Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“Aren’t you excited?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

“Excited,” he repeated in a worried way.

“We’re marrying off our Kate! You are a dark horse, aren’t you?” she said to Kate as she settled herself in an armchair. Pyotr, meanwhile, dragged the rocker he had been sitting on closer to Aunt Thelma. He still had his eyes trained expectantly on her face; he was still beaming. “We didn’t even know you had a beau,” Aunt Thelma told Kate. “We were afraid Bunny might beat you to the altar.”

“Bunny?” Dr. Battista said. “Bunny’s fifteen years old.” The corners of his mouth were turned down, and he still hadn’t taken a seat. He was standing in front of the fireplace.

“Sit, Father,” Kate said. “Aunt Thelma, what can I get you to drink? Uncle Theron’s having ginger ale.”

She mentioned the ginger ale because she had just learned that her father had picked up only one bottle of wine — her mistake, entrusting him with the errand — and she was hoping no one would ask for any wine until dinner. But her aunt said, “White wine, please,” and then turned to Pyotr, who was still waiting with bated breath for any pearls that might drop from her lips. “Tell us, now,” she said, “how—?”

“We only have red,” Kate said.

“Red it will have to be, then. Pyoder, how—?”

“Uncle Barclay?” Kate said.

“Yes, I’ll have some red.”

“ How did you and Kate meet?” Aunt Thelma finally managed to ask.

Pyotr said promptly, “She came to Dr. Battista’s lab. I expected nothing. I thought, ‘Living at home, no boyfriend…’ Then she appeared. Tall. Hair like Italian movie star.”

Kate left the room.

When she returned with the wine, Pyotr had moved on to her inner qualities and Aunt Thelma was smiling and nodding and looking charmed. “She is somewhat like the girls at home,” he was saying. “Honest. Tells what she is thinking.”

“ I’ll say,” Aunt Thelma murmured.

“But in truth she is kindhearted. Thoughtful.”

“Why, Kate!” Aunt Thelma said in a congratulatory tone.

“Takes care of people,” Pyotr went on. “Tends small children.”

“Ah. And will you continue with that?” Aunt Thelma asked Kate as she accepted her wine.

Kate said, “What?”

“Will you continue at the preschool once you’re married?”

“Oh,” Kate said. She had thought Aunt Thelma was asking how long she could keep up her charade. “Yes, of course.”

“She does not need to,” Pyotr said. “I can support her,” and he flung out one arm in a grand gesture, nearly knocking over his glass. (He too had opted for wine, unfortunately.) “If she likes, she may retire now. Or go to college! Go to Hopkins! I will pay. She is my responsibility now.”

“What?” Kate said. “I’m not your responsibility! I’m my own responsibility.”

Aunt Thelma tut-tutted. Pyotr just smiled around the room at the others, as if inviting them to share his amusement.

“Good girl,” Uncle Barclay said unexpectedly.

“Well, once you have children that will be a moot point anyhow,” Aunt Thelma said. “May I ask what wine we’re drinking, Louis?”

“Eh?” Dr. Battista was giving her a distressed look.

“This wine is delicious.”

“Oh,” he said.

He didn’t seem all that thrilled to hear it, even though it might have been the first compliment Aunt Thelma had ever paid him.

“Tell me, Pyoder,” Aunt Thelma said, “will any of your family be coming to the wedding?”

“No,” Pyotr said, still beaming at her.

“Old classmates, then? Colleagues? Friends?”

“I do have friend from my institute, but he is in California,” Pyotr said.

“Oh! Are you close?” Aunt Thelma asked.

“He is in California.”

“I mean…is he someone you’d want at your wedding?”

“No, no, that would be ridiculous. Wedding is five minutes.”

“Oh, surely it will last longer than that .”

Uncle Theron said, “Take his word for it, Thelma; they’ve asked for the stripped-down version.”

“My kind of ceremony,” Uncle Barclay said approvingly. “Short and sweet.”

“Hush, Barclay,” Aunt Thelma told him. “You don’t mean that. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event! That’s why I can’t believe that you and I are not invited.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Aunt Thelma’s own social instincts got the better of her; she was the one who spoke up. “Tell us, Kate, what will you wear?” she asked. “I would love to take you shopping.”

“Oh, I think I’m set,” Kate said.

“I know you couldn’t have hoped to fit into the dress your poor mother wore to her wedding…”

Kate wished that, just once, Aunt Thelma would refer to her mother without using the word “poor.”

Maybe her father felt the same way, because he interrupted to ask, “Isn’t it time to get supper on the table?”

“Yes, Father,” Kate said.

As she stood up, Uncle Theron was asking Pyotr whether he was allowed to practice religion in his country. “Why I would want to do that?” Pyotr said, looking honestly curious.

Kate felt glad to be leaving the room.

The men had done the cooking earlier that afternoon — sautéed chicken on a bed of grated jicama, drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce since the other evening’s maple syrup had not been deemed a success. All Kate had to do was set the platter out on the table and toss the salad. As she walked back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she caught snatches of the talk in the living room. She heard Uncle Theron utter the phrase “premarital counseling,” and she stiffened, but then Pyotr said, “Is so confusing, the two types of ‘counsel.’ I am mixed up how to spell them,” and Aunt Thelma was delighted to jump in and give him an English lesson, so the moment passed. Kate wasn’t sure whether he’d changed the subject on purpose.

He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “ jumped the gun !” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.

He was still undeniably foreign, though. Even his posture was foreign; he walked in a foreign way that was more upright, shorter in stride. He had the foreigner’s tendency toward bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse. “Even a fool can see you’re after something,” she would say, and he would affect a perplexed look. Hearing him now in the living room, pontificating about the hidden perils of ice water, she felt embarrassed by him, and embarrassed for him, and filled with a mixture of pity and impatience.

But just then a pair of sharp heels came clicking across the dining room. “Kate? Do you need any help?” Aunt Thelma called in a loud, false, carrying voice, and a moment later she slipped through the kitchen door to put an arm around Kate’s waist and whisper, on a winey breath, “He’s a cutie !”