Read Maxine for Free Online

Thursday, Maxine has bounced back from whatever bug it was. She needs to work for one more hour before Karen shows up to run. Later she’ll be going to the writing seminar Gail made her sign up for, and then she’ll call Gail to see if she feels like going out for dessert. Going out occasionally is OK. It’s gathering material. If Maxine goes out tonight, though, she’ll have to wait longer next time. Her money will last to the end of the summer if she’s careful, and by then the novel will be done or abandoned, but either way there will be no going back.
    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