The Personal Touch: A Cooney Classic Romance

by Caroline B. Cooney

  “Drop dead!” I said fiercely. I tried to get up and I literally could not. Pain shot through me. Great. I’ve cracked my spine, I thought.

  At least it had knocked out the crush on Tim. A forty-five-minute crush. Well, that was probably the best kind to have. I would not have to lie in bed tonight dreaming of Timothy Lansberry. I could lie there meditating on my own stupidity instead.

  “Oh, no!” said Tim, “What did you do? Crack your spine or something? Really, Sunny, I’m sorry. I didn’t plan that. It just happened.”

  I told him where he could go and we both blushed again, because I had definitely never said that to anybody before. We both kind of glanced around in a panic to see if my mother had heard me, but she was out back and there were no customers.

  Tim bent over me and wrapped his long fingers around me, right under the arms, and effortlessly picked me up. Perhaps the good guys in Westerns really could swing young maidens up onto their horses. If the good guys were built like Tim.

  Tim set me on my feet and sort of dusted me off. Even in the midst of my wrath, I felt my crush coming back at the touch of Tim’s hands. Terrific, I thought. I’m going to be one of those women who loves unreformable alcoholics or criminals.

  “I’m sorry, Sunny,” said Tim, sort of desperately.

  I tottered a few steps. “You didn’t cripple me, at least,” I said. I stared out at the rain, aching. Let Mother and her dear Tim run this stupid store. I was going home.

  I took two steps toward the front door and just as Tim was saying I could not possibly walk home in this rain—he’d borrow my mother’s car and take me if that was the way I felt—and just as I was saying that I wouldn’t trust him to shift gears in a Tonka toy, in barged this great big fat woman. She was truly impressive. Anyone who can gather in that much poundage must be truly dedicated to food. Tim and I paused for a moment to pay our respects.

  “I see you’ve found my chair,” she said, kicking at the one that had thrown me to the floor. “Something wrong with it. I used it only once and it collapsed. Tried to exchange it half an hour ago, but you two were all involved with some silly idiots blathering about the color of umbrellas, so I left it here and finished up my other errands. Now. Is there any possibility of exchanging it?”

  Tim and I did not even look at each other. I think we knew it would be fatal. Tim managed to say, “Yes, ma’am. Certainly. Perhaps a sturdier style?” He guided her over to a display of large yellow metal chairs that looked as though they could take any beating she chose to give them, and she very graciously allowed Tim to carry the new chair out to her car for her.

  When Tim came back in, I looked at him and he looked at me and both of us exploded with laughter. We draped ourselves over the checkout counter and laughed until we cried. I told Tim I forgave him and he said it was time to trust him, really, because honestly, truly, really, he did not do that kind of thing any more.

  The three of us rode home together, with me sitting gingerly on the front seat because of my bruised rear end. Tim was in back, spreading himself generously out over the entire three passenger space, where I couldn’t even look at him, let alone touch him.

  Stop it, I told myself, stop it, stop it, stop it! Crushes on Timothy Lansberry are a waste of time. He thinks you’re a bookmark. At best, a fellow clerk in a neighbor’s store.

  “What a day,” said my mother, sighing in exhaustion. For the rest of the block nothing was heard but the sighs of agreement from Tim and me that it definitely had been a long, hard day.

  We turned left at the Savings Bank and I looked at the cubbyhole next door where Second Time Around was. Mr. Hartley was long gone, but by the fading light of a late summer evening, I noticed something about the swinging, creaking sign. One of the little metal letters had fallen off. Instead of reading Second Time Around, it now said Second Tim Around.

  Second Tim Around, I thought.

  It gave me a little shiver.

  All the way home I thought about Tim. My crush no longer felt like a thundercloud. Instead it had a sort of misty feel, as though maybe the bad weather would clear and I’d find a rainbow after all.

  But the next morning when Tim came crashing into the kitchen to see if my mother was ready to leave yet, I forced myself to stay in my room instead of going to feast my eyes upon the Second Tim.

  A crush on Timothy Lansberry was not suitable, would not work, and was a waste of time. I was going to give it up cold turkey. Like smoking.

  When Tim appeared on the scene, I was not going to rush up to him for the privilege of admiring him. I was going to lie here and not notice he even existed.

  Or, more accurately, lie here and pretend not to notice.

  I went to the beach instead.

  Margaret was there, celebrating her one-hour break between crafts groups. “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “Oh, I still have shreds of sanity left. Although if I help one more ten-year-old string beads on one more leather belt, I shall lose the remainder.”

  She had a beautiful tan. She certainly didn’t sound at the end of her rope. She sounded—and looked—perfect.

  I wondered what sort of fantasies a rich, handsome, athletic summer boy would have. Margaret fantasies? Certainly more likely to have Margaret fantasies than Sunny fantasies.

  “I have learned one thing, though,” said Margaret.

  “What’s that?”

  “A good joke. From a ten-year-old. Bet you can’t tell me how to measure the size of a sneeze, can you?”

  “How to measure the size of a sneeze,” I said thoughtfully. I gave the problem my full attention and decided I did not know.

  “By its gesund height, of course,” said Margaret. She buried her face in the sand and laughed crazily. I retracted my previous judgment. She was only half there after all.

  I lay half on my towel and half in the sand. I dug little furrows with my heels and got my legs completely covered with sand. I love sand. Above me the clouds scudded by, white and fluffy and free.

  One of them was definitely a profile of Timothy Lansberry.

  Go, crush, go! I told it. Unfortunately the crush just got larger. “I’m dying,” I told Margaret.

  “Me, too. Of boredom.”

  We flopped over and toasted our backs. I was finally getting a faint beige tinge to replace my white porcelain. I had an idea the white porcelain may have been more attractive, but it was too late now.

  “Sunny?” said Margaret lazily.

  “Mmmm?”

  “Would you be an angel and arrange something for me?”

  “Sure. What?”

  “Fix me up with Tim.”

  If Margaret had asked me to book her passage to Saturn’s rings, I could not have been more stunned. I was busy having a crush on Tim. Where did Margaret get off, feeling the same way? Besides, she’d had a boyfriend all year and I hadn’t. It was my turn.

  “Fix you up with Tim?” I repeated.

  “I’m crazy about him, Sunny. He was down here one day last week and we had such a good time. We laughed and laughed. I’m sure you think I’ve finally flipped out completely—falling for Tim. I know how you’ve always felt about him. Honestly, though, Sunny, I think he’s turned into something special.”

  “I guess I know what you mean,” I said. When the Margarets of the world wanted to sit on the beach and laugh with Tim, why would he ever feel any desire to hang around with the Sunny types?

  “I’m planning a beach party. I’ll invite Carol and Lisa and their boyfriends, and then Tim and me, and then a boy for you.”

  Lisa and Carol I didn’t know very well, but I did know they’d gone steady for ages. Obviously Margaret figured they’d be safe even with Tim’s newly visible charms on the loose. “Who are you thinking of asking for me?” I said. If it was Leland…

  “How about David?” she said brightly.

  “Margaret. I don’t want your rejects.”

  “David is a lovely person,” said Margaret defensively. “Just because he�
��s a little boring.”

  “No.”

  We flipped again, to get our sides tanned, and Margaret said to my back, “Well, who would you like me to ask for you?”

  Should I give her a list that read Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim?

  Or should I name some absolutely super boy I’d always yearned to date?

  The only absolutely super boy whose name came to me was Tim.

  I made a terrible face at the sand. Be grateful to Margaret, I said to the million grains of sand. I let them sift through my fingers. She’s going to help you get over this silly crush on Tim by taking him out of circulation. He’ll be happy, she’ll be happy, and I’ll be miserable. Sounds perfect.

  “Sunday afternoon?” said Margaret anxiously. “Could you round up Tim and meet us at the Point around one o’clock? I’ll provide the food and fixings. You just provide Tim.”

  It was not Tim I saw that afternoon, though. It was his father.

  Now, I have never known what to make of Mr. and Mrs. Lansberry. As far as I can tell they have no personalities. Beautiful clothes, perfect house, gleaming cars. All they ever said were things like Did you have a good school year, Sunny? How nice. Or at the bookstore, Yes, it is rather warm out. I’ll take these three please. And occasionally some witty remark that I always felt the Lansberry joke writer had handed Mr. Lansberry that morning, and he needed to use it to justify keeping a joke writer on the payroll.

  I tried to regard Mr. Lansberry in a new and favorable light. After all, he now ranked as the father of the boy I had a crush on. Those were his genes rolling around in Tim. Unlikely as it seemed. Maybe Tim was adopted.

  As usual, Mr. Lansberry looked and talked as if he had just fallen out of a slick magazine ad. Somebody had just poured his white wine or groomed his Russian wolfhounds or something. My mother says the Lansberrys are like fine furniture: glossy, expensive, and smelling of lemon polish, but not terribly interesting.

  How awful, when your whole life is built on keeping your personality smooth, sleek, and perspiration-free, to have a son whose personality is noisily splattered all over town.

  “Hello, Mr. Lansberry.” I looked at his beautiful trendy expensive clothes and I felt sort of sorry for him. He just was not the type to be a parent to Tim.

  Mr. Lansberry said good morning, made some amusing observations about the weather, and bought four paperbacks. The kind that start with the illegitimate son in France and end with his great-grandchildren stitching together mighty conglomerates in Chicago and setting world trends in Los Angeles. In six hundred pages or less.

  When Mr. Lansberry left, I said to Mr. Hartley, “Does it ever seem odd to you that Mr. Lansberry should be a used paperback freak? I mean, when everything else in his life is shiny new and perfect?”

  Mr. Hartley laughed. “Perhaps it’s his one redeeming feature. The crack where his personality slips through.”

  Thoughtfully I straightened science fiction.

  “Or maybe,” said Mr. Hartley, “all that expensive stuff is bought on credit. Maybe he’s too poor to buy new paperbacks.”

  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 onl
y person I wanted to see fixed up with Timothy Lansberry was Sunny Compton.

  6

  “SUNNY?” 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.