Vinegar Girl (6 page)

“You would never ask Bunny to do this,” Kate said bitterly. “Your precious treasure Bunny-poo.”

“Well, Bunny’s still in high school,” he said.

“Let her drop out, then; it’s not as if it would be any loss to the world of learning.”

“Kate! That’s uncharitable,” her father said. “Besides,” he added after a moment, “Bunny has all those young men chasing after her.”

“And I don’t,” Kate said.

He didn’t argue with that. He looked at her mutely, hopefully, with his lips tensely pursed so that his little black mustache bunched itself together.

If she kept her expression impassive, if she didn’t blink or even open her mouth to say another word, she might be able to stop the tears from spilling over. So she was silent. By degrees she stood up, careful not to bump into anything, and she set down her calculator and turned and walked out of the dining room with her chin raised.

“Katherine?” her father called after her.

She reached the hall, she crossed the hall, and then she started pounding up the stairs with the tears positively streaming, flying off her cheeks as she arrived on the landing and rounded the newel post and ran smack into Bunny, who was just starting down. “Hello?” Bunny said, looking startled.

Kate threw her pen into Bunny’s face and stumbled into her own room and slammed the door behind her.

You could really feel physically wounded if someone hurt your feelings badly enough. Over the next few days, she discovered that. She had discovered it several times before, but this felt like a brand-new revelation, as sharp as a knife to her chest. Illogical, of course: why her chest? Hearts were just glorified pumps, after all. Still, her own heart felt bruised, simultaneously shrunken and swollen, and if that sounded self-contradictory, well, so be it.

She walked to work every day feeling starkly, conspicuously alone. It seemed that everyone else on the street had someone to keep them company, someone to laugh with and confide in and nudge in the ribs. All those packs of young girls who’d already figured everything out. All those couples interlinked and whispering with their heads together, and those neighbor women gossiping next to their cars before they left for work. Eccentric husbands, impossible teenagers, star-crossed friends they gossiped about, and then they would break off and “Morning” they would say to Kate—even the ones who didn’t know her. Kate pretended not to hear. If she ducked her head low enough, her hair would swing forward so it completely hid her profile.

The weather was more springlike now, and the daffodils were beginning to bloom and the birds were downright raucous. If her time had been her own, she would have worked in the garden. That always soothed her spirits. But no, she had to go to school every morning, and plaster a flashy smile on her face when she arrived at the main entrance where the parents were dropping their children off. Some of the younger children were still reluctant to say good-bye even this late in the school year, and they would cling fiercely to their parents’ knees and bury their faces, and the parents would send Kate a woebegone look and Kate would put on a commiserating, entirely fraudulent expression and ask the child, whoever it was, “Want me to hold your hand while we go in?” This was because Mrs. Darling was standing in the doorway, waiting for any excuse to fire her. Although so what if she were fired? What difference would it make?

On her way to Room 4 she gave no more than a nod to any teachers or assistants she saw conversing in the corridor. She said hello to Mrs. Chauncey and she stowed her belongings in the supply closet. As the children entered the room they raced over to catch her up on some piece of urgent news—a pet’s new trick, a scary dream, a present from a grandmother—and often several were speaking at once while Kate stood in their midst as still as a tree and said, “Really. Huh. Just imagine.” It felt like the most tremendous effort, but none of the children seemed to notice that.

She went through the motions of Show and Tell, Story Time, Activity Hour. She took a break in the faculty lounge, where Mrs. Bower was debating cataract surgery or Mrs. Fairweather was asking whether anyone else had ever had bursitis, and they would all pause to greet her and Kate would mumble something like “Mmph” and let her curtain of hair fall forward as she proceeded to the restroom.

Room 4 seemed to be passing through a particularly contentious period, and all the little girls stopped speaking to Liam M. “What did you do to them?” Kate asked him, and he said, “I don’t
know
what I did.” Kate believed him, too. Sometimes very complicated machinations went on with those little girls. She told Liam M., “Well, never mind, they’ll get over it by and by,” and he nodded and heaved an enormous sigh and threw his shoulders back bravely.

At lunch she would stir her food listlessly around her plate; everything smelled like waxed paper. On Friday she forgot her beef jerky—or rather, she found the drawer at home empty although she could have sworn she still had some—and she didn’t eat a thing except a couple of grapes, but that was okay; she felt not just lacking in appetite but overstuffed, as if that swollen heart of hers had risen in her throat.

At Quiet Rest Time she sat behind Mrs. Chauncey’s desk and stared into space. Ordinarily she would have flipped through Mrs. Chauncey’s discarded newspaper or tidied up some of the more clutter-prone play areas—the Lego corner or the crafts table—but now she just gazed at nothing and racked up points against her father.

He must think she was of no value; she was nothing but a bargaining chip in his single-minded quest for a scientific miracle. After all, what real purpose did she have in her life? And she couldn’t possibly find a man who would love her for herself, he must think, so why not just palm her off on someone who would be useful to him?

It wasn’t that Kate had never had a boyfriend. After she graduated from high school, where the boys had seemed a little afraid of her, she’d had a
lot
of boyfriends. Or a lot of first dates, at least. Sometimes even second dates. Her father had no business giving up on her like that.

Besides, she was only twenty-nine years old. There was plenty of time to find a husband! Provided she even wanted one, and she was not so sure that she did.

Out on the playground on Friday afternoon, aimlessly kicking a bottle cap across the hard-packed earth, she tortured herself by rehashing all that her father had said to her. He liked the fellow, he’d said. As if that were sufficient reason to marry his daughter off to him! And then the part about how Pyotr’s leaving the project would be such a loss to mankind. Her father didn’t care the least little bit about mankind. That project had become an end in itself. To all intents and purposes, it had no end. It just went on and on, generating its own spinoffs and detours and switchbacks, and no one except other scientists even knew what it was, exactly. Recently, Kate had begun to wonder whether even other scientists knew. It seemed possible that his sponsors had forgotten he existed; that they continued funding him purely from force of habit. He’d been phased out of teaching long ago (she could just picture what kind of teacher he’d made) and stuck away in that series of steadily shrinking and peregrinating laboratories, and when Johns Hopkins established a dedicated autoimmune research center he had not been invited to join. Or maybe he had refused to join; she wasn’t entirely sure. In any case, he just went on working away by himself without, apparently, anyone’s bothering to investigate whether he was making any progress. Though who knew? Perhaps he was making all kinds of progress. But at this particular moment, Kate couldn’t invent a single result that would justify sacrificing his firstborn.

She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled.

Natalie might be succeeding in winning Adam’s affections. She looked so pretty and poetic, crouching to console a little girl with a scraped elbow, and Adam stood next to her watching sympathetically. “Why don’t you take her inside for a Band-Aid?” he asked. “I’ll supervise the seesaws,” and Natalie said, “Oh, would you? Thank you, Adam,” and she rose in one graceful motion and shepherded the child toward the building. She was wearing a dress today, which was unusual among the assistants. It swished around her calves seductively, and Adam gazed after her longer than he needed to, it seemed to Kate.

Once, a couple of months ago, Kate had tried wearing a skirt to school herself. Not that it was swishy or anything; actually it was a denim skirt with rivets and a front zip, but she had thought it might make her seem…softer. The older teachers had turned all knowing and glinty. “
Somebody’s
making a big effort today!” Mrs. Bower had said, and Kate had said, “What, this? It was the only thing not in the wash, is all.” But Adam hadn’t seemed to register its existence. Anyhow, it had proved impractical—hard to climb a jungle gym in—and she couldn’t shake the image of the reflection she had glimpsed in the faculty restroom’s full-length mirror. “Mutton dressed as lamb” was the phrase that had come to mind, although she knew she wasn’t really mutton; not yet. The next day, she had gone back to Levi’s.

Now Adam sauntered over to her and said, “Have you ever noticed that certain days are injury days?”

“Injury days?”

“That kid just now, with her elbow; and then this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener—”

“Ooh!” she said, wincing.

“—and just before lunch Tommy Bass knocked his front tooth out and we had to call his mother to come get him—”

“Ooh, that
is
an injury day,” Kate said. “Did you put the tooth in milk?”

“In milk.”

“You put it in a cup of milk and it has a chance of being re-implanted?”

“Gosh, no, I didn’t,” Adam said. “I just wadded it up in a Kleenex in case they wanted it for the tooth fairy.”

“Well, don’t worry; it was only a baby tooth.”

“How do you know about the milk trick?” he asked.

“Oh, I just do,” she said.

She couldn’t figure out where to put her hands so she started swinging her arms back and forth from her shoulders, till she remembered that Bunny had told her she looked like a boy when she did that. (Count on Bunny.) She stopped swinging her arms and stuffed her hands in her rear pockets. “I had a grown-up tooth knocked out by a baseball when I was nine,” she said. Then she realized how unfeminine that sounded and so she added, “I was just walking past a game on my way home? Was how it happened. But our housekeeper knew to put the tooth in milk.”

“Well, it must have worked,” Adam said, looking at her more closely. “You have great teeth.”

“Oh, aren’t you…isn’t it nice of you to say so?” Kate said.

She started drawing arcs in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. Then Sophia walked over, and she and Adam began discussing a recipe for no-knead bread.

During Afternoon Activity Hour, the ballerina doll and the sailor doll had one of their breakups. (Kate wasn’t aware that they had gotten back together.) This time they were breaking up because the sailor doll had been inappropriate. “Please, Cordelia,” Emma G. said, speaking for the sailor, “I’ll never be inappropriate again, I promise.” But the ballerina said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I have given you chance after chance and now you are walking on my last nerve.” Then Jameesha fell off a stepstool and developed a giant lump on her forehead, proving Adam’s point about injury days; and after Kate had managed to divert her, Chloe and Emma W. got into a shouting quarrel. “Girls! Girls!” Mrs. Chauncey said. She had a lower tolerance for discord than Kate did. Chloe said, “It’s not fair! Emma W.’s hogging the child dolls! She has Drink-and-Wet and Squeaky Baby and Anatomically Correct, and all I have is this dumb old wooden Pinocchio!” Mrs. Chauncey turned toward Kate, clearly expecting her to mediate, but Kate just told them, “Well, sort it out,” and walked off to see what the boys were doing. One of the boys had a doll as well (a child doll, she saw), and he was sliding it facedown along the floor and saying “
Vroom
,
vroom
” as if it were a truck, which seemed a waste, since child dolls were in such demand today, but Kate wasn’t up to dealing with it. The wounded feeling had spread from her chest to her left shoulder, and she wondered if she were having a heart attack. She would have welcomed it.

Walking home at
the end of the day, she reviewed her conversation with Adam. “Ooh!” she had said, not once but twice, in that artificial, girlie way she detested, and her voice had come out higher-pitched than usual and her sentences had slanted upward at the end. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Isn’t it nice of you to say so?” she’d asked. Mrs. Gordon’s miniature Japanese maple brushed her face as she passed, and she gave it a vicious swat. As she approached the Mintzes’ house their front door opened, and she speeded up so as not to have to speak to anyone.

Bunny wasn’t home yet. Good. Kate slung her bag onto the hall bench and went to the kitchen for something to eat. Her stomach had begun to notice that she had skipped lunch. She cut herself a chunk of cheddar and strolled around the kitchen as she munched on it, assessing what she would need to pick up tomorrow at the grocery store. If she cooked next week’s meat mash without the meat (which she had decided she would do, just to call Bunny’s bluff ), she would have to increase some other ingredient—the lentils, maybe, or the yellow split peas. Her father’s recipe was calibrated so that they finished the dish completely on Friday evenings. But this past week had been an exception: since Bunny had turned vegetarian she had not been doing her part, and even the addition of Pyotr on Tuesday, wolfish eater though he had been, had not made up for it. They were going to be left with extras tomorrow, and her father would be unhappy.