Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

At lunch she would stir her food listlessly around her plate; everything smelled like waxed paper. On Friday she forgot her beef jerky — or rather, she found the drawer at home empty although she could have sworn she still had some — and she didn’t eat a thing except a couple of grapes, but that was okay; she felt not just lacking in appetite but overstuffed, as if that swollen heart of hers had risen in her throat.

At Quiet Rest Time she sat behind Mrs. Chauncey’s desk and stared into space. Ordinarily she would have flipped through Mrs. Chauncey’s discarded newspaper or tidied up some of the more clutter-prone play areas — the Lego corner or the crafts table — but now she just gazed at nothing and racked up points against her father.

He must think she was of no value; she was nothing but a bargaining chip in his single-minded quest for a scientific miracle. After all, what real purpose did she have in her life? And she couldn’t possibly find a man who would love her for herself, he must think, so why not just palm her off on someone who would be useful to him?

It wasn’t that Kate had never had a boyfriend. After she graduated from high school, where the boys had seemed a little afraid of her, she’d had a lot of boyfriends. Or a lot of first dates, at least. Sometimes even second dates. Her father had no business giving up on her like that.

Besides, she was only twenty-nine years old. There was plenty of time to find a husband! Provided she even wanted one, and she was not so sure that she did.

Out on the playground on Friday afternoon, aimlessly kicking a bottle cap across the hard-packed earth, she tortured herself by rehashing all that her father had said to her. He liked the fellow, he’d said. As if that were sufficient reason to marry his daughter off to him! And then the part about how Pyotr’s leaving the project would be such a loss to mankind. Her father didn’t care the least little bit about mankind. That project had become an end in itself. To all intents and purposes, it had no end. It just went on and on, generating its own spinoffs and detours and switchbacks, and no one except other scientists even knew what it was, exactly. Recently, Kate had begun to wonder whether even other scientists knew. It seemed possible that his sponsors had forgotten he existed; that they continued funding him purely from force of habit. He’d been phased out of teaching long ago (she could just picture what kind of teacher he’d made) and stuck away in that series of steadily shrinking and peregrinating laboratories, and when Johns Hopkins established a dedicated autoimmune research center he had not been invited to join. Or maybe he had refused to join; she wasn’t entirely sure. In any case, he just went on working away by himself without, apparently, anyone’s bothering to investigate whether he was making any progress. Though who knew? Perhaps he was making all kinds of progress. But at this particular moment, Kate couldn’t invent a single result that would justify sacrificing his firstborn.

She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled.

Natalie might be succeeding in winning Adam’s affections. She looked so pretty and poetic, crouching to console a little girl with a scraped elbow, and Adam stood next to her watching sympathetically. “Why don’t you take her inside for a Band-Aid?” he asked. “I’ll supervise the seesaws,” and Natalie said, “Oh, would you? Thank you, Adam,” and she rose in one graceful motion and shepherded the child toward the building. She was wearing a dress today, which was unusual among the assistants. It swished around her calves seductively, and Adam gazed after her longer than he needed to, it seemed to Kate.

Once, a couple of months ago, Kate had tried wearing a skirt to school herself. Not that it was swishy or anything; actually it was a denim skirt with rivets and a front zip, but she had thought it might make her seem…softer. The older teachers had turned all knowing and glinty. “ Somebody’s making a big effort today!” Mrs. Bower had said, and Kate had said, “What, this? It was the only thing not in the wash, is all.” But Adam hadn’t seemed to register its existence. Anyhow, it had proved impractical — hard to climb a jungle gym in — and she couldn’t shake the image of the reflection she had glimpsed in the faculty restroom’s full-length mirror. “Mutton dressed as lamb” was the phrase that had come to mind, although she knew she wasn’t really mutton; not yet. The next day, she had gone back to Levi’s.

Now Adam sauntered over to her and said, “Have you ever noticed that certain days are injury days?”

“Injury days?”

“That kid just now, with her elbow; and then this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener—”

“Ooh!” she said, wincing.

“—and just before lunch Tommy Bass knocked his front tooth out and we had to call his mother to come get him—”

“Ooh, that is an injury day,” Kate said. “Did you put the tooth in milk?”

“In milk.”

“You put it in a cup of milk and it has a chance of being re-implanted?”

“Gosh, no, I didn’t,” Adam said. “I just wadded it up in a Kleenex in case they wanted it for the tooth fairy.”

“Well, don’t worry; it was only a baby tooth.”

“How do you know about the milk trick?” he asked.

“Oh, I just do,” she said.

She couldn’t figure out where to put her hands so she started swinging her arms back and forth from her shoulders, till she remembered that Bunny had told her she looked like a boy when she did that. (Count on Bunny.) She stopped swinging her arms and stuffed her hands in her rear pockets. “I had a grown-up tooth knocked out by a baseball when I was nine,” she said. Then she realized how unfeminine that sounded and so she added, “I was just walking past a game on my way home? Was how it happened. But our housekeeper knew to put the tooth in milk.”

“Well, it must have worked,” Adam said, looking at her more closely. “You have great teeth.”

“Oh, aren’t you…isn’t it nice of you to say so?” Kate said.

She started drawing arcs in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. Then Sophia walked over, and she and Adam began discussing a recipe for no-knead bread.

During Afternoon Activity Hour, the ballerina doll and the sailor doll had one of their breakups. (Kate wasn’t aware that they had gotten back together.) This time they were breaking up because the sailor doll had been inappropriate. “Please, Cordelia,” Emma G. said, speaking for the sailor, “I’ll never be inappropriate again, I promise.” But the ballerina said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I have given you chance after chance and now you are walking on my last nerve.” Then Jameesha fell off a stepstool and developed a giant lump on her forehead, proving Adam’s point about injury days; and after Kate had managed to divert her, Chloe and Emma W. got into a shouting quarrel. “Girls! Girls!” Mrs. Chauncey said. She had a lower tolerance for discord than Kate did. Chloe said, “It’s not fair! Emma W.’s hogging the child dolls! She has Drink-and-Wet and Squeaky Baby and Anatomically Correct, and all I have is this dumb old wooden Pinocchio!” Mrs. Chauncey turned toward Kate, clearly expecting her to mediate, but Kate just told them, “Well, sort it out,” and walked off to see what the boys were doing. One of the boys had a doll as well (a child doll, she saw), and he was sliding it facedown along the floor and saying “ Vroom, vroom ” as if it were a truck, which seemed a waste, since child dolls were in such demand today, but Kate wasn’t up to dealing with it. The wounded feeling had spread from her chest to her left shoulder, and she wondered if she were having a heart attack. She would have welcomed it.