Amateurs Read Free

equally happy to forget them as soon as they were spoken. A month later, sitting in her saggy lawn chair while one of the more martial football coaches led an exercise called “butt kickers,” she considered, not for the first time, that a benefit of passivity is that there’s nothing to undo, not even names to forget or scraps of paper to throw away.
    â€œAn old friend of mine makes Winnipeg out to be a bohemian Shangri-la,” she told Maxwell nearly a year later.
    â€œWhat’s a Shangri-la?”
    â€œAn earthly paradise from a book I haven’t read.” She didn’t much miss her marriage, but she missed having someone around to challenge her half-truths. The “old friend,” for instance, was more accurately one of her ex-husband’s acquaintances, a hairy-eared flâneur who in the nineties supposedly made a scraggy living recruiting new members into the Columbia Record Club, and who once raved about Winnipeg for several minutes outside a Kinko’s. She remembered staring at his ears. It wasn’t just that they were hairy, but that he confronted the problem with an electric razor, so that his ears sprouted little flattops. “He also said that Winnipeg is the Chicago of Canada.”
    â€œI’ve never been to the Chicago of America,” Maxwell said.
    â€œSo.”
    â€œSo to me the Chicago of Canada is like . . . nothing.”
    â€œI love you.”
    â€œI love you too.”
    â€œBut you have been to the Chicago of America,” she said, “though I guess it was before you had a full concept of selfhood.” Had she and Jason, the ex-husband, known definitively that Maxwell would forget the trip, they might have spent more time looking at art, less time watching fish. She asked Maxwell a few questions about school but learned nothing specific. If she could afford to, she would quit her job and spend the summer with him, though he was getting too old to want that. She often preemptively mourned the passing of his childhood phases: the last time she would understand his math homework without a refresher on operations, the last standing hug in which his head nestled perfectly under her chin, the last time she could climb into bed with him after he was asleep without feeling slightly creepy. She stood up. “I should do some work.”
    â€œOh, okay.” He had green eyes, a haircut like a yak’s.
    She made a subtle show of hesitating. “Do you wanna watch a movie or something? A short one.”
    After the long action movie and Maxwell’s shower, she did her back exercises, took over the bathroom, and swallowed the contents of her pill organizer’s Thursday compartment. Instead of hanging up the wet towel Maxwell had left on the floor, she carried it to his bed, laid it on his pillow, and called him back upstairs to bed. She used her fuzzy-socked big toe to turn on her PC tower, its monitor surrounded by tackboards populated with obsolete notes and allegedly inspirational photos. One of the three small bedrooms on the underlit second story of her old house (1911, she’d say confidently when asked, but really she’d forgotten) was a guest room and office that hardly ever lodged guests or facilitated what would normally be recognized as work. It was thinly furnished. Its status as a guest room could be contested on the grounds that it didn’t have a proper bed, though an innocently bloodstained futon kept the closet door from closing flushly. Only part of the room’s faded balloon-motif wallpaper had been scraped off before a rented steamer was returned at dusk some long-past Sunday; at a later point she and Jason wordlessly concluded that the half-finished job fostered a ruined charm.
    As the computer soughed to its vintage speed, she breathed deeply, trying to suck in the calm, flinty mind-set she was after—whenever she wasn’t after irruptions of disheveled emotion. She opened the document