Personal Touch

by Caroline B. Cooney

  But if our kiss had been anything to Tim but a kiss, he didn’t get in touch with me to say so.

  Neither Tim nor I had to work the next day, and I kept thinking maybe I’d manage to get him to go to the beach with me, or maybe we’d bump into each other carrying out the garbage and something would develop (other than spilled trash).

  But it was Mrs. Lansberry who came over, as nervous and jumpy as a cat, wanting to know if I would drive to New Haven with her. “I have a doctor’s appointment,” she said, looking nervously around our kitchen. “I hate doctors. I need company. I’d pay you, Sunny. Would you come along with me? Sit in the waiting room with me until my appointment? Then you could just take off for an hour, lots of things to do, art galleries or Yale or something.” She smiled at me and her cheek twitched. “And afterward, we could have lunch together. Go shopping.”

  It really hurt my feelings that we were such lousy neighbors she thought I needed pay to go along with her under those circumstances. “I know how you feel about doctors,” I said. I wondered if she had some horrid disease that was upsetting her so much she couldn’t do her housework? Or if she was too weak to work? She looked as fit and tan as ever—just frighteningly tense. She filled her lungs each time as if it were the last time. “Forget about paying me,” I said hastily. “That’s awful. We’re next-door neighbors.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It only took us five years to figure that out.”

  We both laughed. My laugh was a lot more certain than hers. Oh, poor lady, I thought. What kind of problems do you have?

  I ran upstairs to get dressed. I was pretty sure Mrs. Lansberry would shop at stores and eat at restaurants where jeans would be very much out of place. Heels—which I never wear; they make my ankles ache. Skirts—which I never wear; they feel floppy after pants. And stockings, which I never wear; they make strange slippery sounds when I walk. Still, I looked pretty good, even if it was alien clothing for me. I admired myself in the mirror and, I thought, my heart freezing over, what if something’s terribly wrong? What if the doctor tells her today?

  I wished it were my mother going with Mrs. Lansberry. I wasn’t sure I was up to this.

  She and I were almost in their carport when she mentioned casually that Tim would be driving. “Tim’s going too?” I said. It must be truly horrible if she needed both male and female escorts!

  I started to feel slightly sick with worry, as if I were the one about to get the examination and take the tests.

  “Hi, Sunny,” said Tim, looking at me backward in the car mirrors.

  Can’t even be bothered to turn around to say hello, I thought miserably. Some fondness for me you’ve got.

  And then I kicked myself. Why would he be thinking about some neighbor girl when his mother might have a fatal disease?

  “Thanks for coming,” said Tim. “Mother didn’t want me to be the one to go into the doctor’s with her.”

  “Any time.” The clues were piling in on me. It must be a gynecologist and Mrs. Lansberry wanted a woman along, not a man and a son. It made me feel sort of warm and adult: being a woman going along to help another woman in trouble. I began thinking of all the possible female troubles there were and I kept thinking about cancer. But Tim seemed awfully cheerful for that. Perhaps the thought of cancer had never crossed his mind. Maybe she had lied to him about what kind of doctor she was going to see.

  Tim drove, his mother took the front passenger seat, and I had the back. The trouble with these sumptuous super-comfortable cars is you recline in all that soft upholstery and never move again. It’s like being embalmed.

  Mrs. Lansberry turned out to be the worst backseat driver I have ever come across. I don’t know how Tim tolerated it. And yet all he said was, “Sure, Mom.”

  “Be a bit more careful, dear,” she said anxiously. “I do wish you’d signal a bit earlier when you’re going to make a turn. You need to be in the left lane now, dear. You do see that truck coming out of the intersection, don’t you? Tim, leave a little more space!!! Don’t miss the exit now, Tim.”

  “Yes, Mom,” he said placidly.

  I marveled. Who would have suspected Tim of patience?

  Deep inside New Haven, where the roads pile in on each other and the traffic surges like animals migrating, Mrs. Lansberry said suddenly, “Let me off here, Timmy. I’ll walk the rest of the way. It’s down the block.”

  I hopped out of the backseat, my throat hurting with worry. What would I say? How was I supposed to help her?

  “Sunny, never mind,” she said, pushing me into the front seat. “Really. I feel much better just taking that long drive in this lovely weather. I can manage on my own.”

  She was white as a sheet. “But Mrs. Lansberry,” I protested, “this is—”

  Tim reached over and took my hand, pulling me into the passenger seat. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll explain.” He had a sort of sad look on his face.

  I really could not think clearly. Mrs. Lansberry was striding off down the sidewalk and cars were honking with rage because we were blocking the road, and I felt I should go with her but she no longer wanted me and—

  “Sun, get in, please,” said Tim. “It’s okay, honest. I’ll explain.”

  So I got in. And Tim proceeded to drive, not explain.

  “Tim,” I said, exasperated and really worried, “she asked me along because she was scared. Now tell me. Stop making left turns and tell me.”

  Tim sighed, drove a little farther, and said, “She’s going to a psychiatrist and she got herself all worked up over it, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with her. He’s going to tell her there’s nothing wrong with her, I’m perfectly sure. And right there at the end I think she realized how much she was magnifying the situation and she got embarrassed at having you there. That’s all. Not a big thing. Now forget it. I have some shopping to do.”

  I almost shriveled into the upholstery I was so relieved. Better a bad case of nerves than cancer, that was for sure. When I thought of what I had been imagining, I almost giggled with relief. “Where are we going?” I said, thinking it would take me the whole hour of her appointment just to be able to uncramp my stomach from worrying about her. Maybe Tim could go into whatever store he wanted to go in and I would just sit and roast quietly in the car, letting all medical worries bake off me.

  “Electronics store.”

  Not my favorite lingering spot, for sure.

  I wondered what was upsetting Mrs. Lansberry. After what I had had in mind it was difficult to think of anything. Her life was perfect: from house to son to husband to suntan. But my mother was always reading first-person articles in her women’s magazines where homemakers disintegrated over things like a fear of crowds, or a feeling of insecurity, or a lack of self-worth. Maybe it was something like that.

  “Come on in,” said Tim.

  “No, I’ll sit in the car.”

  “You’ll cook. It’s going to hit ninety outside and it’ll be a hundred and ten in the car.”

  That was true. I got out and went with him. He had parked in one of those huge vast lots where you know you will never again find your car. You tell yourself it’s six telephone poles from the entrance opposite the drugstore, but when you come back from shopping, there seem to be a dozen drugstores and millions of telephone poles and you feel doomed to wander the parking lot forever looking for your car.

  “Are you going to be able to find this car again?” I said. I worried that we’d be late meeting Mrs. Lansberry at the restaurant. If she felt insecure before, she’d really feel insecure if she thought her son, neighbor, and car had deserted her.

  “Sunny, please. You sound like my mother. Of course I’ll be able to find the car again.”

  “How?”

  He began grinning. “I’ll whistle for it.”

  The grin spread down into his chest and he laughed his deep private chuckle. It meant he really could whistle for his car and he thought he was pretty darn clever to be able to do it.

  “
And when you whistle for it, the car drives up by itself, right?” I said. “Remote control robot?” I wondered if it would be rude to ask Tim exactly what was bothering his mother. I had a small stake in this, after all. She had asked me. Or was that the sort of thing you never asked? Just made little comforting noises and kept silent?

  “No. I rigged up a circuit with a tone decoder that pulls in the car’s relay to honk,” said Tim. “All I have to do is whistle the right tone and the car honks by itself. Then I locate the car by the sound of the honk.” He held up a dog whistle of the sort too high for human ears to hear.

  I stopped walking. “Really?” I said quietly and I hoped, ominously.

  “Really. I love electronic gadgets. I’m always—”

  “Last summer,” I said grimly, “when your car kept honking and you weren’t anywhere near it and you said I must be going out of my mind—that you couldn’t hear your car honking. Maybe I had a brain disease, you said, maybe I needed a shrink.”

  “That was when I installed it,” admitted Tim. “Pretty clever, don’t you think?”

  “You rat.” My mother had actually taken me to have my ears tested, I was so worried over hearing constant car honking. The adults were at work when he pulled that, I thought, that’s why nobody but me ever heard the honking. Rat. “Just for that,” I said, “you can forget going into the electronics store and buying more tricks. You can stop right here at this ice cream shop.”

  Tim agreed that buying me a sundae would be a good penance. “Order something small,” he said. “Mom’s taking us to a super place for lunch.”

  I had forgotten about lunch. In the end we ordered sodas and nothing else. “I’m sorry about that,” he said, meaning the honking.

  “You’re not sorry a bit. It’s a memory you’ll cherish to your grave, me staring into an empty car you insisted wasn’t honking.”

  “You’re right,” said Tim, laughing. “I have a lot of memories like that.” And then suddenly, frighteningly, Tim’s face shut up like a box, as if he’d been shuttered by a memory that wasn’t very funny.

  He would never tell me what it was. He loved to talk, but he hardly ever revealed anything. My father says boys are like that. Only girls tell people what they feel, he says. He’s never made up his mind whether it’s a biological difference or due to upbringing. I didn’t see how it mattered. With Tim it was true and there wasn’t much I could do about it. I listened to his saga about his latest experiment in electronics. He wanted to rig up a dish so he could get satellite television on his own. All he needed now was several thousand dollars.

  I wondered if his father would give it to him.

  “No,” said Tim, looking quiet again. “I’m just pretending about the dish. Mom and I have to start saving instead of spending.”

  “Oh, why? Inflation finally rang your doorbell, too?”

  “”No,” said Tim, stirring the ice shards in the bottom of his soda glass with a straw. “My father left. For good. He’s not coming back and Mom and I are on our own. It’s a little hairy.”

  The ice sat in my mouth unswallowed, freezing my teeth. I shivered. I hate to hear about divorces. They seem to come up all the time in families you thought go along perfectly, and I always get a shiver that my perfect family will suddenly split one day. Impossible, I thought. Never happen. Forget it.

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, looking down into the soda glass as if there were an electronics magazine down there to read, “Mom’s going to the shrink to see if there’s anything wrong with her that made my father leave. That was why she was so nervous and embarrassed.”

  No wonder Mrs. Lansberry had felt under the weather. No wonder she hadn’t felt like picking up the house or cleaning the kitchen! “Your poor mother,” I said. “Tim, that’s awful.”

  Tim shrugged. He looked at his watch. “Time to go,” he said briefly, dropping a few coins on the table and getting up.

  We walked back into the parking lot.

  Not only poor Mrs. Lansberry, I thought. Poor Tim. No wonder he drives his mother all over the place and stays with her so much. It must be terrible for him, trying to help her stay together.

  “Want to blow the whistle?” said Tim.

  My mind was on divorce. Blow the whistle? On Mr. Lansberry?

  “For the car horn to honk,” said Tim.

  Now there was a boy with his priorities straight. So your parents are splitting. Big deal. The important thing is, where is the car parked? I blew the whistle. You couldn’t hear the sound of the whistle, of course, but sure enough, a car immediately honked. I could not help giggling. “There’s probably some poor old blue-haired lady sitting in the car next to yours,” I said to Tim, “and she’s having a heart attack wondering why an empty car is beeping at her.”

  We headed off across the asphalt toward the source of the sound. Partway into the lot I blew the whistle again and sure enough, the horn honked, this time definitely off to our left and further out in the lot. It took me just one more honk to find it. “Clever man,” I said to Tim.

  It was odd. I liked him less. He was shrugging off something that to me would have been so traumatic I think I would have been on a psychiatrist’s couch along with Mrs. Lansberry. I wished he would at least look upset. “So what are you going to do?” I said flatly.

  He started the engine and for a while I thought he wouldn’t answer and I thought, if all he is is a rude, self-centered electronics genius, I don’t need him, and it’s a cinch Mrs. Lansberry isn’t going to have him long. He’ll graduate from school next year and that’ll be that. I hope she likes the shrink she’s going to.

  “We’ll live here,” said Tim at last. “Mom doesn’t want to go back to Albany, not when Dad’s there. Dad’s given her this house and he’ll pay for its upkeep and give her an allowance to support me. But that’s it, and that’s not really enough. She’ll have to get a job, and it terrifies her.”

  “What can she do?” I said.

  “Nothing. All she’s done her entire life is keep a house clean, prepare meals, and get suntanned.”

  What a nothing life. “Hobbies?” I said. “Skills?”

  “Zero.”

  Tim was in the wrong lane for the turn he needed to make, and the traffic was too thick for him to change. He muttered under his breath and went around two blocks trying to get himself back where he needed to be.

  My mother needed another clerk, although it was difficult to imagine Mrs. Lansberry clerking. The yacht club needed a hostess and she was certainly pretty and poised, but I couldn’t imagine her doing anything so servantlike. Actually she was the sort of beautiful bronze woman you can well believe does nothing all her life but wander through her perfect house and look at her perfect self in the mirror.

  And yet I liked her. My heart hurt for her. Poor, poor, lady.

  “She’s afraid to go for interviews,” said Tim. “She’s hoping a psychiatrist will give her strength, or something.”

  A woman my mother’s age afraid of interviews. It made tears prick my eyes. My mother had not only always worked—she had always owned her own store. And I had gotten rejected a dozen times myself at sixteen years of age and it hadn’t scared me. But then, coming right after her husband rejecting her, it could be harder for her than it was for me.

  “You don’t know what it did for Mom,” said Tim, “going to the Fourth with your parents. She kind of realized there are nice people out there, even in Sea’s Edge, and she really could function in the real world. She isn’t limited to lying on her towel getting tanned.”

  I looked at Tim. He really loves her, I thought. He really is worried about her. Terribly. He just has to go about it differently than I would.

  I liked him again.

  9

  I EXPECTED THE NEXT day to be spent in solemn quiet examination of the serious situation facing Tim and his mother. I figured we would sit over breakfast, his family and mine, out on their deck, watching the dedicated early morning sailors, shooing the sea gulls aw
ay from our food, trying to think of a job for Mrs. Lansberry.

  It is best not to have very firm expectations where Tim is concerned.

  He came racing into our kitchen slamming the door so hard he drove the knob another half-inch into the plaster. “Tim,” I said, “kindly remember you are no longer a scrawny little twelve-year-old.”

  “I won the car, Sunny!” he yelled. He actually grabbed me by the shoulder and kissed me. “I bought nineteen lottery tickets for that car and I won it! They just delivered it! Come see it! It’s beautiful, Sunny!” What was beautiful was the way he picked me up and swung me around in his excitement. I tucked my feet in and didn’t even knock anything off the kitchen table. Tim dropped me and sped off to admire his new car. I ran after him.

  It really happens, I thought. Boys actually pick girls up and swing them around, just like in the Westerns. Being slender is a bonus after all. He couldn’t have done that so easily if I weren’t as thin as a bookmark.

  I began dreaming of long, slow drives that Tim and I would take along narrow, romantic country roads that would peter out into softly shaded, private parking spots. What a couple we’d make in that funny little car, dashing around Sea’s Edge!

  I’d need a new wardrobe. A nifty little hat, just right for a girl off for a spin in a sports car. Or was it stretching a point to call a remodeled VW Beetle a sports car? Perhaps a scarf jauntily tied at my throat. A stickpin.

  “Isn’t she terrific?” said Tim in a reverent voice.

  Well, it was fine for a car. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “terrific” and I certainly wouldn’t call it “she.”

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” whispered Tim, stroking the car. “To think that I won her.”

  I began to wonder if Tim had kissed me in the kitchen only because even Tim would feel a bit odd kissing a car.

  “She’s perfect,” sighed Tim, in the voice of one for whom life has reached a peak of joy never to be surpassed. Now if Tim could rave about me that way, I could agree with his choice of adjectives. But a car?