Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“Mrs. Murphy thinks maybe she can give us desk. She has many extra furnitures.”

Kate set her suitcases down and went to look out the window. Below her lay the backyard, long and green and framed by shrubbery, some of which she thought might be rosebushes. She had never had enough sun before for roses. At the far end of the yard, just inside the picket fence, she spotted a rectangle of spaded earth that must be Pyotr’s vegetable garden.

“Come see the rest of apartment,” he told her.

He returned to the doorway but then stood aside to let her go first, and as she walked past him she became acutely aware of his physical proximity. For all her thoughts about how this apartment would be just another coed dorm, it occurred to her that in fact, she was going to be living alone with a man; and when he crossed the hall to open another door and say, “ My room,” she barely glanced in (double bed, nightstand…) before backing away. Perhaps he sensed her discomfort, because he quickly shut the door again. “Bathroom,” he said, waving toward the half-open door at the end of the hall, but he didn’t suggest she step inside. “Is only the one; I am sorry we must share.”

“Oh, that’s okay; at home I share with two people,” she said, and she gave a little laugh, but he didn’t laugh himself.

He led her next to the living room, which contained only a sagging couch, a fake-woodgrain coffee table, and an old-fashioned tube TV on a wheeled metal cart. “Couch looks old but is soft,” he said. He seemed to be studying the couch intently; there was nothing more to be seen in this room, but he made no move to leave.

“One time in high school,” he said, “I went home with classmate to work on project. I slept the night there. In my bed I heard his parents talk downstairs. See, this classmate was not orphan boy but normal.”

Kate glanced at him curiously.

“I heard just the parents’ voices, not words. Parents sat together in the living room. Wife said, ‘Mumble mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble.’ Wife said, ‘Mumble, mumble, mumble?’ Husband said, ‘Mumble mumble.’ ”

Kate couldn’t imagine where Pyotr was heading with this.

He said, “You would maybe sit sometimes in this living room with me? You would say ‘Mumble?’ And I would say ‘Mumble mumble.’ ”

“Or you could say ‘Mumble?’ and I could say ‘Mumble mumble,’ ” Kate suggested. Meaning that she saw no reason why he couldn’t be the tentative one and she the more definite. But she could tell he didn’t get her point. He looked at her with his forehead crinkling. “Sure,” she said finally. “We could do that sometimes.”

“O- kay !” he said, and he let out an enormous breath and started smiling.

“Kitchen?” she reminded him.

“Kitchen,” he said, and he waved her toward the door.

The kitchen lay at the rear of the house, nearest the top of the stairs. It must once have been a storeroom; the walls were cedar, still faintly aromatic. There was a 1950s look to it that was oddly appealing: rusty white metal cabinets, peeling Formica counters, a thickly painted white wooden table with two red chairs. “Nice,” Kate said.

“You like it?”

“Yup.”

“You like the whole place?”

“Yup.”

“I know it is not fancy.”

“It’s very nice. Very comfortable,” she said, and she meant it.

He let out another breath. “Now we go meet Mrs. Murphy,” he said.

Standing back again to let her leave the room first, he drew himself inward to allow an exaggerated amount of space for her to pass, as if to make it clear that he would not presume. Evidently she hadn’t managed to hide the awkwardness she was feeling.

—

Mrs. Murphy was a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a lace-trimmed dress and orthopedic shoes. Mrs. Liu was tiny and wiry, and like many older Asian women she wore what could have been men’s clothes: an untucked khaki work shirt and boxy brown trousers and blindingly white sneakers. The two of them seemed embedded among the antimacassared chairs and the fussy little tables and the shelves of bric-a-brac, and they emerged only by degrees, Mrs. Liu pushing Mrs. Murphy’s wheelchair forward several seconds after Pyotr and Kate stepped through the door. “Is this our Kate?” Mrs. Murphy called out.

Kate almost looked behind her for someone else; it seemed so unlikely that she could be “our” Kate. But Mrs. Murphy was holding out both hands, forcing Kate to step closer and take them in her own. Mrs. Murphy’s hands were large and thick-fingered and meaty. She was so large all over, in fact, that Kate wondered how Pyotr could lift her. “You look just the way Pyoder described you,” Mrs. Murphy was saying. “We thought maybe he was overstating out of smittenness. Welcome, dear Kate! Welcome to your new home.”

“Well…thanks,” Kate said.

“Has he given you the grand tour yet?”

“I have showed her everywhere except yard,” Pyotr said.

“Oh, you have to see the yard, of course. We hear you’re going to be planting up a storm.”

“Well, um, if that’s all right with you ,” Kate said. It occurred to her that she had no idea if Mrs. Murphy had been consulted.

“It’s more than all right,” Mrs. Murphy said, at the same time that Mrs. Liu put in, “Will be flowers, though, yes?” Although Mrs. Liu’s accent was very different from Pyotr’s, she seemed to have the same trouble with pronouns. “This Pyoder is all useful things! Cucumbers, cabbages, radishes! She has no poetry.”

“ He has no poetry,” Pyotr corrected her. (Not even Pyotr confused his genders.) “Kate will plant flowers and vegetables both. Maybe will someday be botanist.”

“Good! You should be botanist too, Pyoder. Get outdoors in sunshine. See how pale?” Mrs. Liu asked Kate. “He is like mushroom!”

If Mrs. Liu were standing closer to Pyotr, she would have nudged him in the ribs, Kate suspected. In fact, both women were looking at him with amusement and affection, and Pyotr was positively basking under their gaze. He wore a serene half-smile and he slid his eyes toward Kate as if to make sure she appreciated his position here.

“But enough about our mushroom man,” Mrs. Murphy announced. “Kate, you’ll have to tell us what you need for the apartment. Besides a desk, that is; we already know you need a desk. But how about in the kitchen? Did you find enough utensils?”

“Oh, yes,” Kate said. She hadn’t so much as opened a drawer in the kitchen, but somehow she felt the urge to live up to Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her. “Everything looks great,” she said.

“You should check our kitchen for duplicates,” Mrs. Murphy told Mrs. Liu. In turning, she let one foot slip off her footrest, and Pyotr bent without her noticing to lift it back into place. “I know we have at least two electric mixers,” she was saying. “The stand mixer and the handheld one. Surely we don’t need both.”

“ Maybe not…” Mrs. Liu said in a doubtful tone.

“We will go see yard now,” Pyotr decided. “Talk about mixers some other time.”

“All right, Pyoder. Come visit us again, Kate! And you be sure to let us know about any little thing that’s lacking.”

“Sure,” Kate said. “Thanks.” And then — evidently still under the spell of Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her — she stepped forward and gave Mrs. Murphy both her hands again.

Out on the stoop, Pyotr said, “You liked them?”

“They seemed really nice,” Kate said.

“They liked you ,” he said.

“They don’t know me!”

“They know you.”

He was leading the way around the side of the house now, toward the picket fence that separated the front yard from the rear. “In garage,” he said, “are garden tools. I will show you where I hide key.”