon. Janet’s shift would end soon, and then she could call her. That prospect was the only thing getting her through the afternoon’s endless script recitations and grease drips.

So an hour later, when the last car of her long lunch shift finally pulled away, Janet rushed to finish her side work, folding napkins and marrying ketchup bottles faster than she ever had before. She tapped her fingers on her apron while Mr. Pritchard inspected her station, and when he finally cleared her to go Janet trotted as fast as she could to the phone booth and shoved a dime into the slot.

She picked up on the second ring.

“I’d hoped it was you.” The smile was clear in Marie’s voice before Janet had even finished saying hello.

Janet wound the phone cord around her fingers and turned her back on the still-busy restaurant. She was smiling, too, even though Marie couldn’t see her.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about last night.” Marie’s voice was a low, warm whisper.

“Neither have I.” Janet closed her eyes. If she tried hard enough, perhaps she could pretend they were still on that dark street outside Meaker’s.

“I want to see you again, soon, but I start work tomorrow. I’ll probably be busy for the next few days.”

“I understand,” Janet replied, though her stomach sank. “Maybe we could meet this weekend.”

“I’d like that. I should be free Saturday.”

“Saturday it is, then.”

They fell silent. Janet traced the tips of her fingers along the curve of the phone cord, wishing she were tracing the delicate skin of Marie’s shoulder instead.

“Could you wait a moment, please?” Marie’s tone suddenly grew a tad too polite. This must’ve been how they taught girls to talk on the phone in secretarial school.

“Certainly.” Janet giggled and waited, wondering what Marie’s teachers would’ve thought of the moment she and Marie had shared the night before.

“There, that’s better.” Marie’s voice came muffled after a pause. “I’ve brought the phone into the pantry. The cord may be about to snap, but at least we can talk in private. Though I’m supposed to be helping my mother with the ironing.”

“Oh.” Janet opened her eyes. “Well, if you have to...”

“But I don’t want to help her. I’d rather talk to you.” Marie paused, drawing in a sharp breath. “I’d rather talk to you always.”

“Oh.” Janet’s knees felt unsteady. “Oh, Marie—it’s the same for me.”

“Where are you? I can hear cars going by.”

Janet smiled again. “I’m in the phone booth at the Soda Shoppe. I keep worrying Mr. Pritchard will come yell at me for forgetting to fold a set of napkins.”

“Tell him you have more important things to do. Like talk to me.”

Janet’s smile stretched from one end of the phone booth to the other. Marie sounded exactly like Sam in A Love So Strange when she and Betty first fell in love.

Was that what was happening to Janet and Marie, too?

“Marie?” Mrs. Eastwood’s voice was unmistakable, even through the pantry door. “What are you doing in there? I need your help. Besides, you shouldn’t stretch out the phone cord.”

Marie sighed into the phone. Janet sighed, too. “I suppose I’ll see you Saturday. Good luck at the new job.”

“Thank you.” Marie’s smooth phone manners were back, probably for her mother’s benefit. “Please give your family my best.”

Janet smoothed out her uniform before she left the phone booth, but her smile stayed wide.

The walk home was no more than fifteen minutes along M Street and up Wisconsin. Nothing in Georgetown was terribly far from anything else. Janet’s and Marie’s houses were close enough that their parents had often driven them to school together when they were still too young to ride the streetcar unaccompanied. Marie’s job, though, would be in the next neighborhood over. The State Department had been in Foggy Bottom since the war.

It was hot out, and Janet, already warm from her shift, grew sweaty as she walked under the hot sun in her silly blue cap, smiling at the shoppers who nodded as they passed. Everyone recognized her Soda Shoppe uniform. Employees were never allowed to be in “partial uniform,” even when their shifts were over.

Janet wished she had a proper job like Marie. Neither of the girls in A Love So Strange had to trot around with steaming piles of cheeseburgers for hours each day. They worked in sensible offices with spiteful coworkers.

Janet had reread half the book after she’d gotten home from Meaker’s the night before, and she’d reread the other half that morning before her shift. She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when Betty first told Sam she was falling in love with her. Sam had replied that she’d known she loved Betty since the first time they danced.

Were there truly girls—other girls, girls Janet had never even met—who thought things like that? Who said things like that?

Janet and Marie didn’t much resemble the girls on the cover of A Love So Strange. Janet was blond and Marie was brown-haired, so they matched on that count, but neither of them wore as much makeup as those girls, and Janet certainly didn’t own any clothes that tight.

She supposed the girls’ looks weren’t what mattered in the end. What mattered was that, like Janet, the girls in Dolores Wood’s book didn’t seem to have much interest in men.

Until the book’s odd ending. In the final chapter, Betty had suddenly become interested in a fellow she worked with, and Sam was fired from her job and threw herself in front of a speeding taxi.

Janet always skipped that chapter now. It felt as if it had been glued on to the real book by mistake. A Love So Strange was meant to be about two girls living in New York, going out in Greenwich Village, kissing and dancing and drinking with other girls like them. That was the book that mattered.

It still seemed impossible that such lives, such places, could be real—and yet they had to be. Why would Dolores Wood write about them otherwise?

In A Love So Strange, Sam never spoke to her parents. She’d been forced to leave the family because of how she was. Betty was on good terms with her parents, but only because she kept up the pretense that she was normal. When Betty’s parents came to visit, Sam slept in the small bed in their spare room as though she were no more than a roommate, and the two girls were careful to make sure that room looked truly lived in, too, hanging pictures on the walls and storing knickknacks on the shelves. They intended to look innocent, even if someone were to report them to the police.

What would happen to Janet if her family discovered she’d kissed Marie? Or, for that matter, if they found the book tucked under her mattress?

Her parents would be devastated. Grandma, too.

Janet would never be able to live a regular life. She’d never get married. Unless she were to move far away, leaving behind everything she’d known, and somehow found a husband for herself in a strange new city.

Janet wasn’t entirely sure she wanted a husband anymore, though.

She’d never thought much about that particular question before. It had never seemed a question in the first place. Everyone got married. It was either that, or become a nun like the sisters at St. Paul’s.

Well, at least there was no need to worry about her family calling the police. Her father’s career was on shaky ground as it was, now that the Democrats had retaken Congress. If they found out about Janet, it would mean disaster for him. Besides, nowadays everyone knew these things were for doctors to handle. If Janet’s parents found out, they’d want her cured and quickly.

Perhaps they’d send her to St. Elizabeths. That was the new name for the local asylum, though some still called it the Government Hospital for the Insane. What if news of Janet’s admission got into the papers, though? The man who wrote the Washington Watch column was all too eager to write about the wrongdoings of Republicans, and a Senate committee attorney’s daughter entering an asylum would be news for at least a day or two, even if her specific illness wasn’t revealed. That day or two of news could be enough to ruin her father’s prospects forever.

No—most likely, her parents would confine her to the house. They might find a discreet doctor to make house calls until she was properly cured.

Janet wondered what such a cure entailed. All she knew about psychiatry was that the patients lay on couches and closed their eyes. That didn’t seem so terrible—but could it really change the way she felt about Marie?

Though the real problem was, Janet didn’t want to stop feeling the way she did.

Perhaps resistance to treatment was part of the sickness. Yet she didn’t feel sick. She felt healthier than she ever had before.

As Janet’s squat two-story row house came into view, she squared her shoulders and pulled off her cap. She ought to simply put all these worries aside for the time being. It was going to be a very busy summer.

The house was quiet as she approached. Her parents had gone to dinner at the club again, leaving Janet and Grandma to an evening on their own. On nights like this one, Janet usually warmed up a casserole and chatted with Grandma while they ate. After dinner they might listen to the radio awhile, then read in comfortable silence until bedtime.

The heat indoors was nearly unbearable on summer nights, so Mom and Dad usually slept on the screened porch at the back of the first floor, with Janet and Grandma on the separate porch just above. It had been their pattern ever since Grandma moved in. She’d declared as soon as she’d unpacked that, although she’d consented to live with them, she would not be forced to tolerate Janet’s father’s snores. It had been bad enough when he was a boy, she’d said, but now that he was grown she was no longer obliged to suffer.

Janet climbed the steps to the front porch, taking care to avoid the rickety old railing, and unlocked the front door, slipping off her shoes in the foyer in case Grandma was resting. In the evenings, every sound in the house was magnified.

A bright shape on the entry table caught Janet’s eye as she shrugged off her uniform jacket. A white envelope, solitary and stark against the shining black wood.

Janet snatched up the letter, her jacket falling to the floor. Panic rose in her throat at the sight of the typed letters across the front, spelling out her name in neat black ink. As her eyes flicked to the return address, she half prayed it was merely another letter from Holy Divinity.

Not this time. Bannon Press, the envelope proclaimed, followed by an address in New York City.

It had come.

Janet hugged the letter to her chest, her shoulders trembling under her thin white blouse. The envelope felt warm against her skin.

The seal was still in place. This letter was hers and hers alone.

Janet would take it straight to her room. She wanted to read the letter over and over, the way she’d done with A Love So Strange. She ran up the steps, her heart pounding, and didn’t slow when she reached the second-floor landing. Her hand was on the door to her bedroom when the voice came behind her.

“Why are you in such a hurry there, girl?”

“Grandma.” Janet tried in vain to steady herself before she turned. Her grandmother stood in the bathroom doorway, a fresh smile on her wrinkled face. Janet lowered her hand, wishing she were wearing a skirt so she could hide the letter in its folds. “Did you have a nice day?”

“Oh, your father came home for lunch and it was wretched, as always.” Grandma tsked. “When you’re not here to make it interesting, that is. I don’t know why they need you at that restaurant so much of the time.”

“Oh?” Janet racked her brain for a way to slip into her room without her grandmother following.

“Yes, yes. You know your father, always on about something.” Grandma folded her arms, and Janet steeled herself for a rant. “These days he’ll talk about nothing but that new bill. This ridiculous measure by the people who want to blaspheme the Lord’s holy name.”

“The In God We Trust bill?”

“That’s the one. The fools think if we put that on all our money, it’ll keep the Communists from blowing us into the sky. As if any one of those men down in Congress truly understands the first thing about Scripture. Or about Communists, for that matter.”

“Oh, Grandma.” Janet bent down to turn on the fan so it would cover the sound of their voices. The houses on either side of them were separated by no more than a narrow wall of bricks, and conversations carried so easily Janet sometimes felt she knew the neighbors’ problems as well as her own. Dad never liked it when Grandma talked about Communists, but he especially didn’t like it when the neighbors might hear.

Grandma had been a Socialist as a girl. She’d even been arrested once, for demonstrating against the draft during the first World War. She’d wanted to go on living in New York after Grandpa died, but Dad insisted she move in with them, telling the neighbors he wanted to look after her health. When they were alone, though, he said he’d made her leave because Grandma couldn’t be trusted not to walk into the United Nations one morning and tell Churchill himself to go fly a kite.

“Oh, don’t you worry about me, girl.” Grandma laughed as Janet switched on the fan. “Your father may act as though he’s in charge of what I do and don’t say, but trust me, he knows better! Now, enough political talk. You be a helpful child and tell me a happy story about your day.”

Janet tried to think, but her whole focus was on the letter tucked against her leg.

She hated having secrets from her grandmother. When she was younger, Janet had always gone to Grandma with her problems first. She’d poured her heart out to her time and again, sharing all the worries about school and friends that Mom and Dad never seemed to understand. Janet’s parents believed all problems stemmed from rule breaking, and so any troubles she encountered were of her own creation, but Grandma didn’t hold with that philosophy. She always knew exactly what to say to make Janet feel all right again.

This new problem was altogether different from the sort Janet used to bring her, though.

“My friend Marie starts her new job tomorrow,” Janet finally said. “She’ll be a typist at the State Department. A much better job than delivering cheeseburgers, if you ask me.”

Grandma laughed. “One of these days I need to borrow your father’s car and you can bring me one of those burgers. I’m a good tipper.”

Janet laughed. “You don’t have to tip me, Grandma.”

“Well, what if I want to? I’m sure I have a nickel somewhere in these pockets.” Grandma pretended to search her housedress.

Janet laughed again. “Shall I go ahead and heat up the casserole?”

“No, don’t you worry about that on my account. Don’t tell your mother, but I ate while I was out shopping this afternoon. I couldn’t take another night of casserole.”

“I won’t tell her if you promise not to tell her I ate at work, too. She’s always after me not to eat the Soda Shoppe food. She says it’ll make my skin greasy.”

“She doesn’t need to worry about that.” Grandma patted Janet’s cheek. “No girl for miles around has a complexion as fresh as yours.”

“Thanks, Grandma.” Janet smiled and reached for her doorknob. “I hope you have a good night, then.”

“A good night?” Grandma tilted her head to one side, her shrewd eyes drifting down to the letter in Janet’s hand. “Aren’t you coming downstairs to listen to Dr. Sixgun with me? Don’t make your poor grandma listen to those cowboys shoot up that desert all by my lonesome.”

“Yes, of course I’ll come.” Janet was getting desperate. “I just need to change out of my uniform first. I’m awfully sweaty.”

“All right, well. You do it quickly.”

Janet nodded, trying to look demure, the way Marie always did around adults. Grandma only laughed and waved before padding off in her slippers.

Janet waited until she was certain her grandmother was downstairs. Then, nearly tripping in her haste, she rushed into her own room, ignoring the swell of heat that smacked her in the face, and shut the door behind her. She threw herself down on the bed and ripped open the envelope. She made the sign of the cross, praying she wouldn’t be interrupted again before she’d read what the envelope contained.

Her hands were shaking so hard it took her a moment to realize four pieces of paper had fluttered out onto the pink bedspread. One was covered in neat black handwriting. Janet scooped up that one first.

It was a letter from Dolores Wood.

Dear Miss Jones,

(First, allow me to congratulate you on selecting such a cleverly simple pseudonym! “Janet Jones.” Much more appropriate than something long and strange, like “Dolores Woo d.” )

Miss Jones, as you can imagine, I receive a great many letters from readers. I wish I had time to reply to them all, but it wouldn’t be possible or I’d never have time left to write books. However, your letter stood out to me when I received it from my publisher, as you sound not unlike myself when I was a younger girl. In fact, I will admit that your letter affected me a great deal. At such a young age, to have the nerves required to obtain a book like mine must have taken a great deal of fortitude. Your courage bodes well for your future.

You requested my advice on how to become a writer yourself. My advice is simple: the only way to become a writer is to write. Every young writer has a story inside, usually countless stories. You must put yours onto paper.

Your letter didn’t specify what kind of writing you mean to undertake, but should you have an interest in paperback fiction, I’ve taken the liberty of asking my editor to include his specifications alongside my letter.

Should you wish, I would also be happy to read your writing and offer my thoughts on it. When I first began to write, the perspective of older writers on my work was invaluable to me.

Finally, because I remember, too, being young, and having no money to call my own, I’ve enclosed bus tickets so that you may visit when your manuscript is ready. You can find me most evenings at the Sheldon Lounge on West Fourth and Charles Streets.

Wishing you well,

Dolores Wood

Janet had to read the letter twice, then three times, before she was certain she understood its contents.

Dolores Wood had written to her.

Dolores Wood wanted Janet to visit her in New York. At a place called the Sheldon Lounge.

Was the Sheldon Lounge like the places she’d written about in A Love So Strange? Was it a—a lesbian bar?

Janet couldn’t wait to show this letter to Marie. She’d be astonished.

She reached for the other slips of paper. Sure enough, two of them were bus tickets, from Washington to New York and back again.

Janet had never taken a bus by herself. She and a few friends had traveled to Ocean City after graduation, but that had simply been for a day at the beach, and with one of the girls’ older sisters as a chaperone. Janet’s parents would never allow her to travel so far as New York on her own.

She tucked the tickets away in the drawer of her dressing table. The fourth piece of paper in the envelope was typewritten, from the Bannon Press office.

Dear Miss Jones,

Per the suggestion of Miss Wood, you are hereby invited to submit a manuscript for consideration by Nathan Levy, editor of Bannon Press. We have found success in publishing the novels of Miss Wood and similar works of Lesbiana by other authors, as interest in this topic has recently increased among paperback readers.

Our books, both fiction and otherwise, must speak honestly and candidly about the true nature of this topic, revealing its dangers and immoral associations (such as with other forms of criminality, witchcraft, et cetera). Our stories must end with appropriate resolutions for characters who engage in these practices. All manuscripts must be typewritten with one–inch margins.

Please send a whole or partial (100 pages or more) manuscript to the address below for review. Be sure to preserve a carbon copy of your original manuscript. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, you would be granted an advance payment of $2,000. Bannon Press maintains all control regarding book titles, covers, advertising and the like.

Yours truly,

Sally Johnson,

assistant to Nathan Levy, editor–in–chief

Bannon Press

54 W 23rd St., 17th floor

New York, NY 10011

This letter was even harder for Janet to understand than Dolores Wood’s. Her eyes kept skipping from word to word.

Lesbiana.

$2,000.

Witchcraft.

Witchcraft? Did it really say witchcraft?

Janet checked again. It did.

Her eyes drifted back to Dolores Wood’s letter, and the drawer that held her bus tickets. Miss Wood must have thought Janet was older than she was. Eighteen-year-old girls didn’t accept bus tickets from people they’d never met, or venture off by themselves to faraway cities.

Besides, it was beyond her wildest imaginings that she might actually go to New York and meet Dolores Wood herself. That she might enter a bar and see other girls like Janet and Marie. Girls who “engaged” in “practices” like the ones the Bannon Press letter had mentioned.

Janet’s mind spun. She closed her eyes, and all at once she saw a story unfolding.

A nondescript bar with no windows on a quiet Greenwich Village street. The type of place workingmen hurried past without looking up. Those men wouldn’t notice the girls who walked in and out of the bar with their eyes trained down, their hands tucked discreetly into their coat pockets.

Janet could see it all perfectly. As though she’d visited this bar already, where girls danced with other girls, as though that were a perfectly normal thing to do.

Behind her closed eyelids, Janet pictured two girls sitting at a small, grimy table, slightly removed from the other patrons. One of the girls had dark, curly hair and glasses. The other had blond hair and reminded Janet of a girl she’d once seen on television—the daughter of a contestant on some quiz show. The girl on the program had worn bright lipstick and a lovely dress, and as she’d smiled and twirled before the cheering audience her skirt had billowed out, offering the briefest glimpse of her knees.

Something about that girl had captivated Janet in a way she hadn’t quite understood, but now she saw that she was exactly right for the story forming in her mind.

The blond girl in the bar had met the brunette that very night, Janet decided. It was the first time either of them had dared to enter the place. Which was called... Penny’s Corner. And the two girls were... Paula. And Elaine.

Their story was only just beginning.

Janet opened her desk and reached in blindly, grabbing her old home economics notebook and a pencil. She turned to an empty page. A strange, tingling feeling flowed into her fingers as she wrote the first words.

I’d never come to an establishment like this one before. At first, I was so nervous I could barely see straight, but when I spotted the blond sitting in the back, looking lost and lovely at the same time, I knew I’d made the right choice.

As Janet’s pencil scratched across the paper, the tingling sensation crawled up to her chest. It was just like the night before, when she’d climbed onto that streetcar with Marie.

Janet lowered the notebook, gazing down at the pencil marks on the page. She’d just written the first sentences of her first novel. From here, the story could only grow.

A new set of lines began to take form in her mind. They were for later in the story, so Janet skipped her pencil down the page.

“There’s something I have to tell you, Elaine. Something I’ve longed to tell you.”

I was so breathless I could barely speak. “What is it, Paula?”

“I love you. I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you.”

I closed my eyes and tasted each word.

Elaine and Paula would fall in love. Janet could see it as clearly as she saw her own reflection in the mirror. The tenderness the two girls shared would be deep, true and undeniable. Until, tragically, society came between them, as it always must.

A title drifted into her mind, too. Alone No Longer. Janet wrote it across the top of the page.

She kept writing, the words coming to mind faster than she could scrawl them out. She jotted down notes for later, too. Scenes she would write soon, about love and loss and heartbreak.

Sometime later, her grandmother knocked on the door, but Janet claimed a headache and wrote on. She wrote all through the evening and the night that followed, until her eyes refused to stay open and the pencil fell from her limp fingers. Yet even as she finally felt herself passing into sleep, that tingling sensation never went away.