He didn’t know anyone. No one knew him. Claire and his mother had moved to Glendora a month into the school year because that’s when the lease had run out on their apartment in Utica. Diane didn’t have a new job lined up, but she’d inherited a little money when Claire’s grandfather died, and she figured they could live off that while she looked. She didn’t want to rush into anything; she didn’t want to settle this time. She’d told Claire that she was sorry about having to start another new school, that they couldn’t have moved later in the year or over the summer, but she didn’t want to wait any longer. This was their chance.
Claire didn’t know why he’d argued so hard against the move, why he’d yelled and sulked and sniped. It wasn’t like there was much to miss in Utica. His dad had left when he was two and Claire had no memory of him and no one had seen the man since. He and Diane had lived in seven different apartments; he’d gone to seven different schools. He was a twelve-year-old boy named Claire with long hair and crooked teeth. A change should do him good, should do them both good. At least, that’s what Diane repeated over and over on the drive west, like if she said it enough times out loud it would somehow become true.
Neither of them had been to California before. The only thing Claire knew about the place came from TV, watching the Yankees play the Angels in Anaheim. Back in Utica, the games started late because of the time difference, nine or ten o’clock, but Diane had always let him stay up, even when he was a little kid, spread out in his sleeping bag on the living room floor, watching his team out in the Wild West. Bobby Bonds tracking a fly ball deep into the right field corner and Claire taking his eyes off the play, distracted by the alien background, the strips of freeway crossing the hazy sunset, the long rows of shag-topped palm trees that looked like something out of Dr. Seuss. They may as well have been playing on another planet. The Yanks never did so well out there. Who could blame them?
Diane had used the promise of potential Angels games to help sweeten the deal of the move. Claire had never seen the Yanks play in person, but Glendora was only an hour or so from Anaheim, and when summer came, Diane said, she’d find a way to get them to a game. He imagined a spot in the right field bleachers, watching Bonds running down a fly, both he and Bobby turning their heads at the last moment to look out over that foreign terrain beyond the wall. Catch, cheer, maybe their eyes meeting in silent recognition. Men of New York. Bobby, though, would get to go back home after the game.
Their new street in Glendora ran long and wide along the base of the lower San Gabriels. The sight of the broad mountains filled Claire’s bedroom window. Diane said that plenty of people would kill for that view, but it was obvious, based on the ages and conditions, that the homes on the other side of the street were the real prizes. They boasted long, smooth, newly paved approaches, driveways like lavish greetings. Big and new and beautiful, those houses stood with the mountains at their backs, as if facing out together, powerful and confident. The neighbors directly across the street had the most impressive spread of all, a broad sweep of gleaming blacktop that stretched back to a white Spanish-style home with an orange tile roof and a two-car garage.
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 tankers 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. This 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.
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 again, 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.
“Hey, space cadet,” Bruce called. “Let’s get to work.”
The big oak stood in the center of the yard, curved and gnarled and shedding crisp leaves even as they raked beneath it. There had been winds the last few days, warm dry breaths in the afternoons and evenings, what Bruce called the Santa Anas, the devil winds, which made people crazy and brought the coyotes down from the mountains.
“See that light?” Bruce said. He’d stopped raking and stood with his arms out, the late afternoon sun falling on his bare forearms. “You don’t get that anywhere but here. That quality. The smog holds the sunset in the air. You can almost feel it in your body.” He closed his eyes. “It changes how you feel.”
Claire watched Bruce. He looked peaceful, maybe even happy, standing there in the orange light. He looked like he belonged here, in this strange, rough landscape, under his tree, beside his mountains. Claire closed his own eyes and slowly lifted his arms, trying to feel what Bruce felt, tried to feel his body as a part of this place, this light, but then Bruce coughed and Claire snapped his eyes open, embarrassed, coughing in response to try to clear the moment.
They raked in silence for a while, just the sound of the leaves scraping across the grass, and then Bruce spoke again from the other side of the tree.
“Seeing you with that bike reminded me of my boys. They were always on their bikes, always jumping over things, off things.” He pulled his leaves into a single low pile. “I haven’t seen them in I don’t know how long. They’ve got their own lives now.” He set his rake against the trunk and looked down at their work. “I can handle the rest. You go on back. Make sure you put this on your invoice.”
When Claire got home he found the phone cord stretched through the kitchen and out the back door. He could see the top of Diane’s head through the window. She was sitting on the back steps. Her voice was muffled, but it was obvious that she was arguing. No, no, you listen. You listen to me now. He heard Steve’s name, said in anger, said as a kind of plea. Steve, listen to me. Steve, why is this happening again?
When Diane came back inside she was carrying the receiver like it was a dead animal, the handset held away from her body. Claire started washing the dishes in the sink to make it look like he hadn’t been eavesdropping.
Diane said, “Since when do you wash dishes?”
Claire shrugged.
“Don’t think you’re going to give me an invoice like Bruce Bartlett.”
She left the kitchen. Claire could hear her in the hall closet, then back in her bedroom. He didn’t know why he suddenly felt so knocked back by this. Diane had had breakups before. Every relationship she’d been in had ended in a breakup. And Claire hadn’t even met Steve. Steve hadn’t taken him bowling or to the movies or the dirt bike races like some of the other boyfriends, as if auditioning for a part in their little family show. Steve was just a name on a letter. He wasn’t anything real.
After a few moments Diane came back out in her hospital scrubs. She told him what to do for dinner, not to watch too much TV. She looked at the sink and told him he was wasting water.
Claire turned off the faucet. “Don’t forget to ask at work.”
“Ask for what?”
“The day off,” he said. “Friday. Remember, you’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right.”
* * *
Claire woke to shouting out on the street, Tammy’s voice, pointed and accusatory. At his window he watched the lights coming on at the Bartletts’ house, and listened to Tammy yelling, louder than normal, then Bruce yelling back, lower but no less angry, their shouts building to screeches that made Claire shake, standing with his face pressed against his Pufnstuf bed sheet.
The Bartletts’ front door flew open and Claire saw Bruce cross the lawn. Tammy followed, still screaming, almost wordless now, just a primal high-pitched shriek, and then Bruce’s voice, lower but just as loud and violent. He was dressed, but she was wearing a bathrobe that kept flying open, revealing her bra and pajama bottoms, the bare skin at her stomach. She followed Bruce to the driveway, to his truck, and when he got inside she started pounding on the door, then the hood, still screaming as he started the engine. When he began to back the truck out, she moved as if to block it, but he shot an arm out his window and pushed her away. She stumbled sideways and he gunned the engine, backing out onto the street, and when she started to scream again, he put the truck in gear and drove up over the hedges lining the driveway and onto the lawn itself, full bore, cranking the wheel and turning doughnuts, digging up grass and flower beds, flinging cacti into the air. Tammy’s screams matched the whine of the truck’s engine. Lights came on up and down the street, other neighbors stepping out of their front doors in their own robes and pajamas, craning their necks to see. The truck spun in a whirl of plants and dirt, then beelined back out onto the street, pausing for one final scream from Tammy before tearing off down the road.
“What the hell?” Diane said. She stood in Claire’s doorway in her nightgown. Claire didn’t know how long she’d been watching. He turned back to his window. Tammy was up now, robe flapping, staggering across the ruined front lawn.
Diane went back to her bedroom. The neighbors went back inside their houses, leaving Claire to watch alone. The sound of the truck and the screaming still seemed to ring, filling the street. He could see Tammy standing in the middle of her yard. She lifted her arms, then dropped them to her sides. Her palms smacked against her thighs. After a moment, she knelt where a poppy bed had been and began gathering the uprooted flowers, trying without much success to set them back into their holes in the dirt.
* * *
The day of the taping, they ate breakfast in nervous silence. Diane was wearing the pale blue dress from her first date. She sat drinking coffee, asking Claire to call out products so she could name the price. Finally, Claire said, “You’re ready. You gotta relax.” Diane smiled and stood from the table, mussing his hair as she passed to the sink.
At school, Claire couldn’t concentrate. He kept picturing Diane out in Television City, imagining what that place must be like. Some kind of radiant electronic kingdom—like Oz, maybe. Maybe Diane had been right.
At lunchtime, he walked out the front doors at school and rode home and turned on The Price Is Right, as if somehow he’d see her, as if the show weren’t taped a week in advance. There was Bob Barker shepherding a giddy old man toward the Showcase Showdown. There was Anitra Ford in a flowing paisley-print dress revealing the price of an Amana refrigerator/freezer. A contestant guessed wrong about Spic and Span. Diane would have known that one. Diane would have gotten that one right.
When the show was over, he went into the bathroom, noticed the water level in the toilet was low. He flushed and the plumbing coughed, pushing back up into the bowl. There were little squares of paper floating on top now, torn neatly from larger sheets. It was Steve’s note, what was left of it. Claire recognized the handwriting in the blurred ink.
He rode around the neighborhood, slowing down every time he passed the mess that was now the Bartletts’ front yard, the clumps of sod and mud, the scattered piles of flowers and grass. The tire marks from Bruce’s truck had hardened deep into the ground, like fossilized tracks from some prehistoric beast. Claire hadn’t seen the truck since the night of the fight; hadn’t seen Bruce at all. Every morning when he brought the newspaper up the driveway he snuck a peek in the garage windows, but Tammy’s Fiat was the only car there.
Back in his room, he drew up that week’s invoice and then walked across the street, up the long drive to the Bartletts’ front door. Bruce had always answered when he’d knocked before, but this time, of course, it was Tammy. She was wearing the same purple robe she’d had on the night of the fight. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and her hair was a mess. It looked like she’d just gotten out of bed. Claire wanted to ask about Bruce, when Bruce would be back, if Bruce would be back, but now, facing her, he couldn’t think of anything to say. He looked past her into the hallway. He’d never been inside their house. He had no idea what was in there, how big it was, how many rooms.
He stood on the smooth red porch where he’d once set his cheek and held out the invoice. Tammy flinched, like he had pointed a weapon. Then she took the invoice and looked it over and handed it back.
“I can get my own paper from now on,” she said, and closed the door.
* * *
He was pulling listless wheelies in front of their house when the Corolla turned into the driveway. He pedaled up to the car, looking in the windows, at the back seat for any sign of cash and prizes. Diane got out, set her purse on the roof. She turned to Claire, shrugged her shoulders, clapped her hands at her sides. There was so much he wanted to ask, about Television City, about Bob Barker and Anitra Ford, about Johnny Olson, what his voice sounded like in person, booming in that big room. But something in her face, in her body, stopped him. Diane looked shaken, stunned. She looked so thin—he hadn’t noticed how thin she’d become. Like a good wind, like one of those Santa Anas, could blow her off down the street.
“There were so many people there, waiting outside,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe all the people. But I had my VIP pass, so they took me right to the front of the line. You should have seen the looks people gave me. They brought us in for interviews with the producers, these very nice young men. We only had a few seconds. Some of the others were acting like idiots. Pick me, pick me. Desperate. I wouldn’t do that. I tried to think about the questions. I wanted to give good answers, intelligent answers, but they were already moving us along again.”
She shook her head, still smiling. “I sat there for the whole hour, waiting for my name. And, Claire, I knew all the prices! Every one! I kept waiting, thinking, Call me, I know these things!”
Her smile widened, trembling, then it gave altogether and Diane turned, picking up her purse and slamming it down again on the roof of the car. She started coughing, started yelling.
“This goddamned smoke! I can barely breathe!” She turned back to him. Her eyes were wet. She shook her head.
“I feel lied to,” she said. “I feel like I lied to you.”
She closed the door and carried her purse inside. Claire sat on his bike for a while, then rode it back out into the street, imagining the Bartlett twins’ ramp there, the line of traffic backed up. He understood now why they’d done it, despite the risks, injuries and cops and punishment. He could imagine it, shutting everything down, making everything stop and be right for just a moment. Racing down the street, the suspended moment, their tires, his tires, hitting the end of the ramp and then lifting, weightless in air.
* * *
The day of the broadcast Claire skipped out of school again before lunch, even though the principal had called Diane about his last skip and Diane had warned him that the bike would go, TV privileges would go, if he ever did it again. He rode through the quiet neighborhood, the midday ghost town, everyone at school, at work. In their living room he stood and stared at the TV, wondering if he should turn it on, like if he watched the show there could be a different outcome, Johnny Olson would call Diane’s name and she would throw her arms up and scream and Come on down! She would show them all what she knew, stunning Bob and Anitra, spinning the Big Wheel, nailing the Showcase Showdown. Instead, he stared at the dark screen for a while until he heard the sound of a truck engine outside. He turned to the window just in time to see the familiar blue pickup driving off down the street.
Claire opened the front door and found an envelope wedged under the security screen. Inside was that last week’s invoice, in Bruce’s handwriting, including everything Claire had done, even the leaf raking, and then another line down at the bottom, right above Bruce’s signature. It read, Severance, $5, and then below that another line, Buy a second brake for that bike.
Claire took the puzzle box from the closet and brought it into his room. His window was open and there was a slight breeze blowing, the last gasp of the Santa Anas. The Pufnstuf bed sheet moved with it, revealing the view of the Bartletts’ house, the mountains beyond. Claire pressed the box’s hidden button in the sunflower petal and put his pay and the invoice in the bottom drawer.
He was outside on the bike when Diane got home. She climbed out of the car, brushing something from the front of her scrubs. “Crumbs,” she said. “I had a late lunch.”
He rode up the driveway with her and she put her lunch bag down on the front step and sat, blew out a breath. She looked at him sitting above her on the bike.
“I don’t know where else to go,” she said. “Is there anywhere else you want to go?”
Claire looked across the street to the Bartletts’, the top of the tall oak reaching high above their roof, the mountains bathed in sundown. The late afternoon light was warm on his face and arms. He thought of Bruce standing under that tree, in this light, his arms raised, his eyes closed.
When Claire looked back, Diane was still watching him, waiting for an answer. He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “Just here.”
She nodded and looked past him, facing west, and he turned to see what she saw. Past the silhouettes of rooftops and telephone poles and TV antennas the sky deepened, the faded pickup blue going metallic purple and pink, shining in the smog, the distant palm trees standing tall against a cherry-red burst at the horizon.
“Well, look at that,” Diane said. “My God, would you look at that.”