Pulp

by Robin Talley

  “He was being a jerk.” Ethan shrugged. “He kicked me out of class for being, like, two minutes late.”

  “Well, yeah.” Abby remembered that from her own dance-class years. “You know you aren’t allowed to be late to the studio. Besides, I thought you always tried to be there five minutes early, since you’re a dance dork and everything.”

  “I’m not a dance dork.” Ethan leaned forward and pinched the bridge of his nose. His face was red and blotchy. Shit—had her goofy kid brother been crying? “Anyway, it was only two minutes.”

  “Okay, but what’s the big deal? School’s over. Why didn’t you just go home?”

  Ethan looked away.

  “So you are in trouble.” Abby tried to sound stern. “What did you do?”

  “It isn’t some huge deal.” Ethan rolled his eyes. “I only told him it was a dumb rule. Then I kind of, um—” Ethan’s voice fell. “Threw my water bottle at his head.”

  “What?” Abby’s jaw dropped. This was so unlike Ethan she might as well have fallen into an alternate universe. “Did you hit him?”

  “Um. Kinda.” Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose again. “He moved, and it kind of—bounced off his shoulder.”

  “That’s horrible!” Abby kept expecting him to say he was joking. Ethan was always thirsty, and he carried one of those huge metal water bottles everywhere he went. Getting hit with it would be incredibly painful. “You could’ve really hurt him!”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “What the hell?” She couldn’t believe he was just sitting there, impassive. “Did you want to hurt him?”

  “I only...” Ethan bent down so far all Abby could see was the back of his head. His thick brown hair pointed into a tiny V at the base of his neck. “I only wanted him to leave me alone.”

  Abby didn’t understand. The Ethan she’d grown up with would’ve at least been sorry for doing something like this.

  “Do you think Mom and Dad will both come?” Ethan didn’t look up. “They did that time I got sick in gym.”

  “Yeah, well, your appendix ruptured. You had to be hospitalized. Water-bottle throwing probably isn’t on the same level.”

  Ethan let out a noisy breath. “It’s like you want me to almost die again.”

  “You didn’t almost die.” Abby rolled her eyes, but she was thinking, If you want to see Mom and Dad voluntarily in the same place at the same time again, almost dying is probably your best bet.

  “Anyway.” Ethan wouldn’t meet her eyes. “They’re calling them both, right?”

  “I don’t know. They’ll probably see who they can get to come. Dad was supposed to get back into town this morning, but he’s only staying one night before he has to leave again. Maybe they’ll call Mom, but she’s in—”

  “Pennsylvania. I know.”

  Abby sat down beside him on the bench, her backpack thumping heavily behind her. “She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Yeah. Because Dad’ll be gone by then.”

  Abby pretended not to hear the resentment in his voice. “They have to travel for work, Ethan.”

  He shrugged and didn’t answer, even though he had to know it was the truth. Their mom was the president of a think tank, and Dad was a lawyer for the National Institutes of Health. They both worked long hours, and they were always having to leave DC for conferences and meetings and other stuff Abby had given up trying to keep track of.

  “Everyone’s parents travel for work.” Abby fixed her eyes on her sandals. “It isn’t a big deal.”

  “I don’t know anybody whose parents travel as much as Mom and Dad do.”

  And a memory swam into Abby’s mind before she could stop it.

  It was a week after the fight—the big fight, the one Linh saw—and everyone at home was being even quieter than usual. Well, Ethan and Abby were, at least. Mom and Dad, whichever one of them was home at any given time, were trying to act normal. Except they kept smiling too hard or sighing too loud, and making it that much more obvious that they were faking.

  But their Tudor-style row house was a hundred years old, and the walls were thin. When you were upstairs, it was nearly impossible to have a conversation without everybody else on the second floor hearing you. Most of the time there was nothing to hear, since no one in the family spoke to each other anymore, but that night was different.

  Mom was on the phone in her room. Abby could tell she was trying to keep her voice down, but it wasn’t working.

  “No, no. Fine. Stay in New York if that’s what you want. I’ll be here, doing everything. Again.” There was a thin, pained note in her voice Abby had never heard before. As though she was actively trying to sound like she was suffering. “No, he’s fine, but I already told you she’s upset. You don’t remember? I think she had a fight with her girlfriend, and—yes, it was about that. What did you think? No, no, she didn’t say anything, you know she never tells me anything, but if you paid attention to anything other than yourself, maybe you’d start to realize—”

  Abby didn’t hear any more after that. She shoved a pillow over her head, dug out her headphones and turned the music up loud enough to drown it all out.

  Now, though, she kind of wished she’d kept listening. As far as she knew, that phone call was the last time her parents had actually spoken to each other.

  “They’re never both home at the same time,” Ethan was muttering. “You’re hardly ever home, either.”

  “I have a lot of work to do. I’m a senior, dude.” Abby tried to sound playful. She’d called him dude when he was a kid, and it always used to make him smile.

  “But don’t you think—”

  “All right, Ethan, it shouldn’t be much longer.” The principal’s voice boomed above them. “Abby Zimet! So good to see you.”

  “Hi, Mr. Geis.” Abby stood up. Mr. Geis had been the assistant principal when she was in middle school. “How are you?”

  “Very well, Abby. You must be a senior? I’m sorry, you’re probably missing a meeting or practice this afternoon, aren’t you?”

  “I just got back from the health care protest at the White House.”

  “Of course you did.” Mr. Geis smiled at her, but from the way his eyes kept darting down, she could tell he wanted to focus on Ethan. “You always were passionate about the causes you believed in. Are you taking Contemporary Politics this semester?”

  “No, I’m doing the Women’s and Gender Studies seminar instead.” Come to think of it, didn’t she have a paper due for WGS sometime this week? On that campaign down in Virginia—the transgender candidate who was running against the homophobe?

  Abby remembered talking to Vanessa about it, but she couldn’t remember when she was supposed to turn it in. It couldn’t have been due today, could it?

  Shit...

  “Well, don’t let us keep you, Abby.” Mr. Geis was still smiling at her brightly. “It was good seeing you. Now, young man, come into my office, please.”

  Abby watched her brother climb to his feet without lifting his head and follow the no-longer-smiling Mr. Geis into the inner office. He didn’t look back.

  “Your dad should be here any minute,” Mr. Geis was telling him as Abby turned to leave.

  “What about my mom?” she heard Ethan say.

  Mr. Geis paused. “Your father said she was out of town.”

  “She isn’t coming?” Suddenly, Ethan sounded frantic. He couldn’t actually be surprised Mom wasn’t coming all the way from Pittsburgh to pick him up from school, could he?

  “I’m sure you’ll talk to her when she’s back home.” Mr. Geis had barely gotten the words out before Ethan started moaning. Footsteps squeaked in the hall outside. “Is something wrong, Ethan?”

  “I don’t feel good,” Ethan croaked, in the fakest voice imaginable.

  “What’s going on?” It was Dad, frowning in the
doorway. Of course he’d show up right as Ethan was laying on the drama. “Abby? What are you doing here?”

  His suit jacket was rumpled. He’d probably been wearing it since he got up that morning in New York. He would’ve worn it the entire train ride back to Union Station, and the cab ride to his office after that, and then through all his meetings or lunches or whatever it was he did all day. Neither of their parents ever went home until it was absolutely unavoidable.

  Behind them, Ethan moaned again.

  “Is Ethan sick?” Dad’s face shifted from confusion to worry. For a second, Abby was jealous she’d never thought to try fake moaning. “I thought they said he got in trouble with his teacher.”

  “You can go on in, Mr. Zimet,” Ms. Jackson said, emerging from the back room. She didn’t seem particularly worried. She’d probably heard plenty of fake moans in her time. “Your son’s in with Mr. Geis. He was feeling fine before.”

  “All right.” Dad turned back to Abby, as though waiting for her to solve this puzzle for him.

  “He wants Mom,” she whispered, as patiently as she could manage. “He thinks if he’s sick you’ll both come, the way you did when he had that appendix thing. You should probably get Mom on the phone. If he hears both your voices he might calm down.”

  “Abby, it isn’t as simple as...” Dad glanced toward the office. “Wait for us out here and we’ll all go home together, all right?”

  “Oh, um...” Her eyes darted up, down, anywhere but at him. As much as she wanted her parents to act like parents again, the thought of actually being alone with her dad and her brother for any amount of time was excruciating. “I’ve gotta go. I have a big project for, uh, French...”

  But Abby couldn’t think of anything more to say about her fictional French project, so she darted under Dad’s arm and out of the office.

  She was halfway down the hall before she realized she was running. Dad wouldn’t come after her, though, not with Ethan and Mr. Geis waiting.

  She swung around a corner into the huge, vacant main stairwell, listening out for footsteps in the hall behind her. Nothing came.

  Abby climbed up one floor, and then another. The third floor looked empty. Surely Dad wouldn’t think to look for her up here. When they got out of their meeting he’d assume she’d already gone home, and he’d take Ethan somewhere to give him a talking-to.

  She opened her laptop with shaky hands, though she wasn’t sure why—it wasn’t as if she could focus enough to do homework right now.

  That was when Abby noticed the ebook sitting on her desktop, staring at her. Women of the Twilight Realm. Without pausing to think, she clicked it open. She was still on the third chapter, and the point of view had switched from Elaine to another character.

  The new girl was magnificent.

  She was young, certainly—no more than twenty or so. Her hand-stitched clothes marked her as a stranger to New York. She was a stranger to bars like Mitch’s Corner, too, Paula was sure of it. She’d seen enough first-timers to know the mix of apprehension and anticipation they always carried, even when they were doing their best to look tough. Before tonight, the pretty, little blond girl hovering by the jukebox with an unlit cigarette clamped between her fingers had never set foot in a queer bar.

  She’d thought about it, though—Paula was certain of that much, too. There was something about the steely set of the new girl’s hips, and the way every so often she cast her eyes from side to side, watching the bar’s patrons as they danced and drank and talked. Yes, the girl might be new, but she wasn’t a total innocent.

  Paula ordered a beer and a martini, and then, holding the drinks tight, sauntered over beside the new girl to peer down at the jukebox. The blond didn’t look up.

  “The songs in that thing are no good,” Paula said, lifting the martini glass. “Old Max is so stingy he probably hasn’t bought a new record since the Hoover years.”

  The blond met Paula’s eyes for a moment, then shifted her gaze back to her own white schoolgirl blouse.

  Paula smiled. The new girl’s nerves only made her look prettier.

  “I suppose I wasn’t really looking for a good song.” The girl took the offered martini and drained half of it in one gulp. “I only hoped that if I waited long enough, someone interesting might come over and talk to me.”

  Paula didn’t bother trying to conceal her reaction. She laughed, long and loud, and let herself relax a little. “I hope I fit the bill.”

  The girl appraised Paula, taking in her height, her faded brown slacks, the full glass of beer sweating in her hand.

  “Interesting, yes.” The girl nodded. “So far. But if I’m going to make a full assessment, I think we’ll need to dance.”

  Paula smiled. If she was going to keep up with this one, she’d need to be quick. She took both drinks and set them on the little table next to the jukebox, then looped her arm around the girl’s back and steered her toward the dance floor.

  “You got a name, new girl?” she asked, teasing, as they started to dance.

  “Elaine.”

  “It’s a pleasure, Elaine. I’m Paula.”

  “Well, Paula, what do the girls do for fun in this city when they’re not sipping martinis and dancing to old records here in Mitch’s Corner?”

  Paula smiled again, winding her arm around Elaine’s back to pull her in close. “I can only speak for myself, Elaine, but I like to hit the movies.”

  “Alone?”

  “If I have to. But I’ve found everything looks better when there’s a pretty girl by your side.”

  Abby tilted her chin to the ceiling. In spite of herself, a grin crept onto her face.

  Meet-cutes were overdone, but Abby had always loved those old-fashioned romance novels the library had on spinner racks. The formulaic romantic comedies you could get on Netflix, too. They were all so predictable. Maybe that was why it was so delightful to lose herself in them.

  She could recite the plot template by heart. A woman and (usually) a man met, traded witty banter and fell in love. There was always some stupid obstacle to them living happily ever after—one of them was a cattle rancher and the other one was a vegetarian, or one was a workaholic and the other was a manic pixie dream girl, or whatever—but they figured out how to overcome it and learned important lessons along the way. Then they did live happily ever after, without ever encountering a single problem for the rest of their lives.

  It was all ridiculous and silly and unrealistic. Abby knew that. She’d only ever been in love with one person, but she still knew fantasy when she saw it.

  Love didn’t conquer all. Whatever else was going on in the lives of Paula and Elaine outside that smoky bar in 1956 wasn’t going to stop just because the two of them had danced and bantered.

  But God, it would be fucking wonderful if it did.

  Abby settled down with her back against the wall and clicked through to the next page. She put in her headphones so she wouldn’t hear anything from downstairs and focused on the screen in front of her.

  It wouldn’t be so bad to lose herself again.

  4

  Tuesday, June 28, 1955

  “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.