A Perfect Universe

by Scott O'Connor

  What do you think is the craziest thing, the woman asked, that your mother would do to be on the show?

  “She’s already done it,” Claire said. The gym coach arrived, his finger stretching toward the phone’s hookswitch. “We moved all the way from New York for this.”

  * * *

  There was something wrong with the toilet. It was slow to flush, and had the ugly habit of coughing up parts of whatever had just been sent down. Diane had left a few phone messages for the landlord, asking for a plumber, but hadn’t heard back yet.

  Claire looked down into the bowl, called out to the kitchen.

  “Diane!”

  “It’s just got heartburn, honey,” Diane yelled back. “Make it swallow again.”

  “Gross.”

  “Plunge it, Claire. Give it a good plunge.”

  Out in the hall closet, Claire stood looking in at the tangled mess of Diane’s clothes and shoes, boxes of tax returns and bank statements and charge card bills, shelves of bath towels, bed sheets, toilet paper, cleaning supplies. It was the only closet in the house, besides the one in Claire’s room. “I will sacrifice,” Diane had said when they’d moved in, “so you can have the front room. But no complaints about this closet. Everything has to fit in here.” Or maybe she just hadn’t wanted the room with the wallpaper.

  Claire started digging. There was no sign of the plunger, but Diane’s jewelry box was there, on the floor beside the paper towels. The box had been a gift from Claire’s grandfather, who’d made wooden puzzle boxes on his days off from the meat market. Each one was different, and each contained a hidden panel that had to be pressed before the front drawers would open. Claire had spent entire afternoons in his grandfather’s basement, trying to solve every box on the workbench.

  This one had a floral carving on top, three sunflowers stretching for the sky. The button was concealed within one of the petals ringing the center flower’s face. Claire pressed it and opened the top drawer. All the familiar treasures were there: Diane’s plain gold wedding band, a pair of earrings she’d been given long ago by a high school boyfriend, a colored glass Santa Claus brooch she wore around the holidays. A square of folded paper was there, too, which was new, and which Claire couldn’t stop himself from opening. It was a long letter to Diane, dated a couple of months back, just before the move. Two pages, neatly printed, from someone named Steve. Claire scanned rather than read, worried that Diane would come around the corner any second. The gist of the letter was how thrilled Steve was that he’d soon see Diane again after all these years. That he’d changed a lot since high school, of course. He was sure she had, too. A lot had happened, but that meant they were wiser now, not just older. There was a Los Angeles address and phone number, a P.S. asking her not to wait too long to call once she was settled out west.

  “Claire?” Diane’s voice called out from the kitchen.

  Claire refolded the letter, stuffed it back in the box. He stood too quickly, bumping a roll of TP off a high shelf, triggering more rolls, falling slowly at first, then gathering speed, an avalanche of unfurling paper. He tried to catch them as they tumbled, or at least deflect them from his face.

  “Did you get it to flush?” Diane called. “Claire, is it going down?”

  * * *

  Claire washed and waxed Bruce’s truck and Tammy’s car every weekend, delivered the paper in the mornings before school, drew up an invoice at the end of each week listing everything he’d done and the accompanying price. On Friday afternoons when he got home from school, an envelope was waiting for him, wedged between the front door and the security gate, cash and exact change inside, along with the invoice, each item checked off and the bottom signed by Bruce.

  On Thanksgiving, while Diane was cooking the turkey, they watched the Macy’s parade on TV, just like every year, except here the incongruity between the blustery weather onscreen and the dry sunny scene out the open windows was jarring, and Claire kept looking from one bright square to another, trying to piece together the space between the two.

  They had dinner early, as Diane had found a job doing laundry at Foothill Presbyterian Hospital, and had to work the evening shift. She wore her new green scrubs at the table, which made her look like a nurse, and Claire remembered that she’d once talked about becoming a nurse, years ago, had even taken some classes, maybe. He had vague memories of Diane dropping him off with his grandparents before dinner so she could go to school. He didn’t say anything about this at dinner though, and he didn’t ask about Steve, the writer of the note he’d found, though there had been numerous times he’d wanted to. Had she called him yet? Had they seen each other? Claire kept checking the puzzle box in the hall closet for the note, as if its disappearance would mean that something was in motion. He knew nothing about the guy’s life, or about Diane’s time with him, but looking at the note was comforting. There was someone who was aware of them, who knew they were here.

  The next morning, Claire woke to find Bruce’s envelope wedged into the front door. Inside was that week’s job list crossed out and paid for, and then, rattling around at the bottom of the envelope, an additional dollar, four shiny new Bicentennial quarters, itemized on the invoice in Bruce’s handwriting, right above his signature, as Holiday Bonus.

  * * *

  That Saturday, Claire was finishing up the wax on Bruce’s truck, when the shouting began again from the house behind him, Bruce and Tammy’s voices, the words indecipherable but the tone and tenor familiar by now, moving through the rooms. Claire imagined the collective sound as a ball of light, a freeze-framed explosion, jagged orange and yellow at its points but white hot in the center. He almost expected to see its glow as it passed by the front windows. He kept waiting for it to give, to blow free, unleashing a supernova, the Big Bang.

  Bruce smacked the screen door open and crossed the front yard, carrying a beer. When he finished the last swallow, it looked to Claire like he was about to toss the can into one of Tammy’s manicured poppy beds, but then he changed his mind and set it down with overdeliberate care, upright, exactly on the border between the lawn and the driveway. He dug into his jeans for his keys, kicked the hose out of his way, nodded to the passenger side, told Claire to get in.

  They headed down Foothill Boulevard, driving west into the low afternoon sun. Bruce was quiet, decompressing. Claire noticed a dull spot on the dash and used the bottom of his T-shirt to rub it to a shine. They rode alongside the freeway, then turned south and crossed underneath.

  “What do you listen to?” Bruce said, breaking the silence. “In terms of music.”

  Claire chewed the nail on an index finger, peeling slivers of car wax with his teeth. “Black Sabbath,” he said. “AC/DC. Judas Priest.”

  Bruce nodded, contemplating, maybe judging the guitar abilities of Tony Iommi and Angus Young and K.K. Downing.

  “Christ,” he said finally. “I feel old sometimes.”

  At the sign for the racetrack, Bruce turned into the enormous, empty parking lot. The marquee by the main entrance said that races would resume after Christmas. Bruce stopped the truck in the middle of an aisle, left it running, got out and stood looking back in at Claire.

  “Slide over.”

  Claire scooched behind the wheel. Bruce crossed around the front of the truck and climbed up into the passenger seat.

  “You ever driven stick before?”

  “I’ve never driven anything before.”

  “The pedal on your left is the clutch. Brake in the middle, gas on the right. Keep one foot on the brake and the other on the clutch and put it in first.”

  Claire maneuvered the truck through the lot, ten, fifteen miles an hour, stalling out a few times but slowly gaining confidence, finding the rhythm, his feet pushing pedals. Eventually he kept the engine going long enough that Bruce started calling out, Clutch! when they hadn’t stalled and Claire would shift up, their speed increasing, his hair blowing back from the open windows, Bruce shouting, Clutch!, the truck going faster, Claire
making turns up and down the aisles, trying for some reason to hold back a smile that wouldn’t be suppressed.

  They drove until the sun was down, Claire controlling everything by the end, Bruce sitting back in his seat with his hands laced behind his head and his eyes closed. There was a tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, a single blue word, Tammy. Claire drove, listened to the music. Bruce had put a cassette in the deck, a country and western band with pretty intricate guitar work, no vocals. Claire kept thinking he should ask if that was Bruce playing, but he felt like he probably knew the answer and he didn’t want to disrupt the sound of the engine and the music. They went together, they fit, and he knew a voice would ruin it, breaking the spell, like putting his finger into one of the soap bubbles when he was washing the cars, a little domed rainbow, something beautiful and fragile and gone.

  * * *

  Diane was home late, tired, her third double shift that week, trying to throw some dinner together in the kitchen. Claire was leaning in the doorway, telling her about his day at school, when the phone rang.

  Claire answered, listened, covered the mouthpiece with his hand.

  “Holy shit.”

  Diane turned on him. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Holy shit.’ It’s somebody from CBS.”

  Diane wiped her hands with a dishtowel, approached warily. “If you’re pulling my leg, I’ll wring your neck.”

  He handed her the phone.

  “Hello?” she said. “Yes, speaking.”

  Claire watched, his stomach doing sudden somersaults.

  “Yes,” Diane said. “Let me get a pen.” She motioned frantically to Claire and he searched the kitchen in a panic, finally coming up with a broken stump of bowling pencil and a Ralphs receipt. Diane began writing directions on the back of the receipt. At the bottom she wrote, CBS Television City, and underlined it twice, emphatically.

  When she hung up the phone they stood in silence for a moment, the air in the kitchen charged, expectant. Then Diane said, “Holy shit is right,” and they were both yelling, jumping, holding hands, dancing around the kitchen, Claire shouting, “Come on down! Come on down!” and Diane making loud whoops, like some kind of ecstatic security alarm, shaking the plates in the dish drainer, rattling the utensils in the drawers, letting the water in the pot on the stove boil and bubble and overflow.

  * * *

  A few nights later, Diane had a date. She didn’t call it a date, she said that she was going to have dinner with an old friend, but while she was getting ready in her bedroom, Claire checked the puzzle box and the note from Steve was gone. He wondered who had called whom. Maybe the phone call from CBS had given Diane the confidence to finally make her move.

  She came out of her room wearing a dress Claire had never seen before. Not new, necessarily, but new to Diane. Pale blue, not unlike the color of Bruce’s truck, and short, ending just above her knees. It had a zipper on the back that Claire had to help with, moving the slider up between Diane’s freckled shoulder blades to the base of her neck.

  They walked out the front door together and Diane gave him a list of instructions, even lengthier than usual: not to open the door for anybody, how long to cook the frozen egg rolls for dinner, when to go to bed if she wasn’t home. She kissed him on the cheek and headed for the Corolla. She smelled like flowers. She was wearing perfume. Claire waved as she backed out of the driveway, then waved again when he saw Bruce and Tammy in their front yard. Tammy was wearing a low-cut sundress, the same artificial color as her hair. Yellow #5, Diane called it. One of the ingredients in Froot Loops.

  Bruce was staring back at Claire, but it was hard to tell if he saw the wave. He was just listening as Tammy spoke in what looked like hard, clipped bursts. Bruce said something back to her, then turned and walked up the lawn, gesturing angrily as he went, brushing his hands together, wiping them clean.

  * * *

  When Diane got home late that night, she was singing. Claire lay in bed, listening as she moved through the dark house. The sound of her heels clicking across the floors, water running in the bathroom sink. Her soft, high, off-key voice drifting between rooms, singing the lyrics when she remembered them and humming the tune when she didn’t, a medley of songs Claire knew from the radio on his grandfather’s old workbench, “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “You’d Be So Easy to Love.”

  * * *

  A kid named Jay was selling his bike. Word went around on the bus, but there wasn’t much interest. Everyone seemed to know the bike in question. Claire approached Jay on the walk home, and Jay led Claire to his house, another Spanish-style villa on Bruce’s side of the street.

  Jay had a crew cut, like every other boy in the neighborhood, but he also had a harelip, a stark crooked thumbprint in the skin below his nose. The first time Claire had seen Jay on the bus, he’d hoped, because of the lip, that Jay might be more open than the other kids; looking for a friend, maybe. But that wasn’t the case. For the most part, he ignored Claire. He was a leader, one of the guys who called the shots at school and on the bus, carrying himself with an exaggerated physical pride, the harelip not a cosmetic blemish but a scar, like a war injury, something he’d earned.

  On the walk up his driveway, Jay made sure Claire knew that this was his second bike, his beater, the bike he used for stunts and hard riding up in the foothills. His other bike was a two-hundred-dollar Mongoose that he kept in the garage, beside his father’s Mercedes. The beater he kept out on the side lawn.

  “The seat is a little loose,” Jay warned, “and the back brakes don’t work, only the front, so if you stop too hard you’ll flip over the handlebars.”

  The garage door was open, and Claire could see the Mongoose and Mercedes inside. The Mercedes had a sticker on its back bumper that read, WIN WITH FORD!, which seemed strange until Claire realized that it referred to the president, not the car company.

  Jay took Claire around to the side of the house, pointed down into the grass. Lying there was a Frankenstein’s monster of a bike, a mishmash of parts from other models, everything slightly out of proportion to everything else. The front tire had a mag rim, the back tire had spokes. The frame was painted primer gray, like there was another color waiting that had never been applied. Claire asked how much Jay wanted for it and Jay said ten dollars. Claire countered with five. Jay scoffed, insulted, but after a moment he looked back at the bike and let out a sigh and said, Okay.

  Claire paid with four dollars in bills, one more in Bicentennial quarters. Jay looked at the coins like he wasn’t sure what they were, like it was play money. He finally put it all in his pocket and nodded to the bike.

  Claire rode it home, turning sine curves along the width of the street, thinking of the Bartlett twins, their legendary ramp in the middle of the road. When he got to their house, Bruce was in the driveway, getting into his truck. He looked at Claire on the bike and smiled.

  “Guess how much,” Claire shouted.

  Bruce put his hands on his hips, appraising the bike as Claire turned in a circular holding pattern at the end of the drive.

  “Eight bucks.”

  “Five!” Claire shouted, pulling a wheelie, pedaling through, off and away down the street.

  * * *

  When Diane wasn’t working and Claire wasn’t at school, they were in Ralphs, or Sears, or Thrifty, walking the aisles, Claire pointing out random items and Diane giving the price. Sometimes Claire gave her a number just off the actual retail value and Diane had to determine if he was high or low. On days when Diane had to work the night shift, they went early, before school, Claire waking to find Diane standing at the foot of his bed in the low light, shaking his bare foot, calling out like a drill sergeant, “Let’s go, let’s go, Hinshaw’s opens at seven!”

  * * *

  Diane had a second date, which meant another almost-new dress, another perfumed goodbye in the driveway. When she was gone, Claire went back inside and opened the puzzle box. The note from Steve was there agai
n, and Claire sat in the hallway and read it more carefully. Steve wrote that he’d lived in Hollywood for about ten years, working as a gaffer on movie sets, which meant that he set up the lights. It wasn’t as glamorous as it might seem, he wrote, though he’d worked with his share of movie stars. He had two kids, a boy and a girl, right about Claire’s age, though they lived with their mother back east and he rarely saw them. He was divorced, of course, couldn’t remember why’d he’d gotten married in the first place. Young and foolish, he guessed. He wrote that it seemed he and Diane had made many of the same mistakes.

  When Diane got home that night she was singing again, a little louder this time. Claire wondered if she was drunk. He got up and joined her in the kitchen. She still smelled of perfume, though she smelled of smoke now, too, the sweet, peaty scent of a cigar, so Claire added that to his mental picture of Steve, a burning stogie clamped between the man’s teeth.

  Diane stood at the end of the kitchen, taking her vitamin with a glass of water. She looked at Claire in his pajamas, smiled.

  “My little boy’s not much of a boy anymore,” she said.

  She finished her water, set her glass in the sink and walked to the doorway, slowing to kiss Claire’s cheek as she passed. A light brush of lips, sticky on his skin. She went down to the bathroom and closed the door. Claire could hear the water running. He returned to bed, realizing as he fell back asleep that, without her shoes, Diane now needed to stretch up on her toes to reach him.

  * * *

  Claire was in the driveway working on his bike when Bruce called him over.

  “I’m raking around the old oak. Come and give me a hand.”

  Bruce handed Claire a pair of gloves and a metal rake and they walked around to the backyard, which was even larger than the front, a great swath of manicured green that ran up to the first slope of the foothills. That dizzy feeling was even stronger here, so close to the towering mountains. Claire felt for a moment like he was about to tip, like the axis of the world was the low wall of river rock at the edge of the Bartletts’ yard, that everything could swing one way or another around that line. He focused on the wall to regain his balance, the smooth gray stones with their deep red veins. Little planets, they looked like. Dead worlds, dried up and uninhabitable, stacked here in counterbalance to the mountains.