Vinegar Girl

by Anne Tyler

  “Lucky,” Alice said. “I mean, sad for him, of course, but lucky for you: no in-laws to deal with. You should meet Jerry’s mother sometime.” She flashed a huge toothy smile toward her husband and trilled her fingers at him. “She thinks he should have married his girlfriend the neurosurgeon,” she said through her smile.

  Uncle Barclay stepped out to the center of the patio and called, “Everyone have champagne now?”

  There was a general murmur.

  “Like to propose a toast, then,” he said. “Pyoder and Katherine! May you two be as happy as your aunt and I have been.”

  Little cheers rose up here and there, and everyone took a sip. Kate had no idea what to do in response. In fact, she had never been toasted before. So she just tipped her glass to them all and nodded, and then she slid her eyes toward Pyotr to see what he was doing. He was grinning from ear to ear. He was holding his glass sky-high, and then he lowered it and threw back his head and drained his champagne in one gulp.

  —

  For her seating arrangements at dinner, Aunt Thelma proceeded as if they were in a formal banquet hall—the bride and groom placed next to each other at the center of one long side of the table, with members of the family aligned to their right and left in descending order of relatedness. It was sort of like The Last Supper.

  “Your father will be on your right,” Aunt Thelma told Kate as she ushered her into the dining room, although she really didn’t need to explain, because elegantly calligraphed name cards stood at the head of each plate. “Bunny’s on Pyoder’s left. Then I’ll sit on your father’s other side and Barclay will sit on Bunny’s other side. Theron’s at this end of the table and Richard’s at that end, and everyone else is boy-girl-boy-girl on the side across from you.”

  But there were problems. First, Bunny refused to sit next to Pyotr. She walked into the dining room and took one look at the place cards and said, “I am not sitting anywhere near that person. Trade seats with me, Uncle Barclay.”

  Uncle Barclay looked surprised, but he was good-natured about it. “Sure thing,” he said, drawing back his chair for her, and then he settled himself in the chair next to Pyotr’s. “Looks like sister-in-law troubles ahead for you, my friend,” he murmured to Pyotr.

  “Yes, she is very enraged at me,” Pyotr said equably.

  Kate leaned closer to her father, who was unfolding his napkin. “What is she enraged about?” she whispered. “I thought you didn’t press charges.”

  “It’s complicated,” her father said.

  “Complicated how?”

  Her father merely shrugged and smoothed his napkin across his lap.

  Then Alice didn’t like her seat assignment, although she was less emphatic about it. She was supposed to sit on the long side opposite Kate and Pyotr, but she sidled up to Aunt Thelma and said, “I hate to ask this, but could I be moved to an end place, please?”

  Aunt Thelma said, “An end place?”

  “I’m going to have to nurse my baby at some point, and I’ll need some elbow room.”

  “Certainly,” Aunt Thelma said. “Richard, dear?” she called. “Could you trade seats with Alice?”

  Richard wasn’t as accommodating as Uncle Barclay had been. “Why?” he asked.

  “She needs room to nurse her baby, dear.”

  “Nurse her baby?”

  Aunt Thelma slipped gracefully into the seat on the other side of Kate’s father. Richard, after a significant pause, stood up and moved one seat over, next to Mr. Gordon, and Alice settled at the end of the table and held out her hands for her baby.

  Kate was beginning to develop a certain grudging respect for Aunt Thelma. It was something like her second, grown-up viewing of Gone with the Wind, when Melanie had all at once struck her as the true heroine. In fact, she almost regretted not inviting her aunt to the wedding. Although probably that was just as well, in view of what a disaster it had been.

  Pyotr and Kate were sitting close enough so that he could nudge her with his elbow anytime he wanted her to share his appreciation of something. And he found plenty to appreciate. He liked the vichyssoise that was served at the start—anything that featured potatoes or cabbage made him happy, Kate had learned—and the rack of lamb that came next. He liked the Bach partita that was playing over Uncle Barclay’s sound system, as well as the sound system itself, with its four discreet speakers positioned in the four corners of the crown molding. He especially liked it when Alice’s baby spit up just as Alice raised her high in the air to show her off. That made him actually laugh out loud, although Kate gave him a nudge then, to shut him up. And when Uncle Theron told Mrs. Gordon that his choir director had been “phoning it in” lately, Pyotr was ecstatic. “ ‘Phoning it in!’ ” he repeated to Kate, jostling her as she was slicing her lamb. The knob of his elbow against her bare arm felt warm and callused.

  On her other side, her father suddenly bent over. He seemed to be trying to crawl underneath the table. “What are you doing?” Kate asked him, and he said, “I’m looking for that bag of yours.”

  “What do you want with it?”

  “I just need to slip these papers in,” he said. Briefly, he displayed them—several sheets folded in thirds like a business letter. Then he ducked his head under the table again. “Papers for the immigration people,” he said in a muffled voice.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Kate snapped, and she stabbed a bite of meat more forcefully than she needed to.

  “Louis? Have you lost something?” Aunt Thelma called.

  “No, no,” he said. He sat up. His face was flushed from his effort, and his glasses had slipped down the bridge of his nose. “Just putting a little something in Kate’s bag,” he said.

  “Oh, yes,” Aunt Thelma said approvingly. She probably thought he meant money; that was how little she knew him. “I must say, Louis: you’ve done comparatively well with these girls,” she told him. “All things considered.” And she inclined her wineglass toward him. “I’ll have to hand you that much. I know I told you at the time that you should give them to me to raise, but I see you might have been right to insist on keeping them with you.”

  Kate stopped chewing.

  “Yes, well,” Dr. Battista said. He turned to Kate and said, in a lower tone, “I suppose all the bureaucratese will seem a bit daunting at first, but I’ve included a business card with Morton Stanfield’s phone number on it. He’s an immigration lawyer and he’s going to help you through this.”

  “Okay,” Kate said. Then she patted his hand and said, “Okay, Father.”

  Alice was asking Bunny to cut her meat up for her, since she was nursing her baby now under cover of her draped cardigan. Jeannette was trying to catch Richard’s eye; he had just poured himself what must have been at least his third glass of wine. She kept leaning forward and holding up an index finger like someone wishing to propose an amendment, but he had his gaze trained studiously elsewhere. Mrs. Gordon was telling Pyotr how sorry she was to hear that the Mintz boy had kidnapped his mice. She was seated on the other side of the table from Pyotr and several places down, so she needed to raise her voice. “Jim and Sonia Mintz should really step up to the plate,” she called, and Kate flinched, because Bunny had to have overheard her.

  “ ‘Step up to the plate,’ ” Pyotr repeated in a musing tone.

  “Batter’s plate,” Uncle Barclay advised him. “As in baseball.”

  “Ah! Nice. Very useful. I was thinking dinner plate.”

  “No, no.”

  “Even when Edward was little,” Mrs. Gordon was saying, “Jim and Sonia were so laissez-faire. He was a peculiar child from the outset, but did they notice?”

  “It sounds they were phoning it in,” Pyotr told her.

  He looked so happy as he said this, so obviously pleased with himself, that Uncle Barclay started laughing. “You really like our American expressions, Pyoder, don’t you,” he said, and Pyotr laughed too and said, “I love them!” His whole face was alight.

  “Good
man,” Uncle Barclay said affectionately. “Here’s to my man Pyoder!” he announced, holding up his wineglass. “Let’s welcome him into the family.”

  There was a general stir around the table, with people chiming in and reaching for their own glasses, but before they could go any further, Bunny’s chair screeched across the parquet and she jumped to her feet. “Well, I don’t welcome him,” she said. “There’s no way on earth I’m going to welcome a guy who assaulted an innocent man.”

  Kate said, “Innocent!” and then, in a kind of double-take, “Assaulted?”

  “He told me what you did!” Bunny said, turning on Pyotr. “You couldn’t just ask him nicely to give you back your mice; oh, no. You had to go and sock him.”

  All the guests were staring at her.

  “You socked him?” Kate asked Pyotr.

  “He was a small bit reluctant to let me into his house,” Pyotr said.

  Bunny said, “You almost broke his jaw! Maybe you did break his jaw. His mother’s thinking now she should take him to the emergency room.”

  “Good,” Pyotr said, buttering a slice of bread. “Maybe they wire his mouth shut.”

  Bunny asked the others, “Did you hear that?” and Dr. Battista said, “Now, Bun-Buns. Now, dear one. Control yourself, dear.” And at the same time Kate was asking, “What happened? Wait.”

  “He practically batters the Mintzes’ door down,” Bunny told her, “yells at Edward right in his face and grabs him by his shirtfront; gives poor Mrs. Mintz a heart attack, just about, and then when Edward tries to block his path as of course he’d try—it’s his private house—Pyoder knocks him flat on his back and goes storming up the stairs barging in and out of the Mintzes’ personal bedrooms till finally he finds Edward’s room and he shouts, ‘Come up here! Come up this instant!’ and he forces Edward to help him carry all the cages down the stairs and out to the Mintzes’ minivan and when Mrs. Mintz says, ‘What is this? Stop this!’ he tells her, ‘Get out of the way!’ in this loud obnoxious voice. When she didn’t know! She thought Edward was just keeping the mice for a friend! And he was keeping them for a friend, this man he’d met on the Internet from an organization in Pennsylvania, who was going to come down next week and take the mice to this no-kill shelter where they could be adopted, he said—”

  Dr. Battista groaned, no doubt picturing his precious mice in the hands of a bunch of germ-ridden Pennsylvanians.

  “—and then after they drive to the lab, and Edward is very helpful about unloading them from the minivan and putting them back in the mouse room, which is no easy task, believe me, what thanks does he get? Pyoder calls the police. He calls the police on him, after Edward has totally undone the damage. Right this very minute Edward would be rotting in jail, I bet, if Mrs. Mintz hadn’t as it turned out called the police on Pyoder.”

  Kate said, “What?”

  “I told you it was complicated,” her father said.

  The other diners looked spellbound. Even Alice’s baby was staring at Bunny open-mouthed.

  “There is poor Edward,” Bunny said, “severely injured; one whole side of his face is swelled up like a pumpkin, so of course his mother called the police. Which means Father here”—and Bunny turned to Dr. Battista; it was the first time in years that Kate had heard her call him “Father”—“Father had to drop the charges, thank heaven, or else the Mintzes said they would press charges on Pyoder. It was a plea bargain.”

  Uncle Barclay said, “Well, I don’t think that’s exactly what they call a—”

  “That’s why you didn’t press charges?” Kate asked her father.

  “It seemed expedient,” he said.

  “But Pyotr was provoked!” Kate said. “It wasn’t his fault he had to hit Edward.”

  “Is true,” Pyotr said, nodding.

  Aunt Thelma said, “In any event—”

  “Naturally you would say that,” Bunny told Kate. “Naturally you would think Pyoder can do no wrong. It’s like you’ve turned into some kind of zombie. ‘Yes, Pyoder; no, Pyoder,’ following him around all moony. ‘Whatever you say, Pyoder; I’ll do anything you like, Pyoder; certainly I’ll marry you, Pyoder, even if all you’re after is any old U.S. citizen,’ you tell him. Then you show up super-late for your own wedding reception and the two of you are not even dressed, looking all mussed and rumpled like you’ve spent the afternoon making out. It’s disgusting, is what it is. You’ll never see me backing down like that when I have a husband.”

  Kate stood up and set her napkin aside. “Fine,” she said. She was conscious of Pyotr’s eyes on her—of everybody’s eyes—and of Uncle Barclay’s highly entertained expression and Aunt Thelma’s tensed posture as she watched for the first possible chance to break in and put an end to this. But Kate focused solely on Bunny. “Treat your husband any way you like,” she said, “but I pity him, whoever he is. It’s hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that’s bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don’t dare show their true feelings. No matter if they’re hurting or desperate or stricken with grief, if they’re heartsick or they’re homesick or some huge dark guilt is hanging over them or they’re about to fail big-time at something—‘Oh, I’m okay,’ they say. ‘Everything’s just fine.’ They’re a whole lot less free than women are, when you think about it. Women have been studying people’s feelings since they were toddlers; they’ve been perfecting their radar—their intuition or their empathy or their interpersonal whatchamacallit. They know how things work underneath, while men have been stuck with the sports competitions and the wars and the fame and success. It’s like men and women are in two different countries! I’m not ‘backing down,’ as you call it; I’m letting him into my country. I’m giving him space in a place where we can both be ourselves. Lord have mercy, Bunny, cut us some slack!”

  Bunny sank onto her chair, looking dazed. She might not have been persuaded, but she was giving up the fight, for now.

  Pyotr rose to his feet and placed an arm around Kate’s shoulders. He smiled into her eyes and said, “Kiss me, Katya.”

  And she did.

  Louie Shcherbakov had a deal with his parents where if they were leaving him with a sitter, he got to fix his own supper. Already he could cook a whole lot better than his mom, and almost as well as his dad. This fall when he entered first grade they were going to start letting him use the stove as long as a grown-up was around, but meanwhile he was allowed the microwave and the toaster oven, and silverware knives but not sharp knives. He was pretty good at cutting up beef jerky with the kitchen shears.

  Tonight his parents were going to Washington because his mother was getting a prize. She had won a Plant Ecology Award from the Botanical Federation. All week, Louie had been telling people this. “Mom’s getting a prize from the Butt-anical Federation,” he would say, and then he would fall on the floor laughing. Most people just smiled politely, but if his dad was within hearing he would laugh as hard as Louie. When his dad laughed, his eyes would tip up at the outside corners. Louie’s eyes did that too, and he had his dad’s straight yellow hair. His mom’s aunt Thelma said he looked so much like his dad that it was comical, but Louie didn’t see what was comical about it. Was she talking about he didn’t have big arm muscles like his dad’s arm muscles? But he was getting there.

  He put two slices of bread in the toaster oven, and then he hauled the stepstool over to the food cupboard and reached down a can of sardines. He wasn’t all that crazy about sardines, but he liked opening the can with its little tin key. After he’d done that, he took a banana from the bowl on the counter because bananas were miracle food, and he peeled it and cut it into disks with a silverware knife. Then he went out on the landing and called, “Have we got any kidney beans?”

  “What? No!” his mom called from his parents’ bedroom.

  “Too bad,” he said, mostly to himself. He often ate kidney beans when he went to his grandpa’s house, mashed up with a lot of o
ther stuff. He liked the sourness of them.

  “What on earth do you want with kidney beans?” his mom called, but then she added, in a lower voice, “I still don’t see why I can’t just wear pants.”

  “This is official occasion, though,” his dad told her. “I myself am wearing suit.”

  “You try wearing a dress sometime. I look like a pet dog decked out by some demented child.”

  Louie went back to the kitchen and climbed up on the stepstool again and reached down the squeeze bottle of ketchup. Red would go good, he figured. Red, silver, and beige: ketchup, sardines, and bananas. “Where would be the green?” his dad always liked to ask, but his mom would say, “Oh, give it a rest. I’ve known kids who ate nothing but foods that were white until they left for college, and they were perfectly healthy.”

  Most times Louie’s grandpa was his sitter, now that Aunt Bunny had married her personal trainer and moved to New Jersey. His grandpa owned a very old and faded book called Curious Science Facts for Young Folks, and when he came to sit he brought it along to read to Louie, which made Louie feel important and cared for even if he didn’t exactly understand every single word. But tonight his grandpa would be going to Washington too, and so would Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay and Uncle Theron, so Louie was staying downstairs with Mrs. Liu. That was okay, though. Mrs. Liu let him drink Coca-Cola, and her friend Mrs. Murphy had these cool objects in her glass-fronted cabinet: a paperweight with gold stars swirling inside it instead of snowflakes, and a bright red berry with a top that opened to spill out a herd of microscopic white elephants, and a weather-house made of tan wood with a brown wooden roof. A tiny man or woman would come to one of the doors of the house—the woman if it was going to be sunny, the man if it was going to rain. Just about always it was the woman, though, holding her eentsy watering can, while the man stayed back in the shadows under his fingernail-size umbrella even when it was pouring. Louie’s dad said it was a very inexact science.

  Mrs. Liu wouldn’t let his parents pay her for babysitting because she was Louie’s auntie, she said. When he was little, Louie had thought she really was his aunt, on account of they had the same name, almost, but then his mom explained that Mrs. Liu was just an honorary aunt. And so was Mrs. Murphy, because this was her house they were living in even though Louie’s grandpa wanted them to move in with him. But Louie’s mom said she wasn’t about to move. She said she’d lived here eleven years now and she was perfectly content, and what did they need more room for; it would only be more to vacuum, and his dad said she was absolutely right.