Vinegar Girl (8 page)

There was a certain liberation in talking to a man who didn’t have a full grasp of English. She could tell him anything and half of it would fly right past him, especially if the words came tumbling out fast enough. “I don’t know how Bunny got this way,” she told him. “When she was born I more or less thought she was my own; I was at that age when kids like tending babies. And she looked up to me so when she was a little girl; she tried to act like me and talk like me, and I was the only one who could comfort her when she was crying. But after she reached her teens she kind of, I don’t know, left me behind. She changed into this whole other person, this
social
person, I don’t know; this social, outgoing person. And somehow she turned
me
into this viperish, disapproving old maid when I’m barely twenty-nine. I don’t know how that happened!”

Pyotr said, “Not
all
scientists.”

“What?”

“Not
all
scientists prefer blondes,” he said, and he flicked a glance at her suddenly from under those half-mast lids. Clearly he hadn’t registered a thing she’d said. It made her feel as if she’d gotten away with something.

“Hey,” she said. “Would you like the other half of my sandwich?”

“Thank you,” Pyotr said. He picked it up unhesitatingly and took a bite. A kind of knot stood out at the angle of his jaw when he chewed. “I think I will call you ‘Katya,’ ” he said with his mouth full.

Kate didn’t want to be called “Katya,” but since she never had to see him again she didn’t bother telling him so. “Oh, well, whatever,” she said carelessly.

He asked her, “Why Americans always begin inch by inch with what they say?”

“Pardon?”

“They must begin every sentence with ‘Oh…’ or ‘Well…’ or ‘Um…’ or ‘Anyhow…’ They start off with ‘So…’ when there has been no cause mentioned before it that would lead to any conclusion, and ‘I mean…’ when they have said nothing previous whose significance must be clarified. Right off from a silence they say that! ‘I mean…’ they begin. Why they do this?”

Kate said, “Oh, well, um…,” drawing it out long and slow. For a second he didn’t get it, but then he gave a short bark of laughter. She had never heard him laugh before. It made her smile in spite of herself.

“For that matter,” she said, “why do
you
begin so abruptly? You just barge into your sentences straight out! ‘
This
and such,’ you begin. ‘
That
and such,’ blunt as a sledgehammer. So definite, so declarative. Everything you say sounds like a…governmental edict.”

“I see,” Pyotr said. Then, as if correcting himself, he said, “Oh, I see.”

Now she laughed too, a little. She took another bite of her sandwich, and he took a bite of his. After a minute she said, “Sometimes I think foreigners
like
sounding different. You know? Listen to a foreigner sing an American pop song, for instance, or tell a story where they have to put on a Southern drawl or a cowboy twang. They can do it perfectly, without a trace of an accent! They can mimic us exactly. That’s when you see that they don’t really want to talk like us at all. They’re proud they have an accent.”

“I am not proud,” Pyotr said. “I would like to not have accent.”

He was looking down at his sandwich as he said this—just holding it in both hands and gazing downward, with those lids of his veiling his eyes so she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. It occurred to her suddenly that he
was
thinking—that only his exterior self was flubbing his
th
sounds and not taking long enough between consonants, while inwardly he was formulating thoughts every bit as complicated and layered as her own.

Well, okay, a glaringly obvious fact. But still, somehow, a surprise. She felt a kind of rearrangement taking place in her mind—a little adjustment of vision.

She set the crust of her sandwich on her plate and wiped her hands on her jeans. “What will you do now?” she asked him.

He looked up. “Do?” he said.

“About your visa.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I’m sorry I can’t help.”

“It is no problem,” he told her. “I say this sincerely. Is kind of you to offer consolation, but I am feeling that things will work out.”

She didn’t see how they could, but she decided to practice restraint and refrain from telling him so.

He finished his own sandwich, crust and all, and dusted off his palms. He made no move to leave, though. “You have very pretty yard,” he said, looking around.

“Thanks.”

“You like to garden?”

“Yup.”

“Me too,” he said.

She said, “I was even thinking I’d be, oh, a botanist or something, before I dropped out of college.”

“Why you dropped out of college?”

But she had had enough by now. She saw he must sense she might be softening toward him; he was pressing his advantage. Abruptly, she stood up and said, “I’ll just see you to your car.”

He stood up too, looking surprised. “There is no need,” he told her.

But she started toward the front yard as if she hadn’t heard him, and after a moment he followed.

As they rounded the side of the house, the Mintzes’ minivan pulled into their driveway and Bunny fluttered a hand out the passenger-side window. She didn’t seem the least bit abashed that Kate had caught her riding with Edward. “Hey again, Pyoder,” she called.

Pyotr lifted an arm in her direction without responding, and Kate turned and headed back to her gardening. It really was a beautiful day, she realized. She was still mad as hell at her father, but she took some faint comfort in telling herself that at least the man he’d tried to palm off on her was not a complete heel.

“Katherine, my dearest!” her father said. “Darling Kate! Apple of my eye!”

Kate looked up from her book. She said, “Huh?”

“I feel as if a great, huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he said. “Let’s celebrate. Where’s Bunny? Do we still have that bottle of wine around?”

“Bunny’s gone to a sleepover,” Kate said. She turned a page corner down and laid her book on the couch beside her. “What are we celebrating?”

“Ha! As if you didn’t know. Come on out to the kitchen with me.”

Kate stood up. She was beginning to feel uneasy.

“That Pyoder is a cagey one, isn’t he?” her father asked as he led the way to the kitchen. “He just slipped away from the lab while Bunny and her tutor were there; never said a word. I had no idea he’d gone to see you until he told me the news.”

“What news?”

Her father didn’t answer; he was opening the refrigerator and stooping to rummage at the back of it.

“What news are you talking about?” Kate asked him.

“Aha!” he said. He straightened and turned toward her, holding up a Chianti bottle that had been loosely re-corked.

“That’s several months old, Father.”

“Yes, but it’s been in the refrigerator all this time. You know my system. Get me some glasses.”

Kate reached up to the top shelf of the china cabinet. “Just tell me what we’re drinking to,” she said as she handed him two dusty wineglasses.

“Why, Pyoder says you like him now.”

“He does?”

“He says you two sat together in the backyard, and you fed him a delicious lunch, and you and he had a nice talk.”

“Well, I suppose that all more or less did happen, in a manner of speaking,” Kate said. “And? So?”

“So he has hope! He thinks this will work out!”

“Is
that
what he thinks! Oh, hang the man! He’s a lunatic!”

“Now, now,” her father said genially. He was pouring wine into the glasses, bunching up his mustache as he stood back to assess the level. “Five ounces,” he said, mostly to himself. He passed her a glass. “Sixteen seconds, please.”

She shut the glass in the microwave and stabbed the appropriate buttons. “What this proves,” she said, “is that it doesn’t pay to be polite to people. Honestly! He comes to the house uninvited, barges in without my say-so, and it’s true the front door was open which is so typical of Bunny, might I add—we could have been robbed blind for all
she
cared—but even so it was boorish of him to take advantage of it. Interrupts my nice quiet lunch, eats half of my roast beef sandwich, which I admit I did offer to him, but still, he could have turned it down; only a foreigner would pounce on it that way—”

“Aren’t you going to get that?” her father asked. He meant the microwave, which had dinged some time ago. He indicated it with a tilt of his chin.

“—and then look at how he twists things!” Kate said, exchanging the first glass for the second. She punched the buttons again. “What was I supposed to do: sit there in total silence? Naturally I talked to him, in a minimal kind of way. So now he has the nerve to say I like him!”

“But he
is
likable, isn’t he?” her father asked.

“We’re not talking about just liking, though,” she said. “You’re asking me to marry the guy.”

“No, no, no! Not immediately,” her father said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All I’m asking is that you take some time before you jump into any decision. Give my plan a little thought. Not too
much
thought, of course; it’s already April. But—”

“Father,” Kate began sternly.

“The wine?” he prompted her, with another tilt of his head.

She retrieved the second glass from the microwave, and he held the first glass aloft. “A toast!” he proposed. “To—”

She felt sure he was going to say “you and Pyoder,” but instead he said “keeping an open mind.”

He took a sip. Kate did not. She set her glass on the counter.

“Delicious,” he said. “I should share my system with
Wine Enthusiast Magazine
.”

He took another, deeper swallow. Now that the weather was warmer, he had abandoned the waffle-knit long-sleeved undershirts he wore all winter. His coverall sleeves were rolled up to expose his bare forearms, which were thin and black-haired and oddly frail. Kate felt an unexpected jolt of pity for him, over and above her exasperation. He was so inept-looking, so completely ill-equipped for the world around him.

Almost gently, she said, “Father. Face it. I will never agree to marry someone I’m not in love with.”

“In other cultures,” he said, “arranged marriages are—”

“We are not in another culture, and this is not an arranged marriage. This is human trafficking.”

“What?”

He looked horrified.

“Well, isn’t it? You’re trying to trade me off against my will. You’re sending me to live with a stranger,
sleep
with a stranger, just for your own personal gain. What is that if not trafficking?”

“Oh, my heavens!” he said. “Katherine. My goodness. I would never expect you to
sleep
with him.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No wonder you’ve been reluctant!”

“Then what
did
you expect?” she asked.

“Why, I just thought…I mean, goodness! There’s no need for
that
kind of thing,” he said. He took another slug of wine. He cleared his throat. “All I had in mind was, we would go on more or less as before except that Pyoder would move in with us. That much, I suppose, is unavoidable. But he would have Mrs. Larkin’s old room, and you would stay on in
your
room. I just assumed you knew that. Goodness gracious!”

“It didn’t occur to you that Immigration might find that suspicious?” Kate asked him.

“Why would they? Lots of couples have separate bedrooms; Immigration’s surely aware of that. We can say Pyoder snores. Maybe he does snore, for all we know. See, now…” He started rummaging through his coverall pockets. He brought out his cell phone. “See, I’ve been reading up,” he said. “I know what they look for. We need to document a gradual courtship, to prove to them that…” He squinted down at his phone, pressed a button and then another, and squinted again. “Photographs,” he told her, handing her the phone. “Taken over time. Recording your shared history.”

The screen showed Kate and Pyotr sitting catty-corner from each other at the table in her father’s laboratory, Kate on a high stool and Pyotr in a folding chair. Kate wore her buckskin jacket; Pyotr was in his lab coat. They were looking toward the viewer with startled, confused expressions.

She flipped to the next photo. Same pose, except that now Kate was speaking directly to the photographer, revealing two sharp tendons in her neck that she had never noticed before.

The next photo showed her from behind, blurry and distant, pausing on a sidewalk. She had turned halfway toward the man who was following her, but from the rear, it wasn’t clear who he was.

In the next, the man had hold of her arm and they were bypassing another couple.

It appeared that her father had been stalking her.

Then she and Pyotr were sitting across from each other at the Battistas’ dining-room table, but Bunny was in the foreground and the honey jar she held up partly obscured Pyotr’s profile.

And then Pyotr sat on Kate’s side of the table and a sliver of Kate stood next to him, minus her head. That was the last photograph.

“I’m going to send you these, as soon as I figure out how,” her father said. “I was thinking you should start texting him, too.”

“Pardon?”

“I read in the paper the other day that Immigration sometimes asks couples for their cell phones. They go through all their texts to make sure they’re really involved with each other.”

Kate held the phone toward her father, but he was busy refilling his wineglass. Somehow he’d already emptied it, and now he was emptying the bottle as well. He passed her the glass and said, “Fourteen seconds.”

“Only fourteen?”

“Well, it’s had time to get warmer now.”

He accepted his phone and pocketed it and then stood waiting, while Kate turned away and set his glass in the microwave.

“See, I haven’t wanted to talk about this yet,” he said, “but I believe I’m on the cusp of something. I may be nearing a breakthrough, at just the very moment when the powers that be are starting to lose faith in my project. And if Pyoder could stay on at the lab, if we really can accomplish this…Do you know what that would mean to me? It’s been such a long haul, Kate. A long, weary,
discouraging
haul, let me tell you, and I know sometimes it must have seemed as if it’s all I’ve cared about; I know your mother used to think so—”

He broke off to tilt his chin at the microwave again. Kate took out the glass of wine and handed it to him. This time he drained half the glass in a gulp, and she wondered if that were wise. He was not accustomed to alcohol. On the other hand, maybe it was thanks to the alcohol that he was suddenly so communicative. “My mother?” she prompted him.

“Your mother thought we should have weekends. Vacations, even! She didn’t understand. I know
you
understand; you’re more like me. More sensible, more practical. But your mother: she was very…unsturdy, I would say. She disliked being alone; can you imagine? And the most trivial little thing would send her into despair. More than once, she told me she didn’t see any point to life.”

Kate clamped her arms across her chest.

“I told her, ‘Well, of course you don’t, dearest. I can’t in good conscience say that there
is
any point. Did you ever believe there was?’ This didn’t seem to comfort her, though.”

“Really,” Kate said.

She reached for her wineglass and took a large swig. “A lot of women, when they have babies they feel happy and fulfilled,” she said once she had swallowed. “They don’t all of a sudden decide that life is not worth living.”

“Hmm?” Her father was staring moodily into the dregs of his own glass. Then he looked up. “Oh,” he said, “it was nothing to do with
you
, Kate. Is that what you’re thinking? She was feeling low long before
you
were born. I’m afraid it might have been my fault, in part. I’m afraid our marriage may have had a deleterious effect on her. Everything I said, it seemed, she took the wrong way. She thought I was belittling her, behaving as if I were smarter than she was. Which was nonsense, of course. I mean, no doubt I
was
smarter, but intelligence is not the only factor to consider in a marriage. In any event, she couldn’t seem to rise above her low spirits. I felt I was standing on the edge of a swamp watching her go under. She did try various different types of therapy, but she always ended up deciding it wasn’t helping. And pills, she tried those. All sorts of antidepressants—SSRIs and so forth. None of them worked, and some of them had side effects. Finally a colleague of mine, a fellow from England, told me about a drug he’d invented that they’d begun using in Europe. It hadn’t yet been approved in the States, he said, but he had seen it work miracles, and he sent me some and your mother tried it. Well, she became a whole new person. Vibrant! Animated! Energetic! You were in eighth grade by then and she suddenly took an interest, started attending PTA meetings, volunteered to accompany your class on field trips. I had my old Thea back, the woman she’d been when I met her. Then she said she wanted another baby. She had always wanted six children, she said, and I said, ‘Well, it’s your decision, dear. You know I leave such matters up to you.’ Right away she got pregnant, and she went to her doctor to confirm it, and that’s when we found out that the miracle drug had damaged her heart. They’d already begun to suspect that in Europe, and they were taking the drug off the market; we just hadn’t heard yet.”

“
That’s
what caused her heart trouble?”

“Yes, and I accept full responsibility for it. If not for me, she would never have known about that drug. Or needed it either, your aunt always claims.” He drained off the last of his wine and set his glass a bit too firmly on the counter beside him. “Although,” he said after a moment, “I suppose it did provide valuable data for my colleague.”