Anne Tyler: Vinegar Girl

“Well, I’m not grateful,” Kate said. “I don’t like pasta.”

There was a shocked silence.

“How could you not like pasta?” Jason asked finally.

“It smells like wet dog,” Kate told him. “Haven’t you noticed?”

“Eew!” everyone said.

They lowered their faces to their plates and took a sniff.

“Right?” Kate asked.

They looked at one another.

“It does,” Jason said.

“Like they put my dog Fritz in a big old crab pot and cooked him,” Antwan said.

“ Eew! ”

“But the carrots seem okay,” Kate said. She was beginning to be sorry she’d started this. “Go ahead and eat, everybody.”

A couple of children picked up their forks. Most didn’t.

Kate dipped a hand in her jeans pocket and brought forth a strip of beef jerky. She always carried beef jerky in case lunch didn’t work out; she was a picky eater. She tore off a piece with her teeth and started chewing it. Luckily, none of the children liked beef jerky except for Emma W., who was plowing ahead with her pasta, so Kate didn’t have to share.

“Happy Monday, boys and girls!” Mrs. Darling said, pegging up to their table on her aluminum cane. She made a point of stepping into the lunchroom at some point during each group’s mealtime, and she always managed to work the day of the week into her greeting.

“Happy Monday, Mrs. Darling,” the children murmured, while Kate surreptitiously shifted her mouthful of beef jerky into the pocket of her left cheek.

“Why are so few people eating?” Mrs. Darling asked. (Nothing escaped her.)

“The noodles smell like wet dog,” Chloe said.

“Like what? My goodness!” Mrs. Darling pressed one wrinkled, speckled hand to her pouchy bosom. “It sounds to me as if you’re forgetting the Something Nice rule,” she said. “Children? Who can tell me what the Something Nice rule is?”

Nobody spoke.

“Jason?”

“ ‘If you can’t say something nice,’ ” Jason mumbled, “ ‘don’t say nothing at all.’ ”

“ ‘Don’t say anything at all.’ That’s right. Can somebody say something nice about our lunch today?”

Silence.

“Miss Kate? Can you say something nice?”

“Well, it’s certainly…shiny,” Kate said.

Mrs. Darling gave her a long, level look, but all she said was “All right, children. Have a good lunch.” And she clomped off toward Mrs. Chauncey’s table.

“It’s as shiny as a shiny wet dog,” Kate whispered to the children.

They went into shrieks of laughter. Mrs. Darling paused and then pivoted on her cane.

“Oh, by the way, Miss Kate,” she said, “could you stop in at my office during Quiet Rest Time today?”

“Sure,” Kate said.

She swallowed her mouthful of beef jerky.

The children turned to her with their eyes very large. Even four-year-olds knew that being called to the office was not a good thing.

“ We like you,” Jason told her after a moment.

“Thanks, Jason.”

“When me and my brother grow up,” David Samson said, “we’re going to marry you.”

“Well, thank you.”

Then she clapped her hands and said, “Know what? Dessert today is cookie dough ice cream.”

The children made little “Mm” sounds, but their expressions remained worried.

—

They had barely finished their ice cream when the five-year-olds arrived in the lunchroom doorway, tumbling all over one another and spilling out of line. Hulking, intimidating giants, they seemed to Kate from the confines of her little world, although only last year they had been her Fours. “Let’s go, children!” Mrs. Chauncey called, heaving herself to her feet. “We’re holding people up here. Say thank you to Mrs Washington.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Washington,” the children chorused. Mrs. Washington, standing by the door to the kitchen, smiled and nodded regally and wrapped her hands in her apron. (The Little People’s School was very big on manners.) The Fours fell into a line of sorts and threaded out past the Fives in a shrinking, deferential way, with Kate bringing up the rear. As she passed Georgina, Room 5’s assistant, she murmured, “I have to go to the office.”

“Eek!” Georgina said. “Well, good luck with that.” She was a pleasant-faced, rosy-cheeked young woman, hugely pregnant with her first child. She had never had to go to the office, Kate would bet.

In Room 4, she unlocked the supply closet to haul out the stacks of aluminum cots that the children took their naps on. She spaced them out around the room and distributed the blankets and the miniature pillows the children kept in their cubbies, as usual thwarting a plan among the four most talkative little girls to sleep all together in one corner. Ordinarily Mrs. Chauncey spent Quiet Rest Time in the faculty lounge, but today she’d returned to Room 4 after lunch, and now she settled herself at her desk and pulled a Baltimore Sun from her tote bag. She must have overheard Mrs. Darling summoning Kate to her office.

Liam D. said he wasn’t sleepy. He said the same thing every day, and then he was the one Kate had to rouse from a deathlike stupor when it was Playground Time. She tucked his blanket underneath him on all sides the way he liked — a white flannel blanket with two yellow stripes that he still called his “blankie” if the other boys weren’t near enough to hear him. Then Jilly needed her ponytail undone so the clasp wouldn’t poke her in the head when she lay down. Kate slipped the clasp under Jilly’s pillow and said, “Remember where it is, now, so you can find it when you get up.” She would probably be back in time to remind her, but what if she were not? What if she were told to pack her things and leave? She ran her fingers through Jilly’s hair to loosen it — soft brown hair with a silky feel to it, smelling of baby shampoo and crayons. She wouldn’t be here to help Antwan work through his little bullying problem; she would never know how Emma B. dealt with the new sister who was coming from China in June.

It wasn’t true that she hated children. At least, a few she liked okay. It was just that she didn’t like all children, as if they were uniform members of some microphylum or something.

But she put on a breezy tone when she told Mrs. Chauncey, “Back in a jiff!”

Mrs. Chauncey just smiled at her (unsuspectingly? pityingly?) and turned a page of her newspaper.

Mrs. Darling’s office was next to Room 2, where the children were so little that they slept on floor pads instead of cots because they might roll off. Their room was dimmed, she could see through the single pane of glass in the door, and an intense, purposeful hush seemed to emanate from it.

The glass in Mrs. Darling’s door revealed Mrs. Darling at her desk, talking on the telephone while she leafed through a sheaf of papers. She said a quick good-bye and hung up, though, as soon as Kate knocked. “Come in,” she called.

Kate walked in and dropped onto the straight-backed chair facing the desk.

“We’ve finally got an estimate for replacing that stained carpeting,” Mrs. Darling told her.

“Huh,” Kate said.

“The question, though, is why is it stained? Clearly there’s some sort of leak, and till we figure it out there’s no sense laying new carpet.”

Kate had nothing to say to this, so she said nothing.

“Well,” Mrs. Darling said. “But enough about that.”

She aligned her papers efficiently and placed them in a folder. Then she reached for another folder. (Kate’s folder? Did Kate have a folder? What on earth would be inside it?) She opened it and studied the top sheet of paper for a moment, and then she peered across at Kate over the rims of her glasses. “So,” she said. “Kate. I’m wondering. How, exactly, would you assess your performance here?”