Jane was not beautiful. Marty had been, and was still quite attractive, and Marty was a fair judge of beauty; she didn’t delude herself about Jane’s looks. To her Jane was lovely but she’d never be a head-turner. She was young, fresh, sweet, clean. To Jane Jane was hopelessly dull.

She had pale freckled skin, prone to burn and blemish. Straight dirty-blonde hair that looked oily if it wasn’t shampooed daily. Jane didn’t battle weight the way Marty had all her life, but she couldn’t see that as an advantage; instead she saw her elbows sharp, her knees knobby, herself a light-haired version of Olive Oyl. She had pale blue eyes, beige-lashed, thin lips, good teeth, a narrow bump-bridged nose. Jane said all she needed was a face wart and the right costume to make a classic witchy crone. Marty said, “Nonsense. You’re coltish and you have awkward grace. You look like Vanessa Redgrave’s daughter.”(Marty didn’t tell Jane she thought the Redgraves were a remarkably unattractive family).

Marty could have said (but happened not to) that Jane was too playful to be any kind of crone. That was her most charming characteristic. From infancy she had been delighted with simple classic toys; even as a toddler she cherished rag dolls and Jacob’s-ladders like they were collectible artifacts. Good Yo-yos, fine kaleidoscopes, weighty gyroscopes, Russian nesting dolls. She began modifying some, designing others. She developed into an incessantly creative young woman who enjoyed the glee of toys. (She also grew indignant about purity. Her first real outrage was about what Disney did to the folktale about the little mermaid. She could be as vituperative about those classical pollutions, as she called them, as she was delighted with well-designed playthings.)

So Marty wasn’t too surprised to see the Slinky. What grabbed her was the triggered memory. Jane entered the room while shuffling the shining coil from palm to palm, creating a waterfall swish as the spring cascaded down. That sound, that sweet whistle high-low, solo/multi-toned, transported Marty immediately to Chula Vista, spring, when she was ten. She got her first Slinky then from her neighbor Bruce, and she adored the sound, the feel, the look of it as it arch-stepped down the stairs. But her brothers bent it to deformity within three days, and her mother was glad for its destruction; it had begun to mark the wood where the stair runner didn’t cover.

“It’s outrageous!” Jane declared, followed by, “How you feeling?”

“Pretty much the same. What is?” Marty glanced at the Slinky and raised her brows about outrage. She pushed herself up on one elbow and adjusted the heat under her waist.

“I just walked by that bath shop on Solano, and they’ve got new-fangled yech Slinkys all over their window. It’s gross.”

Marty just looked at her.

“Maybe you don’t remember but when I was a kid they replaced the good old metal with plastic in Day-Glo colors – you know: loud yellows, shrill oranges, toxic greens. They never worked right, didn’t sound right, flopped after their first holiday season. The manufacturers went back to metal, kind of like Classic Coke.

“Well, someone dug some plastic Slinkys up, and they dangled them in the shop window: a visual pun – Spring? Would have been better in pastels but that’s the image they were going for.”

“It doesn’t sound like a bad idea, actually.” Marty shifted her legs as she spoke, beginning to sit up to stand.

“That’s my point. It’s a good idea. Now I’m afraid that display could make the bad plastic Slinkys have value: you know what I mean – the retro-nostalgia angle.”

(concluded tomorrow)