The Personal Touch: A Cooney Classic Romance Page 7

  “You going to be at the square dancing tonight?” said Margaret.

  Now square dancing is not romantic. For one thing you don’t get to stay with your partner very much, and for another it’s such hard work and you have to pay so much attention that what you do in your spare time is pant, not kiss. Nevertheless, I wanted to be at the square dance with Tim. I didn’t even want Margaret to be on the same block, let alone in the same square.

  That’s awful, I told myself, Margaret is your friend. Of course you want her around.

  “I don’t know how to square dance,” said Tim.

  “Any fool can square dance,” Ginnie said.

  “Thank you,” Tim told her. “I’m reassured.”

  “No, really,” said Ginnie. “They tell you what to do and everybody else is doing it too, so somebody is sure to give you a shove in the right direction. You have the general idea halfway through each dance.”

  We talked a little longer. Tim paid as much attention to Margaret and Ginnie as he could without being rude.

  For the first time, I began to wonder what was back in Albany. After all, Tim lived in our town only ten weeks a year. And it was impossible that anyone as super as Tim did not have a girl. There must be one back in Albany so terrific herself that he never even noticed Margaret, beautiful as she was. And he certainly didn’t notice me. Except as that neighbor girl he’d always tormented in the past and might as well be courteous to in the present.

  Probably writes to her every night, I thought glumly. She’s probably this curvaceous gorgeous thing with dark curling romantic hair she pulls back with ribbons. She probably models swimsuits and wins scholastic awards.

  “I have to check out that car,” said Tim. And just like that he left us.

  Margaret and Ginnie moved on to get themselves some homemade ice cream at the Congregational Church booth and I stood alone on the corner—if you can be alone while ten thousand people swirl gaily around you—and wondered whether to catch up with Tim or shrug and go back to our families on the Green.

  It was an easy decision.

  I caught up with Tim.

  Square dancing has to be the hardest work I can think of. All that frantic, rhythmic leaping from spot to spot. Pounding your feet, clapping your hands, scampering to your left and sashaying to your right.

  I started out in a square that included my parents, Mrs. Lansberry, and Tim, but the callers had one couple move down a square with every new dance, so by the time we’d been dancing half an hour, what with people dropping out and newcomers jumping in, I was in a square with people I had never seen before in my life.

  I was half appropriately dressed. My blouse was a white peasant blouse with puffy sleeves, a big scoop neck and lovely embroidery that made me look as if I had a figure. I don’t own many skirts, though, and the only one wide enough for square dance exertion was a white wraparound that featured frogs in various green leaping positions.

  We finished a dance. I was literally panting with exhaustion. My hair had fallen out of its careful arrangement and my blouse had come untucked. I tried to pat myself back together and then I turned to thank my partner. We’d been flying around so much I had barely noticed him.

  Now I noticed.

  He was older. Maybe twenty. Pretty good-looking. Wearing wheat jeans, a plain navy T-shirt, and sneakers without socks. But what struck me most about him was the way he was looking at me.

  With interest.

  With a whole lot of interest. Leland had looked at my mocha freezer cake like that. My parents looked at my report cards like that. But no boy had ever looked at me like that. It made my skin prickle.

  “Want a Coke?” he said to me.

  “I’d love one.” I was dying of thirst and I had not brought any money with me. How could you hold a purse and square dance? He of course could slide his wallet into his pocket.

  We stood in the darkness, leaning up against a storefront, sipping the icy soda and resting. He said his name was Ken and he was a college student here for a week to sail with friends and who was I?

  “Sunny. Local native. Here forever.”

  He laughed. “I love your name. I’ve never met anybody named that before. Sunny.” He sort of turned the name over gently, making it important, and then he kissed me.

  The funny thing was, I had been expecting it. I knew from the way he looked at me that that was what he wanted to do. It embarrassed me and it frightened me but mostly it made me feel so good that somebody out there wanted to kiss me!

  So when he really did it, I should have been delighted, right? Especially when that kiss proved very definitely that Leland had not known how to do it.

  But I wasn’t delighted. I was scared. Instead of feeling older and wiser I felt younger and dumber.

  Ken took my empty soda cup and tossed it in the trash. Then he put his arm around my waist. “My car’s down at the parking lot off Marsh Road,” he said. “Want to go for a drive before the fireworks begin?”

  My mind felt like one of those cartoons where the bunny gets whopped over the head with a granite block and he doesn’t die, but stars and lightning come out of his skull. In other words, very, very confused.

  My thoughts were all cluttered up with Tim and my mother and my hopes and my crooked teeth and my penchant for Westerns. Ken guided me between the delicatessen and the laundromat to the alley that led down to Marsh Road. He kissed the top of my head and the back of my neck.

  It was still over eighty degrees, with no indication that the evening was going to cool off very much, and I began shivering. It was pretty clear what Ken had planned for our drive in his car. And heaven knew I had done a lot of daydreaming about going for a drive with a sexy boy and stopping along the road to, as they say, get to know him better.

  But I didn’t know Ken at all! And he knew so much more than I did in the first place. A college boy. As quick off the mark as this.

  We got to the end of the alley. The noise of the crowds dimmed. I could hardly hear the square dance caller. The extra lights that had been brought in so the street could be used for dancing after the sun went down did not light up the alley.

  “Ken, I’d better go back to my parents,” I told him. I felt dismal and nervous and angry with myself. “They’ll be worrying.”

  “Oh, come on. You’re too old for them to be stewing about. We won’t go for very long, I promise. I’ll have you back in—oh—forty-five minutes.”

  He kissed me very promisingly. I caught my breath.

  “Come on,” whispered Ken. “You know you want to.”

  He was right. I wanted to.

  But I also didn’t want to.

  I guess when you’re this confused, I said to myself, the best thing to do is back off and think it over.

  Meanwhile Ken had already made his decision and at the same time that he was moving his feet and mine toward his car, his hands were exploring lower and lower.

  I stopped walking. Ken kept walking. For a moment we were almost righting each other. “Thanks for the Coke,” I said, and I pulled away from him and ran back up the alley, bursting into the crowds and rushing through the maze of people to the Green.

  I was blushing so much it hurt, although in the dark no one could possibly tell. What a little girl I was! I couldn’t even leave gracefully. I had to run away as if he’d been planning to mug me.

  Well, maybe he was, I said to myself. You didn’t know the guy. He could have been anyone. Could have been dangerous and horrid.

  But he could also have been a perfectly nice guy whose company I would have loved. What if I saw him again? I would die, that’s all. And I’d gone and told him my real name. There was only one Sunny in Sea’s Edge. What if he told his friends about this kooky girl who’d been so scared of getting kissed she’d actually run away from him? What if I knew his friends? What if they knew my friends? What if—

  I stopped myself.

  There was no point in standing around waiting to be humiliated. Ken would just find ano
ther girl and forget all about me. Just a poor investment buying that kook a drink, that’s all I would be to him.

  I saw Mrs. Lansberry sitting on one of her chairs at the same spot under the tree on the Green, and I walked by several parties of people sprawled in wait for the fireworks to get to her. My parents were there too; I just hadn’t seen them through the dark and the crowds.

  “Hi,” I said, folding down on the blanket.

  “My goodness, you’re still panting,” said my mother. “Did you dance all this time?”

  No, I felt like saying dramatically, I’m just running away from life, that’s all, and it’s tired me out. “Mmm,” I said noncommittally.

  “We gave up ages ago,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I had no idea how out of shape I am. Where’s Tim, Sunny?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “We got separated the second dance.”

  Mrs. Lansberry poured me some Seven-Up and handed me a chocolate cookie to nibble. The picnic basket she’d prepared had no bottom.

  So where was Tim? I thought.

  Maybe he’d found a girl and gone down an alley himself. Tim was definitely not the type to panic. Once he’d decided on something, he’d do it. No one knew that better than me.

  I sat on the blanket, feeling the world’s stupidest, most obvious fool, and tried not to cry.

  Some sixteenth summer.

  The only man who does express an interest in me does it so fast and so anonymously, I run away in a blind panic.

  The only boy I really liked liked his mother better.

  Or maybe his unknown girlfriend in Albany.

  I just lay there, thinking, and stopping myself from thinking. I seemed to have a brain that had condensed down to two thoughts. One, how embarrassing that whole thing with Ken had been. Two, how beautiful and perfect that Albany girlfriend probably was.

  The next thing I knew I was falling asleep on the blanket. The next thing after that, I was aware that there was a foot in my face.

  “I know that foot,” I said.

  “Of course you do,” said Tim. “This is the foot of olden times that used to chase you into the jellyfish water.”

  He squeezed in beside me—our territory on the Green had been considerably cut down now that people were herding in for the fireworks—and curled his ankles up yoga-style.

  “Ginnie was right,” he said.

  Oh, no! Was Ginnie going to be the one he—

  “Any fool could square dance, she told me,” said Tim, “and now any fool is paying for it. I ache in every muscle. Especially my back.”

  “Here. I’ll rub your back for you.”

  We stared at each other in the dark.

  For the first time, Timothy Lansberry was looking at me with the kind of interest that Ken had shown.

  From an invisible bandstand somewhere the Independence Day speaker was making meaningless expanded sounds into a very poor broadcasting system.

  “What’s he saying?” said my mother.

  “The flag,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “America. Benjamin Franklin. Give me liberty or give me death.”

  “A perfect summary,” said my father. “I need hear no more.”

  The adults all laughed companionably.

  “Sunny?” said Tim very softly.

  “Mmmm?”

  “Let’s sit somewhere else.”

  8

  WE WENT TO THE back of the Green, where it dwindles away into a patch of unused ground and eventually becomes the rear of the elementary school playground. There is a little hill and then two tennis courts on the flat top of the rise. Long ago, some do-gooder decided to beautify the courts by planting pretty little roses along the outside of the wire enclosure of the courts. As the years passed, the roses became huge, vicious thorn bushes. Anyone trying to play tennis when the courts were locked would definitely not climb the fence!

  Tim and I found a narrow pocket of thorn-rimmed space between two of the huge roses. Very carefully, we stretched out a Chair Fair blanket and crawled in backward so we could lie facing the fireworks, propping our chins in our hands. “From up here,” said Tim, “we’ll have the best view of anybody in town.”

  I quite agreed. Although I was not looking at the sky. I was looking at Timothy Lansberry and thinking that the second Tim around was the most wonderful boy I’d ever come across. Forget Albany, I thought. Forget Ken. Forget everything. Think Tim.

  We didn’t talk.

  We just looked at each other for a few moments and I found myself shivering again. Tim put his arm around me. The first of the fireworks went off with a tremendous boom which startled both of us enough so that we clutched at each other and then giggled nervously. The clutch relaxed into a hug. The hug moved into a kiss. After that, the fireworks and the crowd below us could have done almost anything and I, at least, would never have known…

  They were putting on the last great splash of fireworks, splendid bursts of red, white and blue, accompanied by earth-shaking booms. Tim traced a path around my face with his fingertip. I shivered and kissed him again. “We’d better head back,” he said. He had to try twice to get his voice clear enough to speak. “We’ll never find our folks in the crowds if we wait much longer.”

  Reluctantly we slid out from under the thorns and threaded our way through throngs of people to the maple tree on the Green.

  “Hi, darlings,” said my mother, waving. “Weren’t the fireworks wonderful this year? I’m such a kid. I love fireworks. I liked the tiny silver ones that popped in sprays all over the sky.”

  I couldn’t remember the fireworks. “Yes,” I agreed. “Those were lovely.”

  Tim looked at the smoking sky and laughed to himself.

  My father gave Mrs. Lansberry a neighborly squeeze. “We must have a picnic like this again some night,” he said. “That food of yours was delicious.”

  How about every night, I thought. Not to mention morning and noon!

  There was no way to say a special goodnight to Tim. My father just paused at the edge of their drive and they got out and slammed the doors. “See you, Sunny,” said Tim.

  Well, I hadn’t really expected him to shout, “I love you passionately, Sunny, I can’t live till tomorrow!” but on the other hand “see you” left a lot to be desired.

  “Bye,” I said, realizing that my response was a little dull also. But there were parents in the way. We would perfect a technique, Tim and I, we would develop a secret language, we would communicate by raised eyebrows and half-smiles.

  I knew I would never fall asleep, because I had so much thinking to do about Tim, but actually what I thought about was how embarrassing and stupid it had been fleeing that character Ken, and I lay there blushing and hoping never to meet him again and then I fell asleep.

  I had expected to be awakened by the sweet music of Tim slamming our back door as he came in to go to work with Mother, but the sound of his arrival never came. “Where are they?” I asked my father when I finally dragged myself down to breakfast.

  “Work. Extra hours, special sale after the Fourth nonsense, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  I split myself an English muffin and stared sleepily into the refrigerator to see if we were featuring anything the slightest bit interesting to spread on it. We weren’t.

  Not fair, I thought. The first morning a girl wakes up in love and (a) the boy she loves is working, and (b) she has to make her own breakfast, and (c) the breakfast is crummy.

  In a good romance, somebody else would have had to split that English muffin and the butter would already be soft and the marmalade imported and the eggs coddled.

  “What are you making those terrible faces about?” said my father.

  “Life,” I told him. “It consistently interferes with my plans.” My heart was singing so loudly I was surprised he could not interpret it. I have a boyfriend, it was thumping. And not a dull old thing like Leland or David. I have crazy, wonderful, interesting Tim!

  I popped popcorn and fed my gulls, who were
delighted to see me after such a long absence. I was sort of hoping Mrs. Lansberry would come outdoors so we could talk about Tim, but she was no doubt sleeping late. Her house had the vacant glassy look of nobody up.

  Instead of talking about Tim I had to bicycle down to a used paperback store and help old ladies choose Agatha Christies they hadn’t read yet.

  There was no one at all I could talk to about Tim. All of a sudden I didn’t feel close to any of them, not even Ginnie. They all seemed distant and remote and not capable of understanding anything. Besides, they were at work.

  I shelved some science fiction. I hate science fiction. It makes me feel queasy just to look at the covers. I threw out a little magazine somebody had slipped into the return pile and swept up some cigarette butts and washed the pitiful scrap of window in my store.

  What was Tim doing right now? Daydreaming about me?

  More likely, he was waiting on ten harried customers and had not given me a thought even once.

  I can’t talk to anybody about Tim yet, I thought. First I have to know that last night really happened. It has to happen again. That will confirm it. Then Tim has to say something so I’ll know there’s no girl in Albany. Then I can talk about it.

  All day I waited for Tim to call me. For me there had been fireworks just between Tim and me. I could not believe he didn’t want to say something about it. Even just “hi.”

  But the phone never rang and when I got home at night there was no Tim in evidence. “I saw him driving with Mrs. Lansberry,” said my mother. “He said something about having to take her somewhere tonight.”

  I actually watched television. I could have been doing something meaningful and interesting and personal and wonderful, like gazing at Tim, and I watched television instead. I love it on TV comedies where they wrap up all their troubles and end all their problems in twenty-five minutes. Don’t I wish.

  I even tried sending mental telepathy to Tim, wherever he might be. Tim, I love you, I sent. I pictured him leaning against the wall in some store somewhere, waiting for his mother to pay for her purchases, and all of a sudden he’d be struck by my words as if by an arrow. He’d gasp and remember and run to the nearest pay phone.