Pulp

by Robin Talley

  Grandma didn’t seem to notice.

  “You work hard at your writing.” Grandma released Janet’s arm and gave her a slight push toward the door. “The rest will work itself out. When you’re all grown-up you’ll be a girl we can all be proud of.”

  Janet felt a new wave of tears forming.

  She had been working hard at her writing, but it wasn’t the sort of writing that would make anyone proud.

  She pasted on her Soda Shoppe smile. “Thank you, Grandma.”

  “You’re welcome, girl.” Her grandmother smiled, too. Janet wondered if the gesture was any sincerer than her own. “Now you run on downstairs and put dinner in the oven. You need a good meal. You’re still growing after all.”

  Janet nodded and stood. She couldn’t believe how foolish she’d been.

  She’d have to pray Grandma kept this conversation secret. She might not tell Janet’s parents—not with the way she ranted about Dad’s opinions every night—but what about her friends from the bridge club? Or Janet’s aunts, who Grandma wrote to every week?

  What about their priest at Holy Trinity? Grandma went to confession every Saturday. What if she told Father O’Brien, and he thought Janet a grievous sinner?

  Was Janet a grievous sinner?

  Grandma lifted the flannel skirt she was still holding, bending back the hem to examine the stitching. “Wait, Janet, let’s hold off on dinner for a moment. Go ahead and try on that skirt and I’ll take a quick measure before we go downstairs.” She passed the mound of drab green fabric to Janet and shifted over to sit on the bed. “Hope you don’t mind if I take a quick rest in the meantime, your chair is awfully stiff and all that chatting’s worn me out, and—why, girl, what’s this? You’ve got a lump the size of the Great Pyramid of Egypt in your bed.”

  “What?” Janet’s panic was instant. She knew she’d need a lie, any lie, but she couldn’t think fast enough. “There’s no lump, Grandma!”

  Janet wanted to jump down, to yank her grandmother away from the bed, but it was already too late. Grandma was on her knees, reaching under the mattress.

  “What’s this?” It was clear from the worry in Grandma’s voice that she’d found something. “Janet? Are you keeping things hidden under here?”

  She shouldn’t have let Grandma sit on her bed. She shouldn’t have even let her come into her room.

  Should she say she’d never seen the books before? No, no, Grandma would never believe her.

  “It—it isn’t mine. It belongs to another girl—” Janet cursed herself for saying that. What girl would she possibly blame for this? Not Marie! “A girl from work, I—she asked me to—I was doing her a favor, keeping it for her—”

  It was obvious Grandma wasn’t listening. She rose to her feet, gingerly dangling Janet’s worn copy of A Love So Strange out in front of her by two fingers. As though it were a bomb, or a mud-covered shoe at the playground.

  The glue that had bound the book was almost gone, and the cover was barely attached to the pages, but her grandmother could see the picture on it well enough. That much was clear by the way the color had drained from Grandma’s face.

  A moment later Grandma shook her head, a thought seeming to take shape in her mind. She flung the book to the floor. The cover broke off entirely and drifted down after the pages, landing featherlight on the gray carpet above them.

  “What is this?” Grandma’s voice was lower than a whisper. Her hands shook as she reached out to grasp Janet’s chin. “Why would you bring this—this filth into our home?”

  Janet blinked back tears. She was all out of lies. “It isn’t like that,” she mumbled.

  Grandma released her and jerked away, facing the window and pressing a hand to her forehead, as though she couldn’t bear to look at Janet any longer.

  “Those questions you were asking.” Grandma’s shoulders hunched. “I told myself you were still a child—just a curious child, but this...” She whipped around to face Janet again, her eyes alight with a strange new animation as she waved her hand toward where the broken book lay on the rug. “You have to put a stop to this. Promise me, girl.”

  Put a stop to what? Janet stared at the pillar of icy fury her grandmother had become.

  She forced herself to take a long breath, then another, before she spoke.

  Grandma didn’t mean for her to stop seeing Marie, surely. She couldn’t possibly know about Janet and Marie.

  Did she mean for her to stop reading the lesbian novels, then? Or for her to stop being who she was?

  It didn’t matter. Janet couldn’t have stopped any of it, even if she’d wanted to.

  “Promise me,” Grandma said again. Her blazing eyes were locked on Janet’s.

  “I promise.” This lie was harder than the ones that had come before it. Janet couldn’t prevent her gaze from wavering, and she knew her grandmother wasn’t fooled.

  “You’re young.” Grandma looked away, as though muttering to herself more than Janet. She kicked at the torn cover of A Love So Strange with her slipper. “Young people are drawn to dangerous literature. That’s been true since even before my time. But reading rubbish can lead to practicing rubbish, so one can never be too careful. I can’t let this go any further, Janet.”

  “What?” A cold ball of fear began to unfurl in Janet’s stomach. “What do you mean?”

  Without another word, Grandma bent and scooped up the tattered pages and the torn-off cover of A Love So Strange, crushing them in her fists as she pushed past Janet to the door.

  “Wait!” Janet had never seen her grandmother move so rapidly. She was already on the stairs, her slippers moving so fast Janet had a flash of worry that she might fall. “Where are you going?”

  She rushed down the stairs after her just as Grandma strode into the living room. When she bent down to fumble on the end table where she kept her cigarettes, Janet almost relaxed—Grandma simply wanted a smoke, that was normal enough—until she saw her grandmother moving toward the fireplace with a matchbook in her hand.

  “No!” Janet forgot caution entirely and shouted the word, but it was too late. Grandma had always had a deft hand with matches, and the pages were already alight in the cold stone fireplace by the time Janet reached her. The blaze bloomed fast and bright, the cheap gray paper turning red, then black, as the flames crept in.

  “It’s for the best, girl.” Grandma’s hands crept onto her shoulders from behind as Janet stared into the fire. She stifled a cry at the touch. “Children need guidance. It’s far too easy to stray onto sin’s path if there’s no one looking out for you.”

  The flames rose higher. Most of the pages had already blackened and crumbled, but the cover took longer, the fire still licking at the edges of Sam and Betty’s portrait. Janet watched as a small hole formed in the middle of Betty’s nightgown and rapidly grew, until the fire had consumed both girls. A moment later they were no more than ash.

  “There.” Grandma retrieved a poker from the rack and thrust it into the dying embers. “Now you go and get a glass of water to douse it, and bring the broom back with you. A grocery bag, too. We’ll need to sweep all this up and throw it in the garbage before your parents get home. This would be the death of them both.”

  Janet didn’t move. She stared into the fireplace. A small black lump was all that remained of the book that had changed her world.

  “Did you hear me, girl?” Grandma reached for Janet as though to grab her chin again. Janet pulled away first.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Her voice croaked on the word, but her grandmother didn’t seem to notice.

  “Then go and do as I said.” Grandma reached into her pocket and pulled out her rosary, methodically fingering the thin, clear beads as though each one told her something new. “It will be all right, Janet. You’ll see. You’ll forget any of this ever happened.”

  Janet forced herself to nod.

/>   “You’ll see.” Grandma pressed a hand onto her shoulder again. Janet closed her eyes to force back the tears. “Soon, everything will be back to normal, and you’ll feel good as new.”

  13

  Monday, October 9, 2017

  A pickup truck had been speeding down the road. Father had been directly in its path, but he hadn’t tried to move.

  When the ambulance arrived, his body was already cold.

  Abby had read the scene where Elaine’s father died more times than she could count. There was something weirdly fascinating about it. She kept changing her mind about whether Marian Love had left it intentionally vague or if it was supposed to be obvious what had happened.

  But she couldn’t stop thinking about that pickup truck. Marian Love had written about Elaine’s father being killed in what might have been an accident or might have been a suicide, and Marian herself had died in a car crash not long after. It was such an eerie coincidence.

  Obviously, it was a coincidence, though. There was no way Marian Love had been trying to kill herself when she and her friend got into that wreck. Her friend had survived after all. If it had been some kind of—of suicide pact—the friend wouldn’t have gotten out of that crash alive.

  Besides, she’d had the manuscript for Women of the Twilight Realm in the car with her when she died. Marian Love wouldn’t have killed herself with her unpublished manuscript by her side, would she?

  There were so many questions. Abby hated unanswered questions. They made her feel unqualified to even read this book, let alone write one of her own.

  Not that it mattered anymore. She’d hardly written anything in days. She kept waiting for inspiration, but all Abby had managed to do since her meeting with Professor Herbert was change her title. She’d decided to call her book Totally Normal Women in the Daytime, since The Erotic Adventures of Gladys and Henrietta might not be allowed on the shelf at Barnes & Noble.

  She stayed late at the library every night now. Sometimes she tried to catch up on homework, hoping that would make Ms. Sloane leave her alone. Her parents had barely said anything about that call from the principal in the end. Dad hadn’t come back into town after all, and Mom had threatened to take Abby’s phone away but she hadn’t actually done it.

  Most nights, though, she spent hours online, searching for information about Marian Love. She was still working up the courage to contact Claire Singer, the writer who’d known Marian, but in the meantime she was hoping to stumble across a helpful post on an obscure blog, or a set of scanned documents like the one on Lawrence Hastings’s website.

  Then there were nights when Abby just read her favorite scenes over and over. By this point she could recite entire pages’ worth of Paula/Elaine banter from memory.

  But today was a holiday—Columbus Day if you were the official DC calendar, or Indigenous Peoples’ Day if you were one of Abby’s teachers—and the library was closed. Fawcett followed its own calendar, so Abby had gone to school that day, and afterward she’d gone to her lit mag meeting just in case Ms. Taylor was paying attention, but now she had no choice but to go home. It was the last place she wanted to be, but at least Mom was in California again. And this early in the afternoon, Dad would still be at the office.

  As she walked, Abby tried to think about the scene she was supposed to be writing. What would Gladys do after Henrietta’s best friend was murdered coming home from a gay bar? She knew Henrietta would bypass all the usual stages of grief and go straight to being absolutely livid, but she had no idea how Gladys would react, so she couldn’t figure out how to start the scene.

  Maybe this was a sign that she shouldn’t write the scene at all. If the words had stopped flowing, that could mean she was on the wrong track.

  Or maybe it just meant Abby was a complete failure.

  The house was quiet when she unlocked the front door. She shrugged out of her favorite cardigan—white with pink flamingos—and hung it up, glancing at the pile of mail on the entry table. More college brochures had arrived. She flipped past a heavy envelope from Washington University and yet another postcard from NYU, then tossed them into the recycling and started up the stairs.

  “Abby?” Footsteps above her. Shit.

  Abby glanced back toward the front door, but it was too late. He’d seen her. “Hi, Dad.”

  Her father climbed down slowly, dressed in an old U2 T-shirt and jeans instead of his usual suit. He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck when he reached the bottom step. “Good, you’re here.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

  “Your brother’s in his room.” Dad glanced toward the top of the stairs, as though that answered Abby’s question.

  “Okay...” Abby stepped past him. “Well, I should start my homework.”

  “One second.” Dad kept looking up the stairs. It was making her nervous. “I need to talk to you about something first.”

  No!

  “I’ve gotta go.” Abby’s heart thundered in her chest. She tried again to push past him. “Let’s talk later.”

  “Abby, your brother was suspended from school today.” His voice cracked on the last word.

  For a second she thought she’d heard wrong. “He—what?”

  Dad nodded. “He got into a fight with another boy.”

  “No, he didn’t.” There had to be some kind of mistake. Ethan had never fought anyone in his life. He cried when they watched Bridge to Terabithia, for God’s sake. “There’s no way. He couldn’t have.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, before I spoke to the principal. Apparently the other boy said something about your brother’s dance recital, and then he—I’m not sure exactly. Mr. Geis wasn’t fully clear on the details, and Ethan won’t talk to me about it.” Dad exhaled slowly. “He won’t talk to me at all.”

  Abby’s head spun. Whenever one of her parents said they needed to talk, her mind sped to the worst possible conclusion. The one that seemed inevitable some days. On other days, it seemed as though if she could just keep her head down—if she could just make it through this day, this week, this year, without anything changing...

  Nothing in the future was inevitable. There was always a way to hit Pause.

  Now, though, something was changing. Her brother was changing, and Abby didn’t know how to stop it.

  “I...” Abby swallowed. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I.” Dad twisted his hands in front of him. “He’s in his room. Would you please go talk to him? He may not be ready to tell us what happened, but if you could just get him to come downstairs that would be a big help. I already tried to tempt him with going out for ice cream, but he wouldn’t even look up.”

  “You were going to take him out for ice cream for getting suspended?”

  Once again, Dad ignored her question. “Actually, why don’t you offer to take him instead? It would do him good to get outside. The two of you could walk down to that deli on Connecticut. Here.” He fished in his wallet and held out a twenty-dollar bill.

  Abby stared at the money in her father’s hand.

  Her parents already seemed to have forgotten about that phone call from Ms. Taylor. Now Dad wanted to give her money to buy her brother ice cream because he’d fought with some other kid?

  Nothing in the entire world made sense anymore.

  “I—I can’t.” Abby tried desperately to think of some reason, any reason, why she couldn’t go upstairs. “I’m supposed to go meet Linh. I’m already late.”

  Dad glanced at her cardigan still hanging on the peg. “I thought you were going to your room. Something about homework.”

  “Yeah, um...” Abby thought fast. “This is homework. Linh and I are working on a project together, and we’re meeting at the library. I’d totally forgotten we made this plan, but I just remembered, so I’ve got to go.”

  She started to panic
before the words were out of her mouth. What if Dad remembered the library was closed?

  “All right, well—all right.” Dad shook his head. “We’ll need to talk soon, though. This week—wait, it can’t be this week, since your mom has the gala in Chicago, but once she gets back into town next Wednesday we’ll all sit down and talk as a family.”

  “I can’t.” Abby’s words were coming so fast she barely knew what she was saying. All she knew was that she would not be participating in any talking-as-a-family-related activities. “Next week I’ve got to work on my college applications. I’m totally behind, and I won’t have time for anything else. So, well, anyway, I’ve gotta go.” She tugged her cardigan off the peg.

  Dad watched her without arguing. He didn’t even seem annoyed. “Text me if you need a ride home, Abby.”

  She didn’t answer. Instead she let the front door slam behind her, took the steps down to the sidewalk two at a time and started up toward Wisconsin.

  Dad wouldn’t be able to see where she went once she turned the corner. She could go to the Starbucks across from the library and find a quiet place to write. She didn’t know what she’d write about, since she still wasn’t sure what should happen next in Gladys and Henrietta’s story, but that was fine. She could go back to one of those exercises they’d done last year in her creative writing seminar. What was that trick Ms. Sloane was always saying to use if you were stumped on a story?

  Write what you know. That was it. Start with real life, and expand from there.

  But Abby didn’t want to write about her real life. She didn’t want to write about her dorky kid brother getting into fights at school, and she didn’t want to write about ex-girlfriends who randomly almost-kissed you, then fell all over themselves apologizing for it. She didn’t want to write about how it felt when it seemed as though there could’ve been someone, somewhere, who might understand, but who turned out to have been dead for decades.

  She wanted to write about something that would take her mind off all that stuff. Something happy.

  Then she turned onto Wisconsin, her eyes latching on to the burger place across the street, and she knew exactly what to use for happy inspiration.