how to segue. studying hardy. switching perspective four times.

Call from Guole → Leslie, they want to buy the house next door, too for the daily trailers given the small lot size of the Oswegos.


“Goodbye,” Leslie said, huffy, urgent.
“Yup,” Guole said.
Without any real motivation, Guole did not flip the phone closed but stayed on the line. He could hear Leslie —it was the sound of the Learning Channel’s ranging leopards, of Lifetime’s raging lovers—the escalated breathing of something angry.
“Yes?” Guole said.
“Oh, forgot this thing was on,” Leslie said. And then there was silence, the beep, the operator’s weedy electric voice. Guole listened to the end of her rant and then flipped the phone closed, returning it to his front pocket where tucked between the folds of silk-lining the digital face read the time, 3:45.
Across the street, a boy who appeared to be about age eight was walking down the sidewalk with a conscious slowness. Stooped slightly under the weight of an oversized backpack of zipped yellow and blue silk, he was carrying out a conversation on his own cell-phone. From where Guole stood he could only discern bits of the conversation: “Page 38…All of the fractions… No, not the evens, just the odds…” It was the sort of dialogue he had forgotten existed, great stuff—heavy with nostalgia, with a sort of real-time boredom that had been edited out of the high-pace dramas he’d been scouting for in recent months. If only they could get another ear like Mamet’s writing TV… But, for the moment, reality would have to do. And, clapping his hands as he turned on his heel to face the Oswego stoop, as a TV host turning from the contestants toward a studio audience, Jerry Guole said for no one but himself, “School’s Out.” It was, he was aware as he said it, bad dialogue. And he took the first step.
The boy, named Terry Dunn, was actually twelve years old and was an occupant of number 97 Oswego, on the inner (and poorer) side of the street in real-estate bereft of ocean views. Dunn was not headed toward his own home but to that of Margaret and Alan Clare, who in number 85 occupied a squat ranch home whose large plate glass windows, facing out toward the street, betrayed lace-curtains nearly-completely parted toward the view of a long black car in the Oswego drive. Terry Dunn, who had his own key somewhere in the front pocket, was still rooting for it when Margaret opened the door. Her face, gaunt and ovular, was given a sort of roundness by the hurricane of hair flowering round and by a wondrously retro pair of oversized tortoise-shell glasses, secured to her person by a neon-pink ribbon that lapped around the back of the neck. “Alan’s in the kitchen,” she said, motioning Terry inside. After she had latched the door, the pair walked down the long dark hall of beige carpet that made up the front entry, turning left at the living room—two pillowed couches, a doilyed piano—and entering the kitchen, whose scrubbed, lemon-scented linoleum was bright with the light that came from that oversized, plate glass window which, facing the West and the length of the street, dominated the room and lit up Alan Clare like floodlights on the foot of a stage.
With a hand leading automatically from the bowl of yogurt on the kitchen table to his thinset mouth, Alan Clare sat with his shoes off and his socks nearly touching the oversized window, a magazine spread over his lap. The first thing people noticed about the boy was his size—6 foot four and thin, the joints (the knees, the elbows) knobby with skin.
“My gosh,” Margaret said to her son, pulling down her glasses so they fell against her chest where they were held by the neon-pink ribbon, “You eat more delicate than a sea otter.” Turning to Terry, and pulling him out a chair at the kitchen table, which was covered by a rubber mat—checked in white and blue—“The boy’s been eating that solitary bowl of yogurt since noon.”
“My dad says I eat too fast,” Terry said, having thrown off his pack, and resting his elbows on the table.
“You do,” Alan said, not looking up from his article.
“Does not,” Margaret said, and, changing the subject, leaned in to Terry, “We haven’t done anything today. Just been watching the scene across the street.”
“Oh?” Terry asked out of politeness. “What scene.”
“Black car pulls up to the Oswego’s—”
“That white house?”
“It’s the music people, and the father with the big beard.”
“Oh okay,” Terry said. “I know ‘em. My sister went over there for a pool party a couple of years ago.”
“Oh yeah?” Margaret said, but the boy not going further, she kept on. “Well, black car pulls up there around noon, guy gets out in a fancy suit, brings out another guy with a big film camera.”
“They’re making a movie there?”
Alan chimed in. “Could just be an ad.”
“Well anyway,” Margaret said, “That was our day.” She looked over at her son, whose doings of nothing she lovingly railed against. “Now tell me about yours.”
The exploits of middle schoolers—Terry Dunn’s two Bs in Science, a paper he feared to write in English class about whether the main character of a book about talking animals feared fame—bored Alan Clare, who continued to read on the races of solar powered cars across a stretch of mudcracked desert as he listened to the coos of his mother coddling the stranger’s son to assuage the sexless boredom of old age. Aged 23, a recent graduate of MIT with an advanced degree in engineering, Alan Clare had been living at home for approximately six months—a window of time in which he had been, Margaret told her friends, “Figuring out what exactly he wanted to do.” In actuality, Alan Clare spent very little time per week—an hour or so—thinking about what he wanted to do next. And during that time, he was high. After a lifetime heavy with a achievements, he was spending much of his time smoking pot out of a bowl he had blown by hand in an MIT mandatory crafts workshop, a little blue pipe he was very proud of, which in the light of his bedroom window upstairs shone cobalt as a right-rvrs* star.
With a degree in engineering you could build things, you could fix things, you could, in the words of his mother “build your own world if you wanted to.” But all of Margaret’s maternal instincts were fine with keeping the boy at home, so she didn’t prod him, but watched him, wondering who the boy had become when he was away, and wishing he might talk about it.