Pulp

by Robin Talley

  The next thing Abby knew, she and Vanessa were recruiting the entire GSA to carpool down to Manassas the Saturday before Election Day, and Abby was nervously emailing Janet to ask if by any chance she’d be volunteering for the Roem campaign that weekend. To her surprise, Janet had replied right away. She said she’d been planning to canvass in that district sometime soon, and that she’d gather up some friends and meet Abby in the campaign office during the training session.

  When Abby told Mom about the plan over dinner one night, she’d half expected her to say no, given that the last time Abby had left town she’d lied and stolen a credit card, but Mom only thought about it for a few minutes before she agreed. Her sole stipulation was that Abby ride down with Ms. Sloane, who was coming along as a faculty chaperone.

  That was when Ethan announced that he wanted to volunteer, too. There was a time when Abby would’ve groaned about her kid brother tagging along, but this time she just grinned.

  After all that, she’d been sure she’d recognize Janet as soon as they entered the campaign office. But the room had been too packed to move around much, and there was so much to do between reading the scripts and filling out forms that Abby hadn’t found her yet. She could only hope Janet might notice her. Abby had told her she’d be wearing her Equality Is Power shirt and a plaid skirt.

  “Last round!” the campaign worker shouted. “Fired up!”

  “Ready to go!”

  “All right! See you when we break at six, everybody!”

  As the chanting faded out, organizers started moving through the crowd. Abby and her friends got assigned to a group, and as they all started shuffling toward the door a familiar voice sounded over her shoulder.

  “Hello there! Are you Abby Zimet?”

  Abby caught her breath.

  It was the older woman who’d started the chanting. She had gray hair, thick glasses and a stoop in her step, and she was dressed in comfortable-looking blue pants and a saggy flower-print shirt with a rainbow scarf tied around her neck.

  She didn’t look anything like the woman Abby had pictured. She didn’t seem particularly glamorous, and she obviously wasn’t holding a martini glass or sitting at a typewriter.

  Still, Abby knew that voice. She knew that solid, steady look in her eyes, too, somehow.

  “Are you Marian Love?”

  Abby’s voice broke. Suddenly, she wanted to cry again.

  The woman’s smile widened. “Yes, but please call me Janet. It’s so lovely to meet you, Abby. Come on over here and let’s—”

  “Hey hey! Ho ho! The homophobe has got to go!”

  The chanting had started again.

  Abby covered her face with her hand. She’d turned bright red, she was positive. Ugh, emotions were the worst.

  “Ms. Smith?” Ms. Sloane had appeared, suddenly, at Abby’s elbow, shouting to be heard over the chant. Most of Abby’s friends had been caught up in the throng pushing its way outside, but Ms. Sloane ignored all the jostling and stuck out her hand, business-style. “It’s such an honor to meet you. I’m Abby’s teacher, Neena Sloane. Do you think we could go somewhere and talk for a few minutes before we all start knocking on doors?”

  “Of course.” Janet started to say more, but her words were drowned out by the crowd around them.

  Abby could still see her friends up ahead. Linh caught her eye, and when Abby nodded, she leaned in to say something to the others. They’d already decided that if Abby found Janet, she’d meet up with the rest of them later.

  Being friends with Linh—real friends this time, not pining-to-get-back-together “just friends”—was turning out to be pretty great. It was kind of amazing how much you could care about a person even without the romantic part.

  Ms. Sloane offered her arm to Janet as they left the building. Abby wished she’d thought to do that. Janet was eighty-one years old, after all. She probably appreciated the help.

  “I must say, Ms. Smith,” Ms. Sloane was saying as they reached the small park across the street from the campaign office, “I’m an ardent admirer of your work. I first read your book in college, and it had a huge impact on me. For so many other women I’ve known, too.”

  Janet thanked her politely, and Abby looked up with interest. She’d assumed Ms. Sloane had never actually read Women of the Twilight Realm. In their American lit class, she’d only ever talked about highbrow authors like Emily Dickinson and Toni Morrison and Gabriel García Márquez.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two to talk.” Ms. Sloane glanced down at her phone. “Abby, I know you’re planning to meet up with the others, but text me if you need a ride.”

  “Oh.” Abby hadn’t realized Ms. Sloane wouldn’t be staying with her. “Um, all right.”

  “Abby, I’m so glad we’ll have some time to talk.” Janet smiled as Ms. Sloane left, leading Abby to an old sedan parked on the curb down the block. “I brought a few things with me that I thought you might want to see.”

  “Oh, you didn’t have to bring anything!”

  “Let’s say I wanted to.” Janet smiled again and passed her a set of car keys. “Would you be so kind as to get them out of the trunk, please? My back’s not what it used to be.”

  Eager to help, Abby opened the trunk and pulled out the reusable grocery bags Janet pointed to, carrying everything to the nearest park bench. Janet settled down and beckoned for Abby to sit beside her.

  “I dug out my old scrapbook.” Janet’s smile was astonishingly warm. Abby already felt as though she’d known her for years. “Would you like to see it?”

  “You have a scrapbook?” It had never occurred to Abby that she might see real, physical evidence of Marian Love’s life. She was still getting used to the idea that Marian Love even had a life. “That would be beyond fantastic.”

  Janet reached into the bag and pulled out a thick, old-fashioned photo album, the kind where the pages stuck together, and passed it to Abby. She carefully opened the stiff cover, making sure not to tear anything. The pages were crowded with photos, some in black and white, most in color. There were other things tacked in between the photos, too—Post-its, napkins, even matchbooks.

  “Who’s in this picture?” Abby pointed to a black-and-white photo that showed a group of people laughing and walking down a city street. From their clothes—badly fitting suits on the men and unfortunate shaggy hair on the women—Abby guessed it was taken in the sixties or seventies. A man at the front of the group looked familiar, and a woman toward the back could’ve been a younger version of Janet.

  “That’s me with Harvey Milk.” Janet traced her finger along the photo’s faded edge. “I hope you’ve learned about him in school.”

  “Not really, but I saw the movie.” Abby peered closer. “Was this in San Francisco?”

  “Oh, yes. I spent a year out there, and I decided to volunteer for his campaign. That’s the only photo I have of the both of us, so I treasure it.” Janet pointed to another photo higher on the page. “Up there, I’m with Frank Kameny. I don’t suppose you would’ve learned about him, though. He hasn’t had a movie yet.”

  It was another black-and-white photo, showing a picket line. A smiling man held a sign with Gay Is Good written on it in old-fashioned block letters. Next to him, the younger Janet was carrying a sign that said Sexual Preference Is Irrelevant to ANY Employer. The look on her face was fierce. “I think the historian I met with mentioned him. He was an activist in DC, right?”

  “Yes. Frank used to work for the federal government, but they fired him for being gay. He was the first to fight back. That we knew of, anyway.” Janet turned the page. “There, that’s what you want to see, isn’t it? That’s an advertisement I saved for Twilight Realm. My first ever advertisement of any kind.”

  “Oh, my gosh.” Abby bent down to study the tiny piece of newsprint. It was so old and faded it was barely legible.

  “They w
alked together, into an evil world where no man dared venture,” the thick black type read, right next to a tiny image of that gorgeous painted cover. “The unashamed tale of two girls with twisted desires and a fierce love...for each other. A harrowing tale of modern lesbianism.”

  “Why did you tell everyone you were dead?” Abby finally looked up, meeting Janet’s eyes. “You could’ve written so many more books. Didn’t you want to keep going?”

  “I did keep going.” Janet smiled. “Just not in the way I’d once imagined. It was worth it to convince my publisher that Janet Jones—that used to be my name, when I was a child—was no more. I had to do it, to help someone I cared about who was in jeopardy because of me. But it meant I got to start over, too, and it turns out that was exactly what I needed. I stopped being the girl I’d been and started a new life.”

  “A new life,” Abby echoed slowly. She shook her head. “How did you keep people from finding out?”

  “Well, it wasn’t quite as unusual to change your name in those days. Particularly if you were a lesbian, or some other identity that wasn’t the norm.” Janet chuckled. “A few of the people I met in New York might have guessed there was something strange going on—I always had a feeling my editor suspected the story Claire gave him didn’t quite add up—but no one asked much in the way of questions, and soon, enough time had passed that it hardly mattered. I’ve been Janet Smith ever since. Except when I’m publishing under another pen name, of course.”

  Abby turned the pages of the album carefully, studying the photos as she went. Some were so faded they were hard to see clearly, but there were things she recognized. Newspaper cutouts showing the AIDS quilt spread across a field. Black-and-white photos of smiling women marching on the mall with rainbow flags. Color photos of Janet beaming next to a gorgeous drag queen in full regalia. Digital printouts of women in nineties-style grunge gathered around a bar, with Janet right in the center of the group.

  “Well, Abby Zimet.” Janet smiled and closed the album. “I want to hear more about you. Tell me all about this book you’re writing.”

  “Oh, um. There’s not much to say.” Now that she was talking to a real writer, Abby hated to think about how bad her first draft of Totally Normal Women in the Daytime had been. “I’m rewriting the whole thing.”

  “Well, there’s nothing wrong with that. Why, I rewrote my first book completely. The original draft was utter rubbish. I’d written it in first person, for one thing, which turned out to be all wrong.”

  Abby leaned forward, fascinated. “You mean Women of the Twilight Realm?”

  “Yes, though it wasn’t called that when I was writing it. It was Nathan who came up with that silly title. When I wrote it, it was called—”

  “Alone No Longer?”

  “Yes!” Janet slammed both her hands down on her knees, making Abby laugh. Suddenly Janet didn’t seem quite so old. “How on earth did you know that?”

  “Er, well.” Sheepishly, Abby explained about finding Lawrence Hastings’s notes.

  “My goodness. The internet really is amazing, isn’t it?”

  “Have you seen any of the fan sites about you?” Abby reached for her phone to show her.

  “Yes, I have.” Janet smiled again. “It’s lovely of people to do those things. Some of my friends from Strangers showed them to me a few years back.”

  “Strangers?”

  “Yes. I suppose you haven’t heard of it.” Janet sighed. “It used to be very popular among young lesbians. It was a bar in southeast DC.”

  “Ohh, I get it. It was called Strangers, the same way all the pulp novels used to have strange or twilight or whatever in their titles.”

  “That’s right. It closed a few years back, I’m sad to say. We tried to save it, but the past few years haven’t been kind to lesbian bars.”

  “Was Strangers around in the fifties?” Abby tried to picture a DC version of those smoky Greenwich Village bars. “Was it like the bar in your book?”

  “Oh, no.” Janet laughed. “We started Strangers in the seventies. By then the raids were becoming less common, so we could be a bit more open about what sort of place it was.”

  “You started a bar?” It had never occurred to Abby that a writer might also want to be a bartender. Or a bar owner.

  “Well, not by myself. I moved back to DC with a few friends I’d made in New York, and we joined up with some women we knew and pooled our money to get it going.” Janet smiled. “Those early years were the best. We had lines waiting down the block nearly every night.”

  It was surprisingly easy to picture eighty-one-year-old Janet waiting in line to get into a lesbian bar. Abby smiled.

  “You said you moved back to DC?” she asked. “So you really are from there?”

  “Oh, yes. I grew up in Georgetown.” Janet gazed off into the trees that lined the park. “That neighborhood was very different then, of course. I moved to New York the summer after I finished high school, though my parents wanted me to go to college. That wasn’t so unusual in those days, either, but all the same, my parents were furious when I finally spoke to them about it.”

  “Wow.” Abby couldn’t even fathom that. What would her parents say? “So they didn’t think you’d died?”

  “Oh, no.” Janet seemed startled at the idea. “No, I only concocted that story for my publisher. For the readers, too, I suppose, though I never dreamed at the time that I’d have any. No, all my parents knew was that I’d run away to New York and left behind everything I’d ever known. Which, of course, was still rather alarming in their eyes.”

  “I’ll bet.” It all sounded simultaneously thrilling and terrifying to Abby. “Did you know people in New York when you moved there?”

  “I’d made some friends.” Janet’s smile had taken on a faraway quality. “I lived on the tips I made waitressing at first, plus the money Nathan put in my bank account. Of course, the book sold better than I’d ever dreamed, so that changed things for me.”

  “It’s such an incredible book. I’ve read it a bunch of times.”

  “Well, that’s lovely to hear.” Janet’s smile softened. “When I look back on it, though, I can only remember how foolish I was. I’d rewrite the whole thing, given the chance.”

  “What?” Abby’s eyes widened. “But it’s perfect!”

  Janet laughed. “There’s no such thing as a perfect book, and I was only eighteen when I wrote that one. I thought I’d already learned so much, but the truth was, I still had my whole life ahead of me. Of course, I didn’t understand that at the time.”

  Abby wasn’t sure she quite understood that, either. “Why didn’t you write more books? Was it because that one sold so well?”

  Janet chuckled. “Well, no. Remember, paperbacks only went for thirty-five cents in those days. Even with millions of copies in print, it wasn’t exactly enough to buy myself a mansion.”

  “So you just kept waiting tables?” Come to think of it, waiting tables in 1950s Greenwich Village sounded pretty fabulous, too.

  “Off and on. But I never stopped writing, either. I used quite a few pseudonyms with several different publishers. I wrote Westerns, science fiction, shoot-’em-ups, that kind of thing. There were dozens of books on my shelf by the time I left the city, but I never wrote another book about lesbians, and I never used the name Marian Love again.”

  “Why not? You were famous!”

  “Of a sort, I suppose.” Janet laughed. “But Marian Love was a name that only applied to one chapter of my life. That chapter had ended when I moved to New York and started truly living as myself.”

  Abby sat back, astonished. Janet’s life really had been exactly like one of her books.

  “Of course, it’s all so different for a young woman of your generation.” Janet smiled at her. “If you don’t mind my asking, do your parents know you’re a lesbian?”

  “Oh,
yeah. I came out in ninth grade.”

  Janet shook her head, her smile shifting to a grin. “Hearing things like that never ceases to delight me. I’m so glad I’ve lived long enough to see your generation.”

  Abby grinned back. “I am, too.”

  “Your friends at school, do they know about you, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. Most of my friends are queer. I’m the treasurer of our Genders and Sexualities Alliance.”

  “Of course you are.” Janet laughed. “How many students are in your group?”

  “Well, if you asked, probably half the school would say they’re in it, but we have about twenty who come to the meetings every week. My friend Vanessa, they’re the president. Vanessa’s non-binary,” Abby added, figuring Janet might not recognize the pronoun.

  “It’s quite a world. A wonderful world. I’m so happy for you all. Now, should we go join our friends and knock on some doors?”

  “Right, of course.” Abby switched on her phone. “I’ll text them. We can wait a few minutes first, though, if you want to rest.”

  “What, do I look like an old lady to you?” Janet’s eyes flashed with amusement. “I’ve been pounding the pavement for liberal politicians since long before you were born, Abby Zimet, and I assure you, I can knock on doors with the best of them.”

  So Abby texted Ms. Sloane, and a moment later she got a text back promising that one of the drivers would come by in a few minutes. Janet and Abby had been assigned to different precincts, so they’d have to split up after that.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Abby asked as they waited. “Did Elaine and Paula stay together at the end of the story? Or did Elaine go back to Wayne?”