by Robin Talley
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Well, hurry up. A car pulled into space sixteen and they’re waiting for you.”
They wouldn’t have had to wait if Mr. Pritchard hadn’t taken up so much time scolding her, but Janet knew better than to talk back.
She trotted over to space sixteen. Yet another college boy on a date with yet another pretty girl. “Welcome to the Soda Shoppe, your top spot for a refreshing drink and a bite to—”
Janet stopped.
The college boy in the green Ford looked no different from any other college boy who came through the Soda Shoppe on a summer night. But this time, the pretty girl in the passenger seat was Marie.
She stared straight at Janet, biting her lip, a pleading look in her eyes. She wasn’t wearing her glasses. She looked so different without them. More vulnerable.
Janet’s gaze flicked back and forth from Marie to the boy in the driver’s seat. She could feel her heart slipping down. Shattering into pieces around her feet.
She’d barely seen Marie in weeks. They’d rarely even managed to talk on the phone for more than a minute or two. Marie was always too busy whenever Janet tried to make plans.
Now here she was, with some boy Janet had never seen before.
Marie was everything to her. That hadn’t changed, regardless of Carol’s warning or Grandma’s order or Senator Hunt’s son.
Yet perhaps what was happening right now would change things.
“Yes?” the boy asked, startling Janet. He had a crew cut and a thin, pale scar on his chin, and he was wearing a Dartmouth letter jacket despite the heat.
Dartmouth. Of course. The college man Marie’s mother had tried to fix her up with. The one Marie had told Carol to call her “boyfriend.”
“You look as though you’ve seen a ghost, miss,” the boy joked. Janet swallowed.
“Ah, yes. Welcome to—ah.” The script flew from Janet’s head. She’d suddenly remembered the boy’s name. It was Harold. Harold Smith. “May I take your order?”
“Sure.” Harold turned to Marie and laid a careless hand on her arm. As though Marie was as much his property as the shiny green car. “You know what you want, sugar?”
Sugar?
Janet couldn’t do this.
She backed away. At first she tried to keep her chin up in case Mr. Pritchard was watching, but she gave up when she felt the tears rushing to her eyes. When she was far enough from the car that she couldn’t be heard, she trotted up to Shirley and grabbed her arm tightly. “Could you take car sixteen for me? I’m in the weeds, and that fellow looks like a big tipper.”
“Of course.” Shirley beamed, adjusted her blue cap and trotted over to the confused-looking Harold Smith.
Janet jerked back. She couldn’t look at Marie again, sitting silent in the passenger seat as though she were any girl out on a date at the Soda Shoppe.
She rushed back to the counter to collect herself, only to find Mr. Pritchard still there.
“Janet!” He sounded genuinely angry now. “You were running again!”
She rubbed her face with her hand. The most she could do was mumble. “Sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
She tried to raise her voice. “I’m very sorry, sir.”
“Don’t give me sorry. Your Double Decker and Big Dog are up. Hop to it!”
He clapped his hands twice. Janet wanted to rip off his blue vinyl apron. Instead, she loaded her tray. “Yes, sir.”
She shoveled the food onto the stand for the couple in the Oldsmobile, not bothering to ask if they needed extra ketchup, and trotted straight over to the car that had pulled into space thirteen. This time she managed to get the script right, but she couldn’t muster even a hint of a smile as she jotted down their order for Cokes, fried shrimp and grilled cheese.
For the next hour she trotted at top speed from car to car, all her attentions focused on not looking at car sixteen. Only when she caught a glimpse of a black Buick in the space did she realize Marie and the Dartmouth man who’d called her “sugar” were gone.
It didn’t help her nerves. She barely smiled at any cars for the rest of the night, and she forgot to put in one family’s steak sandwich order for a full ten minutes. Mr. Pritchard had her bring them free shakes to make up for it, but when Janet was halfway to the car with her tray full of Summer Freezes, her foot caught on an old root beer bottle and she toppled backward. The shakes soared off her tray and into the air, soaking the Buick’s tires.
“Janet!” Footsteps came running up. Shirley’s voice was almost a shriek. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
“No.” Janet sat up. “I mean, yes. I mean, no, I’m not hurt.”
“There’s a new truck in space seven, Shirley. Hop to it.”
Janet didn’t have to look up to know that the new shadow looming over her was Mr. Pritchard’s.
“Whatever’s the matter with you today better be fixed, and fast.” He snapped his fingers as Janet climbed slowly to her feet. Her left shin felt wet. “Take your break. I’ll have Joe clean up this mess and cover your cars, and when your five minutes is up you’d better be back to normal.”
Janet brushed the parking lot dust off her slacks. Blood seeped through the fabric at the knee. “Yes, sir.”
She didn’t look at Mr. Pritchard again. She didn’t want to give him a chance to change his mind.
Ignoring the pain in her leg, Janet trotted straight to the telephone booth and reached into her tip pocket for a dime. She’d plugged it into the slot and started dialing the number before she’d even pulled the door closed behind her. Her heart raced as she listened to the phone ring on the other end.
Marie may not be home yet. She and that Harold might be at a late movie, or simply driving around. Or they might’ve driven somewhere and parked, and—
Janet closed her eyes and listened to the dull ringing sound until the click came. “Hello?”
It was Marie.
“Oh, thank heavens it’s you.” Janet turned her back to the Soda Shoppe and shut her eyes tightly. She wanted to imagine she was alone with Marie’s voice. This Marie, the girl she’d always known, not the stranger she’d seen tonight. “I was afraid—”
“Yes?” Marie’s voice was high, and exceedingly polite. As though she wasn’t entirely sure she recognized Janet’s voice on the line. “What is it?”
“How could you do that?” Janet’s words flooded out. “Why would you? That boy—that—”
“One moment, please.” Marie’s words came quickly, too. There was a pause, and Janet could hear Marie opening doors and closing them again. When her voice returned, the excessive politeness was gone and she was speaking more rapidly than Janet had ever heard her speak before. “I’m so sorry. It was all Harold’s idea. He was hungry, and it was the closest spot. I wanted to tell him not to go to the Soda Shoppe but I couldn’t think of a reason that wouldn’t be suspicious, and besides, I was sure we wouldn’t wind up parked in your section, or perhaps you wouldn’t be working tonight at all, but then the next thing I knew—”
“Is that what matters?” Janet covered her face with her hand. If she started to cry, she didn’t want Mr. Pritchard to see. “Making him suspicious? What about me, Marie? Don’t you even care what I think?”
Marie must’ve heard how upset she was, but Janet didn’t care. She felt raw, open, exposed. Apart from that moment on Marie’s bedroom floor, almost three weeks ago now, this was the most either of them had said aloud about their feelings for one another.
“I don’t—” Marie seemed lost. “I can’t—”
“You can’t what?”
“Of course I care.” Marie’s words were quiet. “Surely you must understand, none of this was my idea. My mother arranged everything. Last week, at the club, and then tonight—”
“Last week?” Janet caught her breath.
“You never said anything about seeing him last week.”
“I’m so sorry.” The pain was audible in Marie’s voice. “I hate this. I hate everything about this. I want to be with you, but I can’t tell my parents that, or Harold, either, and—oh, but we don’t have much time. You’re on your break now, aren’t you? How long do you have?”
Janet looked at her watch. How many minutes had already passed since Mr. Pritchard had sent her away? “Not much. Why?”
“There won’t be time for me to tell you properly, but I don’t know how else to do it.” Marie’s voice shook. “Something happened at work today.”
Janet was lost. Was Marie simply trying to change the subject? “What happened?”
“They’re looking for me.” Marie let out a choking sound. “That is, they’re looking for a typist in my department. Someone they think is—” She whispered the next word, so low Janet could barely understand her. “Subversive.”
“Janet!” Mr. Pritchard was shouting her name, somewhere beyond the glass booth. Janet turned away.
“What do you mean?” she whispered into the phone. “How do you know, Marie?”
“I shouldn’t say anything more over the phone. Though if they’ve tapped this line I suppose it’s already too late, but even so—”
“If they’ve what? What are you talking about?”
“Janet!” Mr. Pritchard’s voice again. “Back to your station, now!”
“Come to my house. We can talk there.” Janet was desperate. “My shift ends in two hours, and everyone will be inside listening to the radio when I get home. I’ll come in through the back. You can meet me in the yard behind the house.”
Marie didn’t answer. A second later, Janet heard a click and then an empty dial tone.
Janet leaned forward, tipping her head against the cool glass of the booth wall.
“Janet!” Mr. Pritchard’s voice was shriller than it had ever been. “Girl, get back here!”
Janet wanted to take off her cap and throw it in the man’s face. Instead, she stepped sluggishly out of the booth. “Coming, sir.”
The rest of her shift was a dazed dream, but she didn’t drop a single tray or forget a single order. She rolled her napkins and completed the rest of her side work faster than she’d ever done it before, and when Mr. Pritchard paused in his inspection to shout reprimands at her again, she nodded without hearing a word.
Janet found, all at once, that she didn’t care what Mr. Pritchard thought of her. Or what anyone else did, either. The only one whose opinion truly mattered was Marie’s.
The thought was strangely liberating.
As soon as Mr. Pritchard dismissed her, Janet tore off her cap and ran the entire six blocks home, no longer caring whether anyone saw her in partial uniform. She was panting when she reached her block, but she didn’t pause to catch her breath as she cut through the alley and navigated the dark, narrow path to her own gate.
When she opened it, Marie was already waiting for her.
She was sitting on the wide, wooden swing behind the storage shed with her back to Janet, gazing up at the darkened house. The shed blocked the ground floor from view, so all they could see from here was the screened-in porch at the back of the second floor where Janet and her grandmother slept. It was dark and empty now. The radio music drifting out from the den was the only sound other than the chirping crickets and the streetcar rumbling from two blocks away.
Marie no longer looked as neat and proper as she had when she was sitting in Harold’s front seat. She’d washed off her makeup and changed out of her ruffled date-dress into jeans and a worn blouse.
She didn’t look like a State Department typist anymore. She looked like the old Marie. The girl Janet had gone to school with for eleven years. The one she’d giggled with over the comic books they’d pilfered from her brother’s bookshelves and blushed with during Sister Josephine’s human reproduction lecture in junior high.
Yet what Janet saw in Marie’s eyes, gleaming sharp in the distant light of the streetlamp, was a very grown-up fear.
“Can anyone hear us?” Marie whispered.
“No.” Janet shook her head as she moved toward the swing. “They’re all inside. And the shed would block the sound anyway, as long as we stay quiet. Please, tell me, what happened?”
“Mr. Harris is gone.” Marie cut her eyes down to stare at her hands. “Another man, too.”
Janet sat down lightly beside her on the swing, but Marie didn’t look up. “Mr. Harris? Your boss?”
“Yes. He was there yesterday, but this morning he’d simply disappeared.” Marie stuffed her hands into her armpits. “His office was completely empty when I arrived.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?” It sounded like something out of a science fiction story.
“They’d gone through my desk as well.” Marie’s voice had grown smaller, even though there was no one in the yard but the two of them. “All his correspondence was missing, and they’d even rifled through my personal things. They’d tried to cover it up, but my comb was in the wrong place, and my pens, too. At first I didn’t understand what had happened, but then Mr. Brown stopped by and told me I reported to him now. He said I didn’t need to answer Mr. Harris’s phone anymore. That was all there was to it. It was as if he’d never even existed!”
A heavy weight took root in Janet’s stomach. “I don’t understand. What happened to Mr. Harris?”
“He was a nice man.” Marie kept talking as though she hadn’t heard Janet’s question. “Always telling silly jokes to make the girls laugh. Do you remember, I told you his favorite one, about the alligator and the ham sandwich?”
“Yes,” Janet said, although she wasn’t sure she did remember.
“The other man was one of the accountants. I’d only ever said hello to him a few times. He didn’t have an office, just a desk, but by the time we got in it had been completely cleaned, as though no one had ever sat there at all. Mr. Thomas was his name. Listen to me, saying was, as though he’s dead. Though for all I know, he might be.”
“Where did they go? Your boss and Mr. Thomas?”
“It happened exactly how she said it would.” Marie lifted her hand to her mouth and bit down on her thumbnail. Janet hadn’t seen her bite her nails since junior high. “All anyone would talk about today was Mr. Harris and Mr. Thomas. Except at the same time, they wouldn’t talk about them. No one used their names, and no one would really say what they meant, but it was clear everyone in the place—everyone except me—knew exactly what had happened.”
“What do you mean?” Janet felt chilly, despite the heat. The more Marie said, the more it all sounded like something from a movie.
“At the end of the day, some of the other men were leaving to get a drink. I was in the elevator with them, and I overheard one of them whispering about how they had to go to a bar where there was plenty of whiskey and plenty of girls. They all laughed, and one man said, ‘We’ve got to make sure everyone knows the men at State aren’t all a bunch of pansies.’”
Janet shuddered. “Surely no one thinks Mr. Harris and the other man—”
“They seemed perfectly normal.” Marie spoke so quietly Janet had to lean in close to understand her. “Mr. Harris was the sweetest man. I knew he wasn’t married, of course—the girls used to joke about who’d be lucky enough to land him—but even so, I never thought he was like that.”
The way she spoke made Janet shiver. “Were they arrested, or simply fired?”
“I don’t know, but—Janet, have you noticed anyone watching you?”
The words crawled up the back of Janet’s neck. She looked over her shoulder, but they were as alone as ever. “Why?”
“We’ve got to start being more careful. Both of us. The FBI investigates everyone who might be a suspect, even if they don’t have hard evidence. And I still don’t have my clearance.�
�
Janet tried to keep her voice steady. “They’d have nothing to investigate. You and I—we’re friends. Everyone knows that. We’ve been friends since we were children.”
“They could’ve been following me, though. What if they saw us go to Carol and Mitch’s house? Or to Silver Spring? Or—oh, Janet, what about that night outside Meaker’s? We should have been more careful!”
She was right.
That first night, out on the darkened street, Janet’s thoughts had been centered solely on their kisses. It would’ve been easy for a man in a trench coat to sneak around the corner and snap a photo. Janet had been so consumed with Marie she wouldn’t have noticed if he’d stood on her head and done a tap dance.
“They’d have no reason to follow you in the first place.” Janet squeezed her eyes shut. If she kept saying these things, perhaps she’d begin to believe them herself. “Mr. Harris was your boss, so he must have had an important job, but you’re only a typist. You don’t know any government secrets.”
“That doesn’t matter. It’s true, everything Carol told us. I found a brief about it in the archives. People have been fired all over the country for moral perversion. It’s not just the State Department, either, it’s the whole government. They’re weeding out sympathizers. You know...” Marie lowered her voice again. “Subversives.”
“That’s preposterous!” Janet slammed her fist into her hand. “They can’t really believe that just because of how we are, we’re all secretly working for the Soviets!”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s preposterous.” Marie’s voice had grown so low and patient she sounded almost like Mitch. “This is how things are, whether we agree with them or not.”
Janet let out a short, frustrated breath, but Marie ignored her.
“No one who’s immoral can have anything to do with the government,” she went on. “Why, if the post office so much as finds an obscene letter in the mail, they hand it over to the FBI.”
Janet felt weak suddenly. “The post office?”
“Of course. If a mailman delivered a letter like that, he could be arrested himself.” As Marie spoke, Janet’s chill returned. “No, no, the government only wants to keep everyone safe.”