Vinegar Girl

Chapter Three

“Happy Tuesday, children,” Mrs. Darling said, and then she asked Kate to come to her office again.

This time Kate couldn’t leave her class during Quiet Rest Time, because Mrs. Chauncey was out sick. And on Tuesdays she was responsible for Extended Daycare once school was over. So she would be forced to stay in suspense from lunchtime until 5:30.

She didn’t have the slightest idea what Mrs. Darling wanted to see her about. But then, she seldom did. The etiquette in this place was so mysterious! Or the customs, or the conventions, or whatever…Like not showing strangers the soles of your feet or something. She tried to cast her mind back over anything she might have done wrong, but how much could she have done wrong between yesterday afternoon and noon today? She had made a point of keeping her interactions with parents to a minimum, and she didn’t think Mrs. Darling could have heard about her little tantrum this morning when she couldn’t get Antwan’s jacket unzipped. “Stupid goddamn-to-hell frigging modern life,” she had muttered. But it was life she was cursing, not Antwan, and surely he’d understood that. Besides, he didn’t seem like the kind of kid who’d go running off to tattle on people, even if he’d had the opportunity.

It had been one of those double-type zippers that could be opened from the bottom while the top stayed closed, and she’d ended up having to take the jacket off by yanking it over his head. She detested that kind of zipper. It was a presumptuous zipper; it wanted to figure out your every possible need without your say-so.

She tried to remember how Mrs. Darling had worded her threat from the day before. She hadn’t said anything about “Just one more offense and you’re out,” had she? No, it had been less specific than that. It had been something like the vague “or else” that grown-ups were always threatening children with, that children eventually realized was not as dire as it sounded.

The phrase “thin ice” had been involved, she seemed to recollect.

How would she fill her days if she had no job anymore? There was absolutely nothing else whatsoever in her life — no reason she could think of to get out of bed every morning.

Yesterday at Show and Tell, Chloe Smith had talked about a visit she’d paid to a petting farm over the weekend. She had seen some baby goats, she said, and Kate had said, “Lucky!” (She had a soft spot for goats.) She asked, “Were they doing that frolicking thing that goats do when they’re happy?”

“Yes, a few of them were just barely beginning to fly,” Chloe said, and it had been such a matter-of-fact description, so concrete and unsurprised, that Kate had experienced a jolt of pure pleasure.

Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.

At 5:40, the very last mother collected the very last child — a Room 5 mother, Mrs. Amherst, late for her son’s whole career here — and Kate had given her very last fake smile, rigidly tight-lipped so that no unfortunate words could escape her. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath and headed to Mrs. Darling’s office.

Mrs. Darling was watering her houseplants. She had probably used up all other ways of killing time. Kate hoped she hadn’t let boredom turn her irritable, as it would have Kate herself if she had been the one waiting, so she began by saying, “I am really, really sorry I’m late. It was Mrs. Amherst’s fault.”

Mrs. Darling seemed uninterested in Mrs. Amherst. “Have a seat,” she told Kate, smoothing her skirt beneath her as she settled behind her desk.

Kate sat.

“Emma Gray,” Mrs. Darling said. She was certainly wasting no words today.

Emma Gray? Kate’s brain went racing through possibilities. There were none at all, as far as she knew. Emma Gray had never been a problem.

“Emma asked who you thought Room Four’s best drawer was,” Mrs. Darling said. She was consulting the notepad she kept beside her telephone. “You said”—and she read off the words—“ ‘I think probably Jason.’ ”

“Right,” Kate said.

She waited for the punch line, but Mrs. Darling put down her notepad as if she thought she’d already delivered it. She laced her fingers together and surveyed Kate with a “So there!” expression on her face.

“That’s exactly right,” Kate expanded.

“Emma’s mother is very upset,” Mrs. Darling told her. “She says you made Emma feel inferior.”

“She is inferior,” Kate said. “Emma G. can’t draw worth a damn. She asked my honest opinion and I gave her an honest answer.”

“Kate,” Mrs. Darling said, “there is so much to argue with in that, I don’t even know where to begin.”

“What’s wrong with it? I don’t get it.”

“Well, one thing you might have said is, ‘Oh, now, Emma, I’ve never looked at art as a competition. I’m just so thrilled that all of you are creative!’ you’d say. ‘All of you doing your best at whatever you’re trying to do.’ ”

Kate tried to imagine herself speaking this way. She couldn’t. She said, “But Emma didn’t mind; I swear she didn’t. All she said was, ‘Oh, yeah, Jason,’ and then she went on about her business.”

“She minded enough to report it to her mother,” Mrs. Darling said.

“Maybe she was only making conversation.”

“Children don’t ‘make conversation,’ Kate.”

In Kate’s experience, making conversation was one of their favorite activities, but she said, “Well, anyhow, that happened way last week.”

“And your point is?”

Kate’s usual response to this question was, “Well, gee. Too bad you missed it.” But she stifled it this time. (The unsatisfying thing about practicing restraint was that nobody knew you were practicing it.)

“So I didn’t just now do it, is my point,” she said. “It happened before that business with Jameesha’s father, even. Before I promised to mend my ways. I mean, I remember what I promised, and I’m working on it. I’m being very diplomatic and tactful.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Darling said.

She didn’t look convinced. But neither did she tell Kate she was fired. She just shook her head and said that that would be all, she supposed.

—

When Kate arrived home, she found Bunny making a mess in the kitchen. She was frying a block of something white at way too high a temperature, and the whole house had the Chinese-restaurant smell of overheated oil and soy sauce. “What is that?” Kate demanded, swooping past her to lower the flame.

Bunny backed away. “Don’t get all in a snit, for God’s sake,” she said. She held up the spatula like a flyswatter. “It’s tofu?”

“Tofu!”

“I’m turning vegetarian?”

“You’re kidding,” Kate said.

“Every hour of every day in this country, six hundred and sixty thousand innocent animals die for us.”

“How do you know that?”

“Edward told me.”

“Edward Mintz?”

“He doesn’t eat things that have faces? So starting next week, I need you to make our meat mash without any beef.”

“You want meatless meat mash.”

“It would be healthier, too. You have no idea, the toxins we’re stuffing our bodies with.”

“Why not just join a cult?” Kate asked her.

“I knew you wouldn’t understand!”

“Oh, go set the table,” Kate said wearily. And she opened the fridge and took out the pot of meat mash.

Bunny hadn’t always been so silly. It seemed that starting around age twelve, she had turned into a flibbertigibbet. Even her hair reflected the change. Once bound in two sensible braids, now it was a mass of springy short golden ringlets through which you could see daylight, if you stood at the proper angle. She had a habit of keeping her lips slightly parted and her eyes wide and artless, and her clothes were oddly young for her, with waistbands up under her armpits and short, short skirts prinked out around her thighs. It was all to do with boys, Kate supposed — attracting boys; except why should childishness be considered alluring to adolescent boys? (Although evidently it was. Bunny was in great demand.) In public she walked pigeon-toed, most often nibbling that fingertip, which gave her an air of timidity that could not have been more misleading. In private, though, here in the kitchen, she still walked normally. She stomped off to the dining room with an armload of plates and she slammed them down on the table one-two-three.

Kate was collecting apples from the bowl on the counter when she heard her father in the front hall. “I’ll just let Kate know we’re here,” he was saying, and then, “Kate?” he called.

“What.”

“It’s us.”

She exchanged a look with Bunny, who was sliding the block of tofu onto a plate now.

“Who’s us?” she called.

Dr. Battista appeared in the kitchen doorway. Pyotr Shcherbakov was at his elbow.

“Oh. Pyotr,” she said.

“Khello!” Pyotr said. He was wearing the same gray jersey he’d worn yesterday, and in one hand he carried a small paper bag.

“And here’s my other daughter, Bunny,” Dr. Battista said. “Bun-Buns, meet Pyoder.”

“Hi, there! How’re you doing?” Bunny asked, dimpling at him.

“For two days now I am coughing and sneezing,” Pyotr told her. “Also blowing nose. Is some sort of microbe, I am thinking.”

“Oh, poor you!”

“Pyoder is going to eat with us,” Dr. Battista announced.

Kate said, “He is?”

She would have reminded her father that as a rule, people informed the cook about such things ahead of time, but the fact was that in this house there was no rule; the situation had never come up before. The Battistas hadn’t had a dinner guest for as long as Kate could remember. And Bunny was already saying, “Goody!” (Bunny was the kind of person who thought the more people, the merrier.) She pulled another clean plate from the dishwasher and another handful of silverware. Pyotr, meanwhile, held his paper bag out to Kate. “Is guest gift,” he told her. “Dessert.”

She took the bag from him and peered down into it. Inside were four bars of chocolate. “Well, thanks,” she said.

“Ninety percent cacao. Flavonoids. Polyphenols.”

“Pyoder’s a big believer in dark chocolate,” Dr Battista said.

“Oh, I adore chocolate!” Bunny told Pyotr. “I’m, like, addicted? I can’t get enough?”

It was lucky Bunny had gone into her bubbling-over act, because Kate wasn’t feeling all that hospitable herself. She took a fourth apple from the bowl and went off to the dining room, throwing her father a sour look as she passed him. He smiled and rubbed his hands together. “A little company!” he told her in a confiding voice.

“Hmph.”

By the time she returned to the kitchen, Bunny was asking Pyotr what he missed most about home. She was looking up into his face with her eyes all starry and entranced, still holding the extra plate and the silverware, cocking her head encouragingly like Miss Hostess of the Month.

“I miss the pickles,” Pyotr said without hesitation.

“That’s so fascinating?”

“Finish setting the table,” Kate told her. “Supper’s ready to go, here.”

“What? Wait,” Dr. Battista said. “I thought we could have drinks first.”

“Drinks!”

“Drinks in the living room.”

“Yes!” Bunny said. “Can I have a drink, Poppy? Just a teeny-weeny glass of wine?”

“No, you cannot,” Kate told her. “Your brain development’s stunted enough as it is.”

Pyotr gave one of his hoots. Bunny said, “Poppy! Did you hear what she said to me?”

“I meant it, too,” Kate told her. “We can’t afford any more tutors. Besides, Father, I’m starving to death. You were even later than usual.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry, Pyoder. The cook calls the shots, I guess.”

“Is no problem,” Pyotr said.

This was just as well, because as far as Kate knew, the only alcohol in the house was an open bottle of Chianti from last New Year’s.

She carried the meat mash into the dining room and put it on the trivet. Bunny, meanwhile, set a place for Pyotr next to her own; they all had to crowd at one end because of the income-tax papers. “How about people, Pyoder?” she asked him once he was settled. (The girl was tireless.) “Don’t you miss any people from home?”

“I have no people,” he said.

“None at all?”

“I grew up in orphanage.”

“Gosh! I never met anybody from an orphanage before!”

“You forgot Pyotr’s water,” Kate told her. She was dishing out mounds of meat mash and passing the filled plates around, exchanging them for empty ones.

Bunny pushed her chair back and started to rise, but Pyotr held a palm up and said again, “Is no problem.”

“Pyoder feels water dilutes the enzymes,” Dr Battista said.

Bunny said, “Huh?”

“The digestive enzymes.”

“Especially water with ice,” Pyotr said. “Freezes enzymes in middle of ducts.”

“Have you ever heard this theory?” Dr. Battista asked his daughters. He looked delighted.

Kate thought it was a pity he couldn’t just marry Pyotr himself, if he was so set on adjusting the man’s status. The two of them seemed made for each other.

On Tuesdays, Kate varied their menu by setting out tortillas and a jar of salsa so that they could have meat-mash burritos. Pyotr didn’t bother with the tortillas, though. He ladled an avalanche of salsa over his serving and then dug in with his spoon, nodding intently as he listened to Dr. Battista ponder why it was that autoimmune disorders affected more women than men. Kate pushed her food around her plate; she wasn’t as hungry as she had thought. And Bunny, across the table from her, seemed lukewarm about her tofu. She cut a corner off with her fork and took an experimental taste, chewing with just her front teeth. Her green vegetable — two pallid stalks of celery — lay untouched, so far. Kate predicted her meat-free phase would last about three days.

Dr. Battista was telling Pyotr that sometimes it seemed to him that women were just more…skinless than men, but he stopped speaking suddenly and looked at Bunny’s plate. “What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s tofu?”

“Tofu!”

“I’ve given up eating meat?”

“Is that wise?” her father asked.

“Is ridiculous,” Pyotr said.

“See there?” Kate told Bunny.

“Where would be her B-twelve?” Pyotr asked Dr. Battista.

“I suppose it could come from her breakfast cereal,” Dr. Battista mused. “Providing the cereal’s fortified, of course.”

“Is still ridiculous,” Pyotr said. “Is so American, subtracting foods! Other countries, when they want healthiness they add foods in. Americans subtract them.”

Bunny said, “How about, like, canned tuna? That doesn’t have a face per se. Could I get B-twelve from canned tuna?”

Kate was so surprised at Bunny’s tossing off that “per se” that it took her a moment to realize their father was way, way overreacting to the suggestion of tuna. He was holding his head in both hands and rocking back and forth. “No, no, no, no, no!” he groaned.

They all stared at him.

He raised his head and said, “Mercury.”

“Ah,” Pyotr said.

Bunny said, “Well, I don’t care; I refuse to eat little baby calves that are kept in cages all their lives and never touch their feet to the ground.”

“You are so far off topic,” Kate told her. “That’s veal you’re talking about! I never put veal in meat mash!”

“Veal, beef, soft woolly lambs…” Bunny said. “I don’t want any of them. It’s wicked. Tell me, Pyoder,” she said, wheeling on him, “how can you live with yourself, making little mousies suffer?”

“Mousies?”

“Or whatever animals you’re torturing over there in that lab.”

“Oh, Bun-Buns,” Dr. Battista said sorrowfully.

“I do not torture mice,” Pyotr said with dignity. “They live very good lives in your father’s lab. Recreation! Companionship! Some of them have names. They live better than in outdoors.”

“Except that you stick them with needles,” Bunny said.

“Yes, but—”

“And those needles make them sick.”

“No, at current time they do not make them sick, which is interesting, you see, because—”

The telephone rang. Bunny said, “I’ll get it!”

She scraped back her chair and jumped up and ran to the kitchen, leaving Pyotr sitting there with his mouth open.

“Hello?” Bunny said. “Oh, hi-yee! Hi, there!”

Kate could tell it was a boy she was talking to because of the breathy, shallow voice she put on. Amazingly, their father seemed able to sense it too. He frowned and said, “Who is that?” Then he turned and called, “Bunny? Who is that?”

Bunny ignored him. “Aww,” they heard her say. “Aww, that’s so sweet! Aren’t you sweet to say so!”

“Who is she talking to?” Dr. Battista asked Kate.

She shrugged.

“It’s bad enough when she gets those…textings all meal long,” he said. “Now they’re calling her on the phone?”

“Don’t look at me,” Kate told him.

Kate would have choked on her own words, talking like that on the phone. She would have lost all self-respect. She tried to imagine it for a moment: getting a call from, oh, maybe Adam Barnes and telling him he was so sweet to say whatever he said to her. The very thought of it made her toes curl.

“Did you speak to her about the Mintz boy?” she asked her father.

“What Mintz boy?”

“Her tutor, Father.”

“Oh. Not yet.”

She sighed and offered Pyotr another helping of meat mash.

—

Pyotr and Dr. Battista fell into a discussion involving lymphoproliferation. Bunny returned from her phone call and sat pouting between them and cutting her block of tofu into infinitesimal cubes. (She wasn’t used to being ignored.) At the end of the meal Kate rose and brought in the chocolate bars from the kitchen, but she didn’t bother clearing the plates and so everyone just dropped the wrappers on top of the remains of dinner.

After Kate’s first bite of chocolate she grimaced; ninety percent cacao was about thirty percent too much, she decided. Pyotr looked amused. “In my country, is a proverb,” he told her. “ ‘If the medication does not taste bitter, then it will fail to cause effective cure.’ ”

“I’m not used to expecting a cure from my desserts,” she said.

“Well, I think it tastes excellent,” Dr. Battista said. He probably didn’t realize that his lips were pulled down at the corners like a Room 4 drawing of a frowny face. Bunny didn’t seem too pleased with the chocolate either, but then she jumped up and went out to the kitchen and returned with a jar of honey.

“Put some of this on,” she told Kate.

Kate waved it away and reached for the apple at the head of her plate.

“Poppy? Put some of this on.”

“Why, thank you, Bunnikins,” her father said. He dipped a corner of his chocolate bar into the jar. “Honey from Bunny.”

Kate rolled her eyes.

“Honey is one of my favorite nutraceuticals,” her father told Pyotr.

Bunny offered the jar to Pyotr. “Pyoder?” she asked.

“I am okay.”

He was watching Kate, for some reason. He had a way of keeping his lids at half-mast, which made him seem to be arriving at some private conclusion as he studied her.

There was a loud clicking sound. Kate started and turned toward her father, who waved his cell phone at her. “I think I’m getting the hang of this thing,” he said.

“Well, quit it.”

“I only wanted to practice.”

“Take one of me,” Bunny begged. She put her chocolate bar down and dabbed her mouth hastily with her napkin. “Take one and send it to my phone.”

“I don’t know how to do that yet,” her father said. But he snapped her picture anyhow. Then he said, “Pyoder, you were hidden behind Bunny in that one. Go over and sit next to Kate and let me take one of both of you.”

Pyotr promptly changed places, but Kate said, “What’s got into you, Father? You’ve had that phone a year and a half and you never gave it a glance until now.”

“It’s time I joined the modern world,” he told her, and he raised the phone to his eye again as if it were a Kodak. Kate pushed her chair back and stood up, trying to get out of the shot, and the click sounded again and her father lowered the phone to check the results.

“I shall help wash the dishes,” Pyotr told Kate. He stood up too.

“Never mind; that’s Bunny’s job.”

“Oh, tonight why don’t you and Pyoder do it,” Dr. Battista said, “because Bunny has homework, I’ll bet.”

“No, I don’t,” Bunny said.

Bunny almost never had homework. It was mystifying.

“Well, but we need to talk about your math tutor, though,” Dr. Battista said.

“What about her?”

“Spanish tutor,” Kate said.

“We need to talk about your Spanish tutor. Come along,” he said, standing.

“I don’t know what we need to say about him,” Bunny told her father, but she rose and followed him out of the room.

Pyotr was already stacking plates. Kate said, “Seriously, Pyotr, I’ve got this under control. Thanks anyhow.”

“You say this because I am foreign,” he told her, “but I know that American men wash dishes.”

“Not in this house. Actually, none of us do. We just throw them in the machine and run it whenever it’s full. We take some out for the next meal, and then we put them back in and run the machine when it’s full again.”

He thought about it. “This means some dishes are washed two times,” he said, “even though they were not eaten from.”

“Two times or half a dozen times; you got it.”

“And sometimes you are maybe using already eaten-from dish, by accident.”

“Only if one of us has licked it really, really clean,” she said. She laughed. “It’s a system. Father’s system.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “A system.”

He turned on the faucet in the sink and started rinsing plates. Her father’s system did not involve pre-rinsing; just send any scuzzy dish through the machine a second time, were his instructions. Besides, even without the second pass they would know it had at least been sterilized. But she sensed that Pyotr already disapproved enough and so she didn’t try to stop him.

Although he was running hot water, which was terrible for the environment and would have driven her father crazy.

“There is no housemaid?” Pyotr asked after a moment.

“Not anymore,” Kate said. She was putting the meat mash back in the fridge. “That’s why we have Father’s systems.”

“Your mother passed away.”

“Died,” Kate said. “Yep.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” he said. He spoke as if he’d memorized the sentence word for word.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Kate said. “I never knew her that well.”

“Why you did not know her?”

“She developed some kind of depression right after I was born.” Kate was in the dining room now, wiping off the table. She returned to the kitchen and said, “Took one look at me and fell into despair.” She laughed.

Pyotr didn’t laugh himself. She remembered he’d been reared in an orphanage. “I guess you didn’t know your mother, either,” she said.

“No,” he said. He was slotting plates into the dishwasher. Already they looked clean enough to eat off of. “I was found.”

“A foundling?”

“Yes, found on porch. In box for canned peaches. Note said only, ‘Two days old.’ ”

When he was talking shop with her father he had sounded halfway intelligent — thoughtful, even — but on subjects less scientific his language turned stunted again. She couldn’t find any logic to his use or non-use of article adjectives, for instance, and how hard could article adjectives be?

She tossed her dishcloth into the hamper in the pantry. (Her father believed in 100-percent cotton dishcloths, used once and then laundered with bleach. He viewed sponges with an almost superstitious horror.)

“Well, all done here,” she told Pyotr. “Thanks for helping. Father’s in the living room, I think.”

He stood looking at her, perhaps waiting for her to lead the way, but she leaned back against the sink and folded her arms across her chest. Eventually, he turned and left the kitchen, and Kate went to the dining room to work on the income tax.

—

“That went well, don’t you agree?” her father asked her.

He had drifted into the dining room after seeing Pyotr off. Kate totaled a column before she looked up, and then she said, “Did you talk to Bunny?”

“Bunny,” he said.

“Did you talk to her about Edward Mintz?”

“I did.”

“What’d she say?”

“About what?”

Kate sighed. “Let’s try to concentrate, here,” she said. “Did you ask her why she didn’t just get a tutor from the agency? Did you find out how much money he’s charging?”

“He’s not charging any money.”

“Well, that’s not good.”

“Why not?”

“We want this arrangement to be on a professional footing. We want to be able to fire him if he turns out to be no help.”

“Would you be willing to marry Pyoder?” her father asked.

“What?”

She sat back in her chair and gaped at him, the calculator still in her left hand, the ballpoint pen in her right. The full import of his question slammed into her after several seconds’ delay — a kind of thud to the midriff.

He didn’t repeat it. He stood waiting trustfully for an answer, with his fists balled up in his coverall pockets.

“Please tell me you’re not serious,” she said.

“Now, just consider the possibility, Kate,” he said. “Don’t make any hasty decisions till you’ve given it some thought.”

“You’re saying you want me to marry someone I don’t even know so that you can hang onto your research assistant.”

“He’s not any ordinary research assistant; he’s Pyoder Cherbakov. And you slightly know him. And you have my word as a reference for him.”

“You’ve been hinting at this for days, haven’t you?” she asked. It was humiliating to hear how her voice shook; she hoped he didn’t notice. “You’ve been throwing him at me all along and I was too dumb to see it. I guess I just couldn’t believe my own father would conceive of such a thing.”

“Now, Kate, you’re overreacting,” her father said. “You’ll have to marry someone sooner or later, right? And this is someone so exceptional, so gifted; it would be such a loss to mankind if he had to leave my project. And I like the fellow! He’s a good fellow! I’m sure you’ll come to feel the same way once you’re better acquainted.”

“You would never ask Bunny to do this,” Kate said bitterly. “Your precious treasure Bunny-poo.”

“Well, Bunny’s still in high school,” he said.

“Let her drop out, then; it’s not as if it would be any loss to the world of learning.”

“Kate! That’s uncharitable,” her father said. “Besides,” he added after a moment, “Bunny has all those young men chasing after her.”

“And I don’t,” Kate said.

He didn’t argue with that. He looked at her mutely, hopefully, with his lips tensely pursed so that his little black mustache bunched itself together.

If she kept her expression impassive, if she didn’t blink or even open her mouth to say another word, she might be able to stop the tears from spilling over. So she was silent. By degrees she stood up, careful not to bump into anything, and she set down her calculator and turned and walked out of the dining room with her chin raised.

“Katherine?” her father called after her.

She reached the hall, she crossed the hall, and then she started pounding up the stairs with the tears positively streaming, flying off her cheeks as she arrived on the landing and rounded the newel post and ran smack into Bunny, who was just starting down. “Hello?” Bunny said, looking startled.

Kate threw her pen into Bunny’s face and stumbled into her own room and slammed the door behind her.