Vinegar Girl (5 page)

“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.”