The Pillow Friend (15 page)

“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.

Her mother kept breaking in on her thoughts with unwelcome advice.

“I don't wear makeup. I'm not going to suddenly start now.”

“Why don't you wear something a little more—”

“Nobody dresses up for a football game!”

“I wasn't going to suggest a formal. But that top you're wearing isn't the most flattering thing in the world. What about that little pink blouse?”

“I'm wearing this.”

“You could do something different with your hair; do you want me to help you put it up?”

She had already rejected Roxanne's offer to help her with hair and makeup; this pressure now from her mother was intolerable.

“Just leave me alone, would you? I'm going like this. I don't need any help getting dressed, thank you.”

“Are you going to wear one of your ‘Equality NOW' buttons? Do you want him to think of you as just one of the boys? Is that what you want?”

“No I don't. I'm not a boy. But I'm not just a girl, either—I don't want him to see me as just a girl. I want him to see who I really am. I want him to know me, and not play silly games with makeup and high heels and acting helpless and flirting . . . pretending. . . .”

“Then what are you doing going out on this date with him, pretending you have the slightest interest in football? Isn't that pretending?”

She felt hot and itchy, caught out, and hated having her own deep discomfort so quickly uncovered by her mother. “He's not exactly the world's biggest fan. It's just something to do, somewhere to go and sit outside and eat hot dogs. Look, it's my business, all right? Aren't you going somewhere? Don't you have shopping to do?”

“It'll wait,” said her mother with a self-satisfied smile. “I want to meet your young man.”

Agnes went and locked herself into her own bathroom. Then, because she couldn't bear to look at herself—her plain, round, bespectacled face, her plain straight brown hair—she sat down on the closed seat of the toilet and put her head in her hands, leaning over like someone afraid of fainting. She was doing this all wrong. She should have taken Roxanne's advice and her mother's, bought contact lenses and a new pants suit, let her friend paint her face, learn to flirt—either go the whole way into it, or stick to her revulsion against dating and the high school social scene. Why had she let Roxanne talk her into this? Why had she asked Alex to the dance? She didn't want to date him. She didn't want that awkwardness between them. She wanted him, simply, in love with her. She wanted something dramatic to happen, the way it did on television, throwing them together.

Trapped in a basement while a hurricane roared outside, or taken hostage by gunmen, their bus hijacked—there could be other people around, that was all right, but in adversity they would find themselves drawn together. They would realize they loved each other, there would be no need for words. She'd imagined so many ways it might happen, but she hadn't had the patience to wait and let fate throw them together.

Her mother knocked at the door. “He's here.”

Something like stage fright made her stomach lurch. She got up like somebody else, without even thinking about what she would say, and went downstairs to greet Alex.

It all went smoothly enough. Her mother was friendly but not intrusively so, and said nothing embarrassing. Alex declined a soft drink, and they were outside in under five minutes.

He apologized for the car, a battered white station wagon which smelled ripely of dog.

“You have a lot of dogs?”

“They're my mother's—so's the car. She collects waifs and strays.”

“Don't you like dogs?”

“Not really. They're so, so
doggy,
the way they stare at you with their big brown eyes, willing you to love them, and loving you no matter what you do.”

She thought, sickly, of her own doggy eyes, always turned his way, trying to compel his love. “I would be your spaniel,” she said sadly.

“What?”

“It's a line from a play. I think that's right. From
Women Beware Women
. I think. I didn't memorize it, it just came into my head. Doesn't it happen like that to you? You read something and then bits of it just stick and turn up in your head, not when they're useful, but like dog hairs stuck to your clothes.”

“I've always got dog hairs on my clothes. You will, too, after riding in this car. I'm sorry.”

“It's all right. I don't mind. They're just ordinary clothes.” She looked out the window while he drove in silence. The route they were traveling was the same one she traveled most days to school, so nothing she saw surprised her. The only surprising thing was that she was in a car with Alex Hill. Maybe someday that would seem as ordinary as sitting beside Roxanne.

“So, you like football?”

“No,” she said, without thinking, and then bit her lip. “I mean, well, I don't know, really. I don't care about it on television, I never watch it, and—well, actually, I've never been to a game. So I'm really looking forward to finding out. If I like it, I mean.” She felt hot and sweaty with effort. “So, are you an Owls fan?”

“God, no. They're hopeless. I got the tickets 'cause my Dad teaches there.”

“Oh, yeah? What subject?”

“Architecture.”

“Will you go to Rice?”

He snorted. “Not even if they'd have me. I can't wait to leave home.”

“Where're you going?”

“UT. How about you?”

If he became her boyfriend they wouldn't be separated after graduation. “Probably UT. My sisters went there—one of them still lives in Austin. Do you know what you want to major in?”

“I might go Pre-Law. I've got the grades for it. I don't know that I'd want to be a lawyer, but Pre-Law's a good start anyway. How about you?”

“Well, I've been thinking about anthropology, or maybe philosophy. Those are the things I'd really like to study. The thing is, I don't know what kind of job I could get afterward. The only thing I want to do is write, but you can't make a living out of poetry, so I thought maybe if I could get a job that had something to do with books, like maybe working for a publishing company, or as a librarian. Even working in a bookstore, but of course you don't exactly need a degree to do that. Anyway, I guess I'll worry about the job when the time comes, and enjoy my time in college. I'm really hoping I can manage to get something published before too long—so far, it's been nothing but rejection slips. I couldn't even make it into
Visions
last year! How about you? Do you send stuff out?”

“What?” He rolled his eyes, startled, in her direction.

“Poetry. I noticed you didn't have anything in
Visions
either. Kind of makes me wonder about the teachers who judged the entries, considering some of the stuff they . . .”

“What makes you think I write poetry?”

“Well—you're the poetry editor.”

He snorted. “Not my choice. Miss Beadle makes the choices. I wanted to be editor, actually, but Freer got that, of course, he's her bright-eyed boy. I don't know why she made me poetry editor. Not that it makes that much difference, you know the editors don't choose the material, we're just responsible for position and layout and making sure there aren't any typos.”

“I know, but I guess I thought you must have a special interest—”

“I don't even like poetry. I don't understand it. Especially all this modern stuff, this free verse that doesn't even rhyme. I mean, what's the point? I think if you're going to have poetry, it should at least rhyme.”

The football game itself turned out to be the best part of their date. There wasn't so much opportunity to talk then, and what talking they did could easily be focused on the game they were watching. She asked questions and he explained what was going on. She enjoyed his nearness, the safe thrill of body heat as they sat thigh to thigh, his flesh separated from hers by only two layers of sturdy denim. Warmed by his body, aware of his every movement, she could for a little while simply enjoy her love.

Once the game was over, though, they were back in the difficult world of their differences, or of his differences from the romantic figure she'd created in her dreams. She struggled to build bridges, initiating conversations intended to bring them closer together, but she had an uncanny knack for saying the wrong things, hitting his sorest spots, drawing out of him always the things she didn't want to hear. Maybe it was because she was tossing the conversational ball to a man she couldn't see, to the figment she imagined in his place.

They went to a Burger King for hamburgers, and it was there, in that artificially cheery atmosphere, in a rare few moments of silence between them, while watching him eat, that she had a sudden, vivid memory of a childhood disappointment.

She'd had a dollhouse when she was small, before their family had broken apart, and in the kitchen of the dollhouse there were several tiny plates and bowls of artificial food. They were more real to her even now than whatever it was she'd had for dinner the night before, and she regretted now having let them go with the house, having agreed with her mother that, at thirteen, she was too big to play with dolls and dollhouses. And yet she knew that if she had them now, if she could put her hand into her purse this minute and pull out the tiny loaf of bread, the bowl of fruit, the beautiful brown roast chicken, they would not make her happy, they would still stir the same frustrated longing in her that they had then. They had always looked good enough to eat—they looked to her even better than the things she really had to eat—and yet they had been inedible. She knew that, she had always known it, and yet she had never, as a child, entirely believed it. There must be a way of approaching them, a special attitude or a particular time of day or night when they would be transformed into something delicious. Once, or maybe more than once, she had gone so far as to bite a tiny piece of the roast chicken. It tasted awful, like dust and old glue, and there had ever after been a notch in the breast where her tooth had chipped out a piece to spoil it and remind her of how silly she had been—and even then she couldn't quite shake off her belief that somehow, someday . . .