Maxine (8 page)

Some people have little awareness of danger. They live in the present without expecting disaster. Tragic consequences of ordinary events come as a surprise to them. A piece of flying glass leads to a dribble of blood, not the morgue. Then there are those who are as fully aware of the potential catastrophe as of the actual present. Such people are everywhere. They may seem relatively normal. Maxine is one of them.

For example. Last summer Maxine climbed a hill to pick blueberries. She saw a boy running down a hill toward the pond. She stood up. Her legs tensed. She put the bucket down. She could feel her molars squeezing shut. When Maxine saw the boy reach the end of the dock, stop, teeter, and tip, she was scrambling though brush, realizing the distance was too great.

People expect a lot of cries and splashes but drowning is deceptively silent. They slip under.

The thing is, the kid didn't fall in. He did mimic the leaning tower of Pisa in hazardous proximity to the dock's edge, but he righted himself and ran back to three buddies who appeared on the grassy verge. When she saw this, Maxine stopped running and returned to her berry bucket and sat back down on the rock.

The problem came when Maxine realized that he could fall in. Once she had that thought, she could see the child falling in as clearly as she in fact saw him and his cohorts whacking a small tree to death with their sticks. Disaster remains forever imminent—the experience of the present is always mediated by the knowledge that the present could explode in your face any second.

Maxine sees hazards lurking everywhere. She will gaze uneasily at a Mason jar of bakeapples, cheery yellow berries bumping one another in clear juice, and think, Botulism. (Actually, botulism is one of the few dangers she scarcely considered before, but now she's read
Larry's Party
; now she knows). To be aware of most potential hazards most of the time is to lug around a great gloomy weight. It's no way to live your life.

Recognizing this fact is not the same as being able to change it.

You could write a book about the things that never happened, the boy who didn't drown. That, Maxine realizes, is what novels are, in theory, except that everyone knows novels are mostly things that have happened, tarted up so we won't be sure who they happened to. No, this is about things that might have happened but didn't. For example, in the supermarket yet again, she's in a good mood, swinging the cart so the cranberry juice rolls and sloshes, and humming. The cashier sits two onions on the scale and says Yellow or Spanish? And here's what Maxine would like to happen, what she considers—for a brief moment—doing. She would look suddenly very serious. She would swing a fist high over her head, curve her arm, snap her fingers; she would do a full circle in a kind of shuffle-stomp; at the end she would cry
Olé
! and drop a bill, scoop up her groceries; she would stride out of that store with her head held high and the flamenco in her hips, and people would watch her leave, they would shake their heads and smile; they'd be smiling all the way home. But instead Maxine just says Yellow.

Frédérique would have done it, Gail says.

Well. Frédérique might have done some of it, says Maxine. (Maxine is after all the expert on what Frédérique would have done and she's not going to be bossed around by Gail, at least not on that score.) Frédérique's cool—it would be surprising. Quick.

Grab the groceries and saunter the hell out of there.

That's her, quick and cool, Gail agrees.

There's no need to point out that this is another difference between Frédérique and Maxine. Maxine does not long to be cool, so it's no big deal. There are times when it would be nice, but other things are more important. Frédérique is cool even in her rare moments of awkwardness. It's kind of a French thing. Even Gail couldn't pull that off. As to character, Maxine feels fairly confident.

She has a winner in Frédérique. She, Maxine, feels a great interest in even the apparently inconsequential details of Frédérique's life, her musings on this and that. Character is definitely not a problem.

A phrase pops into Maxine's mind fully formed:
the smoky smell of human shit
. That's not bad, Maxine thinks. A bit gross.
Smoky
is very good, though. Unfortunately she can't think of a scene in the novel where it would fit. Maxine tries hard to imagine such a scene.
Frédérique
…um...no.
Frédérique happens to visit a location in a rather unsanitary country where
—no.
Frédérique observes, à propos of nothing in particular
... Maxine gives up.

They say the world will never be the same. That America awoke to the possibility of catastrophe when its towers were reduced to the grey dust covering the man and his briefcase in the photo. Never again would our world seem unassailable. No longer the innocent etcetera. For Maxine, there had been no pre-lapsarian sense that everything would be fine most of the time. Your chair could always have a weak leg, and when you stood on it to change the kitchen light bulb, you could, like Karen's uncle, break your back, and in the three seconds that took, your life would be irrevocably changed or, even more irrevocably, ended. Or not. It seems that the rest of the Western world has only recently become aware of the tension between those two possibilities, the falling and the not falling, the leg giving way or deciding to hold tight a while longer, the child staying at your side or disappearing into the forest forever.

Here is Maxine, belting though the supermarket, where she goes every day. She refuses to plan meals in advance the way Gail does because this strategy forces her out the front door. She's hauling past the displays of clementines and nuts and gingerbread kits, in a hurry to get on with it, whatever it is, the next thing in her day, to distance herself from the immediate past by plunging forward at speed. The checkout boy smiles again, and Maxine twists around this time to look behind her but she's the end of the line. Oh. Not a boy, but younger than she is. Well, maybe not that much younger. He's not being overhasty in weighing Maxine's fruit and she's thinking about what she needs to get done before she goes to bed tonight, so she doesn't hear properly because she's not really listening.

Pardon? says Maxine.

I said it's a funny name. Granny Smith.

Oh Christ, thinks Maxine. But she looks up from the apples and he really does have a lovely smile—could you call it resplendent? She could almost call it resplendent and we are all supposed to be more in the moment, are we not? So she offers back: A woman's name...like Pink Lady.

Princess, he says, without missing a beat.

He has her full attention now. Um…Reinette.

They both raise their eyebrows and she can see in the way his right one is cocked that he is not without a sense of irony. She hands him a ten-dollar bill.

I think of apples, he says, as basically masculine.

She leans into the little shelf you sign your credit card receipt on and considers his face. Bananas flash through her mind. He drops coins into her palm and she can feel the warmth of his hand without touching it. Apples are kind of hard, he says, They're a strong fruit. He draws the handles of the bag over her knuckles and his fingers slip over hers. There's that place in Greece—Spartans.

Thanks! Maxine hoists the bag, wiggles it in a half-wave, and says, as she's turning to leave, Cox.

It's hovering around zero. A red pickup rushes past Karen and Maxine and with it a solid slice of snowy water like a sheet of plywood—this mass of brown-grey liquid with slushy bits, water fronds waving and dangling everywhere—levitates jerkily up out of the gutter and slaps Karen and Maxine full on and bodily, almost knocking them over. They're in front of the Pen, almost at the cemetery, on the way home but not close yet. They both cry out with the shock of it, long since soaked but the force and the sheer volume of freezing wetness take them by surprise. Maxine staggers and Karen grabs at her and misses, and they are stumbling and righting themselves and carrying on but there's no fun in it, and the misery of shoving one waterlogged foot in front of the other again and again with the wind clawing into your face is bearable only because it gets you home faster than stopping and walking, only because there's some frigging lunatic beside you doing exactly the same thing. They aren't even talking, that's how bad—too much effort, no story worth it, gasping through slashes of rain, piss-poor day for a run in this town.

At three-twenty-five on Monday, Kyle knocks and lets himself in, and these days Maxine is prepared. Barb almost never drops over now, and the mail slot gifts have long since ceased. Maxine understands that for reasons unknown—and she's not about to inquire—Barb has allowed Kyle to replace her. Yesterday she bought juice and, after a lengthy study of the cookie aisle, animal crackers, and both have been set out on the coffee table. She's finished her typing for a while and printed off some pages to edit.

Cool! says Kyle, seeing the bowl. I remember those from when I was a kid.

Oh. I guess they're kind of young for you.

Nah, they're still pretty good. Thank you. He takes a handful. Can I eat these at the computer?

Try not to get any crumbs down in the keyboard, OK?

Especially giant crumbs, right?

Especially monolithic, damp-around-the-edges crumbs.

Especially awesome mondo-crumbs like as big as the Trojan Horse and with little guys in them with spears and stuff. Because if the crumbs broke open then the guys would be like running around inside your keyboard and maybe stabbing you in the finger. Kyle is grinning, swivelling gently from side to side.

Especially those ones.

OK.

When people ask Maxine why she left her job, she feels embarrassed. She'd enjoyed being M. Carter, Communications Officer. It sounded important and purposeful. Now she is someone trying to write a novel, which at first had seemed possible and interesting and now strikes her as pretentious and flaky. Someone else is C.O., and it helps to try to remember the amount of time she used to spend reading blindingly dull oil-exploration documents with a view to rearranging their apostrophes and, where possible, tidying up the odd dangling modifier. A delicate business. Maxine was surprised to learn that many people do not want their grammatical errors cleaned up, even when the sentence has been only minimally and tactfully readjusted. For some reason, Could we just put a semi-colon in here? is received as: God, you are a fat pig. They want it the way they wrote it, subject-verb agreement errors and all.

Now Maxine imagines herself saying: I guess I wasn't cut out to write a novel.
When asked about her Concise History of Astrophysics, Frédérique twirled her vivid orange scarf dramatically and cried: Everything I touch turns to dust!
Maxine pictures people nodding in sympathy, saying something encouraging and changing the topic, while thinking What a fool. She's getting nowhere. Maxine had turned down her parents' offer of points to fly her to Vancouver Island to spend Christmas with them—this year was supposed to be about being frugal and finishing the book. It feels as if she's scarcely started the book, though, and being frugal is all very well but it doesn't create money; it only stems the flow.

Maxine is typing at her desk, head tipped to one side and a shoulder hiked up to wedge the phone into place.

Hi, I'm looking for a gift, can you tell me if you have the
Conquest VI
expansion pack for PC?

Warlords?

Beg pardon?

You're looking for the
Conquest VI
expansion:
Warlords
?

...Sure, I'll have some. I mean, um, I'll have it with warlords.

Maxine leans forward over the bathroom sink, peering into the mirror and running her tongue all over her teeth in search of furriness. Her face does not look completely symmetrical. She notices this without wanting to and quickly tries not to think about it. Maxine's face looks to her sometimes symmetrical, sometimes a little off-kilter, and the thought that the off-kilterness might gradually—or, worse, not so gradually—increase gives her a surge of cold dready feeling in her gut, a feeling she tries breezily to brush aside. When you are Maxine you are often engaged in attempting not successfully to brush aside thoughts that make you feel that cold damp whooshing somewhere in your upper intestines. Maybe it's normal. Maxine is never quite sure about normal, what it is and whether she is it. Her teeth have felt much cleaner since the dentist recommended the electric toothbrush but it's still easy to miss a patch. Maxine pulls on her purple flannel pyjamas. In the bedroom she opens the window but only half an inch. She rolls herself up in her duvet so only her face and one arm remain exposed, and with that arm she reaches for the paper. She decides to have another look at today's cryptic crossword, just until eleven. Then the phone rings, jerking her up on her elbows. She swats frantically around on the far side of the night table until she has gripped the cordless.

Maxine.

Gail?

Come for a drive?

Are you OK?

Yeah.

Gail does not say she's worried about Ted. Gail mostly doesn't think about Ted a lot when he's away, but is pleased to see him when he comes back. She's not given to worrying. Every now and again, though, she's possessed by thoughts like how small is a rig and how large the ocean, or she'll hear Ron Hynes singing “Atlantic Blue” on the radio, or a helicopter will run into trouble somewhere. One thing, or nothing at all, and it's the passivity, the waiting, that drives her cracked—she's got to move, get out of the house, jump in the car and go. Sometimes this means Maxine has to jump in the car too.

(Who'd have pegged Gail as one to marry at all, let alone marry the mild-mannered guy she went to her high-school grad with, and stay married to him? Gail worked front desk at the Hotel while Ted got himself qualified as an engineer. At staff parties, people were surprised to meet this quiet fellow with square, wire-rimmed glasses and the kind of hairline that wasn't going to stick around. From what Maxine can see, though, it works. Ted is pleasant and agreeable, fundamentally a serious person. He's very serious about his work and he travels a lot, so when he's travelling he can work all the time, and when he's at home he can do more things with Gail. Gail has a similar kind of determination but a shorter attention span. She requires change to stay interested in something. Ted's frequent absences mean that she's always happy to see him at home, and that she doesn't have to think about him when he isn't. It's not that Gail doesn't love Ted. She does, very much. But she'd be bored if she thought about him all the time. This strikes Maxine as perfectly reasonable.)