Vinegar Girl (4 page)

This was a new development. Edward Mintz was several years older than Bunny, an unhealthy-looking young man with patchy beige chin whiskers that reminded Kate of lichen. He had graduated from high school two Junes ago but failed to leave for college; his mother claimed he had “that Japanese disease.” “What disease is that?” Kate had asked, and Mrs. Mintz said, “The one where young people shut themselves in their bedrooms and refuse to go on with their lives.” Except that Edward seemed bound not to his bedroom but to the glassed-in porch that faced the Battistas’ dining-room window, where day in and day out he could be seen sitting on a chaise longue hugging his knees and smoking suspiciously tiny cigarettes.

Well, all right: no danger of romance, at least. (Bunny’s weakness was football types.) Still, a rule was a rule, so Kate said, “Bunny, you know you’re not supposed to entertain when you’re on your own.”

“Entertain!” Bunny cried, making her eyes very round and bewildered. She held up a spiral notebook that lay open on her lap. “I’m having my Spanish lesson!”

“You are?”

“I asked Papa, remember? Señora McGillicuddy said I needed a tutor? And I asked Papa and he said fine?”

“Yes, but…” Kate began.

Yes, but he surely hadn’t meant some pothead neighbor boy. Kate didn’t say this, however. (Diplomacy.) Instead, she turned to Edward and asked, “Are you especially fluent in Spanish, Edward?”

“Yes, ma’am, I had five semesters,” he said. She didn’t know whether the “ma’am” was smart-aleck or serious. Either way, it was annoying; she wasn’t
that
old. He said, “Sometimes, I even think in Spanish.”

This made Bunny give a little giggle. Bunny giggled at everything. “He’s already taught me so much?” she said.

Another irksome habit of hers was turning declara-tive sentences into questions. Kate liked to needle her by pretending she thought they really
were
questions, so she said, “I wouldn’t know that, would I, because I haven’t been in the house with you.”

Edward said, “What?” and Bunny told him, “Just ignore her?”

“I got an A or A-minus in Spanish every semester,” Edward said, “except for senior year, and that one wasn’t my fault. I was undergoing some stress.”

“Well, still,” Kate said, “Bunny’s not allowed to have male visitors when no one else is home.”

“Oh! This is
humiliating
!” Bunny cried.

“Tough luck,” Kate told her. “Carry on; I’ll be nearby.” And she walked out.

Behind her, she heard Bunny murmur, “
Un bitcho
.”

“
Una bitch-AH
,” Edward corrected her in a didactic tone.

They fell into a little spasm of snickers.

Bunny was not nearly as sweet as other people thought she was.

Kate had never quite understood why Bunny existed, even. Their mother—a frail, muted, pink-and-gold blonde with Bunny’s same asterisk eyes—had spent the first fourteen years of Kate’s life checking in and out of various “rest facilities,” as they were called. Then all at once, Bunny was born. It was hard for Kate to imagine how her parents had considered this to be a good idea. Maybe they hadn’t considered; maybe it had been a case of mindless passion. But that was even harder to imagine. At any rate, the second pregnancy had brought to light some defect in Thea Battista’s heart, or perhaps had caused the defect, and she was dead before Bunny’s first birthday. For Kate, it was hardly a change from the absence she’d known all her life. And Bunny didn’t even remember their mother, although some of Bunny’s gestures were uncannily similar—the demure tuck of her chin, for instance, and her habit of nibbling prettily on the very tip of her index finger. It was almost as if she had been studying their mother from inside the womb. Their aunt Thelma, Thea’s sister, was always saying, “Oh, Bunny, I swear, it makes me cry to see you. If you aren’t the image of your poor mother!”

Kate, on the other hand, was not in the least like their mother. Kate was dark-skinned and big-boned and gawky. She would have looked absurd gnawing on a finger, and nobody had ever called her sweet.

Kate was
una bitcha
.

“Katherine, my dear!”

Kate turned from the stove, startled. Her father stood in the doorway with a shiny smile on his face. “How was your day?” he asked her.

“It was all right.”

“Things went well?”

“Semi-okay.”

“Excellent!” He continued standing there. As a rule, he returned from his lab in a funk, his mind still occupied with whatever he had been working on, but maybe today he’d had a breakthrough of some sort. “You walked to work, I guess,” he said.

“Well, sure,” she said. She always walked, unless the weather was truly miserable.

“And you had a nice walk home?”

“Yup,” she said. “I ran into your assistant, by the way.”

“
Did
you!”

“Yup.”

“Wonderful! How was he?”

“How
was
he?” Kate repeated. “Don’t
you
know how he was?”

“I mean, what did you talk about?”

She tried to remember. “Hair?” she said.

“Ah.” He went on smiling. “What else?” he asked finally.

“That was it, I guess.”

She turned back to the stove. She was reheating the concoction they had for supper every night. Meat mash, they called it, but it was mainly dried beans and green vegetables and potatoes, which she mixed with a small amount of stewed beef every Saturday afternoon and puréed into a grayish sort of paste to be served throughout the week. Her father was the one who had invented it. He couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t follow the same system; it provided all the requisite nutrients and saved so much time and decision-making.

“Father,” she said, lowering the gas flame, “did you know Bunny’s arranged for Edward Mintz to be her Spanish tutor?”

“Who is Edward Mintz?”

“Edward next door, Father. He was over here this afternoon when I got home from work. Here in the house, incidentally, which you’ll recall is against the rules. And we have no idea if he’s any good as a tutor. I don’t even know what she told him we would pay him. Did she ask
you
about this?”

“Well, I believe she…yes, I seem to recollect she said she wasn’t doing well in Spanish.”

“Yes, and you said she should go ahead and find a tutor, but why didn’t she get in touch with that place that’s supplying her math tutor and her English tutor? Why did she hire a neighbor boy?”

“She must have had good reason,” her father said.

“I don’t know why you assume that,” Kate told him. She banged her spoon against the side of the pot to dislodge the clump of mash that was stuck to it.

It always amazed her to see how ignorant her father was about normal everyday life. The man existed in a vacuum. Their housekeeper used to say it was because he was so smart. “He has very important matters on his mind,” she would say. “Wiping out worldwide disease and such.”

“Well, that shouldn’t mean he can’t have us on his mind besides,” Kate had said. “It’s like those mice of his matter more to him than we do. Like he doesn’t even care about us!”

“Oh, he does, honey! He does. He just can’t show it. It’s like he…never learned the language, or something; like he comes from another planet. But I promise you he cares about you.”

Their housekeeper would have thoroughly approved of Mrs. Darling’s Something Nice rule.

“When I mentioned Pyoder’s visa the other day,” her father was saying, “I’m not sure you fully understood the problem. His visa is good for three years. He’s been here two years and ten months.”

“Gee,” Kate said. She turned off the burner and picked up the pot by both handles. “Excuse me.”

He backed out of the doorway. She walked past him into the dining room, where she set the pot on the trivet that waited permanently in the center of the table.

Although the dining room was decorated with formal, genteel furniture handed down by Thea’s ancestors, it had taken on a haphazard appearance after her death. Vitamin bottles and opened mail and various office supplies crowded the silver service on the sideboard. The unset end of the table bore a stack of receipts and a calculator and a budget book and a sheaf of income-tax forms. It always fell to Kate to do the taxes, and now she glanced guiltily at her father, who had followed on her heels. (They were perilously close to tax day.) But he was intent on his own line of thought. “You see the difficulty,” he said. He followed her back to the kitchen. She took a carton of yogurt from the fridge. “Excuse me,” she said again. He followed her into the dining room again. He had both fists balled up in the deep front pockets of his coveralls, which made it seem as if he were carrying a muff. “In two more months he’ll be forced to leave the country,” he said.

“Can’t you get his visa renewed?”

“Theoretically, I can. But it’s all about who’s applying for him—whether that person’s project is important enough, and I suspect that some of my colleagues think mine has gone off the deep end. Well, what do
they
know, right? I’m on to something here, I really feel it; I’m about to discover one single, unified key to autoimmune disorders. Still, Immigration’s going to say I should just get along without him. Ever since nine-eleven, Immigration’s been so unreasonable.”

“Huh,” Kate said. They were back in the kitchen. She chose three apples from the bowl on the counter. “So who will you get instead?”

“Instead!” her father said. He stared at her. “Kate,” he said. “This is Pyoder Cherbakov! Now that I’ve worked with Pyoder Cherbakov, nobody else will do.”

“Well, it sounds to me as if somebody else will
have
to do,” Kate said. “Excuse me,” she said again. She returned to the dining room, with her father once more following, and placed an apple above each plate.

“I’m ruined,” her father said. “I’m doomed. I might as well abandon my research.”

“Heavens, Father.”

“Unless, perhaps, we could get him an…adjustment of status.”

“Oh, good. Get him an adjustment of status.”

She brushed past him and went out to the hall. “Bunny!” she shouted up the stairs. “Supper’s on!”

“We could adjust his status to ‘married to an American.’ ”

“Pyotr’s married to an American?”

“Well, not quite yet,” her father said. He trailed her back to the dining room. “But he’s fairly nice-looking, I believe. Don’t you agree? All those girls working in the building: they seem to find different reasons to talk to him.”

“So could he marry a girl in the building?” Kate asked. She sat down at her place and shook out her napkin.

“I don’t think so,” her father said. “He doesn’t…the conversations never seem to develop any further, unfortunately.”

“Then who?”

Her father sat down at the head of the table. He cleared his throat. He said, “You, maybe?”

“Very funny,” she told him. “Oh, where
is
that girl? Bernice Battista!” she shouted. “Get down here this instant!”

“I
am
down,” Bunny said, arriving in the doorway. “You don’t have to blast my ears off.”

She plopped herself in the chair across from Kate. “Hi, Poppy,” she said.

There was a long silence, during which Dr. Battista seemed to be dragging himself up from the depths. Finally he said, “Hello, Bunny.” His voice had a mournful, hollow sound.

Bunny raised her eyebrows at Kate. Kate shrugged and picked up the serving spoon.

“Happy Tuesday, children,” Mrs. Darling said, and then she asked Kate to come to her office again.

This time Kate couldn’t leave her class during Quiet Rest Time, because Mrs. Chauncey was out sick. And on Tuesdays she was responsible for Extended Daycare once school was over. So she would be forced to stay in suspense from lunchtime until 5:30.

She didn’t have the slightest idea what Mrs. Darling wanted to see her about. But then, she seldom did. The etiquette in this place was so mysterious! Or the customs, or the conventions, or whatever…Like not showing strangers the soles of your feet or something. She tried to cast her mind back over anything she might have done wrong, but how much
could
she have done wrong between yesterday afternoon and noon today? She had made a point of keeping her interactions with parents to a minimum, and she didn’t think Mrs. Darling could have heard about her little tantrum this morning when she couldn’t get Antwan’s jacket unzipped. “Stupid goddamn-to-hell frigging modern
life
,” she had muttered. But it was life she was cursing, not Antwan, and surely he’d understood that. Besides, he didn’t seem like the kind of kid who’d go running off to tattle on people, even if he’d had the opportunity.

It had been one of those double-type zippers that could be opened from the bottom while the top stayed closed, and she’d ended up having to take the jacket off by yanking it over his head. She detested that kind of zipper. It was a presumptuous zipper; it wanted to figure out your every possible need without your say-so.

She tried to remember how Mrs. Darling had worded her threat from the day before. She hadn’t said anything about “Just one more offense and you’re out,” had she? No, it had been less specific than that. It had been something like the vague “or else” that grown-ups were always threatening children with, that children eventually realized was not as dire as it sounded.

The phrase “thin ice” had been involved, she seemed to recollect.

How would she fill her days if she had no job anymore? There was absolutely nothing else whatsoever in her life—no reason she could think of to get out of bed every morning.

Yesterday at Show and Tell, Chloe Smith had talked about a visit she’d paid to a petting farm over the weekend. She had seen some baby goats, she said, and Kate had said, “Lucky!” (She had a soft spot for goats.) She asked, “Were they doing that frolicking thing that goats do when they’re happy?”

“Yes, a few of them were just barely beginning to fly,” Chloe said, and it had been such a matter-of-fact description, so concrete and unsurprised, that Kate had experienced a jolt of pure pleasure.

Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.

At 5:40, the very last mother collected the very last child—a Room 5 mother, Mrs. Amherst, late for her son’s whole career here—and Kate had given her very last fake smile, rigidly tight-lipped so that no unfortunate words could escape her. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath and headed to Mrs. Darling’s office.

Mrs. Darling was watering her houseplants. She had probably used up all other ways of killing time. Kate hoped she hadn’t let boredom turn her irritable, as it would have Kate herself if she had been the one waiting, so she began by saying, “I am really, really sorry I’m late. It was Mrs. Amherst’s fault.”

Mrs. Darling seemed uninterested in Mrs. Amherst. “Have a seat,” she told Kate, smoothing her skirt beneath her as she settled behind her desk.

Kate sat.

“Emma Gray,” Mrs. Darling said. She was certainly wasting no words today.

Emma Gray? Kate’s brain went racing through possibilities. There were none at all, as far as she knew. Emma Gray had never been a problem.

“Emma asked who you thought Room Four’s best drawer was,” Mrs. Darling said. She was consulting the notepad she kept beside her telephone. “You said”—and she read off the words—“ ‘I think probably Jason.’ ”

“Right,” Kate said.

She waited for the punch line, but Mrs. Darling put down her notepad as if she thought she’d already delivered it. She laced her fingers together and surveyed Kate with a “So there!” expression on her face.

“That’s exactly right,” Kate expanded.

“Emma’s mother is very upset,” Mrs. Darling told her. “She says you made Emma feel inferior.”

“She
is
inferior,” Kate said. “Emma G. can’t draw worth a damn. She asked my honest opinion and I gave her an honest answer.”

“Kate,” Mrs. Darling said, “there is so much to argue with in that, I don’t even know where to begin.”

“What’s wrong with it? I don’t get it.”

“Well, one thing you might have said is, ‘Oh, now, Emma, I’ve never looked at art as a competition. I’m just so thrilled that
all
of you are creative!’ you’d say. ‘All of you doing your best at whatever you’re trying to do.’ ”

Kate tried to imagine herself speaking this way. She couldn’t. She said, “But Emma didn’t mind; I swear she didn’t. All she said was, ‘Oh, yeah, Jason,’ and then she went on about her business.”

“She minded enough to report it to her mother,” Mrs. Darling said.

“Maybe she was only making conversation.”

“Children don’t ‘make conversation,’ Kate.”

In Kate’s experience, making conversation was one of their favorite activities, but she said, “Well, anyhow, that happened way last week.”

“And your point is?”

Kate’s usual response to this question was, “Well,
gee
. Too bad you missed it.” But she stifled it this time. (The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)

“So I didn’t just now do it, is my point,” she said. “It happened before that business with Jameesha’s father, even. Before I promised to mend my ways. I mean, I remember what I promised, and I’m working on it. I’m being very diplomatic and tactful.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Darling said.

She didn’t look convinced. But neither did she tell Kate she was fired. She just shook her head and said that that would be all, she supposed.

When Kate arrived
home, she found Bunny making a mess in the kitchen. She was frying a block of something white at way too high a temperature, and the whole house had the Chinese-restaurant smell of overheated oil and soy sauce. “What
is
that?” Kate demanded, swooping past her to lower the flame.

Bunny backed away. “Don’t get all in a snit, for God’s sake,” she said. She held up the spatula like a flyswatter. “It’s tofu?”

“Tofu!”

“I’m turning vegetarian?”

“You’re kidding,” Kate said.

“Every hour of every day in this country, six hundred and sixty thousand innocent animals die for us.”

“How do you know that?”

“Edward told me.”

“Edward Mintz?”

“He doesn’t eat things that have faces? So starting next week, I need you to make our meat mash without any beef.”

“You want meatless meat mash.”

“It would be healthier, too. You have no idea, the toxins we’re stuffing our bodies with.”

“Why not just join a cult?” Kate asked her.

“I knew you wouldn’t understand!”

“Oh, go set the table,” Kate said wearily. And she opened the fridge and took out the pot of meat mash.

Bunny hadn’t always been so silly. It seemed that starting around age twelve, she had turned into a flibbertigibbet. Even her hair reflected the change. Once bound in two sensible braids, now it was a mass of springy short golden ringlets through which you could see daylight, if you stood at the proper angle. She had a habit of keeping her lips slightly parted and her eyes wide and artless, and her clothes were oddly young for her, with waistbands up under her armpits and short, short skirts prinked out around her thighs. It was all to do with boys, Kate supposed—attracting boys; except why should childishness be considered alluring to adolescent boys? (Although evidently it was. Bunny was in great demand.) In public she walked pigeon-toed, most often nibbling that fingertip, which gave her an air of timidity that could not have been more misleading. In private, though, here in the kitchen, she still walked normally. She stomped off to the dining room with an armload of plates and she slammed them down on the table one-two-three.

Kate was collecting apples from the bowl on the counter when she heard her father in the front hall. “I’ll just let Kate know we’re here,” he was saying, and then, “Kate?” he called.

“What.”

“It’s us.”

She exchanged a look with Bunny, who was sliding the block of tofu onto a plate now.

“Who’s us?” she called.

Dr. Battista appeared in the kitchen doorway. Pyotr Shcherbakov was at his elbow.

“Oh. Pyotr,” she said.

“Khello!” Pyotr said. He was wearing the same gray jersey he’d worn yesterday, and in one hand he carried a small paper bag.

“And here’s my other daughter, Bunny,” Dr. Battista said. “Bun-Buns, meet Pyoder.”

“Hi, there! How’re you doing?” Bunny asked, dimpling at him.

“For two days now I am coughing and sneezing,” Pyotr told her. “Also blowing nose. Is some sort of microbe, I am thinking.”

“Oh, poor you!”

“Pyoder is going to eat with us,” Dr. Battista announced.

Kate said, “He is?”

She would have reminded her father that as a rule, people informed the cook about such things ahead of time, but the fact was that in this house there
was
no rule; the situation had never come up before. The Battistas hadn’t had a dinner guest for as long as Kate could remember. And Bunny was already saying, “Goody!” (Bunny was the kind of person who thought the more people, the merrier.) She pulled another clean plate from the dishwasher and another handful of silverware. Pyotr, meanwhile, held his paper bag out to Kate. “Is guest gift,” he told her. “Dessert.”

She took the bag from him and peered down into it. Inside were four bars of chocolate. “Well, thanks,” she said.

“Ninety percent cacao. Flavonoids. Polyphenols.”

“Pyoder’s a big believer in dark chocolate,” Dr Battista said.

“Oh, I adore chocolate!” Bunny told Pyotr. “I’m, like, addicted? I can’t get enough?”

It was lucky Bunny had gone into her bubbling-over act, because Kate wasn’t feeling all that hospitable herself. She took a fourth apple from the bowl and went off to the dining room, throwing her father a sour look as she passed him. He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “A little company!” he told her in a confiding voice.

“Hmph.”

By the time she returned to the kitchen, Bunny was asking Pyotr what he missed most about home. She was looking up into his face with her eyes all starry and entranced, still holding the extra plate and the silverware, cocking her head encouragingly like Miss Hostess of the Month.

“I miss the pickles,” Pyotr said without hesitation.

“That’s so fascinating?”

“Finish setting the table,” Kate told her. “Supper’s ready to go, here.”

“What? Wait,” Dr. Battista said. “I thought we could have drinks first.”

“Drinks!”

“Drinks in the living room.”

“Yes!” Bunny said. “Can I have a drink, Poppy? Just a teeny-weeny glass of wine?”

“No, you cannot,” Kate told her. “Your brain development’s stunted enough as it is.”

Pyotr gave one of his hoots. Bunny said, “Poppy! Did you hear what she said to me?”

“I meant it, too,” Kate told her. “We can’t afford any more tutors. Besides, Father, I’m starving to death. You were even later than usual.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry, Pyoder. The cook calls the shots, I guess.”

“Is no problem,” Pyotr said.

This was just as well, because as far as Kate knew, the only alcohol in the house was an open bottle of Chianti from last New Year’s.

She carried the meat mash into the dining room and put it on the trivet. Bunny, meanwhile, set a place for Pyotr next to her own; they all had to crowd at one end because of the income-tax papers. “How about people, Pyoder?” she asked him once he was settled. (The girl was tireless.) “Don’t you miss any
people
from home?”

“I have no people,” he said.

“None at all?”