Vinegar Girl (7 page)

Reluctantly, she deleted
stew beef
from the shopping list. The list was computer-generated—her father’s work, the household’s usual supplies arranged according to their order in the supermarket aisles—and all she had to do every week was cross off what wasn’t needed. Today she crossed off the salami sticks Bunny ordinarily snacked on; she left
beef jerky
uncrossed and she added
shampoo
, which her father had not included in his prototype list because it was his opinion that a bar of plain soap would do the same job for a fraction of the price.

In the old days, when they still had their housekeeper, things had been less regimented. Not that Dr. Battista hadn’t tried; Mrs. Larkin’s easygoing ways used to drive him to distraction. “What’s wrong with just writing down what I want whenever I think of it?” she’d asked when he’d urged his list on her. “It’s not that hard: carrots, peas, chicken…” (Mrs. Larkin used to make a wonderful chicken potpie.) Out of his hearing, she had warned Kate not ever to let a man meddle with the housework. “He’ll get all carried away with it,” she’d said, “and your life won’t never be your own after that.”

One of Kate’s few memories of her mother involved an argument that had developed when her father tried to tell her mother she was loading the dishwasher wrong. “Spoons should go in with their handles down, knives and forks with their handles up,” he had said. “If you do it that way, you see, the knives and forks will never poke you, and you can sort out the silverware basket much faster when it’s time to empty the dishwasher.” This was before he had evolved the notion of not emptying it ever again, obviously. To Kate the plan had sounded sensible, but her mother had ended up in tears and retreated to her bedroom.

There was a clementine in the bowl on the counter, left over from a box that Kate had bought back in February. She peeled it and ate it, even though it was slightly shriveled. She stood at the sink and looked out the window at the little red birdhouse she had hung last week in the dogwood tree. So far, no birds had been interested. She knew it was silly of her to take this personally.

Was Pyotr aware of what her father had been plotting? He had to be, she supposed. (How mortifying.) He had needed to play his part, after all—“accidentally” catching up with her as she walked home that time, and making all that fuss about her hair, and then coming to dinner. Also, he hadn’t looked like a man who was worried that his visa was about to expire. He’d probably been taking it for granted that her father’s scheme would save him.

Well,
now
he wasn’t taking anything for granted. Ha! By now he would have heard that she had refused to cooperate. She wished she could have seen his face when he found out.

You can’t get around Kate Battista as easily as all that.

She carried a laundry basket upstairs and filled it with the clothes in the hamper in Bunny’s room. According to their father, the most time-consuming part of doing the laundry was separating different people’s clothes afterward. He had decreed that each of them should have an individual washday, and Bunny’s was Friday. Although Kate, wouldn’t you know, was the one who always
did
the laundry.

Bunny’s bedroom had a bruised-fruit smell from all the cosmetics cluttering her bureau. A good many of the clothes that should have been in the hamper were scattered across the floor, but Kate let them stay there. Picking them up was not her job.

In the basement, something about the dusty gloom made her limbs feel heavy and achy, all at once. She set the basket down and just stood there a moment, clamping her forehead with one hand. Then she straightened and flipped up the lid of the washing machine.

She was gardening
when Bunny came home. She was cleaning out some of the old growth on the clematis vine beside the garage, and Bunny opened the back screen door to call, “You out there?”

Kate turned and blotted her forehead on her sleeve.

“What’ve we got to eat?” Bunny asked her. “I’m starved.”

Kate said, “Did you take the last of my beef jerky?”

“Who, me? Do you not remember I’m a vegan?”

“You’re a vegan?” Kate repeated. “Wait. You’re a
vegan
?”

“Vegan, vegetarian; whatever.”

Kate said, “If you don’t even know which is which—”

“Is my wash done yet?”

“It’s in the dryer.”

“You didn’t put my off-the-shoulder blouse in, did you?”

“I did if it was in the hamper.”

“Kate! Honestly! You know I save my whites out for sheets day.”

“If you want something saved out, you should be here to see to it,” Kate said.

“I had cheerleading practice! I can’t be everywhere at once!”

Kate went back to her gardening.

“This family is so lame,” Bunny said. “Other people separate their colors.”

Kate stuffed a snarl of vine into her trash bag.

“Other people’s clothes don’t come out all the same gray.”

Kate wore only darks and plaids, herself. She didn’t find the subject worth discussing.

At supper, her
father poured forth compliments. “Did you grind your own curry powder?” he asked. (The meat mash metamorphosed into a curry on Fridays.) “It tastes so authentic.”

“Nope,” she said.

“Maybe it has to do with the amount you put in, then. I really like the spiciness.”

He had behaved this way for the past three days. It was pathetic.

Bunny was having a toasted cheese sandwich with a side of green-onion potato chips. She claimed the potato chips were her vegetable. Fine, let her die of scurvy. It was all the same to Kate.

The only sounds for a while were the crunching of chips and the clink of forks against plates. Then Dr. Battista cleared his throat. “So,” he began delicately. “So, I notice we still have the tax papers here.”

“Right,” Kate said.

“Ah, yes. I only mention it because…it occurred to me there’s a deadline.”

“Really?” Kate said, raising her eyebrows in astonishment. “A deadline! Fancy that!”

“I mean…but probably you’re already bearing that in mind, though.”

Kate said, “You know what, Father? I think this year you should do your own taxes.”

His mouth flew open and he stared at her.

“You do yours; I do mine,” Kate said. Hers were about as simple as taxes could get, and in fact they were already finished and mailed.

Her father said, “Oh, why…but you’re so good at them, Katherine.”

“I’m sure you can figure them out,” Kate said.

He turned to Bunny. Bunny gave him a bland smile. Then she looked across the table at Kate and raised a fist toward the ceiling. “Go, Katherine!” she said.

Well. Kate had not seen
that
one coming.

Bunny was picked
up by a mother driving a crowd of teenage girls who were squealing and laughing and waving wildly out all the open windows. Drumbeats pounded from the radio. “Have you got your phone?” Kate asked, and then, belatedly, “Where will you be?”

Bunny just said, “Bye-yee!” and she was out the door and gone.

Kate finished making her father’s lunch for the next day, and then she turned off the lights in the kitchen and the dining room. Her father was reading in the living room. He sat in his leather armchair beneath a pool of yellow lamplight, and seemingly he was absorbed in his journal, but when Kate crossed the hall there was a certain stiffening in his posture, an
awareness
. Before he could attempt to start a conversation, though, she took a sharp left turn and climbed the stairs two at a time. She heard the creak of leather behind her, but he didn’t try to stop her.

Although dusk had barely fallen, she changed into her pajamas. (It was tiring, dragging herself around all day.) She stared at herself in the bathroom mirror after she had brushed her teeth; she let her head tip forward till it was resting against the glass and she looked into her own eyes, which from this angle had bags beneath them almost as dark as her irises. Then she returned to her room and climbed into her bed. She propped her pillow against the headboard and adjusted the shade of her lamp and took her book from the nightstand and started reading.

She was reading a Stephen Jay Gould book that she had read before. She liked Stephen Jay Gould. She liked nonfiction—books about natural history or evolution. She didn’t have much use for novels. Although she did enjoy a good time-travel novel, now and again. Whenever she had trouble sleeping, she fantasized about traveling back through time to the Cambrian Era. The Cambrian Era was some 450 million years ago. Just about the only living creatures then were invertebrates, and not a one of them lived on dry land.

Last fall Kate had planted an assortment of spring crocuses beneath the redbud tree in the backyard, and she had been on the lookout for several weeks now but not a one had shown itself. It was puzzling. She checked again on Saturday morning after her grocery trip; she poked around with her trowel, even, but she couldn’t find a single bulb. Was this the work of moles, or voles, or some other kind of varmint?

She quit digging and stood up, flinging back her hair, just as the telephone rang in the kitchen. Bunny was awake, she knew—earlier she’d heard the shower running—but the telephone rang again and then again. By the time she’d made it into the house, the answering machine had swung into its “Hi-yee!” and then her father was saying, “Pick up, Kate. It’s your father.”

Already, though, she had spotted his lunch bag on the counter. She didn’t know how she had missed it before. She stopped just inside the back door and scowled at it ferociously.

“Kate? Are you there? I forgot my lunch.”

“Well, isn’t that just too damn bad,” Kate told the empty kitchen.

“Could you bring it to me, please?”

She turned and went back outside. She tossed her trowel into her gardening bucket and reached for her dandelion weeder.

The telephone rang again.

This time, she made it into the house before the answering machine could click over. She snatched up the receiver and said, “How many times did you think I’d fall for this, Father?”

“Ah, Kate! Katherine. It seems I’ve forgotten my lunch again.”

She was silent.

“Are you there?”

“I guess you’ll have to go hungry,” she said.

“Excuse me? Please, Kate. I don’t ask very much of you.”

“Actually, you ask a lot of me,” she told him.

“I just need you to bring my lunch. I haven’t eaten since last night.”

She considered. Then she said, “Fine,” and slammed the receiver down before she could hear his response.

She went out to the hall and shouted up the stairs: “Bunny?”

“What,” Bunny said, from much nearer than Kate had expected.

Kate turned from the stairs and went to the living-room doorway. Bunny and Edward Mintz were sitting rather close together on the couch. Bunny had an open book on her lap. “Hi, there, Kate!” Edward said enthusiastically. He was wearing jeans so ragged that both of his hairy bare knees poked out.

Kate ignored him. “Father needs his lunch brought,” she told Bunny.

“Brought where?”

“Where do you think? How come you didn’t answer the phone when it rang?”

“Because I’m having my Spanish lesson?” Bunny said indignantly, spreading her palms to indicate her book.

“Well, take a break from it and run over to the lab.”

“Your dad’s in his lab on Saturdays?” Edward asked Bunny.

“He’s always in his lab?” Bunny said. “He works seven days a week?”

“What, on Sundays too?”

“I don’t know why
you
can’t do it,” Bunny told Kate, speaking over Edward’s words.

“I’m gardening, is why,” Kate said.

“I’ll drive you there,” Edward told Bunny. “Where is this lab, exactly?”

Kate said, “Sorry. Bunny’s not allowed to ride alone with a boy.”

“Edward’s not a boy!” Bunny protested. “He’s my tutor?”

“You know Father’s rule. Not till you’re sixteen.”

“But I’m a really responsible driver,” Edward told Kate.

“Sorry; it’s the rule.”

Bunny snapped her book shut and flung it onto the couch. “There are plenty of girls in my school a whole lot younger than me that get to ride alone with boys every night of the week,” she said.

“Tell Father that; it’s not
my
rule,” Kate said.

“It might as well be. You’re just exactly like him: two peas in a pod.”

“I’m what? Take that back!” Kate said. “I’m not a bit like him!”

“Oh, so sorry, my mistake,” Bunny said, with a luminous, sweet smile playing at the corners of her mouth. (The smile of all the mean girls Kate used to know in seventh grade.) She stood up and said, “Come along, Edward.”

He stood up too and followed her. “I am the one and only normal person in this family,” she told him. Kate trailed them through the hall. In the kitchen doorway, she had to stand aside because Bunny was already stalking back out, violently swinging the lunch bag. “The other two are crazy people,” she was telling Edward. He followed her toward the front of the house like a pet dog.

Kate opened the fridge and took out a roast beef sandwich she had bought at the deli counter that morning. Already she was feeling meat-deprived, although she hadn’t even assembled her vegetarian meat mash yet.

While she was unwrapping her sandwich, she happened to glance out the window and see the Mintzes’ gray minivan backing out of their garage. Bunny was in the passenger seat, riding high like royalty and gazing straight ahead.

Well, fine, then. Be that way. If their father cared so much about his precious rules, he ought to stick around to enforce them.

“I don’t remember that
I
wasn’t allowed to ride alone with a boy,” Kate had told him when he announced this particular rule.

“I don’t remember that any boy asked you,” her father had said.

Kate allowed herself a little fantasy: one day Bunny would get old, and she would age in that unfortunate way that blondes so often did. Her hair would become strawlike, and her face would be wrinkly as an apple and ruddier than her lips. She had turned out to be such a disappointment, their father would confide to Kate.

A concrete bench
stood at the rear of the backyard, mottled and pitted and greenish. Nobody ever sat on it, but today, instead of eating in the kitchen, Kate decided to take her sandwich out there. She settled at one end of the bench with her sandwich plate beside her, and she tipped her head back to stare up into the tree above her. A robin was going crazy on one of the lower branches, hopping about and showering her with agitated
chink-chink
sounds. Maybe it had a nest up there, although she couldn’t see one. And in the giant oak across the alley, two other birds, invisible, seemed to be having a conversation. “Dewey? Dewey? Dewey?” one was saying, and the other said, “Hugh! Hugh! Hugh!” Kate couldn’t tell whether the second bird was greeting the first one or setting him straight.

After she’d finished gardening she would assemble her mash ingredients in the Crock-Pot, and then she would change all the beds and start a sheet wash.

And after that, what?

She didn’t have any friends anymore. They had all moved on in their lives—graduated from college, found jobs in distant cities and even married, some of them. At Christmas they might come back to Baltimore for a visit, but they had stopped phoning her, for the most part. What would they find to talk about? The only time she got a text nowadays was when Bunny was being kept after school and needed a ride home.

Dewey and Hugh had gone quiet now, and the robin had flown away. Kate pretended to herself that the robin had decided she could be trusted. She took a bite of her sandwich and gazed studiously at a nearby cluster of hyacinths to demonstrate that she had no interest in robbing his stupid nest. The tiers of curly white blooms reminded her of the white paper frills on lamb chops.

“Khello?”

She stopped chewing.

Pyotr was coming out the back door; he was descending the back steps. He wore his lab coat today, and it flapped open over his T-shirt as he walked toward her across the grass.

She couldn’t believe it. She could not believe that he would have the nerve.

“How’d you get into the house?” she demanded as soon as he was close enough.

“Front door was standing wide,” he said.

Damn Bunny to hell.

He stopped when he reached her and stood looking down at her. At least he had the good grace not to attempt any chitchat.

She couldn’t invent a reason for his being there. Surely he must see that she wanted nothing to do with him, even if for some reason her father hadn’t yet told him so. And her father
had
told him, she sensed. The other times she’d seen Pyotr, he had arrived in front of her with (it struck her in retrospect) a little bounce, a “Here-I-am!” air, but today he was solemn, chastened, and he held himself with an almost military erectness.

“What do you want?” she asked him.

“I came to offer apology.”

“Oh.”

“I fear Dr. Battista and I have offended you.”

She felt both gratified and humiliated to know that he comprehended this.

“Was inconsiderate of us to ask you to deceive your government,” he said. “I think Americans feel guilt about such things.”

“It wasn’t just inconsiderate,” she said. “It was piggish and self-centered and insulting and…despicable.”

“Aha! A shrew.”

“Where?” she asked, and she spun around to look toward the shrubbery behind her.

He laughed. “Very comical,” he told her.

“What?”

She turned back to find him smiling down at her, rocking from heel to toe with his hands in his pockets. Apparently he imagined that they were on good terms now. She picked up her sandwich and took a large, defiant bite and started chewing. He just went on smiling at her. He seemed to have all the time in the world.

“You realize you could be arrested,” she told him once she’d swallowed. “It’s a criminal offense to marry somebody for a green card.”

He didn’t look very concerned.

“But I accept your apology,” she said. “So. See you around.”

Not that she had any intention of seeing him ever again.

He let out a long breath and took his hands from his pockets and stepped over to sit beside her on the bench. This was unexpected. Her plate sat between them and she feared for its safety, but if she picked it up he might feel encouraged to move closer. She let it be.

“Was a foolish notion anyhow,” he said, speaking to the lawn in general. “It is evident you could choose any husband you want. You are very independent girl.”

“Woman.”

“You are very independent woman and you have the hair that avoids beauty parlors and you resemble dancer.”

“Let’s not go overboard,” Kate said.

“Resemble flamingo dancer,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Flamenco.”

Stomping the floorboards. Made sense.

“Okay, Pyotr,” she said. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“You are only person I know who pronounces my name right,” he said sadly.

She took another bite from her sandwich and chewed it, staring straight out across the lawn now the same way he was doing. But she couldn’t help feeling a little stab of sympathy.

“And Dr. Battista!” he said, turning to her suddenly. “Why your name for Dr. Battista is ‘Father’ but your sister calls him ‘Papa’?”

“ ‘Father’ is what he told us to call him,” she said. “But you know our Bunnikins.”

“Ah,” he said.

“While we’re on the subject,” she said, “why do you call him ‘Dr. Battista’ when he calls you ‘Pyotr’?”

“I could never call him ‘Louis,’ ” Pyotr said in a shocked tone. (“Loov-wiss,” he made it sound like.) “He is too illustrious.”

“He is?”

“In my country he is. I had for many years been hearing about him. When I announced that I am leaving to assist him, there became a great outcry in my institute.”

“Is that a fact,” Kate said.

“You did not know his reputation? Ha! Is like a proverb we have: ‘Man who is respected in rest of the world is not—’ ”

“Right; I get your gist,” Kate said hastily.

“Is true he is sometimes oligarch, but I have observed other men so important act much worse. He does not ever shout! And see how he tolerates your sister.”

“My sister?”

“She is empty-head, yes? You know this.”

“Airhead,” Kate said. “No kidding.”

She felt filled with a certain airiness herself, all at once. She started smiling.

“She is puffing her hair and blinking her eyes and abandoning animal proteins. And he does not point it out to her. This is very nice of him.”

“I don’t think he’s being nice,” Kate said. “I think he’s being predictable. You see it all the time: those mad-genius scientists who go gaga over dumb blondes, the ditzier the better. It’s practically a cliché. And naturally the blondes are crazy about
them
; a lot of women are. You should get a load of my father at my aunt Thelma’s Christmas parties! All these women flocking around him because they think he’s so unreadable and unreachable and mysterious. They think that they’re the ones who might finally crack his code.”