Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “An…”

  “I’m not that easily squashed. Trust me: I can take him on with one hand tied behind me.”

  “Okay,” Bunny said. “Fine. If your idea of fun is sparring and squabbling, so be it. But you’re going to have to be around him all the time! Nobody’s even mentioned how soon you’ll be allowed to divorce him, but I bet it’s a year at least and meanwhile you’re sharing an apartment with someone who doesn’t say please or thank you or smile when you’d expect him to and thinks ‘How are you?’ means ‘How are you?’ and stands too close to people when he talks and never tells them, ‘I think maybe perhaps such-and-such,’ but always, flat-out, ‘You are wrong,’ and ‘This is bad,’ and ‘She is stupid’; no shades of gray, all black and white and ‘What I say goes.’ ”

  “Well, part of that is just a matter of language,” Kate said. “You can’t always be bothered with ‘please’ and ‘maybe’ when you’re struggling to get your basic message across.”

  “And the worst of it is,” Bunny said, as if Kate hadn’t spoken, “the worst is, it won’t be any different from the fix you’re in here—living with a crazed science person who’s got a system for every little move you make and spouts off his old-man health theories every chance he gets and measures the polyphenols or whatever in every meal.”

  “That’s not true at all,” Kate said. “It will be a lot different. Pyotr’s not Father! He listens to people, you can tell; he pays attention. And did you hear what he said the other night about how maybe I’d want to go back to school? I mean, who else has ever suggested that? Who else has even given me a thought? Here in this house I’m just part of the furniture, somebody going nowhere, and twenty years from now I’ll be the old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father. ‘Yes, Father; no, Father; don’t forget to take your medicine, Father.’ This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny! Just give it a good shaking up! Can you blame me for wanting to try?”

  Bunny looked at her dubiously.

  “But thank you,” Kate thought to add, and she sat forward and patted Bunny’s bare foot. “You’re nice to be concerned.”

  “Well,” Bunny said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Not until she’d left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn’t ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

  —

  It felt strange to have their father home in the daytime. He was sitting at the breakfast table when Kate came downstairs, a cup of coffee at his elbow and the newspaper spread before him. “Morning,” Kate told him, and he glanced up and adjusted his glasses and said, “Oh. Good morning. Do you know what’s going on in the world?”

  “What?” Kate asked him, but he must have been referring to the news in general because he just waved a hand despairingly toward the paper and then returned to his reading.

  He was wearing a pair of his coveralls. This was fine with Kate, but when Bunny walked into the kitchen a moment later she said, “You are not going to the church dressed like that.”

  “Hmm?” her father said. He turned a page of his paper.

  “You have to show some respect, Papa! This is some people’s house of worship; I don’t care what you believe personally. You need to at least put on a regular shirt and trousers.”

  “It’s Saturday,” her father said. “Nobody else will be there, just us and your uncle.”

  “What kind of photo will it make for Immigration, though?” Bunny asked. She could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion. “You in your work outfit. Sort of obvious, don’t you think?”

  “Ah. Yes, you have a point,” he said. He sighed and folded his newspaper and stood up.

  Bunny herself was wearing her angel-winged sundress, and Kate—motivated by a vague sense that she owed it to Uncle Theron—had put on a light-blue cotton shift that dated from college. She wasn’t accustomed to wearing pale colors and she felt uncomfortably conspicuous; she wondered if she seemed to be trying too hard. Apparently Bunny approved, though. At least, she offered no criticisms.

  Kate took a carton of eggs from the fridge and asked Bunny, “Want an omelet?” but Bunny said, “No, I’m going to make myself a smoothie.”

  “Well, be sure you clean up, then. Last smoothie you made, the kitchen was a disaster.”

  “I cannot wait,” Bunny said, “till you are out of this house and not breathing down my neck all the time.”

  Evidently she had overcome her concern about palming off her only sister.

  A few days ago, Kate had hired a woman named Mrs. Carroll to come in every afternoon and do a little light housekeeping and serve as a companion to Bunny till Dr. Battista got home from work. Mrs. Carroll was the aunt of Aunt Thelma’s maid, Tayeema. Aunt Thelma had first suggested Tayeema’s younger sister, but Kate wanted someone seasoned who wouldn’t be susceptible to whatever Bunny tried to put over on her. “She is a whole lot cagier than some might realize,” Kate had told Mrs. Carroll, and Mrs. Carroll had said, “I hear you; yes, indeed.”

  After breakfast, Kate went back upstairs and packed her last few odds and ends into her canvas tote. Then she changed her sheets for Bunny. She supposed this room would look very different the next time she laid eyes on it. There would be photos and picture postcards bristling around the mirror, and cosmetics crowding the bureau top, and clothes strewn across the floor. The thought didn’t disturb her. She had used this room up, she felt. She had used this life up. And after Pyotr got his green card she was not going to move back home, whatever her father might fantasize. She would find a place of her own, even if all she could afford was a little rented room somewhere. Maybe she would have her degree by then; maybe she’d have a new job.

  She dumped her sheets in her hamper. They were Mrs. Carroll’s to deal with now. She picked up her tote and went back downstairs.

  Her father was waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch drumming his fingers on his knees. He wore his black suit; once urged, he had gone all out. “Ah, there you are!” he said when she walked in, and then he rose to his feet and said, in a different voice, “My dear.”

  “What?” she asked, because it seemed he was about to make some sort of announcement.

  But he said, “Ah…” And then he cleared his throat and said, “You’re looking very grown up.”

  She was puzzled; he had last seen her just minutes ago, looking exactly as she looked now. “I am grown up,” she told him.

  “Yes,” he said, “but it’s somewhat of a surprise, you see, because I remember when you were born. Neither your mother nor I had ever held a baby before and your aunt had to show us how.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “And now here you are in your blue dress.”

  “Well, shoot, you’ve seen this old thing a million times,” Kate said. “Don’t make such a big deal of it.”

  But she was pleased, in spite of herself. She knew what he was trying to say.

  It crossed her mind that if her mother had known too—if she had been able to read the signals—the lives of all four of them might have been much happier.

  For the first time, it occurred to her that she herself was getting much better at reading signals.

  —

  Her father drove, because being a passenger made him nervous. Their car was an elderly Volvo with countless scuff marks on the bumpers from other times he had driven, and the backseat was heaped with the mingled paraphernalia of their three lives—a rubber lab apron, a stack of journals, a construction-paper poster featuring the letter C, and Bunny’s winter coat. Kate had to sit back there because Bunny had snagged the front seat lickety-split. When the car jerked to an especially sudden stop at a traffic light on York Road, half of the journals slid onto Kate’s feet. The expressway would have been smoother, not to mention faster, but her father didn’t like merging.

  Rhodos 3 for $25, she read as they passed the garden center where she sometimes shopped, and all at once she wished she were shopping there today, having a normal Saturday morning full of hum
drum errands. It had turned out sunny, in the end, and you could tell by the slow, dreamy way people were drifting down the sidewalks that the temperature was perfect.

  She was feeling as if she couldn’t get quite enough air in her lungs.

  Uncle Theron’s church was called the Cockeysville Consolidated Chapel. It was a gray stone building with a miniature steeple on the roof—a sort of shorthand steeple—and it lay just behind the section of York Road that featured clusters of antique stores and consignment shops. Uncle Theron’s black Chevy was the only car in the lot. Dr. Battista pulled up next to it and switched the ignition off and collapsed for a moment with his forehead on the steering wheel, the way he always did when he had managed to get them someplace.

  “No sign of Pyoder yet,” he said when he finally looked up.

  Pyotr was in charge of the morning rounds today at the lab. “See?” Dr. Battista had said earlier. “From now on I’ll have a trusted son-in-law whom I can depend on to spell me.” However, he had already brought up several details that he worried Pyotr might chance to overlook. Twice before they left the house he had said to Kate, “Should I just telephone him and find out how things are going?” but then he had answered his own question. “No, never mind. I don’t want to interrupt him.” This may have been due not only to his phone allergy but also to the recent shift in his and Pyotr’s relationship. He still hadn’t quite gotten over his sulk.

  They went to the rear of the building, as Uncle Theron had instructed them, and knocked at a plain wooden door that could have led to somebody’s kitchen. Its windowpanes were curtained in blue-and-white gingham. After a moment the gingham was drawn aside and Uncle Theron’s round face peered out. Then he smiled and opened the door for them. He was wearing a suit and tie, Kate was touched to see—treating this like a real occasion. “Happy wedding day,” he told her.

  “Thanks.”

  “I just got off the phone with your aunt. I imagine she was hoping against hope for a last-minute invitation, but she claimed she was only calling to ask if I thought Pyoder would object to champagne.”

  “Why would he object to champagne?”

  “She figured he might expect vodka.”

  Kate shrugged. “Not as far as I know,” she said.

  “Maybe she was thinking he might want to smash his glass in the fireplace or something,” Uncle Theron said. He was a good deal more cavalier about his sister when he was not in her presence, Kate noticed. “Come on into my office,” he said. “Does Pyoder know that he should knock on the back door?”

  Kate sent a glance toward her father. “Yes, I told him,” he said.

  “We can look at the vows while we’re waiting. I know we agreed that you’ll do just the bare minimum, but I want to show you what your choices are so you’ll know what you’ll both be promising.”

  He led them down a narrow corridor to a small room crammed with books. Books overflowed the shelves and towered in piles on the desk and the seats of the two folding chairs and even the floor. Only the swivel chair behind the desk was usable, but Uncle Theron must have felt that it would have been rude to sit down and let the three of them remain standing. He leaned back against the front of his desk, half sitting on the edge of it, and plucked a book from the top of one stack and opened it to a dog-eared page. “Now, the beginning,” he said, running a finger along one line. “ ‘Dearly beloved’ and such. You have no objection to that, I assume.”

  “No, that’s okay.”

  “And should I ask, ‘Who gives this woman?’ ”

  Dr. Battista drew a breath to answer, but Kate jumped in with “No!” so she didn’t hear whatever it was that he had planned to say.

  “And I’m guessing we’ll do without the promise to obey—knowing you, Kate, heh-heh. Well, in fact almost no one keeps the ‘obey’ in, these days. We’ll just proceed straight to ‘For better or worse.’ Will ‘For better or worse’ be all right?”

  “Oh, sure,” Kate said.

  It was nice of him to be so accommodating, she thought. He hadn’t said a word about the Battistas’ known lack of religion.

  “You’d be surprised at what some couples want omitted nowadays,” he said, closing the book and laying it aside. “And then the vows they write for themselves: some of those you wouldn’t believe. Such as ‘I promise not to talk more than five minutes a day about the cute things the dog did.’ ”

  “You’re kidding,” Kate said.

  “I’m not, I’m afraid.”

  She wondered if she could get Pyotr to promise to stop quoting proverbs.

  “How about photographs?” Dr. Battista asked.

  “How about them?” Uncle Theron said.

  “May I take some? During the vows?”

  “Well, I suppose so,” Uncle Theron said. “But these are very brief vows.”

  “That’s all right. I’d just like to get, you know, a record. And maybe you could snap a photo of the four of us together, afterward.”

  “Certainly,” Uncle Theron said. He looked at his watch. “Well! All we need now is a groom.”

  It was 11:20, Kate already knew, because she had just checked her own watch. They had arranged to do this at 11:00. But her father said confidently, “He’ll be along.”

  “Is he bringing the license?”

  “I have it.” Dr. Battista pulled it from his inner breast pocket and handed it to him. “Then on Monday we’ll get things started with Immigration.”

  “Well, let’s go ahead to the chapel where you can all wait more comfortably, shall we?”

  “They have to be actually married before they can apply,” Dr. Battista said. “It needs to be a fait accompli, evidently.”

  “Have you met Miss Brood?” Uncle Theron asked. He had stopped at another doorway leading off from the corridor. A pale woman in her mid-forties, her short fair hair drawn girlishly back from her forehead with a blue plastic barrette, glanced up from her desk and smiled at them. “Miss Brood is my right hand,” he told them. “She’s here seven days a week sometimes, and it’s only a part-time position. Avis, this is my niece Kate, who’s getting married today, and her sister, Bunny, and my brother-in-law, Louis Battista.”

  “Congratulations,” Miss Brood said, rising from her chair. She had turned a bright pink, for some reason. She was one of those people who look teary-eyed when they blush.

  “Tell them how you got the name ‘Avis,’ ” Uncle Theron said. Then, without waiting for her to speak, he said to the others, “She was delivered in a rental car.”

  “Oh, Reverend Dell,” Miss Brood said with a tinkly laugh. “They don’t want to hear about that!”

  “It was an unexpected birth,” Uncle Theron explained. “Unexpectedly rapid, that is. Of course the birth itself was expected.”

  “Well, naturally! It’s not as if Mama intended to have me in the car,” Miss Brood said.

  Dr. Battista said, “Thank God it wasn’t a Hertz.”

  Miss Brood gave another tinkly laugh, but she kept her eyes on Uncle Theron. She was fiddling with the strand of white glass beads at her throat.

  “Well, moving right along…” Uncle Theron said.

  Miss Brood went on smiling as she lowered herself to her chair again with a scooping motion at the back of her skirt. Uncle Theron led the rest of them on down the corridor.

  The chapel itself, which Kate had seen on several long-ago Christmas Eves and Easter Sundays, was a modern-looking space, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting and plain clear windows and blond wooden pews. “Why don’t you all have a seat,” Uncle Theron told them, “and I’ll head back to my office where I can hear when Pyoder knocks.”

  Kate had been worrying about that—whether they might miss Pyotr’s knock—so she was glad to see him go. Also, they wouldn’t have to make small talk if they were on their own. They could sit in silence.

  She listened closely to her uncle’s footsteps receding down the corridor, because she was wondering if he would pause or at least slow down as he approached Miss
Brood’s doorway. But no, he hurried right past, oblivious.

  “This church is where your mother and I were married,” Dr. Battista said.

  Kate was startled. She had never thought to ask where they had married.

  Bunny said, “Really, Papa? Was it a big fancy wedding with bridesmaids?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, she had her heart set on the whole damn farce,” he said. “And Theron had just been hired here as assistant pastor, so nothing would do but that he should officiate. My sister had to come all the way from Massachusetts, bringing my mother. My mother was still alive in those days though not in the best of health, but oh, it was ‘We need to have your family at this’ and ‘Haven’t you got any friends? Any colleagues?’ My postdoc served as my best man, I seem to recall.”

  He rose and began pacing up and down the center aisle. He always grew restless when he had to sit idle for any time. Kate looked toward the pulpit, which was made of the same blond wood as the pews. A gigantic book, presumably a Bible, lay open on top of it, with several red ribbon bookmarks hanging out of it, and in front of the pulpit was a low wooden altar with a vase of white tulips centered on a doily. She tried to picture her mother standing there as a bride with a younger, less stuffy version of her father, but all she could summon up was the image of a limp invalid in a long white dress, alongside a bald and stooped Dr. Battista consulting his wristwatch.

  A text message came in for Bunny; Kate recognized the tweeting sound. Bunny drew her phone from her purse and looked at it and giggled.

  Their father stopped beside a pew and took a leaflet from the hymnal rack. He studied the front of it and the back, and then he returned it to the rack and resumed pacing.

  “I hope nothing’s gone wrong at the lab,” he told Kate the next time he passed her.

  “What could go wrong?” she asked him.

  She honestly wanted to know, because whatever it was would be preferable to Pyotr’s simply deciding he found it too off-putting to marry her no matter how advantageous it was. “Would not be worth it,” she could hear him saying. “Such a difficult girl! So unmannerly.”