Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “We discussed this and I said no,” Pyotr said.

  Aunt Thelma took on a gleeful expression. “Louis,” she said, “face it. Your little girl has grown up.”

  “I realize that, but the understanding was that she and Pyoder will live here.”

  Bunny said, “No one told me that! I thought they were living at Pyoder’s! I thought I was going to get Kate’s room now. With the window seat?”

  “It makes much more sense for them to live here,” her father told her. “We would just rattle around in this big house all by ourselves.”

  “Whatever happened to ‘Whither thou goest, I will go’?” Bunny asked.

  Uncle Theron cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “those words were spoken to a mother-in-law. People never seem to realize that.”

  “To a mother-in-law?”

  “Is entire top floor of house,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Second bedroom is study now, but I am going to change it to bedroom for Kate.”

  Aunt Thelma sat up alertly. Her husband grinned and said, “Well, now. I seriously doubt if Kate will require her own bedroom.”

  Aunt Thelma waited for Pyotr’s response as intently as a pointer narrowing in on a quail, but Pyotr was too busy staring down Dr. Battista.

  It could be like the coed dorm Kate had lived in while she was in college, she thought. She had loved the coed dorm. She had felt very free there, very casual and natural, and the boys there had been not dates but comfortable acquaintances.

  She wondered if Pyotr liked chess. He and she could play chess in the evenings, maybe.

  “I blame that old popular song,” Uncle Theron was saying. “ ‘Whither thou goest…’ ” he started singing in a fine-grained, slightly quavery tenor.

  “Bunny is too young to be at home without supervision,” Dr. Battista told Pyotr. “You of all people should be aware of my long hours.”

  It was true. Bunny would have the house stocked with teenage boys as quick as a wink. Kate experienced a pang of loss as she saw the big, large, huge, sunny backyard slipping out of her grasp.

  But Pyotr said, “You can hire a person.”

  This was also true. Kate perked up.

  Aunt Thelma said, “Can’t argue with that, Louis. Ha! Seems you’ve met your match.”

  “But…wait!” Dr. Battista said. “This is not at all how I planned it! You’re talking about an entirely different setup here.”

  Aunt Thelma turned to Kate and said, “It would be my pleasure to come to your apartment and give you two a free consultation. If this is some old Hopkins professor’s house, I’ll bet it has all kinds of potential.”

  “Oh, yes, lots,” Kate said, because it would look suspicious if she admitted she had never laid eyes on the place.

  —

  Dessert was just store-bought ice cream, because neither Pyotr nor Dr. Battista had had any other ideas. When they’d looked hopefully at Kate, she had said, “Well, I’ll see what I can find.” So at the end of the meal she went out to the kitchen and took a carton of butter pecan from the freezer. As she was setting a row of bowls on the counter, the door to the dining room swung open and Pyotr walked in. He came up next to her and elbowed her in the ribs. “Quit that,” she told him.

  “Is going well, no?” he murmured in her ear. “I think they like me!”

  “If you say so,” she said, and she started scooping ice cream.

  Then he flung an arm exuberantly around her waist and pulled her close and kissed her cheek. For a moment, she didn’t resist; his arm enclosed her so securely, and his fresh-hay smell was quite pleasant. But then, “Whoa!” she said, jerking away. She turned to confront him. “Pyotr,” she said sternly. “You remember what we agreed on.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, and he stood back and held up both palms. “Yes, nobody shall be crazy about anybody,” he said. “I can help you carry these bowls in?”

  “Please do,” she told him, and he picked up the first two she’d filled and backed out the swinging door to the dining room.

  It was true that they seemed to like him. She saw that while they were eating their ice cream—Uncle Barclay quizzing him about whether his country had hedge funds, Uncle Theron more interested in whether his country had ice cream, Aunt Thelma leaning toward him in an intimate way to suggest that he call her “Aunt Thelma.” (Which he immediately shortened to “Aunt Thel,” or more accurately, “Aunt Sel.”) Dr. Battista had been in a silent sulk ever since the housing discussion, but the three guests were acting quite animated.

  Well, no wonder. They were happy to be getting rid of her.

  She had always been such a handful—a thorny child, a sullen teenager, a failure as a college student. What was to be done with her? But now they had the answer: marry her off. They would never have to give her another moment’s thought.

  So when Uncle Theron reminded her that she and Pyotr would need to apply for a marriage license, she said pointedly, “Yes, Father and Pyotr already saw to that. And Father has the form he wants me to fill out for Immigration.” And she sent a challenging look around the table.

  This should have made her aunt and her uncles sit up and take notice, but Uncle Theron just nodded and then they all went back to talking. It was much more convenient to pretend they hadn’t understood her.

  “Wait!” she wanted to tell them. “Don’t you think I’m worth more than this? I shouldn’t have to go through with this! I deserve to have a real romance, someone who loves me for myself and thinks I’m a treasure. Someone who showers me with flowers and handwritten poems and dream catchers.”

  But she kept quiet and stirred her ice cream in her bowl.

  A couple of days before the wedding, Pyotr drove over to the house after work so that he and Kate could load her belongings into his car. There weren’t all that many: just the clothes from her bureau, packed in a couple of suitcases, and a carton containing her shower gifts, and a garment bag filled with the clothes that had hung in her closet. The suitcases and the carton fit easily into Pyotr’s trunk. He laid the garment bag full length across the backseat.

  Bunny had greeted Pyotr tepidly and then wandered off somewhere, and Dr. Battista was still at the lab. Kate suspected him of staying away to make a point. He had acted noticeably aloof ever since the decision about her new living arrangements.

  Pyotr lived in one of those big old faculty houses within shouting distance of the Johns Hopkins campus, a white clapboard Colonial with faded green shutters. He parked at the front curb, although a driveway lay to one side. He told Kate that he wasn’t supposed to block Mrs. Liu’s exit; Mrs. Liu was Mrs. Murphy’s live-in attendant.

  They moved everything into the house in one trip—Kate lugging the suitcases, Pyotr carrying the carton and the garment bag, which he had draped over his shoulder. On the stoop he set down the carton to unlock the front door. “After we carry things up we go to visit Mrs. Murphy,” he told her. “She is wanting to meet you.”

  “Is she okay with my moving in like this?” Kate thought to ask. (Belatedly, it was true.)

  “She is okay. Just worries you will say in a while we must move to place of our own.”

  Kate gave a little snort. No doubt Mrs. Murphy was visualizing some wifey type in a ruffled apron.

  The front hall was dim and musty-smelling. A giant gilt-framed mirror loomed over a claw-footed mahogany buffet, and the doors on either side were closed tightly, which was reassuring. Kate wouldn’t have to greet the two women every time she went in or out. Also the rest of the house was less dark, she could tell. The stairs in front of her glowed with the late-afternoon sunlight that filtered through a window above them, so that the higher she and Pyotr climbed, the brighter it grew.

  The hallway on the next level was carpeted, but the top level—onetime servants’ quarters, Kate surmised—had bare pine floorboards and honey-colored wood trim instead of the somber trim of the rest of the house. Kate found it a relief. No door closed this level off, but it was high enough so she coul
dn’t hear any sounds from below. She could tell she would feel private here.

  Pyotr led the way to the right, toward a room down the hall. “This will be yours,” he told her. He stood back to let her enter and then followed her inside.

  It had been serving as his study, clearly. A mammoth desk crowded with computer equipment filled one end of it, and a daybed covered in a garish leopard-print velour stood along the opposite wall. Next to the window was a bureau, antique-looking and small but adequate for Kate’s needs, and in the corner sat a dowdy skirted armchair with an ottoman.

  “Desk will go to living room,” Pyotr told her. He heaved the carton onto the bureau and went to the closet to hang the garment bag. “Later we get a smaller desk, for if you become a student.”

  Kate said, “Oh! Well. Thank you, Pyotr.”

  “Mrs. Murphy thinks maybe she can give us desk. She has many extra furnitures.”

  Kate set her suitcases down and went to look out the window. Below her lay the backyard, long and green and framed by shrubbery, some of which she thought might be rosebushes. She had never had enough sun before for roses. At the far end of the yard, just inside the picket fence, she spotted a rectangle of spaded earth that must be Pyotr’s vegetable garden.

  “Come see the rest of apartment,” he told her.

  He returned to the doorway but then stood aside to let her go first, and as she walked past him she became acutely aware of his physical proximity. For all her thoughts about how this apartment would be just another coed dorm, it occurred to her that in fact, she was going to be living alone with a man; and when he crossed the hall to open another door and say, “My room,” she barely glanced in (double bed, nightstand…) before backing away. Perhaps he sensed her discomfort, because he quickly shut the door again. “Bathroom,” he said, waving toward the half-open door at the end of the hall, but he didn’t suggest she step inside. “Is only the one; I am sorry we must share.”

  “Oh, that’s okay; at home I share with two people,” she said, and she gave a little laugh, but he didn’t laugh himself.

  He led her next to the living room, which contained only a sagging couch, a fake-woodgrain coffee table, and an old-fashioned tube TV on a wheeled metal cart. “Couch looks old but is soft,” he said. He seemed to be studying the couch intently; there was nothing more to be seen in this room, but he made no move to leave.

  “One time in high school,” he said, “I went home with classmate to work on project. I slept the night there. In my bed I heard his parents talk downstairs. See, this classmate was not orphan boy but normal.”

  Kate glanced at him curiously.

  “I heard just the parents’ voices, not words. Parents sat together in the living room. Wife said, ‘Mumble mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble.’ Wife said, ‘Mumble, mumble, mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble mumble.’ ”

  Kate couldn’t imagine where Pyotr was heading with this.

  He said, “You would maybe sit sometimes in this living room with me? You would say ‘Mumble?’ And I would say ‘Mumble mumble.’ ”

  “Or you could say ‘Mumble?’ and I could say ‘Mumble mumble,’ ” Kate suggested. Meaning that she saw no reason why he couldn’t be the tentative one and she the more definite. But she could tell he didn’t get her point. He looked at her with his forehead crinkling. “Sure,” she said finally. “We could do that sometimes.”

  “O-kay!” he said, and he let out an enormous breath and started smiling.

  “Kitchen?” she reminded him.

  “Kitchen,” he said, and he waved her toward the door.

  The kitchen lay at the rear of the house, nearest the top of the stairs. It must once have been a storeroom; the walls were cedar, still faintly aromatic. There was a 1950s look to it that was oddly appealing: rusty white metal cabinets, peeling Formica counters, a thickly painted white wooden table with two red chairs. “Nice,” Kate said.

  “You like it?”

  “Yup.”

  “You like the whole place?”

  “Yup.”

  “I know it is not fancy.”

  “It’s very nice. Very comfortable,” she said, and she meant it.

  He let out another breath. “Now we go meet Mrs. Murphy,” he said.

  Standing back again to let her leave the room first, he drew himself inward to allow an exaggerated amount of space for her to pass, as if to make it clear that he would not presume. Evidently she hadn’t managed to hide the awkwardness she was feeling.

  —

  Mrs. Murphy was a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a lace-trimmed dress and orthopedic shoes. Mrs. Liu was tiny and wiry, and like many older Asian women she wore what could have been men’s clothes: an untucked khaki work shirt and boxy brown trousers and blindingly white sneakers. The two of them seemed embedded among the antimacassared chairs and the fussy little tables and the shelves of bric-a-brac, and they emerged only by degrees, Mrs. Liu pushing Mrs. Murphy’s wheelchair forward several seconds after Pyotr and Kate stepped through the door. “Is this our Kate?” Mrs. Murphy called out.

  Kate almost looked behind her for someone else; it seemed so unlikely that she could be “our” Kate. But Mrs. Murphy was holding out both hands, forcing Kate to step closer and take them in her own. Mrs. Murphy’s hands were large and thick-fingered and meaty. She was so large all over, in fact, that Kate wondered how Pyotr could lift her. “You look just the way Pyoder described you,” Mrs. Murphy was saying. “We thought maybe he was overstating out of smittenness. Welcome, dear Kate! Welcome to your new home.”

  “Well…thanks,” Kate said.

  “Has he given you the grand tour yet?”

  “I have showed her everywhere except yard,” Pyotr said.

  “Oh, you have to see the yard, of course. We hear you’re going to be planting up a storm.”

  “Well, um, if that’s all right with you,” Kate said. It occurred to her that she had no idea if Mrs. Murphy had been consulted.

  “It’s more than all right,” Mrs. Murphy said, at the same time that Mrs. Liu put in, “Will be flowers, though, yes?” Although Mrs. Liu’s accent was very different from Pyotr’s, she seemed to have the same trouble with pronouns. “This Pyoder is all useful things! Cucumbers, cabbages, radishes! She has no poetry.”

  “He has no poetry,” Pyotr corrected her. (Not even Pyotr confused his genders.) “Kate will plant flowers and vegetables both. Maybe will someday be botanist.”

  “Good! You should be botanist too, Pyoder. Get outdoors in sunshine. See how pale?” Mrs. Liu asked Kate. “He is like mushroom!”

  If Mrs. Liu were standing closer to Pyotr, she would have nudged him in the ribs, Kate suspected. In fact, both women were looking at him with amusement and affection, and Pyotr was positively basking under their gaze. He wore a serene half-smile and he slid his eyes toward Kate as if to make sure she appreciated his position here.

  “But enough about our mushroom man,” Mrs. Murphy announced. “Kate, you’ll have to tell us what you need for the apartment. Besides a desk, that is; we already know you need a desk. But how about in the kitchen? Did you find enough utensils?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kate said. She hadn’t so much as opened a drawer in the kitchen, but somehow she felt the urge to live up to Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her. “Everything looks great,” she said.

  “You should check our kitchen for duplicates,” Mrs. Murphy told Mrs. Liu. In turning, she let one foot slip off her footrest, and Pyotr bent without her noticing to lift it back into place. “I know we have at least two electric mixers,” she was saying. “The stand mixer and the handheld one. Surely we don’t need both.”

  “Maybe not…” Mrs. Liu said in a doubtful tone.

  “We will go see yard now,” Pyotr decided. “Talk about mixers some other time.”

  “All right, Pyoder. Come visit us again, Kate! And you be sure to let us know about any little thing that’s lacking.”

  “Sure,” Kate said. “Thanks.” And then—evidently still un
der the spell of Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her—she stepped forward and gave Mrs. Murphy both her hands again.

  Out on the stoop, Pyotr said, “You liked them?”

  “They seemed really nice,” Kate said.

  “They liked you,” he said.

  “They don’t know me!”

  “They know you.”

  He was leading the way around the side of the house now, toward the picket fence that separated the front yard from the rear. “In garage,” he said, “are garden tools. I will show you where I hide key.”

  He lifted the latch of the gate and then stepped back to let her go through. Again he allowed far more space than she needed, but it crossed her mind now that it might be for his sake as much as for hers. Both of them, for some reason, seemed to be feeling a little shy with each other.

  On her wedding morning, Kate opened her eyes to find Bunny sitting at the foot of her bed. “What, are you checking out my window seat?” she asked, although Bunny wasn’t even looking at the window seat. She was sitting tailor-fashion in her baby-doll pajamas, staring at Kate intently as if willing her to wake up.

  “Listen,” she told Kate. “You don’t have to do this.”

  Kate reached behind her to prop her pillow against her headboard. She glanced toward the sky outside; there was a whiteness to the light that made her wonder if rain might be on the way, although the forecast was for sunshine. (Aunt Thelma had been reporting the forecast throughout the past week, because she was hoping to serve drinks on her patio before the “wedding banquet,” as she had taken to calling it.)

  “I know you think you’re just doing a little something on paper to fool Immigration,” Bunny said, “but this guy is starting to act like he owns you! He’s telling you what last name to use and where to live and whether to go on working. I mean, I do think it would be nice if I could have a bigger room, but if the price for that is my only sister getting totally tamed and tamped down and changed into some whole nother person—”

  “Hey. Bun-Buns,” Kate said. “I appreciate the thought, but do you not know me even a little? I can handle this. Believe me. It’s not as if I haven’t dealt my whole life with an…oligarch, after all.”