Vinegar Girl (14 page)

On her wedding morning, Kate opened her eyes to find Bunny sitting at the foot of her bed. “What, are you checking out my window seat?” she asked, although Bunny wasn’t even looking at the window seat. She was sitting tailor-fashion in her baby-doll pajamas, staring at Kate intently as if willing her to wake up.

“Listen,” she told Kate. “You don’t have to do this.”

Kate reached behind her to prop her pillow against her headboard. She glanced toward the sky outside; there was a whiteness to the light that made her wonder if rain might be on the way, although the forecast was for sunshine. (Aunt Thelma had been reporting the forecast throughout the past week, because she was hoping to serve drinks on her patio before the “wedding banquet,” as she had taken to calling it.)

“I know you think you’re just doing a little something on paper to fool Immigration,” Bunny said, “but this guy is starting to act like he owns you! He’s telling you what last name to use and where to live and whether to go on working. I mean, I do think it would be nice if I could have a bigger room, but if the price for that is my only sister getting totally tamed and tamped down and changed into some whole nother person—”

“Hey. Bun-Buns,” Kate said. “I appreciate the thought, but do you not know me even a little? I can handle this. Believe me. It’s not as if I haven’t dealt my whole life with an…oligarch, after all.”

“An…”

“I’m not that easily squashed. Trust me: I can take him on with one hand tied behind me.”

“Okay,” Bunny said. “Fine. If your idea of fun is sparring and squabbling, so be it. But you’re going to have to be
around
him all the time! Nobody’s even mentioned how soon you’ll be allowed to divorce him, but I bet it’s a year at least and meanwhile you’re sharing an apartment with someone who doesn’t say please or thank you or smile when you’d expect him to and thinks ‘How are you?’ means ‘How
are
you?’ and stands too close to people when he talks and never tells them, ‘I think maybe perhaps such-and-such,’ but always, flat-out, ‘You are wrong,’ and ‘This is bad,’ and ‘She is stupid’; no shades of gray, all black and white and ‘What I say goes.’ ”

“Well, part of that is just a matter of language,” Kate said. “You can’t always be bothered with ‘please’ and ‘maybe’ when you’re struggling to get your basic message across.”

“And the worst of it is,” Bunny said, as if Kate hadn’t spoken, “the
worst
is, it won’t be any different from the fix you’re in here—living with a crazed science person who’s got a system for every little move you make and spouts off his old-man health theories every chance he gets and measures the polyphenols or whatever in every meal.”

“That’s not true at all,” Kate said. “It will be a
lot
different. Pyotr’s not Father! He listens to people, you can tell; he pays attention. And did you hear what he said the other night about how maybe I’d want to go back to school? I mean, who else has ever suggested that? Who else has even given me a thought? Here in this house I’m just part of the furniture, somebody going nowhere, and twenty years from now I’ll be the old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father. ‘Yes, Father; no, Father; don’t forget to take your medicine, Father.’ This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny! Just give it a good shaking up! Can you blame me for wanting to try?”

Bunny looked at her dubiously.

“But thank you,” Kate thought to add, and she sat forward and patted Bunny’s bare foot. “You’re nice to be concerned.”

“Well,” Bunny said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Not until she’d left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn’t ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

It felt strange
to have their father home in the daytime. He was sitting at the breakfast table when Kate came downstairs, a cup of coffee at his elbow and the newspaper spread before him. “Morning,” Kate told him, and he glanced up and adjusted his glasses and said, “Oh. Good morning. Do you know what’s going
on
in the world?”

“What?” Kate asked him, but he must have been referring to the news in general because he just waved a hand despairingly toward the paper and then returned to his reading.

He was wearing a pair of his coveralls. This was fine with Kate, but when Bunny walked into the kitchen a moment later she said, “You are
not
going to the church dressed like that.”

“Hmm?” her father said. He turned a page of his paper.

“You have to show some respect, Papa! This is some people’s house of worship; I don’t care what you believe personally. You need to at least put on a regular shirt and trousers.”

“It’s Saturday,” her father said. “Nobody else will be there, just us and your uncle.”

“What kind of photo will it make for Immigration, though?” Bunny asked. She could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion. “You in your work outfit. Sort of obvious, don’t you think?”

“Ah. Yes, you have a point,” he said. He sighed and folded his newspaper and stood up.

Bunny herself was wearing her angel-winged sundress, and Kate—motivated by a vague sense that she owed it to Uncle Theron—had put on a light-blue cotton shift that dated from college. She wasn’t accustomed to wearing pale colors and she felt uncomfortably conspicuous; she wondered if she seemed to be trying too hard. Apparently Bunny approved, though. At least, she offered no criticisms.

Kate took a carton of eggs from the fridge and asked Bunny, “Want an omelet?” but Bunny said, “No, I’m going to make myself a smoothie.”

“Well, be sure you clean up, then. Last smoothie you made, the kitchen was a disaster.”

“I cannot wait,” Bunny said, “till you are out of this house and not breathing down my neck all the time.”

Evidently she had overcome her concern about palming off her only sister.

A few days ago, Kate had hired a woman named Mrs. Carroll to come in every afternoon and do a little light housekeeping and serve as a companion to Bunny till Dr. Battista got home from work. Mrs. Carroll was the aunt of Aunt Thelma’s maid, Tayeema. Aunt Thelma had first suggested Tayeema’s younger sister, but Kate wanted someone seasoned who wouldn’t be susceptible to whatever Bunny tried to put over on her. “She is a whole lot cagier than some might realize,” Kate had told Mrs. Carroll, and Mrs. Carroll had said, “I hear you; yes, indeed.”

After breakfast, Kate went back upstairs and packed her last few odds and ends into her canvas tote. Then she changed her sheets for Bunny. She supposed this room would look very different the next time she laid eyes on it. There would be photos and picture postcards bristling around the mirror, and cosmetics crowding the bureau top, and clothes strewn across the floor. The thought didn’t disturb her. She had used this room up, she felt. She had used this
life
up. And after Pyotr got his green card she was not going to move back home, whatever her father might fantasize. She would find a place of her own, even if all she could afford was a little rented room somewhere. Maybe she would have her degree by then; maybe she’d have a new job.

She dumped her sheets in her hamper. They were Mrs. Carroll’s to deal with now. She picked up her tote and went back downstairs.

Her father was waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch drumming his fingers on his knees. He wore his black suit; once urged, he had gone all out. “Ah, there you are!” he said when she walked in, and then he rose to his feet and said, in a different voice, “My dear.”

“What?” she asked, because it seemed he was about to make some sort of announcement.

But he said, “Ah…” And then he cleared his throat and said, “You’re looking very grown up.”

She was puzzled; he had last seen her just minutes ago, looking exactly as she looked now. “I
am
grown up,” she told him.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s somewhat of a surprise, you see, because I remember when you were born. Neither your mother nor I had ever held a baby before and your aunt had to show us how.”

“Oh,” Kate said.

“And now here you are in your blue dress.”

“Well, shoot, you’ve seen this old thing a million times,” Kate said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

But she was pleased, in spite of herself. She knew what he was trying to say.

It crossed her mind that if her mother had known too—if she had been able to read the signals—the lives of all four of them might have been much happier.

For the first time, it occurred to her that she herself was getting much better at reading signals.

Her father drove,
because being a passenger made him nervous. Their car was an elderly Volvo with countless scuff marks on the bumpers from other times he had driven, and the backseat was heaped with the mingled paraphernalia of their three lives—a rubber lab apron, a stack of journals, a construction-paper poster featuring the letter
C
, and Bunny’s winter coat. Kate had to sit back there because Bunny had snagged the front seat lickety-split. When the car jerked to an especially sudden stop at a traffic light on York Road, half of the journals slid onto Kate’s feet. The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.

Rhodos 3 for $25
, she read as they passed the garden center where she sometimes shopped, and all at once she wished she were shopping there today, having a normal Saturday morning full of humdrum errands. It had turned out sunny, in the end, and you could tell by the slow, dreamy way people were drifting down the sidewalks that the temperature was perfect.

She was feeling as if she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs.

Uncle Theron’s church was called the Cockeysville Consolidated Chapel. It was a gray stone building with a miniature steeple on the roof—a sort of shorthand steeple—and it lay just behind the section of York Road that featured clusters of antique stores and consignment shops. Uncle Theron’s black Chevy was the only car in the lot. Dr. Battista pulled up next to it and switched the ignition off and collapsed for a moment with his forehead on the steering wheel, the way he always did when he had managed to get them someplace.

“No sign of Pyoder yet,” he said when he finally looked up.

Pyotr was in charge of the morning rounds today at the lab. “See?” Dr. Battista had said earlier. “From now on I’ll have a trusted son-in-law whom I can depend on to spell me.” However, he had already brought up several details that he worried Pyotr might chance to overlook. Twice before they left the house he had said to Kate, “Should I just telephone him and find out how things are going?” but then he had answered his own question. “No, never mind. I don’t want to interrupt him.” This may have been due not only to his phone allergy but also to the recent shift in his and Pyotr’s relationship. He still hadn’t quite gotten over his sulk.

They went to the rear of the building, as Uncle Theron had instructed them, and knocked at a plain wooden door that could have led to somebody’s kitchen. Its windowpanes were curtained in blue-and-white gingham. After a moment the gingham was drawn aside and Uncle Theron’s round face peered out. Then he smiled and opened the door for them. He was wearing a suit and tie, Kate was touched to see—treating this like a real occasion. “Happy wedding day,” he told her.

“Thanks.”

“I just got off the phone with your aunt. I imagine she was hoping against hope for a last-minute invitation, but she claimed she was only calling to ask if I thought Pyoder would object to champagne.”

“Why would he object to champagne?”

“She figured he might expect vodka.”

Kate shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” she said.

“Maybe she was thinking he might want to smash his glass in the fireplace or something,” Uncle Theron said. He was a good deal more cavalier about his sister when he was not in her presence, Kate noticed. “Come on into my office,” he said. “Does Pyoder know that he should knock on the back door?”

Kate sent a glance toward her father. “Yes, I told him,” he said.

“We can look at the vows while we’re waiting. I know we agreed that you’ll do just the bare minimum, but I want to show you what your choices are so you’ll know what you’ll both be promising.”