A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  The place Claire and Diane were renting was a beige shrug of a house, a short wooden shoebox with a square patch of dirt and weeds for the front lawn, a stub of buckled concrete driveway barely long enough for their tired green Corolla. Security bars covered the windows and there was a heavy metal screen bolted over the front door, though Claire wasn’t sure who they were trying to keep out. Their wealthy neighbors?

  The neighbors across the street, those of the incredible driveway and fancy villa, as Diane called it, were named the Bartletts. Claire knew this because it was spelled out along the side of their huge stainless steel mailbox, one reflective metallic sticker for each letter, so that when a car’s headlights passed at night Claire could see the name appear in the dark from his bedroom window, the letters flashing quickly white. Bartlett!

  Like the Quotations, Diane said. It’s a big book, she told him, with famous sayings by famous people. Most of them dead.

  Claire had called his mom Diane since he was four, when he’d first discovered her real name. Over the years, plenty of adults had tried to correct him, teachers and his grandparents, some of Diane’s boyfriends. But he’d stuck to it. He preferred Diane to Mom. It bound her to him, specifically. Everyone had a Mom, but only Claire had Diane.

  “Give me a quote,” Diane said. They were having breakfast at the kitchen table. Frosted Flakes and toast and the newspaper classifieds. She’d already started looking for a job. The inheritance money had gone faster than expected. Much of it had been eaten by the move itself, and everything else was so much more expensive out here, rent and groceries and gas.

  Diane said, “Give me the most famous quote you can think of.” She loved riddles, quizzes, puzzles. She loved a good test.

  “ ‘Ask not what your country can do for you,’ ” Claire said.

  “Excellent. Definitely in Bartlett’s.”

  “Your turn.”

  Diane thought for a second. She set the job listings down, tilted her head back, chin up.

  “Herbert Hoover had a good one,” she said. “ ‘About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.’ ”

  * * *

  The central, unavoidable feature of Claire’s new bedroom was the wallpaper some previous tenant had left behind, a giant floor-to-ceiling photo of a beach scene, sunset over the water, or maybe sunrise, depending on where he was standing, as the same paper covered two opposite walls. Claire added what he’d brought along, a Yankees pennant, an Ozzy Osbourne poster, a few pictures he’d cut out from dirt bike magazines. Diane had hammered a couple of nails above the window and hung one of Claire’s old bed sheets to cover it. H.R. Pufnstuf, the big yellow puppet smiling and waving in front of a psychedelic rainbow swirl. Claire remembered the sheet mostly for wetting it, waking up long ago in the middle of the night, one of their old apartments, Diane stripping the bed in the dark while he stood by, shivering and crying, Diane telling him it was all right, just an accident, everybody makes mistakes.

  The Bartletts spent most of their days outside, so it wasn’t like Claire was spying on them, more just watching whatever was happening out his window. Mrs. Bartlett was a tall, tan woman with crayon yellow hair, skinny except in her bust and hips. She worked long hours in her front yard, trimming the hedges that bordered the bright, short grass; clipping roses; weeding out the beds of wildflowers and prickly cactus that curved through the lawn in long, gentle swoops. While his wife worked in the yard, Mr. Bartlett worked on his pickup, a big, new-model Ford with a pale blue finish that almost perfectly matched the sky above the San Gabriels. He looked like a cowboy, stood and walked like a cowboy, wide-stanced, tall and trim in checkered western shirts and faded jeans, with a generous mustache that obscured most of his mouth and the top of his chin.

  The other kids on the street, all crew-cut boys, had no interest in Claire except as an object of sneering condescension—Hey, hippie!—but they had a lot to say about Mrs. Bartlett, who often did her yard work wearing a red-and-white-striped bikini. The boy who lived three houses down from the Bartletts liked to tell stories of clandestine, binoculared viewings of Mrs. B. sunbathing topless on a chaise in her backyard, the details offered in the back of the school bus drawn out for maximum erotic effect: Mrs. Bartlett rolling slowly from her belly to her back, brown skin slick with baby oil. Mr. Bartlett was pretty cool, the boys said, which was how he’d gotten such a foxy wife. He was a guitarist, an electric guitarist, who played on all sorts of records for singers who didn’t have their own bands and for already famous bands that had really bad guitarists.

  The Bartletts had twin sons, but they were grown and lived away upstate. They’d left some legends behind, though, and the boys on Claire’s bus, the younger brothers of the Bartlett twins’ contemporaries, told these stories with all the required reverence due to great mythic narratives. There was the time the Bartletts did battle with a pack of coyotes down from the mountains, scaring away the rangy beasts with hockey sticks and baseball bats. There was the time they shot a bottle rocket so high on the Fourth of July that it hit the underside of a TV helicopter. There was the time they built a plywood ramp in the middle of the street, backing up traffic as they rode their bikes over and off until the cops came and made them take it down.

  Claire listened, beguiled by the amazing tales. But he understood the intention with which they were told, the message being sent: this history belonged to these boys. Claire could be impressed, but it wasn’t his to share. They made it very clear that he was a visitor here. This wasn’t his place, and these weren’t his stories.

  * * *

  “Why California?” Claire had asked, back when Diane first announced the move.

  “Why not?” she’d said. “That pioneer spirit. Leaving the old world behind. And it’s the Bicentennial. What better way to celebrate our independence? Westward ho!”

  But there were plenty of places to move where she could wait tables or answer phones. Claire knew that Diane had picked California because of The Price Is Right. Not in terms of the cost of living, but rather the actual television game show starring Bob Barker. Diane’s deepest desire was to be a contestant, seated anxiously in the audience, waiting for Bob to call out for her to Come on down! She dreamt of that run down the aisle steps, waving her arms in the air, shouting with joy, her oversized name tag bouncing along as she descended toward the stage. And not just the usual daydreams, she’d told Claire, but real honest-to-God dreams in the night now, coming unbidden into her sleeping head.

  “It’s a sign,” she’d said. “Don’t you think? When you’re having real dreams, it’s time to stop wishing. It’s time to act.”

  But why Glendora, out of the seemingly millions of possible L.A. suburbs? Why not Lakewood or Sylmar or the intriguingly futuristic-sounding Panorama City?

  Listen to it, she’d said when he’d asked. Listen to the word. Glendora. How beautiful. How magical. It sounds like the Good Witch on the way to Oz.

  Claire wasn’t so sure. This wasn’t what he’d expected. Where was the Los Angeles of The Brady Bunch or The Partridge Family, the lush endless TV suburb? Instead they’d found a hot, dry place, with a sharp tang in the air that wasn’t the sea salt he’d first foolishly thought, but car exhaust, stuck here hanging at the foothills, unable to rise and escape. And the mountains—no one had said there’d be mountains. They were so close they made him dizzy. They filled his vision, sloped and shadowed, folded like great mounds of crumpled paper. Even when he wasn’t looking, he could feel their looming presence, setting the neighborhood off balance, threatening to tip the whole place from the unequal distribution of weight, as if just a few more pounds crossing the street would be enough for everything to swing.

  It was the first of November but still rainless, warm even in the overnight hours. He slept with just a sheet on top of him. He’d always imagined mountains as snow-capped, but these were copper-headed, covered with dry tinderbox grass. There were fires farther down the range. At night he could hear the air ta
nkers buzzing through the darkness, racing to drop water, then passing back overhead to suck more from the reservoir. He left his window open, pictured the Bartletts’ yard: cool, green, teeming with foliage. Sometimes in the early hours their sprinklers would burst on, waking him halfway, and he’d lie in the dark for a few moments before falling back asleep, listening to the flickering spray, his room growing cooler with the sound.

  * * *

  He was walking home from the bus stop when Mr. Bartlett called him over. Claire and the other boys all did confused double and triple takes as to whom the cowboy was talking to. “My new neighbor,” Mr. Bartlett called out, to confirm. He was standing at the end of his driveway, by the open door of his idling pickup.

  Claire jogged across the street, feeling the daggers stared into his back by the boys continuing on to their own houses, feeling his own anxious knife points in his gut. Had he been caught staring out his window at Mrs. Bartlett?

  Claire reached the end of the driveway and Mr. Bartlett extended a hand. Claire took it, shook.

  “Bruce Bartlett,” Mr. Bartlett said. “Bruce to you. My wife Tammy’s inside. We’ve been meaning to introduce ourselves.”

  “I’ve been admiring your truck,” Claire said, nodding back across the street to his own house, his bedroom window, attempting a little preemptive ass-covering.

  “She is a beauty. Remind me sometime and I’ll give you a ride.” Bruce looked across the street. “Who’s living with you there? Your mother?”

  “Diane,” Claire said.

  “That’s it?”

  Claire nodded.

  “We have two boys ourselves. Up raising hell in Bakersfield now.” He turned back to Claire. “Tell you what. You want to earn some money sometime, you come on over and I’ll set you up washing and waxing the truck. Then we can drive it into town and show it off. Sound good?”

  “Yes, sir,” Claire said.

  “Good man.” Bruce clapped him on the shoulder, got into the cab of the pickup.

  Claire was halfway across the street when Bruce called to him again.

  “Didn’t get your name, son.”

  Claire had the urge to shout back something harder, more masculine, Greg or Derrick or Jake. He thought better of it, though, the other boys were still watching from their own driveways, so he yelled out his name, but it was right in time with an engine rev from Bruce’s pickup, so he had to do it again, louder this time, his voice cracking as he called out from the middle of the street.

  “Claire!”

  * * *

  “A dollar and twenty-nine cents. Seventy-nine cents. Two and a quarter.”

  Just before dinnertime, but it was an artificially overlit high noon in the canned soup and vegetable aisle of the Ralphs supermarket on Glendora’s eastern edge. Claire pushed the cart and Diane called out prices without looking as Claire named items on the shelves. This was how she kept in shape for The Price Is Right. Same routine when she saw a commercial on TV. Sometimes in the evening they watched just for the commercials, eating dinner off tray tables on the couch, keeping the sound down and talking during All in the Family or McMillan & Wife but getting serious when the ads started, Claire crossing the room to raise the volume while Diane called out prices.

  “Sixty-two cents.”

  “Negative.” Their cart had a wonky front wheel, and Claire had to muscle it forward to keep from drifting into the shelves.

  “Campbell’s Cream of Potato Soup is sixty-two cents,” Diane said.

  “Sixty-five cents.”

  “Jesus. Really? Price hike.”

  Claire dropped the can into their cart, picked at a zit that had surfaced in the center of his chin. “I talked to Bruce Bartlett the other day.”

  “Is that a kid at school?”

  “He’s our neighbor. Across the street.”

  “With the villa?”

  “Green Giant Corn Niblets.”

  “Fifty-eight cents.”

  Claire nodded, dropped the can into their cart. “He seemed okay. Bruce. Said he’d pay me to wash his truck sometime.”

  “How generous.”

  “It’s a nice truck.”

  “He should tell his wife to put some clothes on.”

  “Wattie’s Diced Fruit Salad.”

  “Fifty-three cents,” Diane said. “Always.”

  “When are you going to go over and get in line?”

  “When we’re done shopping.”

  “I mean at The Price Is Right. The audience line.”

  “They’re running a contest,” Diane said. “Johnny Olson announced it during the credits the other day. You call in and tell them why you’re the show’s biggest fan. If they pick you, you get a VIP place in the line.”

  “And you’d get on?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t say that. You’d just have a better chance, I guess.”

  Claire jockeyed the cart into a checkout aisle, started handing groceries to the woman at the register. “So when are you going to call?”

  “It’s not the right time.” Diane dug into her purse for cash. Kept digging. “We need to get settled, get our feet under us. I need to get a job.”

  “You’re scared.”

  “We have all the time in the world. We’re here now.”

  “You told me it’s time to act.”

  Diane smiled at the woman behind the register, handed her the money for the groceries, a wrinkled sheaf of small bills with a halo of change. “I’ll think about it.”

  “ ‘The only thing we have to fear . . .’ ”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Diane hefted a grocery bag over to Claire. “I’ve heard that line before.”

  * * *

  He washed and waxed the truck, eating up most of a Saturday morning in the Bartletts’ driveway, jeans and T-shirt wet from the hose, Chuck Taylors soaked and squeaking with every step. Bruce had given Claire very detailed instructions, then he and Mrs. Bartlett had taken off in her car, a little red Fiat with a removable hard top they’d left propped against a wall in the garage on their way out.

  When he was finished with the truck, Claire sat back on the edge of the front porch, stretching his legs onto the driveway, drying his shoes in the sun. The porch was made of large flat slabs of concrete, painted a color that resembled the warm red brick of his grandparents’ house back in Utica. The paint was smooth as a cheek. He ran his hand along the top, thought about leaning over and setting his own cheek against it, wondering how that would feel. It felt soft, and warm from the sun. He closed his eyes, his cheek against the paint. He thought of the house in Utica, coming up the front walk, his grandfather waiting in the doorway.

  He heard the Fiat before he saw it, howling down the street and then taking the turn into the driveway so tightly that Bruce, sitting in the passenger seat, had to grab the top of the door to keep from tumbling out. Mrs. Bartlett hit the brakes just a few inches shy of the newly shined pickup, threw open the door and stalked to the front door of the house in her halter top and cutoffs, right past Claire, now sitting upright on the edge of the porch, her bare thighs just an inch or two from the side of his face as she passed.

  Bruce sat in the car for a moment, then collected himself and got out, closing his door and crossing around to the other side to close hers. He gave Claire a tight-lipped smile, then began inspecting the pickup, face close to the finish, studying the wax job.

  Claire stood, pulling his wet jeans from where they’d stuck to his thighs. He started winding the hose. He could hear Mrs. Bartlett back in the house, what sounded like kitchen cabinets slamming shut. Bruce ignored the noise. He picked one of the dry rags out of Claire’s bucket and buffed a few spots around the headlights, the front bumper.

  “Not bad at all.” He dropped the rag back in the bucket, turned to Claire. “What price did we agree on?”

  “We didn’t.”

  “You’re a terrible negotiator. How about a buck?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t let me off so easy. Thi
s is a buck and a quarter job, at least.” Bruce reached into the back pocket of his jeans for his wallet, then let his hand drop. “How about this. I’ll come up with an invoice. One twenty-five for the truck, another dollar if you do Tammy’s car tomorrow. Ten cents a day if you bring the paper up the driveway in the morning before school. That’s two seventy-five, and I’ll pay you on Friday. Every Friday. What do you think?”

  Claire nodded.

  “You drive a hard bargain.” Bruce’s mustache bowed up in a smile. He stepped to Claire. He was a good half-foot taller, Claire at eye level with his mustache. His breath was sour with beer. Claire could hear the slamming of doors inside the house, a quick succession, popping like TV gunshots.

  Bruce’s smile stayed steady, not without some apparent effort. He extended his hand and Claire took it.

  “You’re hired,” Bruce said.

  * * *

  At lunchtime, Claire went down to the faculty lounge under the pretense of finding his science teacher, who he knew was on yard duty at the time. The gym coach told him that he could hang out and wait, so Claire casually flipped on the TV by the toaster oven and switched it to The Price Is Right. The gym coach looked at the TV and then went back to his sandwich. Once Johnny Olson had announced the phone number for the audience contest, Claire headed out to the pay phone just inside the main entrance, dug for a dime, dialed.

  “She’s the biggest fan by far,” he explained to the woman on the other end of the line, spelling Diane’s full name and giving their new phone number. The woman asked him to elaborate. Why The Price Is Right?

  “Because you have to know things to win,” Claire said. He turned to see the gym coach coming his way, frowning. “It’s not just luck. You have to make it happen.”

  The woman said she had one more question. The gym coach was coming faster, slicing his hand back and forth under his chin, telling Claire to cut the call.