Personal Touch (12 page)

“I haven’t ever driven a standard shift,” I said.

“I’ll teach you. It isn’t hard.”

I remembered Tim learning—bucking over the rose bushes, missing driving into the marsh by half an inch, grinding the gears with a screaming rasp that set my teeth on edge. “I don’t know,” I said. “Are you sure I can do that?”

He snorted. “Look at all the fools on the road who do it every day, Sunny. If they can do it, you can do it.”

I got into the driver’s seat. It was very cramped. I put my hand on the gear stick and Tim put his hand over mine and I thought a girl could get to enjoy being cramped like this. “Put the clutch in,” directed Tim. Then he had to tell me which was the clutch. We’ve never had a manual transmission car; every car we’ve ever owned has been automatic. I put the clutch in.

“Now,” said Tim, settling in for a tutoring session. He was enjoying himself.

My mother yelled out the kitchen window, “Tim! Sunny doesn’t have her license yet! It’s one thing for her to go driving with me in an automatic for practice, but it’s something else entirely to go out on the road with you in a completely unfamiliar car you probably don’t even have proper insurance on! You do not have my permission to do this!”

“Oh,” said Tim meekly. He looked at me very carefully, as if being sixteen were a strange and bizarre phenomenon he had totally forgotten about. “That’s right,” he said pleasantly. “You’re just a little kid still, aren’t you, Sun?”

We exchanged a few insults. I told him the laboratory had his brain ready and he told me I was in luck: the same lab had cloned him and now I could possess a matched pair of Tims.

“I’ll settle for one,” I said, and then we were looking at each other the way we had that night at the fireworks. A funny, breathless look that said enough for both of us to blush and fumble.

We left his car sitting in the driveway.

“For the sea gulls to wreck my finish,” said Tim mournfully. “Why did you train those gulls to come up on our property anyway?”

I didn’t answer. Why dredge up old feelings when the new ones were so much better? We walked down to the beach, holding hands.

It was early enough that only the young mothers and the day camps were on the sand. We carried our shoes and waded through the warm shallow water along the rim of the beach.

The summer Tim was thirteen, he and I had been friends for exactly one afternoon. I remembered it suddenly. We’d corralled about a dozen fiddler crabs and had fiddler crab races. My crabs won. Tim made me a tiny blue first-prize ribbon out of a bit of a beer bottle label that washed up in the tide. I wondered now if he had ever thought of that day since. I didn’t ask.

Had I saved the little ribbon? I had boxes of junk in the attic. I’d have to look for it. If Tim and I got married, and we had children, I’d show them the prizes back from when we were little and played in the sand.

Got married
, I thought.

I blushed scarlet. Tim was probably daydreaming about finishing up the wax job on his car and going for a long drive up north. If he knew I was thinking about
marriage
, he’d be sprinting up the beach so fast he’d have a lock built on his eight-foot fence before I even managed to get home.

“How’s your mother doing?” I said.

“Okay, I guess. Dad called up last night. He was very jovial. Trying to pretend we’re all friends and everything’s cool. He wants a divorce immediately. He wants mother to be civilized about this. That’s his word. Civilized.”

“In other words, he doesn’t want her to make him feel guilty.”

“You got it.”

We had left the beach. We went over to a breakwater, dry for low tide, and sat on a high, hot rock. We spent the rest of the morning talking about divorce and stepparents.

Tim spouted like a steaming tea kettle.

There was not much I could say except, “Oh, dear” and “what a mess” and then, for variation, “Oh, Tim, how awful that would be.”

The curious thing—I was half ashamed of it—was that I enjoyed it. Every bit of it. Tim trusted me enough to say things to me I had not thought he would ever allow himself to say to anyone. Tim, who talked and chattered and joked…but never, not once, revealed anything about himself if he could help it.

It was, in a way, another kind of blue ribbon.

When we got home, Tim’s father’s car was in the driveway.

A
REN’T MORNINGS TERRIFIC?

That yellow sunshine spills in your bedroom window and makes patterns on the wall and you can lie there for a moment and you just
know
it’s going to be a good day. In the morning everything is okay.

It was chilly and damp.

Nothing could dampen me, though. I hugged to myself the wonderful time I had had talking to Tim. Today, I thought. Today will be the day he calls and we’ll actually go on a date.

I thought about his father’s car in the driveway. Maybe Mr. Lansberry had repented and missed them terribly and everything was going to be okay after all.

I shivered and closed my window against the chill, feeling sorry for families whose only vacation was this week, and they were having to spend it in sweaters instead of bikinis. I like sweaters myself. I put on a marvelous black sweater Jeter knit me last year: cotton, with a seven-color rainbow that rushes across the front and sleeves. It’s very striking. I always feel triumphant in it.

When I danced downstairs the kitchen phone was ringing and I was not at all surprised when my mother said, “For you, Sunny. Tim.”

“Hi, Tim,” I said gaily.

But he didn’t respond the way I had planned. He said his father wanted him to go up to Albany for a while and he didn’t seem to have much choice in the matter.

Leaving! I thought. Oh, no! “For how long?” I said. Summer was drawing to a close. Tim and I had really just begun to reach a friendship that meant something, that was more than teasing.

He’ll stay in Albany, I thought. After all, it’ll be his senior year in high school. He won’t want to change schools at this late date. Next thing I know, he’ll be in college and I’ll never see him again. Mrs. Lansberry won’t stay here alone. She’ll put the house on the market and go live somewhere else and—

“I don’t know how long,” said Tim wearily. “Can I speak to your mother, please?”

For a moment, forgetting he was mother’s employee, I could not imagine why he would want to speak to my mother instead of to me.

Tim was obviously straightening out with mother his absence from work. She wasn’t too pleased, but she said she’d find somebody else to work. “Yes,” she said, “we’ll keep an eye on your house. But why, Tim? Is your mother going back to Albany with you? Will the house be empty?

“Oh,” said my mother. “Georgia. What’s in Georgia? Oh, your mother’s family. I see.”

He won’t come back, I thought. Tears pricked the back of my eyes. Mrs. Lansberry would stay in Georgia, surrounded and comforted by family. Tim would stay in Albany. I would never see him again.

Tim and I got back on the phone together, but it was no good. He was terribly stilted and tense. “Is your father there?” I said.

“Waiting for me to hang up so we can get going,” said Tim.

I could just picture Mr. Lansberry, elegantly annoyed, looking at his Swiss watch and refraining in a gentlemanly way from losing his temper at his poky son. “Well, good-bye,” I said finally. My heart was full of things to say to him, but not one of them came out.

For a few seconds Tim was silent and then he said, “Bye” and hung up. And that was all.

“Maybe it’s just as well they’ve gone,” I overheard my mother saying to my father. “I was afraid Sunny was getting in over her head. She had a terrible crush on that boy.”

“Anybody in love is in over his head,” said my father. “But don’t worry. Tim didn’t even notice. He was too worried about his parents to notice Sunny making eyes at him. I worry about that boy. His mother and father are going to rip him apart in their private little war.”

“Tim didn’t even notice.”

I went up to my room and wept.

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.

“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.”