The Personal Touch: A Cooney Classic Romance Read online

  As long as he hired me to sell that book, I really don’t care. I spent the end of April and the beginning of May developing this long fantasy where all these terrific boys would bring in their paperbacks and end up hanging around the cash register because that delightful girl, Sunny, so well-named—really just the sight of Sunny brightened your day—Sunny was so appealing these boys didn’t even want to get back to the beach; they just wanted to feast their eyes on that girl.

  Mr. Hartley told me I’d meet every single summer person who came to Sea’s Edge, assuming they were literate this year. I tried to figure the proportion of sixteen to eighteen-year-old boys in a summer population of about six thousand. I decided there could not possibly be fewer than fifty. I further decided that all of them would be voracious readers with a deep insatiable need for used paperbacks.

  “And the best thing about this job,” said my father, “is that it’s within walking distance. I really didn’t want to have to drive you to work every day.”

  “Walking distance!” I yelled. “It’s at least two miles from home!”

  “So use your bike,” said my mother. “You don’t have any trouble riding two miles when you’re headed for the beach, I notice.”

  I hadn’t used the bike much since starting high school because I take a bus now, so I had to haul the bike out of the toolshed and scrape it down with steel wool to get the accumulated rust off it. I did this job out in the driveway, where passersby could definitely see me, and I wore my best jeans and pulled my hair back with my new white scarf, but the only person who noticed me there was Mrs. Macauley, who is eighty, who told me I was going to ruin my pretty clothes doing that filthy chore.

  I kept telling myself that I’d be spotted by the very earliest summer people—and their fine young sons—but I wasn’t.

  I didn’t have any of these daydreams last summer. Last summer, when I was fifteen, it would have been enough just to see the handsome boys. Or even the plain ones. I didn’t really want to get to know them better. Then I would have had to speak to them. Or—horrors—touch them.

  This summer. Good grief. All I could think about was getting to know them better. It was ridiculous. I knew perfectly well the only people who’d come to buy used paperbacks would be elderly, overweight, retired bridge players with copper tans from spending the winter on a Florida beach. The only two good things that would happen to me my sixteenth summer were that I’d earn money and that by fall I’d be incredibly knowledgeable about books.

  The moment I admitted that that was what would really happen, I’d get swept up in this detailed fantasy where I would become incredibly knowledgeable about boys. And not by reading about them, either.

  Everybody had managed to land a job.

  Several people were working at the fast food joints (we have only two in Sea’s Edge, and believe me, they’re on the edge of town, literally, where they can’t disrupt the quaintness of the rest of the village), and a lot of my friends were going to be waiting table or working in the kitchens of better restaurants. That bunch talked all May about the size of the tips they hoped to earn.

  A few boys had jobs in factories inland, and I knew a couple of girls were going to be toll takers at the Turnpike Exit. Ginnie was a lifeguard at the Holiday Inn Pool and Margaret was teaching crafts at The Sandpiper Summer Camp for Little Boys and Girls…the one where Tim lasted about three days before being thrown out.

  “Speaking of Tim,” said Margaret lazily, scooping sand between her toes, “is he returning again this year?”

  I stared up into a blue, blue sky to watch the sea gulls wheel. I love the beach in May. It’s not quite warm enough to sunbathe, but we all wear our bathing suits anyway and then we lie there on the sand with blankets on top of us. “I guess so,” I said. I had not given Tim much thought, what with jobs to consider and fantasies to construct. Tim was all too real. A noisy nuisance.

  “He has to grow up eventually,” said David. “He can’t always be a little juvenile delinquent.”

  “Optimist,” said Margaret. “I bet Tim’s doing time. He’ll be spending the summer at a detention center.”

  We all laughed.

  David is Margaret’s boyfriend. I envy them and yet I don’t. They seem so placid together. They act as if they’ve gone together for generations and the whole dating thing is old stuff to them. The excitement long gone. Honestly, you’d think they were twenty-five and married.

  David objected. “Tim was never really bad, Margaret,” he said. “Just—just—”

  “Bad,” I said, knowing firsthand. What did Margaret and David know of a kid who celebrated my mother’s Fourth of July birthday by giving her a swarm of honeybees? And having the nerve to claim he thought she would like them, since she used honey on her waffles? What did Margaret and David know of a brat who—

  But why waste good beach time thinking about Tim? I said to myself.

  Because David kept talking about Tim, that was why. “The thing is,” said David, “seventeen is a much more mature age than Tim has been any other summer.”

  “So what?” demanded Ginnie. “Every year, David, in case you have not noticed, every single human being on earth is a more mature age than he was the year before. That has no significance regarding Tim’s behavior any of the previous years.”

  “Aw, give him a chance,” said David. “Tim is the most interesting summer person I’ve ever met.”

  I studied David. His profile, his hair, his bare chest. Last fall I had suddenly gotten a crush on him. It had been very intense and I had been terrified I would be saddled with that crush the rest of my life—imagine loving David who loved Margaret forever—but by the next Monday the crush was all gone and David was just another pleasant kid in my algebra class.

  “I think you actually like Tim,” I accused David. “I thought you would have higher standards.”

  David laughed. “I think Tim qualifies for high standards. I went sailing with him a couple of times last year. He’s a lot of fun. He never wants to do anything the way anybody else does it. I wouldn’t want to be in a sailing race with him; he’d have to make up his own course and he’d get disqualified. But just to sail with—gosh, Sunny, we had a blast.”

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

  “He just has too much energy,” said David.

  I thought that “energy” was a very kind word for what Tim had too much of. I closed my eyes to stare up through my lids into the sun. Prisms of rainbow colors chased themselves across my eyes. What dumb fantasies I have, I thought. I know what rich summer boys are like. They’re like Tim. Spoiled rotten. I’ve got to stop pretending I want to date a handsome, rich, gallant, yacht-owning summer boy. I’ve got to begin looking for someone nice and ordinary and pleasant like old David.

  Except that all the pleasant old Davids were taken.

  Abruptly, David and Margaret got to their feet, synchronized like twin watches, and shook the sand off themselves. Would I watch their cassette for them, they asked, they’d be back in a little while. Holding hands, they strolled down the beach toward the Point where gnarled old pines make a private grove.

  “They didn’t even have to ask each other if they felt like it,” said Ginnie. “They just knew they wanted to go off and make out.”

  I kicked the sand.

  Keeper of the cassette, that was me.

  And this summer? Would I be keeper of the bookstore, while the Margarets I knew were off with their boyfriends?

  “I’m not jealous,” said Ginnie. “Sunny, tell me I’m not jealous.”

  “You’re not jealous,” I told her. “But I am.”

  We fell back on the sand and giggled. It was a relief not to be the only girl not dating.

  “It’s like field hockey,” said Ginnie.

  “What is?”

  “Not dating. When the captains start picking their teams and you’re the one still sitting on the gym floor because no captain in her right mind would want you on her team.”


  “Oh, how depressing,” I said. “Ginnie, don’t talk like that. I’m always the one left on the gym floor. Captains of basketball, soccer, field hockey and softball all pray somebody else will get stuck with me. I couldn’t go on living if I thought dating was going to be like that, too.”

  “You could always go back to Leland,” suggested Ginnie.

  “Oh, well, Leland,” I said. “Those weren’t dates. Those were cooking sessions.” Ginnie and I lay on the blankets talking about boys and school and the summer to come and I knew and she knew that what we were really thinking about was David and Margaret off in the pines.

  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!”

  2

  IN 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 su
mmer 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.”