“Welcome to the Soda Shoppe, your top spot for a refreshing drink and a bite to eat. I’ll be your carhop this afternoon.”
“Hi there, honey. Could I get a cheese sandwich and a Summer Freeze?”
“Righty-o.” Janet suppressed a yawn as she scribbled down the order from the bald man in the station wagon.
Someone whispered loudly over her shoulder. “Janet? Janet! Over here!”
Janet didn’t let her smile slip as she delivered the next line in her script—“Back in a jiff!”—and trotted away from the station wagon to see Shirley, one of her fellow carhops, looking anxious.
“Could you cover car nine for me?” Shirley shifted from one foot to the other. “I haven’t had my break yet and I’m about to burst.”
Janet glanced over her shoulder. “Sure. You’d better hurry or Mr. Pritchard will see.”
“Thanks, Janet. You’re a star.”
Janet waved her on and trotted to space nine. Carhops were permitted to trot across the parking lot, but never to run. Mr. Pritchard, who watched over the staff with an unyielding expression and a blue vinyl apron tied snugly around his middle, was even stricter about running on shift than he was about break schedules.
Janet took down car nine’s order and trotted inside to the food counter. The Soda Shoppe had started out as a regular restaurant, with tables inside and waitresses to serve them, before Mr. Pritchard realized he could make a lot more money sending high school girls out to the parking lot while the customers sat in their Oldsmobiles and Chevrolets. Now the shiny lunch counter inside sat empty while Janet, Shirley and the other girls wore out their saddle shoes trotting from car to car in their too-hot-for-summer-in-Washington cotton uniforms.
As she lifted her tray, Janet gazed at the empty phone booth that sat at the edge of the parking lot, the cars on M Street whizzing past.
Soon. Janet’s shift would end soon, and then she could call her. That prospect was the only thing getting her through the afternoon’s endless script recitations and grease drips.
So an hour later, when the last car of her long lunch shift finally pulled away, Janet rushed to finish her side work, folding napkins and marrying ketchup bottles faster than she ever had before. She tapped her fingers on her apron while Mr. Pritchard inspected her station, and when he finally cleared her to go Janet trotted as fast as she could to the phone booth and shoved a dime into the slot.
She picked up on the second ring.
“I’d hoped it was you.” The smile was clear in Marie’s voice before Janet had even finished saying hello.
Janet wound the phone cord around her fingers and turned her back on the still-busy restaurant. She was smiling, too, even though Marie couldn’t see her.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about last night.” Marie’s voice was a low, warm whisper.
“Neither have I.” Janet closed her eyes. If she tried hard enough, perhaps she could pretend they were still on that dark street outside Meaker’s.
“I want to see you again, soon, but I start work tomorrow. I’ll probably be busy for the next few days.”
“I understand,” Janet replied, though her stomach sank. “Maybe we could meet this weekend.”
“I’d like that. I should be free Saturday.”
“Saturday it is, then.”
They fell silent. Janet traced the tips of her fingers along the curve of the phone cord, wishing she were tracing the delicate skin of Marie’s shoulder instead.
“Could you wait a moment, please?” Marie’s tone suddenly grew a tad too polite. This must’ve been how they taught girls to talk on the phone in secretarial school.
“Certainly.” Janet giggled and waited, wondering what Marie’s teachers would’ve thought of the moment she and Marie had shared the night before.
“There, that’s better.” Marie’s voice came muffled after a pause. “I’ve brought the phone into the pantry. The cord may be about to snap, but at least we can talk in private. Though I’m supposed to be helping my mother with the ironing.”
“Oh.” Janet opened her eyes. “Well, if you have to...”
“But I don’t want to help her. I’d rather talk to you.” Marie paused, drawing in a sharp breath. “I’d rather talk to you always.”
“Oh.” Janet’s knees felt unsteady. “Oh, Marie—it’s the same for me.”
“Where are you? I can hear cars going by.”
Janet smiled again. “I’m in the phone booth at the Soda Shoppe. I keep worrying Mr. Pritchard will come yell at me for forgetting to fold a set of napkins.”
“Tell him you have more important things to do. Like talk to me.”
Janet’s smile stretched from one end of the phone booth to the other. Marie sounded exactly like Sam in A Love So Strange when she and Betty first fell in love.
Was that what was happening to Janet and Marie, too?
“Marie?” Mrs. Eastwood’s voice was unmistakable, even through the pantry door. “What are you doing in there? I need your help. Besides, you shouldn’t stretch out the phone cord.”
Marie sighed into the phone. Janet sighed, too. “I suppose I’ll see you Saturday. Good luck at the new job.”
“Thank you.” Marie’s smooth phone manners were back, probably for her mother’s benefit. “Please give your family my best.”
Janet smoothed out her uniform before she left the phone booth, but her smile stayed wide.
The walk home was no more than fifteen minutes along M Street and up Wisconsin. Nothing in Georgetown was terribly far from anything else. Janet’s and Marie’s houses were close enough that their parents had often driven them to school together when they were still too young to ride the streetcar unaccompanied. Marie’s job, though, would be in the next neighborhood over. The State Department had been in Foggy Bottom since the war.
It was hot out, and Janet, already warm from her shift, grew sweaty as she walked under the hot sun in her silly blue cap, smiling at the shoppers who nodded as they passed. Everyone recognized her Soda Shoppe uniform. Employees were never allowed to be in “partial uniform,” even when their shifts were over.
Janet wished she had a proper job like Marie. Neither of the girls in A Love So Strange had to trot around with steaming piles of cheeseburgers for hours each day. They worked in sensible offices with spiteful coworkers.
Janet had reread half the book after she’d gotten home from Meaker’s the night before, and she’d reread the other half that morning before her shift. She couldn’t stop thinking about the moment when Betty first told Sam she was falling in love with her. Sam had replied that she’d known she loved Betty since the first time they danced.
Were there truly girls—other girls, girls Janet had never even met—who thought things like that? Who said things like that?
Janet and Marie didn’t much resemble the girls on the cover of A Love So Strange. Janet was blond and Marie was brown-haired, so they matched on that count, but neither of them wore as much makeup as those girls, and Janet certainly didn’t own any clothes that tight.
She supposed the girls’ looks weren’t what mattered in the end. What mattered was that, like Janet, the girls in Dolores Wood’s book didn’t seem to have much interest in men.
Until the book’s odd ending. In the final chapter, Betty had suddenly become interested in a fellow she worked with, and Sam was fired from her job and threw herself in front of a speeding taxi.