The Pillow Friend (14 page)

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 their 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.”