Free Maxine by Claire Wilkshire

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