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  Frances cleared her throat. “That’s not so.” Her voice sounded loud and strange in her own ears. “I tried. You don’t end a marriage easily, not even a bad one. But I’ve hated every day of it.”

  “You’ll only go back to your husband. It’s better that way.” But Erika was softening. Her voice was doubtful, and she looked at Vince to be reassured.

  Frances shook her head. “I’ll go away if you really want me to. I won’t bother you anymore. Maybe I’ll even find somebody else to love. But it won’t be a man. I’m a lesbian, I’ll never try to make it with a man again, but I can live alone if I have to.” She knew, with a wonderful sense of freedom, that she was telling the truth at last. “Or maybe somebody will come along who’s lonesome and likes me. But what I won’t do, I won’t be guilty of this terrible self-pity the way you have been.”

  She turned away. Erika looked at Vince. “Is that what you think? I’ve been faking.”

  “No,” he said gently. “Not faking—just all wrapped up in yourself. That’s all right for a while, but it’s time now to grow up.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Sure you are. So’m I. So’s everybody.”

  Erika said, “Yes.” She looked around as though a door might open in the wall and let her out.

  Frances said, “Erika.”

  Erika’s face broke up. She said, “I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Let me introduce you. Mrs. Ollenfield, this is my dear old friend, Miss Frohmann. I do hope you girls will like each other—you have so much in common. Like you’re both queer as a pair of three-dollar bills.”

  Erika asked faintly, “Is my face bruised?”

  Frances said indignantly, “I’ll kill him if he ever hits you again.” She glared at Vince, putting her arms protectively around Erika’s thin shoulders.

  Erika said, “Look.” And burst into tears. At the sight of her face all puckered up Frances started crying too. There was nothing restrained about it.

  Vince said, “Leave me out of here before I drown.” He dropped his key on the bed. “Give me a call tomorrow, if you have the strength to.”

  Nobody paid him any attention.

  When she heard the door close, Erika disentangled herself from Frances’s arms and said, “I feel like a fool. I never cry.”

  “I never do either,” Frances said in a shaky voice. “But when I do they can hear me ten miles away.”

  “What killed me,” Erika said, refusing to be amused, “was thinking you were using me for an amusement. I should have known better.”

  “It was my fault for being such a coward. I should have left Bill years and years ago, when I found out about myself. Bake kept telling me. First I didn’t think I could leave my son, but really I was only afraid.”

  “I didn’t even know you had a son.”

  “He’s a freshman in college. Married. They’re going to have a baby.” Frances looked stricken. “I’ll be a grandmother. Can you care for a grandmother?”

  “You are the youngest looking grandmother I know.”

  “Look,” Frances said, “with Bake it was like being hit by lightning. You don’t mind if I mention this just once, do you? It was the great big love of a lifetime. Then things went wrong, she drank too much, her friends were more sophisticated than I was, I wasn’t brave enough to leave Bill—it was probably mostly my fault. Everything happened at once.” She laid her hand on Erika’s. “This time I’m not expecting it to be perfect. I’ll fail you, we’ll probably fight sometimes, but maybe we can talk things over and make a few compromises.”

  “There will be times when I don’t want to talk to anybody, not even you.”

  “Then you can go into the bathroom and lock the door.”

  “Also I can’t help thinking about Kate sometimes. You don’t get over these things in one day.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll lie on the other side of the bed and think about all the wonderful girls I’ve made love to.”

  “I’m sure there were dozens.” Erika’s eyes crinkled into the unwilling beginning of a smile. “We’re both getting older. Maybe we can make a more mature relationship, not so exciting, but a better one.” She closed her thin fingers around Frances’s wrist. “What you mean to me I can’t begin to tell you. Only I tell you one thing, I don’t want just an affair. I want a marriage.”

  “So do I. A trial one if you’re not 100 percent sure, six months or a year so you won’t feel trapped.”

  Erika shook her head. “You can leave any time you get tired of me. But please, no short-term contracts.”

  “All right.” She laughed. “We’ll have bills to pay and dishes to wash. I hate washing dishes.”

  “You can’t scare me that way. I want you very badly.”

  Frances sighed. “I don’t think I can live through another day like this.”

  “Let’s not think about the dishes tonight. We didn’t even buy them yet. Are you tired? Do you want to go to bed?”

  “Not yet. I want a newspaper. I don’t suppose there’s a paper stand open within ten miles of here, this hour of the night.”

  “Sure, at the corner. Do you want to go by yourself, or can I walk along?”

  “Come on. It’s beautiful outside.”

  “Oh,” Erika said joyfully, “do you like the night too?”

  Stepping into the deep lake of shadow under overarching branches, they came into each other’s arms. Frances said, “Hold me,” and they stayed together until a car came along, its headlights picking them out. Frances broke away first. “That was a good sample. Do you want to walk all the way to the corner, or should we go back in?”

  “No, first we buy you a paper.”

  The newsstand was next door to the little diner where she had eaten breakfast that morning, so long ago. Erika said, “I wish I had brought my pocketbook, I’d like a cup of coffee.”

  “I’m loaded. Listen.”

  Erika was shocked. “No! Why do you carry so much money in your shirt pocket?”

  “It’s my hope chest.”

  “About the hope I don’t know, but it’s a beautiful chest.”

  They found stools at the counter. The counterman said, looking at Frances’s discolored eye and swollen chin with a great deal of interest, “Wasn’t you in here this morning?”

  “Sure, I’m back for my second cup.”

  He set the steaming cups down in front of them.

  Frances unfolded the paper, turned to the Help Wanted page and refolded it. Her hands shook a little. “Got a pencil?”

  The counterman said, “Here, take this, I’m not using it.”

  She began making check marks against the first column.

  He said, “You girls mind keeping an eye on the register for a minute? I want to get my dishtowels out on the line.”

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  Erika put her hand down on the paper, blotting out Frances’s view. “I don’t mean to be curious,” she said sweetly, “I know even married couples are entitled to a little privacy, but what are you doing?”

  “Jobs. I’m going to get up early tomorrow—around noon, maybe—and go out and apply for a job. Or were you figuring to live on love?”

  “Well,” Erika said, “the landlady won’t approve.” She leaned her whole weight against Frances, a promise for the night that lay ahead. “It’s a good beginning, though.”

  About the Author

  VALERIE TAYLOR (1913-1997) is the pen name of Velma Young, author of the lesbian pulp classics Whisper Their Love (1957), The Girls in 3-B (1959), World Without Men (1963), Journey to Fulfillment (1964), and Ripening (1988). With the $500 proceeds of her first novel, Hired Girl (1953), Taylor bought a pair of shoes, two dresses, and hired a divorce lawyer. After leaving her husband, she kicked off a prolific career as the author of pulp fiction novels, poetry (under the name of Nacella Young), and romances (under the name Francine Davenport). A long-time activist for gay and lesbian rights, she was a co-founder of Mattachine Midwest and the Lesbian Wr
iters Conference in Chicago.

  The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reiko Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.

  See our complete list of books at feministpress.org, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.

  Also Available From the Feminist Press

  Femmes Fatales Series

  Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

  Skyscraper

  Faith Baldwin

  eISBN: 9781558617872 | ISBN: 9781558614574

  An exciting career in a gleaming skyscraper—intrigues with a dashing stranger—or marriage to a regular guy? What’s a girl to do?

  “With its sexual bargains and betrayals, insider trades and financial maneuvers, Skyscraper is pulp fiction at its best.”

  —Maria Dibattista, author of Fast-Talking Dames

  “A captivating and quietly subversive novel, featuring a spunky young working woman struggling to make it on her own. Skyscraper declares that despite all challenges, women should insist on their right to have it all.”

  —Alicia Daly, Ms.

  Bedelia

  Vera Caspary

  eISBN: 9781558616486 | ISBN: 9781558615076

  Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: pretty, ultra femme, and “adoring as a kitten.” A perfect housekeeper and lover, she seems to want nothing more than to please her wealthy, if insecure, new husband, Charlie Horst, who can’t believe his luck.

  A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a “kitten with claws of steel”—a picture-perfect wife who leaves a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.

  But then a detective unsettles the picket-fence Connecticut town, looking for “a kitten with claws” who has left a trail of dead husbands behind her. Snowbound by a blizzard, the protagonists carry their doubt and treacheries to deadly conclusions.

  “You must read Bedelia to see just how slick Miss Caspary’s technique of soft-shoe terror can be—how frightening she can make the chatter at an innocent dinner party, the lure of a lady’s dishabille, the glimpse of a black pearl in a dresser drawer.”

  —The New York Times

  “A tour de force of psychological suspense, Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Caspary’s Bedelia.”

  —Liahna Armstrong, President Emerita, Popular Culture Association

  Laura

  Vera Caspary

  ISBN: 9781558615052

  Meet Laura Hunt, a “modern woman” personified –ravishing, elegant, ambitious, and utterly unknowable. No one can resist her charms, not even cynical NYPD detective Mark McPherson sent to track down the killer who has turned Laura into a faceless corpse. By day McPherson interrogates the men who loved her; by night, he combs her apartment for clues, gazing at her portrait, smelling her lingering scent. One stormy night, the door opens to an electrifying plot twist.”

  “Laura continues to weave a spell. . . achieving a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style.”

  —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

  “Everyone loves the movie, of course, but it is now possible again to read this stunning novel with one of the great surprise moments in the history of mystery fiction. Brava!”

  —Otto Penzler, owner, The Mysterious Bookshop

  Now, Voyager

  Olive Higgins Prouty

  eISBN: 9781558616332 | ISBN: 9781558614765

  Now, Voyager is the story of a woman who discovers love, sex, and motherhood outside of marriage; and who learns that men are, ultimately, dispensable in the quest for happiness and fulfillment.

  Bunny Lake is Missing

  Evelyn Piper

  eISBN: 9781558617759 | ISBN: 9781558614741

  This 1957 thriller starts out innocently enough, with a mother arriving to pick up her daughter at nursery school. But Bunny Lake has vanished without a trace, and soon everyone suspects that she is merely a figment of her mother’s twisted imagination. With no help from the police, Blanche Lake begins a desperate search to find her daughter – lost, or taken, on the streets of New York City. In this fraught and at times freakish tale of suspense, Evelyn Piper takes us deep into the psyche of the 1950s to explore American fetishes, fallacies, and fears around motherhood and sexuality.

  “A brilliant tale of psychological suspense, Bunny Lake is Missing is a classic thriller – a riveting revisit to the dark side of the fifties, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Prime pulp—pure pleasure.”

  —Linda Fairstein, author of The Bone Vault

  The G-String Murders

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  eISBN: 9781558617612 | ISBN: 9781558615038

  Narrating a twisted tale of a backstage double murder, Gypsy Rose Lee provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of burlesque theater—richly populated by strippers, comics, and Siggy the G-string salesman.

  Mother Finds a Body

  Gypsy Rose Lee

  eISBN: 9781558618022 | ISBN: 9781558618015

  A sexy, hard-boiled murder mystery by America’s most famous burlesque entertainer, this steamy sequel to The G-String Murders, Gypsy Rose Lee’s noir thriller reads as if it’s ripped from her own diary pages. When her mother finds a dead body in Gypsy’s honeymoon trailer, Gypsy realizes that no one is who they seem to be and everyone is worthy of suspicion.

  “Pure ozone to those tired of ordinary oxygen.”

  —New Yorker

  “Our most famous burlesque queen may raise the temperature with a strip tease, but she chills the blood when she goes into her detective routine.”

  —Boston Post

  “One of the greatest mysteries ever written.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  The Girls in 3-B

  Valerie Taylor

  eISBN: 9781558617629 | ISBN: 9781558614567

  Three small-town girls face the hard choices of big city life in this classic 1950s pulp.

  Stranger on Lesbos

  Valerie Taylor

  eISBN: 9781558618008 | ISBN: 9781558617995

  Sexy, beautiful, frustrated…a neglected housewife finds the delights and degradations of forbidden love. Frances, a 1950s housewife, becomes bored with her suburban life and enrolls in a class at the local community college. When she meets Bake, a butch lesbian, her life completely changes. In thrall to a world of martini lunches, late nights at queer bars, and a sexual passion she never knew was possible, Frances must choose between the safety of being a wife and mother, or the dangers of life on the edge of society.

  In this age of Mad Men fever, the reissue of Stranger on Lesbos comes at a perfect moment, invoking an era we can’t help romanticize, yet despise.

  “A remarkable slice of bohemia, Valerie Taylor gives ‘pulp’ a good name.”

  —Judith
Halberstam

  By Cecile

  Tereska Torres

  eISBN: 9781558618060 | ISBN: 9781558618053

  Her husband takes her novels and signs them as his own; she takes his lover and becomes her mistress.

  Women’s Barracks

  Tereska Torres

  eISBN: 9781558617148 | ISBN: 9781558614949

  The grim setting of an urban military barracks—with its freezing dorms, rationed food, and unbecoming regulation underwear—became the setting for one of the steamiest novels of its time and the first-ever “lesbian pulp.” Touchingly written from the point of view of one of the younger and more innocent “girl soldiers,” Women’s Barracks reflects Tereska Torres’s experiences in the Free French forces assembled under General Charles de Gaulle.

  Condemned in 1952 for its “artful appeals to sensuality, immorality, filth, perversion, and degeneracy” by the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials, this novel was an underground phenomenon, selling four million copies in the United States and many more abroad.

  “As a lesbian historian, as a citizen of a war-torn world, simply as a reader, I found this 1950 novel, considered obscene in its own time, moving, arousing, and deeply interesting.”

  —Joan Nestle, author of A Restricted Country