Read Online The Pillow Friend by Lisa Tuttle - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Lisa Tuttle
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“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
“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
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