by Anne Tyler
“Oh.”
Mrs. Darling set the sheet of paper down. “Someday,” she told Kate, “I can imagine your becoming a full-fledged teacher.”
“You can?”
Kate had never noticed that this place had an actual career path. Certainly there had been no evidence of it to date.
“I can see you in charge of a classroom, once you mature,” Mrs. Darling said. “But when I say ‘mature,’ Kate, I don’t mean just getting older.”
“Oh. No.”
“I mean that you would need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”
“Okay.”
“Do you even understand what I’m talking about?”
“Tact. Restraint. Diplomacy.”
Mrs. Darling studied her a moment. “Because otherwise,” she said, “I can’t quite picture your continuing in our little community, Kate. I’d like to picture it. I’d like to keep you on for the sake of your dear aunt, but you are walking on very thin ice here; I want you to know that.”
“Got it,” Kate said.
Mrs. Darling didn’t seem reassured, but after a pause she said, “Very well, Kate. Leave the door open when you go, please.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. D.,” Kate told her.
—
“I think I’ve been put on probation,” she told the Threes’ assistant. They were standing out on the playground together, supervising the seesaws so that no one got killed.
Natalie said, “Weren’t you already on probation?”
“Oh,” Kate said. “Maybe you’re right.”
“What’d you do this time?”
“I insulted a parent.”
Natalie grimaced. They all felt the same way about parents.
“It was this nutso control-freak dad,” Kate said, “who keeps trying to turn his kid into Little Miss Perfect.”
But just then Adam Barnes arrived with a couple of his Twos, and she dropped the subject. (She always tried to look like a nicer person than she really was when Adam was around.) “What’s up?” he asked them, and Natalie said, “Oh, not a whole lot,” while Kate just grinned at him foolishly and jammed her hands in her jeans pockets.
“Gregory here was hoping to go on a seesaw,” Adam said. “I told him maybe one of the big guys would let him take a turn.”
“Of course!” Natalie said. “Donny,” she called, “could you give Gregory a little turn on the seesaw?”
She wouldn’t do that for anyone but Adam. The children were supposed to be learning to wait—even the two-year-olds. Kate sent her a narrow-eyed stare, and Donny said, “But I just now got on!”
“Oh, then,” Adam broke in immediately. “That wouldn’t be fair, then. You don’t want to be unfair to Donny, do you, Gregory?”
Gregory seemed to feel that he did want to be unfair. His eyes filled with tears and his chin started wobbling.
“Or, I know what!” Natalie said, in a super-enthusiastic tone. “Gregory, you can ride with Donny! Donny can be a big boy and share his ride with you!”
Kate felt like upchucking. She nearly went so far as to pantomime sticking a finger down her throat, but she stopped herself. Luckily, Adam wasn’t looking in her direction. He was lifting Gregory onto the seesaw in front of Donny, who at least was tolerating the arrangement, and then he walked over to set a hand behind Jason at the other end to add some weight.
Adam was the school’s only male assistant, a lanky, kind-faced young English-major type with a tangle of dark hair and a curly beard. Mrs. Darling seemed to feel she’d been exceptionally daring to have hired him, although most of the other preschools had several men on their staffs by that time. She had first assigned him to the Fives, known also as the Pre-Ks because the children there, mostly boys, were old enough for kindergarten but were thought to need a further year of socialization. A man would provide discipline and structure, Mrs. D. felt. However, Adam had turned out to be such a mild man, so gentle and solicitous, that halfway through his first year he and Georgina had been switched. Now he happily tended two-year-olds, wiping noses and soothing random cases of homesickness, and before Quiet Rest Time every day his mumbly, slightly furry voice could be heard singing lullabies above the soporific strumming of his guitar. Unlike most men, he stood noticeably taller than Kate, and yet somehow in his presence she always felt too big and too gangling. She longed all at once to be softer, daintier, more ladylike, and she was embarrassed by her own gracelessness.
She wished she had had a mother. Well, she had had a mother, but she wished she’d had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.
“I saw you walk past during Quiet Rest Time,” Adam called to her as he worked the seesaw. “Were you in trouble with Mrs. Darling?”
“No…” she said. “You know. We were just discussing a child I was concerned about.”
Natalie made a snorting noise. Kate glared at her, and Natalie put on an exaggerated “Oh-excuse-me” expression. So transparent, Natalie was. Everybody knew she had a huge crush on Adam.
Last week, it was all over the school that Adam had given Sophia Watson one of his handmade dream catchers. “Oho!” everyone said. But Kate thought he might just have done that because Sophia was his co-assistant in Room 2.
—
Tact, restraint, diplomacy. What was the difference between tact and diplomacy? Maybe “tact” referred to saying things politely while “diplomacy” meant not saying things at all. Except, wouldn’t “restraint” cover that? Wouldn’t “restraint” cover all three?
People tended to be very spendthrift with their language, Kate had noticed. They used a lot more words than they needed to.
She was taking her time walking home because the weather was so nice. In the morning it had been downright cold, but since then the day had warmed up and she carried her jacket slung over one shoulder. A young couple was strolling at a leisurely pace in front of her, the girl telling some long tale about some other girl named Lindy, but Kate didn’t bother trying to pass them.
She wondered whether the pale blue, faceless pansies she saw in somebody’s garden urn would bloom in her backyard. She had way too much shade in her backyard.
Behind her, she heard her name called. She turned to see a light-haired man hurrying toward her with one arm raised, as if he were hailing a cab. For a moment she couldn’t imagine what he had to do with her, but then she recognized her father’s research assistant. The absence of his lab coat had confused her; he was wearing jeans and a plain gray jersey. “Hi!” he said as he arrived next to her. (“Khai,” it sounded like.)
“Peter,” she said.
“Pyotr.”
“How’re you doing,” she said.
“I fear I may be having cold,” he told her. “My nose waters and I sneeze a great deal. Has been taking place since last night.”
“Bummer,” she said.
She resumed walking, and he fell into step alongside her. “It was a good day at your school?” he asked.
“It was okay.”
They were right on the heels of the young couple now. Lindy ought to just dump the guy, the girl was saying, he was making her unhappy; and the boy said, “Oh, I don’t know, she seems all right to me.”
“Where are your eyes?” the girl asked him. “The whole time they’re together she keeps looking into his face and he keeps looking away. Everybody’s noticed it—Patsy and Paula and Jane Ann—and finally my sister came right out and said to Lindy; she said—”
Pyotr briefly clamped Kate’s upper arm to steer her around them. It startled her for a moment. He was barely taller than Kate, but she had trouble matching his stride, and then she wondered why she was trying and she slowed her pace. He slowed too. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked him.
“Yes! I am just going.”
Since the lab lay two blocks in the opposite direction, this didn’t make any sense, but that was no concern of hers. She glanced at her watch. She liked to get home before Bunny, who was not suppo
sed to entertain boys when she was alone but sometimes did anyhow.
“In my country we have proverb,” Pyotr was saying.
Didn’t they always, Kate thought.
“We say, ‘Work when it is divided into segments is shorter total period of time than work when it is all together in one unit.’ ”
“Catchy,” Kate said.
“How long you have been letting your hair grow?”
The change of subject took her aback. “What?” she said. “Oh. Since eighth grade, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t take any more of that Chatty Cathy act.”
“Chatty Cathy?”
“In the beauty parlor. Talk, talk, talk; those places are crawling with talk. The women there start going before they even sit down—talk about boyfriends, husbands, mothers-in-law. Roommates, jealous girlfriends. Feuds and misunderstandings and romances and divorces. How can they find so much to say? I could never think of anything, myself. I kept disappointing my beautician. Finally I went, ‘Shoot. I’ll just quit getting my hair cut.’ ”
“It is exceedingly attractive,” Pyotr said.
“Thanks,” Kate said. “Well, this is where I turn off. Do you realize the lab’s back that way?”
“Oh! Is back that way!” Pyotr said. He didn’t seem too perturbed about it. “Okay, Kate! See you soon! Was nice having a talk.”
Kate had already started down her own street, and she raised an arm without looking back.
—
She had barely stepped into the house when she heard a distinct male voice. “Bunny,” she called in her sternest tone.
“In here!” Bunny sang out.
Kate tossed her jacket onto the hall bench and went into the living room. Bunny was sitting on the couch, all frothy golden curls and oh-so-innocent face and off-the-shoulder blouse far too lightweight for the season; and the Mintz boy from next door was sitting next to her.
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.
