Matrimony by Joshua Henkin Page A

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