Vinegar Girl Read online

  Immigration was the family’s new bugaboo. Kate envisioned Immigration as a “he”—one man, wearing a suit and tie, handsome in the neutral, textureless style of a detective in an old black-and-white movie. He might even have that black-and-white-movie voice, projected-sounding and masterful. “Katherine Battista? Immigration. Like to ask you a few questions.”

  So she arrived at school the next morning, a Tuesday, wearing her great-aunt’s diamond ring, and before she had even checked into Room 4 she went to the faculty lounge, where most of the teachers and a few assistants were standing around the tea kettle, and she silently held her left hand out.

  Mrs. Bower was the first to notice. “Oh!” she squawked. “Kate! What is this? Is this an engagement ring?”

  Kate nodded. She couldn’t quite manage the “all smiles” part, because Mrs. Bower taught Room 2—the room where Adam assisted. She was certain to go straight back to Room 2 and tell Adam that Kate was engaged.

  Kate had been thinking about the telling-Adam part ever since she had gotten herself into this.

  Then all the other women clustered around her, exclaiming and asking questions, and if Kate’s behavior seemed subdued they probably chalked it up to her usual unsociableness. “Aren’t you the sly one!” Mrs. Fairweather said. “We didn’t even know you had a boyfriend!”

  “Yeah, well,” Kate mumbled.

  “Who is he? What is his name? What does he do for a living?”

  “His name is Pyoder Cherbakov,” Kate said. Without planning to, she pronounced it the way her father pronounced it, making it sound less foreign. “He’s a microbiologist.”

  “Really! A microbiologist! Where did you two meet?”

  “He works in my father’s lab,” she said. Then she glanced toward Mrs. Chauncey and said, “Gosh, nobody’s watching the Fours,” trying to find an excuse to escape before they could ask more questions.

  But of course they didn’t let her off that easily. Where was Pyotr from? (He must not be a Baltimore boy.) Did her father approve of the match? When would the wedding take place? “So soon!” they said when they learned the date.

  “Well, he’s been in the picture three years,” Kate said. Which was true, strictly speaking.

  “But you’ll have so much planning to do!”

  “Not really; it’s going to be very low-key. Just immediate family.”

  This disappointed them, she could tell. They had imagined attending. “When Georgina got married,” Mrs. Fairweather reminded her, “she invited her whole class, remember?”

  “This won’t be that kind of wedding. We are neither one of us much for dressing up,” she said—the unaccustomed “we” sounding as odd to her ears as if she had just popped a stone in her mouth. “My uncle who’s a pastor is going to marry us in a private ceremony. Just my father and my sister as witnesses—I’m not even letting my aunt come. She’s having conniptions about it.”

  That it was taking place in a church at all was a compromise. Kate had wanted a quickie affair down at City Hall, while her father had wanted a full-dress ceremony that would photograph well for Immigration. And clearly her coworkers agreed with him; they exchanged sad looks. “The children sat in the pew just behind Georgina’s closest relatives, and each of them carried a yellow rose, do you remember that?” Mrs. Fairweather asked Mrs. Link.

  “Yes, because Georgina’s gown was yellow, the prettiest, palest yellow, and her husband wore a yellow tie,” Mrs. Link said. “Both of the mothers were scandalized that she wasn’t wearing white. ‘What will people think?’ they said. ‘Whoever heard of a bride not wearing white?’ ”

  “And Georgina said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve always looked washed out in white,’ ” Mrs. Chauncey said.

  Sometimes, Kate was downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4.

  It was Mrs. Chauncey who announced the wedding to Kate’s class. “Children! Children!” she said, clapping her plump hands together as soon as they’d finished the “Good Morning” song. “I have wonderful news. Guess who’s getting married!”

  There was a silence. Then Liam M. ventured, “You, maybe?”

  Mrs. Chauncey looked distressed. (She had been married thirty-five years.) “Miss Kate, that’s who!” she said. “Miss Kate has gotten engaged. Show them your ring, Miss Kate.”

  Kate held out her hand. A number of the little girls made murmuring sounds of admiration, but most of the children seemed confused. “Is that okay?” Jason asked her.

  “Is what okay?”

  “I mean, will your mother let you?”

  “Uh…sure,” Kate said.

  And the Samson twins were clearly unhappy. They didn’t say anything in class, but out on the playground later that morning they came up to her and Raymond asked, “Now who will we marry?”

  “Oh, you’ll find somebody,” she assured them. “Somebody closer to your own age, I bet.”

  “Who?” Raymond asked.

  “Well…”

  “There’s Jameesha,” David reminded him.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And there’s—”

  “That’s okay, I’ll take Jameesha.”

  “But how about me?” David asked him. “Jameesha’s always mad at me about something.”

  Kate didn’t get to hear the end of this discussion, because just then Adam came over. He was carrying a tiny pink hoodie and he looked very somber, or perhaps she was only imagining that. “So,” he said, arriving next to her. He looked off toward the swings. “I heard the news.”

  “News?” she asked. (Inanely.)

  “They say you’re getting married.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.”

  “I didn’t even know you were seeing anybody.”

  “I wasn’t,” Kate said. “I mean, I kind of was, but…this was very sudden.”

  He nodded, still looking somber. His eyelashes were so dark and thick that they gave his eyes a sooty effect.

  They spent some time watching a three-year-old who had laid herself belly-down on a swing that she’d wound up. She spun around and around, hanging on for dear life, her expression intensely concentrated, and then she got off and tottered away unsteadily, like a very small drunk.

  Adam said, “Is that…wise, do you think, jumping into such a decision?”

  Kate sent him a quick glance, but he was still gazing after the three-year-old and it was impossible to read his expression. “Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.”

  Then after a long pause she said, “This could be, you know, just temporary, though.”

  Now he did look at her. “Temporary!” he said.

  “I mean, who can ever tell if a marriage will last, right?”

  The sooty eyes grew darker and narrower. “But it’s a covenant,” he said.

  “Yes, but…yes, right. A covenant. You’re right.”

  And she was back to feeling too tall again, too outspoken, too brassy. She took a sudden interest in Antwan, who’d climbed dangerously high on the jungle gym, and she walked off abruptly to deal with him.

  Tuesday 2:46 PM

  Hi Kate! You would like me to walk you from school?

  No.

  Why not?

  It’s my day for Extended Daycare.

  I walk you later?

  No.

  You are not polite enough.

  Bye.

  —

  A new photo: Kate standing stiffly on the front walk, Pyotr standing next to her wearing a wide smile even though he was looking a little pink around the nostrils. His so-called cold was an allergy to something outdoors, it was beginning to seem.

  Then Kate and Pyotr sitting on a restaurant banquette. Pyotr’s right arm was stretched proprietorially along the back of the seat behind Kate, which gave him a contorted, trying-too-hard aspect because the seat back was fairly high. Also he was frowning slightly with the effort to see in the dimness; he complained that American
restaurants were not lit brightly enough. Kate’s father had been there too, of course, because someone had to take the photo. He and Kate had each ordered a burger. Pyotr had ordered veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac drizzled with pomegranate molasses, after which he and Dr. Battista fell into a discussion of the “genetic algorithms” of recipes. When Pyotr was listening closely to someone his face took on a kind of peacefulness, Kate noticed. His forehead smoothed, and he grew completely still as he concentrated on the other person.

  Next, Kate and Pyotr on the living-room couch, a foot of empty space between them, Pyotr grinning broadly and doing his arm-along-the-seat-back thing while Kate, stony-faced, poked her left hand toward the photographer to display her diamond ring. Or it could have been cubic zirconia; nobody was quite sure. The great-aunt had clerked in a dime store.

  Kate and Pyotr doing the dishes. Pyotr, wearing an apron, waved a pre-rinsed plate in the air. Kate stood looking sideways at him as if she wondered who this person was. Bunny, only partly visible, seemed to be wondering who both of them were; she rolled her big blue eyes disbelievingly toward the camera.

  It was Bunny who showed their father how to forward the photos to Kate’s and Pyotr’s cell phones, since he himself hadn’t the remotest idea. She rolled her eyes again, but she helped him. She made no secret, though, of her horror at the marriage plan. “What are you?” she asked Kate. “Chattel?”

  “It’s only for a while,” Kate told her. “You don’t know how desperate things are getting at the lab.”

  “No, and I don’t care. That lab has nothing to do with you.”

  “It does have to do with Father, though. It’s the center of his life!”

  “We are supposed to be the center of his life,” Bunny said. “What is it with him? The man forgets for months at a stretch that we even exist, but at the same time he thinks he has the right to tell us who we can ride in cars with and who we should marry.”

  “Whom,” Kate said automatically.

  “Wake up and smell the coffee, sis. He’s making a human sacrifice of you, don’t you get it?”

  “Oh, now, it’s not that bad,” Kate said. “This will only be on paper, remember.”

  But Bunny was so upset that her Taylor Swift ringtone played nearly all the way through before she could think to answer her phone.

  Friday 4:16 PM

  Hi Kate! I come with you to the grocery store tomorrow.

  I like shopping alone.

  I come because your father and I are cooking supper.

  What!

  I will pick you up in my car at eight in morning. Bye.

  —

  His car was an original Volkswagen Beetle; she hadn’t seen one of those in years. It was peacock blue, and so weatherworn that it looked not painted but chalked. Otherwise, though, it seemed to be in excellent condition. This struck her as miraculous, in view of the way he treated it. Was there some natural law that decreed that scientists couldn’t drive? Or maybe they could drive, but they were too immersed in their own esoteric thoughts to bother looking at the road. Pyotr kept looking at Kate instead, turning his face fully toward her to talk while the Beetle careened down 41st Street and the other drivers braked and honked and a tumult of books and lab coats and empty water bottles and fast-food wrappers slid around the backseat. “We get a pork loin,” he was saying. “We get cornmeal.”

  “Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake.”

  “This store will sell maple syrup?”

  “Maple syrup! What on earth are you cooking?”

  “Braised pork on a bed of polenta drizzled with maple syrup.”

  “Good God.”

  “Your father and I have discussed.”

  “The genetic algorithms of recipes,” Kate said, remembering.

  “Ah. You were paying attention. You were heeding what I said.”

  “I was not heeding what you said,” Kate told him. “I just couldn’t avoid overhearing you blab away in my ear.”

  “You were heeding me. You like me! You are crazy about me, I think.”

  “Pyotr,” Kate said, “let’s get something straight.”

  “Awk! That was too-big truck for this road.”

  “I am only doing this to help my father out. He seems to think it’s important that you should stay in this country. After you get your green card, you and I will go our separate ways. Not a step of this plan involves anybody being crazy about anybody.”

  “Or maybe you will decide not to separate,” Pyotr said.

  “What? What are you talking about? Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

  “Yes, yes,” he said hastily. “I am listening. Nobody shall be crazy about anybody. And now we will go buy pork.”

  He pulled into the supermarket parking lot and cut the engine.

  “Why are we having pork?” Kate asked as she followed him across the lot. “You know Bunny’s not going to eat it.”

  “I am not much concerned about Bunny,” he said.

  “You’re not?”

  “In my country they have proverb: ‘Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.’ ”

  This was intriguing. Kate said, “Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

  “Yes, they would,” Pyotr said mysteriously. He had been walking a couple of steps ahead of Kate, but now he dropped back and, without any warning, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. “But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl.”

  “Let go of me,” Kate said. Up close, he smelled like fresh hay, and his arm felt steely and insistent. She broke free of him. “Good grief,” she said. And the rest of the way across the parking lot, it was she who kept a few steps ahead.

  At the entrance to the store she snagged a cart and started inside, but Pyotr caught up with her to reach for the cart and take over. She was beginning to suspect that he had some kind of he-man complex. “What-ever,” she told him. He merely smiled and cruised along beside her with the empty cart.

  For someone who talked so much about vitamins, he was remarkably uninterested in the vegetable section. He languidly tossed in a head of cabbage and then asked, gazing around him, “The cornmeal: where we would find that?”

  “You really seem to go for those la-di-da kinds of dishes,” Kate said as she led the way. “Like that thing you ordered in the restaurant, with puréed celeriac.”

  “I just echoed final item.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The waiter, when he came to our table: he talked so complicated. He said, ‘Like to tell you guys about a few specials this evening…’ ” Pyotr had the waiter’s Baltimore accent down pat; it was uncanny. “Then he said things very long and combined; he said the free-range and the stone-ground and the house-cured until I am vertiginous. So I just repeated what came last. ‘The veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac,’ I repeated, because it was still in my ears.”

  “Then maybe this evening we could go back to plain old mash,” Kate said.

  But Pyotr said, “No, I think not.” And that was the end of that.

  The computer-generated grocery list wasn’t much use today. For one thing, they still had a hefty supply of mash left over from last Saturday’s batch, which was why Kate had been hoping that she could serve it tonight. This past week had been so different from their usual week, as far as meals were concerned. Not only had her father arranged for that photo-op restaurant dinner with Pyotr, but then the next night Pyotr had insisted on taking them to a restaurant (all except Bunny, who had said that enough was enough), and on Tuesday, claiming the need to celebrate a brief, freakish spring snowfall, he had shown up unannounced with a tub of KFC chicken.

  And this coming week, at some point, Kate would have to think up some kind of dinner for Aunt Thelma. Dr. Battista had been making noises about inviting her in to meet Pyotr, along with her husband and perhaps Uncle Theron too, if it didn’t conflict with his ch
urch obligations. They might as well grit their teeth and get it over with, Dr. Battista said. He and Aunt Thelma were not on the best of terms (Aunt Thelma blamed him for her sister’s depression), but “Immigration-wise,” he said, “I feel it would be smart to expose as many relatives as possible to your marriage plans. And since you’re not letting your aunt attend the wedding, this seems a strategic alternative.”

  The reason Kate wasn’t letting her aunt attend the wedding was that she knew her too well. It would be just like her to show up with six bridesmaids and a full choir.

  What to feed her, though? Certainly not meatless mash, although it would have been a convenient way to get rid of those damn leftovers. Maybe just plain chicken; Kate could manage that much, surely. She picked out a couple of roasters while Pyotr was browsing the pork selections, and then she doubled back to the vegetable department for asparagus and russet potatoes.

  As she was returning to the meat department, she caught sight of Pyotr from a distance, deep in conversation with a black man in an apron. Pyotr’s stretched-out gray jersey and his vulnerable-looking bare neck struck her all at once as oddly touching. It wasn’t entirely his fault, she supposed, that he found himself in this peculiar position. And for a moment she tried to imagine how she herself would feel if she were alone in a foreign country, her visa about to expire, no clear notion of where she would go once it did expire or how she would support herself. Plus the language problem! She had been a middling-good language student, once upon a time, but she would have felt desolate if she’d had to actually live in another language. Yet here Pyotr stood, blithely engaged in a discussion of pork cuts and displaying his usual elfin good spirits. She had to smile, a little.