Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“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?