The Personal Touch: A Cooney Classic Romance

  Perhaps he was moonlighting as a busboy somewhere.

  Impossible. I kept track of his comings and goings through my dining room window and the only place he worked was Chair Fair.

  Maybe he didn’t like beach parties.

  Impossible.

  Maybe he didn’t like Margaret.

  Impossible.

  Maybe he had some project at home (let’s face it, Tim always had some project at home that he absolutely had to work on).

  Possible.

  And maybe his mother needed him to take out the garbage.

  Possible.

  But whatever the reasons Tim had for refusing to go to a party with Margaret, even in my wildest dreams it was hard to pretend he’d turned Margaret down because the only person he wanted to go to parties with was me.

  My crush on Tim was proving to be very unwieldy. It was always in the way. I thought of it at the most inconvenient times and it interrupted my thoughts just when I needed them to be uninterrupted. Since I was always thinking about him, when we met I was always a little bit embarrassed. And the worst thing about seeing Tim now was that I felt extra thin around him. He had turned into a muscular tanned man, and I was still this scrawny little girl who undoubtedly qualified as a bookmark in his mind.

  Oh, well.

  I closed up Second Time Around, hopped on my bicycle, and headed for home. The Jaycees and their wives were busy getting ready to decorate Main Street for the Fourth of July. The street would be closed off for a fair—crafts and game booths and raffles and yummy food and stuff—and then there would be a block dance and finally the fireworks.

  I love the Fourth of July. Especially in Sea’s Edge.

  Today’s fantasy had me and Tim hand in hand, sauntering from booth to booth, Tim buying me cotton candy, me buying him an initialed leather key ring, the two of us square dancing, watching the fireworks together.

  He would probably decline.

  He would probably have to “work” instead.

  I stuck my bike in our garage and clumped over the cedar decking to tell Mrs. Lansberry the news about Tim.

  The Lansberry house, inside and out, is perfection. The signed lithographs are always hanging nice and straight and the white upholstery is always spotless, and the kitchen counter so crumb-free you wonder if they even eat.

  They don’t have a maid. It’s Mrs. Lansberry who keeps it in this pristine condition. I think there are better things to do in life than vacuum but Mrs. Lansberry, judging from appearances, disagrees. Imagine being turned on by another chance to dust!

  She didn’t answer the doorbell for so long I began to worry that something had happened. Maybe she’d had a fall on her newly waxed kitchen floor and broken her hip or something. I was just planning to go in by a window when she came to the door.

  Her eyes were puffy and her hair disheveled. I had never seen her anything but perfect. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “You already went to bed. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “No, no, I wasn’t asleep. I was watching this movie on TV. It was so sad I cried all the way through it. That’s why I look so awful.”

  “Oh, I love sad movies,” I said. “Which one was it?”

  She didn’t tell me. “Well, come in,” she said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing. Tim just asked me to give you a message.”

  She had left the door for the living room, so to give her the message I had to follow her. When I came into the living room I actually gasped in surprise. Damp towels, used paper cups, overflowing ashtrays, opened newspapers, dead flowers in smelly vases. Mrs. Lansberry actually shoved a stack of newspapers off the couch onto the floor to make room for me to sit down. I knew for a fact that newsprint had not even been allowed in the same room with that white upholstery last summer, let alone been allowed to repose on it.

  “Are you sick?” I said. She looked pitiful. “I’m not working tomorrow. Want me to come over and run the vacuum for you?”

  “No, no.” She laughed nervously. “I’ll get myself together. Clean this up in the morning.” She looked at her living room as if it would be a lifetime task to straighten it. She looked at her hands as if she had terminal arthritis and it would have to take somebody else’s lifetime to do the housework from now on.

  Probably a better attitude, all things considered.

  “How about some coffee?” she said. “Pie? Cake? Ice cream? You must be hungry. Have something.”

  I was exhausted. I wanted to go home and go to bed, but Mrs. Lansberry seemed frantic for company, so I stayed. Mrs. Lansberry sort of wandered around the room trying to think of things to say to me, but we were both too tired to think of anything.

  Finally she thanked me for coming. “I’ve been—well, I’ve been a bit under the weather this month,” she told me at the door. “I guess it shows. Tim worries too much. Tell him not to worry so much.”

  How peculiar for them to be giving me messages to carry back and forth. I wondered what “under the weather” might mean. I had a feeling that the “work” Tim had had to do last Sunday might be his mother.

  I yawned so many times I was afraid I might have yawning disease. My jaw hurt. Thank goodness you don’t yawn in your sleep.

  I spent a few moments thinking about the mysteries of yawning and then turned to the mysteries of crushes on boys.

  I know! I thought gleefully. I can be with Tim very easily on the Fourth! Long-time next door neighbors ought to do things together, and we never had. We’d invite Mrs. Lansberry and Tim to go with us to all the festivities. My parents wouldn’t think there was anything odd about that because Tim was around so much anyway.

  Perfect.

  I congratulated myself, yawned a final jaw-breaking yawn, tipped over on the pillow, and went to sleep.

  7

  MR. HARTLEY DECIDED THAT nobody in his right patriotic mind would want to exchange a paperback on the Fourth of July, so he gave me the day off.

  My mother, on the contrary, felt that all people with decent patriotic attitudes would want to buy a folding lawn chair to sit on so as to watch the festivities from dawn until midnight in comfort. It was her duty as a citizen, she informed us, to keep Chair Fair open.

  With the help of Jeter, my father, Tim, and me.

  My father and Jeter declined. Tim and I, being ever eager for higher incomes, agreed. “Do we get double time for working on a national holiday?” said Tim hopefully.

  My mother just looked at him silently.

  “From that expression,” Tim said to me, “I deduce that requesting double time is not a patriotic thing to do.”

  I giggled, and Tim grinned at me and my heart fluttered—but the first customer needing a blanket to spread on the Green walked in, and for the next four hours, that was the end of any pleasant conversational exchange with Tim. Quite literally there was no longer time to look out the window of the shop. When Mrs. Lansberry came in about 11:00, loaded down with the picnic she had promised to supply, I was amazed to see outside that Main Street was not only blocked off, but that little booths stretched as far as I could see and that several thousand people were busily entertaining themselves right in front of our door.

  “What better place?” said my mother, rubbing her hands together in what Tim told her was an unseemly greedy fashion.

  Mrs. Lansberry announced that we were going to have a picnic to end all picnics. We were featuring, she announced, everything from sangria to ham on rye; from crabmeat dip to chocolate cheesecake, from melon balls to poppy seed buns.

  My father inspected Mrs. Lansberry’s baskets. Our family leans toward very primitive picnics—the kind where you shove some old stale baloney sandwiches into a bag and drop a can of soda on top of them and walk down to the beach. When my father saw the contents were exactly what she had advertised, he said, “Close up early, folks. It isn’t worth any amount of chair income to let this bounty spoil.”

  Mrs. Lansberry laughed as if my father had awarded her Chef-of-the-Year blue ribbo
ns. How odd, I thought. I have never heard her laugh before. I’ve watched her tan and I’ve listened to her scold, but I’ve never heard her sound happy before. In five summers.

  She looked much better today than she had the other night. Kind of excited, as if she was expecting something really special to happen on the Green.

  That was okay. I was rather hoping for something special to happen also.

  Closing up was easier said than done. People came in faster than we could shovel them out. Mrs. Lansberry hovered next to me. Over and over again she said, “Oh, I wish I could help. I wish I knew how to do anything at all!”

  Finally my father just closed the front door and refused to let anybody else in. Every time we let someone out he pulled the door to very quickly. It was like putting a litter of kittens outside. They kept wanting back in.

  Finally panting, exhausted, and more than ready for whatever goodies Mrs. Lansberry had packed, we locked up and I took one end of a cooler and Tim took the other and we staggered down a crowded street toward the Green.

  “I don’t believe how many people there are,” said my mother. “We’ll never find a spot. We’ll end up having to sit in the alley behind the bank or something just to find a place to sit down.”

  How depressing! I didn’t want to have this super picnic sitting on asphalt.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I put out a blanket and chairs hours ago under that great big maple tree by the War Monument. I’ve been going back to check on it and it’s perfectly safe. Nobody’s taken it.”

  “What a woman,” said my father.

  Mrs. Lansberry flushed with pleasure.

  Now my father says that to my mother probably ten times a day the year round. But somehow with Mrs. Lansberry, I had the feeling that she wasn’t used to compliments, even one as dull and meaningless as “What a woman!”

  The picnic spot was perfect. We were in the shade, on soft thick cool grass, while all around us the ebb and flow of thousands of eager, excited fair-goers were like a marvelous movie filmed just for our benefit. Mrs. Lansberry had three folding chairs for the adults and two fat cushions for Tim and me. I wanted to thank her for such thoughtful arrangements. That way they could converse on their level, and Tim and I, sprawled on the ground, could converse on ours.

  The food was absolutely scrumptious. We kept telling Mrs. Lansberry and she kept wiggling and flushing with pleasure like a little girl.

  Tim and I talked. Not about anything in particular. Just nice, comfortable talk. We speculated on how much money the costumed juggler was making when he passed his hat. We made wisecracks about a couple wearing outsized cowboy hats and boots. We debated the pros and cons of buying raffle tickets for the handmade quilt and the color television. We did not debate the merits of buying a raffle ticket on the car. We knew we wanted to win that. It was an old Volkswagen Beetle that had been remodeled with one of those fiberglass kits so that it now resembled some sort of squished-in 1920s car, complete with running boards, exterior horns, and funny old protruding headlights. Tim tried to estimate how many raffle tickets would be sold and what the odds would be in his favor if he bought twenty-five tickets.

  Mrs. Lansberry kept reaching into the depths of her baskets and coolers and coming up with yet more delicious stuff.

  “Do you remember,” said Tim, “that first time I tried to start a fire for barbecuing?”

  Did I remember. It was the beginning of the legend of TIM, Terrible Infuriating Monster.

  Tim had been determined to start the fire for the hamburgers by rubbing two sticks together, the way he’d read that frontiersmen always started their campfires. He began about five in the evening and was still rubbing at ten o’clock when his parents had long since broiled their supper in the stove and were begging him to go to bed. He tried maple twigs, pine sticks, oak, tulip poplar and willow and all the rubbing he could manage, and nothing happened. Finally around one o’clock that morning Tim began screaming happily, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  The fire department, summoned by a terrified neighbor, was not amused.

  Tim and I lay on the blanket and laughed helplessly.

  This summer is different, I thought. Second Tim Around. This summer either he’d rub right or he’d use matches.

  How dull, I thought. How absolutely dull and like other boys. Don’t let Tim get dull, God. Wouldn’t it be awful if Tim solidified into the sort of man who’s genuinely happy selling chairs to summer people?

  I decided I did not necessarily want a Second Tim Around.

  “Why don’t you two kids wander on down Main Street and see what there is?” suggested my father. “I read in the paper that this year they have over one hundred fifty exhibitors.”

  “Ought to be at least one interesting booth in that many,” agreed Tim.

  “I’d go myself,” said my father, “but I’m too tired to budge. Give my regards to the elementary school P.T.A. booth, will you?”

  “Tired?” said my mother indignantly. “You haven’t done one thing all day but close the shop door.”

  “If you find any good hand-thrown pottery, come back and tell me,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I love it. And I need a lot, because every time Tim crosses a room he’s apt to bump something off a shelf. The survival rate of my pottery is very poor.”

  Tim laughed. And then this marvelous thing happened: he stood up first and reached a hand down to help me up.

  I tried to think of a way to hang on to his hand permanently, but Tim nearly always walks with his hands jammed deep into his pockets, and he’s told me more than once that he feels lopsided when he can only get one hand pocketed. So I didn’t hold his hand very tightly. I let him hold mine and, sure enough, he let go in a moment and shoved both hands deep into his jeans’ pockets.

  Well, it was a start. After all, the good guy in the Western paperback doesn’t toss the young maiden up onto the magnificent horse in the very first chapter. He builds up to it.

  “If this were the good old days,” said Tim, “I’d have something special planned for the end of the road. Some really devious thing you’d never suspect.”

  A nice devious thing for you to do, I thought, would be to swing me into some quiet corner and kiss me.

  Instead he bought us tickets to throw plastic rings at distant plastic knobs. Violently colored stuffed animals were offered as prizes. I definitely did not want one. There’s nothing dumber-looking than somebody at a fair carting around some huge lime-green teddy bear.

  Fortunately neither of us was an especially competent plastic-ring thrower.

  When we left that booth I thought I might just silently take Tim’s hand, saying nothing, being very subtle—but he jammed his hands into his pockets a little too fast for me. I could always take his wrist, but then I’d feel like a pair of handcuffs.

  Tim stopped so abruptly he had to take a hand out of his pocket and grab my elbow to stop me. I didn’t object. “What is it?” I said, hoping that a crush similar to mine had just struck him.

  “Pottery.”

  How depressing. All he wanted was a clay bowl for his mother. I watched him pick over the pottery. If he was that careful choosing a girlfriend, no wonder he never dated! Tim found flaws on every single piece he examined. The woman who’d made it began to look a bit tense around the edges. Tim often has that effect on people.

  “It’s for my mother,” he explained to the lady. “Has to be perfect.”

  “Why?” I said. “She just told us all that would happen to the bowl is that you’ll break it.”

  Tim loved that. “Okay,” he said to the potter, “I’ll take that one over there. The one with the big crack across the bottom. Prebroken, so to speak.” He had her wrap it in sparkling tissue and ribbon.

  I thought a boy of seventeen should be less interested in buying his mother presents and more interested in girls, but I didn’t say so. After all, I bought things for my mother, too. In fact, maybe I would buy her a piece of pottery.

  I chose one
without a flaw. A lovely little blue glazed pitcher for, the potter told me, pouring cream at breakfast. Tim snorted. He knows perfectly well that our breakfasts are so frantic we’re lucky if we can get the plastic milk carton in and out of the fridge without spilling it, let alone pour cream into a sweet little pitcher. “It can sit on the sill and look pretty,” I told him.

  “That’s all pottery is good for, anyway,” said Tim, which did nothing to help him develop a friendship with the pottery lady.

  We were gathering up our packages and getting ready to go inspect the strange little orange gas-saver car when who should come up but Margaret and Ginnie.

  I hate comparing myself to people. It’s fatal. It makes me feel scrawny and stupid and pale. Especially Margaret. Margaret aimed her perfect smile right at Tim’s heart and I did not see how he could fail to be affected. Both Margaret and Tim wore braces for years and now they have these beautiful, straight white perfect teeth. My teeth were just a little bit crooked, not enough, my mother said, for braces. My mother says my smile has character. I would rather it lacked some of that character and that my teeth could be exactly evenly spaced.

  “Hi, Margaret,” said Tim, “how are you?”

  He sounded as if he really did care how she was. Immediately I stopped feeling the least bit pretty, interesting, or sexy and just felt thin and boring.

  Margaret is a very relaxed person. She can do things that would take me six months to build up to and even then I might chicken out. She put a long, tanned arm around Tim’s shoulder and pulled his head down to hers so she could give him a kiss. There was no noticeable lack of cooperation on Tim’s part. “Hi, Tim,” she drawled. “Long time, no see. When are you coming out on the beach with the rest of us? You don’t want us to have a boring summer, do you?”

  I had been thinking about my arm around Tim’s shoulder like that for days and dreaming about kissing him for weeks. And Margaret had gone and done it.

  “I’ve been working,” explained Tim. “Keeps me out of trouble.”

  “You?” said Ginnie cynically.

  We all laughed. One of the things that impressed me about Tim was that he hardly ever batted an eye about his checkered past. Me, I’d have been mumbling and scuffing my feet and flushing. Tim just looked back at the neighborhood terror he’d been and thought it was funny.