The Pillow Friend Read online

“You'll never get a boyfriend if you carry on like that! You need to look softer, more feminine, you need to make a little effort. If you're determined to stick with those glasses, then at least you could do something about your hair.” Mary's most recent attack had been only that morning, over breakfast.

  There was no point in pretending she wasn't interested in a boyfriend; her mother knew better. “You're saying I should trick some boy into liking me? What's the point of that? I want somebody I can talk to, as an equal; I don't want a boyfriend who sees me as a sex object.”

  “Sex object? What kind of talk is that?”

  “If you'd read some of those books I gave you—”

  “No thank you. Feminism is for women who don't like men, or who can't attract them.”

  “Oh! That is so ridiculous!” She jumped up from the table and carried her half-full cereal bowl to the sink. “If you would just read what Simone de Beauvoir or Germaine Greer—God, you can't call Germaine Greer unattractive to men, you really can't!”

  “Who?”

  “I gave you her book. The Female Eunuch.”

  She sighed. “Agnes, I'm really not interested.”

  “I know you're not, but I don't understand why. You're a working woman, you must have faced discrimination, prejudice—don't you care?”

  “We're not talking about me, we're talking about you and why you want a reputation as a man-hater when you're desperate for a boyfriend.”

  “I'm not desperate; there are guys I could go out with if I was desperate. If I was desperate, maybe I would paint myself up and pretend I was a pea-brain, but I'm not, so I don't.” Her face felt very hot. “Anyway, if having a boyfriend is this big thing, where's yours?”

  She saw the flicker—not as pronounced as a flinch, but it was there, a guilty flicker in her eyes—and then her mother got up from the table, smoothing her hair and her skirt, moving away, saying, “I'm going to be late if I don't get moving, and you—”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I think that asking a forty-two-year-old woman about a boyfriend—”

  “A lover, then. Do you have a lover?”

  “That's enough.”

  “Are you seeing somebody? Are you dating? Don't I have a right to know?”

  Her mother gave her what was meant to be, or to appear to be, a frank and open look. “If it affects you, then of course I'll tell you. I'm not going to check it out with you every time a man asks me out to dinner. Of course I'm dating. I'd be happier if you were, too. Now I really have to go.”

  As soon as her mother had left she'd gone straight to her bathroom, and there in the medicine cabinet was the evidence, the little gray rectangle bubble-pack of Norinyl, the pills as small as saccharine tablets, three gone. Her mother was on the Pill. Her mother either had a lover, or expected to have one.

  She'd been almost desperate to share this shocking information with Roxanne, to explore her feelings about it, but there had been no time before school, and then the sight of Alex Hill limned in light, his soft, rather hesitant voice reading the Second Elegy, had simply knocked it all out of her head.

  The memory of that morning's discovery was waiting for her when she got home, but its sharp colors had faded, it was something to do with her mother, not herself. She'd rather think about Alex than worry about her mother's sex life.

  She got a Dr Pepper from the refrigerator and took it up to her bedroom. There, she opened the doors to the balcony, put Leonard Cohen's “Songs from a Room” on her record player, and stretched across her bed with The Duino Elegies. Between rereadings of the familiar lines she would sip her cold drink and gaze out through green leaves at the glittering blue water of the swimming pool, and every now and then the memory of Alex would make her shiver and smile. Oh Alex, Oh Angel.

  He was her companion all that summer, her invisible friend. She shared the highs and lows of her life with him—another poem back with a form rejection slip from The New Yorker; her letter about women's liberation published in The Houston Post; another argument with her mother; her feelings on reading The Magus and the day she found, and bought, Graham Storey's first poetry collection, a narrow hardbacked volume with a dark green jacket called The Memory of Trees. This Alex in her mind received many of the same confidences as did Roxanne. He knew about Roxanne, but Roxanne still didn't know about him. But how could she tell her—what was there to tell? She knew perfectly well that her Alex was a fantasy, and as the weeks of summer wore on without so much as a glimpse of the real boy, the lover inside her head became ever more fabulous a creature, part Rilke, part Nicholas Urfe, part Graham Storey. The back cover photograph of Graham Storey almost obliterated her memory of Alex's own face, and in her head he spoke with a slight but perceptible English accent.

  It was a shock when September finally rolled around—still as hot as August—and school started, and she saw the real Alex Hill. She had known it would be a shock; what surprised her was that as she approached him in the hall on the first day of school he looked at her, saw her, smiled a bit tentatively, and said, in his soft, Texas voice, “Hello, Agnes.”

  Her heart lifted and swelled, the ground fell away beneath her feet, and she floated blissfully through the crowded, noisy hall, knowing that it was true, it was just like the songs and the poems had promised, she was really in love. He had remembered her name!

  A little later her excitement increased when she discovered that he was in her English class. Or, it might have been more accurate to say, she was in his. He'd been in the Special Progress stream, like most of the other kids there; she'd only been transferred into Miss Beadle's class after a year of being at the top of Mrs. Parker's class—and bored out of her mind. No more sentence diagrams! No more reciting grammatical rules by rote! It would be literature all the way, and maybe a chance of getting something published in the school magazine, sponsored by Miss Beadle. Yet all of that sank into insignificance beside the sheer joy of being able to sit next to Alex Hill for fifty-five minutes every school day.

  At first, just being in his presence was enough to make her happy. But love is demanding, and by the second week of school she was beginning to pine, yearning for more. She decided to confide in Roxanne.

  Roxanne had been her friend for a little less than two years. Before that, she'd been aware of her as an exotic figure, a member of the drama club who dressed flamboyantly, wearing a black cape and black leather boots whenever the weather gave her the slightest opportunity. Agnes hadn't imagined they had anything in common until the day they met in the Paperback Exchange. She was in the science fiction section looking at a novel by Philip K. Dick, when she heard a voice cry, “Oh, Eye in the Sky! I don't have that one—oh, you're not going to buy that one, are you?”

  Agnes had looked around and been astonished. A girl! Someone she recognized from school! “You read science fiction?”

  “Well, of course I do! It's the most interesting stuff around! Have you read Delany? Ellison? You must have read Dangerous Visions?”

  It was a revelation to Agnes, who had never met anyone who read science fiction, and only saw teenage boys buying it. Roxanne had been turned on to it, she said, by her boyfriend, a student at Rice University: “All the guys there read SF. So, who've you read? What do you like?”

  They had started talking then and had scarcely stopped since. Agnes had been bowled over by her, charmed by her, bewildered by her, and reminded a little of her Aunt Marjorie, someone she hadn't seen or heard from since the summer her father had left. On the day that she'd run away from Houston, she'd found the house in the woods locked and empty—even a new padlock on the cellar door. She hadn't dared try to break in, so she had hiked back to Camptown and then, when she found there wouldn't be another bus until the next day, called her mother. From that day on, Marjorie's name was not to be mentioned. She had tried writing to her aunt, care of the Camptown post office, but the letter came back: “NOT KNOWN.”

  She had told Roxanne about Marjorie in the first few days of th
eir friendship. It was somehow very easy to tell Roxanne things she'd never told anyone before. Roxanne's parents were divorced—she lived with her father, her mother having gone to San Francisco to find herself—so she understood about losing a parent; and she believed in magic.

  “There's someone I like,” Agnes said solemnly that day after school as soon as they were in Roxanne's car and moving. “A boy.”

  Roxanne slammed on the brakes and gave a rebel yell.

  Behind them, other people were trying to get out of the parking lot. A boy in a convertible honked his horn.

  “So who is this paragon of animals?”

  “Um . . . aren't you going to drive?”

  “Not until I know his name! God, this is too exciting! How can I concentrate on driving when you hit me with something like that?”

  “If you don't drive, those kids back there are going to lynch you. I'll tell you everything, just keep moving.”

  Roxanne's eyes were hidden by her sunglasses, but wickedness was evident in the set of her full lips. Agnes was afraid for a moment that she would simply, stubbornly refuse to drive on until she'd heard every detail, even if a full-scale riot was going on around her gold Camaro. Then she took her foot off the brake and they shot forward out of the parking lot and into the moving stream of traffic on the street, miraculously without collision.

  “We'll go to my place, yeah? Then you won't have to leave out any of the gory details just because your mom comes in.”

  “There aren't any gory details. Nothing's happened yet.”

  “Only in your head.”

  “Well, there, yes. There.”

  Roxanne lived in a condo with her father. Agnes had never even heard of a condo before meeting her friend, and even now, after numerous visits, she didn't know what the word meant. It seemed to be a rich people's version of apartment, the way that “town house” was a fancy word for duplex. Anyway, Roxanne's condo was a big, six-room apartment in a high-rise on Woodway, with a view of the tops of a lot of pine trees. She had her own telephone, her own television and stereo system, and a fake tiger-skin rug thrown across the satin sheets of the four-poster bed where they now sprawled with their Dr Peppers and a box of Mr. Salty pretzels. Joni Mitchell provided the background music.

  Agnes felt exhausted. She had told everything, there was nothing left to tell, and now she began to feel anxious. Maybe she should have kept it to herself. She looked at her friend, who was looking at the picture of Alex Hill in last year's Annual. It wasn't a flattering picture.

  “Poetry editor of Visions. Figures. I mean, perfect for you. So does he write poetry, too?”

  “I don't know. Oh, Roxanne, how can I make him like me?”

  “You don't have to make him like you. You just have to make him notice you. He'll like you, I promise. How could he not like you?”

  “So how do I make him notice me? I mean, there I am, I've noticed him, and I'm right there next to him in English class, I always sit next to him—it's not assigned seats but people tend to choose a seat at the beginning and stick with it—and I talk to him, he knows my name, he says hello, sometimes when he sees me in the hall or outside he smiles. . . .” She sighed with longing.

  “Ask him out.”

  “I couldn't!”

  “And you call yourself a liberated woman.”

  “I do not. Liberation is a process, not an achievement, and no woman will be truly liberated—”

  “—until the destruction of the patriarchal system which oppresses all our sisters. Yeah, yeah, I know all that, the point is revolution now and the personal is political, and why should you wait for him to make the first move?”

  They had discussed it all in theory and were agreed that the old-fashioned dating system which prevailed at their school was unfair to both boys and girls. But it could be a long leap from theory to practice.

  “I've asked guys out,” said Roxanne.

  “Not at our school.”

  “Only because I'm not interested in anybody there. You are, so why shouldn't you ask him out? Come on, Grey!”

  “What if he doesn't like—what if he's old-fashioned?”

  “Then you don't want him.”

  She felt a pain in her chest. “But I do. I do. I do want him.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a while. “Poor baby,” said Roxanne softly. Then, firmly, “But you're going to have to do it, you know. It's the only way.”

  “Just, like, ‘Want to go see a movie on Friday night?' Like that? I couldn't.”

  “Why not? Boys do it all the time. You think they like risking being turned down?” Then Roxanne straightened up and pushed a curly mass of hair away from her face. Her dark eyes gleamed. “Sadie Hawkins. You can ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Girls have to ask the boys to that, and it doesn't have to mean anything—perfect.”

  It was perfect. The annual Sadie Hawkins dance, named after the institution of Sadie Hawkins Day in the “L'il Abner” comic strip, was one of their high school's traditional events. It was held every October in the gym, and it was informal, based on the idea of a barn dance or a hillbilly hoedown. Nobody dressed up; girls could wear either skirts or jeans.

  “Perfect.”

  “Call him now. Use my phone.”

  “Oh, no, there's loads of time—”

  “Yeah, loads of time for some other girl to get to him first. Let me find that directory. . . .”

  She had long ago memorized his telephone number, but she didn't say so. “Chicken,” said Roxanne, thrusting the school directory at her.

  She remembered phone calls made long ago to please her pillow friend. Numbers dialed at random. “Do you know where your children are?” then hanging up. She dialed his number.

  “Alex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Agnes Grey, you know, from English class?” Immediately she felt stupid for identifying herself like that. She stared down at the orange and black of the bed to keep from meeting Roxanne's eye.

  “Oh. Yeah. What do you want?”

  I wanted you to love me, but obviously you don't. A line from Gerard Manley Hopkins came into her head, summing up her feelings. No worst, there is none. But it was too late to hang up now.

  “Well, actually, I wanted to ask you to go to the Sadie Hawkins Dance.” She closed her eyes.

  “Oh. Oh, God, I'm sorry. I must have sounded so rude. I didn't mean to, it's just, it's a bad time, when the phone rang my Dad was just yelling—we were having a fight—but you don't want to hear about that, I'm sorry, that's all. I didn't mean to bark at you. Yes, thank you, I'd like to go to the dance with you.”

  It took her a little while, through the welter of “sorries,” to understand that he had agreed. “He said yes.” She fell back against the pillows after hanging up.

  “Of course he did! I told you it'd be easy.”

  “Oh, Rox . . .” It struck her suddenly that this, her first victory, might be her last; certainly it was the only easy one. Now she had to go out with him, get to know him, let him get to know her, trying all the while to present to him the image, the persona, of someone he could like, someone he might love—it was impossibly daunting. “Remember you told me about a book you got in New Orleans, with love charms and a recipe for a love potion?”

  Roxanne stared at her as if she'd said something genuinely crazy. “You don't need a love potion. You got a date with the guy; now just let things happen.”

  “But what if they don't happen? What if he doesn't like me?”

  “Well, maybe you won't like him, either.”

  “I love him.”

  “No you don't. You don't even know him. You're attracted to him. You won't know what you really feel about him until you get to know him.”

  “Will you quit talking like somebody's mother? I know what I feel! I want him. And if he doesn't want me back, I don't know what I'll do.”

  “You've already done it. You've let him know you're interested. Now it's his move and believe me, Grey,
he will make a move. I know you think he's hot stuff, but what are you, chopped liver? You're cute and funny and smart; he'd have to be crazy not to notice. Just let him make his move. If he's got anything on the ball he won't wait long.”

  Roxanne was right. The next day before English class, just after she said hello, he told her he had two tickets to the Rice football game on Saturday, and would she like to go with him?

  “Would I?” She grinned hugely at her own words. “Would I! Do you know that joke?”

  He shook his head, smiling slightly but looking worried.

  “Well, there's this girl who has a harelip and she's terribly insecure about her looks, and she's never had a date. So one night she goes along to a dance by herself, and this guy starts talking to her. She thinks he's wonderfully good-looking and can't believe her luck. Now, as it happens, this guy actually has only one eye, and he's pretty poor so the best he could do for a replacement eye was to make one out of wood and paint it. But it looks pretty good, and this girl doesn't notice a thing, she thinks he has two beautiful sparkling blue eyes—but he's real self-conscious and can't believe she's not staring at it. But after a while he thinks this girl—who is rather attractive except for her mouth, and who seems very nice—either hasn't noticed or genuinely doesn't care, so he asks her to dance. And she's so amazed that this handsome guy should want to dance with her, who's never had a boyfriend in her life, that all she can manage when he says, ‘Would you like to dance?' is to stammer gratefully, ‘Oh, would I! Would I!' So the guy hauls himself up, really affronted, and snaps back in her face: ‘Harelip! Harelip!'”

  Alex gave a snorting laugh, unexpectedly loud, and, gratified by her success, she laughed, too.

  “How nice to hear you enjoying yourselves,” said Miss Beadle from the front of the room. “Miss Grey. Mr. Hill. If you wouldn't mind giving me your attention now, we can begin today's class.”

  She had less than no interest in football but she was too pleased by the invitation to care where they were going. On Saturday morning, as she waited for him to arrive, she thought more about what they would do after the game, where they would go, what they would talk about. She wondered if he would kiss her, and then immediately tried not to think about it, crossing her fingers against the jinx. She had been kissed before, but had responded more from curiosity than desire. She had never wanted to kiss anyone the way she wanted to kiss Alex. All summer long she had dreamed about it. Her own desire frightened her a little, making her think about what Marjorie had said about wishes, and what she had learned about how they could backfire.