Personal Touch (8 page)

Mrs. Lansberry announced that we were going to have a picnic to end all picnics. We were featuring, she announced, everything from sangria to ham on rye; from crabmeat dip to chocolate cheesecake, from melon balls to poppy seed buns.

My father inspected Mrs. Lansberry’s baskets. Our family leans toward very primitive picnics—the kind where you shove some old stale baloney sandwiches into a bag and drop a can of soda on top of them and walk down to the beach. When my father saw the contents were exactly what she had advertised, he said, “Close up early, folks. It isn’t worth any amount of chair income to let this bounty spoil.”

Mrs. Lansberry laughed as if my father had awarded her Chef-of-the-Year blue ribbons. How odd, I thought. I have never heard her laugh before. I’ve watched her tan and I’ve listened to her scold, but I’ve never heard her sound happy before. In five summers.

She looked much better today than she had the other night. Kind of excited, as if she was expecting something really special to happen on the Green.

That was okay. I was rather hoping for something special to happen also.

Closing up was easier said than done. People came in faster than we could shovel them out. Mrs. Lansberry hovered next to me. Over and over again she said, “Oh, I wish I could help. I wish I knew how to do anything at all!”

Finally my father just closed the front door and refused to let anybody else in. Every time we let someone out he pulled the door to very quickly. It was like putting a litter of kittens outside. They kept wanting back in.

Finally panting, exhausted, and more than ready for whatever goodies Mrs. Lansberry had packed, we locked up and I took one end of a cooler and Tim took the other and we staggered down a crowded street toward the Green.

“I don’t believe how many people there are,” said my mother. “We’ll never find a spot. We’ll end up having to sit in the alley behind the bank or something just to find a place to sit down.”

How depressing! I didn’t want to have this super picnic sitting on asphalt.

“Don’t worry,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I put out a blanket and chairs hours ago under that great big maple tree by the War Monument. I’ve been going back to check on it and it’s perfectly safe. Nobody’s taken it.”

“What a woman,” said my father.

Mrs. Lansberry flushed with pleasure.

Now my father says that to my mother probably ten times a day the year round. But somehow with Mrs. Lansberry, I had the feeling that she wasn’t used to compliments, even one as dull and meaningless as “What a woman!”

The picnic spot was perfect. We were in the shade, on soft thick cool grass, while all around us the ebb and flow of thousands of eager, excited fair-goers were like a marvelous movie filmed just for our benefit. Mrs. Lansberry had three folding chairs for the adults and two fat cushions for Tim and me. I wanted to thank her for such thoughtful arrangements. That way they could converse on their level, and Tim and I, sprawled on the ground, could converse on ours.

The food was absolutely scrumptious. We kept telling Mrs. Lansberry and she kept wiggling and flushing with pleasure like a little girl.

Tim and I talked. Not about anything in particular. Just nice, comfortable talk. We speculated on how much money the costumed juggler was making when he passed his hat. We made wisecracks about a couple wearing outsized cowboy hats and boots. We debated the pros and cons of buying raffle tickets for the handmade quilt and the color television. We did not debate the merits of buying a raffle ticket on the car. We
knew
we wanted to win that. It was an old Volkswagen Beetle that had been remodeled with one of those fiberglass kits so that it now resembled some sort of squished-in 1920s car, complete with running boards, exterior horns, and funny old protruding headlights. Tim tried to estimate how many raffle tickets would be sold and what the odds would be in his favor if he bought twenty-five tickets.

Mrs. Lansberry kept reaching into the depths of her baskets and coolers and coming up with yet more delicious stuff.

“Do you remember,” said Tim, “that first time I tried to start a fire for barbecuing?”

Did I remember. It was the beginning of the legend of TIM, Terrible Infuriating Monster.

Tim had been determined to start the fire for the hamburgers by rubbing two sticks together, the way he’d read that frontiersmen always started their campfires. He began about five in the evening and was still rubbing at ten o’clock when his parents had long since broiled their supper in the stove and were begging him to go to bed. He tried maple twigs, pine sticks, oak, tulip poplar and willow and all the rubbing he could manage, and nothing happened. Finally around one o’clock that morning Tim began screaming happily, “Fire! Fire! Fire!”

The fire department, summoned by a terrified neighbor, was not amused.

Tim and I lay on the blanket and laughed helplessly.

This summer is different, I thought. Second Tim Around. This summer either he’d rub right or he’d use matches.

How dull, I thought. How absolutely dull and like other boys. Don’t let Tim get dull, God. Wouldn’t it be awful if Tim solidified into the sort of man who’s genuinely happy selling chairs to summer people?

I decided I did not necessarily want a Second Tim Around.

“Why don’t you two kids wander on down Main Street and see what there is?” suggested my father. “I read in the paper that this year they have over one hundred fifty exhibitors.”

“Ought to be at least one interesting booth in that many,” agreed Tim.

“I’d go myself,” said my father, “but I’m too tired to budge. Give my regards to the elementary school P.T.A. booth, will you?”

“Tired?” said my mother indignantly. “You haven’t done one thing all day but close the shop door.”

“If you find any good hand-thrown pottery, come back and tell me,” said Mrs. Lansberry. “I love it. And I need a lot, because every time Tim crosses a room he’s apt to bump something off a shelf. The survival rate of my pottery is very poor.”

Tim laughed. And then this marvelous thing happened: he stood up first and reached a hand down to help me up.

I tried to think of a way to hang on to his hand permanently, but Tim nearly always walks with his hands jammed deep into his pockets, and he’s told me more than once that he feels lopsided when he can only get one hand pocketed. So I didn’t hold his hand very tightly. I let him hold mine and, sure enough, he let go in a moment and shoved both hands deep into his jeans’ pockets.

Well, it was a start. After all, the good guy in the Western paperback doesn’t toss the young maiden up onto the magnificent horse in the very first chapter. He builds up to it.

“If this were the good old days,” said Tim, “I’d have something special planned for the end of the road. Some really devious thing you’d never suspect.”

A nice devious thing for you to do, I thought, would be to swing me into some quiet corner and kiss me.

Instead he bought us tickets to throw plastic rings at distant plastic knobs. Violently colored stuffed animals were offered as prizes. I definitely did not want one. There’s nothing dumber-looking than somebody at a fair carting around some huge lime-green teddy bear.

Fortunately neither of us was an especially competent plastic-ring thrower.

When we left that booth I thought I might just silently take Tim’s hand, saying nothing, being very subtle—but he jammed his hands into his pockets a little too fast for me. I could always take his wrist, but then I’d feel like a pair of handcuffs.

Tim stopped so abruptly he had to take a hand out of his pocket and grab my elbow to stop me. I didn’t object. “What is it?” I said, hoping that a crush similar to mine had just struck him.

“Pottery.”

How depressing. All he wanted was a clay bowl for his mother. I watched him pick over the pottery. If he was that careful choosing a girlfriend, no wonder he never dated! Tim found flaws on every single piece he examined. The woman who’d made it began to look a bit tense around the edges. Tim often has that effect on people.

“It’s for my mother,” he explained to the lady. “Has to be perfect.”

“Why?” I said. “She just told us all that would happen to the bowl is that you’ll break it.”

Tim loved that. “Okay,” he said to the potter, “I’ll take that one over there. The one with the big crack across the bottom. Prebroken, so to speak.” He had her wrap it in sparkling tissue and ribbon.

I thought a boy of seventeen should be less interested in buying his mother presents and more interested in girls, but I didn’t say so. After all, I bought things for my mother, too. In fact, maybe I would buy her a piece of pottery.

I chose one without a flaw. A lovely little blue glazed pitcher for, the potter told me, pouring cream at breakfast. Tim snorted. He knows perfectly well that our breakfasts are so frantic we’re lucky if we can get the plastic milk carton in and out of the fridge without spilling it, let alone pour cream into a sweet little pitcher. “It can sit on the sill and look pretty,” I told him.

“That’s all pottery is good for, anyway,” said Tim, which did nothing to help him develop a friendship with the pottery lady.

We were gathering up our packages and getting ready to go inspect the strange little orange gas-saver car when who should come up but Margaret and Ginnie.

I hate comparing myself to people. It’s fatal. It makes me feel scrawny and stupid and pale. Especially Margaret. Margaret aimed her perfect smile right at Tim’s heart and I did not see how he could fail to be affected. Both Margaret and Tim wore braces for years and now they have these beautiful, straight white perfect teeth. My teeth were just a little bit crooked, not enough, my mother said, for braces. My mother says my smile has character. I would rather it lacked some of that character and that my teeth could be exactly evenly spaced.

“Hi, Margaret,” said Tim, “how are you?”

He sounded as if he really did care how she was. Immediately I stopped feeling the least bit pretty, interesting, or sexy and just felt thin and boring.

Margaret is a very relaxed person. She can do things that would take me six months to build up to and even then I might chicken out. She put a long, tanned arm around Tim’s shoulder and pulled his head down to hers so she could give him a kiss. There was no noticeable lack of cooperation on Tim’s part. “Hi, Tim,” she drawled. “Long time, no see. When are you coming out on the beach with the rest of us? You don’t want us to have a boring summer, do you?”

I had been thinking about my arm around Tim’s shoulder like that for days and dreaming about kissing him for weeks. And Margaret had gone and done it.

“I’ve been working,” explained Tim. “Keeps me out of trouble.”

“
You
?” said Ginnie cynically.

We all laughed. One of the things that impressed me about Tim was that he hardly ever batted an eye about his checkered past. Me, I’d have been mumbling and scuffing my feet and flushing. Tim just looked back at the neighborhood terror he’d been and thought it was funny.

“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.