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Authors: Claire Wilkshire
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wife). She held the banister and looked straight into his dark eyes for what seemed a long time during which it was clear to them both that the ramifications of this act, should she choose it, would not soon subside, and that the experience might well be worth the consequences. She leaned forward a fraction but hesitated. He shrugged.
A shame, he said, Happy Birthday anyway.
Maxine could feel the bristles of his chin on her own fingertips. Almost. But that would be touching.
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 didnât fall in. He did mimic the leaning tower of Pisa in hazardous proximity to the dockâs 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 imminentâthe 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 sheâs read Larryâs Party ; now she knows). To be aware of most potential hazards most of the time is to lug around a great gloomy weight. Itâs 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 didnât 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 wonât be sure who they happened to. No, this is about things that might have happened but didnât. For example, in the supermarket yet again, sheâs 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 hereâs what Maxine would like to happen, what she considersâfor a brief momentâdoing. 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; theyâd 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 sheâs not going to be bossed around by Gail, at least not on that score.)
A shame, he said, Happy Birthday anyway.
Maxine could feel the bristles of his chin on her own fingertips. Almost. But that would be touching.
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 didnât fall in. He did mimic the leaning tower of Pisa in hazardous proximity to the dockâs 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 imminentâthe 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 sheâs read Larryâs Party ; now she knows). To be aware of most potential hazards most of the time is to lug around a great gloomy weight. Itâs 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 didnât 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 wonât be sure who they happened to. No, this is about things that might have happened but didnât. For example, in the supermarket yet again, sheâs 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 hereâs what Maxine would like to happen, what she considersâfor a brief momentâdoing. 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; theyâd 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 sheâs not going to be bossed around by Gail, at least not on that score.)
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