Pulp

by Robin Talley

  “You’re certain this is what you want?” Marie still sounded anxious, but Janet could see she understood. This plan was the only one that made sense. Besides, it was a relief, in a way. Janet would truly be leaving her old life behind.

  “I’m certain.” Janet would need help, of course—but Claire, surely, could help her write letters once she’d arrived in New York. Janet trusted Claire with all her heart. The other girls she’d met at the Sheldon already knew her as Janet, but she could begin calling herself by a different surname.

  Smith, perhaps. Janet Smith.

  She smiled up at Marie, though she didn’t dare tell her this part of the plan. Smith was such a common name it would go unnoticed by everyone she met, but it would also become Marie’s name when she married. To call herself by the same name would be a small but powerful way of connecting her to Marie forever.

  “All right.” Marie nodded, once. Janet nodded back.

  There was nothing more to be said.

  Janet led the way down the narrow, rickety stairs. Marie stumbled on her uneven heels, and Janet reached back to steady her. It was the last time they would touch.

  She didn’t look back as they descended to the first floor. She didn’t meet Marie’s eyes as she opened the back door, either. Only when Marie was walking away into the hot summer afternoon did Janet allow her eyes to linger on her slumped shoulders in that sweaty, powder-blue suit.

  I love you. Janet sent the thought out into the empty, quiet air.

  When she turned back and crossed to the front door, something caught on Janet’s slacks. Only then did she remember the brown package on the entry table.

  Slowly, she lifted the parcel and ripped the seal. A thick stack of pages fell out. On top was a typed letter.

  Dear Miss Jones,

  Thank you for submitting your partial manuscript to Bannon Press. Mr. Levy has just finished reading it, and he requested that I contact you, though our office does not respond to every submission we receive from previously unpublished authors.

  Mr. Levy informed me that he enjoyed your pages a great deal, and that they speak to your promise as a writer. He recommends that you take the kernel of a story you have here with Elaine and Paula and write a new version that's bolder in its approach, truly exploring the world of these characters beyond their inner lives and physicality. Mr. Levy recommended considering several questions as you write, including: What is their broader community like? What obstacles do they face in society as well as within their budding relationship? Et cetera.

  I've enclosed your pages, where Mr. Levy marked additional notes on some passages.

  We hope you'll submit your revised manuscript at your earliest opportunity.

  Yours truly,

  Sally Johnson,

  assistant to Nathan Levy, editor–in–chief

  Bannon Press

  54 W 23rd St., 17th floor

  New York, NY 10011

  Beneath the letter was the original manuscript Janet had put in the mail. All hundred and eight pages, with pencil marks in the margins. Scribbled notes that said things like “Good description” and “Need more detail here.”

  Janet had set Elaine and Paula free into the world, and they’d come right back to her.

  Tears swam in Janet’s eyes as she gazed down at those five chapters. She’d have to rewrite them completely. She’d lost all the pages she’d written since she’d put that first half in the mail, too, but that was all right. She’d only just begun to understand how to tell Paula and Elaine’s story.

  They weren’t the girls she’d thought they were all those weeks ago. Paula wasn’t the exalted, flawless creature she’d first imagined, and Elaine wasn’t such an innocent herself, either. They’d both already survived heartbreak.

  In the next draft, both of them would make mistakes, but they’d each show their true strength, too. Not a single choice either of them made would be easy. It took tremendous courage to give up the life you’d known, no matter which path you chose. Janet hadn’t understood that until today.

  Tears flowed down her face, but her fingers itched for her typewriter. She’d have to write in the library in New York until she’d saved up enough to buy a machine secondhand. She’d need a pen name, too—Janet Smith was too close to her real name.

  But the novel itself was already taking shape in her mind. Paula and Elaine’s story was a story about love. It was about a girl who was certain of what she wanted, until it turned out she wasn’t certain at all. It was about a girl who was afraid, terribly afraid, but who still knew who she was. It was about a pair of girls, still young, with no choice but to separate from the families who could never accept them.

  She’d planned for Wayne to ruin the characters’ happiness, but Janet saw now that their problems weren’t all about one man. Paula and Elaine were up against an entire world, but they would prevail. Because they had each other.

  Their story was about two women who refused to back down. Who fought back, no matter what the world put in their path. She’d leave the conclusion open for the reader to decide where Elaine and Paula’s paths led them in the end, but both girls would live to face the future—Janet would make that much clear.

  The first line of the book would be different, too. Bolder. The words took shape in her mind even as the sobs still choked her throat.

  Elaine had already had her heart broken once. From now on, she was keeping it wrapped up in cellophane.

  Janet felt the pieces of the new story sliding into place as she climbed the stairs to pack her clothes. She could see it all so vividly Paula might as well have been standing right in front of her, a cigarette dangling from her hand and a fierce expression on her face.

  And suddenly, Janet knew her name, too. The one she would put on the cover of her book, if she was lucky enough to have a cover someday.

  Her new name would have its own power. It would reflect everything she’d learned so far, and her dreams for the future, too. It would come from the love and heartbreak she’d known and the tears that still flowed down her cheeks.

  She would become Marian Love.

  21

  Saturday, November 4, 2017

  The real Marian Love looked nothing like Paula.

  Not as far as Abby could tell anyway. Marian was supposed to be somewhere in the same building she was, and though Abby had scanned the crowd at least a dozen times, there was no one who remotely resembled a glamorous 1950s lesbian. Not a single person out of the hundred or so huddled around their canvassing scripts was smoking a cigarette or wearing a pencil skirt.

  “Okay, my turn.” Linh hid her script behind her back and turned to Ethan, pasting on her thousand-watt smile and pantomiming knocking on a door.

  Ethan pretended to open it. The campaign office around them buzzed with other practicing volunteers, so he had to raise his voice. “Hello?”

  “Hi!” Linh chirped. “My name is Linh and I’m a volunteer with the Danica Roem campaign. We’re talking with your neighbors today about the election for the state legislature, and we wanted to learn your thoughts and feelings about the race. Have you heard of Danica Roem, running for state delegate?”

  “Yep.” Ethan bobbed his head. “She’s the trans lady, right?”

  “Dude, no one’s going to say that,” Vanessa interrupted. “At least, not in those words.”

  “Okay, but if someone does say that, we just say yes, right?” Linh asked. “Then pivot to talking about Route 28?”

  Savannah and Ben flipped through the handouts the campaign staff had given them. “Exactly,” Ben said, reading off the page. “You say, ‘Yes, that’s her! You’ve probably heard Danica has taken a strong stance on Route 28. On a scale from zero to ten, how important is fixing the traffic here in Manassas to you?’”

  “Is anyone actually going to believe we know anything about the traffic in Manassas?
” Abby cut in. “Most of us can’t even drive.”

  “True,” Ben said. “Plus, no offense, Ethan, because I’m really and truly psyched to go knock on doors with you, but, well—you look about eight. You’re not much of a poster boy for talking about road rage.”

  “I don’t look eight!” Ethan stuck out his tongue, which didn’t exactly make him look more mature. “Abby, tell him!”

  “Yeah. Come on, he looks at least nine.” Abby grinned down at him, and Ethan stuck his tongue out again.

  She knew she was supposed to be focusing on these practice sessions along with everyone else, but the idea that Marian Love—well, Janet Smith—was somewhere in this room was making it incredibly hard. Abby had never volunteered for a political campaign before, and she needed this training badly. Virginia’s election was coming up on Tuesday, and if enough Democrats won here, it would prove that change really was possible everywhere. So the GSA had driven down to Manassas to volunteer with Danica Roem’s campaign, going door-to-door reminding people to vote.

  “Well, that’s why we’re practicing,” Savannah told them. “We need to make it sound as if we drive on Route 28 every day.”

  “No, we don’t.” Vanessa sighed. “We aren’t supposed to lie to people. We can just talk about how Danica’s mom got stuck in traffic trying to pick her up from school when she was a kid.”

  While the others went through another practice round, Abby scanned the crowd again. She didn’t know how she was supposed to recognize Marian Love in this throng of excited, nervous people. There were plenty of older women in the group, and a lot of them were wearing rainbow accessories and T-shirts that said things like United Against Hate and This Is What a Queer Feminist Looks Like, but none of them also had buttons that said I Am a World-Famous Lesbian Pulp Author.

  Even so, Marian Love was here, somewhere. Abby only had to find her.

  She still couldn’t believe she was this close. She’d been obsessing about this moment for weeks.

  At first, though, Abby had been too terrified to call her back. In the end, she’d only done it because Ms. Sloane made her.

  The morning after she and Ethan talked, Abby had woken up so early it was still dark out. There was no way she was going to fall back asleep, so she’d taken a long shower, gotten dressed and walked to campus as the sun was rising. When she got there, the building was deserted except for the early-morning cleaning crew, but when she got to Ms. Sloane’s classroom, she found her teacher sitting with a laptop open on her desk.

  “Good morning, Abby,” Ms. Sloane had said, as though nothing about the moment was unusual.

  “Um,” Abby had said. “Hi.”

  She sat down at the long table and took out her own laptop. She’d meant to write, or maybe play more solitaire.

  Instead she heard herself say, “Um. Is it all right if I tell you something?”

  Ms. Sloane closed her laptop and looked right at her. “Of course.”

  And suddenly Abby was telling her everything.

  About her parents, and her brother. About Linh. About college, and how she couldn’t bear to even look at an application.

  She told Ms. Sloane about her book, and how for weeks she’d been unable to focus on anything but the stories in her mind. And about Marian Love, and how desperate she’d been to track her down.

  “I don’t even know why.” Abby’s throat felt sore from talking so much. “It’s as if—if I can just figure out this one thing, then maybe the rest of my life won’t be...the way it’s been. It’s dumb.”

  “It’s not dumb at all.” Ms. Sloane hadn’t looked away from Abby once the whole time she’d been talking. “I’m so sorry you’ve been going through this, Abby. You’ve been having an absolutely horrible year.”

  “It’s not that—” Abby started to say. Then she stopped.

  It really had been an absolutely horrible year.

  Hearing it said out loud—hearing another person say it...it made something snap in her brain. Abby swallowed once, then again, to keep herself from bursting into fresh tears.

  “Also, you won’t believe this.” Abby pushed up her glasses on her nose and took out her phone, eager to change the subject. “She called me. Marian Love. I mean, Janet Smith—apparently that’s her real name. She’s alive after all, and I guess the other author I talked to must’ve given her my number, because she called me yesterday. But I couldn’t talk then, because of all this, and now I don’t know what to do.”

  Ms. Sloane’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re sure this phone call was genuine?”

  “I think so.” Abby explained about meeting with Claire Singer in Philadelphia.

  “You’re saying Marian Love is alive? And you found her?” Ms. Sloane’s eyebrows climbed even higher. Abby couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen a teacher look so genuinely thrilled. “Do you realize how significant this is?”

  “I said I’d call her back, but I don’t know what to say.” Abby fixed her gaze on the early-morning light shining through the high, narrow classroom windows. “She’s Marian Love. She’s famous. She shouldn’t be spending her time talking to someone like me. All I ever do is mess things up.”

  “Abby, if you don’t call her back, you’ll spend years regretting it.” The words were stern, but Ms. Sloane’s smile was tender. “I’ll help you write down what to say. That sometimes makes it easier for me when I need to talk about something difficult.”

  So they spent the rest of the morning until the first period bell writing a script. And at lunch, Abby came back to the classroom and called Marian Love.

  Her blood was pumping so loud she could hear it in her ears. Still, Abby forced herself to read the script, and Janet Smith turned out to be astonishingly nice. She didn’t seem surprised that Abby was nervous, and she said thank you a bunch of times when Abby stuttered out that Women of the Twilight Realm was the best book she’d ever read. Then she told Abby that she was in Alabama for the next few weeks volunteering on the Senate race, and that she was going to be working on campaigns in Virginia once she left there, but she wanted to find a time for them to meet after the election. They’d traded email addresses. Janet even said she wanted to read Abby’s manuscript.

  Since then, Abby had reread Women of the Twilight Realm three more times. She’d deleted a hundred pages from the first draft of Gladys and Henrietta’s story, too, and written a hundred new ones. The new pages were nothing like the first draft she’d dashed out, but Ms. Sloane had told her this version was a huge improvement. Abby’s characters, she said, had finally started growing and changing. The book had a story now, not just a plot.

  Plus, she’d managed to catch up on most of the homework she’d missed. Ms. Taylor had given her until the end of the semester to finish everything, and Ms. Sloane had sat down with Abby to write out deadlines for every assignment she’d missed. They met once a week to talk it through, which was strangely helpful. Ms. Sloane must’ve said something to her other teachers, too, because they’d started calling on Abby in class again, though she noticed they asked her easier questions than usual.

  And she’d started walking to and from school with Ethan again. Sometimes they spent the trip talking about Mom and Dad and what was going to happen next, but mostly they just talked about French class, or told each other funny stories from school that day, or made plans to binge-watch a show together.

  When they got home, they sat at the kitchen table and did their homework. Sometimes Abby even helped Ethan with his algebra, which she was surprised to realize she remembered pretty well. Then when Mom got home from work she made dinner and the three of them all talked together.

  It was kind of nice having family dinners again, even though the family was different now. Plus, Mom was talking about getting a kitten. Abby hadn’t admitted it, but she couldn’t wait.

  They were already used to only one parent being home at a time. Even so, it f
elt different knowing Dad didn’t live there anymore. They’d be going to his new apartment for the first time soon, and Abby was dreading it, but Ethan kept talking about the stuff he wanted to get for his new room. He wanted to paint a mural on the wall showing a UFO flying over the Washington Monument. Abby had told him to go for it. If there was ever a time in their lives when their parents would allow an alien mural to be painted on a bedroom wall, it was right now.

  Abby didn’t have any plans for her new room, but maybe she should make some. Pretending none of this was happening hadn’t exactly worked for her so far.

  Maybe she should order one of those Women of the Twilight Realm posters for her wall. Then next year, when she came back from college for visits, Paula and Elaine would be there waiting for her. She could gaze up at them on the wall if she ever needed a reminder that committed relationships were a real thing.

  “Okay, folks,” said a short guy with a red crew cut and square glasses who’d climbed onto a table at the front of the room. “Now that you’ve practiced, we’re going to divide you into teams to go out into the precincts. Is everybody fired up?”

  “Ready to go!” shouted an older woman in a rainbow scarf at the front of the crowd. Everyone laughed, and then they all joined in, chanting.

  “Fired up!”

  “Ready to go!”

  “Fired up!”

  “Ready to go!”

  “Fired up!”

  The chant rolled over Abby, filling her ears. She closed her eyes and soaked it in. “Ready to go!”

  It was because of Janet Smith that she was in this room. Well, her and Vanessa. Abby had told her friends about Janet’s phone call and lamented that they couldn’t meet in person until after Election Day. Vanessa had pointed out that they should really be volunteering in the Virginia election, too, and that Danica Roem’s district was only a short drive from DC. Danica was the first openly trans candidate to run for the Virginia legislature, and she was running against a self-described homophobe who’d made his name supporting anti-trans legislation. Plus, hardly anyone in his district even seemed to like him, so Danica had a real chance to win. It was the most exciting race they could’ve imagined volunteering for.