Vinegar Girl (10 page)

His car was
an original Volkswagen Beetle; she hadn’t seen one of those in years. It was peacock blue, and so weatherworn that it looked not painted but chalked. Otherwise, though, it seemed to be in excellent condition. This struck her as miraculous, in view of the way he treated it. Was there some natural law that decreed that scientists couldn’t drive? Or maybe they
could
drive, but they were too immersed in their own esoteric thoughts to bother looking at the road. Pyotr kept looking at Kate instead, turning his face fully toward her to talk while the Beetle careened down 41st Street and the other drivers braked and honked and a tumult of books and lab coats and empty water bottles and fast-food wrappers slid around the backseat. “We get a pork loin,” he was saying. “We get cornmeal.”

“Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake.”

“This store will sell maple syrup?”

“Maple syrup! What on earth are you cooking?”

“Braised pork on a bed of polenta drizzled with maple syrup.”

“Good God.”

“Your father and I have discussed.”

“The genetic algorithms of recipes,” Kate said, remembering.

“Ah. You were paying attention. You were heeding what I said.”

“I was not heeding what you said,” Kate told him. “I just couldn’t avoid overhearing you blab away in my ear.”

“You were heeding me. You like me! You are crazy about me, I think.”

“Pyotr,” Kate said, “let’s get something straight.”

“Awk! That was too-big truck for this road.”

“I am only doing this to help my father out. He seems to think it’s important that you should stay in this country. After you get your green card, you and I will go our separate ways. Not a step of this plan involves anybody being crazy about anybody.”

“Or maybe you will decide
not
to separate,” Pyotr said.

“What? What are you talking about? Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

“Yes, yes,” he said hastily. “I am listening. Nobody shall be crazy about anybody. And now we will go buy pork.”

He pulled into the supermarket parking lot and cut the engine.

“Why are we having pork?” Kate asked as she followed him across the lot. “You know Bunny’s not going to eat it.”

“I am not much concerned about Bunny,” he said.

“You’re not?”

“In my country they have proverb: ‘Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.’ ”

This was intriguing. Kate said, “Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“Yes, they
would
,” Pyotr said mysteriously. He had been walking a couple of steps ahead of Kate, but now he dropped back and, without any warning, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. “But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl.”

“Let go of me,” Kate said. Up close, he smelled like fresh hay, and his arm felt steely and insistent. She broke free of him. “Good grief,” she said. And the rest of the way across the parking lot, it was she who kept a few steps ahead.

At the entrance to the store she snagged a cart and started inside, but Pyotr caught up with her to reach for the cart and take over. She was beginning to suspect that he had some kind of he-man complex. “What-
ever
,” she told him. He merely smiled and cruised along beside her with the empty cart.

For someone who talked so much about vitamins, he was remarkably uninterested in the vegetable section. He languidly tossed in a head of cabbage and then asked, gazing around him, “The cornmeal: where we would find that?”

“You really seem to go for those la-di-da kinds of dishes,” Kate said as she led the way. “Like that thing you ordered in the restaurant, with puréed celeriac.”

“I just echoed final item.”

“Excuse me?”

“The waiter, when he came to our table: he talked so complicated. He said, ‘Like to tell you guys about a few specials this evening…’ ” Pyotr had the waiter’s Baltimore accent down pat; it was uncanny. “Then he said things very long and combined; he said the free-range and the stone-ground and the house-cured until I am vertiginous. So I just repeated what came last. ‘The veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac,’ I repeated, because it was still in my ears.”

“Then maybe this evening we could go back to plain old mash,” Kate said.

But Pyotr said, “No, I think not.” And that was the end of that.

The computer-generated grocery list wasn’t much use today. For one thing, they still had a hefty supply of mash left over from last Saturday’s batch, which was why Kate had been hoping that she could serve it tonight. This past week had been so different from their usual week, as far as meals were concerned. Not only had her father arranged for that photo-op restaurant dinner with Pyotr, but then the next night Pyotr had insisted on taking
them
to a restaurant (all except Bunny, who had said that enough was enough), and on Tuesday, claiming the need to celebrate a brief, freakish spring snowfall, he had shown up unannounced with a tub of KFC chicken.

And this coming week, at some point, Kate would have to think up some kind of dinner for Aunt Thelma. Dr. Battista had been making noises about inviting her in to meet Pyotr, along with her husband and perhaps Uncle Theron too, if it didn’t conflict with his church obligations. They might as well grit their teeth and get it over with, Dr. Battista said. He and Aunt Thelma were not on the best of terms (Aunt Thelma blamed him for her sister’s depression), but “Immigration-wise,” he said, “I feel it would be smart to expose as many relatives as possible to your marriage plans. And since you’re not letting your aunt attend the wedding, this seems a strategic alternative.”

The reason Kate wasn’t letting her aunt attend the wedding was that she knew her too well. It would be just like her to show up with six bridesmaids and a full choir.

What to feed her, though? Certainly not meatless mash, although it would have been a convenient way to get rid of those damn leftovers. Maybe just plain chicken; Kate could manage that much, surely. She picked out a couple of roasters while Pyotr was browsing the pork selections, and then she doubled back to the vegetable department for asparagus and russet potatoes.

As she was returning to the meat department, she caught sight of Pyotr from a distance, deep in conversation with a black man in an apron. Pyotr’s stretched-out gray jersey and his vulnerable-looking bare neck struck her all at once as oddly touching. It wasn’t entirely his fault, she supposed, that he found himself in this peculiar position. And for a moment she tried to imagine how she herself would feel if she were alone in a foreign country, her visa about to expire, no clear notion of where she would go once it did expire or how she would support herself. Plus the language problem! She had been a middling-good language student, once upon a time, but she would have felt desolate if she’d had to actually
live
in another language. Yet here Pyotr stood, blithely engaged in a discussion of pork cuts and displaying his usual elfin good spirits. She had to smile, a little.

When she arrived next to him, though, he said, “Oh! Is my fiancée. This nice gentleman says maybe not loin but fresh ham,” and right away she felt annoyed again. “Fiancée”: ick. And she had always hated the mealy-mouthed sound of “gentleman.”

“Get what you want,” she told him. “It’s all the same to me.” Then she dumped her groceries into the cart and wandered off again.

Pyotr wasn’t entirely satisfied with the notion of serving Aunt Thelma roast chicken, it turned out. When Kate made the mistake of telling him her menu plan, after he had caught up with her in the syrup-and-molasses aisle, his first question was “The chickens can be cut into pieces?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I am thinking you could make fried, like KFC. You know how to make fried chicken?”

“No.”

He waited, looking hopeful.

“But you could learn?” he asked finally.

“I could if I wanted to, I guess.”

“And you would want to, maybe?”

“Well, Pyotr, if you like KFC so much, why don’t I just buy some?” Kate said. She would love to see the expression on Aunt Thelma’s face if she did.

“No, you should be cooking something,” Pyotr said. “Something with much labor. You are trying to make your aunt feel welcome.”

Kate said, “Once you meet Aunt Thelma, you’ll realize that the last thing we want to do is make her feel too welcome.”

“But she is
family
!” Pyotr said. He pronounced the word as if it were holy; he surrounded it with invisible cushions. “I want to know all of your family—your aunt and her husband and her son and also your uncle the pastor. I anticipate your uncle the pastor! He will try to convert me, maybe?”

“Are you kidding? Uncle Theron couldn’t convert a kitten.”

“Theron,” Pyotr repeated. He made it sound like “Seron.” “You are doing this to torture me?”

“Doing what?”

“So many
th
names!”

“Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, and my mother’s name was Thea.”

He groaned. “What is the surname of these people?” he asked.

After the briefest pause, she said, “Thwaite.”

“My God!” He clapped a hand to his forehead.

She laughed. “I’m pulling your leg,” she told him. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “I was just kidding,” she clarified. “Really their surname is Dell.”

“Ah,” he said. “You were joking. You made a joke. You were teasing me!” And he started capering around the cart. “Oh, Kate; oh, my comical Kate; oh, Katya mine…”

“Stop it!” she said. People were staring at them. “Quit that and tell me which syrup you want.”

He stopped capering and selected a bottle, seemingly at random, and dropped it into the cart. “That’s kind of small,” she said, peering down at it. “Are you sure it’ll be enough?”

“We do not want an excess of mapleness,” Pyotr said severely. “We want balance. We want subtlety. Oh! If it is very successful, we could serve a maple-syrup dish to your aunt! We could serve chicken on a bed of…some unusual substance, drizzled with maple syrup. Your aunt will say, ‘What a heavenly dish you are giving me!’ ”

“That would be a very, very unlikely thing for Aunt Thelma to say,” Kate told him.

“I may call her ‘Aunt Selma’ too?”

“If you mean Aunt
Thelma
, I suggest you wait until she says you can. Anyhow, I don’t know why you’d want to claim her as your aunt if you didn’t have to.”

“But I have never had an aunt!” Pyotr said. “This will be my very first aunt.”

“Lucky you.”

“I will wait till she gives permission, though, I promise. I will be deeply respectful.”

“Don’t overdo it on my account,” Kate said.

Then Pyotr had
to go and tell her father that they had had a “lovely time” grocery-shopping. This was later that afternoon, when the two men were cooking dinner in the kitchen. Kate stepped in from the backyard with her bucket of gardening tools, and her father beamed at her as if she’d just won a Nobel Prize. “You had a lovely time at the grocery store!” he said.

“I did?”

“I
told
you Pyoder was a good fellow! I knew you’d figure it out, eventually! He says you had a lovely, friendly grocery trip together.”

Kate sent Pyotr an evil glare. He was smiling modestly with his eyes lowered as he patted spices all over his fresh ham.

“Maybe after supper you two would like to go to a movie,” her father suggested.

Kate said, “I’m washing my hair after supper.”

“After supper? You’re washing your hair after supper? Why are you doing it
then
?”

Kate sighed and slung her bucket into the broom closet.

Pyotr said, “We are wondering if you can be explaining to us what braising is.”

“I have no idea what braising is,” Kate said. She went to the sink to wash her hands. There were bloody meat wrappers in the sink and a cabbage core, along with several outer leaves. Since her father was fanatic about the clean-as-you-go principle, she knew all too well whom to blame. “Don’t you dare leave the kitchen like this when you’re finished,” she told Pyotr as she dried her hands.

“I will take care of everything!” Pyotr said. “Eddie is staying to dinner?”

“Who’s Eddie?”

“Your sister’s boyfriend. In the living room.”

“Edward, you mean. No, he’s not. ‘Eddie’! Good grief!”

“Americans love to be called nicknames,” Pyotr said.

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Please!” Kate’s father said. “Enough.” He was stirring a pot on the stove. He looked toward them with a pained expression.

“Plus, he’s not her boyfriend,” Kate told Pyotr.

“Yes, he is.”

“No, he’s not. He’s too old to be her boyfriend. He’s her tutor.”

“Your sister is studying microorganisms?”

“What?”

“Book on her lap is
Journal of Microbiological Methods
.”

“It is?”

“Is that a fact!” Dr. Battista marveled. “I didn’t even know she was interested!”

“Oh, geez,” Kate muttered. She flung her towel onto the counter and turned to leave the kitchen.

“Is like a proverb I know,” Pyotr was telling her father as she walked out.

“Spare us,” Kate tossed back. In her sneakers, she made no sound as she crossed the hall. She popped through the living-room doorway and said, “Bunny—”

“Eek!” Bunny said, and she and Edward sprang apart.

The Journal of Microbiological Methods
was not on her lap anymore. It lay at the far end of the couch. Even so, Kate crossed the room in four strides and picked it up and stuck it in front of Bunny’s face. “This is
not
what you need to be learning,” she told Bunny.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re paying him to teach you Spanish.”

“You’re not paying him a thing!”

“Well…and that’s exactly what I meant when I told Father we
should
be paying.”

Bunny and Edward looked bewildered.

“Bunny is fifteen years old,” Kate told Edward. “She’s not allowed to date yet.”