Vinegar Girl

Chapter Two

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 just 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.’ ”

“Oh.”

Mrs. Darling set the sheet of paper down. “Someday,” she told Kate, “I can imagine your becoming a full-fledged teacher.”

“You can?”

Kate had never noticed that this place had an actual career path. Certainly there had been no evidence of it to date.

“I can see you in charge of a classroom, once you mature,” Mrs. Darling said. “But when I say ‘mature,’ Kate, I don’t mean just getting older.”

“Oh. No.”

“I mean that you would need to develop some social skills. Some tact, some restraint, some diplomacy.”

“Okay.”

“Do you even understand what I’m talking about?”

“Tact. Restraint. Diplomacy.”

Mrs. Darling studied her a moment. “Because otherwise,” she said, “I can’t quite picture your continuing in our little community, Kate. I’d like to picture it. I’d like to keep you on for the sake of your dear aunt, but you are walking on very thin ice here; I want you to know that.”

“Got it,” Kate said.

Mrs. Darling didn’t seem reassured, but after a pause she said, “Very well, Kate. Leave the door open when you go, please.”

“Sure thing, Mrs. D.,” Kate told her.

—

“I think I’ve been put on probation,” she told the Threes’ assistant. They were standing out on the playground together, supervising the seesaws so that no one got killed.

Natalie said, “Weren’t you already on probation?”

“Oh,” Kate said. “Maybe you’re right.”

“What’d you do this time?”

“I insulted a parent.”

Natalie grimaced. They all felt the same way about parents.

“It was this nutso control-freak dad,” Kate said, “who keeps trying to turn his kid into Little Miss Perfect.”

But just then Adam Barnes arrived with a couple of his Twos, and she dropped the subject. (She always tried to look like a nicer person than she really was when Adam was around.) “What’s up?” he asked them, and Natalie said, “Oh, not a whole lot,” while Kate just grinned at him foolishly and jammed her hands in her jeans pockets.

“Gregory here was hoping to go on a seesaw,” Adam said. “I told him maybe one of the big guys would let him take a turn.”

“Of course!” Natalie said. “Donny,” she called, “could you give Gregory a little turn on the seesaw?”

She wouldn’t do that for anyone but Adam. The children were supposed to be learning to wait — even the two-year-olds. Kate sent her a narrow-eyed stare, and Donny said, “But I just now got on!”

“Oh, then,” Adam broke in immediately. “That wouldn’t be fair, then. You don’t want to be unfair to Donny, do you, Gregory?”

Gregory seemed to feel that he did want to be unfair. His eyes filled with tears and his chin started wobbling.

“Or, I know what!” Natalie said, in a super-enthusiastic tone. “Gregory, you can ride with Donny! Donny can be a big boy and share his ride with you!”

Kate felt like upchucking. She nearly went so far as to pantomime sticking a finger down her throat, but she stopped herself. Luckily, Adam wasn’t looking in her direction. He was lifting Gregory onto the seesaw in front of Donny, who at least was tolerating the arrangement, and then he walked over to set a hand behind Jason at the other end to add some weight.

Adam was the school’s only male assistant, a lanky, kind-faced young English-major type with a tangle of dark hair and a curly beard. Mrs. Darling seemed to feel she’d been exceptionally daring to have hired him, although most of the other preschools had several men on their staffs by that time. She had first assigned him to the Fives, known also as the Pre-Ks because the children there, mostly boys, were old enough for kindergarten but were thought to need a further year of socialization. A man would provide discipline and structure, Mrs. D. felt. However, Adam had turned out to be such a mild man, so gentle and solicitous, that halfway through his first year he and Georgina had been switched. Now he happily tended two-year-olds, wiping noses and soothing random cases of homesickness, and before Quiet Rest Time every day his mumbly, slightly furry voice could be heard singing lullabies above the soporific strumming of his guitar. Unlike most men, he stood noticeably taller than Kate, and yet somehow in his presence she always felt too big and too gangling. She longed all at once to be softer, daintier, more ladylike, and she was embarrassed by her own gracelessness.

She wished she had had a mother. Well, she had had a mother, but she wished she’d had one who had taught her how to get along in the world better.

“I saw you walk past during Quiet Rest Time,” Adam called to her as he worked the seesaw. “Were you in trouble with Mrs. Darling?”

“No…” she said. “You know. We were just discussing a child I was concerned about.”

Natalie made a snorting noise. Kate glared at her, and Natalie put on an exaggerated “Oh-excuse-me” expression. So transparent, Natalie was. Everybody knew she had a huge crush on Adam.

Last week, it was all over the school that Adam had given Sophia Watson one of his handmade dream catchers. “Oho!” everyone said. But Kate thought he might just have done that because Sophia was his co-assistant in Room 2.

—

Tact, restraint, diplomacy. What was the difference between tact and diplomacy? Maybe “tact” referred to saying things politely while “diplomacy” meant not saying things at all. Except, wouldn’t “restraint” cover that? Wouldn’t “restraint” cover all three?

People tended to be very spendthrift with their language, Kate had noticed. They used a lot more words than they needed to.

She was taking her time walking home because the weather was so nice. In the morning it had been downright cold, but since then the day had warmed up and she carried her jacket slung over one shoulder. A young couple was strolling at a leisurely pace in front of her, the girl telling some long tale about some other girl named Lindy, but Kate didn’t bother trying to pass them.

She wondered whether the pale blue, faceless pansies she saw in somebody’s garden urn would bloom in her backyard. She had way too much shade in her backyard.

Behind her, she heard her name called. She turned to see a light-haired man hurrying toward her with one arm raised, as if he were hailing a cab. For a moment she couldn’t imagine what he had to do with her, but then she recognized her father’s research assistant. The absence of his lab coat had confused her; he was wearing jeans and a plain gray jersey. “Hi!” he said as he arrived next to her. (“Khai,” it sounded like.)

“Peter,” she said.

“Pyotr.”

“How’re you doing,” she said.

“I fear I may be having cold,” he told her. “My nose waters and I sneeze a great deal. Has been taking place since last night.”

“Bummer,” she said.

She resumed walking, and he fell into step alongside her. “It was a good day at your school?” he asked.

“It was okay.”

They were right on the heels of the young couple now. Lindy ought to just dump the guy, the girl was saying, he was making her unhappy; and the boy said, “Oh, I don’t know, she seems all right to me.”

“Where are your eyes?” the girl asked him. “The whole time they’re together she keeps looking into his face and he keeps looking away. Everybody’s noticed it — Patsy and Paula and Jane Ann — and finally my sister came right out and said to Lindy; she said—”

Pyotr briefly clamped Kate’s upper arm to steer her around them. It startled her for a moment. He was barely taller than Kate, but she had trouble matching his stride, and then she wondered why she was trying and she slowed her pace. He slowed too. “Shouldn’t you be at work?” she asked him.

“Yes! I am just going.”

Since the lab lay two blocks in the opposite direction, this didn’t make any sense, but that was no concern of hers. She glanced at her watch. She liked to get home before Bunny, who was not supposed to entertain boys when she was alone but sometimes did anyhow.

“In my country we have proverb,” Pyotr was saying.

Didn’t they always, Kate thought.

“We say, ‘Work when it is divided into segments is shorter total period of time than work when it is all together in one unit.’ ”

“Catchy,” Kate said.

“How long you have been letting your hair grow?”

The change of subject took her aback. “What?” she said. “Oh. Since eighth grade, maybe. I don’t know. I just couldn’t take any more of that Chatty Cathy act.”

“Chatty Cathy?”

“In the beauty parlor. Talk, talk, talk; those places are crawling with talk. The women there start going before they even sit down — talk about boyfriends, husbands, mothers-in-law. Roommates, jealous girlfriends. Feuds and misunderstandings and romances and divorces. How can they find so much to say? I could never think of anything, myself. I kept disappointing my beautician. Finally I went, ‘Shoot. I’ll just quit getting my hair cut.’ ”

“It is exceedingly attractive,” Pyotr said.

“Thanks,” Kate said. “Well, this is where I turn off. Do you realize the lab’s back that way?”

“Oh! Is back that way!” Pyotr said. He didn’t seem too perturbed about it. “Okay, Kate! See you soon! Was nice having a talk.”

Kate had already started down her own street, and she raised an arm without looking back.

—

She had barely stepped into the house when she heard a distinct male voice. “Bunny,” she called in her sternest tone.

“In here!” Bunny sang out.

Kate tossed her jacket onto the hall bench and went into the living room. Bunny was sitting on the couch, all frothy golden curls and oh-so-innocent face and off-the-shoulder blouse far too lightweight for the season; and the Mintz boy from next door was sitting next to her.

This was a new development. Edward Mintz was several years older than Bunny, an unhealthy-looking young man with patchy beige chin whiskers that reminded Kate of lichen. He had graduated from high school two Junes ago but failed to leave for college; his mother claimed he had “that Japanese disease.” “What disease is that?” Kate had asked, and Mrs. Mintz said, “The one where young people shut themselves in their bedrooms and refuse to go on with their lives.” Except that Edward seemed bound not to his bedroom but to the glassed-in porch that faced the Battistas’ dining-room window, where day in and day out he could be seen sitting on a chaise longue hugging his knees and smoking suspiciously tiny cigarettes.

Well, all right: no danger of romance, at least. (Bunny’s weakness was football types.) Still, a rule was a rule, so Kate said, “Bunny, you know you’re not supposed to entertain when you’re on your own.”

“Entertain!” Bunny cried, making her eyes very round and bewildered. She held up a spiral notebook that lay open on her lap. “I’m having my Spanish lesson!”

“You are?”

“I asked Papa, remember? Señora McGillicuddy said I needed a tutor? And I asked Papa and he said fine?”

“Yes, but…” Kate began.

Yes, but he surely hadn’t meant some pothead neighbor boy. Kate didn’t say this, however. (Diplomacy.) Instead, she turned to Edward and asked, “Are you especially fluent in Spanish, Edward?”

“Yes, ma’am, I had five semesters,” he said. She didn’t know whether the “ma’am” was smart-aleck or serious. Either way, it was annoying; she wasn’t that old. He said, “Sometimes, I even think in Spanish.”

This made Bunny give a little giggle. Bunny giggled at everything. “He’s already taught me so much?” she said.

Another irksome habit of hers was turning declara-tive sentences into questions. Kate liked to needle her by pretending she thought they really were questions, so she said, “I wouldn’t know that, would I, because I haven’t been in the house with you.”

Edward said, “What?” and Bunny told him, “Just ignore her?”

“I got an A or A-minus in Spanish every semester,” Edward said, “except for senior year, and that one wasn’t my fault. I was undergoing some stress.”

“Well, still,” Kate said, “Bunny’s not allowed to have male visitors when no one else is home.”

“Oh! This is humiliating!” Bunny cried.

“Tough luck,” Kate told her. “Carry on; I’ll be nearby.” And she walked out.

Behind her, she heard Bunny murmur, “Un bitcho.”

“Una bitch-AH,” Edward corrected her in a didactic tone.

They fell into a little spasm of snickers.

Bunny was not nearly as sweet as other people thought she was.

Kate had never quite understood why Bunny existed, even. Their mother — a frail, muted, pink-and-gold blonde with Bunny’s same asterisk eyes — had spent the first fourteen years of Kate’s life checking in and out of various “rest facilities,” as they were called. Then all at once, Bunny was born. It was hard for Kate to imagine how her parents had considered this to be a good idea. Maybe they hadn’t considered; maybe it had been a case of mindless passion. But that was even harder to imagine. At any rate, the second pregnancy had brought to light some defect in Thea Battista’s heart, or perhaps had caused the defect, and she was dead before Bunny’s first birthday. For Kate, it was hardly a change from the absence she’d known all her life. And Bunny didn’t even remember their mother, although some of Bunny’s gestures were uncannily similar — the demure tuck of her chin, for instance, and her habit of nibbling prettily on the very tip of her index finger. It was almost as if she had been studying their mother from inside the womb. Their aunt Thelma, Thea’s sister, was always saying, “Oh, Bunny, I swear, it makes me cry to see you. If you aren’t the image of your poor mother!”

Kate, on the other hand, was not in the least like their mother. Kate was dark-skinned and big-boned and gawky. She would have looked absurd gnawing on a finger, and nobody had ever called her sweet.

Kate was una bitcha.

—

“Katherine, my dear!”

Kate turned from the stove, startled. Her father stood in the doorway with a shiny smile on his face. “How was your day?” he asked her.

“It was all right.”

“Things went well?”

“Semi-okay.”

“Excellent!” He continued standing there. As a rule, he returned from his lab in a funk, his mind still occupied with whatever he had been working on, but maybe today he’d had a breakthrough of some sort. “You walked to work, I guess,” he said.

“Well, sure,” she said. She always walked, unless the weather was truly miserable.

“And you had a nice walk home?”

“Yup,” she said. “I ran into your assistant, by the way.”

“Did you!”

“Yup.”

“Wonderful! How was he?”

“How was he?” Kate repeated. “Don’t you know how he was?”

“I mean, what did you talk about?”

She tried to remember. “Hair?” she said.

“Ah.” He went on smiling. “What else?” he asked finally.

“That was it, I guess.”

She turned back to the stove. She was reheating the concoction they had for supper every night. Meat mash, they called it, but it was mainly dried beans and green vegetables and potatoes, which she mixed with a small amount of stewed beef every Saturday afternoon and puréed into a grayish sort of paste to be served throughout the week. Her father was the one who had invented it. He couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t follow the same system; it provided all the requisite nutrients and saved so much time and decision-making.

“Father,” she said, lowering the gas flame, “did you know Bunny’s arranged for Edward Mintz to be her Spanish tutor?”

“Who is Edward Mintz?”

“Edward next door, Father. He was over here this afternoon when I got home from work. Here in the house, incidentally, which you’ll recall is against the rules. And we have no idea if he’s any good as a tutor. I don’t even know what she told him we would pay him. Did she ask you about this?”

“Well, I believe she…yes, I seem to recollect she said she wasn’t doing well in Spanish.”

“Yes, and you said she should go ahead and find a tutor, but why didn’t she get in touch with that place that’s supplying her math tutor and her English tutor? Why did she hire a neighbor boy?”

“She must have had good reason,” her father said.

“I don’t know why you assume that,” Kate told him. She banged her spoon against the side of the pot to dislodge the clump of mash that was stuck to it.

It always amazed her to see how ignorant her father was about normal everyday life. The man existed in a vacuum. Their housekeeper used to say it was because he was so smart. “He has very important matters on his mind,” she would say. “Wiping out worldwide disease and such.”

“Well, that shouldn’t mean he can’t have us on his mind besides,” Kate had said. “It’s like those mice of his matter more to him than we do. Like he doesn’t even care about us!”

“Oh, he does, honey! He does. He just can’t show it. It’s like he…never learned the language, or something; like he comes from another planet. But I promise you he cares about you.”

Their housekeeper would have thoroughly approved of Mrs. Darling’s Something Nice rule.

“When I mentioned Pyoder’s visa the other day,” her father was saying, “I’m not sure you fully understood the problem. His visa is good for three years. He’s been here two years and ten months.”

“Gee,” Kate said. She turned off the burner and picked up the pot by both handles. “Excuse me.”

He backed out of the doorway. She walked past him into the dining room, where she set the pot on the trivet that waited permanently in the center of the table.

Although the dining room was decorated with formal, genteel furniture handed down by Thea’s ancestors, it had taken on a haphazard appearance after her death. Vitamin bottles and opened mail and various office supplies crowded the silver service on the sideboard. The unset end of the table bore a stack of receipts and a calculator and a budget book and a sheaf of income-tax forms. It always fell to Kate to do the taxes, and now she glanced guiltily at her father, who had followed on her heels. (They were perilously close to tax day.) But he was intent on his own line of thought. “You see the difficulty,” he said. He followed her back to the kitchen. She took a carton of yogurt from the fridge. “Excuse me,” she said again. He followed her into the dining room again. He had both fists balled up in the deep front pockets of his coveralls, which made it seem as if he were carrying a muff. “In two more months he’ll be forced to leave the country,” he said.

“Can’t you get his visa renewed?”

“Theoretically, I can. But it’s all about who’s applying for him — whether that person’s project is important enough, and I suspect that some of my colleagues think mine has gone off the deep end. Well, what do they know, right? I’m on to something here, I really feel it; I’m about to discover one single, unified key to autoimmune disorders. Still, Immigration’s going to say I should just get along without him. Ever since nine-eleven, Immigration’s been so unreasonable.”

“Huh,” Kate said. They were back in the kitchen. She chose three apples from the bowl on the counter. “So who will you get instead?”

“Instead!” her father said. He stared at her. “Kate,” he said. “This is Pyoder Cherbakov! Now that I’ve worked with Pyoder Cherbakov, nobody else will do.”

“Well, it sounds to me as if somebody else will have to do,” Kate said. “Excuse me,” she said again. She returned to the dining room, with her father once more following, and placed an apple above each plate.

“I’m ruined,” her father said. “I’m doomed. I might as well abandon my research.”

“Heavens, Father.”

“Unless, perhaps, we could get him an…adjustment of status.”

“Oh, good. Get him an adjustment of status.”

She brushed past him and went out to the hall. “Bunny!” she shouted up the stairs. “Supper’s on!”

“We could adjust his status to ‘married to an American.’ ”

“Pyotr’s married to an American?”

“Well, not quite yet,” her father said. He trailed her back to the dining room. “But he’s fairly nice-looking, I believe. Don’t you agree? All those girls working in the building: they seem to find different reasons to talk to him.”

“So could he marry a girl in the building?” Kate asked. She sat down at her place and shook out her napkin.

“I don’t think so,” her father said. “He doesn’t…the conversations never seem to develop any further, unfortunately.”

“Then who?”

Her father sat down at the head of the table. He cleared his throat. He said, “You, maybe?”

“Very funny,” she told him. “Oh, where is that girl? Bernice Battista!” she shouted. “Get down here this instant!”

“I am down,” Bunny said, arriving in the doorway. “You don’t have to blast my ears off.”

She plopped herself in the chair across from Kate. “Hi, Poppy,” she said.

There was a long silence, during which Dr. Battista seemed to be dragging himself up from the depths. Finally he said, “Hello, Bunny.” His voice had a mournful, hollow sound.

Bunny raised her eyebrows at Kate. Kate shrugged and picked up the serving spoon.