Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

—

It wasn’t bridal jitters.

It was “Why is everyone going along with this? Why are you allowing this? Isn’t anyone going to stop me?”

The previous Tuesday — Kate’s day for Extended Daycare — she had returned to Room 4 after herding the last child into the last parent’s car, and all the teachers and all the assistants had jumped up from the miniature chairs shouting, “Surprise! Surprise!” In the short time that she had been gone, they had assembled from wherever they’d been hiding to cover Mrs. Chauncey’s desk with a paper tablecloth and set out refreshments and paper cups and a stack of paper plates, and on the Lego table an upside-down lace parasol spilled tissue-wrapped gifts. Adam was strumming his guitar and Mrs. Darling was holding court behind the punch bowl. “Did you know? Did you guess?” they kept asking Kate, and she said, “It never crossed my mind,” which was absolutely true. “I don’t know what to say!” she kept saying. They pressed their gifts on her with long-winded explanations: these mugs were ordered in blue but when they arrived they were green; this salad bowl was dishwasher-proof; she was welcome to exchange this carving set if she already had one. They settled her in the place of honor — Mrs. Chauncey’s desk chair — and served her pink-and-white cupcakes and homemade brownies. Adam sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Mrs. Fairweather asked if they could see a photo of Pyotr. (Kate showed them the restaurant photo on her cell phone. Several people said he was good-looking.) Georgina wanted to know if Kate was planning to bring him to Room 4 for Show and Tell, but Kate said, “Oh, he can’t possibly spare the time away from his research”—picturing, meanwhile, how Pyotr would have reveled in being put on display, how he would have turned the whole event into some kind of circus. And Mrs. Bower advised her to make it clear from the get-go that he should pick his own socks up.

It seemed they viewed her differently now. She had status. She mattered. All at once they were interested in what she had to say.

She hadn’t fully understood that before this, she hadn’t mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified. And also fraudulent. It was confusing.

Would getting married have any effect on her probation? She couldn’t help wondering. She hadn’t been called to the office even once since she had announced her engagement, she realized.

Adam’s gift was a dream catcher. The hoop was made of willow, he said. He had wound it in strips of suede, and then he had added beads like those on the dream catcher he had given Georgina for her coming baby, and feathers like those on the dream catcher he had given Sophia. “Now, this open space at the center,” he said, taking it from Kate to demonstrate, “is supposed to let the good dreams slip through, and this webbing around the edge is supposed to block the bad dreams.”

“That’s lovely, Adam,” Kate said.

He placed it in her hands again. He seemed sad about something, or was she deluding herself? He looked directly into her eyes and said, “I want you to know, Kate, that I wish you only good in your life.”

“Thank you, Adam,” she said. “That means a great deal to me.”

The forecast had been for rain that day, and Kate had taken the car to work. Driving home, with mugs and pots and candlesticks rattling in the backseat among her father’s lab supplies, she had smacked the steering wheel with the flat of her hand. “ ‘That’s lovely, Adam,’ ” she quoted herself in a high-pitched, mincing voice. “ ‘That means a great deal to me.’ ”

And she balled up her fist and punched her own forehead.

—

Aunt Thelma asked Kate if she were planning to be Kate Cherbakov (pronouncing it as her brother-in-law did). “Definitely not,” Kate said. Even if this marriage had not been temporary, she was opposed to the notion of brides changing their names. And Pyotr, to her relief, chimed in with “ No , no, no.” But then he added, “Will be Shcherbakov- ah . Female ending, because she is girl.”

“Woman,” Kate said.

“Because she is woman.”

“I’m sticking with Battista,” Kate told her aunt.

Uncle Theron said, perhaps in context, “I was telling Pyoder in the living room that I like to suggest a little counseling session to couples before I marry them.”

“Oh, what a good idea!” Aunt Thelma exclaimed, as if this were the first she’d heard of it.

“We don’t need counseling,” Kate said.

“Issues like whether you plan to change your last name, though—” Uncle Theron began.

“Do not worry,” Pyotr said hastily. “Is not important. Is only a brand of canned peaches.”

“Excuse me?”

“We’ll settle it between ourselves,” Kate told everyone. “Who wants more chicken?”

The chicken was all right, she supposed, but the pink-peppercorn sauce tasted weird. She was looking forward to raiding her stash of beef jerky as soon as she was alone again.

“I don’t know whether Kate mentioned it,” Aunt Thelma was saying to Pyotr, “but I’m an interior decorator.”

“Ah!”

Kate had the impression that Pyotr didn’t have the slightest inkling what an interior decorator was.

“Will you two be living in a house, or in an apartment?” Aunt Thelma asked him.

“Apartment, I think you would call it,” Pyotr said. “Is inside a house, however. Widow’s house; Mrs. Murphy’s. I have top floor.”

“But after they marry, he’s moving in with us,” Dr. Battista said.

Aunt Thelma frowned. Pyotr frowned too. Bunny said, “With us?”

“No,” Pyotr said, “I have whole top floor of Mrs. Murphy’s house, rent-free because I lift Mrs. Murphy from wheelchair to car and I change her light bulbs. Is only a walk to Dr. Battista’s lab, and every window I look out of, I see trees. This spring there is a bird nest! Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, bathroom. No dining room, but kitchen has table.”

“It sounds darling,” Aunt Thelma said.

“After the wedding, though, he’ll live here,” Dr. Battista said.

“I am allowed to use whole backyard, big, large, huge, sunny backyard, because Mrs. Murphy cannot go there in wheelchair. I plant cucumbers and radishes. Kate could maybe plant also.” He turned to Kate. “You wish to plant vegetables? Or only flowers.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, yes, I’d like to plant vegetables. At least, I think I would. I’ve never had a vegetable garden before.”

“But I thought we discussed this,” Dr. Battista said.

“We discussed this and I said no,” Pyotr said.

Aunt Thelma took on a gleeful expression. “Louis,” she said, “face it. Your little girl has grown up.”

“I realize that, but the understanding was that she and Pyoder will live here.”

Bunny said, “No one told me that! I thought they were living at Pyoder’s! I thought I was going to get Kate’s room now. With the window seat?”

“It makes much more sense for them to live here,” her father told her. “We would just rattle around in this big house all by ourselves.”

“Whatever happened to ‘Whither thou goest, I will go’?” Bunny asked.

Uncle Theron cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “those words were spoken to a mother-in-law. People never seem to realize that.”

“To a mother -in-law?”

“Is entire top floor of house,” Pyotr was telling Dr. Battista. “Second bedroom is study now, but I am going to change it to bedroom for Kate.”

Aunt Thelma sat up alertly. Her husband grinned and said, “Well, now. I seriously doubt if Kate will require her own bedroom.”

Aunt Thelma waited for Pyotr’s response as intently as a pointer narrowing in on a quail, but Pyotr was too busy staring down Dr. Battista.