Odd Girl (22 page)

"I'll send you tickets for opening night," Beth said. She was hard in that same assured way that Anne had first responded to. The weakness was gone from her eyes. Anne had taken it away.

"I want the whole gang to come see me be a star." Beth dared to brush Anne's cheek lightly with her hand. "I want you to come especially."

Anne could not bear the touch of Beth's hand. She took it and kissed it sweetly, and then pressed Beth very close. The tables had turned. Beth had once held her, protected her. Now Anne was holding Beth and Beth was hiding tears.

"Don't marry Rick," Anne said, brushing her lips against Beth's forehead. "You can get what you want without his help."

Beth smiled and pulled away from her and patted her cheek. "This isn't the right time for me to reform," she said. "In six months I'll be famous, and then I’ll do what I want. I've dissipated for so long now I think I can stand it a while longer."

Anne smiled too. That was so much like Beth. She liked life to come easily. And perhaps it was right for Beth that it should. Rick would not be hurt; he was only her partner in crime.

"Come back stage after the show," Beth said, going to the cabinet for her glass of scotch. "We'll all have a ball."

Anne put on her jacket slowly. Beth was making a curtain speech for her benefit. Anne had one of her own. "I'll with someone," she said hesitantly. She did not want to be cruel but the cut had to be final. "A girl I met the other day. I think I'm beginning to love her."

She waited for Beth to answer and saw for a moment the hurt in Beth's eyes and then at once admired her for her quick recovery. "Any friend of yours is a friend of mine," Beth said, and tipped her glass.

Anne let Beth's be the last line and turned toward the door.

She ran down the steps and outside, letting Rick brush past her, hurrying on his way to Beth's door. There was no anger or jealousy for him. She was not in the same world.

It had rained and now the street was shiny and full of the hissing of cars on wet pavement—a clean sound, like the air. Anne walked, hearing the hollow sounds of her shoes, and felt not alone on the empty street. Paradise was just around the corner.

Pru, how did you know so well? Anne addressed her loudly in her mind. But Anne knew how Pru had known. Anne was full of the same clarity, the same freedom that made the world seem simple and all hers. She could do what she wanted and knew why she wanted to do things. And she knew how not to be cruel. She knew that cruelty thrived in people who did not dare seize happiness by the horns. It thrived in people who denied themselves the right to live the way they needed to live.

Pru would be waiting at Paradise. Anne hoped she would be there—perhaps she's given up, flashed quickly in her mind. She ran, perhaps hoping to save a few seconds, ran to the door and hurried into Paradise, brushing past Manny, through the crowd of Thanksgiving revelers.

It was hard to see because of the smoke. She made her way toward the back, looking everywhere. Remotely she saw Esther dancing with a pretty young girl, and Skippy, passed out at the bar. It was wild in Paradise.

And then she saw Pru. She was sitting behind a pillar, at a little table hidden from the crowd. She was alone, a cup of coffee before her.

Anne made her way to her and through her joy she had to laugh.

“Johnson, you’re not even drunk.”

Pru looked up sleepily and smiled, “I’m too big for you to carry home,” she said.

THE END

A new revolution was underway at the start of the 1940s in America—a paperback revolution that would change the way publishers would produce and distribute books and how people would purchase and read them.

In 1939 a new publishing company—Pocket Books—stormed onto the scene with the publication of its first paperbound book. These books were cheaply produced and sold in numbers never before seen, in large part due to a bold and innovative distribution model that soon after made Pocket Books available in drugstores, newsstands, bus and train stations, and cigar shops. The American public could not get enough of them, and before long the publishing industry began to take notice of Pocket Book’s astonishing success.

Traditional publishers, salivating at the opportunity to cash in on the phenomenal success of the new paperback revolution, soon launched their own paperback ventures. Pocket Books was joined by Avon in 1941, Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943. The popular genres reflected the tastes of Americans during World War II—mysteries, thrillers, and “hardboiled detective” stories were all the rage.

World War II proved to be a boon to the emerging paperback industry. During the war, a landmark agreement was reached with the government in which paperbound books would be produced at a very low price for distribution to service men and women overseas. These books were often passed from one soldier or sailor to another, being read and re-read over and over again until they literally fell apart. Their stories of home helped ease their loneliness and homesickness, and they could be easily carried in uniform pockets and read anywhere—in fox holes, barracks, transport planes, etc. Of course, once the war was over millions of veterans returned home with an insatiable appetite for reading. They were hooked, and their passion for reading these books helped launch a period of unprecedented growth in the paperback industry.

In the early 1950s new subgenres emerged—science fiction, lesbiana, juvenile delinquent and “sleaze”, for instance—that would tantalize readers with gritty, realistic and lurid stories never seen before. Publishers had come to realize that sex sells. In a competitive frenzy for readers, they tossed away their staid and straightforward cover images for alluring covers that frequently featured a sexy woman in some form of undress, along with a suggestive tag line that promised stories of sex and violence within the covers. Before long, books with sensational covers had completely taken over the paperback racks and cash registers. To this day, the cover art of these vintage paperback books are just as sought after as the books themselves were sixty years ago.

With the birth of the lesbian-themed pulp novel, women who loved women could finally see themselves—their experiences and their lives—represented within the pages of a book. They finally had a literature they could call their own. Of course, that’s not what the publishers of the day intended—these books were written primarily for men… indeed shamelessly packaged and published to titillate the male reading public.

Some of the books were written by men using female pseudonyms and were illustrated by cover artists who never read the content between the covers. However, a good number were written by women, many of whom were lesbians themselves. For lesbians across the country, especially those living isolated lives in small towns, these books provided a sense of community they never knew existed… a connection to women who experienced the same longings, feelings and fears as they did—the powerful knowledge that they were not alone.

We are excited to make these wonderful paperback stories available in ebook format to new generations of readers. We present them in their original form with very little modification so as to preserve the tone and atmosphere of the time period. In fact, much of the language—the slang, the colloquialisms, the lingo, even the spellings of some words—appear as they were written fifty or sixty years ago. The stories themselves reflect the time period in which they were written, reflecting the censorship, sensibilities and biases of the 1950s and early 1960s. Still, these lesbian pulp novels are a treasure in our collective literary history and we hope you will enjoy this nostalgic journey back in time.