Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  “I’m too big for the bed,” Julian admitted.

  Her mother was down the hall, recovering from the chemotherapy; a new round would begin tomorrow. Her father and sister were focused on the details, which was a way to occupy themselves, she understood, but she didn’t want to discuss the details. She just wanted them to admit how frightened they were, but it seemed they weren’t able to. And maybe she wasn’t, either. Last night, she’d stood silently with Olivia in the kitchen, and then she blurted out, “I love you,” and Olivia blurted it back. A discomfort settled between them, a shame almost. What freighted words those were, reserved for so few people sometimes it seemed they were never to be used at all. She recalled being a child, four, five, six when she said those words to her teachers and classmates, when it seemed there wasn’t anybody she didn’t love. Then a hardening set in, a calcifying of the heart, and you didn’t love anyone any longer, or at least you didn’t say you did, so that now she couldn’t remember the last time she’d said those words to anyone besides Julian, when there were other people she loved, her family, certainly.

  She nudged Julian out of bed and they shambled in their pajamas through the house. She felt desperate for him to know her better, felt a conviction that despite having been with her for three years, he didn’t apprehend her at all. From her parents’ bedroom came the sinister whirr of the white-noise machine. She felt somnolent, guiding Julian through a haze from which she feared she would never emerge.

  They stood in her father’s study, where built-in bookshelves rose from the floor to the ceiling, with a library ladder that rolled along a track. And there she was, in the photo on her father’s desk, poised between her parents at a McGill graduation, holding a 7-Up aloft. The faculty brat, surrounded by books. She and Olivia used to play a game, Guess the Number of Books in Dad’s Study, like Guess the Number of Jelly Beans in the Jelly Bean Jar.

  In the den, she flipped on the TV. Only three hours after the fact, Times Square looked abandoned except for the garbage. Now the countdown was being replayed, and the TV, a small black-and-white number with a broken antenna, started to go fuzzy. “You think this is bad,” she said. When she was growing up, her parents’ TV had been even smaller and her father had used a metal hanger to function, sporadically, as an antenna. Her parents had kept the TV in the closet, taking it out only for special occasions—they liked to watch Masterpiece Theatre and Upstairs Downstairs—so that the status quo ante, as her father liked to say, was with the TV in the closet. Though late at night, when she was supposed to be asleep, she would emerge to find her father watching hockey games on tape delay and she would sit down and watch with him. When she was small, her father liked to explain hockey to her, not just the rules of the sport but the physics of the game, the strategic use of angles and the way the puck caromed off the boards, and it seemed to her listening to him that the ideal hockey player was really a physicist.

  She handed Julian a stack of papers. “Look what I came across when I was poking around. My mother’s half-finished dissertation.” It was on onionskin paper, so gossamer she feared it would crumble in his hands.

  “What did she write about?”

  “Ancient Athenian coinage.” Mia stared down at the typed pages. “What a fucking shame.”

  “To write about ancient coins?”

  “No,” she said impatiently. “That she never finished it. It would have taken her another year. Two, at most.”

  “She told you that?”

  Mia nodded. The assumption had been that her mother would finish her dissertation when she got to Montreal and then, who knew, maybe there would be a classics position at McGill. But she never went back to her graduate work. It was one of the things Mia had fought with her about. Mia had sworn she would never be like her mother, would never abandon the city she loved and relinquish her career for her husband’s.

  In the basement, she and Julian swatted a Ping-Pong ball back and forth. They went at it silently, the ball hitting the paddle and the table and the paddle again. Then they climbed the stairs and wandered around the same rooms they’d been in before, moving mindlessly about the house like rodents trundling across a cage.

  Opposite her bed, Sigmund Freud looked down at her paternally. How curious, she thought, to grow up with a poster of Freud in her bedroom when all her friends had plastered their walls with the heartthrobs of the day. Freud had begun his career as a hypnotist, and Mia had been obsessed with hypnotists; there had been one at every Bar and Bat Mitzvah she attended. She would come home from those parties and swing a pendant in front of her parents’ eyes, chanting “You’re getting weary, you’re getting very, very weary” until her parents, utterly unhypnotizable, insisted that she stop.

  She was crouched in her closet, rifling through boxes. “Hebrew School,” said one. “Synagogue,” said another. “My Jewish archives,” she told Julian.

  “You really could read this?” He flipped through the papers with Hebrew lettering on them.

  “I still can,” she said. “Sort of.”

  “My girlfriend the Orthodox Jew.”

  There was a Hillel at Graymont, and she had gone a couple of times to Friday night services, but she found them uninspiring, so she never returned. It had all started with those Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, the hotel ballrooms and the hypnotists, the celebrant’s name emblazoned on the dessert mints. A charade, her father said, retrieving her from one of the parties. He was right, Mia thought; she was convinced this wasn’t Judaism as it was intended. But she didn’t know how Judaism was intended, and she felt suddenly, at age twelve, a disconnection from her faith and past so profound she couldn’t believe she’d never experienced it before. So she joined the local Jewish youth group and came under the sway of an Orthodox rabbi, and soon she was going to synagogue every week.

  She’d driven her father crazy by becoming religious—that, she suspected, had been her real motive—and there had been a protracted battle over her wish to unscrew the lightbulb on Friday afternoons so she could open the fridge on the Sabbath without turning on the light. She unscrewed the lightbulb and her father screwed it back and she unscrewed it again, until her mother intervened and removed the lightbulb, which meant she’d won: there was no light in the refrigerator. And that was how it stayed, even when, a year later, she stopped being religious. Perhaps the lightbulb had been lost, or maybe everyone had just gotten used to a dark refrigerator.

  “And your mother?” Julian said. “She went along with all this?”

  “She was amazing.” And now, hearing that white-noise whirr from her parents’ bedroom, voices, indecipherable, escalating and diminishing, Mia started to grow teary-eyed. She had resolved for the new year not to cry anymore or, at the very least, to cry less than she had been, and she was already breaking her resolution. The year she was religious, her mother had walked with her to synagogue, three miles there and three miles back, because Mia didn’t travel in a car on the Sabbath, and her mother sat with her through the services despite not being religious herself. Her mother purchased kosher meat for her, and two new sets of dishes, one for dairy and one for meat. And earlier, before Mia became observant, her mother had gone with her to the Oasis of the Occult and had lain down in the magician’s box as she’d requested. Her assistant, her beautiful mother, the lady she sawed in half. “Things are only going to get worse,” she told Julian.

  “How can you say that?”

  As if what she said made a difference. It was superstition, this belief that hope had any bearing. Yet she knew she had her own superstitions, for in a way her pessimism was her hope. She would prostrate herself before the god she didn’t believe in, humble herself to the point that she couldn’t be any more lowly, for how could you lay waste to someone who had so utterly given up hope?

  “My mother wants me to shop for a wig with her.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I’m scared. What if I don’t recognize her?”

  “Of course you will.”

  “
Julian, I want you to come with us.”

  He hesitated.

  “Please? Do it for me?”

  At the store, above the cash register, sat rows of torsoless heads with wigs perched on them. In front of Julian, an Orthodox Jewish woman was examining a wig, her six children holding hands behind her, linked like sausages. Next to them stood Mia’s mother; her hair was already starting to fall out, and filaments the color of wheat had landed on her jacket.

  Julian watched Mia’s mother choose a wig. Then Mia was crying and Mia’s mother was, too, and Julian felt like crying, also, listening in on this family that wasn’t his, making their despair his own.

  “You look good,” he told Mia’s mother. “Really, you do.”

  Then Mia seized his hand, was clutching him by the elbow, and Mia’s mother was holding him, too, and he was guiding them out the door and into their car, Mia’s mother’s wig in its box like a cake on her lap as he drove the two of them home.

  January of their senior year of college: the calm before a storm so savage it would deposit her in places she didn’t know existed. The doctors were saying the treatment was working. The tumor had shrunk; it was too early to say “remission,” yet that was what they implied.

  Then February came, and as snow pummeled campus, leaving everyone in drifts, there arrived the news that her mother’s cancer had spread to her spine.

  And in March to her liver.

  An organ a month, Mia thought darkly, and it was true what people said; nothing was more unendurable than the waiting. The doctors tried new kinds of chemotherapy, but all these did was make her mother weaker. There was an experimental therapy, but her mother didn’t qualify, and another one, interferon, she couldn’t endure, and so she was removed from the protocol.

  Mia wanted to drop out of school, but her parents wouldn’t let her. She staggered to class, and once she was there she couldn’t recall having arrived. She was like a drunk driver who had left the party and woke up the next morning not remembering how she’d gotten home. She didn’t care whether she went to class, but she needed to go somewhere. Often Julian would find her wandering like a lunatic on the streets, and he would skip his own classes to accompany her to hers. She had stopped sleeping, and the bags under her eyes were so dark it looked as if someone had hit her.

  Often now, she drove Julian’s car into Worcester and Boston, and sometimes north toward New Hampshire and Maine, with no destination in mind, letting the gas needle dip perilously close to empty. Once a week, she attended a support group for people with a parent who had died of cancer.

  “Your mother hasn’t died,” Julian said.

  “I know that.”

  “What would she say if she knew you were doing this?”

  “I want to prepare myself.”

  “By pretending? Do you talk at these meetings? Do you actually say your mother has died?”

  “You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”

  “But do you?”

  She didn’t answer him.

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because it’s the only cancer support group I know of. Find me a support group for people whose mothers have breast cancer and who are supposed to pretend they’re going to college, and fine, I’ll go to that one.”

  “You’re spying on other people’s pain.”

  “Jesus Christ, Julian, going to these things makes me feel better. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  “Of course it does.”

  “Well?”

  She let him take her back to their room and put her into bed, but he found her an hour later walking down Main Street in the rain, without a raincoat or an umbrella, her shoes waterlogged, mud coating her ankles. Holding his raincoat above her head, he guided her back to their room and into a warm set of clothes. He made her a cup of tea and placed her damp and mumbling into their bed where; still wet himself, he ran a towel across her body.

  Now, more and more, people gave her a wide berth, even her friends, who, not knowing what to say, chose not to say anything.

  “Pilar’s awful,” she told Julian. “The way she stares at me, it’s as if I threw up on her tennis whites.”

  “Her intentions are good.”

  “Well, the road to hell…”

  She found Carter one night alone in the co-op kitchen, warming up food in the microwave.

  “You want some ravioli?”

  She shook her head.

  “They’re Chef Boyardee.”

  “Is that supposed to be an inducement?”

  Carter shrugged.

  “I’m not hungry,” she explained.

  “In general?”

  “No.”

  “A person has to eat.”

  Now Carter was doing the dishes. Mia watched the movement of his shoulder blades as he worked the sponge, the pumping up and down of his clavicle.

  “My mother had breast cancer,” he said.

  “She what?”

  He was silent.

  “You never told me that.”

  He was scrubbing pans and pots that were already clean, doing his best, it was clear, to seem occupied.

  “Is that all you’re going to say?”

  “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  “I mean about your mother.”

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you. I was six when she was diagnosed, and they cured her. I barely even remember it.”

  “You’re so fucking laconic, aren’t you, Carter?”

  “It’s probably encoded in my DNA.”

  “You don’t really believe that.”

  “That we’re genetically programmed?”

  “Oh, forget it,” she said. She didn’t want to have a debate right now about nature versus nurture.

  “We think about you a lot,” Carter said. “Both me and Pilar.”

  “Pilar,” Mia snorted.

  “She’s terrible with illness,” Carter said. “Her appendix burst when she was a kid and she spent two weeks in the hospital. When people are sick she gets the heebie-jeebies. You should see what she’s like when I have the flu.”

  “My mother doesn’t have the flu,” Mia said evenly.

  Carter looked at her as if to say, “Exactly.”

  What, Mia wondered, did Carter want her to say? That she forgave him and Pilar their discomfort? She felt suddenly that they weren’t her friends, that despite all the time they’d spent together, they’d never really cared about her. She wished she were at a big university, but here at Graymont everyone knew her, and when she entered a classroom she could hear the whispers, could see people averting their eyes.

  Carter had cut his hair short, and as he leaned against the refrigerator the back of his head reflected off the metal. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “If there’s anything I can do…” He reached out to hug her. But his arms felt limp around her, and now, stepping away, he shrugged apologetically. “You take care of yourself, Mia.” Then he was out the door and into the garden.

  Over spring break, home in Montreal, she sat down, finally, with her mother’s doctor. “Your mother doesn’t have much longer,” he said.

  Still, his words didn’t shake her, not until her father said them, too, her father who knew nothing compared with the doctors but upon whose resolve she had come to depend. From the start, he had insisted that statistics didn’t matter, the stage of cancer didn’t matter, what the doctors said didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he didn’t believe his wife was going to die. Mia had never seen him cry before, and now, seeing him cry at last, she realized her mother would die soon.

  She turned her mother’s hospital room into a shrine. She unplugged the lamps and lit candles and incense and put on tapes of Native American oboe music and covered the walls with photos of the family. She scoured her parents’ cabinets for the vases she’d made for her mother as a girl and brought them to the hospital and put flowers in them. Then she lay in bed with her mother and read poems to her.

 
“Come back soon, sweetie.”

  “I will.”

  “Promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Swear to me you’ll take care of Olivia. You’re stronger than she is. You’ll be all right.”

  “What about me?” Mia wanted to say. “Who’s going to take care of me?”

  Back on campus she ran into Pilar, who wore a look of such carefully wrought compassion it was as if she’d painted it on. In anthropology class, Mia’s professor had said they lived in a death-denying culture, for sickness had been banished to the silent confines of the hospital, whereas in other cultures it was less feared. That, Mia thought, was what Pilar should do. She needed to immerse herself in death so as to overcome her fear of it. Though Mia realized she needed to do that, too.

  “I’m so sorry,” Pilar said, but before Mia could respond, the words came spooling out of Pilar: at least Mia was getting the chance to tell her mother goodbye.

  “Tell her goodbye?” Mia said. “Do you think that’s what I want to do?”

  “I mean…”

  “Just stop, Pilar. Please.”

  Someone else had said the opposite (“At least you don’t have to see your mother suffer for too long”), and Mia said to Julian, “If another person starts a sentence with the words ‘At least,’ I’m going to throttle them.”

  “Ignore Pilar,” Julian said. “She doesn’t know what to say.”

  Mia lay down and took a nap, and when she awoke she said, “Come with me.” She led Julian out of the co-op and over to campus. They entered a dormitory and went down to the basement, where she held open the door to the laundry room.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Don’t you remember?” she said. “This is where we met. Spring of freshman year.”

  He nodded.

  “Julian, I want us to get married.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I thought you loved me.”

  “You know I do.”