Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “Oh! Are you close?” Aunt Thelma asked.

  “He is in California.”

  “I mean…is he someone you’d want at your wedding?”

  “No, no, that would be ridiculous. Wedding is five minutes.”

  “Oh, surely it will last longer than that.”

  Uncle Theron said, “Take his word for it, Thelma; they’ve asked for the stripped-down version.”

  “My kind of ceremony,” Uncle Barclay said approvingly. “Short and sweet.”

  “Hush, Barclay,” Aunt Thelma told him. “You don’t mean that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event! That’s why I can’t believe that you and I are not invited.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Aunt Thelma’s own social instincts got the better of her; she was the one who spoke up. “Tell us, Kate, what will you wear?” she asked. “I would love to take you shopping.”

  “Oh, I think I’m set,” Kate said.

  “I know you couldn’t have hoped to fit into the dress your poor mother wore to her wedding…”

  Kate wished that, just once, Aunt Thelma would refer to her mother without using the word “poor.”

  Maybe her father felt the same way, because he interrupted to ask, “Isn’t it time to get supper on the table?”

  “Yes, Father,” Kate said.

  As she stood up, Uncle Theron was asking Pyotr whether he was allowed to practice religion in his country. “Why I would want to do that?” Pyotr said, looking honestly curious.

  Kate felt glad to be leaving the room.

  The men had done the cooking earlier that afternoon—sautéed chicken on a bed of grated jicama, drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce since the other evening’s maple syrup had not been deemed a success. All Kate had to do was set the platter out on the table and toss the salad. As she walked back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she caught snatches of the talk in the living room. She heard Uncle Theron utter the phrase “premarital counseling,” and she stiffened, but then Pyotr said, “Is so confusing, the two types of ‘counsel.’ I am mixed up how to spell them,” and Aunt Thelma was delighted to jump in and give him an English lesson, so the moment passed. Kate wasn’t sure whether he’d changed the subject on purpose.

  He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “jumped the gun!” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.

  He was still undeniably foreign, though. Even his posture was foreign; he walked in a foreign way that was more upright, shorter in stride. He had the foreigner’s tendency toward bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse. “Even a fool can see you’re after something,” she would say, and he would affect a perplexed look. Hearing him now in the living room, pontificating about the hidden perils of ice water, she felt embarrassed by him, and embarrassed for him, and filled with a mixture of pity and impatience.

  But just then a pair of sharp heels came clicking across the dining room. “Kate? Do you need any help?” Aunt Thelma called in a loud, false, carrying voice, and a moment later she slipped through the kitchen door to put an arm around Kate’s waist and whisper, on a winey breath, “He’s a cutie!”

  So Kate was being too critical, clearly.

  “With that golden cast to his skin, and his eyes tilting up at the corners…And I love that ropy yellow hair,” her aunt said. “He must have some Tartar in him, don’t you think?”

  “I have no idea,” Kate said.

  “Or is it ‘Tatar.’ ”

  “I really don’t know, Aunt Thelma.”

  —

  Over supper, Aunt Thelma proposed that she should take charge of the reception. “What reception?” Kate asked, but her father drilled her with a narrow stare. She could guess his meaning: he was thinking that a reception would look so convincing to Immigration.

  “I have to admit that this must be a genuine marriage,” the black-and-white detective would report to his superiors, “because the bride’s family threw a big shindig for them.”

  Immigration often used 1940s slang words, in Kate’s fantasies.

  “It’s just selfish not to let your friends and relations be part of your happiness,” Aunt Thelma was saying. “Why, what about Richard and his wife?”

  Richard was Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay’s only child, a blow-dried, overconfident type who worked as a lobbyist in Washington and had a habit of drawing himself up and taking a deep, portentous, whiskery-sounding breath through his nose before delivering one of his opinions. He couldn’t have cared less about Kate’s happiness.

  “I suppose it’s your decision if you don’t want us all at the ceremony,” Aunt Thelma told her. “I’m not pleased about it, but this is not about me, I suppose. However, we should be allowed to take part in the occasion somehow or other.”

  It was like blackmail. Kate could imagine Aunt Thelma parading in front of the church with a picket sign if she weren’t allowed her precious reception. She looked toward Pyotr, who was still wearing his huge, hopeful smile. She looked toward Uncle Theron—deliberately bypassing her father—and he was nodding at her encouragingly.

  “Well,” she said finally. “Well, I’ll think about it.”

  “Oh, goody. This is so, so perfect, because I’ve just redone the living room,” Aunt Thelma said. “You’ll love what I’ve covered the couches in: this gorgeous satin-stripe fabric that cost an arm and a leg, but it was worth every penny. And I’ve opened out the seating arrangement so the room can hold forty people now. Fifty, in a pinch.”

  “Fifty people!” Kate said. This was exactly why she hadn’t wanted her aunt to come to the wedding: she just somehow ran away with things. “I don’t even know fifty people,” Kate told her.

  “Oh, you must. Old school friends, neighbors, fellow teachers…”

  “Nope.”

  “How many do you know, then?”

  Kate thought. “Eight?” she suggested.

  “Kate. There are more than eight people at the Little People’s School alone.”

  “I just don’t like crowds,” Kate told her. “I don’t like mingling. I don’t like feeling guilty I’m not moving on and talking with somebody new.”

  “Ah,” Aunt Thelma said. A calculating look came over her face. “How about a little-bitty sit-down dinner, then?”

  “How big is little-bitty?” Kate asked warily.

  “Well, my table only seats fourteen, so you know it can’t be too big.”

  Fourteen people sounded to Kate like quite a lot, but it was better than fifty. “Well…” she said, and then her father jumped in to say, “Let’s see, now: there would be you and Pyoder, me and Bunny, Thelma and Barclay and Theron, and Richard and his wife, and, oh, maybe our neighbors, Sid and Rose Gordon; they were so nice to us after your mother died. And then…how about what’s-her-name?”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Your best friend from high school, what’s-her-name.”

  “Oh. Alice. She’s married now,” Kate said.

  “Good. She can bring her husband.”

  “But I haven’t seen her in years!”

  “Oh, I remember Alice. She was always so polite,” Aunt Thelma said. “So, how many does that make?” She started counting on her fingers. “Nine, ten…”
>
  “It’s not as if we’re trying to meet a minimum requirement,” Kate told her.

  “Eleven, twelve…” Aunt Thelma said, pretending Kate hadn’t spoken. “Thirteen,” she finished. “Oh, dear. Thirteen at the table: unlucky.”

  “Maybe add Mrs. Larkin,” Dr. Battista suggested.

  “Mrs. Larkin is dead,” Kate reminded him.

  “Ah.”

  “Who’s Mrs. Larkin?” Aunt Thelma asked.

  “The woman who used to tend the girls,” Dr. Battista said.

  “Oh, yes. She died?”

  “We could have Edward!” Bunny piped up.

  “Why would you want to invite your Spanish tutor to a wedding reception?” Kate asked her, evilly.

  Bunny slumped lower in her seat.

  “Louis,” Aunt Thelma said, “is that sister of yours still alive?”

  “Yes, but she lives in Massachusetts,” Dr. Battista said.

  “Or…I know you must have one favorite colleague at the Little People’s School,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “Some special friend there?”

  Kate pictured Adam Barnes sending her a sooty-eyed gaze over Aunt Thelma’s Wedgwood china. “None,” she said.

  There was a silence. They were all looking at her reproachfully—even Uncle Theron, even Pyotr.

  “What’s wrong with thirteen at the table?” she asked them. “Are you all really that superstitious? I don’t want any at the table! I don’t know why we’re doing this! I thought we were just going to have a simple little no-frills ceremony, Father and Bunny and Pyotr and me. Everything’s getting out of control here! I don’t know how this happened!”

  “There, there, dear,” Aunt Thelma said. She stretched a hand across the table to pat Kate’s place mat, which was the only part of her she could reach. “Thirteen at the table will be fine,” she said. “I was just trying to observe the conventions, that’s all; we’re not the least bit superstitious. Don’t you trouble your head about it. It will all be taken care of. Tell her, Pyoder.”

  Pyotr, who was seated next to Kate, leaned closer to sling an arm around her shoulders. “Do not worry, my Katya,” he said, breathing pink-peppercorn fumes.

  “Sweet,” Aunt Thelma cooed.

  Kate pulled away and reached for her water glass. “I just don’t like fuss,” she told them all, and she took a drink of water.

  “Of course you don’t,” Aunt Thelma said soothingly. “And there’s not going to be any fuss; you’ll see. Louis, where’s that wine? Pour her a glass of wine.”

  “We finished it, I’m afraid.”

  “This is stress, that’s all. It’s bridal jitters. Now, Kate, I just want to ask you one more teeny, tiny question and then I’ll shut up: you’re not going away on the same day as your wedding, are you?”

  “Going away?” Kate said.

  “On your honeymoon.”

  “No.”

  She didn’t bother explaining that they wouldn’t be taking a honeymoon.

  “Wonderful,” Aunt Thelma said. “I always think it’s such a mistake, starting a long demanding trip right on the heels of the ceremony. So this means we can have our little party in the evening. So much nicer. We’ll make it early, because you’ll have had a big day. Five or five-thirty or so, for the drinks. Now. That’s all I’m going to say. We’re going to change the subject now. Isn’t the chicken interesting! And you men did this? I’m impressed. Bunny, are you not having any?”

  “I’m a vegetarian?” Bunny said.

  “Oh, yes. Richard went through that stage too.”

  “It’s not a—?”

  “Thank you, Aunt Thelma,” Kate said.

  For once, she really meant it. She found it oddly comforting that her aunt was proving so unflappable.

  —

  It wasn’t bridal jitters.

  It was “Why is everyone going along with this? Why are you allowing this? Isn’t anyone going to stop me?”

  The previous Tuesday—Kate’s day for Extended Daycare—she had returned to Room 4 after herding the last child into the last parent’s car, and all the teachers and all the assistants had jumped up from the miniature chairs shouting, “Surprise! Surprise!” In the short time that she had been gone, they had assembled from wherever they’d been hiding to cover Mrs. Chauncey’s desk with a paper tablecloth and set out refreshments and paper cups and a stack of paper plates, and on the Lego table an upside-down lace parasol spilled tissue-wrapped gifts. Adam was strumming his guitar and Mrs. Darling was holding court behind the punch bowl. “Did you know? Did you guess?” they kept asking Kate, and she said, “It never crossed my mind,” which was absolutely true. “I don’t know what to say!” she kept saying. They pressed their gifts on her with long-winded explanations: these mugs were ordered in blue but when they arrived they were green; this salad bowl was dishwasher-proof; she was welcome to exchange this carving set if she already had one. They settled her in the place of honor—Mrs. Chauncey’s desk chair—and served her pink-and-white cupcakes and homemade brownies. Adam sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Mrs. Fairweather asked if they could see a photo of Pyotr. (Kate showed them the restaurant photo on her cell phone. Several people said he was good-looking.) Georgina wanted to know if Kate was planning to bring him to Room 4 for Show and Tell, but Kate said, “Oh, he can’t possibly spare the time away from his research”—picturing, meanwhile, how Pyotr would have reveled in being put on display, how he would have turned the whole event into some kind of circus. And Mrs. Bower advised her to make it clear from the get-go that he should pick his own socks up.

  It seemed they viewed her differently now. She had status. She mattered. All at once they were interested in what she had to say.

  She hadn’t fully understood that before this, she hadn’t mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified. And also fraudulent. It was confusing.

  Would getting married have any effect on her probation? She couldn’t help wondering. She hadn’t been called to the office even once since she had announced her engagement, she realized.

  Adam’s gift was a dream catcher. The hoop was made of willow, he said. He had wound it in strips of suede, and then he had added beads like those on the dream catcher he had given Georgina for her coming baby, and feathers like those on the dream catcher he had given Sophia. “Now, this open space at the center,” he said, taking it from Kate to demonstrate, “is supposed to let the good dreams slip through, and this webbing around the edge is supposed to block the bad dreams.”

  “That’s lovely, Adam,” Kate said.

  He placed it in her hands again. He seemed sad about something, or was she deluding herself? He looked directly into her eyes and said, “I want you to know, Kate, that I wish you only good in your life.”

  “Thank you, Adam,” she said. “That means a great deal to me.”

  The forecast had been for rain that day, and Kate had taken the car to work. Driving home, with mugs and pots and candlesticks rattling in the backseat among her father’s lab supplies, she had smacked the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. “ ‘That’s lovely, Adam,’ ” she quoted herself in a high-pitched, mincing voice. “ ‘That means a great deal to me.’ ”

  And she balled up her fist and punched her own forehead.

  —

  Aunt Thelma asked Kate if she were planning to be Kate Cherbakov (pronouncing it as her brother-in-law did). “Definitely not,” Kate said. Even if this marriage had not been temporary, she was opposed to the notion of brides changing their names. And Pyotr, to her relief, chimed in with “No, no, no.” But then he added, “Will be Shcherbakov-ah. Female ending, because she is girl.”

  “Woman,” Kate said.

  “Because she is woman.”

  “I’m sticking with Battista,” Kate told her aunt.

  Uncle Theron said, perhaps in context, “I was telling Pyoder in the living room that I like to suggest a little counseling session to couples before I marry them.”

  “Oh, wh
at a good idea!” Aunt Thelma exclaimed, as if this were the first she’d heard of it.

  “We don’t need counseling,” Kate said.

  “Issues like whether you plan to change your last name, though—” Uncle Theron began.

  “Do not worry,” Pyotr said hastily. “Is not important. Is only a brand of canned peaches.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’ll settle it between ourselves,” Kate told everyone. “Who wants more chicken?”

  The chicken was all right, she supposed, but the pink-peppercorn sauce tasted weird. She was looking forward to raiding her stash of beef jerky as soon as she was alone again.

  “I don’t know whether Kate mentioned it,” Aunt Thelma was saying to Pyotr, “but I’m an interior decorator.”

  “Ah!”

  Kate had the impression that Pyotr didn’t have the slightest inkling what an interior decorator was.

  “Will you two be living in a house, or in an apartment?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

  “Apartment, I think you would call it,” Pyotr said. “Is inside a house, however. Widow’s house; Mrs. Murphy’s. I have top floor.”

  “But after they marry, he’s moving in with us,” Dr. Battista said.

  Aunt Thelma frowned. Pyotr frowned too. Bunny said, “With us?”

  “No,” Pyotr said, “I have whole top floor of Mrs. Murphy’s house, rent-free because I lift Mrs. Murphy from wheelchair to car and I change her light bulbs. Is only a walk to Dr. Battista’s lab, and every window I look out of, I see trees. This spring there is a bird nest! Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. No dining room, but kitchen has table.”

  “It sounds darling,” Aunt Thelma said.

  “After the wedding, though, he’ll live here,” Dr. Battista said.

  “I am allowed to use whole backyard, big, large, huge, sunny backyard, because Mrs. Murphy cannot go there in wheelchair. I plant cucumbers and radishes. Kate could maybe plant also.” He turned to Kate. “You wish to plant vegetables? Or only flowers.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, yes, I’d like to plant vegetables. At least, I think I would. I’ve never had a vegetable garden before.”

  “But I thought we discussed this,” Dr. Battista said.