Personal Touch (2 page)

Summer in Sea’s Edge sounds so good. Beaches, boats, live theater, terrific restaurants, dancing, street fairs and auctions. Somehow my last few summers, however, have been less than successful.

I’m sixteen, I told the gulls as I left the dock. Sixteen should be a super year. Don’t let me have another dud, please!

All winter I had been dating Leland Derrick. It was not what you might call an in-depth relationship. “I love her for her chocolate cheesecake,” Leland told people, beaming toothily. Our dates (if you could call them that) usually meant me in the kitchen baking and Leland in our den eating and watching television. My father saw more of Leland than I did.

The only good thing about Leland was that I could say I had a boyfriend. It was stretching the definition. Leland was a friend, and he was a boy, but other than that Leland did not fit my romantic ideas of a real, true, boyfriend.

“I don’t care for Leland,” said my mother this past March. “The only thing Leland has ever reflected on is his own face in the mirror.”

I reflected on that and decided she was right and Leland and I split. He didn’t mind. I made him a mocha freezer cake to go out on.

Since then I had had three dates. My parents were definitely not impressed by those boys either.

“It could be worse,” said my father when I came in from the third date. “She could be dating Tim.”

My mother and I gagged.

I wondered if Tim, who would be seventeen now, planned to get a summer job. Probably not. He certainly did not need the money and he had never struck me as good employee material. He was a shade on the independent side to be somebody’s hireling. Besides, with his reputation locally, he’d have to go two towns away to get a job.

That
sounded so good I considered job hunting for Tim instead of for me. Imagine being able to place Tim two towns away!

My mother’s roses were getting tiny green swellings where the leaves would appear in May. All summer the thick scent of her flowers would waft through the air.

I began a rose-scented fantasy in which I would find this super, interesting, well-paying, stimulating job and my co-worker would be an equally interesting, stimulating, handsome, marvelous young man who would fall for me and adore me and take me everywhere and give me this wonderful sixteenth summer.

It was strictly a fantasy.

My first job interview had been one Julie’s mother wangled for me: clerk at a children’s clothing shop called (sickeningly) Heaven to Eleven. Now how many handsome young men are going to be out buying toddler’s sunsuits? Definitely not young men with whom I need to have a relationship. Heaven to Eleven is located in a half-above-ground basement under the coffee shop called the Rusted Rudder. Now if I could get a job there, and bring cheese Danish to handsome rich summer boys, that would be one thing. But the Rusted Rudder didn’t need any more help and the only thing Heaven to Eleven shared with the Rusted Rudder was an employees’ bathroom.

However, Heaven to Eleven didn’t offer me a job, so I didn’t have to worry about that.

I also didn’t get offered a job waiting table at Dock and Dine, a posh seafood restaurant for yachtsmen known for generous tipping habits, and next I was passed up by Josiah’s Antiques and Brassworks.

It was beginning to look as though I would be able to spend the summer getting a tan and showing off my backstroke, which would have been okay, except I was too broke to buy a new bathing suit to do that in. They frown on swimming in the nude here in Sea’s Edge and my parents said I had a perfectly good navy blue tank suit that was only two years old, and if I wanted something expensive that was my problem, not theirs.

So I had to get a job.

The real danger looming, however, was that I would have to work at Chair Fair. My mother owns that store. It’s seasonal, opening May 1st, selling lawn chairs, beach chairs, barbecue cookers, beach umbrellas, picnic tables and so forth. I loathe helping there. Passionately. First I hate my mother’s partner, Jeter, who is this huge bosomy woman with a voice louder than Baby Julie’s. Second, I hate the customers. Anybody who shops at Chair Fair has forgotten something he meant to bring along and he resents spending the money and he’s in a hurry and he thinks we overcharge. He’s right about that; we are definitely in business to make a profit, my mother says, trying to balance our budget. And he’s rude.

I have this terrible tendency to be rude right back.

I waved good-bye to my sea gulls and they shrieked and wheeled as I walked back home, ordering me to come again and feed them tomorrow.

When I was down to the last three employers I knew of in our entire village (and two of those my mother said no daughter of hers would ever work for)—I found a job.

Mr. Hartley’s Second Time Around. (You may have noticed that here in Sea’s Edge we specialize in quaint names. Since neon or garish signs are zoned out, we have these cute little wooden signs that swing and creak in the breeze. The summer people love it.)

Second Time Around sells used paperbacks. “Summer people,” Mr. Hartley told me, “read an awful lot. In winter I open only on Saturdays, but in summer I’m open six days a week.”

Second Time Around is in a little cubbyhole of a store between the Savings Bank and Annette’s Bread Basket (a bakery), which is nice for depositing my paycheck but not so good for keeping my waist trim.

It contains roughly ten thousand paperbacks sorted equally roughly by category, like science fiction or World War II. You bring in your old paperbacks and get a credit to apply to buying other people’s old paperbacks, for which Mr. Hartley charges you half price. At first I didn’t see how Mr. Hartley could make any money that way, but he said twenty-five-and fifty-cent sales really add up, and besides sometimes you sell the same book ten times a season.

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.