The Pillow Friend (8 page)

“Cause I found him, of course. What did you think? Didn't your Mom tell you? I gave him to her to give you when you were in the hospital. I thought you must be missing him.”

So Myles had not escaped. Her mother had him again, delivered back into her very hands by her best friend. She felt a thick, suffocating anger filling her, an anger which had no outlet. She couldn't blame Leslie, who had thought she was doing her a favor. Maybe, if she'd trusted her friend, Myles would be safe now. If she'd been more careful, if she'd thought things through—She had only herself to blame, and she knew that Myles would never forgive her. If he had survived.

“What's wrong, Ag? You don't look so hot. Aggie?”

She scrambled up and ran for the door, almost falling, screaming for her mother.

At first Mary Grey pretended not to understand but finally, out of concern for her daughter's health, she had to give in. “All right, settle down! You'll burst your stitches if you aren't careful, and you won't like it if I have to take you back to get the doctor to stitch you up again! Calm down! Yes, all right, all right, I'll get the doll, only be still!”

She stopped struggling and let herself be pushed onto the couch. Agnes and her mother glared at each other.

“Leslie, stay with her and don't let her move, got that? Agnes, I mean it.”

“Just get him!”

She waited, clenching and unclenching her fists, trying not to think about how long her mother had had him, ignoring Leslie's puzzled noises.

There was her mother, with Myles in her hand. Agnes reached out, eagerly, and took him. As soon as she felt the stiff little body, even before she looked down at the still, painted face, she knew that this time she had been too late. Her mother had won. She had lost her pillow friend. Myles was just an old doll. He would never look back at her again.

IN THE WOODS

—Rainer Maria Rilke

H
er parents had been arguing all week, quietly but ferociously, while she struggled to remain unconscious of the conflict, sinking ever deeper into her books. She read as a chain-smoker smokes; if she could she would have lived inside her books and never come out. When she had to do something that made reading impossible—walking, washing dishes, eating dinner with her parents—a voice inside her head described what she was doing, feeling or seeing. It became a necessary habit, a way of making her whole life as much like the experience of reading as possible.

No matter how she tried to remain unaware she knew she was the cause of her parents' argument.

Thirteen was old enough, according to her mother, to be trusted to look after herself alone during the day. When the twins were thirteen they'd been left to look after their younger sister, and she was no less mature now than they'd been then.

She was a good girl, and bright, and if there were any problems Jane-Ann was just down the road.

According to her father the point was not whether she was old enough to look after herself, but whether it was fair to make her. For a day or two, fine, but not for two weeks. It wasn't possible to get around Houston without a car. If Mary was gone, with Mike at work all day, poor Agnes would be confined to the house. With Leslie away at camp it wasn't fair to ask Jane-Ann to ferry her back and forth from the country club, let alone the library. What was the poor kid supposed to do all day?

“I don't know why Agnes couldn't go to camp, too,” said her mother. “I'm sure she'd be happier there, with other girls her own age, with plenty to do, than sitting indoors reading all the time. And then we wouldn't have this problem.”

“We wouldn't have this problem if you just stayed home,” said her father. His tone made Agnes feel chilly, although Mary didn't seem to notice how much less patience he had with her lately.

She overheard her mother on the phone that evening pleading with the twins to leave Austin and come home for just a couple of weeks, but it was a losing battle. Clarissa had already enrolled for both summer semesters and Roz had a job and a boyfriend she had no intention of being separated from. When the twins had been home at Christmas their father had baited them both about their taste in clothes and music and had been particularly merciless in his sarcastic attacks on Rozzy's long-haired “liberal” boyfriend. They didn't have to take it, and they didn't. Agnes envied them their extra years. When she was old enough to get away, she wouldn't come back either.

Her parents didn't ask Agnes what she wanted to do, and she didn't ask her mother where she wanted to go. She didn't want to hear another story about a bit part in a film which would end on the cutting-room floor. More than a year had passed since Mary Grey's last “trip to Hollywood.” The twins had been living at home then, seniors in high school, willing to look after their younger sister and test their cooking skills, especially since their housekeeping duties included unquestioned right of access to their mother's car. She remembered that time, those two weeks, vividly because they had been so happy. Instead of working late and spending his weekends down at the bay, working on his boat as he did now, their father had started coming home earlier in the evenings, to take them out to dinner or, after a meal at home, out to a movie or to play miniature golf. One Sunday they all went sailing, and on the Saturdays, when her sisters were busy with their friends, he had taken Agnes to see the battleship
Texas
and the San Jacinto Monument. He'd talked to her—mostly about Texas history, as she recalled, but the subject mattered less than the fact of his interested presence. She had wished it could always be like that with the four of them.

But Mary Grey came back from wherever she had been, the twins graduated and moved up to Austin, and Mike spent less and less time at home. The house which had once been so full of voices was now too quiet.

Things were getting worse, the way they always did before Mary went away. The long, tense silences between her parents would be punctuated by short, quiet arguments. There were many days when Agnes saw her father only for a few minutes in the morning in the kitchen before he left for work, and her mother only for a few minutes in the evening, in her darkened bedroom where she'd spent the day with one of her bad headaches.

Something had to happen; she couldn't understand why her father was being so difficult. He'd always let his wife go before, and things had always been better, at least for a while, afterward. But now he was using her as an excuse to keep her mother home, and she couldn't even say anything because she wasn't supposed to know they were arguing.

It came as a complete surprise when her mother asked if she'd mind spending a couple of weeks with her Aunt Marjorie.

The name lifted her spirits like a promise of magic.

“Marjorie's coming to stay here?”

“No. You'd be going to stay with her, in East Texas. Where we grew up. Would that be all right with you? It might be kind of boring, I remember when I was a teenager I couldn't stand being stuck out in the woods like that, but you could take a suitcase full of books with you, and there's a pond where we used to swim, and . . .”

She had seen her aunt only three times in the last three years, but she often dreamed about her, and held imaginary conversations with her. To have her all to herself for two whole weeks was a dream come true. She threw her arms around her mother. “Oh, thank you!”

With a short, embarrassed laugh her mother pushed her away. “Oh, don't thank me. Thank Marjorie. And please remember, she's not used to having children around, and she'll have things she'll want to do, so . . . be as grown up as you can. Don't make too many demands. Don't expect too much from her.”

Agnes wasn't listening. She was already deep in imagining her perfect vacation with Marjorie.

Mary Grey left in a taxi on Friday afternoon. Agnes was to spend the weekend with her father before taking a Trailways bus to East Texas on Monday morning. She had been looking forward to that, imagining conversations and adventures, but her father was remote and uncommunicative. He avoided her—even when they were together he would not meet her eyes. When she asked him what he was thinking about he said “nothing” or “business.” When she tried to share her pleasure at going to visit Marjorie he grew colder. He wouldn't even pronounce Marjorie's name, and his refusal acted like a spell that locked her tongue. She tried to draw him out, and felt like a fake and a fool, asking him questions about Texas history, as if she cared. Halfway through Saturday she gave up and escaped as usual into her books. But when the bus carried her away on Monday morning and, craning back, she discovered that her father was already lost to sight, her eyes filled with tears. She should have tried harder. She shouldn't have given up so easily. She ached with loss, feeling as if she was leaving her father for very much longer than two weeks.

She blew her nose and got her transistor radio out of her bag, settling the earplug in her ear to listen to her favorite DJ and her favorite Top 40 station. She heard songs by all the best groups, The Lovin' Spoonful, Buffalo Springfield, The Turtles, The Beatles, The Young Rascals, and her mood improved with each hit. But then The Doors' “Light My Fire” began to fade out, and the Hollies singing “Carrie Ann” were even more wracked by static. The bus had carried her beyond the reach of the Houston station. For a time she station-hopped as best she could, but by the time she reached Camptown she wasn't receiving anything but country-western, and those twanging, nasal voices could not uplift her but only annoy.

Camptown was a settlement in the middle of the piney woods of East Texas, about a hundred and sixty miles northeast of Houston. There wasn't much to it: gazing out the window she saw a few houses, two churches, a short strip of storefronts and a filling station which served as the bus stop. Most of the people who lived there probably worked for the big sawmill whose whistle split the air twice a day. She was the only person who got off the bus, and there was only one person there to meet it. As always, the sight of her aunt gave her the strange frisson of seeing someone so much like yet unlike her mother. Mary would never have been seen in public unflatteringly dressed or without makeup; Marjorie, with her bare, lined face, frowzy hair, long cotton skirt and tie-dyed T-shirt, looked like a fading flower child. In the past, she had seemed glamorous in her own arty, offbeat way; a beatnik. But beatniks had been replaced in the public eye by hippies, and this woman, she thought with a swirl of hot, disowning embarrassment, was too old to be a hippie.

Her aunt stepped forward and hugged her briefly and awkwardly. Agnes inhaled the mingled smells of stale cigarettes, sweat, and patchouli oil, and Marjorie withdrew.

“How was your journey?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“Both of these bags yours?”

“I brought a lot of books. Mother said I should, in case . . .”

“That's right, you'll need them. I don't have television, and I won't have time to entertain you. You'll have lots of time for reading. Put them in there.” She gestured at a little red wagon.

Agnes hesitated. “Where's your car?”

“That's it, princess. The baggage car.”

“You don't have a car?” The idea was shocking. Until now, she had not met a single grown-up person without a car. “How do you—”

“I walk,” said Marjorie shortly. “And so do you, unless you want to spend the night at the Camptown filling station.” She grabbed the wagon handle and marched away, pulling it behind her.

Agnes didn't move. She had a sudden vision of her mother on the telephone pleading, wheedling, blackmailing, and of Marjorie, unhappily, grudgingly, giving in.

It was hot and quiet and still, the air buzzing slightly with an insect noise, and no cars in sight. When she turned her head she could see the grimy windows of the service station office and, inside, a man in overalls sitting on a chair, his feet up on the desk, gazing at her with a bored lack of curiosity. Marjorie's figure grew smaller in the distance, walking back down the empty highway in the direction from which the bus had come, pulling the wagon with Agnes' luggage behind her. The sound of the wheels on the road grew fainter. She did not pause or look back. If she didn't move, nothing would change, nothing would get better, no one would come for her. At last she started to walk. Then, fearful of getting lost, she began to run.