Matrimony (8 page)

“I’m thinking of doing that,” Carter said.

“You’d be good at it, I suspect. The fact is, I haven’t seen anything you’re not good at.”

Carter tapped his hand against the dashboard, nodding purposefully to the beat.

“If you want to resent someone,” Julian said, “you should resent Pilar.” Pilar’s father, Theodore Brodhead, had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He’d been in attendance at President Johnson’s fifty-seventh birthday party when the White House chef made a cake decorated with the symbols of the Great Society. Pilar’s father had eaten Medicaid.

“Maybe I do resent her,” Carter said.

They were quiet now, and as the fog settled onto the road it was as if they were driving through bags of fleece. The gas needle had dropped and there were no signs anywhere and Julian was afraid they might run out of fuel. “We should probably head back. The girls will be waiting up for us.”

Carter spun the car around, and Julian thought of him and Pilar on his scooter, Carter spending the risk he’d been allotted.

“Did you ever think you’d still be with Mia? Three years after you started to go out?”

Julian shook his head. “What about you and Pilar?”

“Not a chance. Before Pilar, I hadn’t been with anyone for more than three months.”

“We’re the last ones standing,” Julian said. “The only two couples still together from freshman year.”

Julian heard a popping sound, then the whispering ululations of night. A deer stood at the side of the road, looking at them inquisitively. The rain had stopped, and on the pavement lay a puddle of gas rippling out in reds and purples. Carter opened the window and let the breeze in. Julian could see the sign for Graymont.

“Looks like we made it back,” he said. “Tell them to call off the search party.”

“Listen,” Carter said, “we’ve got the rest of this year. It doesn’t matter what happens after we graduate.”

“No one’s going anywhere, Carter. Wherever I am, you can pick up the phone.”

Thanksgiving came,
and a gloom settled over Mia. She was Canadian, so Thanksgiving wasn’t her holiday, and every year its arrival impended earlier: the row of plastic turkeys dangling from a wire above Main Street, strung up by workers the day after Halloween; the annual Thanksgiving ball announced each autumn in
The Graymont Clarion
with more drawn-out ceremony; the Pocahontas Piñata hanging from a tree next to Thompson Hall, waiting for classes to end and the students to eviscerate it.

Yet her reaction surprised her, for she wasn’t someone who usually felt excluded, and with the approach of Christmas, not her holiday either, she joined in the campus Secret Santa rituals without resentment or regret. But Thanksgiving was different, and Canadian Thanksgiving felt like pallid consolation. She could have embraced Canadian pride and its attendant disdain for the United States, but that struck her as banal, a pose; in high school, when she’d traveled over the summer on her Eurail Pass, she had steadfastly refused to be one of her country people who sewed the Canadian flag onto their backpacks. The truth was, she considered herself an honorary American. Her parents had been raised in the United States, and although she’d been happy growing up in Montreal, she’d always borne a dim resentment over how her family had ended up there. Her mother had once said that Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday; these words had made an impression on Mia, who had come to see distilled in her mother’s love of Thanksgiving the pattern of her parents’ journey and of their lives in general, her mother following her father to Montreal, abandoning her career—she’d been studying for a Ph.D. in classics—so he could accept a job teaching physics at McGill. Twenty-five years later, her father had little but contempt for the United States, which he saw as two hundred and fifty million people content to do nothing but eat Big Mac after Big Mac. For him, Joe McCarthy equaled Vietnam equaled McDonald’s equaled Disneyland equaled Ronald Reagan calling in the National Guard in 1968.

Yet it was in the United States that Mia’s parents had met, in graduate school, at Harvard, less than two hours from where she was now. In coming to Graymont, she saw herself as reversing her parents’ course, returning to the place where her mother had grown up and where she’d visited her grandparents over school vacations. From the start, Northington had felt like home to her, but then Thanksgiving would come and leave her feeling displaced. This, her senior year, there had been talk of staying on campus and celebrating Thanksgiving with friends, but when Carter joined Pilar in Connecticut, she resolved to go with Julian to New York.

Mia liked Julian’s parents, but she felt acutely that this wasn’t her family and, worse, that it wasn’t really a family at all. In her mind, Thanksgiving involved a throng of children surrounded by uncles, aunts, and cousins, and she felt bad for Julian and his parents, for their feeble approximation of a Thanksgiving meal, the four of them sitting around a turkey too large to consume, engaged in what felt like play-acting. Living alone must have been like this, the pretense of laying out a table for one’s own solitude, and she thought, depressingly, that if she ever lived alone she would subsist on Cheetos and late-night pizza, that she would always be eating off Styrofoam.

Later that night, in bed with Julian, she said, “I found tonight depressing.”

“The meal?”

“Everything. It’s not your parents, Julian. God knows they’re nice to welcome me.” Outside, she could hear the keening of an ambulance, then a choir of voices waxing and subsiding. Julian’s figure was lumplike, his breath expelled from the pillow next to hers, the smell of turkey and candied yams.

At the window now, Julian pressed his hands against the glass, leaving big mitts of condensation. “What do you think? No sneaking around this year?”

It had come as a shock to her that his parents hadn’t set up the guest room as they always did, that they’d helped carry her suitcase into his bedroom. No one said anything, but it was understood: this year they were allowed to sleep together. “We’re twenty-one,” she said. “Officially adults.”

When Julian visited Montreal, they never had to sneak around at night; from the start, her parents had let them stay in the same bedroom. Even when she was in high school, her parents had allowed her to sleep with her boyfriend. So it surprised her to miss the old ritual, she and Julian whispering late at night with his bedroom door locked, the sleepless whiling away of the hours as they stood half-clad in front of Julian’s window looking down at the people dotting York Avenue. Mia felt in a deep way that she was growing up, that she’d become an adult without having realized it. Already she and Julian alternated holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas in New York, New Year’s and spring break in Montreal. “Where do you think you’ll be next Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t know,” Julian said. “How about you?”

“Me, either.” She loved Julian—she’d never doubted it—but she wasn’t sure what this translated into now that they were graduating. She tried to imagine the two of them married, a lifetime of dividing holidays. In a way she could envision it all too easily, but the exercise was speculative, undertaken in the same curious, abstracted way she’d always done it, with any boy she’d ever been with. She’d never really given marriage much thought, and the more time passed the less seriously she took it, as if the fact that she was getting older, closer, presumably, to actually getting married, no longer accommodated the fantasy. She’d read that most college students met their spouses in college, but “college students” included junior college students and state college kids from Oklahoma and Nebraska, and she understood that people like her, at schools like Graymont, didn’t marry their college boyfriends. Doing so seemed fantastical and quaint, not all that different from marrying the boy next door or even from the dimly exotic world of dowries and arranged marriages, of parents conscripting the town elders to marry their children off, as had been done for her great-grandparents in Eastern Europe. “What happens, happens,” she liked to say. But sometimes she wondered what was
going
to happen. With the exception of the year after she graduated from high school, the year she spent in France, everything she’d done had been a matter of course: school, school, and more school. It had always struck her as uninventive, all that studying, but now, finally, when she had to invent something, she wasn’t sure how to do it.

“You can drive up with me tomorrow if you’d like.” She was going home to see her parents in Montreal.

“Do you want me to?”

“I always want you to, Julian. You know that.”

But the truth was she was content to go alone, and Julian, seeming to sense this, allowed her to. It was what she’d done the last couple of years, spending Thanksgiving with Julian’s family, then going home for the remainder of the weekend.

It was after midnight when she arrived. Olivia stood in the kitchen with her back to her, washing dishes. She had headphones over her ears, she was in her leotard, and her hair, pale as butternut, rested wet on her shoulders.

“Olivia,” Mia said. “Sweetie.”

Olivia spun around. Her sister the dancer—she even extinguished the water with élan—and Mia had an epiphany: this was what she would do when she graduated. She would move back to Montreal and get to know her sister, not simply in the way she’d known her before she left home, when she was seventeen and Olivia was twelve and knowing Olivia was the least consequential thing she could imagine. But she realized this wouldn’t happen. She didn’t want to move back to Montreal, and Olivia would be a senior next year—she was thinking of going to Juilliard, or maybe, to her parents’ consternation, simply moving to New York—with her own indifference to attend to.

“Look at you,” Mia said. “In your leotard at one in the morning.”

Olivia took a fistful of her hair, as if to wring it out. “Mom and Dad think I’ve turned the house into a gym.”

“No pain, no gain?”

Olivia raised her hands above her head and did a pirouette.

“How are you, Ol?”

“I’m all right.”

“And Mom and Dad? Are they still driving you crazy?”

“They’ve turned it into a science.”

“You’ll be getting out soon.”

“Not soon enough.”

Olivia had begged Mia to apply to McGill. But Mia had never seriously considered McGill and she quietly dismissed Olivia’s pleas as the exaggerated entreaties of a twelve-year-old. And maybe they’d been that. Though now Mia wondered whether, if she’d stayed in Montreal, things might have been easier for Olivia, who fought with their parents, especially their father, over her increasing commitment to dance. What they were really fighting about, Olivia said, was that she wasn’t as good a student as Mia was. Their father had been the valedictorian of every school he’d attended; he’d never gotten a B in his life. But Olivia’s grades were middling, and every time she brought home a report card her father was baffled anew.

Mia held up two turkey sandwiches in Baggies. “Look,” she said. “Smuggled across the border from Manhattan.”

“Zabar’s?”

“Wainwright’s. They’re leftovers from Thanksgiving. Julian’s mother packed them for me.”

“How
is
Julian?”

“He’s good.”

“So when is he going to come rescue me?”

“What do you mean?”

“He could take me to New York,” Olivia said. “Do you think he’ll let me rent out his bedroom?”

“Olivia, what would you do on the Upper East Side? It’s all ladies with frosted hair wearing beaver stoles. Believe me, it isn’t SoHo.”

“It isn’t Montreal, either.”

“A city that doesn’t know how to make a bagel?” Montreal bagels were dipped in sugar water and cooked in ovens. They were more like doughnuts, Mia understood, but since she liked doughnuts she liked these, too. The fact was, Montreal’s denizens claimed their bagels were the best in the world, and St.-Viateur Bagel had become a tourist destination. They weren’t, however, to Olivia’s liking. Olivia was always saying that someday she, too, would move to the United States and share an apartment with Mia—in New York, or San Francisco, or Chicago, or New Orleans, anywhere but Montreal.

“Eat up,” Mia said. Julian’s mother had placed toothpicks in the sandwiches, and the bread looked anchored to the plate.

Now, watching Olivia perched on a stool, her legs like a foal’s dangling down from her, Mia realized her sister had lost weight. “You look so thin.”

“Dancers need to be thin.”

“So do anorexics.”

Olivia removed a carton of milk from the fridge. “I’m not anorexic, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“You promise me?”

Olivia dutifully ate her turkey sandwich. Then, for good measure, she finished the last couple of bites of Mia’s sandwich, too. “Are you happy?”

Mia smiled at her.

“I have to go,” Olivia said.

“Where to?”

“Off to throw up my food.”

“Olivia!”

“I’m only kidding.”

Later, wandering sleepily through the house, Mia found Olivia’s door closed, the music playing low, the quiet murmur of her sister on the telephone. Tacked to the door was a “Hazardous Waste” sign Olivia had filched from the high school chemistry lab. It was the bedroom of a teenager, when Mia still remembered the frills and bows and stuffed animals, the blue-green tank that housed Olivia’s turtle, which she’d named Rocket, after Maurice “The Rocket” Richard. Their father was a die-hard Montreal Canadiens fan and Mia and Olivia had become hockey fans, too. Before the games, they would walk around the house in their Canadiens jerseys in anticipation of a night in front of the TV. “My hockey Martians,” Mia’s mother called them. “One of these days, you’ll be watching the game wearing ice skates.”

That weekend, it was for hockey that Olivia emerged from her bedroom and they all stayed up late in front of the TV. The rest of the time Olivia was gone, and it was just Mia and her parents, her father with
The New York Review of Books
and the
TLS,
her mother reading a novel, Mia going through old mail. Collapsed on the couch, in the house she’d lived in her whole life, Mia felt as if everything else had receded and the world, not unpleasantly, was shrinking in on her, swaddling her in its silent diversions.

Back at school, she studied for her finals in the college library, alternating between the carrels and the sectional couches, which, like the treadmills at the gym, now generated long lines of waiting students.

“It’s rush hour,” Julian said. It was one in the morning. Someone had tacked a sign-up sheet above the couches with the words “Orchestra Seats” in bold letters, and people had started to sign their names on the list.

“It’s crazy,” Mia said. She found tests insulting; she believed in learning for learning’s sake (Graymont purportedly did as well; that was the idea behind the pass-fail option, which she, to her regret, had declined), but the words sounded trite to her, uttered by generations of students before her who nonetheless took their exams with the same mute resentment she felt.

“It’s flash card time,” Julian said, unfurling a sheaf of flash cards and waving them in front of her.

“Anthropology?” Mia said.

“How about Semiotics? Or Western Civ?”

Back at the house, they found Carter and Pilar with their own set of flash cards, which Carter flung like Frisbees across the garden. “It’s an art installation,” Carter said. “I’ve gotten funding from the NEA.”

With finals approaching, the four of them had started to play backgammon. Carter would stand in the hot tub and place the board on his head and the rest of them would play as if he were the table.

“I’ve got a flat head,” Carter reasoned. “I’m good at balancing things.”

“Carter has a lot of useless talents,” said Pilar.

Carter smiled dolefully. “Am I pathetic or what?”

“Pathetic and bathetic,” Julian said.

“What’s the difference?” said Pilar.

“Pathos,” Julian said, “is the sight of Heinz with a backgammon board on his head. Bathos is when he capsizes.” He shoved Carter off-balance, sending him and the backgammon board careening into the water.