The Pillow Friend (13 page)

“I wish I could be with Snowy forever,” she said to the blue sky above. “I wish I never had to go back to Houston but could just stay in the woods with Snowy forever.” It was so like a prayer she had to put her lips together quickly to keep from saying “Amen.”

There was a muffled thudding sound. She performed a quick half-roll that brought her upright, treading water and facing the shore. The horse was no longer peacefully grazing. He was running straight at the pond, right for her.

She stared, mystified, half-expecting him to perform some trick for her. When he plunged into the water she still didn't understand—she remembered one especially hot day when she had tried to lure him in, using an apple as bait, and how he'd made it clear to her that he had no liking for bodies of water, no matter how shallow. It was only when he drew closer, and she could see from the way he strained to keep his head above water, from his rolling, bloodshot eyes, how much he disliked this, how much it went against his nature, that she glimpsed the truth. And when he still kept coming straight at her, making no attempt to turn aside, his powerful hooves lashing out directly at her, she knew that he was coming to kill her. Not because he was evil or hated her, but because it was her wish. He would kill her and die himself, and they would be together forever.

She tried to swim backward, tried to swim away, but fear and the water together straitjacketed her. Or maybe it was her own wish which kept her bound and struggling before his approach.

“No,” she screamed with all her might. “No! I wish
you
were gone, not me, not me!” And then, as he was nearly on top of her, she managed to plunge to one side and swim a little away from him.

She felt something, a heavy blow, a pain in her heart that took her breath away, but somehow managed to keep swimming, and she swam without looking back until her knees sank into the mud and she couldn't swim any farther, until she was crawling and stumbling ashore.

Only then, on dry land, did she risk pausing to cast a glance back over her shoulder. Then she turned around and stared.

The pond was empty. Empty and, on this hot, windless day, as still as if its waters had not been disturbed by anything for days. With its empty, quiet, glassy sheen it was a perfect mirror of the sky.

She began to cry. Only when her lungs ached as she struggled to draw breath did she become aware of another, worse pain, and looking down at herself she saw the mark on her naked chest. It was on the left side, between shoulder and nipple, a reddish contusion, horseshoe-shaped.

IMAGINARY MEAT

—Mary Shelley

J
eder Engel ist schrecklich.”

The words lifted her out of her seat; she quivered and was still, shocked awake and throbbing with attention.

The dull honors presentations, the students with their stumbling or fluent readings of English, French and Spanish texts, had nearly sent her to sleep. Roxanne, seated beside her in the warm, dark auditorium, had run out of caustic comments, and not even the faint hope of hearing her own name called for some unimagined achievement (most original book report? best poem to be rejected by the school magazine?) was enough to keep her focused in the present, until those words, the familiar, foreign words that opened Rilke's Second Elegy. She stared at the boy on the stage as if he were the poet reincarnate.

The boy's name was Alex Hill. He'd been in her social studies class last year, and he was assistant poetry editor—the position she had applied for, not realizing then that only students in the Special Progress English stream ever made the staff—on
Visions,
the school magazine. She had been aware of him without any particular feelings: he was just another “good” boy, tall and skinny and bespectacled (like herself), nonathletic, nonpolitical, studious.

And he liked Rilke. He'd actually chosen to translate one of the Elegies, and he'd won this year's German prize for it—he wasn't even a senior, just a junior like herself.

As she stared the stage lights combined with smears on her glasses to give him a halo. He looked as glorious and terrible to her as the poet's angel.

It had finally happened. One week shy of her seventeenth birthday, she had fallen in love.

She sought him out at lunchtime to tell him his translation had been brilliant and his prize well-deserved.

He looked apprehensive, as if he was waiting for the stinger to her compliment.

“I mean it,” she said earnestly. “Believe me, I've read all the translations there are, and even tried to work out one of my own—hopeless, of course!—so I know what I'm saying.”

“Well, thank you, uh—”

“Call me Grey. It's Agnes, actually, Agnes Grey.”

“Sure, right, I remember. You were there that night we collated
Visions.
But you're not in my German class—you must be in Biedermann's?”

“I'm not taking German. I wish I was, now, but I've been doing Spanish since junior high and if I switch it'll just screw up the language credits I need. I'm not very good at learning languages, but I thought I might try German when I get to college.”

Bushy eyebrows moved together above the horn-rims. “So if you're not taking German . . .”

“Oh, I read the Elegies on my own! In English, of course, but it was a dual-language version, and then I found another translation and, well, with the differences, I really wanted to read him in the original. He's such a
German
poet, don't you think? To try to understand him. So I got a German dictionary, and read everything I could find about Rilke and the poems, and—oh, I'm sorry, I'm keeping you from eating!”

“That's all right. I'd say sit down, but—” He gestured at the table she was leaning on, which was full. One of the other boys, a heavyset blond, had obviously been listening to their conversation, and his interested gaze made her abruptly self-conscious.

She straightened up. “Oh, that's all right. I haven't got my food yet, anyway. And my friend always saves me a seat. I just wanted to say congratulations, you deserved it and I really loved your reading, and all that.” She gave him a little wave and wandered off to get in the line for food even though, for once, she had no appetite.

The next time Alex saw her, passing her in the hall at the end of the day, he smiled and said her name.

She felt as if he'd blown up a balloon full of happiness and she'd swallowed it. She felt as if she could fly away, and even just the memory of his smile would keep her from coming back to earth for a long, long time.

Roxanne drove her home from school that day, as she often did, and noticed her friend's unusually buoyant mood, but was willing to accept that it was a natural reaction to the fact that her seventeenth birthday was on the immediate horizon, and after that, only a week of school stood between them and the freedom of summer vacation.

Agnes generally kept her friend well-informed about her emotional landscape, but she didn't feel like talking about Alex Hill just yet. She wanted to luxuriate in the experience of being in love by herself for just a little longer. She wasn't ready to hear why he wasn't good enough for her, or that he already had a girlfriend; she wasn't ready for plotting ways of “getting him.” For the moment, anyway, the feeling was enough.

So she didn't invite Roxanne in to talk—they both had exams to study for—but waved good-bye to her in the parking lot, then walked around past the small, kidney-bean-shaped swimming pool and let herself in to the apartment she shared with her mother.

For the past three years, since her parents' divorce, this two-bedroom, two-story apartment in a small complex off Westheimer, near Post Oak, had been home. Although she didn't think her mother believed her, she really preferred it to their old house. She loved that her bedroom had a telephone jack and a balcony overlooking the swimming pool. She loved the swimming pool; she didn't miss the loss of their country club membership at all. And they were now within easy walking distance of a shopping center. It wasn't the mall where a lot of the kids she knew liked to hang out, but it had a drugstore with a soda fountain, a Mexican restaurant, and a record store, and she and Roxanne met there several times a week.

Really, she didn't miss anything about the old house, her old life, except her father. She missed him a lot; she always would. At least, she missed the person he had been.

The person he was now didn't seem to love her anymore.

Now that he had remarried and moved to Dallas she hadn't seen him for a whole year. She didn't know if he ever even thought about her now.

If her father had become a different person, so had her mother, but with her mother the change was for the better. Once she got over the initial trauma of it, her husband's desertion had galvanized her. There were no more days spent languishing in bed in a darkened room, no more blank, icy moods that lasted for days, no more fantasies about her great acting career. Instead, Mary Grey woke up and, with no one else to do it for her, took control of her own life. She got a sales job at Sakowitz, she made new friends, and she became much closer to her youngest daughter. The twins had their own lives up in Austin; it was just the two of them now.

But lately that closeness had started to itch. Maybe because she no longer had to fear her mother's icy withdrawals and she dared to disagree with her. Maybe because as she was growing up she was discovering that her mother could be wrong about things, they argued all the time. They sniped at each other, and picked and criticized every trivial detail. Mary objected to her daughter's unkempt appearance, to her refusal to wear makeup, to the “Sisterhood is Powerful” button on the strap of her denim shoulder bag.

“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.”