Personal Touch

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Was that true? Had I been “making eyes at him” and he didn’t even notice? Probably yes. To both. I’d been trying to flirt when Tim was trying to survive.

  You’re a lousy person, I said to myself. Worrying because you’re lonely. Because you didn’t have the dates you daydreamed about. Because you don’t have a boyfriend. And you’re embarrassed. Because you did flirt and it wasn’t noticed.

  And meanwhile here’s Tim being ripped apart by his family.

  It was hard to imagine anybody as strong and sure of himself as Tim being hurt so much. Yet I knew how much Mrs. Lansberry had demanded of him. I wondered what Mr. Lansberry was demanding up in Albany.

  It dawned on me that I had no idea what Tim would be thinking right now. We had talked and talked, yet I didn’t even know if he’d like his parents to get back together. He hadn’t said he’d rather live in Albany with his father or in Sea’s Edge with his mother. For all I knew he’d join the army if one more person asked one more thing of him.

  What had we talked about, anyway?

  Whatever it had been, it had just been a start. I hardly knew him. Come back, Tim! I thought. Let me get to know you better. Don’t, please don’t, stay in Albany.

  Every morning I collected the Lansberry mail, glad for an excuse to walk on their property. I began gull-feeding again, just to walk out on their deck. It was very dry. The radio and newspapers began to fret about water shortages and the television warned us not to wash our cars or water our lawns. I took buckets of old dish water and dumped them on Mrs. Lansberry’s perennials.

  Tim did not write to me. I hadn’t expected him to: I couldn’t imagine anything less like Tim, actually, and yet I’d been sort of hoping for a letter. At least a postcard telling me when—or if—he’d be back in town. But not even that came.

  At the bookstore, I sold war novels to an elderly retired woman and Gothics to a young mother and self-help books to a teenager. I tried to do a crossword in Games Magazine marked “easy” but I didn’t get a single word. This summer, I thought, this so-called fabulous sixteenth summer, is going to last forever.

  The fan moved the stale hot air listlessly.

  In five more minutes, I said to myself, I am going to lean out the window and scream. Not for any particular reason. Just because I am going to have a mental collapse sometime during the summer and it might as well be up here where I can blame it on the heat.

  Margaret’s old boyfriend David came up to the bookshop just in time to prevent me from making a fool of myself screaming. I hadn’t seen him all summer, although he was a dedicated reader.

  “Library,” he explained.

  I asked him what kind of books he liked, so I could show him how the shop was arranged and where his sort of book was shelved.

  “Spy stories,” he said. “Something that really moves.”

  How funny, I thought, trying not to show my amusement. It was the same kind of book Margaret liked. I wondered if Margaret had bored David as much as David had bored Margaret! Or maybe liking spy stories had not been enough of a bond to hold them together.

  I watched David bending over the shelves and then kneeling to see the lower titles. I compared him to Tim. Tim, as he had all summer, looked superior to anyone else.

  “Saw you in that funny little car Tim won,” said David, handing me a ten-dollar bill.

  I wondered if he thought Tim and I were on a date, or if he knew Tim had just picked me up at work one day. I smiled at David and made change. “It’s a neat car, isn’t it?”

  “You think Tim would let me drive it?”

  “I’m sure he would. He isn’t around, though. He’s gone back up to Albany.”

  “Already?” said David, surprised. “I thought they always stayed through Labor Day. That’s too bad. Well, maybe next year.” David shrugged, as if it hardly mattered to him.

  Matters to me, I thought. It crossed my mind that no matter what future Tim and his parents decided on, Tim would at least come back to collect his nifty little car. So I would see him one more time, anyway. Provided they didn’t sneak in by night and rush out by dawn.

  I felt so negative. I hated it. I liked feeling like my name: Sunny. Happy. Warm. No problems.

  “Well, Dave, old boy,” said Mr. Hartley, “you going to be glad to be in school again this fall?”

  I felt a little pain in my chest. Was summer so close to finishing that we were talking about the start of school already? Where had all the sunny days gone? I felt this rush of loss and sorrow come over me and I felt sort of dizzy. David and Mr. Hartley noticed nothing.

  “Sort of,” said David, sounding hot and bored. “At least there’s one good thing. High school will be over after this year.”

  Oh, God, don’t let my senior year be hot and boring! I thought. Don’t let me shrug over it. Please let my senior year be good.

  I leaned in front of the portable fan to cool my forehead and pretended that Tim came to Sea’s Edge for his senior year and we dated all year long and it was not a fan but his fingers running through my hair. “That’s all you can think of to do?” said Mr. Hartley. He handed me a broom. “Sweep the stairs.”

  So I proceeded to walk blindly to the top of the stairs and vigorously I swept dust down on top of a customer’s head. I spent the rest of the hour apologizing to a very angry summer lady.

  The days passed in that peculiar way they have sometimes of being both too slow and too fast. The hours took forever, but the days rushed by. We were getting closer and closer to the opening of school and I hadn’t heard from Tim. I saved the Lansberry mail and newspapers and kept them in a cardboard box in our front hall. We had a bad late summer storm, with the wind howling like the harbinger of hurricanes to come. I pulled the tarp up over his precious Beetle and tied it down so the whipping sand wouldn’t mar the finish.

  11

  “I’M DONE,” SAID MARGARET ecstatically. “Camp is over! The last session is finished. No more brats who need double knots tied in their sneakers. No more lanyards to braid. No more seashells to glue on wastebaskets. No more Band-Aids to put on cuts so small I can’t even find them.”

  We were lying on the beach.

  A row of girls.

  It’s a re-run, I thought. Not one thing has changed since the beginning of summer. Except David is gone and we’re all tan. Even me.

  Ginnie and Lois talked about how lousy their jobs had been while I complained about how hot the bookstore was, and Margaret wrapped up by informing us that senior year was going to be terrific, just wait and see.

  “We said that about junior year,” Ginnie told her, “and it still was a dud.”

  “Not to mention sophomore year,” said Lois. “That wasn’t exactly a standout either.”

  We watched some sea gulls fighting over a heap of french fries some little kid had accidentally dumped into the sand. “Sunny?” said Margaret, yawning. “Whatever happened to Tim?”

  Good question. Too bad I didn’t have an answer. “He went back up to Albany for a while. I don’t know if they’ll be back again this summer or not.”

  I wondered about Mrs. Lansberry’s kindergarten job application. My father wanted her to have the job: they were holding it open ’til they heard from her. Maybe she simply wouldn’t come back. I didn’t know how reliable she was. When you got right down to it, all I knew about her was that she packed terrific picnics.

  How stupid we were, I thought, to let five years of living next door slip by without ever getting to know each other.

  It seemed to me that my sixteenth summer had been like a row of mistakes, materializing one by one for me to look at and learn by. Tim, come home, I thought. Let me talk to you. It’s my turn to talk.

  “I thought you two had something going there,” said Margaret, “the way you looked at each other that night at the square dance.”

  Ginnie said, “I still need to earn more money this summer, Sunny. Any chance your mother would hire me to fill in for Tim for a few weeks? And maybe on into the scho
ol year? She doesn’t close on Labor Day, does she?”

  Ginnie and I discussed Chair Fair—certainly a subject I knew better than Tim—and Margaret fell asleep. Beaches and hot sun are soporific. I flopped over on my stomach and rested my chin in my hands so I faced the picnic pavilion instead of the ocean. It was a great view. I watched a mother rearrange an umbrella over her dozing baby. I watched a little boy try to lick an ice cream bar faster than it melted. I watched a kid toss a crumpled napkin at a trash basket and miss.

  “What’s so fascinating up there?” said Tim. “I’ve been wiggling my toes in your face for five minutes and you haven’t even noticed. You specifically informed me in June that my toes were imprinted on your brain for all time.”

  He was back! I patted his terrific toes, feeling a wonderful thick joy rise all the way up inside me, like carbonated soda bubbling.

  “Sit with us, Tim,” said Margaret, waking up for something as interesting as Tim.

  “Thanks,” said Tim, and I caught a note of strain in his voice. “I’d love to but I can’t just now.” I looked up at him. He looked stretched, his skin pulled tightly, his smile forced. “Sunny?” he said. “Want to go for a ride?” I got my book and my sunglasses; Tim took my towel and Thermos.

  “Sorry to break it up,” I said to the girls.

  “But not very,” whispered Ginnie, grinning.

  Tim strode over the parking lot to his car. I was barefoot, which is no fun when crossing hot pavement. I scurried beside him, trying out my tiptoes, then my heels, and finally flying in an effort to burn just parts of my feet instead of all of them.

  Tim was in a rage.

  I had never seen him like that. Don’t drive, I thought. Go pound your head on a wall, or pound nails in a board, or break up some furniture. But don’t drive.

  It was too late. By the time I realized how angry he was, we were out on the road. He was having a sort of wheel-borne tantrum. He made jackrabbit starts at red lights, took corners far too fast, and passed cars in no-passing zones. I shrank down in my seat and prayed.

  Let him calm down, God, I thought. And please let us both live through this drive so I can find out what happened in Albany!

  He held the steering wheel so tightly I thought his hands would be permanently joined to the metal.

  I kept thinking of all the color safety films we’d seen in school in driver’s education classes. They figure the more blood they show you, the more apt you are to drive well. I ought to speak up, I thought. I ought to scream at him. For both our sakes I can’t just sit here and let him drive like a maniac. Never mind our sakes. He could kill somebody else along with us.

  We were at a four-way stop when Tim said his first syllable since leaving the beach. “Sorry,” he muttered. I was enormously relieved to see him shift slowly into first and leave the intersection at a normal, intelligent speed.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re alive.”

  He shot me a half-furious, half-ashamed look.

  I’m more grown up than he is, I thought suddenly. I wonder if my father would attribute that difference to the fact that he’s a boy and I’m a girl.

  “Let’s stop somewhere and talk,” I said.

  He drove for a little while. I didn’t pressure him. He was driving fine; the tantrum, if that was the right word, was over.

  A few miles later he said, “Okay.”

  He turned off the main road into a village whose name I could not see on any signs—we must have been thirty or forty miles from Sea’s Edge. We drove down a few quaint little streets and came upon a factory with a huge empty parking lot. Tim pulled under the shade of a huge old maple tree at the far end of the lot. Its first leaves had already turned scarlet. Autumn, I thought, can it really be autumn already?

  “So what happened?” I said.

  He shrugged and got out of the car. He walked around, opened my door, and helped me out. I needed help for a change. My knees were still jelly from that terrifying drive. We walked over to the tree. I inspected the ground for stinging insects and crawling bugs, decided it was relatively safe, and sat down. Tim just paced.

  I bet he won’t tell me, I thought. Oh, he might say what his father plans to do or where his mother is going to live, but he’s not going to tell me how he feels. Although I could make some pretty good guesses.

  “They’re definitely splitting up,” said Tim at last.

  We talked about Mrs. Lansberry. All the time we had been driving so fast I had known we would talk about Tim’s mother. “But she agreed to a divorce?” I said.

  “What’s she going to do?” demanded Tim, his voice rising in anger. It didn’t bother me. It wasn’t me he was so angry at.

  Finally Tim sat down beside me, but he kept flexing his muscles as if he were still pacing.

  Or kicking somebody, I thought.

  Tim took a very deep breath, stopped jerking his legs around, and said, “So tell me what you did while we were gone.”

  “I swept dust and sand into the hairdo of a lady from New York. She wanted Mr. Hartley to fire me and he told her she was absolutely right. I was a typical worthless, inconsiderate, stupid teenager, and she went away happy hearing that and Mr. Hartley said for me to forget it. He could think of a whole lot of summer people he’d always wanted to sweep dirt onto.”

  Tim laughed much harder than the story deserved, as if he’d been a long time without laughter. Oh, Tim! I thought sadly.

  “How’d you sweep it all the way up into her hair?” he asked.

  “I was on top of the stairs and she was at the bottom.”

  “Oh. Now I can picture it.” He grinned again.

  There was a long silence. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and pull him over on top of me and hug everything away, but I couldn’t. His smile was forced, his body was stiff. It wouldn’t work. He wasn’t ready to be touched. How odd, I thought, that I have never really touched a boy, but I can tell this isn’t the time. “I put a tarp over your car during a windstorm,” I said. Other girls give a guy a handknit sweater, I thought, or homemade fudge. My gift is a tarp on a car.

  “Thanks, Sun.” He took my hand and rubbed it absently between his fingers.

  “It’s late,” I said finally. “We’d better get on home.”

  I didn’t say anything about how worried my parents would be. They’d have to get mad at me, not Tim. Tim had had just about enough anger for one year, I thought.

  We didn’t talk driving home.

  There was one week left before school began. Mother was working madly to unload her summer inventory before her summer buyers moved away; my father was at school every moment getting ready for all the hordes of little urchins who would soon descend upon him. The weather stayed cool, Mr. Lansberry stayed in Albany, and I stayed at Second Time Around, peddling books.

  “Can I ride to work with you this morning?” said Tim, poking his head in our door as we were having breakfast.

  “May I,” corrected my mother. “Yes, you may. Why? Did you hurt your car?”

  “Nope. I’m out of gas and I won’t have any way to fill the tank ’til payday. Hi, Sunny,” he added, getting the important things out of the way.

  I saluted. I was dumping a little heap of dry cereal in my bowl and dribbling milk on it. I like my cereal barely dampened. Nothing is more repugnant in the morning than soggy cereal.

  Tim watched me pour the milk. It’s quite hard to do even the simplest things when somebody puts his face right up to you and stares. I almost missed the bowl. “Tim,” I said irritably. “Please.”

  “Like to go out tonight?” said Tim.

  I almost didn’t hear him, I had gotten so involved putting the cap back on the milk bottle. When I did hear him, I was opening the refrigerator door and I thought I must have misunderstood. Somebody is asking me on a date? I thought. Somebody named Tim?

  “Yes,” I said, since there was only one possible answer to the question.

  “I like your sweater,” he told me. “I’ve never se
en you except in summer clothes.”

  “Thank you.” Perhaps he daydreamed about me in woolen kilts and ski jackets. For the first time I really considered school: Tim and I were going to be in the same class at the same school for one entire year. If we rode the bus, we’d get on at the same stop…and if Tim drove, surely he’d take me.

  “Better eat your cereal,” said Tim, “it’s getting soft at the bottom.”

  “Hurry up, Tim,” said my mother, “we’ll be late.” She didn’t even give Tim time to protest that he had been the one waiting.

  All day long at Second Time Around I thought about our date. An evening picnic on the beach? I thought. Swimming by moonlight? It was pretty cool for that. Bowling, I thought, putt-putt golf, movies. Jazz concerts in Newport, dancing at the night club across the river.

  He likes me! I thought delightedly, selling Gothics with more spirit than usual. It isn’t just that he needs someone to talk to. It isn’t just that I’m the only one in Sea’s Edge who is willing to listen to his stories about his father’s mid-life crisis. He actually likes me!

  I kept hugging myself.

  Mr. Hartley, who was in back trying to figure his quarterly income taxes in such a manner as to pay none, said, “Are you cold, Sunny? All summer you’ve been complaining about being hot? Here we are the first day of cool weather and you stand there and shiver.”

  “I’m not cold,” I said, hugging myself.

  I wrote “Sunny C. Lansberry” on a piece of paper to see how it looked and it looked symmetrical and handsome. I kind of liked the initials, too. S.C.L. Sounded like a conglomerate.

  Terrific, I thought. I’m drafting wedding invitations and we haven’t had our first date yet.

  I sold three paperbacks to a very fat summer visitor who should have spent his time exercising instead of reading.

  But it was not Tim who bounded up the steps of Second Time Around that evening—it was his mother. “Guess what, Sunny!” she cried. “I just got a call from the school. They hired me!” Mrs. Lansberry hugged me and I hugged her. “They hired me, Sunny,” she said, as if this were a minor miracle. “Well, of course,” I said. “You’ll be terrific in the kindergarten.” Personally I wouldn’t be a kindergarten aide for all the money in Sea’s Edge. Imagine nothing but five-year-olds all day long!