Maxine (5 page)

If she writes for a solid and concentrated hour before the run, she may call Gail about dessert.

How very often it is possible to check the time during the course of a solid and concentrated hour.

Frédérique doesn't notice time when she works. It flies by. Frédérique is preparing a lecture for her graduate class. She frowns in concentration and clicks fast
and furiously
on the keyboard, and an hour passes in a moment.

Karen's banging at the screen door. She's turned to look down the street, so Maxine sees her in profile, the outline of a dark baseball cap, her sporty athletic wear with the white side stripes. Gail thinks Maxine should choose a more social sport like, say, aerobics, which Gail teaches. But running suits Maxine—you don't have to be any good at it, don't have to pay or show up anywhere, you just go.

Maxine used to run mostly with Cindy and sometimes with the running group Karen belonged to, but that was before. Cindy's big worry had been that she wouldn't get into graduate school, once she'd decided to go back to university, and then when she got scholarships everywhere it had been which one to go to, and five months later it was whether she'd last another week. You could slide quite easily from one state to the other, apparently, from running on trails and filling out application forms to lying unrecognizable at the centre of a cluster of horrified, powerless friends and family. They'd been a triumvirate, Maxine, Gail, and Cindy, an equilateral triangle, and when Cindy died just before 9-11, she skewed the balance. Not only was there a big corner missing but each of the remaining points had been altered in a process that was neither comprehensible nor complete. And forty-eight hours later the whole western world went berserk—suddenly poor old Cindy was no longer a Defining Event. Maxine and Gail remain Defined, though, will probably continue to be Defined for the duration, and part of being Defined means having a lot less confidence in what that duration might be.

For a time after Cindy died, Maxine didn't run at all. Eventually, though, she decided Cindy would be furious with her, so she returned one of Karen's phone messages, laced up, and plodded out, and did the same two days later, and two days later again. In this way running became both an assertion of her own life—an investment in her health, a triumph over slothfulness and discomfort— and a reminder of Cindy, of that shocking, sinister, and sometimes short chain of events that leads from a minor symptom through tests to diagnosis, treatments, and death, a chain whose first links are invisible and may already be forming in Maxine, in Gail, even in Kyle.

Karen tells Maxine as they pound down the street in the clear grey light that Mr. Simms is having a bad week. This is excellent news. And on top of that, it's above zero, the streets are dry and the trees aren't moving. Not bad for the fifth of December.

Told you it was a great day for it, Karen says.

Karen and Maxine have developed a symbiotic running friendship. Neither is wholeheartedly devoted to athleticism; neither has goals involving competition or significant fitness challenges. The responsibility of the running buddy is to stick to an agreed schedule most of the time, and to talk during the run. It doesn't matter how trivial the topic of conversation: the point is to cough up enough minor encounters, frustrating incidents, funny anecdotes or potentially useful bits of information to distract the buddy from the task at hand. Mr. Simms, Karen's boss, has been invaluable in this regard. His unpredictable behaviour has sustained Maxine and Karen through miles of drizzle and wind and a general disinclination to keep flattening the gravel. Mr. Simms is a loose cannon. He is all warmth and concern one minute, claws out the next. He says he will do things and then forgets; then he demands to know why they haven't been done yet. He can't
believe
no one has prepared that mini-budget. The one he himself said he would prepare at the last boardmeeting. It's in the minutes. You saucy thing, he said to Karen, when she pointed to item 4(g). Karen conveys the extent of his outrage while they twist down small streets to the tennis courts and the trail to the lake.

As an added benefit to these kinds of conversations, every now and then one receives useful advice from the other, follows up, and resolves a difficulty—medical, culinary, interpersonal, or other— successfully. This is beside the point but it's definitely a plus. Maxine has followed Karen (and her partner Theresa, mostly in absentia, since Theresa doesn't run) through their purchase of a house and adoption of a daughter, has discovered how to roast cherry tomatoes, has come to learn about Karen, about Theresa, about little Chloe, about bringing your electrical up to code. Karen has gone from an acquaintance in the women's running group to someone whose life is not just known to Maxine but actually part of Maxine's. And, although Maxine can't imagine what she could possibly have been saying for the last year or so, the reverse is probably also true.

After the seminar, Maxine tosses her brown satchel into the hall and bends down for the envelope she's just stepped over, which is lying on the floor near the mail slot. It's one of those expensive ones with the raggedy edges that is handmade or is made to look handmade, and as Maxine opens the plain, elegant card, she wonders who sent it. Maxine reads the card—Barb, inviting her for supper on Sunday. Alas. She locates the cordless, stretches out on the couch, and calls Gail, who, it turns out, has pulled off a highly successful last-minute office luncheon—not a lunch, Max, a luncheon—for forty people, stepping into the breach last night, when the other caterer was hospitalized.

My god. You mean Emerg, or did they admit her?

Max, you're missing the point here.

The point is that a number of guests asked for Gail's card and whether she did hors d'oeuvres, and Gail is expecting to hear from them about Christmas parties within a day or two. She rewarded herself with a new and rather pricey vermilion lipstick she's dying to escort downtown. But not tonight, as she needs to recover from the luncheon. Gail was up puréeing soup at dawn, to her attached neighbours' annoyance, and she's zombified. A night out on the weekend? Excellent. And Maxine no doubt met Craig at the writing seminar. How was that? Maxine must call Craig. Just for a follow-up coffee, no big deal.

I am totally not calling him. Forget it.

Don't be so narrow-minded. Nan adores him.

She can ask him out then. Maxine can feel that she has cocked her head with the snotty, ironic expression Gail accuses her of acquiring when she digs in her heels about something.

There's no need to be snotty about Nan.

I love your Nan. I'm saying she can make her own decisions.

Oh and I'm holding a gun to your head here. I mean, you have a perfect opportunity to get to know a guy. For once. Because god knows one is not going to plop down out of your ceiling and land on the keyboard. But. For reasons invisible to the naked eye— OK Gail, he might be your cousin and all, but Craig is creepy.

He's sweet.

He's the only one who made a special announcement that he was single when everyone introduced themselves at the beginning of the seminar.

Gail pauses for a briefmoment: There's nothing wrong with that.

And when we had the receptiony thing after, his fly was open the whole time and there was this little white cotton bulge pooking out.

Eew.

And he has that arrogant psychopath look.

...OK, yeah, he does have that.

(And now Maxine feels completely guilty, because just the other day in the supermarket she took off her coat and a security guard gave her a funny look, and then a woman near the toothpaste called out with some urgency Ma'am, excuse me, ma'am, and Maxine went over, wondering what the woman could possibly want from her—she didn't look like an employee, was she going to ask Maxine for money?—and the woman said Your pants, ma'am, and sure enough Maxine had been wearing the burgundy jeans with the unreliable zipper, and did that make her a bad person, any more than Craig?)

I'm sure he's a nice guy, though, Maxine adds.

It's not as if Maxine has never had a boyfriend. She just hasn't seen a suitable candidate lately. She and Keith were together for a few years at university, but he went away to do a master's in Amsterdam and there wasn't much point then, although she sometimes wonders what would have happened if she'd gone with him. Keith had round granny glasses, dark hair with lots of curls, an easy, lanky way about him. He wore outdoorsy sorts of clothes and looked like a wildlife biologist, which he wasn't. They haven't kept in touch. Maxine thinks of him occasionally with affection. Later there was Andrew. They shared an apartment and Andrew wanted to get married but, although he was a nice guy, small things about him got on her nerves, more and more things, until almost everything he did was irritating. It can't be the individual things, Gail had told her. You don't have to marry the guy if you don't want to, but there's no such thing as an annoying way of tying your shoes. Maxine wasn't convinced at the time, although now she sees the reasonableness of it. There was a shirt he wore—a metallic grey shot through with something orangey—and she couldn't help hating him a bit when he wore that shirt. She was not, she now realizes, considerate in the way she let Andrew go, although that wasn't intentional. Letting go of people wasn't her area of expertise.

Maxine flicks on the radio and washes a small head of lettuce. A British high commission has closed in Kenya. There's an al-Qaeda connection and it's all over the radio again. Fear. Terrorism. Doubt is poisonous. The more people doubt some things—the pacific intentions of certain religious groups, for example—the more they doubt absolutely everything. Whether the meat's full of chemicals, whether the guy next door's going to hack someone's head off one day for no reason. It's a generalized suspicion. They've had over a year of suspicion now, and no one can agree what to be suspicious of. Maxine has the urge to walk up to Middle-Eastern-looking people and say I know it wasn't you. You didn't do anything wrong—but she realizes that, however well-intentioned, this behaviour might be misconstrued. And she doesn't know. It would be just Maxine's luck to absolve the only hardened terrorist within thousands of miles, out of fuzzy fellow-feeling. What could one say, anyway?
I'm sure it had nothing to do with you? I don't imagine there's any proof of your involvement?
(That one runs a tad lukewarm.)
I believe you are innocent?
But then you'd end up adding, hastily,
No, of course no one has accused you of anything, I didn't mean, look I was just trying to.
Maybe something simple:
I love you
. But that might be going too far.

Just die, Maxine says, dropping a tiny pellet into a bowl. The blue fins flicker eagerly. Everyone knows you're not supposed to give pets as gifts.

She drops another pellet.

Couldn't you get some bacterial thing from the water? Couldn't you starve when I forget to feed you?

Kyle knew about the workshop so he didn't come then but the next day is Friday and around the middle of the afternoon she hears his feet on the stairs outside, his quick knock and the front door opening, and soon they are in the kitchen looking for something to eat.

Look, I don't know about homework, OK? I don't remember how. I don't know what you're supposed to know.

I'm supposed to know about the book of Job, and it's really boring and I don't understand it.

Maxine sighs but Kyle appears not to take it personally. Not personally enough.

I thought, she says, you were here to play computer games.

I have to do some homework before I play on the computer. It's a rule. How about, he suggests, if you read the first two chapters and I read the first two and then we talk about it?

Me
, read it?

Yeah. Otherwise how can you talk about it?

But I don't have homework. I don't need to read it.

You do if you're going to talk about it.

But—

You might learn something useful. For your novel.

You barge in here and hog the computer and now you're wanting me to read the Bible. Well forget it, I've already read some and it's long. But by now Kyle knows her well enough to grin and wait. And so it comes to pass that Maxine digs out the faded red Bible she'd been given by her grandmother and lies on the couch with Job, chapters 1 and 2, while Kyle reads them off the Internet.

It's a bit much, says Maxine. I mean, he didn't do anything, and just because the Enemy of Man comes along and says he should be afflicted, God goes along with it. I don't think that shows much strength of character on God's part, do you?

Maxine? I don't think that's what they want us to learn.

Oh. Well, then, how about a fact check. What, uh, let me see. What does God do to Job?

He takes everything away and smotes him with boils.

Smites. And it's the scab, not boils.

Mine says boils.

Let me see that. Maxine hops up and scrutinizes the online text. OK, what do you think would be worse, boils or scab?

Maxine?

Well I'm just pointing out the interesting parts. It's not my fault if they don't want you to learn anything.

How come you have a bookmark in right there?

None of your business. So, what have we learned then?

There's different words for the same things?

Correct. It wasn't written in English and you can translate one thing different ways.

I think scabs because they'd be itchy all the time. I had a huge one in Bermuda from scraping my leg on a rock underwater when I was swimming? And it was itchy like forever. I think it might still be itchy sometimes.

Do you miss Bermuda?

All my friends are there. Like Ben and Amir. And I went swimming all the time in the sea. I hope we move back. You can come visit.

4

december 2002