Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

The reason Kate wasn’t letting her aunt attend the wedding was that she knew her too well. It would be just like her to show up with six bridesmaids and a full choir.

What to feed her, though? Certainly not meatless mash, although it would have been a convenient way to get rid of those damn leftovers. Maybe just plain chicken; Kate could manage that much, surely. She picked out a couple of roasters while Pyotr was browsing the pork selections, and then she doubled back to the vegetable department for asparagus and russet potatoes.

As she was returning to the meat department, she caught sight of Pyotr from a distance, deep in conversation with a black man in an apron. Pyotr’s stretched-out gray jersey and his vulnerable-looking bare neck struck her all at once as oddly touching. It wasn’t entirely his fault, she supposed, that he found himself in this peculiar position. And for a moment she tried to imagine how she herself would feel if she were alone in a foreign country, her visa about to expire, no clear notion of where she would go once it did expire or how she would support herself. Plus the language problem! She had been a middling-good language student, once upon a time, but she would have felt desolate if she’d had to actually live in another language. Yet here Pyotr stood, blithely engaged in a discussion of pork cuts and displaying his usual elfin good spirits. She had to smile, a little.

When she arrived next to him, though, he said, “Oh! Is my fiancée. This nice gentleman says maybe not loin but fresh ham,” and right away she felt annoyed again. “Fiancée”: ick. And she had always hated the mealy-mouthed sound of “gentleman.”

“Get what you want,” she told him. “It’s all the same to me.” Then she dumped her groceries into the cart and wandered off again.

Pyotr wasn’t entirely satisfied with the notion of serving Aunt Thelma roast chicken, it turned out. When Kate made the mistake of telling him her menu plan, after he had caught up with her in the syrup-and-molasses aisle, his first question was “The chickens can be cut into pieces?”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I am thinking you could make fried, like KFC. You know how to make fried chicken?”

“No.”

He waited, looking hopeful.

“But you could learn?” he asked finally.

“I could if I wanted to, I guess.”

“And you would want to, maybe?”

“Well, Pyotr, if you like KFC so much, why don’t I just buy some?” Kate said. She would love to see the expression on Aunt Thelma’s face if she did.

“No, you should be cooking something,” Pyotr said. “Something with much labor. You are trying to make your aunt feel welcome.”

Kate said, “Once you meet Aunt Thelma, you’ll realize that the last thing we want to do is make her feel too welcome.”

“But she is family !” Pyotr said. He pronounced the word as if it were holy; he surrounded it with invisible cushions. “I want to know all of your family — your aunt and her husband and her son and also your uncle the pastor. I anticipate your uncle the pastor! He will try to convert me, maybe?”

“Are you kidding? Uncle Theron couldn’t convert a kitten.”

“Theron,” Pyotr repeated. He made it sound like “Seron.” “You are doing this to torture me?”

“Doing what?”

“So many th names!”

“Oh,” Kate said. “Yes, and my mother’s name was Thea.”

He groaned. “What is the surname of these people?” he asked.

After the briefest pause, she said, “Thwaite.”

“My God!” He clapped a hand to his forehead.

She laughed. “I’m pulling your leg,” she told him. He lowered his hand and looked at her. “I was just kidding,” she clarified. “Really their surname is Dell.”

“Ah,” he said. “You were joking. You made a joke. You were teasing me!” And he started capering around the cart. “Oh, Kate; oh, my comical Kate; oh, Katya mine…”

“Stop it!” she said. People were staring at them. “Quit that and tell me which syrup you want.”

He stopped capering and selected a bottle, seemingly at random, and dropped it into the cart. “That’s kind of small,” she said, peering down at it. “Are you sure it’ll be enough?”

“We do not want an excess of mapleness,” Pyotr said severely. “We want balance. We want subtlety. Oh! If it is very successful, we could serve a maple-syrup dish to your aunt! We could serve chicken on a bed of…some unusual substance, drizzled with maple syrup. Your aunt will say, ‘What a heavenly dish you are giving me!’ ”

“That would be a very, very unlikely thing for Aunt Thelma to say,” Kate told him.

“I may call her ‘Aunt Selma’ too?”

“If you mean Aunt Thelma , I suggest you wait until she says you can. Anyhow, I don’t know why you’d want to claim her as your aunt if you didn’t have to.”

“But I have never had an aunt!” Pyotr said. “This will be my very first aunt.”

“Lucky you.”

“I will wait till she gives permission, though, I promise. I will be deeply respectful.”

“Don’t overdo it on my account,” Kate said.

—

Then Pyotr had to go and tell her father that they had had a “lovely time” grocery-shopping. This was later that afternoon, when the two men were cooking dinner in the kitchen. Kate stepped in from the backyard with her bucket of gardening tools, and her father beamed at her as if she’d just won a Nobel Prize. “You had a lovely time at the grocery store!” he said.

“I did?”

“I told you Pyoder was a good fellow! I knew you’d figure it out, eventually! He says you had a lovely, friendly grocery trip together.”

Kate sent Pyotr an evil glare. He was smiling modestly with his eyes lowered as he patted spices all over his fresh ham.

“Maybe after supper you two would like to go to a movie,” her father suggested.

Kate said, “I’m washing my hair after supper.”

“After supper? You’re washing your hair after supper? Why are you doing it then ?”

Kate sighed and slung her bucket into the broom closet.

Pyotr said, “We are wondering if you can be explaining to us what braising is.”

“I have no idea what braising is,” Kate said. She went to the sink to wash her hands. There were bloody meat wrappers in the sink and a cabbage core, along with several outer leaves. Since her father was fanatic about the clean-as-you-go principle, she knew all too well whom to blame. “Don’t you dare leave the kitchen like this when you’re finished,” she told Pyotr as she dried her hands.

“I will take care of everything!” Pyotr said. “Eddie is staying to dinner?”

“Who’s Eddie?”

“Your sister’s boyfriend. In the living room.”

“Edward, you mean. No, he’s not. ‘Eddie’! Good grief!”

“Americans love to be called nicknames,” Pyotr said.

“No, they don’t.”

“Yes, they do.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Please!” Kate’s father said. “Enough.” He was stirring a pot on the stove. He looked toward them with a pained expression.

“Plus, he’s not her boyfriend,” Kate told Pyotr.

“Yes, he is.”

“No, he’s not. He’s too old to be her boyfriend. He’s her tutor.”

“Your sister is studying microorganisms?”

“What?”

“Book on her lap is Journal of Microbiological Methods .”

“It is?”

“Is that a fact!” Dr. Battista marveled. “I didn’t even know she was interested!”

“Oh, geez,” Kate muttered. She flung her towel onto the counter and turned to leave the kitchen.

“Is like a proverb I know,” Pyotr was telling her father as she walked out.