Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

—

Walking home at the end of the day, she reviewed her conversation with Adam. “Ooh!” she had said, not once but twice, in that artificial, girlie way she detested, and her voice had come out higher-pitched than usual and her sentences had slanted upward at the end. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Isn’t it nice of you to say so?” she’d asked. Mrs. Gordon’s miniature Japanese maple brushed her face as she passed, and she gave it a vicious swat. As she approached the Mintzes’ house their front door opened, and she speeded up so as not to have to speak to anyone.

Bunny wasn’t home yet. Good. Kate slung her bag onto the hall bench and went to the kitchen for something to eat. Her stomach had begun to notice that she had skipped lunch. She cut herself a chunk of cheddar and strolled around the kitchen as she munched on it, assessing what she would need to pick up tomorrow at the grocery store. If she cooked next week’s meat mash without the meat (which she had decided she would do, just to call Bunny’s bluff ), she would have to increase some other ingredient — the lentils, maybe, or the yellow split peas. Her father’s recipe was calibrated so that they finished the dish completely on Friday evenings. But this past week had been an exception: since Bunny had turned vegetarian she had not been doing her part, and even the addition of Pyotr on Tuesday, wolfish eater though he had been, had not made up for it. They were going to be left with extras tomorrow, and her father would be unhappy.

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.”