Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  When she arrived next to him, though, he said, “Oh! Is my fiancée. This nice gentleman says maybe not loin but fresh ham,” and right away she felt annoyed again. “Fiancée”: ick. And she had always hated the mealy-mouthed sound of “gentleman.”

  “Get what you want,” she told him. “It’s all the same to me.” Then she dumped her groceries into the cart and wandered off again.

  Pyotr wasn’t entirely satisfied with the notion of serving Aunt Thelma roast chicken, it turned out. When Kate made the mistake of telling him her menu plan, after he had caught up with her in the syrup-and-molasses aisle, his first question was “The chickens can be cut into pieces?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I am thinking you could make fried, like KFC. You know how to make fried chicken?”

  “No.”

  He waited, looking hopeful.

  “But you could learn?” he asked finally.

  “I could if I wanted to, I guess.”

  “And you would want to, maybe?”

  “Well, Pyotr, if you like KFC so much, why don’t I just buy some?” Kate said. She would love to see the expression on Aunt Thelma’s face if she did.

  “No, you should be cooking something,” Pyotr said. “Something with much labor. You are trying to make your aunt feel welcome.”

  Kate said, “Once you meet Aunt Thelma, you’ll realize that the last thing we want to do is make her feel too welcome.”

  “But she is family!” Pyotr said. He pronounced the word as if it were holy; he surrounded it with invisible cushions. “I want to know all of your family—your aunt and her husband and her son and also your uncle the pastor. I anticipate your uncle the pastor! He will try to convert me, maybe?”

  “Are you kidding? Uncle Theron couldn’t convert a kitten.”

  “Theron,” Pyotr repeated. He made it sound like “Seron.” “You are doing this to torture me?”

  “Doing what?”

  “So many th names!”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, and my mother’s name was Thea.”

  He groaned. “What is the surname of these people?” he asked.

  After the briefest pause, she said, “Thwaite.”

  “My God!” He clapped a hand to his forehead.

  She laughed. “I’m pulling your leg,” she told him. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “I was just kidding,” she clarified. “Really their surname is Dell.”

  “Ah,” he said. “You were joking. You made a joke. You were teasing me!” And he started capering around the cart. “Oh, Kate; oh, my comical Kate; oh, Katya mine…”

  “Stop it!” she said. People were staring at them. “Quit that and tell me which syrup you want.”

  He stopped capering and selected a bottle, seemingly at random, and dropped it into the cart. “That’s kind of small,” she said, peering down at it. “Are you sure it’ll be enough?”

  “We do not want an excess of mapleness,” Pyotr said severely. “We want balance. We want subtlety. Oh! If it is very successful, we could serve a maple-syrup dish to your aunt! We could serve chicken on a bed of…some unusual substance, drizzled with maple syrup. Your aunt will say, ‘What a heavenly dish you are giving me!’ ”

  “That would be a very, very unlikely thing for Aunt Thelma to say,” Kate told him.

  “I may call her ‘Aunt Selma’ too?”

  “If you mean Aunt Thelma, I suggest you wait until she says you can. Anyhow, I don’t know why you’d want to claim her as your aunt if you didn’t have to.”

  “But I have never had an aunt!” Pyotr said. “This will be my very first aunt.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “I will wait till she gives permission, though, I promise. I will be deeply respectful.”

  “Don’t overdo it on my account,” Kate said.

  —

  Then Pyotr had to go and tell her father that they had had a “lovely time” grocery-shopping. This was later that afternoon, when the two men were cooking dinner in the kitchen. Kate stepped in from the backyard with her bucket of gardening tools, and her father beamed at her as if she’d just won a Nobel Prize. “You had a lovely time at the grocery store!” he said.

  “I did?”

  “I told you Pyoder was a good fellow! I knew you’d figure it out, eventually! He says you had a lovely, friendly grocery trip together.”

  Kate sent Pyotr an evil glare. He was smiling modestly with his eyes lowered as he patted spices all over his fresh ham.

  “Maybe after supper you two would like to go to a movie,” her father suggested.

  Kate said, “I’m washing my hair after supper.”

  “After supper? You’re washing your hair after supper? Why are you doing it then?”

  Kate sighed and slung her bucket into the broom closet.

  Pyotr said, “We are wondering if you can be explaining to us what braising is.”

  “I have no idea what braising is,” Kate said. She went to the sink to wash her hands. There were bloody meat wrappers in the sink and a cabbage core, along with several outer leaves. Since her father was fanatic about the clean-as-you-go principle, she knew all too well whom to blame. “Don’t you dare leave the kitchen like this when you’re finished,” she told Pyotr as she dried her hands.

  “I will take care of everything!” Pyotr said. “Eddie is staying to dinner?”

  “Who’s Eddie?”

  “Your sister’s boyfriend. In the living room.”

  “Edward, you mean. No, he’s not. ‘Eddie’! Good grief!”

  “Americans love to be called nicknames,” Pyotr said.

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Yes, they do.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “Please!” Kate’s father said. “Enough.” He was stirring a pot on the stove. He looked toward them with a pained expression.

  “Plus, he’s not her boyfriend,” Kate told Pyotr.

  “Yes, he is.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s too old to be her boyfriend. He’s her tutor.”

  “Your sister is studying microorganisms?”

  “What?”

  “Book on her lap is Journal of Microbiological Methods.”

  “It is?”

  “Is that a fact!” Dr. Battista marveled. “I didn’t even know she was interested!”

  “Oh, geez,” Kate muttered. She flung her towel onto the counter and turned to leave the kitchen.

  “Is like a proverb I know,” Pyotr was telling her father as she walked out.

  “Spare us,” Kate tossed back. In her sneakers, she made no sound as she crossed the hall. She popped through the living-room doorway and said, “Bunny—”

  “Eek!” Bunny said, and she and Edward sprang apart.

  The Journal of Microbiological Methods was not on her lap anymore. It lay at the far end of the couch. Even so, Kate crossed the room in four strides and picked it up and stuck it in front of Bunny’s face. “This is not what you need to be learning,” she told Bunny.

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re paying him to teach you Spanish.”

  “You’re not paying him a thing!”

  “Well…and that’s exactly what I meant when I told Father we should be paying.”

  Bunny and Edward looked bewildered.

  “Bunny is fifteen years old,” Kate told Edward. “She’s not allowed to date yet.”

  “Right,” he said. He was less practiced than Bunny at faking self-righteous innocence. He flushed and looked glumly down at his knees.

  “She can only see boys in groups.”

  “Right.”

  Bunny said, “But he’s my—”

  “And don’t tell me he’s your tutor, because why did I have to sign your D-plus Spanish test yesterday?”

  “It’s the subjunctive?” Bunny said. “I just never have gotten the hang of the subjunctive?” She seemed to be asking whether there was any chance this explanation might be convincing.

  Kate turned on
her heel and walked out. Before she was halfway across the hall, though, Bunny had jumped up from the couch and come after her. “Are you saying we can’t see each other anymore?” she asked. “He’s just visiting me at my house! We’re not going out on dates or anything.”

  “The guy must be twenty years old,” Kate told her. “You don’t find anything wrong with that?”

  “So? I’m fifteen years old. A very mature fifteen.”

  “Don’t make me laugh,” Kate told her.

  “You’re just jealous,” Bunny said. She was following Kate through the dining room now. “Just because you have to settle for Pyoder—”

  “His name is Pyotr,” Kate said through her teeth. “You might as well learn to pronounce it right.”

  “Well, la-di-da to you, Miss Frilling-Your-rs. At least I didn’t have to rely on my father to find me a boyfriend.”

  By the time she was saying this, they had reached the kitchen. The two men glanced over at them, surprised. “Your daughter is a jerk,” Bunny told their father.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She is a snoopy, jealous, meddlesome jerk, and I refuse to—and now look!”

  Her attention had been snagged by something outside the window. The rest of them turned to see Edward slinking past with his shoulders hunched, veering beneath the redbud tree to cross to his own house.

  “I hope you’re satisfied,” Bunny told Kate.

  “Why is it,” Dr. Battista asked Pyotr, “that whenever I’m around women for any length of time, I end up asking, ‘What just happened here?’ ”

  “That is extremely sexist of you,” Pyotr said sternly.

  “Don’t blame me,” Dr. Battista said. “I base the observation purely on empirical evidence.”

  Monday 1:13 PM

  Hi Kate! We went to get marriage license!

  Who’s we?

  Your Father and I.

  Well I hope you’ll be very happy together.

  “How do you do, Pyoder?” Aunt Thelma asked.

  “Um!” Kate broke in.

  Too late, though. “I have been having very bad allergy, but now am feeling better,” Pyotr said. “It was maybe the smelly wooden material they put on the ground around bushes.”

  “Mulch, we call that,” Aunt Thelma informed him. “M-U-L-C-H. It’s meant to hold the moisture in during our long hot summers. But I very much doubt that that could be what you’re allergic to.”

  It always made Aunt Thelma happy when she could set somebody straight. And Pyotr was smiling into her face so widely and so steadily, clearly preconditioned to adore her—just the sort of thing she found appealing. Maybe the evening would go better than Kate had imagined.

  They were assembled in the entrance hall: Kate and her father and Pyotr, and Aunt Thelma and her husband, Uncle Barclay. Aunt Thelma was a tiny, pretty woman in her early sixties, with a smooth blond bob and very bright makeup. She wore a beige silk pantsuit and a filmy, color-splashed scarf wound several times around her neck and flung back over her shoulders. (Kate used to fantasize that her aunt’s perennial scarves were meant to hide something—a past surgery or, who knows, maybe a couple of fang marks.) Uncle Barclay was lean and handsome and gray-haired, wearing an expensive-looking gray suit. He headed a high-powered investment firm and seemed to find Dr. Battista and his daughters humorously quaint, like something in a small-town natural history museum. Now he watched them with an indulgent smile, slouching gracefully in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, which caused an elegant drape in the hem of his suit coat.

  The rest of them had dressed up to the extent of their abilities. Kate wore her denim skirt with one of her plaid shirts. Pyotr was in jeans—foreign jeans, belted exactly at his waist and ballooning around his legs—but he had added a crisply ironed white shirt and his shoes were not his usual running shoes but snub-nosed brown Oxfords. Even Dr. Battista had made an effort. He had put on his one suit, which was black, and a white shirt and a spindly black tie. He always looked so thin and uncertain when he was out of his beloved coveralls.

  “This is very exciting,” Aunt Thelma began, at the same time that Kate said, “Let’s go to the living room.” She and Aunt Thelma frequently experienced an overlapping-speech problem. “Uncle Theron’s already here,” Kate said as she led the way.

  “Is he,” Aunt Thelma said. “Well, he must have shown up too early, then, because Barclay and I are exactly on time.”

  Since Uncle Theron had indeed arrived early, by special arrangement so that they could discuss the ceremony, Kate had nothing to say to this.

  Aunt Thelma sailed ahead of the rest of them and entered the living room with both arms outstretched, ready to engulf Bunny, who was just rising from the couch. “Bunny, dear!” Aunt Thelma said. “Gracious! Aren’t you chilly?”

  It was the first really hot day of the year, and Bunny couldn’t possibly be chilly. Aunt Thelma was merely pointing out the skimpiness of her sundress, which was the length of a normal person’s shirt and tied at the shoulders with huge, perky bows that resembled angel wings. Also, her sandals had no backs to them. A no-no.

  One of Aunt Thelma’s many instructions to the girls over the years had been: Never wear backless shoes for a social occasion. It was second only to Rule Number One: Never, ever, under any circumstances apply lipstick while at the table. All of Aunt Thelma’s rules were etched permanently in Kate’s mind, although by natural preference Kate owned no backless shoes anyhow and she never wore lipstick.

  Bunny, though, tended not to catch Aunt Thelma’s subtexts. She just said, “No, I’m sweltering!” and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Hi, Uncle Barclay,” she said, and she gave him a peck too.

  “Theron,” Aunt Thelma said regally, as if granting a dispensation. Uncle Theron had risen from his chair and was standing with his chubby, blond-furred hands clasped in front of his crotch. He and Aunt Thelma were twins, which explained their alliterative names if not their baby sister’s, but Aunt Thelma had “come out first,” as she always put it, and she had the firstborn’s self-assured edge to her while Theron was a timid man who had never married or, it seemed, had any serious experiences in life. Or maybe he’d just failed to realize if he had had them. He always seemed to be blinking at something, as if he were trying to get his mind around the most ordinary human behavior, and in the nonministerial, short-sleeved yellow shirt that he was wearing tonight he had a peeled, defenseless look.

  “Aren’t you excited?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

  “Excited,” he repeated in a worried way.

  “We’re marrying off our Kate! You are a dark horse, aren’t you?” she said to Kate as she settled herself in an armchair. Pyotr, meanwhile, dragged the rocker he had been sitting on closer to Aunt Thelma. He still had his eyes trained expectantly on her face; he was still beaming. “We didn’t even know you had a beau,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “We were afraid Bunny might beat you to the altar.”

  “Bunny?” Dr. Battista said. “Bunny’s fifteen years old.” The corners of his mouth were turned down, and he still hadn’t taken a seat. He was standing in front of the fireplace.

  “Sit, Father,” Kate said. “Aunt Thelma, what can I get you to drink? Uncle Theron’s having ginger ale.”

  She mentioned the ginger ale because she had just learned that her father had picked up only one bottle of wine—her mistake, entrusting him with the errand—and she was hoping no one would ask for any wine until dinner. But her aunt said, “White wine, please,” and then turned to Pyotr, who was still waiting with bated breath for any pearls that might drop from her lips. “Tell us, now,” she said, “how—?”

  “We only have red,” Kate said.

  “Red it will have to be, then. Pyoder, how—?”

  “Uncle Barclay?” Kate said.

  “Yes, I’ll have some red.”

  “How did you and Kate meet?” Aunt Thelma finally managed to ask.

  Pyotr said promptly, “She came to Dr. Battista’s lab. I expected nothing. I t
hought, ‘Living at home, no boyfriend…’ Then she appeared. Tall. Hair like Italian movie star.”

  Kate left the room.

  When she returned with the wine, Pyotr had moved on to her inner qualities and Aunt Thelma was smiling and nodding and looking charmed. “She is somewhat like the girls at home,” he was saying. “Honest. Tells what she is thinking.”

  “I’ll say,” Aunt Thelma murmured.

  “But in truth she is kindhearted. Thoughtful.”

  “Why, Kate!” Aunt Thelma said in a congratulatory tone.

  “Takes care of people,” Pyotr went on. “Tends small children.”

  “Ah. And will you continue with that?” Aunt Thelma asked Kate as she accepted her wine.

  Kate said, “What?”

  “Will you continue at the preschool once you’re married?”

  “Oh,” Kate said. She had thought Aunt Thelma was asking how long she could keep up her charade. “Yes, of course.”

  “She does not need to,” Pyotr said. “I can support her,” and he flung out one arm in a grand gesture, nearly knocking over his glass. (He too had opted for wine, unfortunately.) “If she likes, she may retire now. Or go to college! Go to Hopkins! I will pay. She is my responsibility now.”

  “What?” Kate said. “I’m not your responsibility! I’m my own responsibility.”

  Aunt Thelma tut-tutted. Pyotr just smiled around the room at the others, as if inviting them to share his amusement.

  “Good girl,” Uncle Barclay said unexpectedly.

  “Well, once you have children that will be a moot point anyhow,” Aunt Thelma said. “May I ask what wine we’re drinking, Louis?”

  “Eh?” Dr. Battista was giving her a distressed look.

  “This wine is delicious.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  He didn’t seem all that thrilled to hear it, even though it might have been the first compliment Aunt Thelma had ever paid him.

  “Tell me, Pyoder,” Aunt Thelma said, “will any of your family be coming to the wedding?”

  “No,” Pyotr said, still beaming at her.

  “Old classmates, then? Colleagues? Friends?”

  “I do have friend from my institute, but he is in California,” Pyotr said.