Vinegar Girl

Chapter Twelve

Aunt Thelma answered the door in a floor-length, flowered hostess gown. Kate could smell her perfume even from where they stood. “Hello, my dears!” she cried. There was no way she could not have been taken aback by what they were wearing, but she hid it well. She stepped out onto the veranda to press her cheek to Kate’s and then to Pyotr’s. “Welcome to your wedding banquet!”

“Thank you, Aunt Sel,” Pyotr said, and he flung his arms around her in an enthusiastic hug that nearly knocked her over.

“Sorry we’re so late,” Kate told her. “Sorry we didn’t have time to dress.”

“Well, you’re here; that’s all that matters,” her aunt said — a much milder reaction than Kate would have predicted. She patted down the side of her hairdo that Pyotr had disarranged. “Come on out back; everyone’s having drinks. Aren’t we lucky the weather’s so nice!”

She turned to lead them through the entrance hall, which was two stories high. A giant crystal chandelier hung at its center like an upside-down Christmas tree, and Pyotr slowed to gaze up at it for a moment with a dazzled expression. In the living room, sectional couches lumbered through the vast space like a herd of rhinos, and both coffee tables were the size of double beds. “Kate’s father has been telling us what an eventful day you’ve had, Pyoder,” Aunt Thelma said.

“Was very eventful,” Pyotr said.

“He’s been quite talkative, for him. We’ve all learned the most amazing amount about mice.”

She opened the French doors to the patio. It was a long while yet till sunset, but paper lanterns glowed in the trees and netted candles flickered palely on all the tables. When Kate and Pyotr stepped out onto the flagstones, the guests turned as a group, which made it seem as if there were considerably more of them than there really were. Kate felt the force of their attention like a wind that suddenly smacked her in the face. She stopped short, holding her tote low in front of her to hide the mayonnaise stain. “Here they are!” Aunt Thelma caroled, and she flung out one arm majestically. “Introducing…Mr. and Mrs. Cherbakov and Cherbakova! Or however they do it.”

There was a general “Ah!” and a smattering of applause, most people just patting the insides of their wrists with their fingertips in order to accommodate their wineglasses. Kate’s girlhood friend Alice had put on a little weight since Kate had last seen her, and her husband held a baby perched in the crook of his arm. Uncle Theron was wearing a defiantly unchurchy outfit of khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, but all the other men wore suits, and the women were in spring dresses that showed their winter-white arms and legs.

Dr. Battista was clapping the loudest. He had set his glass on a table to free his hands, and his face was shining with emotion. Bunny, at the far end of the patio, wasn’t clapping at all. She clenched a Pepsi can in her fist and glared at Pyotr and Kate belligerently.

“All right, everybody, we’re switching to champagne,” Uncle Barclay called. He arrived in front of Pyotr and Kate with two foam-topped flutes. “Drink up; it’s the good stuff,” he told them.

“Thanks,” Kate said, accepting hers, and Pyotr said, “Thank you, Uncle Bark.”

“Looks like you just got out of bed, Pyoder,” Uncle Barclay said with a sly chuckle.

“This is the latest fashion,” Kate told him. She’d be damned if she would offer any more apologies. “He bought it at Comme des Garçons.”

“Beg your pardon?”

She took a hefty sip of champagne.

“Could you and Pyoder stand closer together?” her father asked her. He was holding his cell phone in both hands. “I can’t believe I didn’t get any pictures of the wedding. I know I had a lot on my mind, but…Maybe your uncle could restage the ceremony for us.”

“No,” Kate told him flatly.

“No? Oh, well,” he said, squinting down at his phone. “Whatever you say, darling. This is such a joyous day! And you are the one we have to thank, pointing us toward the Mintz boy. I never would have suspected him.”

He was snapping more photographs as he spoke; he’d begun to look less incompetent at it. But there was no hope that the results would be any better, because Kate had her nose buried in her glass and Pyotr was turning away to snag a canapé from the tray Aunt Thelma was offering. “Maybe I take two,” he was saying. “I have not had breakfast or lunch.”

“Oh, you poor thing! Take three,” Aunt Thelma said. “Louis? Caviar?”

“No, never mind that. Barclay, could you snap a picture of me with the bride and groom?”

“Be glad to,” Uncle Barclay said, at the same time that Aunt Thelma told him, “First you have to see to everybody’s champagne. Kate’s already drinking hers, and we haven’t even had the toast yet.”

Kate lowered her glass guiltily, although really it was Uncle Barclay’s fault. He was the one who had told her to drink up.

Her father said, “The thing that gets me is, I still don’t understand why this happened. This thing with the animal people, I mean. My mice lead enviable lives! More healthful than many humans’ lives, in fact. I’ve always had a very good relationship with my mice.”

“Well, better with them than with no one, I suppose,” Aunt Thelma said, and she sailed off with her tray.

Aunt Thelma’s son, Richard, was making his way toward them with his wife, a pale, icy blonde with poreless skin and pearly pink lips. Kate tugged at her father’s sleeve and whispered, “Quick: what’s Richard’s wife’s name?”

“You’re asking me?”

“It starts with an L. Leila? Leah?”

“Cuz!” Richard said jovially. He wasn’t usually so friendly. “Congratulations! Congratulations, Pyoder,” he said, slapping him jarringly on the back. “I’m Kate’s cousin, Richard. This is my wife, Jeannette.”

Dr. Battista raised his eyebrows at Kate. Pyotr said, “Rich, I am glad to meet you. Jen, I am glad to meet you.”

Kate waited for Richard to draw one of his nose-breaths in protest, but he let it pass. “Can’t believe we’re finally marrying this gal off,” he said. “Whole family’s beside themselves with relief.”

Since this confirmed Kate’s worst suspicions, she felt stabbed to the heart. And Jeannette said, “Oh, Richard,” which somehow made it worse.

Pyotr said, “I too am relieved. I did not know if Kate would like me.”

“Well, sure she would! You’re her own kind, right?”

“I am her kind?”

Richard suddenly looked less sure of himself, but he said, “I mean you’re in that same milieu or whatever. That science milieu she was raised in. Right, Uncle Louis?” he asked. “No normal person could understand you people.”

“What exactly do you find difficult to understand?” Dr. Battista asked him.

“Oh, you know, all that science jargon; I can’t offhand—”

“I am researching autoimmune disorders,” Dr. Battista said. “It’s true that ‘autoimmune’ has four syllables, but perhaps if I broke the word down for you…”

Kate felt somebody slip an arm around her waist, and she started. She turned to find Alice standing next to her, smiling and saying, “Congratulations, stranger.”

“Thanks,” Kate said.

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world. How’ve you been?”

“I’m okay.”

“Have you seen my little lambie pie over there?”

“Yes, I noticed. Is it a boy or a girl?”

Alice frowned. “She’s a girl, of course,” she said. Then she brightened and said, “Hurry up and have one of your own now, so they can be playmates.”

“Oh, gosh,” Kate said. She looked around for the canapés, but they were clear across the patio.

“So tell me about your guy! Where’d you meet him? How long have you known him? He’s very sexy.”

“He works in my father’s lab,” Kate said. “We’ve known each other three years.” This was beginning to feel like the truth, she realized. She could almost summon up some concrete memories from their long acquaintance.

“Are those two over there his parents?”

“What? Oh, no, that’s the Gordons,” Kate said. “Our neighbors from two doors down. Pyotr doesn’t have any parents. He doesn’t have any family at all.”

“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.