Robin Talley - Pulp

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.