Matrimony by Joshua Henkin

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