Dual Citizens Read online

  ALSO BY ALIX OHLIN

  The Missing Person

  Babylon and Other Stories

  Inside

  Signs and Wonders

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Alix Ohlin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Nancy Willard, in care of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Swimming Lessons” from Swimming Lessons: New and Selected Poems by Nancy Willard, copyright © 1996 by Nancy Willard.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ohlin, Alix, author.

  Title: Dual citizens : a novel / Alix Ohlin.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018058308 | ISBN 9780525521891 (hardcover) ISBN 9780525654629 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Self-realization in women—Fiction. | Domestic fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Coming of Age.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.H57 D83 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018058308

  Ebook ISBN 9780525654629

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Bauer Syndication / Alamy

  Cover design by Gabriele Wilson

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Alix Ohlin

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Before

  Part Two: Childhood

  Part Three: Motherhood

  Part Four: After

  Acknowledgments

  for PTOR

  Editing—even on a more “normal” film—is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of a path.

  —WALTER MURCH, IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

  Little Red Riding Hood: A wolf and a person aren’t the same thing.

  Witch: Ask a wolf’s mother.

  —JAMES LAPINE, INTO THE WOODS

  My heart is not afraid of deep water.

  It is wearing its life vest,

  that invisible garment of love

  and trust, and it tells you this story.

  —NANCY WILLARD, “SWIMMING LESSONS”

  PART ONE

  Before

  The story of Scottie’s life—which is, of course, the story of my life too—begins with my sister Robin. It’s strange how little we talk about it now. Of the three of us, I’m the only one who dwells on our history, probably because I’m the one who chose and formed it. If I bring up that day in the Laurentians, Robin says she doesn’t remember much about it. I find this impossible to imagine. For me, the opposite is true, with every detail lodged unwaveringly in my memory, recorded in detail, like a film I can replay at any time.

  It goes like this: a sunny day in June, the leafy heat of summer at odds with my frozen terror as I stood fixed to the ground. The air thick and still as a wall against Robin’s ragged breath.

  And the wolf my sister had named Catherine inspecting us both with her yellow eyes.

  Robin was thirty-eight weeks pregnant at the time, and she’d just irritably informed me that pregnancy lasted ten months, not nine. She was angry about this, as if there had been a conspiracy to keep her misinformed. She was angry in general, because she was hot and uncomfortable and couldn’t sleep. We were walking down a trail behind her house that led to a canopy of pine trees, hoping the air would be cooler there. Walking was all Robin wanted to do, although she complained about this, too: her hips hurt, her knees hurt, her ribs hurt. Complaining wasn’t typical of my sister, who was stoically, even savagely independent, and it worried me. We stopped every few steps so she could catch her breath, and when we did, I watched her stroke her belly; she wasn’t in other ways tender toward the baby inside her, or herself.

  She frowned. “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re touching yourself,” she said.

  I hadn’t realized until then that I was imitating her, making myself a mirror. My palm was flat against my own stomach, though there was nothing to stroke. I flushed with embarrassment, and my sister gave her harsh bark of a laugh.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I get it.”

  But how could she get it? She didn’t live in my body any more than I could live in hers. We stood body to body, sister to sister, across an impossible divide.

  To change the subject, I began telling her about a cache of old films that had been discovered in a permafrost landfill beneath an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. Dating from the early twentieth century, the films had belonged to a movie house. Back in those days, I said, movies traveled from California to cities like Calgary and Vancouver before heading to Whitehorse and eventually reaching the mining community in Dawson City, at which point it made no sense to ship them back to their point of origin. So they accumulated there, an accidental archive. The films were made of cellulose nitrate, a material known to disintegrate, melt, even spontaneously combust. If they hadn’t been buried below the rink—nestled alongside chicken wire and dirt and bits of wooden debris—they might have burned the whole town down.

  “Movies used to explode?” Robin said.

  I nodded. I told her how the movie house went out of business and dumped the films, which were found decades later by a backhoe operator clearing the land for a new recreation center. The story fascinated me, with its unlikely combination of flammable film and icy bedrock, of preservation by neglect, how a town had maintained its history by forgetting it. Most silent films of that era have been lost to fire or decay, but abandonment saved these ones. As for my sister, she’d heard me go on about this kind of trivia for years—I was a collector of arcane information, especially anything relating to film—and I suppose she must have been used to it. She was listening now, so quietly that it took me longer than it should have to notice something was wrong.

  Her eyes were trained on a point behind my head. “Look,” she said.

  We saw the wolf trot out of the forest like a lost dog looking for its home. From her strange gait, one leg hobbled, we knew it was Catherine. Her grey-brown fur looked knotted and flat, her body narrow-hipped and sinewy. It was possible, we thought later, that she was searching for her pack. To me it hardly matters; her motives aren’t my concern. What I remember is her graceless stagger, and how quickly she moved despite it. How when she bore down on us, so close that I could see her eyes, I couldn’t tell whether she recognized us, whether the bond Robin had nurtured with her was sturdy, or significant, or the slightest bit present in her mind.

  What happened next was my fault.

  The wolf ran toward Robin as if to jump on her, and I pulled my sister sharply to the side, scared for both her and the baby. Robin wrestled against me—wanting to greet Catherine, I guess, or at least to see her close-up. A fit of vertigo washed over me then, the sky and earth changing places; everything solid jellied and spun. I clung to whatever I could grasp as my
vision hazed, and inside my ears was the crash and roll of some invisible ocean. I think I grabbed Robin’s shoulder, but it might have been her leg—that’s how disoriented I was. In the push and pull between us Robin lost her balance, stumbled, and fell. The wolf kept going, running past us as if we didn’t even exist.

  Slowly my eyes cleared, and the ground assembled itself beneath me. Vertigo passing is like an earthquake in reverse: pieces knit themselves back together, the world unshudders and comes to rest.

  Next to me, Robin moaned, a terrible, keening sound.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  She didn’t answer. Her face was an ashy color I’d never seen before, and she pressed a hand to her belly again, the gesture not gentle this time.

  I cradled my sister’s head in my lap but she seemed hardly to notice my presence, much less be eased by it. Her body was hot to my touch, her hair sticking wetly to my hand.

  Then we heard the rest of the pack begin to vocalize in rolling harmonics, whether in greeting to Catherine or for some other reason. Their silvery howls rose and fell, rose and fell. I thought it was spooky, but Robin’s face relaxed and she opened her eyes. What I found wild, she found a comfort, and that had always been a difference between us.

  “Where’s Catherine?” she said.

  I told her I didn’t know; the wolf had gone. My sister struggled to sit up, and I could see she was hurting, but there was no stopping her from standing. There had never been any stopping Robin from whatever she wanted to do. She got to her feet, though her knees buckled once and she had to brace herself against me as I tried and failed to coax her back to the house.

  Only my sister would have ignored going into labor in order to look for a wolf. Only my sister would have asked, through the pain, “Where did she go?”

  PART TWO

  Childhood

  1.

  It seems to me now, as I look back, that my sister was never entirely tame. When we were children, Robin often disappeared for an hour, an afternoon, a day. Our mother, who was rarely home, didn’t notice, but I was bothered by these absences. I nursed a passion for regularity; I craved fixed mealtimes and weekday routines. Every Wednesday I went to the pizza parlor down the block from our apartment and, using the crinkled bills our mother left scattered on the counter, bought a pizza, carried it home in a white box loose-bottomed with grease, and waited. I only did this on Wednesdays. On Tuesdays my class had library time and on Thursdays we had art. I liked the library and art, but I loved knowing what was coming next. In my mind each day wore a color—purple for library, orange for pizza, a splatter of yellow for art—that stitched the week into a rainbow, into structure and sense. Even at that age I was a collector of patterns, a magpie in search of scraps.

  Our mother, Marianne, was vexed by my expectations. If I asked her when she’d be home, she wouldn’t answer, finding the question unreasonable. She considered it a form of imprisonment to say where she was going or why, and as the young mother of two young children she’d already been imprisoned enough. At least that’s what I think now. At the time, I thought she resented us, and contrived one reason or another to be away from us as much as she could. Which may also have been true.

  Marianne was beautiful. She had long shiny black hair that she wore loose or in a flat ponytail tied at the base of her neck, and either way you could see her high pale forehead and dark brown eyes. Years later, at a museum in New York, I came across Giacometti’s tall, spindly bronze sculptures of women and burst into tears, because they reminded me so much of her: thin but not fragile, flesh hard as metal, unembraceable. She didn’t enjoy being touched, at least not by us. She came from a rigid Catholic family, the dual strands of Irish and French-Canadian tradition forcefully interwoven, and I suspect her father had laid a hand on her more than once when she was growing up. Her mother was equally severe. When Marianne was fifteen she began fighting with them, protesting that her older brothers were given freedoms and futures denied to her. Her parents wanted her to get married as soon as possible; that was the extent of their hopes. Instead, she left their cramped apartment near the Farine Five Roses Flour sign and moved in with a friend whose parents were more permissive. She dropped out of school and got a job at a record store, where she charmed anyone who came in for a listen. She knew every band and every album. I’ll say this for Marianne, whatever her faults: she filled our home with music. She had a Magnavox turntable and a collection of albums she “borrowed” from the store, rotating the stock in her personal library, so we grew up listening to everything from Félix Leclerc to Mahler to the Rolling Stones.

  It was at the record store that she met my father, Todd, who’d come to Montreal from Vermont; although the draft for the Vietnam War had ended two years earlier, he maintained conscientious objections to American warmongering. He was, according to Marianne, very handsome and not very smart. She had no pictures to show me, so I was left to conjure him based on her description: a curly-haired puppy of a boy, nineteen years old, who wore plaid shirts and a sheepskin jacket unbuttoned despite the cold. They spent most of their time together with his friends. She enjoyed this, the feeling of being apart from her own background, of breaking ties to the past without even having to leave town. When they discovered she was pregnant, Todd whooped with happiness, she told me, and I have no reason to doubt her; she never once lied to protect my feelings.

  They didn’t marry, because marriage was a corrupt institution of the bourgeoisie, a fading remnant of the old order, and they put my mother’s last name, Brossard, on my birth certificate. Todd stayed in Montreal long enough to bestow upon me his American citizenship and a collection of rare coins he’d brought along from Vermont, thinking he could sell them to support us. They were worth less than he’d imagined and so, I gather, were we. One morning Marianne woke up to find him gone, leaving a garbled and poorly written note that she tore up in irritation and whose contents she could not, years later, remember.

  I’ve never looked for my father. I like to think he has regrets, that sometimes he wakes at night believing someone has spoken to him, a voice he doesn’t know but nonetheless recognizes; that sometimes, when he sees a woman my age, he wonders if that’s what his daughter looks like, walks like. This is my right, to think about him as I please, since he’s never been around to contradict me.

  * * *

  —

  After he left, we were alone together. Another girl of that era, adolescent and abandoned, might have turned to her family for help, but not Marianne. Finding herself a single mother only reaffirmed her break from her background, her stalwart refusal of their judgment and values. Her parents, Cathleen and Jean-Louis, didn’t even know she’d had a baby until they encountered her on Sherbrooke Street pushing me in a pram one Saturday afternoon. Marianne was wearing what she called, with the fond nostalgia she reserved for herself, “an outrageous costume”: something like a flapper dress, hung with beads that shook when she moved, and platform sandals, and a feather in her hair. She’d come to think of life as performance. Calmly, she kissed them each on both cheeks. Jean-Louis sputtered wordlessly; Cathleen burst into tears. Their reaction seemed to have as much to do with her appearance as with the baby.

  Marianne lifted a corner of the blanket one of her friends had crocheted for me and explained that the father was an American, that they’d named me in memory of the summer days they’d spent in La Fontaine Park when she was pregnant, listening to the sounds of birds. So it could have been worse—I might have been a cardinal or a dove—but my name infuriated Marianne’s parents, as she must have known it would. The fact that in French it was the name of the Montreal football team only added to the offense.

  Marianne didn’t care. “That’s her name,” she announced on the street, “whether you like it or not.”

  This story was one of her favorites, and I used to beg her to tell it when she was putting me to sleep, knowing it made h
er tender, that she’d caress my cheek with a finger.

  “Mais qu’est-ce ça veux dire, alouette?” cried her perplexed, angry father. “What kind of a name is Lark?”

  2.

  To keep a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs, Marianne took a number of jobs: hairdresser, waitress, coat-check girl. She was good with people and did well with tips. She was less good at showing up on time, or at being told what to do. Sometimes, when she was between jobs, we ate at soup kitchens or the homes of friends. When things got dire she’d sell her costume jewelry at a stand in the flea market, taking the money to the nearest diner, where we’d devour grilled cheese sandwiches as she filled her purse with oyster crackers and jelly packets. But she was rarely without work for long; her charm always saw her through.

  After Todd left, she talked herself into a job as a secretary at a bank downtown, and it was at this position that she met Bob Johnson, of Fox Run, Minnesota, who became her husband and Robin’s father.

  Bob was older than my mother—at thirty years old, he seemed ancient—and the opposite of Todd. A creature of habit, he ate a seven-minute egg and a slice of buttered toast with the crusts cut off for breakfast every day. I was fascinated by how the perfect rectangle of his bread disappeared neatly between his perfect rectangular teeth. He was quite handsome, with thick, wavy brown hair and high cheekbones that my mother claimed were traceable to his Dakota Sioux ancestry. Although it was 1979 when they met, he dressed like a movie idol from the fifties, in slim-cut pants and collared shirts with sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

  After they married in a small ceremony at the Palais de Justice, we moved to a tidy, well-kept apartment in Rosemount. I ought to have been happy, because my mother had, inexplicably, chosen a man whose attraction to routine was even stronger than my own. Bob liked a roast on Sundays. He liked a single glass of whiskey while he watched the evening news. He liked to think he was rescuing us from a life of poverty. He liked gratitude.