Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

Next, Kate and Pyotr on the living-room couch, a foot of empty space between them, Pyotr grinning broadly and doing his arm-along-the-seat-back thing while Kate, stony-faced, poked her left hand toward the photographer to display her diamond ring. Or it could have been cubic zirconia; nobody was quite sure. The great-aunt had clerked in a dime store.

Kate and Pyotr doing the dishes. Pyotr, wearing an apron, waved a pre-rinsed plate in the air. Kate stood looking sideways at him as if she wondered who this person was. Bunny, only partly visible, seemed to be wondering who both of them were; she rolled her big blue eyes disbelievingly toward the camera.

It was Bunny who showed their father how to forward the photos to Kate’s and Pyotr’s cell phones, since he himself hadn’t the remotest idea. She rolled her eyes again, but she helped him. She made no secret, though, of her horror at the marriage plan. “What are you?” she asked Kate. “Chattel?”

“It’s only for a while,” Kate told her. “You don’t know how desperate things are getting at the lab.”

“No, and I don’t care. That lab has nothing to do with you.”

“It does have to do with Father, though. It’s the center of his life!”

“ We are supposed to be the center of his life,” Bunny said. “What is it with him? The man forgets for months at a stretch that we even exist, but at the same time he thinks he has the right to tell us who we can ride in cars with and who we should marry.”

“Whom,” Kate said automatically.

“Wake up and smell the coffee, sis. He’s making a human sacrifice of you, don’t you get it?”

“Oh, now, it’s not that bad,” Kate said. “This will only be on paper, remember.”

But Bunny was so upset that her Taylor Swift ringtone played nearly all the way through before she could think to answer her phone.

Friday 4:16 PM

Hi Kate! I come with you to the grocery store tomorrow.

I like shopping alone.

I come because your father and I are cooking supper.

What!

I will pick you up in my car at eight in morning. Bye.

—

His car was an original Volkswagen Beetle; she hadn’t seen one of those in years. It was peacock blue, and so weatherworn that it looked not painted but chalked. Otherwise, though, it seemed to be in excellent condition. This struck her as miraculous, in view of the way he treated it. Was there some natural law that decreed that scientists couldn’t drive? Or maybe they could drive, but they were too immersed in their own esoteric thoughts to bother looking at the road. Pyotr kept looking at Kate instead, turning his face fully toward her to talk while the Beetle careened down 41st Street and the other drivers braked and honked and a tumult of books and lab coats and empty water bottles and fast-food wrappers slid around the backseat. “We get a pork loin,” he was saying. “We get cornmeal.”

“Watch what you’re doing, for God’s sake.”

“This store will sell maple syrup?”

“Maple syrup! What on earth are you cooking?”

“Braised pork on a bed of polenta drizzled with maple syrup.”

“Good God.”

“Your father and I have discussed.”

“The genetic algorithms of recipes,” Kate said, remembering.

“Ah. You were paying attention. You were heeding what I said.”

“I was not heeding what you said,” Kate told him. “I just couldn’t avoid overhearing you blab away in my ear.”

“You were heeding me. You like me! You are crazy about me, I think.”

“Pyotr,” Kate said, “let’s get something straight.”

“Awk! That was too-big truck for this road.”

“I am only doing this to help my father out. He seems to think it’s important that you should stay in this country. After you get your green card, you and I will go our separate ways. Not a step of this plan involves anybody being crazy about anybody.”

“Or maybe you will decide not to separate,” Pyotr said.

“What? What are you talking about? Have you heard a word I’ve been saying?”

“Yes, yes,” he said hastily. “I am listening. Nobody shall be crazy about anybody. And now we will go buy pork.”

He pulled into the supermarket parking lot and cut the engine.

“Why are we having pork?” Kate asked as she followed him across the lot. “You know Bunny’s not going to eat it.”

“I am not much concerned about Bunny,” he said.

“You’re not?”

“In my country they have proverb: ‘Beware against the sweet person, for sugar has no nutrition.’ ”

This was intriguing. Kate said, “Well, in my country they say that you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“Yes, they would ,” Pyotr said mysteriously. He had been walking a couple of steps ahead of Kate, but now he dropped back and, without any warning, slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. “But why you would want to catch flies, hah? Answer me that, vinegar girl.”

“Let go of me,” Kate said. Up close, he smelled like fresh hay, and his arm felt steely and insistent. She broke free of him. “Good grief,” she said. And the rest of the way across the parking lot, it was she who kept a few steps ahead.

At the entrance to the store she snagged a cart and started inside, but Pyotr caught up with her to reach for the cart and take over. She was beginning to suspect that he had some kind of he-man complex. “What- ever ,” she told him. He merely smiled and cruised along beside her with the empty cart.

For someone who talked so much about vitamins, he was remarkably uninterested in the vegetable section. He languidly tossed in a head of cabbage and then asked, gazing around him, “The cornmeal: where we would find that?”

“You really seem to go for those la-di-da kinds of dishes,” Kate said as she led the way. “Like that thing you ordered in the restaurant, with puréed celeriac.”

“I just echoed final item.”

“Excuse me?”

“The waiter, when he came to our table: he talked so complicated. He said, ‘Like to tell you guys about a few specials this evening…’ ” Pyotr had the waiter’s Baltimore accent down pat; it was uncanny. “Then he said things very long and combined; he said the free-range and the stone-ground and the house-cured until I am vertiginous. So I just repeated what came last. ‘The veal cheeks on a bed of puréed celeriac,’ I repeated, because it was still in my ears.”

“Then maybe this evening we could go back to plain old mash,” Kate said.

But Pyotr said, “No, I think not.” And that was the end of that.

The computer-generated grocery list wasn’t much use today. For one thing, they still had a hefty supply of mash left over from last Saturday’s batch, which was why Kate had been hoping that she could serve it tonight. This past week had been so different from their usual week, as far as meals were concerned. Not only had her father arranged for that photo-op restaurant dinner with Pyotr, but then the next night Pyotr had insisted on taking them to a restaurant (all except Bunny, who had said that enough was enough), and on Tuesday, claiming the need to celebrate a brief, freakish spring snowfall, he had shown up unannounced with a tub of KFC chicken.

And this coming week, at some point, Kate would have to think up some kind of dinner for Aunt Thelma. Dr. Battista had been making noises about inviting her in to meet Pyotr, along with her husband and perhaps Uncle Theron too, if it didn’t conflict with his church obligations. They might as well grit their teeth and get it over with, Dr. Battista said. He and Aunt Thelma were not on the best of terms (Aunt Thelma blamed him for her sister’s depression), but “Immigration-wise,” he said, “I feel it would be smart to expose as many relatives as possible to your marriage plans. And since you’re not letting your aunt attend the wedding, this seems a strategic alternative.”