Vinegar Girl

Chapter Six

“Katherine, my dearest!” her father said. “Darling Kate! Apple of my eye!”

Kate looked up from her book. She said, “Huh?”

“I feel as if a great, huge weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” he said. “Let’s celebrate. Where’s Bunny? Do we still have that bottle of wine around?”

“Bunny’s gone to a sleepover,” Kate said. She turned a page corner down and laid her book on the couch beside her. “What are we celebrating?”

“Ha! As if you didn’t know. Come on out to the kitchen with me.”

Kate stood up. She was beginning to feel uneasy.

“That Pyoder is a cagey one, isn’t he?” her father asked as he led the way to the kitchen. “He just slipped away from the lab while Bunny and her tutor were there; never said a word. I had no idea he’d gone to see you until he told me the news.”

“What news?”

Her father didn’t answer; he was opening the refrigerator and stooping to rummage at the back of it.

“What news are you talking about?” Kate asked him.

“Aha!” he said. He straightened and turned toward her, holding up a Chianti bottle that had been loosely re-corked.

“That’s several months old, Father.”

“Yes, but it’s been in the refrigerator all this time. You know my system. Get me some glasses.”

Kate reached up to the top shelf of the china cabinet. “Just tell me what we’re drinking to,” she said as she handed him two dusty wineglasses.

“Why, Pyoder says you like him now.”

“He does?”

“He says you two sat together in the backyard, and you fed him a delicious lunch, and you and he had a nice talk.”

“Well, I suppose that all more or less did happen, in a manner of speaking,” Kate said. “And? So?”

“So he has hope! He thinks this will work out!”

“Is that what he thinks! Oh, hang the man! He’s a lunatic!”

“Now, now,” her father said genially. He was pouring wine into the glasses, bunching up his mustache as he stood back to assess the level. “Five ounces,” he said, mostly to himself. He passed her a glass. “Sixteen seconds, please.”

She shut the glass in the microwave and stabbed the appropriate buttons. “What this proves,” she said, “is that it doesn’t pay to be polite to people. Honestly! He comes to the house uninvited, barges in without my say-so, and it’s true the front door was open which is so typical of Bunny, might I add — we could have been robbed blind for all she cared — but even so it was boorish of him to take advantage of it. Interrupts my nice quiet lunch, eats half of my roast beef sandwich, which I admit I did offer to him, but still, he could have turned it down; only a foreigner would pounce on it that way—”

“Aren’t you going to get that?” her father asked. He meant the microwave, which had dinged some time ago. He indicated it with a tilt of his chin.

“—and then look at how he twists things!” Kate said, exchanging the first glass for the second. She punched the buttons again. “What was I supposed to do: sit there in total silence? Naturally I talked to him, in a minimal kind of way. So now he has the nerve to say I like him!”

“But he is likable, isn’t he?” her father asked.

“We’re not talking about just liking, though,” she said. “You’re asking me to marry the guy.”

“No, no, no! Not immediately,” her father said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. All I’m asking is that you take some time before you jump into any decision. Give my plan a little thought. Not too much thought, of course; it’s already April. But—”

“Father,” Kate began sternly.

“The wine?” he prompted her, with another tilt of his head.

She retrieved the second glass from the microwave, and he held the first glass aloft. “A toast!” he proposed. “To—”

She felt sure he was going to say “you and Pyoder,” but instead he said “keeping an open mind.”

He took a sip. Kate did not. She set her glass on the counter.

“Delicious,” he said. “I should share my system with Wine Enthusiast Magazine.”

He took another, deeper swallow. Now that the weather was warmer, he had abandoned the waffle-knit long-sleeved undershirts he wore all winter. His coverall sleeves were rolled up to expose his bare forearms, which were thin and black-haired and oddly frail. Kate felt an unexpected jolt of pity for him, over and above her exasperation. He was so inept-looking, so completely ill-equipped for the world around him.

Almost gently, she said, “Father. Face it. I will never agree to marry someone I’m not in love with.”

“In other cultures,” he said, “arranged marriages are—”

“We are not in another culture, and this is not an arranged marriage. This is human trafficking.”

“What?”

He looked horrified.

“Well, isn’t it? You’re trying to trade me off against my will. You’re sending me to live with a stranger, sleep with a stranger, just for your own personal gain. What is that if not trafficking?”

“Oh, my heavens!” he said. “Katherine. My goodness. I would never expect you to sleep with him.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No wonder you’ve been reluctant!”

“Then what did you expect?” she asked.

“Why, I just thought…I mean, goodness! There’s no need for that kind of thing,” he said. He took another slug of wine. He cleared his throat. “All I had in mind was, we would go on more or less as before except that Pyoder would move in with us. That much, I suppose, is unavoidable. But he would have Mrs. Larkin’s old room, and you would stay on in your room. I just assumed you knew that. Goodness gracious!”

“It didn’t occur to you that Immigration might find that suspicious?” Kate asked him.

“Why would they? Lots of couples have separate bedrooms; Immigration’s surely aware of that. We can say Pyoder snores. Maybe he does snore, for all we know. See, now…” He started rummaging through his coverall pockets. He brought out his cell phone. “See, I’ve been reading up,” he said. “I know what they look for. We need to document a gradual courtship, to prove to them that…” He squinted down at his phone, pressed a button and then another, and squinted again. “Photographs,” he told her, handing her the phone. “Taken over time. Recording your shared history.”

The screen showed Kate and Pyotr sitting catty-corner from each other at the table in her father’s laboratory, Kate on a high stool and Pyotr in a folding chair. Kate wore her buckskin jacket; Pyotr was in his lab coat. They were looking toward the viewer with startled, confused expressions.

She flipped to the next photo. Same pose, except that now Kate was speaking directly to the photographer, revealing two sharp tendons in her neck that she had never noticed before.

The next photo showed her from behind, blurry and distant, pausing on a sidewalk. She had turned halfway toward the man who was following her, but from the rear, it wasn’t clear who he was.

In the next, the man had hold of her arm and they were bypassing another couple.

It appeared that her father had been stalking her.

Then she and Pyotr were sitting across from each other at the Battistas’ dining-room table, but Bunny was in the foreground and the honey jar she held up partly obscured Pyotr’s profile.

And then Pyotr sat on Kate’s side of the table and a sliver of Kate stood next to him, minus her head. That was the last photograph.

“I’m going to send you these, as soon as I figure out how,” her father said. “I was thinking you should start texting him, too.”

“Pardon?”

“I read in the paper the other day that Immigration sometimes asks couples for their cell phones. They go through all their texts to make sure they’re really involved with each other.”

Kate held the phone toward her father, but he was busy refilling his wineglass. Somehow he’d already emptied it, and now he was emptying the bottle as well. He passed her the glass and said, “Fourteen seconds.”

“Only fourteen?”

“Well, it’s had time to get warmer now.”

He accepted his phone and pocketed it and then stood waiting, while Kate turned away and set his glass in the microwave.

“See, I haven’t wanted to talk about this yet,” he said, “but I believe I’m on the cusp of something. I may be nearing a breakthrough, at just the very moment when the powers that be are starting to lose faith in my project. And if Pyoder could stay on at the lab, if we really can accomplish this…Do you know what that would mean to me? It’s been such a long haul, Kate. A long, weary, discouraging haul, let me tell you, and I know sometimes it must have seemed as if it’s all I’ve cared about; I know your mother used to think so—”

He broke off to tilt his chin at the microwave again. Kate took out the glass of wine and handed it to him. This time he drained half the glass in a gulp, and she wondered if that were wise. He was not accustomed to alcohol. On the other hand, maybe it was thanks to the alcohol that he was suddenly so communicative. “My mother?” she prompted him.

“Your mother thought we should have weekends. Vacations, even! She didn’t understand. I know you understand; you’re more like me. More sensible, more practical. But your mother: she was very…unsturdy, I would say. She disliked being alone; can you imagine? And the most trivial little thing would send her into despair. More than once, she told me she didn’t see any point to life.”

Kate clamped her arms across her chest.

“I told her, ‘Well, of course you don’t, dearest. I can’t in good conscience say that there is any point. Did you ever believe there was?’ This didn’t seem to comfort her, though.”

“Really,” Kate said.

She reached for her wineglass and took a large swig. “A lot of women, when they have babies they feel happy and fulfilled,” she said once she had swallowed. “They don’t all of a sudden decide that life is not worth living.”

“Hmm?” Her father was staring moodily into the dregs of his own glass. Then he looked up. “Oh,” he said, “it was nothing to do with you, Kate. Is that what you’re thinking? She was feeling low long before you were born. I’m afraid it might have been my fault, in part. I’m afraid our marriage may have had a deleterious effect on her. Everything I said, it seemed, she took the wrong way. She thought I was belittling her, behaving as if I were smarter than she was. Which was nonsense, of course. I mean, no doubt I was smarter, but intelligence is not the only factor to consider in a marriage. In any event, she couldn’t seem to rise above her low spirits. I felt I was standing on the edge of a swamp watching her go under. She did try various different types of therapy, but she always ended up deciding it wasn’t helping. And pills, she tried those. All sorts of antidepressants — SSRIs and so forth. None of them worked, and some of them had side effects. Finally a colleague of mine, a fellow from England, told me about a drug he’d invented that they’d begun using in Europe. It hadn’t yet been approved in the States, he said, but he had seen it work miracles, and he sent me some and your mother tried it. Well, she became a whole new person. Vibrant! Animated! Energetic! You were in eighth grade by then and she suddenly took an interest, started attending PTA meetings, volunteered to accompany your class on field trips. I had my old Thea back, the woman she’d been when I met her. Then she said she wanted another baby. She had always wanted six children, she said, and I said, ‘Well, it’s your decision, dear. You know I leave such matters up to you.’ Right away she got pregnant, and she went to her doctor to confirm it, and that’s when we found out that the miracle drug had damaged her heart. They’d already begun to suspect that in Europe, and they were taking the drug off the market; we just hadn’t heard yet.”

“That’s what caused her heart trouble?”

“Yes, and I accept full responsibility for it. If not for me, she would never have known about that drug. Or needed it either, your aunt always claims.” He drained off the last of his wine and set his glass a bit too firmly on the counter beside him. “Although,” he said after a moment, “I suppose it did provide valuable data for my colleague.”

“She went on field trips with me?” Kate asked. She was trying to wrap her mind around this. “She was interested in me? She liked me?”

“Why, of course. She loved you.”

“I missed her one good spell!” Kate said. It was almost a wail. “I don’t remember it!”

“You’ve forgotten how you used to go shopping together?”

“We went shopping together?”

“She was so happy, she said, to have a daughter she could do girl things with. She took you shopping for clothes and lunch, and once you went for manicures.”

This made her feel eerily disconnected. Not only had she mislaid the memory of experiences she thought she would have treasured all her life, but also, they were experiences that she assumed she would have hated. She couldn’t abide shopping! Yet apparently she had gone along willingly, and maybe even enjoyed herself. It was as if Kate the child had been a completely different entity from Kate the grown-up. She looked down at her blunt, colorless nails and could not make herself believe that once they had been professionally filed and buffed and painted with polish.

“So that’s why we have our Bunny,” her father was saying. There was a blurriness in his voice, perhaps due to the wine, and the lenses of his glasses were misting. “And of course I’m delighted we do have her. She’s so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she’s not, let’s say, very…cerebral. And she doesn’t have your backbone, your fiber. Kate, I know I depend on you too much.” He reached out to set his fingertips on her wrist. “I know I expect more of you than I should. You look after your sister, you run the house…I worry you’ll never find a husband.”

“Gee, thanks,” Kate said, and she jerked her wrist away from him.

“No, what I mean is…Oh, I always put things so awkwardly, don’t I. I just meant you’re not out where you could meet a husband. You’re shut away at home, you’re puttering in the garden, you’re tending children in a preschool, which, come to think of it, is probably the last place on earth to…I’ve been selfish. I should have made you go back to school.”

“I don’t want to go back to school,” Kate said. She really didn’t; she felt a flutter of dismay.

“There are other schools, though, if that was not the right one for you. It’s not as if I’m unaware of that. You could finish up at Johns Hopkins! But I’ve been indulging myself. I told myself, ‘Oh, she’s young; there’s plenty of time; and meanwhile, I get to have her here at home. I get to enjoy her company.’ ”

“You enjoy my company?”

“It may be, too, that that was another reason I thought of pairing you off with Pyoder. ‘I’d still get to keep her around!’ I must have been thinking. ‘No harm done: it’s a marriage only on paper, and she would still be here in the house.’ You have every right to be cross with me, Kate. I owe you an apology.”

“Oh, well,” Kate said. “I guess I can see your side of it.”

She was remembering the evening she had come home from college. She had arrived unannounced with several suitcases — all she had taken away with her — and when the taxi dropped her off at the house she’d found her father in the kitchen, wearing an apron over his coveralls. “What are you doing here?” he had asked, and she had said, “I’ve been expelled”—putting it even more baldly than need be, just to get the worst of it over with. “Why?” he had asked, and she had told him about her professor’s half-assed photosynthesis lecture. When her father said, “Well, you were right,” she had felt the most overwhelming sense of relief. No, more than relief: it was joy. Pure joy. She honestly thought it might have been the happiest moment in her life.

Her father was holding the wine bottle up to the window now, plainly hoping to find another drop or two in the bottom.

She said, “When you say ‘On paper…’ ”

He glanced over at her.

“If it’s just a formality,” she said, “if it’s just some little legal thing that would allow you to change his visa status and after that we could reverse it…”

He set the bottle back down on the counter. He stood tensed, possibly not breathing.

“I suppose that’s not that big a deal,” she said.

“Are you saying yes?”

“Oh, Father. I don’t know,” she said wearily.

“But you might consider it. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I suppose,” she said.

“You really might do this for me?”

She hesitated, and then she gave him a tentative nod. In the very next instant she wondered what on earth she could be thinking, but already her father was pulling her into a fierce, clumsy hug, and then thrusting her away again to gaze exultantly into her face. “You’ll do it!” he said. “You really will! You care enough about me to do this! Oh, Kate, my darling, I can’t even put into words how grateful I am.”

“I mean, it’s not as if it would make all that much difference in how I live,” she said.

“It will make no difference at all, I swear it. You’ll hardly know he’s in the picture; everything will go on exactly the same as before. Oh, I’m going to do all I can to arrange it so things will be easy for you. This changes everything! Everything’s looking up; somehow I feel certain now that my project’s going to succeed. Thank you, sweetheart!”

After a moment, she said, “You’re welcome.”

“So…” he said. “And…Kate?”

“What.”

“Do you think you could finish my taxes for me? I did try, but”—and here he stood back to spread his spindly arms comically, helplessly—“you know how I am.”

“Yes, Father,” she said. “I know.”