Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

Immigration was the family’s new bugaboo. Kate envisioned Immigration as a “he”—one man, wearing a suit and tie, handsome in the neutral, textureless style of a detective in an old black-and-white movie. He might even have that black-and-white-movie voice, projected-sounding and masterful. “Katherine Battista? Immigration. Like to ask you a few questions.”

So she arrived at school the next morning, a Tuesday, wearing her great-aunt’s diamond ring, and before she had even checked into Room 4 she went to the faculty lounge, where most of the teachers and a few assistants were standing around the tea kettle, and she silently held her left hand out.

Mrs. Bower was the first to notice. “Oh!” she squawked. “Kate! What is this? Is this an engagement ring?”

Kate nodded. She couldn’t quite manage the “all smiles” part, because Mrs. Bower taught Room 2—the room where Adam assisted. She was certain to go straight back to Room 2 and tell Adam that Kate was engaged.

Kate had been thinking about the telling-Adam part ever since she had gotten herself into this.

Then all the other women clustered around her, exclaiming and asking questions, and if Kate’s behavior seemed subdued they probably chalked it up to her usual unsociableness. “Aren’t you the sly one!” Mrs. Fairweather said. “We didn’t even know you had a boyfriend!”

“Yeah, well,” Kate mumbled.

“Who is he? What is his name? What does he do for a living?”

“His name is Pyoder Cherbakov,” Kate said. Without planning to, she pronounced it the way her father pronounced it, making it sound less foreign. “He’s a microbiologist.”

“Really! A microbiologist! Where did you two meet?”

“He works in my father’s lab,” she said. Then she glanced toward Mrs. Chauncey and said, “Gosh, nobody’s watching the Fours,” trying to find an excuse to escape before they could ask more questions.

But of course they didn’t let her off that easily. Where was Pyotr from? (He must not be a Baltimore boy.) Did her father approve of the match? When would the wedding take place? “So soon!” they said when they learned the date.

“Well, he’s been in the picture three years,” Kate said. Which was true, strictly speaking.

“But you’ll have so much planning to do!”

“Not really; it’s going to be very low-key. Just immediate family.”

This disappointed them, she could tell. They had imagined attending. “When Georgina got married,” Mrs. Fairweather reminded her, “she invited her whole class, remember?”

“This won’t be that kind of wedding. We are neither one of us much for dressing up,” she said — the unaccustomed “we” sounding as odd to her ears as if she had just popped a stone in her mouth. “My uncle who’s a pastor is going to marry us in a private ceremony. Just my father and my sister as witnesses — I’m not even letting my aunt come. She’s having conniptions about it.”

That it was taking place in a church at all was a compromise. Kate had wanted a quickie affair down at City Hall, while her father had wanted a full-dress ceremony that would photograph well for Immigration. And clearly her coworkers agreed with him; they exchanged sad looks. “The children sat in the pew just behind Georgina’s closest relatives, and each of them carried a yellow rose, do you remember that?” Mrs. Fairweather asked Mrs. Link.

“Yes, because Georgina’s gown was yellow, the prettiest, palest yellow, and her husband wore a yellow tie,” Mrs. Link said. “Both of the mothers were scandalized that she wasn’t wearing white. ‘What will people think?’ they said. ‘Whoever heard of a bride not wearing white?’ ”

“And Georgina said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve always looked washed out in white,’ ” Mrs. Chauncey said.

Sometimes, Kate was downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4.

It was Mrs. Chauncey who announced the wedding to Kate’s class. “Children! Children!” she said, clapping her plump hands together as soon as they’d finished the “Good Morning” song. “I have wonderful news. Guess who’s getting married!”

There was a silence. Then Liam M. ventured, “You, maybe?”

Mrs. Chauncey looked distressed. (She had been married thirty-five years.) “Miss Kate, that’s who!” she said. “Miss Kate has gotten engaged. Show them your ring, Miss Kate.”

Kate held out her hand. A number of the little girls made murmuring sounds of admiration, but most of the children seemed confused. “Is that okay?” Jason asked her.

“Is what okay?”

“I mean, will your mother let you?”

“Uh…sure,” Kate said.

And the Samson twins were clearly unhappy. They didn’t say anything in class, but out on the playground later that morning they came up to her and Raymond asked, “ Now who will we marry?”

“Oh, you’ll find somebody,” she assured them. “Somebody closer to your own age, I bet.”

“Who?” Raymond asked.

“Well…”

“There’s Jameesha,” David reminded him.

“Oh, yes.”

“And there’s—”

“That’s okay, I’ll take Jameesha.”

“But how about me?” David asked him. “Jameesha’s always mad at me about something.”

Kate didn’t get to hear the end of this discussion, because just then Adam came over. He was carrying a tiny pink hoodie and he looked very somber, or perhaps she was only imagining that. “So,” he said, arriving next to her. He looked off toward the swings. “I heard the news.”

“News?” she asked. (Inanely.)

“They say you’re getting married.”

“Oh,” she said. “That.”

“I didn’t even know you were seeing anybody.”

“I wasn’t,” Kate said. “I mean, I kind of was, but…this was very sudden.”

He nodded, still looking somber. His eyelashes were so dark and thick that they gave his eyes a sooty effect.

They spent some time watching a three-year-old who had laid herself belly-down on a swing that she’d wound up. She spun around and around, hanging on for dear life, her expression intensely concentrated, and then she got off and tottered away unsteadily, like a very small drunk.

Adam said, “Is that…wise, do you think, jumping into such a decision?”

Kate sent him a quick glance, but he was still gazing after the three-year-old and it was impossible to read his expression. “Maybe not,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t. I don’t know.”

Then after a long pause she said, “This could be, you know, just temporary, though.”

Now he did look at her. “Temporary!” he said.

“I mean, who can ever tell if a marriage will last, right?”

The sooty eyes grew darker and narrower. “But it’s a covenant ,” he said.

“Yes, but…yes, right. A covenant. You’re right.”

And she was back to feeling too tall again, too outspoken, too brassy. She took a sudden interest in Antwan, who’d climbed dangerously high on the jungle gym, and she walked off abruptly to deal with him.

Tuesday 2:46 PM

Hi Kate! You would like me to walk you from school?

No.

Why not?

It’s my day for Extended Daycare.

I walk you later?

No.

You are not polite enough.

Bye.

—

A new photo: Kate standing stiffly on the front walk, Pyotr standing next to her wearing a wide smile even though he was looking a little pink around the nostrils. His so-called cold was an allergy to something outdoors, it was beginning to seem.

Then Kate and Pyotr sitting on a restaurant banquette. Pyotr’s right arm was stretched proprietorially along the back of the seat behind Kate, which gave him a contorted, trying-too-hard aspect because the seat back was fairly high. Also he was frowning slightly with the effort to see in the dimness; he complained that American restaurants were not lit brightly enough. Kate’s father had been there too, of course, because someone had to take the photo. He and Kate had each ordered a burger. Pyotr had ordered veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac drizzled with pomegranate molasses, after which he and Dr. Battista fell into a discussion of the “genetic algorithms” of recipes. When Pyotr was listening closely to someone his face took on a kind of peacefulness, Kate noticed. His forehead smoothed, and he grew completely still as he concentrated on the other person.