Anne Tyler - Vinegar Girl

“There is poor Edward,” Bunny said, “severely injured; one whole side of his face is swelled up like a pumpkin, so of course his mother called the police. Which means Father here”—and Bunny turned to Dr. Battista; it was the first time in years that Kate had heard her call him “Father”—“ Father had to drop the charges, thank heaven, or else the Mintzes said they would press charges on Pyoder. It was a plea bargain.”

Uncle Barclay said, “Well, I don’t think that’s exactly what they call a—”

“ That’s why you didn’t press charges?” Kate asked her father.

“It seemed expedient,” he said.

“But Pyotr was provoked!” Kate said. “It wasn’t his fault he had to hit Edward.”

“Is true,” Pyotr said, nodding.

Aunt Thelma said, “In any event—”

“Naturally you would say that,” Bunny told Kate. “Naturally you would think Pyoder can do no wrong. It’s like you’ve turned into some kind of zombie. ‘Yes, Pyoder; no, Pyoder,’ following him around all moony. ‘Whatever you say, Pyoder; I’ll do anything you like, Pyoder; certainly I’ll marry you, Pyoder, even if all you’re after is any old U.S. citizen,’ you tell him. Then you show up super-late for your own wedding reception and the two of you are not even dressed, looking all mussed and rumpled like you’ve spent the afternoon making out. It’s disgusting, is what it is. You’ll never see me backing down like that when I have a husband.”

Kate stood up and set her napkin aside. “Fine,” she said. She was conscious of Pyotr’s eyes on her — of everybody’s eyes — and of Uncle Barclay’s highly entertained expression and Aunt Thelma’s tensed posture as she watched for the first possible chance to break in and put an end to this. But Kate focused solely on Bunny. “Treat your husband any way you like,” she said, “but I pity him, whoever he is. It’s hard being a man. Have you ever thought about that? Anything that’s bothering them, men think they have to hide it. They think they should seem in charge, in control; they don’t dare show their true feelings. No matter if they’re hurting or desperate or stricken with grief, if they’re heartsick or they’re homesick or some huge dark guilt is hanging over them or they’re about to fail big-time at something—‘Oh, I’m okay,’ they say. ‘Everything’s just fine.’ They’re a whole lot less free than women are, when you think about it. Women have been studying people’s feelings since they were toddlers; they’ve been perfecting their radar — their intuition or their empathy or their interpersonal whatchamacallit. They know how things work underneath, while men have been stuck with the sports competitions and the wars and the fame and success. It’s like men and women are in two different countries! I’m not ‘backing down,’ as you call it; I’m letting him into my country. I’m giving him space in a place where we can both be ourselves. Lord have mercy, Bunny, cut us some slack !”

Bunny sank onto her chair, looking dazed. She might not have been persuaded, but she was giving up the fight, for now.

Pyotr rose to his feet and placed an arm around Kate’s shoulders. He smiled into her eyes and said, “Kiss me, Katya.”

And she did.

Louie Shcherbakov had a deal with his parents where if they were leaving him with a sitter, he got to fix his own supper. Already he could cook a whole lot better than his mom, and almost as well as his dad. This fall when he entered first grade they were going to start letting him use the stove as long as a grown-up was around, but meanwhile he was allowed the microwave and the toaster oven, and silverware knives but not sharp knives. He was pretty good at cutting up beef jerky with the kitchen shears.

Tonight his parents were going to Washington because his mother was getting a prize. She had won a Plant Ecology Award from the Botanical Federation. All week, Louie had been telling people this. “Mom’s getting a prize from the Butt -anical Federation,” he would say, and then he would fall on the floor laughing. Most people just smiled politely, but if his dad was within hearing he would laugh as hard as Louie. When his dad laughed, his eyes would tip up at the outside corners. Louie’s eyes did that too, and he had his dad’s straight yellow hair. His mom’s aunt Thelma said he looked so much like his dad that it was comical, but Louie didn’t see what was comical about it. Was she talking about he didn’t have big arm muscles like his dad’s arm muscles? But he was getting there.

He put two slices of bread in the toaster oven, and then he hauled the stepstool over to the food cupboard and reached down a can of sardines. He wasn’t all that crazy about sardines, but he liked opening the can with its little tin key. After he’d done that, he took a banana from the bowl on the counter because bananas were miracle food, and he peeled it and cut it into disks with a silverware knife. Then he went out on the landing and called, “Have we got any kidney beans?”

“What? No!” his mom called from his parents’ bedroom.

“Too bad,” he said, mostly to himself. He often ate kidney beans when he went to his grandpa’s house, mashed up with a lot of other stuff. He liked the sourness of them.

“What on earth do you want with kidney beans?” his mom called, but then she added, in a lower voice, “I still don’t see why I can’t just wear pants.”

“This is official occasion, though,” his dad told her. “I myself am wearing suit.”

“ You try wearing a dress sometime. I look like a pet dog decked out by some demented child.”

Louie went back to the kitchen and climbed up on the stepstool again and reached down the squeeze bottle of ketchup. Red would go good, he figured. Red, silver, and beige: ketchup, sardines, and bananas. “Where would be the green?” his dad always liked to ask, but his mom would say, “Oh, give it a rest. I’ve known kids who ate nothing but foods that were white until they left for college, and they were perfectly healthy.”

Most times Louie’s grandpa was his sitter, now that Aunt Bunny had married her personal trainer and moved to New Jersey. His grandpa owned a very old and faded book called Curious Science Facts for Young Folks , and when he came to sit he brought it along to read to Louie, which made Louie feel important and cared for even if he didn’t exactly understand every single word. But tonight his grandpa would be going to Washington too, and so would Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay and Uncle Theron, so Louie was staying downstairs with Mrs. Liu. That was okay, though. Mrs. Liu let him drink Coca-Cola, and her friend Mrs. Murphy had these cool objects in her glass-fronted cabinet: a paperweight with gold stars swirling inside it instead of snowflakes, and a bright red berry with a top that opened to spill out a herd of microscopic white elephants, and a weather-house made of tan wood with a brown wooden roof. A tiny man or woman would come to one of the doors of the house — the woman if it was going to be sunny, the man if it was going to rain. Just about always it was the woman, though, holding her eentsy watering can, while the man stayed back in the shadows under his fingernail-size umbrella even when it was pouring. Louie’s dad said it was a very inexact science.

Mrs. Liu wouldn’t let his parents pay her for babysitting because she was Louie’s auntie, she said. When he was little, Louie had thought she really was his aunt, on account of they had the same name, almost, but then his mom explained that Mrs. Liu was just an honorary aunt. And so was Mrs. Murphy, because this was her house they were living in even though Louie’s grandpa wanted them to move in with him. But Louie’s mom said she wasn’t about to move. She said she’d lived here eleven years now and she was perfectly content, and what did they need more room for; it would only be more to vacuum, and his dad said she was absolutely right.