Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “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?”

  “I grew up in orphanage.”

  “Gosh! I never met anybody from an orphanage before!”

  “You forgot Pyotr’s water,” Kate told her. She was dishing out mounds of meat mash and passing the filled plates around, exchanging them for empty ones.

  Bunny pushed her chair back and started to rise, but Pyotr held a palm up and said again, “Is no problem.”

  “Pyoder feels water dilutes the enzymes,” Dr Battista said.

  Bunny said, “Huh?”

  “The digestive enzymes.”

  “Especially water with ice,” Pyotr said. “Freezes enzymes in middle of ducts.”

  “Have you ever heard this theory?” Dr. Battista asked his daughters. He looked delighted.

 
; Kate thought it was a pity he couldn’t just marry Pyotr himself, if he was so set on adjusting the man’s status. The two of them seemed made for each other.

  On Tuesdays, Kate varied their menu by setting out tortillas and a jar of salsa so that they could have meat-mash burritos. Pyotr didn’t bother with the tortillas, though. He ladled an avalanche of salsa over his serving and then dug in with his spoon, nodding intently as he listened to Dr. Battista ponder why it was that autoimmune disorders affected more women than men. Kate pushed her food around her plate; she wasn’t as hungry as she had thought. And Bunny, across the table from her, seemed lukewarm about her tofu. She cut a corner off with her fork and took an experimental taste, chewing with just her front teeth. Her green vegetable—two pallid stalks of celery—lay untouched, so far. Kate predicted her meat-free phase would last about three days.

  Dr. Battista was telling Pyotr that sometimes it seemed to him that women were just more…skinless than men, but he stopped speaking suddenly and looked at Bunny’s plate. “What’s that?” he asked.

  “It’s tofu?”

  “Tofu!”

  “I’ve given up eating meat?”

  “Is that wise?” her father asked.

  “Is ridiculous,” Pyotr said.

  “See there?” Kate told Bunny.

  “Where would be her B-twelve?” Pyotr asked Dr. Battista.

  “I suppose it could come from her breakfast cereal,” Dr. Battista mused. “Providing the cereal’s fortified, of course.”