Matrimony by Joshua Henkin Page B

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.