Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  It wasn’t that Kate had never had a boyfriend. After she graduated from high school, where the boys had seemed a little afraid of her, she’d had a lot of boyfriends. Or a lot of first dates, at least. Sometimes even second dates. Her father had no business giving up on her like that.

  Besides, she was only twenty-nine years old. There was plenty of time to find a husband! Provided she even wanted one, and she was not so sure that she did.

  Out on the playground on Friday afternoon, aimlessly kicking a bottle cap across the hard-packed earth, she tortured herself by rehashing all that her father had said to her. He liked the fellow, he’d said. As if that were sufficient reason to marry his daughter off to him! And then the part about how Pyotr’s leaving the project would be such a loss to mankind. Her father didn’t care the least little bit about mankind. That project had become an end in itself. To all intents and purposes, it had no end. It just went on and on, generating its own spinoffs and detours and switchbacks, and no one except other scientists even knew what it was, exactly. Recently, Kate had begun to wonder whether even other scientists knew. It seemed possible that his sponsors had forgotten he existed; that they continued funding him purely from force of habit. He’d been phased out of teaching long ago (she could just picture what kind of teacher he’d made) and stuck away in that series of steadily shrinking and peregrinating laboratories, and when Johns Hopkins established a dedicated autoimmune research center he had not been invited to join. Or maybe he had refused to join; she wasn’t entirely sure. In any case, he just went on working away by himself without, apparently, anyone’s bothering to investigate whether he was making any progress. Though who knew? Perhaps he was making all kinds of progress. But at this particular moment, Kate couldn’t invent a single result that would justify sacrificing his firstborn.

  She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled.

  Natalie might be succeeding in winning Adam’s affections. She looked so pretty and poetic, crouching to console a little girl with a scraped elbow, and Adam stood next to her watching sympathetically. “Why don’t you take her inside for a Band-Aid?” he asked. “I’ll supervise the seesaws,” and Natalie said, “Oh, would you? Thank you, Adam,” and she rose in one graceful motion and shepherded the child toward the building. She was wearing a dress today, which was unusual among the assistants. It swished around her calves seductively, and Adam gazed after her longer than he needed to, it seemed to Kate.

  Once, a couple of months ago, Kate had tried wearing a skirt to school herself. Not that it was swishy or anything; actually it was a denim skirt with rivets and a front zip, but she had thought it might make her seem…softer. The older teachers had turned all knowing and glinty. “Somebody’s making a big effort today!” Mrs. Bower had said, and Kate had said, “What, this? It was the only thing not in the wash, is all.” But Adam hadn’t seemed to register its existence. Anyhow, it had proved impractical—hard to climb a jungle gym in—and she couldn’t shake the image of the reflection she had glimpsed in the faculty restroom’s full-length mirror. “Mutton dressed as lamb” was the phrase that had come to mind, although she knew she wasn’t really mutton; not yet. The next day, she had gone back to Levi’s.

  Now Adam sauntered over to her and said, “Have you ever noticed that certain days are injury days?”

  “Injury days?”

  “That kid just now, with her elbow; and then this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener—”

  “Ooh!” she said, wincing.

  “—and just before lunch Tommy Bass knocked his front tooth out and we had to call his mother to come get him—”

  “Ooh, that is an injury day,” Kate said. “Did you put the tooth in milk?”

  “In milk.”

  “You put it in a cup of milk and it has a chance of being re-implanted?”

  “Gosh, no, I didn’t,” Adam said. “I just wadded it up in a Kleenex in case they wanted it for the tooth fairy.”

  “Well, don’t worry; it was only a baby tooth.”

  “How do you know about the milk trick?” he asked.

  “Oh, I just do,” she said.

  She couldn’t figure out where to put her hands so she started swinging her arms back and forth from her shoulders, till she remembered that Bunny had told her she looked like a boy when she did that. (Count on Bunny.) She stopped swinging her arms and stuffed her hands in her rear pockets. “I had a grown-up tooth knocked out by a baseball when I was nine,” she said. Then she realized how unfeminine that sounded and so she added, “I was just walking past a game on my way home? Was how it happened. But our housekeeper knew to put the tooth in milk.”

  “Well, it must have worked,” Adam said, looking at her more closely. “You have great teeth.”

  “Oh, aren’t you…isn’t it nice of you to say so?” Kate said.

  She started drawing arcs in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. Then Sophia walked over, and she and Adam began discussing a recipe for no-knead bread.

  During Afternoon Activity Hour, the ballerina doll and the sailor doll had one of their breakups. (Kate wasn’t aware that they had gotten back together.) This time they were breaking up because the sailor doll had been inappropriate. “Please, Cordelia,” Emma G. said, speaking for the sailor, “I’ll never be inappropriate again, I promise.” But the ballerina said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I have given you chance after chance and now you are walking on my last nerve.” Then Jameesha fell off a stepstool and developed a giant lump on her forehead, proving Adam’s point about injury days; and after Kate had managed to divert her, Chloe and Emma W. got into a shouting quarrel. “Girls! Girls!” Mrs. Chauncey said. She had a lower tolerance for discord than Kate did. Chloe said, “It’s not fair! Emma W.’s hogging the child dolls! She has Drink-and-Wet and Squeaky Baby and Anatomically Correct, and all I have is this dumb old wooden Pinocchio!” Mrs. Chauncey turned toward Kate, clearly expecting her to mediate, but Kate just told them, “Well, sort it out,” and walked off to see what the boys were doing. One of the boys had a doll as well (a child doll, she saw), and he was sliding it facedown along the floor and saying “Vroom, vroom” as if it were a truck, which seemed a waste, since child dolls were in such demand today, but Kate wasn’t up to dealing with it. The wounded feeling had spread from her chest to her left shoulder, and she wondered if she were having a heart attack. She would have welcomed it.

  —

  Walking home at the end of the day, she reviewed her conversation with Adam. “Ooh!” she had said, not once but twice, in that artificial, girlie way she detested, and her voice had come out higher-pitched than usual and her sentences had slanted upward at the end. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Isn’t it nice of you to say so?” she’d asked. Mrs. Gordon’s miniature Japanese maple brushed her face as she passed, and she gave it a vicious swat. As she approached the Mintzes’ house their front door opened, and she speeded up so as not to have to speak to anyone.

  Bunny wasn’t home yet. Good. Kate slung her bag onto the hall bench and went to the kitchen for something to eat. Her stomach had begun to notice that she had skipped lunch. She cut herself a chunk of cheddar and strolled around the kitchen as she munched on it, assessing what she would need to pick up tomorrow at the grocery store. If she cooked next week’s meat mash without the meat (which she had decided she would do, just to call Bunny’s bluff ), she would have to increase some other ingredient—the lentils, maybe, or the yellow split peas. Her father’s recipe was calibrated so that they finished the dish completely on Friday evenings. But this past week had been an exception: since Bunny had turned vegetarian she had not been doing her part, and even the addition of Pyotr on Tuesday, wolfish eater though he had been, had not made up for it. They were going to be left with extras tomorrow, and her father would be unhappy.

  Reluctantly, she deleted stew beef from the shopping list. The list was computer-generated—her fath
er’s work, the household’s usual supplies arranged according to their order in the supermarket aisles—and all she had to do every week was cross off what wasn’t needed. Today she crossed off the salami sticks Bunny ordinarily snacked on; she left beef jerky uncrossed and she added shampoo, which her father had not included in his prototype list because it was his opinion that a bar of plain soap would do the same job for a fraction of the price.

  In the old days, when they still had their housekeeper, things had been less regimented. Not that Dr. Battista hadn’t tried; Mrs. Larkin’s easygoing ways used to drive him to distraction. “What’s wrong with just writing down what I want whenever I think of it?” she’d asked when he’d urged his list on her. “It’s not that hard: carrots, peas, chicken…” (Mrs. Larkin used to make a wonderful chicken potpie.) Out of his hearing, she had warned Kate not ever to let a man meddle with the housework. “He’ll get all carried away with it,” she’d said, “and your life won’t never be your own after that.”

  One of Kate’s few memories of her mother involved an argument that had developed when her father tried to tell her mother she was loading the dishwasher wrong. “Spoons should go in with their handles down, knives and forks with their handles up,” he had said. “If you do it that way, you see, the knives and forks will never poke you, and you can sort out the silverware basket much faster when it’s time to empty the dishwasher.” This was before he had evolved the notion of not emptying it ever again, obviously. To Kate the plan had sounded sensible, but her mother had ended up in tears and retreated to her bedroom.

  There was a clementine in the bowl on the counter, left over from a box that Kate had bought back in February. She peeled it and ate it, even though it was slightly shriveled. She stood at the sink and looked out the window at the little red birdhouse she had hung last week in the dogwood tree. So far, no birds had been interested. She knew it was silly of her to take this personally.

  Was Pyotr aware of what her father had been plotting? He had to be, she supposed. (How mortifying.) He had needed to play his part, after all—“accidentally” catching up with her as she walked home that time, and making all that fuss about her hair, and then coming to dinner. Also, he hadn’t looked like a man who was worried that his visa was about to expire. He’d probably been taking it for granted that her father’s scheme would save him.

  Well, now he wasn’t taking anything for granted. Ha! By now he would have heard that she had refused to cooperate. She wished she could have seen his face when he found out.

  You can’t get around Kate Battista as easily as all that.

  She carried a laundry basket upstairs and filled it with the clothes in the hamper in Bunny’s room. According to their father, the most time-consuming part of doing the laundry was separating different people’s clothes afterward. He had decreed that each of them should have an individual washday, and Bunny’s was Friday. Although Kate, wouldn’t you know, was the one who always did the laundry.

  Bunny’s bedroom had a bruised-fruit smell from all the cosmetics cluttering her bureau. A good many of the clothes that should have been in the hamper were scattered across the floor, but Kate let them stay there. Picking them up was not her job.

  In the basement, something about the dusty gloom made her limbs feel heavy and achy, all at once. She set the basket down and just stood there a moment, clamping her forehead with one hand. Then she straightened and flipped up the lid of the washing machine.

  —

  She was gardening when Bunny came home. She was cleaning out some of the old growth on the clematis vine beside the garage, and Bunny opened the back screen door to call, “You out there?”

  Kate turned and blotted her forehead on her sleeve.

  “What’ve we got to eat?” Bunny asked her. “I’m starved.”

  Kate said, “Did you take the last of my beef jerky?”

  “Who, me? Do you not remember I’m a vegan?”

  “You’re a vegan?” Kate repeated. “Wait. You’re a vegan?”

  “Vegan, vegetarian; whatever.”

  Kate said, “If you don’t even know which is which—”

  “Is my wash done yet?”

  “It’s in the dryer.”

  “You didn’t put my off-the-shoulder blouse in, did you?”

  “I did if it was in the hamper.”

  “Kate! Honestly! You know I save my whites out for sheets day.”

  “If you want something saved out, you should be here to see to it,” Kate said.

  “I had cheerleading practice! I can’t be everywhere at once!”

  Kate went back to her gardening.

  “This family is so lame,” Bunny said. “Other people separate their colors.”

  Kate stuffed a snarl of vine into her trash bag.

  “Other people’s clothes don’t come out all the same gray.”

  Kate wore only darks and plaids, herself. She didn’t find the subject worth discussing.

  —

  At supper, her father poured forth compliments. “Did you grind your own curry powder?” he asked. (The meat mash metamorphosed into a curry on Fridays.) “It tastes so authentic.”

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Maybe it has to do with the amount you put in, then. I really like the spiciness.”

  He had behaved this way for the past three days. It was pathetic.

  Bunny was having a toasted cheese sandwich with a side of green-onion potato chips. She claimed the potato chips were her vegetable. Fine, let her die of scurvy. It was all the same to Kate.

  The only sounds for a while were the crunching of chips and the clink of forks against plates. Then Dr. Battista cleared his throat. “So,” he began delicately. “So, I notice we still have the tax papers here.”

  “Right,” Kate said.

  “Ah, yes. I only mention it because…it occurred to me there’s a deadline.”

  “Really?” Kate said, raising her eyebrows in astonishment. “A deadline! Fancy that!”

  “I mean…but probably you’re already bearing that in mind, though.”

  Kate said, “You know what, Father? I think this year you should do your own taxes.”

  His mouth flew open and he stared at her.

  “You do yours; I do mine,” Kate said. Hers were about as simple as taxes could get, and in fact they were already finished and mailed.

  Her father said, “Oh, why…but you’re so good at them, Katherine.”

  “I’m sure you can figure them out,” Kate said.

  He turned to Bunny. Bunny gave him a bland smile. Then she looked across the table at Kate and raised a fist toward the ceiling. “Go, Katherine!” she said.

  Well. Kate had not seen that one coming.

  —

  Bunny was picked up by a mother driving a crowd of teenage girls who were squealing and laughing and waving wildly out all the open windows. Drumbeats pounded from the radio. “Have you got your phone?” Kate asked, and then, belatedly, “Where will you be?”

  Bunny just said, “Bye-yee!” and she was out the door and gone.

  Kate finished making her father’s lunch for the next day, and then she turned off the lights in the kitchen and the dining room. Her father was reading in the living room. He sat in his leather armchair beneath a pool of yellow lamplight, and seemingly he was absorbed in his journal, but when Kate crossed the hall there was a certain stiffening in his posture, an awareness. Before he could attempt to start a conversation, though, she took a sharp left turn and climbed the stairs two at a time. She heard the creak of leather behind her, but he didn’t try to stop her.

  Although dusk had barely fallen, she changed into her pajamas. (It was tiring, dragging herself around all day.) She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror after she had brushed her teeth; she let her head tip forward till it was resting against the glass and she looked into her own eyes, which from this angle had bags beneath them almost as dark as her irises. Then she returned to her room and climbed into her bed. She propped
her pillow against the headboard and adjusted the shade of her lamp and took her book from the nightstand and started reading.

  She was reading a Stephen Jay Gould book that she had read before. She liked Stephen Jay Gould. She liked nonfiction—books about natural history or evolution. She didn’t have much use for novels. Although she did enjoy a good time-travel novel, now and again. Whenever she had trouble sleeping, she fantasized about traveling back through time to the Cambrian Era. The Cambrian Era was some 450 million years ago. Just about the only living creatures then were invertebrates, and not a one of them lived on dry land.

  Last fall Kate had planted an assortment of spring crocuses beneath the redbud tree in the backyard, and she had been on the lookout for several weeks now but not a one had shown itself. It was puzzling. She checked again on Saturday morning after her grocery trip; she poked around with her trowel, even, but she couldn’t find a single bulb. Was this the work of moles, or voles, or some other kind of varmint?

  She quit digging and stood up, flinging back her hair, just as the telephone rang in the kitchen. Bunny was awake, she knew—earlier she’d heard the shower running—but the telephone rang again and then again. By the time she’d made it into the house, the answering machine had swung into its “Hi-yee!” and then her father was saying, “Pick up, Kate. It’s your father.”

  Already, though, she had spotted his lunch bag on the counter. She didn’t know how she had missed it before. She stopped just inside the back door and scowled at it ferociously.

  “Kate? Are you there? I forgot my lunch.”

  “Well, isn’t that just too damn bad,” Kate told the empty kitchen.

  “Could you bring it to me, please?”

  She turned and went back outside. She tossed her trowel into her gardening bucket and reached for her dandelion weeder.

  The telephone rang again.

  This time, she made it into the house before the answering machine could click over. She snatched up the receiver and said, “How many times did you think I’d fall for this, Father?”