Maxine

by Claire Wilkshire

  When Gail and Maxine were growing up, the blanket was a lot smaller. They’re both from the north-east end, Gail from Wedgewood Park, which was, at the time, the remote outreaches of civilization, beyond which lay trees and more trees. You can’t see it well from here because it doesn’t contain large floodlit buildings. Cindy andMaxine were across the road fromthe school andMount Cashel orphanage, which is now a supermarket. But these days all the neighbourhoods run together in an extravaganza of glowing white and yellow. It’s pretty in a way, but something about it seems depressing and overdone. Gail starts the car.

  I’m through, she says. Thanks, Max. Want to go out somewhere? Or will I take you home?

  Maxine unzips the top of the jacket she threw on with her jeans. Underneath it is the purple PJ shirt with the cows on it that she’d found at the clothes swap.

  Home, I think, Jeeves.

  Maxine takes an hour or more of each workday to read. It’s hard to force yourself to read slowly, to spend a long time over a short paragraph, but you can get used to it. She’s fixating on a line from a novel she recently finished: “I love old Scott, the flexible lips said.” Who would have thought to write that: “the flexible lips said”?

  "Rub your teeth on my nipples, honey," said the vermilion lipstick.

  Three-thirtyish is turning out to be a good time to move from the desk to the couch for some reading, and on Wednesday, Maxine is preparing for that transition when the doorbell rings. She brings out a glass of milk and a plate with four chocolate-covered digestives from the kitchen and places them on the coffee table. She considers them for a minute and then pulls the coffee table a little closer to the computer. Kyle is for some reason not coming in, and she remembers that he doesn’t ring the bell either. As soon as she turns the corner into the porch she can see that it’s Barb, looking lost in her fat winter parka. She swings the door open quickly.

  Is he OK?

  Barb looks surprised:Who?

  Kyle. I thought it would be Kyle.

  Oh. Yes he’s fine. Dave took him out to buy me a present.

  Maxine, there’s something I need to talk to you about.

  Maxine nods in silent resignation and holds the door open for Barb, who stamps the snow off her boots, steps in, wipes them on the mat, and pulls them off, her eyes moving from the computer chair to the old couch and back. Maxine adjusts a throw to cover the mangiest bit of the couch and Barb sits there, gazing at the digestive biscuits as if she once saw such things but can’t quite recall their function. Maxine passes her the plate.

  Thanks, but I don’t eat chocolate, Barb says. Maxine, I have to tell you something.

  There’s a flap of panic between Maxine’s stomach and lungs. Um. Are you sure? I mean, don’t feel—

  No, no I have to. I feel like I’m lying to you all the time, I can’t stand it. Look, Maxine, this is between us. I haven’t told a soul.

  Maxine winces.

  When Kyle got lost and you couldn’t reach me—

  Oh! Oh, that! Barb, please.Maxine smiles and waves her arm as if a fly had landed on it: That’s ancient history now.

  No, you don’t understand. You couldn’t reach me because I wasn’t there. I wasn’t at the hospital. Dave wasn’t at the hospital. Barb reaches for a biscuit, her eyes fixed on Maxine. She eats it in two bites and licks her index finger.

  Oh!... Oh. Anyway, it’s all over now. You don’t owe me any explan—

  I was in a lawyer’s office downtown, Barb says, with Dave. I had no idea anything would happen to Kyle. And even so, I really knew it was the wrong thing to do but I was in such a state I didn’t know what to think about anything, and the meetings ran much later than I’d expected, and when I called and you weren’t home I thought you’d just gone out with Kyle somewhere.

  Ah.

  Maxine, Dave is being investigated at work.There’s a possibility of criminal charges. Fraud and insider trading.That’s why wemoved here.

  Oh man.

  Barb is whispering now: I didn’t know. I didn’t know that’s why we were coming here. He didn’t tell me. She seizes another cookie and sucks it in like a jail ration. I guess, she says. I mean, I think he figured if he didn’t do anything, the situation would just evaporate. Merry Christmas, hey? Fucker!

  Maxine has never heard Barb swear before. It sounds much more shocking than when she and Gail do it. It sounds like a child swearing for effect and not succeeding in sounding mean but creating an effect all the same. She pats her pockets discreetly for her inhaler, just so she’ll know where it is.

  He’s going to have to go back at some point and face the music. Head office, in Alberta. That’s why I’m telling you. One reason.

  Maxine’s head pops up like a spring-loaded toy: Me?

  I’m going to have to go with him, for the first few days. It’ll look bad if I don’t and I think they want to talk to me too... not that I know anything about it. Barb fires a venomous look out the window at her own front door. But I was doing some administrative stuff for them at the time. Some clerical and bookkeeping.

  And, I?...

  I can’t take Kyle. I was wondering if he could stay here. It would be maybe four or five days. Probably some time in the late spring. Early summer. These things seem to take forever.

  Stay here. Youmean, sleep andmeals and. If it’s the school year, homework? Lunch bags...Maxine trails off, wondering what other mysterious and emotionally complex responsibilities mine the path parents seem to navigate so effortlessly. I’m not sure I’d be your best bet. I didn’t do so well the first time. Don’t you think you might be better off asking someone else?

  Barb picks up Kyle’s milk glass and empties it down her throat. She helps herself to the last cookie. Her jaw champs up and down in an exaggerated and rhythmic manner, as though she were a teacher demonstrating the meaning of the word chew.

  There is no one else, she says calmly.

  6

  december 2002

  throughher living-room window, Maxine sees Barb walk up the steps to the Larsens’ white house carrying a stick of French bread. At the top she hauls the door open, wedges herself into it, and searches her purse for keys. If called upon, her wiry body could probably perform a tight series of somersaults down themiddle of the road. Barb’s head is bent over the bag so her ponytail points skyward. She looks pint-sized and vulnerable.

  Barb’s a farm girl from Saskatchewan and sometimes she gets a puzzled look, as if she’d been heading out the back door in her gumboots with the egg basket when a sudden breeze had flicked her cheek, she’d tasted salt on the air, coloured row houses had sprung up between her and the chicken coop, and she’d lost her bearings. It’s as if part of Barb is still that tough, skinny, sunburnt ten-year-old, as if the house and Kyle and the car and how all those things came to be remain a mystery. As if one day when she’s driving her wet-headed boy back from the Aquarena or reaching for a carton of eggs in Dominion, she might feel the basket bumping her thigh and blink; she might find herself staring in a daze at the henhouse and hear her mom calling and gather the eggs in her quick, practised way, and go on in for breakfast.

  Maxine hadn’t thought working on the novel would be easy, but somehow she had imagined it would be more straightforward. OnceMaxine knows what to do she forges on. Forging on is one of her areas of expertise. It may be her best trait, a thought she prefers not to pursue. But what to do seems often unclear now. She has two chapters and a bit, misgivings about the first, not much plot in mind for the rest. Should she revise the first chapter or soldier on? What if she spends a month revising the first chapter and later cuts it? She doesn’t have time for that. She’s feeling a bit panicked about time. Life isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to be about getting things done.

  The strength of the novel is rarely plot, not these days. It’s character, psychology, language. Maxine read that in a book Barb stuffed into her mail slot—“Right” a Novel in Six Months! Maxine has skimmed it, and there’s not much about plot. The book
allows that plot is necessary without revealing how it might be confected.

  She will ask Gail what should happen. Gail isn’t always so good at the forging on—she gets distracted—but she’s busting with ideas. Gail will have to have an idea becauseMaxine is growing desperate. Maxine runs the kitchen tap desperately until the water is cold enough to cramp your teeth, and fills a large, desperate glass. Then she turns on the computer.

  Early Friday morning there’s a docu-update on the radio—the second Christmas for the families is only days away, etcetera. Maxine turns it off. It’s not that she minds the families talking. It’s everyone else. What drove her nuts, in the weeks and months afterwards, was all that radio coverage, the TV, the papers. People just never shutting up, feeling that although it had no direct impact on them, they had an entitlement, a civic duty, to go on and on and on about it. They had an expert on to talk about how it was important to meet the needs of the people who wanted to help but who lived too far away...what could we do to make those people feel better? Maybe, Maxine had said to Gail in the cold, quiet tone reserved for the fury of the just. Maybe if those people had no friends or relatives hurt, and no money to contribute, and they weren’t going to New York—maybe they could shut the fuck up.

  The eagerness of the utterly uninvolved to elbow their way into the spotlight. But it was more than that. You can feel sorry for a few odd socks with not enough to do clambering aboard the tragedy wagon. It was the self-righteous collective imperative to blab that gotMax glowering. If you weren’t talking about it, you didn’t care. Those who yapped the most cared the most.Maxine’s approach to someone else’s catastrophe is: see if you can help. If you can’t help, take one hard compassionate look and then turn away. There’s nothing to be gained by watching the same people jumping from windows over and over again. Mind your own.

  Freezing snow now smashes into the front window: the noise reminds her of visiting her mother’s Acadian family, a bunch of grownups playing cards in a trailer in the rain, the warm fug of rum and cigarettes, laughter, Maxine squeezed in next to her mother, rain hammering on the roof and she’d never felt so safe and dry. But now it looks almost dark outside. Suddenly the Larsen front door opens; an arm emerges and points at the black hatchback; its headlights flash. Moments later, Dave hurtles down the steps holding a newspaper over his head, flings a briefcase onto the back seat, throws himself in the car. Next, Kyle shoots down, drops something halfway, stops on the bottom step and turns; Barb has the door open and points at the whatever-it-is, Kyle runs back up and grabs it, jumps down the rest of the steps, staggers back to the car as Dave starts to honk the horn. Now Barb, jacketless— and, surely, in socks?—descends at speed on tiptoe, holding a lunch bag. She raps on the passenger window for a while until the door opens. Her torso disappears into the car for a few moments and then Barb pulls herself out, stands on the sidewalk, waving at the back of the car as it pulls away and the sleet hammers down on her; she waves until it has turned the corner. Then she’s back up the steps and in the house, the car gone, the door closes, show’s over, and Maxine heads for the kitchen to plug in the kettle, exhausted by it all.

  While she’s waiting for the water to boil,Maxine returns to the window and gazes at the empty street, wondering what it would be like if Kyle stayed with her for a few days, what unforeseen challenges might arise. How do you know what to put in those lunch bags? He could get sick. She might lose him. (Again.) He walks to school by himself when the weather is fine, it’s so close. What if a car hit him? A snowflake hits the glass and melts. It slides down with stops and starts and a sudden burst of speed, like a spider lowering itself on a thread.

  When Maxine was that age she’d sit at a table in the Arts and Culture Centre kids’ library writing in her notebook or poring over emergency handbooks. How to Survive After a Plane Crash.Maxine the Younger could have erected a sturdy bivouac. Knew, in theory at least, how to condense water out of a hole in the desert sand and onto a piece of plastic sheeting propped over it by a twig. Inside Maxine’s backpack, next to her math book, she carried her emergency kit: a Twinings tea tin containing waterproof matches, pencil and candle ends, a small plastic cup, beef jerky, yellow ribbon, pocket knife, string, a clear groundsheet folded into a tiny square, and a red foil emergency blanket ditto. Most of these were scavenged but she had to ask for the beef jerky and the emergency blanket and matches. Maxine’s mother didn’t seem to mind about the beef jerky; she even offered a few peppermints. With this kit every morning, Maxine crossed the road, snuck along a driveway and into someone’s yard, and hopped the fence into the grounds of Vanier Elementary.

  Pass the dictionary would you Ky, it’s right there by the monitor.

  What word are you looking up?

  A grownup word. Over here, buddy, please.

  Here.What’s the word?

  Minutemen. I sort of know what they are, Maxine says untruthfully. But I want a precise definition.

  Oh, are you writing about the American Revolution? Kyle swings his chair around and looks interested.

  …No. Actually, I’m, um, having a little break and doing the crossword.

  Aren’t the minutemen the guys who had to be all ready to drop everything, like drop their stuff out in the fields and run off to be in the war with just a minute’s notice?What does it say?

  Um...yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s pretty much what it says.

  And then all of a sudden the season sweeps them up and even the Scrooges of the world are forced to take notice—Maxine brings Gail and Ted to a small Christmas Eve drop-in at the Larsens’ at which Kyle is allowed to open the game and asks to go over and install it immediately on Maxine’s computer and Barb says No. They finish the evening at Ted’s brother’s annual party. Maxine sleeps in on Christmas Day and then opens her half-bottle of champagne and some expensive orange juice, arranges them on a tray with a glass and brings them happily back to bed with a dictionary and the giant Christmas crossword. In the afternoon Kyle shows up brandishing his game. Supper is with Gail and Ted and Gail’s father; the extended weekend between Christmas and New Year’s includes at least one party a day, and by New Year’s Eve, Maxine is telling Gail she’s more than ready to go back to long, quiet days of peering at a screen.

  I know, says Gail. It’s so much effort, all that getting dressed up and eating and drinking.The thing is, though, this is it. After New Year’s it’s just months of blizzards and claustrophobia. So we have to make the effort now.

  They’re having coffee in the place where people used to have their hair cut. They have changed seats because Maxine does not want to see herself in the huge mirror, whereas Gail doesn’t actually mind all that much.

  Look, Gail, I need your help. I need a plot. I am so completely stuck. I’m afraid to start at it again because I don’t know what to write. Please please please tell me a plot or I won’t be able to carry on, and then I’ll have wasted all this time.

  Gail seems quite unsurprised at what appears to be a life-or-death confession. She does a kind of squinty-frowny thing that shows she’s thinking hard.

  OK, Max. The way I see it, you have three choices—

  Wait, Maxine says. Halt. I changed my mind. I think I’ll realize I can’t do any of them and then I’ll feel inadequate and discouraged.

  Don’t be so—

  No, no, I mean it. I’m not kidding, don’t tell me, OK?

  Your first choice—

  Lalalalalalalalalalaaaaaaa—

  —is to brazen it out. If someone tells you there’s no plot, act as if it’s a complete surprise. Say:Hello? Frédérique has her hair done?

  You can roll your eyes a little, like obviously they didn’t read it closely enough.

  Are you saying I should pretend there’s a plot?

  Basically. OK now another thing you could do is make one up. Give yourself ten minutes and write any kind of ridiculous story you like. Frédérique is taking her parrot to the vet and on the way her brakes fail and she has to be pried out of
the car with the Jaws of Life and the, uh, the—the fireman, who pops her out of there, he’s just been left by his wife, he dissolves in tears in her lap—she’s fine, not a scratch, but the parrot’s neck is broken, and—

  Firefighter.

  What?

  They call them firefighters these days.

  Oh no honey, this is a fireMAN.

  It sounds good but I think the dead pet thing is you know kind of overdone in fiction— Fine. The parrot lives. It has a broken paw.

  Claw.

  Max, this is not your plot. I’m saying you make your plot up. It doesn’t matter what your plot is. It’s what you do with it.

  Is there one choice left?

  Option Three. Get the paper. Pick a story—pick a couple and squish them together. Now if you go this route, bear in mind that your novel will probably have to include, let me see, a politician, a death, a prize winner and amissing child...Hey, you’ve got the child nailed.

  Oh, ha. Ha.

  I don’t know why you’re so touchy about that. It’s all over.

  Look, this plot. Do you really think anything can happen?

  It doesn’t just happen, Max. You have to make it happen.

  7

  january 2003

  this one looks rather good, says Kyle, who’s just coming off an Enid Blyton phase. I found this one by accident. You win, and then off you go to Paris.

  Really?Maxine leans across the arm of the couch and reads over his shoulder—English language press...thriller competition...one week accommodation...heart of the City of Light. Oh yeah, that looks nice.

  Kyle visits most weekdays now. They’ve long since settled into a pattern. By three-thirty she has finished with the computer and shifted to the couch. Some days she hardly notices he’s there—he’ll come over and play one of his games and go again, and she spends the entire time on the couch with a pen behind her ear, scowling at printed drafts. Other times she’s ready to take a break and have a cup of tea while she watches him excavate a relic or set up one of the weirdly ahistorical battles that pit the Aztecs against Hirohito’s forces. Sometimes she’ll have gone to the corner bakery and chosen them a treat before he arrives.