Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “O-1 visas last three years.”

  She reached out to touch his forearm. “Of course you’re anxious about your project,” she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. “But I bet things will be fine.”

  “You really think so?” he asked.

  She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. “I’m sure of it,” she told him. “Don’t forget to bring your sandwich box home.”

  Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass.

  The little girls in Room 4 were playing breakup. The ballerina doll was breaking up with the sailor doll. “I’m sorry, John,” she said in a brisk, businesslike voice—Jilly’s voice, actually—“but I’m in love with somebody else.”

  “Who?” the sailor doll asked. It was Emma G. who was speaking for him, holding him up by the waist of his little blue middy blouse.

  “I can’t tell you who, on account of he’s your best friend and so it would hurt your feelings.”

  “Well, that’s just stupid,” Emma B. pointed out from the sidelines. “Now he knows anyhow, since you said it was his best friend.”

  “He could have a whole bunch of best friends, though.”

  “No, he couldn’t. Not if they were ‘best.’ ”

  “Yes, he could. Me, I have four best friends.”

  “You’re a weirdo, then.”

  “Kate! Did you hear what she called me?”

  “What do you care?” Kate asked. She was helping Jameesha take her painting smock off. “Tell her she’s weird herself.”

  “You’re weird yourself,” Jilly told Emma B.

  “Am not.”

  “Are so.”

  “Am not.”

  “Kate said you were, so there!”

  “I didn’t say that,” Kate said.

  “Did so.”

  Kate was about to say, “Did not,” but she changed it to, “Well, anyhow, I wasn’t the one who started it.”

  They were gathered in the doll corner—seven little girls and the Samson twins, Raymond and David. In another corner all six of the remaining boys were crowded at the sand table, which they had contrived to turn into a sports arena. They were using a plastic spoon to catapult Lego bricks into a fluted metal Jell-O mold that had been positioned at the far end. Most of the time they missed, but whenever anyone scored a hit there would be a burst of cheers, and then the others would start elbowing one another aside and wrestling for control of the spoon so that they could try for themselves.

  Kate should go over and quiet them down, but she didn’t. Let them work off some of that energy, she figured. Besides, she was not, in fact, the teacher; she was the teacher’s assistant—a world of difference.

  The Charles Village Little People’s School had been founded forty-five years ago by Mrs. Edna Darling, who still ran it, and all of her teachers were old enough that they required assistants—one assistant apiece, and two for the more labor-intensive two-year-old class—because who could expect them to chase around after a gang of little rapscallions at their advanced stage of life? The school occupied the basement level of Aloysius Church, but it was aboveground, mostly, so the rooms were sunlit and cheerful, with a set of double doors opening directly onto the playground. The end farthest from the doors had been walled off to form a faculty lounge where the older women spent large blocks of time drinking herbal tea and discussing their physical declines. Sometimes the assistants would venture into the lounge for a cup of tea themselves, or to use the faculty restroom with its grown-up-size sink and toilet; but always they had the sense that they were interrupting a private meeting, and they tended not to linger even though the teachers were cordial to them.

  To put it mildly, it had never been Kate’s plan to work in a preschool. However, during her sophomore year in college she had told her botany professor that his explanation of photosynthesis was “half-assed.” One thing had led to another, and eventually she was invited to leave. She had worried about her father’s reaction, but after he’d heard the whole story he said, “Well, you were right: it was half-assed,” and that was the end of it. So there she was, back home with nothing to do until her aunt Thelma stepped in and arranged for a position at the school. (Aunt Thelma was on the board there. She was on many boards.) In theory Kate could have applied for readmission to her college the following year, but she somehow didn’t. It had probably slipped her father’s mind that she had the option, even, and certainly it was easier for him to have her around to run things and look after her little sister, who was only five at the time but already straining the abilities of their ancient housekeeper.

  The teacher Kate assisted was named Mrs. Chauncey. (All the teachers were “Mrs.” to their assistants.) She was a comfortable, extremely overweight woman who had been tending four-year-olds longer than Kate had been alive. Ordinarily she treated them with a benign absentmindedness, but when one of them misbehaved, it was “Connor Fitzgerald, I see what you’re up to!” and “Emma Gray, Emma Wills: eyes front!” She thought that Kate was too lax with them. If a child refused to lie down at Quiet Rest Time, Kate just said, “Fine, be that way,” and stomped off in a huff. Mrs. Chauncey would send her a reproachful look before telling the child, “Somebody isn’t doing what Miss Kate told him to.” At such moments, Kate felt like an impostor. Who was she to order a child to take a nap? She completely lacked authority, and all the children knew it; they seemed to view her as just an extra-tall, more obstreperous four-year-old. Not once during her six years at the school had the students themselves addressed her as “Miss Kate.”

  From time to time Kate entertained the notion of looking for work elsewhere, but it never came to anything. She didn’t interview well, to be honest. And anyhow, she couldn’t think what she might be qualified to do instead.

  In her coed dorm back in college she had once been drawn into a game of chess in the common room. Kate was not very good at chess, but she was an audacious player, reckless and unorthodox, and she managed to keep her opponent on the defensive for some time. A small crowd of her dorm mates gathered around the board to watch, but Kate paid them no attention until she overheard what the boy behind her whispered to someone standing next to him. “She has. No. Plan,” he whispered. Which was true, in fact. And she lost the game shortly thereafter.

  She thought of that remark often now, walking to school every morning. Helping children out of their boots, scraping Play-Doh from under their nails, plastering Band-Aids onto their knees. Helping them back into their boots.

  She has. No. Plan.

  —

  Lunch was noodles with tomato sauce. As usual, Kate headed one table and Mrs. Chauncey the other, on the other side of the lunchroom, with the class divided between them. Before the children took their seats they had to hold up their hands, fronts first and then backs, for Kate or Mrs. Chauncey to inspect. Then they all sat down and Mrs. Chauncey dinged her milk glass with her fork and called out, “Blessing time!” The children ducked their heads. “Dear Lord,” Mrs. Chauncey said in a ringing voice, “thank you for the gift of this food and for these fresh sweet faces. Amen.”

  The children at Kate’s table bobbed up instantly. “Kate had her eyes open,” Chloe told the others.

  Kate said, “So? What of it, Miss Holy One?”

  This made the Samson twins giggle. “Miss Holy One,” David repeated to himself, as if memorizing the words for future use.

  “If you open your eyes during blessing,” Chloe said, “God will think you’re not grateful.”

  “Well, I’m not grateful,” Kate said. “I don’t like pasta.”

  There was a shocked silence.

  “How could you not like pasta?” Jason asked finally.

  “It smells like wet dog,” Kate
told him. “Haven’t you noticed?”

  “Eew!” everyone said.

  They lowered their faces to their plates and took a sniff.

  “Right?” Kate asked.

  They looked at one another.

  “It does,” Jason said.

  “Like they put my dog Fritz in a big old crab pot and cooked him,” Antwan said.

  “Eew!”

  “But the carrots seem okay,” Kate said. She was beginning to be sorry she’d started this. “Go ahead and eat, everybody.”

  A couple of children picked up their forks. Most didn’t.

  Kate dipped a hand in her jeans pocket and brought forth a strip of beef jerky. She always carried beef jerky in case lunch didn’t work out; she was a picky eater. She tore off a piece with her teeth and started chewing it. Luckily, none of the children liked beef jerky except for Emma W., who was plowing ahead with her pasta, so Kate didn’t have to share.

  “Happy Monday, boys and girls!” Mrs. Darling said, pegging up to their table on her aluminum cane. She made a point of stepping into the lunchroom at some point during each group’s mealtime, and she always managed to work the day of the week into her greeting.

  “Happy Monday, Mrs. Darling,” the children murmured, while Kate surreptitiously shifted her mouthful of beef jerky into the pocket of her left cheek.

  “Why are so few people eating?” Mrs. Darling asked. (Nothing escaped her.)

  “The noodles smell like wet dog,” Chloe said.

  “Like what? My goodness!” Mrs. Darling pressed one wrinkled, speckled hand to her pouchy bosom. “It sounds to me as if you’re forgetting the Something Nice rule,” she said. “Children? Who can tell me what the Something Nice rule is?”

  Nobody spoke.

  “Jason?”

  “ ‘If you can’t say something nice,’ ” Jason mumbled, “ ‘don’t say nothing at all.’ ”

  “ ‘Don’t say anything at all.’ That’s right. Can somebody say something nice about our lunch today?”

  Silence.

  “Miss Kate? Can you say something nice?”

  “Well, it’s certainly…shiny,” Kate said.

  Mrs. Darling gave her a long, level look, but all she said was “All right, children. Have a good lunch.” And she clomped off toward Mrs. Chauncey’s table.

  “It’s as shiny as a shiny wet dog,” Kate whispered to the children.

  They went into shrieks of laughter. Mrs. Darling paused and then pivoted on her cane.

  “Oh, by the way, Miss Kate,” she said, “could you stop in at my office during Quiet Rest Time today?”

  “Sure,” Kate said.

  She swallowed her mouthful of beef jerky.

  The children turned to her with their eyes very large. Even four-year-olds knew that being called to the office was not a good thing.

  “We like you,” Jason told her after a moment.

  “Thanks, Jason.”

  “When me and my brother grow up,” David Samson said, “we’re going to marry you.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  Then she clapped her hands and said, “Know what? Dessert today is cookie dough ice cream.”

  The children made little “Mm” sounds, but their expressions remained worried.

  —

  They had barely finished their ice cream when the five-year-olds arrived in the lunchroom doorway, tumbling all over one another and spilling out of line. Hulking, intimidating giants, they seemed to Kate from the confines of her little world, although only last year they had been her Fours. “Let’s go, children!” Mrs. Chauncey called, heaving herself to her feet. “We’re holding people up here. Say thank you to Mrs Washington.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Washington,” the children chorused. Mrs. Washington, standing by the door to the kitchen, smiled and nodded regally and wrapped her hands in her apron. (The Little People’s School was very big on manners.) The Fours fell into a line of sorts and threaded out past the Fives in a shrinking, deferential way, with Kate bringing up the rear. As she passed Georgina, Room 5’s assistant, she murmured, “I have to go to the office.”

  “Eek!” Georgina said. “Well, good luck with that.” She was a pleasant-faced, rosy-cheeked young woman, hugely pregnant with her first child. She had never had to go to the office, Kate would bet.

  In Room 4, she unlocked the supply closet to haul out the stacks of aluminum cots that the children took their naps on. She spaced them out around the room and distributed the blankets and the miniature pillows the children kept in their cubbies, as usual thwarting a plan among the four most talkative little girls to sleep all together in one corner. Ordinarily Mrs. Chauncey spent Quiet Rest Time in the faculty lounge, but today she’d returned to Room 4 after lunch, and now she settled herself at her desk and pulled a Baltimore Sun from her tote bag. She must have overheard Mrs. Darling summoning Kate to her office.

  Liam D. said he wasn’t sleepy. He said the same thing every day, and then he was the one Kate had to rouse from a deathlike stupor when it was Playground Time. She tucked his blanket underneath him on all sides the way he liked—a white flannel blanket with two yellow stripes that he still called his “blankie” if the other boys weren’t near enough to hear him. Then Jilly needed her ponytail undone so the clasp wouldn’t poke her in the head when she lay down. Kate slipped the clasp under Jilly’s pillow and said, “Remember where it is, now, so you can find it when you get up.” She would probably be back in time to remind her, but what if she were not? What if she were told to pack her things and leave? She ran her fingers through Jilly’s hair to loosen it—soft brown hair with a silky feel to it, smelling of baby shampoo and crayons. She wouldn’t be here to help Antwan work through his little bullying problem; she would never know how Emma B. dealt with the new sister who was coming from China in June.

  It wasn’t true that she hated children. At least, a few she liked okay. It was just that she didn’t like all children, as if they were uniform members of some microphylum or something.

  But she put on a breezy tone when she told Mrs. Chauncey, “Back in a jiff!”

  Mrs. Chauncey just smiled at her (unsuspectingly? pityingly?) and turned a page of her newspaper.

  Mrs. Darling’s office was next to Room 2, where the children were so little that they slept on floor pads instead of cots because they might roll off. Their room was dimmed, she could see through the single pane of glass in the door, and an intense, purposeful hush seemed to emanate from it.

  The glass in Mrs. Darling’s door revealed Mrs. Darling at her desk, talking on the telephone while she leafed through a sheaf of papers. She said a quick good-bye and hung up, though, as soon as Kate knocked. “Come in,” she called.

  Kate walked in and dropped onto the straight-backed chair facing the desk.

  “We’ve finally got an estimate for replacing that stained carpeting,” Mrs. Darling told her.

  “Huh,” Kate said.

  “The question, though, is why is it stained? Clearly there’s some sort of leak, and till we figure it out there’s no sense laying new carpet.”

  Kate had nothing to say to this, so she said nothing.

  “Well,” Mrs. Darling said. “But enough about that.”

  She aligned her papers efficiently and placed them in a folder. Then she reached for another folder. (Kate’s folder? Did Kate have a folder? What on earth would be inside it?) She opened it and studied the top sheet of paper for a moment, and then she peered across at Kate over the rims of her glasses. “So,” she said. “Kate. I’m wondering. How, exactly, would you assess your performance here?”

  “My what?”

  “Your performance at the Little People’s School. Your teaching abilities.”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “I don’t know.”

  She was hoping this would qualify as an answer, but when Mrs. Darling went on gazing at her expectantly, she added, “I mean, I’m not really a teacher. I’m an assistant.”

  “Yes?”

  “I jus
t assist.”

  Mrs. Darling continued to gaze at her.

  “But I guess I do okay at it,” Kate said finally.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Darling said, “you do, for the most part.”

  Kate tried not to look surprised.

  “I would say, in fact, that the children seem quite taken with you,” Mrs. Darling said.

  The words “for some mysterious reason” hung silently in the room.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t believe their parents feel the same way.”

  “Oh,” Kate said.

  “This issue has come up before, Kate. Do you remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “You and I have had some discussions about it. Some very serious discussions.”

  “Right.”

  “Just now it’s Mr. Crosby. Jameesha’s father.”

  “What about him?” Kate asked.

  “He spoke to you on Thursday, he says.” Mrs. Darling picked up the top sheet of paper and readjusted her glasses to consult it. “Thursday morning, when he brought Jameesha in to school. He told you he wanted to talk to you about Jameesha’s thumb sucking.”

  “Finger sucking,” Kate corrected her. Jameesha had a habit of sucking her two middle fingers, with her pinkie and her index finger sticking up on either side like the sign language for “I love you.” Kate had seen that a few times before. Benny Mayo, last year, used to do that.

  “Finger sucking; all right. He asked you to stop her whenever you caught her at it.”

  “I remember.”

  “And do you remember what you answered?”

  “I said he shouldn’t worry about it.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I said she was bound to stop on her own, by and by.”

  “You said…” And here Mrs. Darling read aloud from the sheet of paper. “You said, ‘Chances are she’ll stop soon enough, once her fingers grow so long that she pokes both her eyes out.’ ”

  Kate laughed. She hadn’t realized she’d been so witty.

  Mrs. Darling said, “How do you suppose that made Mr. Crosby feel?”

  “How would I know how it made him feel?”

  “Well, you might venture a guess,” Mrs. Darling said. “But I’ll just go ahead and tell you, why don’t I. It made him feel that you were being…” She read aloud again. “ ‘…flippant and disrespectful.’ ”