Personal Touch

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Tim,” said Mother again, and now she stepped forward and opened the kitchen window. “Tim!” she yelled at the top of her lungs, which was hardly necessary, as he was standing right there. Tim jumped about a foot, which was gratifying.

  Now, in past summers, when Tim got yelled at, he’d come up to my parents belligerently, ready to deny having done a thing. However, he d have this gleam of pride m his eyes, so you knew perfectly well he’d also done something else that you hadn’t even found out about yet.

  This summer he merely walked up to the window looking puzzled.

  And also looking tall.

  Good grief, I thought. How tall is he?

  “Tim,” said my mother breathlessly, “did you ever find a summer job?”

  “No, ma’am. I pretty much gave up looking. There just didn’t seem to be anything available.”

  “Consider yourself employed,” said my mother. “Get a shirt and some shoes and meet me at my car in five minutes.”

  Tim looked down at his bare tanned chest as though he had never before considered putting a shirt over it.

  I also looked down at that bare tanned chest. Good grief, I thought. Margaret was right.

  “Doing what?” said Tim. “I mean, I’d love a job. I accept. I’m just curious.”

  “Only natural,” said my mother. “Clerking at my store. Think you can sell deck chairs?”

  “Better than anybody,” said Tim, with becoming modesty, and he was off, presumably looking for shirt and shoes.

  There was a long silence at the breakfast table.

  My mother looked like the cat that lapped the cream.

  My father looked very skeptical.

  I, doubtless, looked ill.

  But that is how, on the morning of June 17th, I came to be clerking in a chair store with Timothy Lansberry.

  We were exceptionally polite to each other, like good little employees. I showed Tim how to do things and where things were and how we marked them. Tim said, “Thank you, Sunny,”

  I said, “You’re welcome, Tim.”

  There were no insults. Nobody threw anything at anybody. Tim behaved like a robot trained in Bloomingdale’s for perfect service and I behaved like my mother’s good little daughter.

  Tim learned the store faster than I had. I told myself this was because after all I was so exhausted from my other bookselling job that I couldn’t put my entire attention to Chair Fair the way Tim could. My father said it was an act; Tim was like a volcano masquerading as a placid old mountain top and we’d better be very very careful. My mother said she thought perhaps Tim really could sell deck chairs better than anybody.

  “That’ll be twenty-one dollars and eleven cents, ma’am,” said Tim. “May I carry that to your car for you? Don’t forget your other package. Shall I carry that one, too?”

  Tim was so gallant he reminded me of the good guy in the Westerns I read. (For that matter, the bad guys. In Westerns, all men are gallant.) Tim carried packages to cars as if he were swinging the fair maiden onto the horse. He kept the counters stocked and the floors clean and the light bulbs changed. In one week my father and I were obsolete and my mother and Tim Lansberry were running Chair Fair.

  The customers loved him.

  My mother loved him.

  Even my father decided to take advantage of the situation and love him.

  And I…

  What I felt would be very difficult to describe.

  4

  I ROLLED OVER IN bed and looked with glassy eyes at my clock. 7:30 in the morning. I had just started to drag myself out from between the covers when I remembered that Mother and Tim were handling things today; I could sleep late.

  I flopped back on the mattress and tucked myself under the cotton blanket again. I love being in bed when it’s just cool enough so you can snuggle, but not so cold your nose hurts. It was a perfect chilly early summer morning. You just knew the cool would burn off in an hour or two and the beach would be at its sunny best.

  I’ll get up around 10:00, I told myself. Have a leisurely breakfast in front of the television and see what movie star is being interviewed on what taboo topic.

  But it was not a movie star that came into my mind. It was, infuriatingly, Tim.

  Or maybe I’ll go to the beach, I said to myself, refusing to think about the Terrible Infuriating Monster, and work on my pitiful tan.

  Scan the sand for decent boys. At the very least, strike up a friendship with some decent girls who might have decent older brothers.

  Downstairs the kitchen door slammed, bounced back off the wall, and slammed again. “I’m ready!” yelled Tim. “You ready to leave yet, Mrs. Compton?”

  “Yes, dear,” called my mother from her bedroom. “Just a moment.”

  Yes, dear? The much-loathed Tim? The Terrible Infuriating Monster of yore was now a yes dear?

  The picture I had in my mind of Tim was Tim at thirteen, with half his hair cut, holding the purple paint sprayer.

  But Tim didn’t look like that any more. He wasn’t scrawny and freckled and sharp-elbowed and yelling Korean fight calls. He was—he was—

  I rallied. He was still Tim, that’s what he was.

  My mother came rushing into my room to borrow a hair clip from me. She has trouble keeping her hair out of her eyes. I always suggest cutting it, but Mother thinks her hair is her only decent feature, and therefore she should have lots of it around. She chose a tortoise shell barrette.

  “I don’t think that’s Tim down there,” I said to her.

  She used my mirror and my brush as well as my barrette. We put up the mirror when I was about nine years old. It’s now a foot too low, so you have to crouch painfully to see yourself in it. Tim would be able to see his belt buckle in that, I thought. And then I yelled at myself. How come Tim kept interfering with my thoughts?

  “Sure sounds like Tim,” said my mother. “Slammed the door just like Tim.”

  “I think Tim is in a reformatory in northern New York. That person downstairs is some deserving youth Mr. and Mrs. Lansberry have adopted for the summer.”

  My mother burst out laughing and hugged me. “Everybody has to grow up eventually,” she told me. “And I figure if old Tim can do it as successfully as he has, there’s hope for the human race.”

  “Do you think he’s permanently changed?” I said.

  “Sunny, nothing is permanent. All I know is that Tim is by far the most energetic, enthusiastic, and eager worker I have ever had except for myself. I am really looking forward to the entire summer. Tim is a joy to work with.”

  She kissed me good-bye and I thought about Tim being a joy to work with. Had he been? I had been so busy revising some of my opinions of Tim and waiting on customers and not letting myself think about how terrific-looking he had become that I hadn’t thought in terms of joy.

  But there. I had said it in my head. Tim was terrific-looking.

  But that’s all, I told myself. Just his looks. The rest of Tim is probably still Tim.

  “See you for dinner?” Mother asked. “Want to meet me at the Rusted Rudder? My treat?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Six o’clock.”

  We kissed good-bye again (my family is big on kissing) and she clattered down our narrow steep stairs to hurry out the door with Tim.

  The boys I knew,” like David, thought Tim was neat. We have some really bad actors in school and they’re universally detested. It dawned on me that nobody detested Tim except me. The rest of my friends either tolerated or enjoyed him.

  And here was my mother saying yes dear and calling him a joy.

  I ate breakfast slowly. The TV interview sounded good but turned out to be a bore and I switched it off during the first toothpaste ad. My mind kept leaning in Tim’s direction and I kept propping it up with all the bad memories I had of Tim.

  There were enough to do a lot of propping.

  Like that time when he purposely stranded me out on the tidal flats off Oyster River and I had to flounder home through the m
ud and the grass and the horseshoe crabs, half-swimming, half-wading, my bare feet getting sucked into the mire, my skin torn on the sharp grass. Tim had been thirteen, I knew, because I could vividly remember promising him I would cut off the other half of his hair by the simple expedient of removing his worthless head.

  The day at Second Time Around passed slowly. The morning chill had not burned off but turned into a drizzle and then into a steady rain. Very few people felt motivated to exchange paperbacks. Probably they were holed up somewhere cozy with someone they liked and were reading what they already had.

  I pitied Margaret doing her arts and crafts indoors, and Ginnie having to lifeguard in the rain, because there are always some idiots who insist on getting their money’s worth from a vacation even if it means swimming in the rain. I especially pitied Eloise in the toll booth. I wondered if they had heat in those little booths.

  At five o’clock the telephone rang. Nobody ever called Second Time Around. I was apt to forget it even featured a phone. In a book shop you tend to think the only means of communication is the written word.

  “Hello?” I said dubiously.

  It was my mother. When Mr. Hartley came to substitute for me so I could go have supper, she wanted to know, would I please come over to Chair Fair instead of going to a restaurant?

  “Sure, Mom, why?”

  “It’s pouring down rain, Sunny. Everybody in town here is buying umbrellas, tarpaulins, plastic drop cloths and rain hats. They all seem to have scheduled picnics that must go on regardless of a little thing like rain. I need you. Tim and I can’t quite manage alone.”

  The word Tim wriggled through my entire body.

  “Stop it,” I whispered, and I slapped at the word as if it were a mosquito.

  My mother kissed me good-bye over the phone. She always does that. It comes over the line as a little puckery smack.

  Kisses, I thought.

  I got very firm with myself.

  A mother’s kisses, I said. They connote security. Concern. Family. Merely in this case a technique of saying good-bye.

  Whereas a boy’s kisses…

  I got very very firm with myself. I had kissed Leland. Big deal.

  Mr. Hartley came in, drenched, to cover for me. I told him the problem at Chair Fair and he said, “Oh, heck. Stay there. Don’t bother to come back here. Nobody’ll exchange books in the rain. If I get bored, I’ll just close up. Bye, Sunny, see you tomorrow.”

  I draped myself in newspaper and ran through the rain. I am going to my mother’s store, I told myself.

  But my feet were running to somebody else.

  I refuse to participate, I muttered to the rain. This is the pits, the absolute pits. I have better taste. I’m not going to play this game. I quit.

  I strode into Chair Fair determined to see the rotten, worthless, creep of a delinquent who’d ruined my last five summers.

  I saw Tim. Tall, husky, handsome, gallant…

  Oh, no, I thought. Oh, six hundred times no.

  I turned blindly away from Tim and walked purposely up the aisle toward picnic supplies and plastic glasses.

  It was like a sudden summer thunderstorm. The one where you’re lying placidly on the beach and you see this black cloud on the horizon. You tell yourself it’s nothing, just a mirage, and then suddenly the cloud is rolling toward you, getting darker and more menacing, and then you’re madly packing up the beach chairs and the Thermos and shoving your crossword puzzle into your beach bag and thumping desperately across the sand to try to get into the car before you get soaked.

  There was this huge black cloud coming. Descending on me.

  Never ask for something, I said to myself. I went and asked for a crush on a handsome rich gallant summer boy. Look what I got.

  Tim.

  Terrific.

  Now he was going to ruin the sixth summer in a row.

  5

  I REMINDED MYSELF THAT Tim was the person who had stood outside last summer watching me knock Japanese beetles off my mother’s roses into the jar of kerosene and instead of admiring my new lavender and pink terry cloth jumpsuit, told me I had just the right figure to get a job as a bookmark.

  It was entirely possible that Tim still bore scars from where I kicked him.

  Two people like us could not love each other. Impossible.

  “We’ve run out of telescoping umbrellas up here, Sunny,” said Tim. “Mind running out into the stockroom and bringing me another box? They’re on the left about three shelves up.”

  He gave me the sweetest smile on earth.

  Don’t fall for it, I told myself. Last time he smiled at you like that was just after he purposely left you stranded on the tidal flats.

  Then I realized the sweet smile had been for the customer’s benefit and not mine. In fact the customer was standing there beaming back at Tim as if Tim were a rock star and the customer’s sole reason for living was to get his autograph.

  I refused to participate in the exchange of sweet smiles. I went off to get his umbrellas and when I got back the magic had run out. Now Tim was circled by customers humming like angry wasps as they waited for us to replenish the supply of telescoping umbrellas in three fashionable colors. It turned out our colors weren’t fashionable enough. The customers whined and complained that we didn’t have a sufficient selection and what kind of store was this Chair Fair anyway?

  I was about to tell them that for all I cared, they could go out into the rain and use a maple leaf when Tim put a restraining hand on mine and gently accepted the customers’ wrath and talked them into the purchase anyway; and finally, exhaustingly, they trooped off with their unfashionably colored umbrellas all paid for. My mother was utterly delighted that Tim could handle the situation as diplomatically as that. And I, I will have to admit, was utterly delighted at the presence of Tim’s hand on mine.

  It was the same hand that had once attempted to lynch me, but after all, we were only twelve then, and now was the year to forgive and forget, right?

  Oh, Sunny, I said to myself, have you got it bad!

  I watched Tim ring up another purchase on the cash register and thought how strong and fine his hands were and how—

  I turned away in a hurry. All I needed to do was let Tim see how I was feeling right at that moment. He would laugh himself sick. He would lie down in the aisle and guffaw. Displays would fall to the floor from the vibrations of his laughter. He would remind me that I was the girl by whose brain he wanted to post a sign reading Space For Rent. That it was my body whose only possible use was a bookmark.

  I stumbled around the store trying to find plastic picnic glasses for some poor harried mother who had left her four children in her station wagon and was sure they were going to escape while she was in the store and meet a dreadful, violent end. My advice would have been to shrug and let it happen, but then I am rather low on motherly instincts.

  Anyway, the lady was frantic because I couldn’t find the plastic glasses, and she kept jabbering that couldn’t I understand she was in a hurry! Naturally, I finally located the glasses about two inches from where I had started hunting ten minutes earlier.

  The lady looked at me as if I were some caterpillar guilty of defoliating her favorite tree. A creature totally incapable of contributing anything useful to society. It did not help at all to see Tim’s eyebrows raised at me as if he were inclined to agree.

  It was only thanks to the firm upbringing of a severe set of parents that I was able to tell the lady a humble “I’m sorry.”

  Tim rang up her plastic glasses and set them gently into a brown paper bag for her. When she had scurried out and we were alone for a moment, he said, “Sunny, old girl, you definitely need a rest. Why don’t you sit down over here?”

  I was so tired by then—what with two jobs to handle and now this ridiculous emotional maelstrom of a crush on Tim—that all I could do was stare at the chair Tim was offering. It was a model we had never carried before: a complex wood and canvas thing that folded into
almost nothing.

  I doubted if I had the strength to drag myself around the badminton display to get there.

  I glanced at Tim and he was blushing.

  I stared. “You’re blushing?” I said. “Over a chair?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Tim, cheeks blazing. I very much doubted he knew what I was thinking. He would have been running, not blushing. “I’ve outgrown that kind of thing,” Tim said. “It’s not rigged. This chair is nothing but a chair. It won’t dump you on the floor or make weird noises or anything like that.”

  Tim Lansberry blushing at the memories of past booby traps. It was close to a miracle.

  “I was such a gullible little kid,” I said. “Every time you tied a hammock I actually climbed into it and every time you hung a rope from a tree limb, I actually tried to shinny up it.”

  “You were irresistible,” said Tim, grinning.

  My heart flopped into an anatomically impossible position at the thought of being irresistible to Timothy Lansberry.

  He does not mean you were irresistibly sexy, I told myself. He means you were irresistible for putting on the receiving end of his tricks.

  But even knowing that, I blushed too, at the very thought that he might know what I was thinking. Know I was wishing I could be irresistibly sexy and appealing to him, of all people. We stared at each other, embarrassed and hot and flushed, and I sat down heavily in the chair, just to end the scene, and the blasted chair split down the middle and dumped me agonizingly right on the tile floor.

  “Timothy Lansberry!” I screamed. “You rotten, worthless, perverted, warped creep! I can’t believe I fell for it again!” My rear end hurt so much I was almost in tears. The rage I was feeling at him and at myself was enough that I think I really could have strangled him with pleasure.

  Tim, incredibly, was not laughing with glee. He was staring at me in horror. “Oh, Sunny,” he said, and you would have thought he was honestly traumatized, “really, I didn’t do that. I’m sorry. I really meant to offer you a chair, honest, I didn’t—”