The Pillow Friend by Lisa Tuttle Read Free Book Online Page A

as my situation . . .

and I longed to

You would never

it was the promise of

unspeakable things

in the garden, moving swiftly across

neglected, in the shadows, waiting for

Indeed! Pray tell

a wind down the alley

the touch of your hand, or a breath

I should like to . . . I have never . . . when shall we ever

In the fire. Like something marvelous.

To recover what I had lost and quietly return

Again, but I must not repeat

resourceful

small and gleaming

there in the doorway

beneath the overhanging

trees, moving

invisible figures

when you finally understand what
     
    They made no more sense on the tenth reading than they had the first. One day when she was bored she copied some of the lines onto another page and set herself the task of weaving them into a story. It was surely not the story that Myles had been telling to his invisible audience, but she found it strangely satisfying. There was something exciting about giving his words more meaning, and it was not long before writing in this way became her favorite bedtime activity, better even than reading.
    That was the year she began to write, not just the private, bedtime stories, but poetry, in school, encouraged by her teacher. Some of her poems appeared in the school's mimeographed magazine, and one of them was singled out and won a prize.
    That was the year she made friends with Nina Schumacher, who would gradually, over the next couple of years, replace Leslie as her best friend.
    Second grade was also the year of air raid drills, and seeing a teacher cry; of the demonic Russians who wanted to destroy the world; of President Kennedy on television telling his fellow Americans that if the Russian ships did not turn back we might soon be at war. It was a particularly bad time for her mother, who often did not emerge from her darkened bedroom all day, leaving her family to cope as best they could.
    By December the Cuban Missile Crisis was over and the world was not destroyed. Whether or not it was connected Agnes never knew, but the worst of Mary Grey's personal crisis had also passed. On December 15, she bought herself a new turquoise dress with matching shoes and put on her rarely worn mink stole to go out with her husband to celebrate their fourteenth wedding anniversary.
    The twins were left in charge. Agnes had a bath and got into her nightie early, her agreement with her sisters being that she could stay up until they heard their parents' car on the drive—then she had to jump into bed and pretend she'd been asleep for hours.
    Getting to stay up late always sounded like such a treat, but the twins would never play with her for very long and she didn't like watching television as they did, so she soon grew bored. She was tired of reading and didn't feel like writing. She was casting about for something else to do when she thought of her parents' closet and the Christmas presents which were sure to be hidden there.
    That closet was strictly off-limits, and not just at Christmas time. It was full of her mother's clothes, many of them expensive designer dresses which had not been worn since before Agnes' birth. Before the twins were born Mary Grey had been a model (“mannequin,” she said, which made Agnes imagine her frozen into a lifeless posture like the human-sized dolls in the windows of the big downtown stores) and had special discounts at Battlestein's and Neiman-Marcus. The old clothes were kept carefully stored in plastic wrap or garment bags. “They'll come back in fashion someday, and as long as I keep my figure I don't have to worry,” said her mother. “So I want them kept nice. I don't want your grubby little paws all over them.” Sometimes as a special treat she would give her daughters a fashion show, mincing along an imaginary catwalk in the living room. But it had been many months since she'd been in the mood to do that.
    That night Agnes felt a wistful longing for her mother, as if she had been away for much longer than a few hours.