Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“Spare us,” Kate tossed back. In her sneakers, she made no sound as she crossed the hall. She popped through the living-room doorway and said, “Bunny—”

“Eek!” Bunny said, and she and Edward sprang apart.

The Journal of Microbiological Methods was not on her lap anymore. It lay at the far end of the couch. Even so, Kate crossed the room in four strides and picked it up and stuck it in front of Bunny’s face. “This is not what you need to be learning,” she told Bunny.

“Excuse me?”

“We’re paying him to teach you Spanish.”

“You’re not paying him a thing!”

“Well…and that’s exactly what I meant when I told Father we should be paying.”

Bunny and Edward looked bewildered.

“Bunny is fifteen years old,” Kate told Edward. “She’s not allowed to date yet.”

“Right,” he said. He was less practiced than Bunny at faking self-righteous innocence. He flushed and looked glumly down at his knees.

“She can only see boys in groups.”

“Right.”

Bunny said, “But he’s my—”

“And don’t tell me he’s your tutor, because why did I have to sign your D-plus Spanish test yesterday?”

“It’s the subjunctive?” Bunny said. “I just never have gotten the hang of the subjunctive?” She seemed to be asking whether there was any chance this explanation might be convincing.

Kate turned on her heel and walked out. Before she was halfway across the hall, though, Bunny had jumped up from the couch and come after her. “Are you saying we can’t see each other anymore?” she asked. “He’s just visiting me at my house! We’re not going out on dates or anything.”

“The guy must be twenty years old,” Kate told her. “You don’t find anything wrong with that?”

“So? I’m fifteen years old. A very mature fifteen.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Kate told her.

“You’re just jealous,” Bunny said. She was following Kate through the dining room now. “Just because you have to settle for Pyoder—”

“His name is Pyotr,” Kate said through her teeth. “You might as well learn to pronounce it right.”

“Well, la-di-da to you, Miss Frilling-Your- r s. At least I didn’t have to rely on my father to find me a boyfriend.”

By the time she was saying this, they had reached the kitchen. The two men glanced over at them, surprised. “Your daughter is a jerk,” Bunny told their father.

“I beg your pardon?”

“She is a snoopy, jealous, meddlesome jerk, and I refuse to — and now look!”

Her attention had been snagged by something outside the window. The rest of them turned to see Edward slinking past with his shoulders hunched, veering beneath the redbud tree to cross to his own house.

“I hope you’re satisfied,” Bunny told Kate.

“Why is it,” Dr. Battista asked Pyotr, “that whenever I’m around women for any length of time, I end up asking, ‘What just happened here?’ ”

“That is extremely sexist of you,” Pyotr said sternly.

“Don’t blame me ,” Dr. Battista said. “I base the observation purely on empirical evidence.”

Monday 1:13 PM

Hi Kate! We went to get marriage license!

Who’s we?

Your Father and I.

Well I hope you’ll be very happy together.

“How do you do, Pyoder?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“Um!” Kate broke in.

Too late, though. “I have been having very bad allergy, but now am feeling better,” Pyotr said. “It was maybe the smelly wooden material they put on the ground around bushes.”

“Mulch, we call that,” Aunt Thelma informed him. “M-U-L–C-H. It’s meant to hold the moisture in during our long hot summers. But I very much doubt that that could be what you’re allergic to.”

It always made Aunt Thelma happy when she could set somebody straight. And Pyotr was smiling into her face so widely and so steadily, clearly preconditioned to adore her — just the sort of thing she found appealing. Maybe the evening would go better than Kate had imagined.

They were assembled in the entrance hall: Kate and her father and Pyotr, and Aunt Thelma and her husband, Uncle Barclay. Aunt Thelma was a tiny, pretty woman in her early sixties, with a smooth blond bob and very bright makeup. She wore a beige silk pantsuit and a filmy, color-splashed scarf wound several times around her neck and flung back over her shoulders. (Kate used to fantasize that her aunt’s perennial scarves were meant to hide something — a past surgery or, who knows, maybe a couple of fang marks.) Uncle Barclay was lean and handsome and gray-haired, wearing an expensive-looking gray suit. He headed a high-powered investment firm and seemed to find Dr. Battista and his daughters humorously quaint, like something in a small-town natural history museum. Now he watched them with an indulgent smile, slouching gracefully in the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets, which caused an elegant drape in the hem of his suit coat.

The rest of them had dressed up to the extent of their abilities. Kate wore her denim skirt with one of her plaid shirts. Pyotr was in jeans — foreign jeans, belted exactly at his waist and ballooning around his legs — but he had added a crisply ironed white shirt and his shoes were not his usual running shoes but snub-nosed brown Oxfords. Even Dr. Battista had made an effort. He had put on his one suit, which was black, and a white shirt and a spindly black tie. He always looked so thin and uncertain when he was out of his beloved coveralls.

“This is very exciting,” Aunt Thelma began, at the same time that Kate said, “Let’s go to the living room.” She and Aunt Thelma frequently experienced an overlapping-speech problem. “Uncle Theron’s already here,” Kate said as she led the way.

“ Is he,” Aunt Thelma said. “Well, he must have shown up too early, then, because Barclay and I are exactly on time.”

Since Uncle Theron had indeed arrived early, by special arrangement so that they could discuss the ceremony, Kate had nothing to say to this.

Aunt Thelma sailed ahead of the rest of them and entered the living room with both arms outstretched, ready to engulf Bunny, who was just rising from the couch. “Bunny, dear!” Aunt Thelma said. “Gracious! Aren’t you chilly?”

It was the first really hot day of the year, and Bunny couldn’t possibly be chilly. Aunt Thelma was merely pointing out the skimpiness of her sundress, which was the length of a normal person’s shirt and tied at the shoulders with huge, perky bows that resembled angel wings. Also, her sandals had no backs to them. A no-no.

One of Aunt Thelma’s many instructions to the girls over the years had been: Never wear backless shoes for a social occasion. It was second only to Rule Number One: Never, ever, under any circumstances apply lipstick while at the table. All of Aunt Thelma’s rules were etched permanently in Kate’s mind, although by natural preference Kate owned no backless shoes anyhow and she never wore lipstick.

Bunny, though, tended not to catch Aunt Thelma’s subtexts. She just said, “No, I’m sweltering!” and gave her a peck on the cheek. “Hi, Uncle Barclay,” she said, and she gave him a peck too.

“Theron,” Aunt Thelma said regally, as if granting a dispensation. Uncle Theron had risen from his chair and was standing with his chubby, blond-furred hands clasped in front of his crotch. He and Aunt Thelma were twins, which explained their alliterative names if not their baby sister’s, but Aunt Thelma had “come out first,” as she always put it, and she had the firstborn’s self-assured edge to her while Theron was a timid man who had never married or, it seemed, had any serious experiences in life. Or maybe he’d just failed to realize if he had had them. He always seemed to be blinking at something, as if he were trying to get his mind around the most ordinary human behavior, and in the nonministerial, short-sleeved yellow shirt that he was wearing tonight he had a peeled, defenseless look.