Personal Touch (7 page)

I entertained myself all afternoon by thinking about the Lansberry family and wondering which of the above was true. What it was like for Tim to be a Lansberry and most of all, what it would be like to date a Lansberry like Tim.

Naturally when I met Mother that night for supper at the Rusted Rudder—my father had a school board meeting and couldn’t join us—who should be with her but Tim.

I blushed all evening long, feeling like a low-life spy who’d been peeking in the windows of Tim’s life. “Who’s minding the store?” I said.

“Jeter. She got bored,” Mother told me. “That woman is so unreliable. Anyway she said she’d like to take an evening now and then so Tim and I gave her one.”

Tim and I, I thought. Now how come it’s my mother who gets to be paired up with Tim?

Tim proceeded to place his dinner order. Steak, baked potato, three vegetables, salad, extra rolls, a double Pepsi, and oh, also, the
soup du jour.

“Not very hungry, are you?” said Mother, ordering scallops broiled in butter for herself.

For me the day had been too slow to work up an appetite, and worrying about whether to ask Tim to go on a date with Margaret had killed what little appetite I had. “Just soup and crackers, please,” I said.

“Sunny!” said my mother, upset. “You’ll dry up and blow away if you don’t eat more than that.”

That had been my favorite remark to Tim one of those early summers. I thought I was so cool. “Timothy,” I’d say in this cutting voice. “Dry up and blow away.”

I
was
awful then, I thought. Tim was right to corner me on his dock on June 1st and tell me to shape up this summer. I really have given him just as hard a time as he’s ever given me. It’s just that the things I did were less splashy.

“What’s the matter?” said Tim. He actually paused in the buttering of his fourth roll to consider my emotional state. What a tribute. “You seem kind of down,” he said.

“Hard day.”

Immediately Tim and mother set about telling enough stories to prove to me that
their
day had been harder than
my
day.

During the second story I finished my soup and halfway through the third story I waved to the waitress. “I need a bacon-burger to carry me through the rest of the conversation,” I explained.

My mother smiled happily. Mothers of skinny people are very easily pleased. All you have to do is eat.

Tim launched into a long tale about a woman who wanted to try out each style hammock before buying one. “She fell asleep in the cotton weave style,” said Tim, laughing, “and I forgot about her.”

“It turned out she’d left her entire family waiting in the car with the motor idling,” said mother. “After about an hour, the kids and the husband began to wonder just how long it could take to buy a hammock anyway.”

I choked on my bun, laughing.

Tim drained his double Pepsi and ordered another along with his dessert. We had a long argument about whether strawberry pie or rhubarb pie would be better. Tim felt in order to make a good and fair assessment of the merits of each pie, he should have both.

“You’re really enjoying working at Chair Fair, aren’t you?” I said to Tim.

He attacked the mound of whipped cream on the strawberry pie. “Sure am. I hate to be doing nothing. I can’t sit around. It drives my parents crazy. They’re always telling me to relax and rest and take it easy so I can enjoy myself. But there’s nothing I enjoy less than hanging around. I guess that’s one reason I never liked coming to Sea’s Edge much. It was always so hard to fill up the time.”

“Funny,” said my mother dryly. “I thought you succeeded admirably in filling up your summers.”

It was Tim’s turn to blush. For a moment he was the same gawky colt of a kid whose joints hinged in all directions and whose elbows were always sharpening themselves on my ribs. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I always get carried away whenever I start something.”

My mother laughed and leaned over and kissed him. We kiss an awful lot in our family and I didn’t think a thing of it, except to wish I had been in a position to do that so casually.

Tim almost jumped out of his skin.

“I’m sorry,” said Mother contritely. “I was just trying to say that summers of the past are something we ought to shrug over.”

“She was just shrugging with a kiss,” I told him.

“Oh,” said Tim, looking amazed. You would have thought no parent had ever kissed him before. I pictured the two pieces of furniture he had for parents. Maybe none ever had.

Then I thought about kissing Tim. I would do it rather differently than my mother had. With more passion.

“If you’re not going to eat your pie, I will,” offered Tim.

I split it with him.

A memory of Margaret wanting me to fix her up with Tim flickered through my mind.

I let it flicker back out just the way it came.

The only person I wanted to see fixed up with Timothy Lansberry was Sunny Compton.

“S
UNNY?” SAID TIM
.

I wrapped my fingers around the telephone, as if it were a true extension of Timothy Lansberry. Any clod who chose this moment to try to exchange a paperback would just have to cool his heels. (Ridiculous phrase for the sweatbox I labored in!)

“Hi, Tim,” I said.

“Hi. Listen. Could you do me a big favor?”

“Definitely.”

If Tim noticed a difference in my response from what it would have been last summer, he didn’t say so. “Your mother and I are way behind. We’ll never be ready for the Fourth of July sale at this rate.”

Terrific. He was just calling because they needed another body to scribble markdowns and prepare displays. Oh, well. At least I’d be in the same building with him.

“I called home,” said Tim, “but the phone must be off the hook or something. My father’s gone back to Albany for a while and Mother is home alone. She gets panicky if I’m not in right on the dot. Could you go over and tell her not to worry? That I’ll be in eventually?”

“No problem.” The last time I’d had to tell Mrs. Lansberry where Tim was, he’d gotten himself half-drowned off Oyster Point and he was in the Coast Guard cutter getting yelled at for sheer stupidity and possible suicidal tendencies.

“Great. Thanks.” Tim hung up before I could say one more word. Some romantic conversation. I worked gloomily on a crossword puzzle and agreed with a customer that the Gothic pickings were very slim this week.

I had never gotten around to asking Tim to go to Margaret’s party with her, and she, being made of tougher stuff than I, called him herself. I figured that was the end of my little daydream, but Tim, incredibly, turned her down. He really appreciated being thought of for the party, he told her, but he had to work, maybe another time.

All the rest of the week I thought about this refusal. Whatever work he had to do, it wasn’t at the Chair Fair, because Mother closed on Sundays. Therefore, “work” was an excuse to say no.

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.

M
R. 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.