Maxine (6 page)

k
yle has discovered an Internet site with quizzes about countries, continents, and capitals. There's a timer and a box where you type things in, and Maxine is hazy on the details but he's keen for her to participate. He does these quizzes all the time, muttering as he types, country after country punched into the little box and if it's the right name, it slides away and sits on the right spot on the map. He'll ask Maxine to name all the countries in Africa and type her answers in. Kyle has done this so often he can name the capital of every country in the world, with the exception of the odd tiny island. Maxine's geography is fuzzier than she would like to admit. She couldn't believe Zaire didn't exist. Just gone. She hadn't got the memo re: Zaire.

What do you mean, it's not
there
?

Is there another way to spell it?

Try with two dots over the
i
.

…Nope.

That's ridiculous, it was always there.

Maxine, I just searched it. It's part of the Democratic Republic of Congo now. It's not a country any more.

That's absurd, says Maxine. She's putting her papers aside and leaning in behind him to look at the screen and make sure, but of course he's right. There's also The Gambia. It used to be plain old Gambia when Maxine was growing up. What's with that? While Maxine was looking away, the world changed. Words, countries had come and gone.

You look like someone should have asked you first, Kyle tells her.

Well, someone could have
mentioned
it.

The funny part is that it works. Things do change. The first time Maxine abandons her attempt to name national capitals, Kyle says sympathetically, Wow, they didn't teach you guys much in school back then, did they? But for some reason he wants her to improve.

He's patient, and he uses helping strategies. After she has responded Mexico City, the next answer will be Guatemala City, and then Panama City. He'll say Laos and she'll say I don't know, and he'll say Vvvv-Vvvv-Vvvvvvii. And she'll say, irritably, I don't
know
! and just when he's about to tell her, she'll interrupt: Oh wait, wait now, Vientiane? After a few weeks of this, she's saying, Djibouti, now that's a trick isn't it, Kyle, because the capital of Djibouti is Djibouti,HAH!Hah haHAH! She'll rhyme off Astana-Kazakhstan, Asmara-Eritrea, Ashgabat-Turkmenistan, as if she'd known them all along. It's hard to know who is more pleased by this or why, but when Maxine successfully identifies every country in Africa and its capital, they go out for hot chocolate.

On her last day in the office, Maxine was to meet her boss in the boardroom at four o'clock, to finalize the details of the transition, he'd said, and deal with any loose ends he might need to address with her replacement. I know you're on top of it already, he'd added, gazing down at Maxine's desk, where brightly-coloured file folders sat in strategically asymmetrical stacks, each of which had a large, lined sticky note on top. The handwriting on the sticky notes was calm and even, and suggested that everything was manageable. But, he'd told her, I'd like to make sure we've covered all the bases.

Punctuality was not Maxine's chief virtue, but she did scuttle, at only a couple of minutes past four, along the hall that led to the boardroom, armed with a notebook and a list. For a brief moment she thought the atmosphere felt not quite as deserted as on a normal Friday at this time, but the thought passed, and then she opened the door to the boardroom and stopped dead. The boardroom was full. It was full of her boss and her colleagues and bowls of chips and a cake and a cooler overflowing with pop and Corona, full of streamers and balloons and her boss's granddaughter Bridget, who was pulling on Maxine's finger and saying, The presents are over here.

Someone pressed an open Corona into her palm. They gave her a pen and a notebook and a fish in a bowl, to keep her company when she missed them all terribly, which, it was explained, she would. Bridget was tugging at her arm so Maxine squatted down.

I was allowed to come, Bridget said solemnly, Because of the cake.

Well, said Maxine. I'm, um, glad you were available.

I think I can have seconds.

Oh, I see. Let's get you some, then. What do you think I should call the fish?

Bridget thought for a minute and then scooched up to Maxine's ear. She whispered: His name is Bluebird.

So Bluebird it was. Maxine's boss made a speech in which he said they were only letting her slip away briefly, on the condition that she come back. He said that in return for all the writing assistance she had provided in this office, he would be offering input into her manuscript at what he described as a significantly reduced rate, as a result of which she could expect to discover in it many more references to positive developments in the upstream petroleum industry and to an intelligent and dashing supervisory figure. At the end, everyone laughed and clapped and Maxine said thank you to the carpet and then, to her surprise, her boss gave her a hug.

Things don't always go as planned, Maxine, he said quietly. Just in case—you're always welcome here.

I had no idea, Maxine tells Gail later. I mean, either they were really happy to get rid of me— Oh Max, give it up.

Or. Well, they were all so nice. It seemed like they really appreciated me. Maxine screws up her face as she processes this thought.

On the way downtown Maxine had been thinking: Portugal, Lisbon; Liechtenstein, Vaduz. Germany, Berlin; Switzerland, Berne. If the Western world used to feel self-assured and confident of a brighter future and now it jumps at shadows and wonders which city is next on the list, then maybe it just wasn't very self-aware. Maxine is fairly self-aware, although the awareness is not undistorted. And she's got Gail to set her straight. Unlike Frédérique, Gail exists in the flesh. Blue eyes, blond hair of the kind that tends not to look recently brushed, somewhere between curly and frizzish. She has the long limbs and wide wrists of a tall person, and one of those wrists is propped on the edge of the table at the Ship while her fingers tap the drum beat to something on the sound system. Some tall people feel the need to counteract their height by being as quiet and invisible as possible, but Gail does not number among them. It's not that she's loud, exactly, not all the time, but her personality has a certain force. Now Gail is leaning forward over the table to tell Maxine that when she has trouble getting in the mood she fantasizes about two naked women pulling her onto a large bed. This comes as a surprise to Maxine, who had thought Gail and Ted were in good shape that way, not the sort of couple who would require imaginary assistance, and she asks, in as discreet and roundabout a manner as is possible in a conversation about a person's sex life after five beers on a Friday night, if she was mistaken in that regard. Gail, who seems to be coming more fully alive as the discussion progresses, who appears actually to be glinting at the eyes and teeth and somewhere in the hair, snorts.

Max, you are
so
naive. Do you know what word I think, when my mind's clambering into that bed? I can see their smiles, their boobs swinging, and I think the word
cavort
.

Jeez, says Maxine.Wasn't there a guy on
The Muppets
who used to say that? Cavort, cavort? It wasn't Kermit. Jeez.

Gail can't remember, but she confesses she has made obscene phone calls within the last ten years (she refuses to be precise about when). She pulled out the yellow pages, dialled business numbers at random until a man's voice answered, and then said in her sultriest tone, Rub your teeth on my nipples, honey. Maxine is concerned about the ethics, the repercussions. What if the guy felt upset? What if he worried about it all day, wondering whether his secretary had overheard, whether his wife would find out? Gail would never know; she just hung up. It wasn't responsible.

I didn't say it was my finest hour. We were talking about things you
regret
.

Regret, repeats Maxinemuzzily. Oh yeah. Did you feel...I mean, was it fun?

Shit yes, says Gail. I don't regret it very much. Hardly at all.

But you didn't feel guilty, you didn't go around wondering if you might run into one of those guys' girlfriends?

Max. Relax. I probably made their day.

Maxine wakes up excessively early with a rapid heartbeat, a headache, and the feeling that she has done something indefinably disastrous, or perhaps several indefinably disastrous things. This feeling is powerful enough to prevent her from sleeping any longer, and it's interfering with her ability to take a proper breath, so she tries to locate its source. Her dominant impressions are the shiny gold garland around the bar the night before and Gail's face in close-up. It comes to Maxine that she and Gail did drink far too much beer and she does not have one hundred percent recall of the walk home. She thinks it was snowing. She could look out the window now and be reassured by signs of a recent snowfall, but maybe it didn't snow, and discovering that might be worse. Or maybe it did snow but now it has melted. She will look out the window and the unsnowed streets will tell her that she was loaded beyond reason, and that might possibly be a waste of remorse. She reaches for her inhaler. She'll avoid looking out the window for a while.

It's good to buy groceries while you're hungover. The experience seems less quotidian, more penitential. The bright lights and grating Christmas tunes make you feel atonement is in order. While you inspect darkened bananas on the rack of bagged and reduced produce, in the hope of finding one that remembers being yellow, you have the leisure to resolve that everything will change. You will cease all foolish worrying about plot. Squandering of time is to be discontinued as of the present moment. Drinking too much beer with Gail, while pleasant, is strongly discouraged henceforth.

There's no warning when the jar falls. Maxine is staring grimly into a bin of discounted instant noodles. An elderly woman grazes Maxine's hip with a shopping cart. Maxine raises her head and sees a high shelf, a jar of applesauce wedged above the canned cherries, pineapple, and plums. As Maxine looks up, it begins to fall. The only people in the aisle are Maxine and the woman; the jar is ten, fifteen feet away from them. It's an oddly slow, stylized plummet. Flashback to the wavering, indistinct footage of windows, a tall building, a shape falling horribly—but now, suddenly, a smash, smear of yellow on the tiles, squares of glass bouncing high and wide.

Oh! the woman says.

Are you all right? Maxine touches her shoulder: Are you OK?

I was struck. She turns and there is a trickle of blood above her eyebrow.

It's all right, says Maxine, it's not deep.

What about glass? Can you see any glass in it?

Just a minute. It's hard to tell. Maxine reaches up with her finger, wipes away a trickle of blood and then feels embarrassed, such an intimate gesture. Another half an inch and it would have been the woman's eye. She could have lost her sight. She looks old and frail. Infection. They're both realizing it might have been the end. Or at least Maxine is—maybe the woman isn't thinking that, maybe she's thinking about the suddenness, the unpredictability, maybe she's wondering where the first-aid cream is, whether she'll be late for bowling. Maxine shoves her hand in her pocket and scrubs the blood vigorously off her finger in what she hopes is an unobtrusive manner. The woman lowers her basket on the floor. Eversweet margarine and two tubs of glacé cherries.

I makes a cherry cake for Christmas.

Right, says Maxine.

Everyone loves my cherry cake. They keeps asking me for the recipe but I don't use one.

Let me just take you to the manager's office and we can get that cut cleaned up. Maxine picks up the basket.

It's only when she is home unpacking her groceries that Maxine realizes she completely forgot to think in the third person. She tries to go back to the supermarket in her head, to recreate the incident in sentences, but all she can come up with are single words.

Applesauce.

Glass.

Blood.

Eye.

It's possible that if Maxine thinks all her thoughts in the third person and writes down the best ones then she will be able to cobble them together into a work of substance and luminosity. That's Plan A.

Failing that, an unreadable but novel-length chunk would suffice to show she'd made an effort.

What's she afraid of? Not sure. Anything. Plan Z.

Just croak, Bluebird. The pellet sits on the surface of the water. The fish darts up to the surface, mouth first, and the pellet disappears. The blue fins flicker. Oh, OK. One more.

Sunday has finished looming and, inevitably, arrived. Maxine is due at the Larsens' for dinner at six and she would rather be shot but there is no non-rude way of expressing such a thought and she has wriggled sideways out of so many invitations already that it would require a spectacular brazenness not to give in on occasion. Barb has repeatedly assured her that everyone is looking forward to it. Several times during the morning she forgets about the supper and then remembers, and the sinking feeling returns. She knows Barb likes white wine so she traipses through the liquor store wondering what would be the right kind. Australian, she thought, could be the right kind. If Barb were from some other Commonwealth country, Maxine could imagine it being Australia. She could picture Barb in the outback with a peeling nose, handling sheep in a businesslike manner. She can almost imagine her with an Australian accent. On the deck of the ranch, at the end of the day, Barb would look out over the desert. No, there must be something for the sheep to eat. She would look out over the scrubland or the grass or whatever it is. She would put her feet up and gaze out over whatever vegetation is provided and reach for a glass of…Australian white? Maxine is lost in the back country when someone clinks two bottles behind her and she comes to with a start and thinks Oh frig, dinner.