Vinegar Girl (11 page)

“Right,” he said. He was less practiced than Bunny at faking self-righteous innocence. He flushed and looked glumly down at his knees.

“She can only see boys in groups.”

“Right.”

Bunny said, “But he’s my—”

“And don’t tell me he’s your tutor, because why did I have to sign your D-plus Spanish test yesterday?”

“It’s the subjunctive?” Bunny said. “I just never have gotten the hang of the subjunctive?” She seemed to be asking whether there was any chance this explanation might be convincing.

Kate turned on her heel and walked out. Before she was halfway across the hall, though, Bunny had jumped up from the couch and come after her. “Are you saying we can’t see each other anymore?” she asked. “He’s just visiting me at my house! We’re not going out on dates or anything.”

“The guy must be twenty years old,” Kate told her. “You don’t find anything wrong with that?”

“So? I’m fifteen years old. A very
mature
fifteen.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Kate told her.

“You’re just jealous,” Bunny said. She was following Kate through the dining room now. “Just because you have to settle for Pyoder—”

“His name is Pyotr,” Kate said through her teeth. “You might as well learn to pronounce it right.”

“Well, la-di-da to you, Miss Frilling-Your-
r
s. At least
I
didn’t have to rely on my father to find me a boyfriend.”

By the time she was saying this, they had reached the kitchen. The two men glanced over at them, surprised. “Your daughter is a jerk,” Bunny told their father.

“I beg your pardon?”

“She is a snoopy, jealous, meddlesome jerk, and I refuse to—and
now
look!”

Her attention had been snagged by something outside the window. The rest of them turned to see Edward slinking past with his shoulders hunched, veering beneath the redbud tree to cross to his own house.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” Bunny told Kate.

“Why is it,” Dr. Battista asked Pyotr, “that whenever I’m around women for any length of time, I end up asking, ‘What just happened here?’ ”

“That is extremely sexist of you,” Pyotr said sternly.

“Don’t blame
me
,” Dr. Battista said. “I base the observation purely on empirical evidence.”

Hi Kate! We went to get marriage license!

Who’s we?

Your Father and I.

Well I hope you’ll be very happy together.

“How do you do, Pyoder?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“Um!” Kate broke in.

Too late, though. “I have been having very bad allergy, but now am feeling better,” Pyotr said. “It was maybe the smelly wooden material they put on the ground around bushes.”

“Mulch, we call that,” Aunt Thelma informed him. “M-U-L-C-H. It’s meant to hold the moisture in during our long hot summers. But I very much doubt that that could be what you’re allergic to.”

It always made Aunt Thelma happy when she could set somebody straight. And Pyotr was smiling into her face so widely and so steadily, clearly preconditioned to adore her—just the sort of thing she found appealing. Maybe the evening would go better than Kate had imagined.

They were assembled in the entrance hall: Kate and her father and Pyotr, and Aunt Thelma and her husband, Uncle Barclay. Aunt Thelma was a tiny, pretty woman in her early sixties, with a smooth blond bob and very bright makeup. She wore a beige silk pantsuit and a filmy, color-splashed scarf wound several times around her neck and flung back over her shoulders. (Kate used to fantasize that her aunt’s perennial scarves were meant to hide something—a past surgery or, who knows, maybe a couple of fang marks.) Uncle Barclay was lean and handsome and gray-haired, wearing an expensive-looking gray suit. He headed a high-powered investment firm and seemed to find Dr. Battista and his daughters humorously quaint, like something in a small-town natural history museum. Now he watched them with an indulgent smile, slouching gracefully in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, which caused an elegant drape in the hem of his suit coat.

The rest of them had dressed up to the extent of their abilities. Kate wore her denim skirt with one of her plaid shirts. Pyotr was in jeans—foreign jeans, belted exactly at his waist and ballooning around his legs—but he had added a crisply ironed white shirt and his shoes were not his usual running shoes but snub-nosed brown Oxfords. Even Dr. Battista had made an effort. He had put on his one suit, which was black, and a white shirt and a spindly black tie. He always looked so thin and uncertain when he was out of his beloved coveralls.

“This is very exciting,” Aunt Thelma began, at the same time that Kate said, “Let’s go to the living room.” She and Aunt Thelma frequently experienced an overlapping-speech problem. “Uncle Theron’s already here,” Kate said as she led the way.

“
Is
he,” Aunt Thelma said. “Well, he must have shown up too early, then, because Barclay and I are exactly on time.”

Since Uncle Theron had indeed arrived early, by special arrangement so that they could discuss the ceremony, Kate had nothing to say to this.

Aunt Thelma sailed ahead of the rest of them and entered the living room with both arms outstretched, ready to engulf Bunny, who was just rising from the couch. “Bunny, dear!” Aunt Thelma said. “Gracious! Aren’t you chilly?”

It was the first really hot day of the year, and Bunny couldn’t possibly be chilly. Aunt Thelma was merely pointing out the skimpiness of her sundress, which was the length of a normal person’s shirt and tied at the shoulders with huge, perky bows that resembled angel wings. Also, her sandals had no backs to them. A no-no.

One of Aunt Thelma’s many instructions to the girls over the years had been: Never wear backless shoes for a social occasion. It was second only to Rule Number One: Never, ever, under any circumstances apply lipstick while at the table. All of Aunt Thelma’s rules were etched permanently in Kate’s mind, although by natural preference Kate owned no backless shoes anyhow and she never wore lipstick.

Bunny, though, tended not to catch Aunt Thelma’s subtexts. She just said, “No, I’m sweltering!” and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Hi, Uncle Barclay,” she said, and she gave him a peck too.

“Theron,” Aunt Thelma said regally, as if granting a dispensation. Uncle Theron had risen from his chair and was standing with his chubby, blond-furred hands clasped in front of his crotch. He and Aunt Thelma were twins, which explained their alliterative names if not their baby sister’s, but Aunt Thelma had “come out first,” as she always put it, and she had the firstborn’s self-assured edge to her while Theron was a timid man who had never married or, it seemed, had any serious experiences in life. Or maybe he’d just failed to realize if he
had
had them. He always seemed to be blinking at something, as if he were trying to get his mind around the most ordinary human behavior, and in the nonministerial, short-sleeved yellow shirt that he was wearing tonight he had a peeled, defenseless look.

“Aren’t you excited?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

“Excited,” he repeated in a worried way.

“We’re marrying off our Kate! You
are
a dark horse, aren’t you?” she said to Kate as she settled herself in an armchair. Pyotr, meanwhile, dragged the rocker he had been sitting on closer to Aunt Thelma. He still had his eyes trained expectantly on her face; he was still beaming. “We didn’t even know you had a beau,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “We were afraid Bunny might beat you to the altar.”

“Bunny?” Dr. Battista said. “Bunny’s fifteen years old.” The corners of his mouth were turned down, and he still hadn’t taken a seat. He was standing in front of the fireplace.

“Sit, Father,” Kate said. “Aunt Thelma, what can I get you to drink? Uncle Theron’s having ginger ale.”

She mentioned the ginger ale because she had just learned that her father had picked up only one bottle of wine—her mistake, entrusting him with the errand—and she was hoping no one would ask for any wine until dinner. But her aunt said, “White wine, please,” and then turned to Pyotr, who was still waiting with bated breath for any pearls that might drop from her lips. “Tell us, now,” she said, “how—?”

“We only have red,” Kate said.

“Red it will have to be, then. Pyoder, how—?”

“Uncle Barclay?” Kate said.

“Yes, I’ll have some red.”

“
How
did you and Kate meet?” Aunt Thelma finally managed to ask.

Pyotr said promptly, “She came to Dr. Battista’s lab. I expected nothing. I thought, ‘Living at home, no boyfriend…’ Then she appeared. Tall. Hair like Italian movie star.”

Kate left the room.

When she returned with the wine, Pyotr had moved on to her inner qualities and Aunt Thelma was smiling and nodding and looking charmed. “She is somewhat like the girls at home,” he was saying. “Honest. Tells what she is thinking.”

“
I’ll
say,” Aunt Thelma murmured.

“But in truth she is kindhearted. Thoughtful.”

“Why, Kate!” Aunt Thelma said in a congratulatory tone.

“Takes care of people,” Pyotr went on. “Tends small children.”

“Ah. And will you continue with that?” Aunt Thelma asked Kate as she accepted her wine.

Kate said, “What?”

“Will you continue at the preschool once you’re married?”

“Oh,” Kate said. She had thought Aunt Thelma was asking how long she could keep up her charade. “Yes, of course.”

“She does not need to,” Pyotr said. “I can support her,” and he flung out one arm in a grand gesture, nearly knocking over his glass. (He too had opted for wine, unfortunately.) “If she likes, she may retire now. Or go to college! Go to Hopkins! I will pay. She is my responsibility now.”

“What?” Kate said. “I’m not your responsibility! I’m my own responsibility.”

Aunt Thelma tut-tutted. Pyotr just smiled around the room at the others, as if inviting them to share his amusement.

“Good girl,” Uncle Barclay said unexpectedly.

“Well, once you have children that will be a moot point anyhow,” Aunt Thelma said. “May I ask what wine we’re drinking, Louis?”

“Eh?” Dr. Battista was giving her a distressed look.

“This wine is delicious.”

“Oh,” he said.

He didn’t seem all that thrilled to hear it, even though it might have been the first compliment Aunt Thelma had ever paid him.

“Tell me, Pyoder,” Aunt Thelma said, “will any of your family be coming to the wedding?”

“No,” Pyotr said, still beaming at her.

“Old classmates, then? Colleagues? Friends?”

“I do have friend from my institute, but he is in California,” Pyotr said.

“Oh! Are you close?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“He is in California.”

“I mean…is he someone you’d want at your wedding?”

“No, no, that would be ridiculous. Wedding is five minutes.”

“Oh, surely it will last longer than
that
.”

Uncle Theron said, “Take his word for it, Thelma; they’ve asked for the stripped-down version.”

“My kind of ceremony,” Uncle Barclay said approvingly. “Short and sweet.”

“Hush, Barclay,” Aunt Thelma told him. “You don’t mean that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event! That’s why I can’t believe that you and I are not invited.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Aunt Thelma’s own social instincts got the better of her; she was the one who spoke up. “Tell us, Kate, what will you wear?” she asked. “I would love to take you shopping.”

“Oh, I think I’m set,” Kate said.

“I know you couldn’t have hoped to fit into the dress your poor mother wore to
her
wedding…”

Kate wished that, just once, Aunt Thelma would refer to her mother without using the word “poor.”

Maybe her father felt the same way, because he interrupted to ask, “Isn’t it time to get supper on the table?”

“Yes, Father,” Kate said.

As she stood up, Uncle Theron was asking Pyotr whether he was allowed to practice religion in his country. “Why I would want to do that?” Pyotr said, looking honestly curious.

Kate felt glad to be leaving the room.

The men had done the cooking earlier that afternoon—sautéed chicken on a bed of grated jicama, drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce since the other evening’s maple syrup had not been deemed a success. All Kate had to do was set the platter out on the table and toss the salad. As she walked back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she caught snatches of the talk in the living room. She heard Uncle Theron utter the phrase “premarital counseling,” and she stiffened, but then Pyotr said, “Is so confusing, the two types of ‘counsel.’ I am mixed up how to spell them,” and Aunt Thelma was delighted to jump in and give him an English lesson, so the moment passed. Kate wasn’t sure whether he’d changed the subject on purpose.

He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “
jumped the
gun
!” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.

He was still undeniably foreign, though. Even his posture was foreign; he walked in a foreign way that was more upright, shorter in stride. He had the foreigner’s tendency toward bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse. “Even a fool can see you’re after something,” she would say, and he would affect a perplexed look. Hearing him now in the living room, pontificating about the hidden perils of ice water, she felt embarrassed by him, and embarrassed
for
him, and filled with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But just then a pair of sharp heels came clicking across the dining room. “Kate? Do you need any help?” Aunt Thelma called in a loud, false, carrying voice, and a moment later she slipped through the kitchen door to put an arm around Kate’s waist and whisper, on a winey breath, “He’s a
cutie
!”

So Kate was being too critical, clearly.

“With that golden cast to his skin, and his eyes tilting up at the corners…And I love that ropy yellow hair,” her aunt said. “He must have some Tartar in him, don’t you think?”