Personal Touch (3 page)

When David and Margaret sauntered back down the sand, Ginnie said, “Funny. They—don’t look different.”

I knew what she meant. You’d expect stars in their eyes. At the very least, mussed-up hair.

David and Margaret could have been off buying charcoal briquets for all the romance in their eyes.

“I don’t want to be that settled. I want to whip around some,” Ginnie told me. “My mother says thirty is a good age to be settled.”

“And there are David and Margaret settled at sixteen,” I agreed. “Well, I don’t want to be settled, Ginnie, but I sure would like to be attached!”

I
N MAY THE STORES
began opening for the season and the summer residents began sifting back into our lives. My father was terribly busy wrapping up the school year and my mother was totally involved with starting up Chair Fair again.

In May Mr. Hartley told me that summer people don’t read books in the morning. At first I did not think that was particularly useful information, but then he said, “I don’t know what they
do
in the morning, but they definitely don’t exchange paperbacks. Therefore, Second Time Around is open from noon until eight.”

“Noon ’til eight?” I repeated weakly. Those were my hours?

It called for considerable revision of my daydreams. It meant, basically, that I could date mornings and Sundays.

“How am I ever going to meet anybody?” I wailed. “Everybody but me will be on the beach and back home again while I’m still slaving away.”

“Why would you want to meet anybody?” said my father. “You know every single person in Sea’s Edge already.”

“Summer people, she means,” said my mother, pouring him another cup of coffee. He had conferences with the parents of the kids he was keeping back a grade and he had to fortify himself.

“I don’t know why you’d want to meet any summer people,” said my father.

It was too hard to explain, but my mother managed to tell him in one word. She’s clever that way. “Dates,” said my mother.

“Oh.” He slurped coffee. “I know who you could date. And you already know him, too. A summer person the exact right age and sex.”

I waited.

Daddy grinned. “You and Tim could start something,” he suggested.

I groaned. “Start what? A riot?”

We all laughed but changed the subject promptly so we wouldn’t ruin our entire day by remembering that Lansberrys always arrived precisely on June 1st. In our household it was a date very much like the day Benedict Arnold became a traitor. Not a day for positive thoughts.

I shifted my thoughts into the old boyfriend fantasies.

Down at the Rusted Rudder (where everybody in Sea’s Edge takes coffee breaks) is a huge bulletin board where people pin up personal notices. Things like: Free Kittens; or, Wanted—Boy to Sand Old Wooden Boat.

“I know,” I said eagerly. “I could put Available: Pretty Girl on Mornings and Sundays.”

It was pretty clear from the look my parents gave me that I could not put up any such notice.

Mr. Hartley opened the store on May 20th. I wasn’t going to be out of school until June 11th, so to start with I worked from four to eight. I had never had a job before and it was very very hard to get used to. Going from a full day of school to four solid hours of work was
much
harder than I had expected.

And Second Time Around was not at all what I had anticipated.

First, it was busy. There really were a lot of people out there eager to buy used paperbacks. When I wasn’t at the adding machine totting up people’s return credits, I was rushing their exchange books back to the shelves. I made change and stapled paper shopping bags together and straightened the Silhouette romances and scurried back to ring up another purchase.

It was
work.

I was sort of offended. I had wanted a job, all right, and an income, but I hadn’t really wanted to work. It was so exhausting that every evening I just tottered home, pretended to study, and fell into bed.

The whole summer? I thought, depressed.

I’m going to spend the whole summer that was supposed to be my first summer of romance and fun going to bed early because I’m so tired from jabbing cash register buttons?

It could have been worse. Eloise had started her job as a toll taker at the Turnpike Exit. “You never meet anybody,” she said. “And all they ever do is grunt. You can pretend they’re saying ‘Thank you,’ or ‘Have a good day,’ but deep down you know all they’re doing is grunting.”

Still, I was able to buy my new bathing suit before the end of May. Of course, I didn’t have time to go to the beach in it, what with final exams and the job, but it was nice to know I owned it. It was a two piece. My mother had always refused to buy me a two piece with her money but she glumly agreed that with my money I could buy what I wanted. “You spent that much money,” she said, seeing it on me, “I should think you could have bought a little more fabric.”

But the suit was beautiful.

Now I was another matter entirely. First of all I was thin. Second of all I was pasty white. Not even a freckle, let alone a tan. I don’t know how summer people do it, but they
arrive
at the beach tanned. Ginnie insists that somewhere there is a pre-beach for beach people to get their primary tans in privacy. I, lacking a pre-beach, always have to spend June faded and wimpy.

I looked even more faded and pasty with my jungle pattern bikini. All that splashy pattern on this white twig of a girl.

So, naturally, the following Saturday, since I didn’t have to get to work until noon, I took advantage of a hot sunny day to go to my pre-beach. The Lansberrys’ dock. Mrs. Lansberry was always coppery tan. She was never tanned too little and never tanned too much.

If we still had our open meadow, I told myself, and our view, not to mention our access to the sun, I could have a perfect tan, too. Without having to steal dock space from the Lansberrys.

I fed my sea gulls, went back for my hugest beach towel, and stretched myself out on the very end of the dock, where the waves lapped gently among the tall sea grass.

I toasted my face and then I toasted my back and I was just thinking that I should put on a shirt before I got a burn when I fell asleep. It was the kind of sleeping where you know you’re going to do it, you can feel yourself getting softer and more limp, but you don’t have enough will power to stop the sleep because it feels so warm and good.

I’m going to have a burn, I told myself.

But I didn’t move. I slept in the hot sun.

When I woke up there were toes in my face.

I spent a sleepy moment trying to figure out how I had managed that contortionist’s act and decided the toes were too big to be mine, and anyhow I was wearing Cranberry Surf polish on my toenails.

A great heavy gloom settled over me.

I know those toes, I thought. I know them from the good old days when those very toes kicked sand in my face all summer long.

Those are Tim’s toes.

“Hello, Sunny,” said Tim.

I had forgotten how deep his voice was. Somehow I remembered Tim best at age thirteen when he was all ankles and elbows (I swear Tim Lansberry had the sharpest elbows on earth) and his voice broke every other sentence. That was the summer when Tim couldn’t get in or out of the car, let alone the sailboat, because his joints didn’t merely hinge, they flopped. That was the summer Tim wanted long hair and his parents wanted short hair, and about August Tim compromised and cut the right half of his head in a crew cut and let the rest dangle down to his shoulders. Yes, the summer Tim was thirteen was a memorable one.

And just what I didn’t want to do the first beautiful Saturday in June was find out what he was like at seventeen. How could I have forgotten that June first was Lansberry Moving Day?

“I thought I’d better come down and wake you up,” said Tim. “You’re red as a beet. What is this, your first day out? Pretty dumb to fall asleep in the sun when you don’t have any tan yet.”

We were off to our usual start. I sat up morosely. “It’s you,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s me.” He looked surprisingly civilized, for Tim. He was wearing wheat jeans, torn in all the best places (summer people love torn, faded clothing, don’t ask me why) and a green T-shirt that, incredibly, lacked any evidence of brand names. Last year all his T-shirts said things like SHAKESPEARE MARRIED AN AVON LADY, and all his good shirts had alligators.

I tried to think of an insult, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’ve grown out of that, I thought. It was a good superior feeling. Tim could behave like an infant if he liked, but I, Sunny, was too mature for a response.

Tim sat down beside me on the dock and crossed his ankles yoga fashion. I have never been able to do that, even with a friend holding down one of my knees and bending the other and trying to insert my ankle for me. And there was uncoordinated Tim just tucking his ankles in as if it were nothing.

Well, that at least was a change for the better. If he broke my mother’s garden sculptures again this year, we’d know it wasn’t an accident.

I remembered our parting shots from last summer. I had told Tim he should hang a sign by his ear. Enter Carefully. Empty Pit Within.

He had retaliated by shouting that my sign should read Space For Rent.

Oddly enough, looking back at that, our retorts didn’t seem very insulting. They seemed funny. I was just thinking about laughing when Tim said in a very serious voice, “Listen, Sunny. I’ve been thinking about coming to Sea’s Edge for weeks now and I want to get things straight right from the beginning.”

He was going to tell me there was to be no trespassing on their precious dock and I wasn’t to bring my screaming infant charges up near his fence. I glared at him.

“Let’s not fight, okay?” said Tim. He spoke like me last summer trying to reason with Baby Julie. “Honestly, every May when I realize I’m going to have to see you daily for ten weeks I start to feel depressed. Let’s call a truce before the war begins, okay? Let’s actually be courteous to each other.”

I almost shoved him off the dock.

The nerve!

I was always courteous. And we’d never waged war. Tim had attacked and I had had to defend. And where did
he
get off being depressed about ten weeks here?
His
house was the one with the sun and the sea and the view and the dock.

Tim looked into the water while he spoke. You can’t swim off the dock. Jellyfish. It was clear that Tim would rather swim with the jellyfish than sit with me.

I could just hear him back in Albany, New York, complaining to his mother about me. That girl is such a pain, he probably told her, and she probably said, Be up front about it, Tim dear. Be firm with that Sunny person, and be sure she behaves this year so she doesn’t spoil your summer.

And here I was on their dock. I’d have burned it down before walking on it again this season.

“I have to go,” I said stiffly, as if he’d been preventing me. Why couldn’t I think of anything cutting to say. “I have to get to my job.” I winced when I stood up. My back already hurt. It must be a whopper of a sunburn. Terrific way to start June. Lansberrys and a sunburn.

“Oh?” said Tim. “What’s your job? Where are you working?”

No doubt he was trying to gauge how much blissful Sunny-free time he’d have when I would not be around. Second Time Around, I told him.

“Oh, yeah? That’s my dad’s hangout. You’ll see a lot of him.”

Oh, wonderful. Best news in ten years.

“I’m going to start looking for a job myself Monday,” said Tim. “Got any idea where I could go first?”

I restrained myself from giving him a truthful and obscene answer to that one. “There aren’t any jobs left.” I folded my towel very very neatly. Maybe I could convince Mr. Lansberry to use the library.

“Actually,” said Tim confidingly, “I didn’t want to come this year at all. There’s never anything to do at Sea’s Edge. Things are so much better at home. But my folks made me come.”

I almost kicked him. I actually looked down at his shins and thought how much I’d like to break one. I didn’t partly because I could not stoop to his level and partly because I was barefoot.

There was a lot to do in Sea’s Edge. Nice, pleasant, happy things to do…until some summer jerk like Tim came along and wrecked them. The idea that Albany would be better in the summer than Sea’s Edge. Anybody who does not love Sea’s Edge is probably perverted and demented.

I stalked past Tim. “Timothy,” I said grimly, “feel free to go back.”

F
OR THE NEXT TWO
weeks, thank heavens, I caught only glimpses of Tim and his family. If we’d been forced to associate with each other, I don’t know what I might have said or done. And as the days passed, I simmered down. Who cared what Tim Lansberry thought about anything? I had better things to consider than whether or not he liked Sea’s Edge.

Like final exams, end-of-the-year beach parties, and work.

Especially work.

And heat. Especially work and heat combined.

Mr. Hartley’s used book loft was not air-conditioned. He insisted that books and book lovers could not thrive in the refrigerated false chill of air-conditioning. A few rotating fans gently moving the air around—that was what book lovers loved, claimed Mr. Hartley.

Well, maybe they did. If so, we didn’t feature any genuine book lovers in Sea’s Edge. Every unfortunate person who came in gasped for breath in my hot, stuffy loft. “Sunny,” they’d moan. “What have you got against the twentieth century? You can’t put a window unit in here?”

“It’s not my store,” I’d explain. “Complain to Mr. Hartley.” But Mr. Hartley was never there when I was. That was the whole point, you see—that
I
should run Second Time Around so he could relax and enjoy his summer.

At least all the patrons became immediate friends.

The browser at science fiction would clutch his chest and say, “I hope you have the phone number of the medical squad written down, Sunny. I’m gonna die of this heat.” The woman at historical romances would add, “Make sure there’s room for two on the stretcher.” Then the man at biographies would say, “You
do
have a certificate in lifesaving, don’t you, Sunny?”