Anne Tyler: Vinegar Girl

Kate, on the other hand, was not in the least like their mother. Kate was dark-skinned and big-boned and gawky. She would have looked absurd gnawing on a finger, and nobody had ever called her sweet.

Kate was una bitcha .

—

“Katherine, my dear!”

Kate turned from the stove, startled. Her father stood in the doorway with a shiny smile on his face. “How was your day?” he asked her.

“It was all right.”

“Things went well?”

“Semi-okay.”

“Excellent!” He continued standing there. As a rule, he returned from his lab in a funk, his mind still occupied with whatever he had been working on, but maybe today he’d had a breakthrough of some sort. “You walked to work, I guess,” he said.

“Well, sure,” she said. She always walked, unless the weather was truly miserable.

“And you had a nice walk home?”

“Yup,” she said. “I ran into your assistant, by the way.”

“ Did you!”

“Yup.”

“Wonderful! How was he?”

“How was he?” Kate repeated. “Don’t you know how he was?”

“I mean, what did you talk about?”

She tried to remember. “Hair?” she said.

“Ah.” He went on smiling. “What else?” he asked finally.

“That was it, I guess.”

She turned back to the stove. She was reheating the concoction they had for supper every night. Meat mash, they called it, but it was mainly dried beans and green vegetables and potatoes, which she mixed with a small amount of stewed beef every Saturday afternoon and puréed into a grayish sort of paste to be served throughout the week. Her father was the one who had invented it. He couldn’t understand why everybody didn’t follow the same system; it provided all the requisite nutrients and saved so much time and decision-making.

“Father,” she said, lowering the gas flame, “did you know Bunny’s arranged for Edward Mintz to be her Spanish tutor?”

“Who is Edward Mintz?”

“Edward next door, Father. He was over here this afternoon when I got home from work. Here in the house, incidentally, which you’ll recall is against the rules. And we have no idea if he’s any good as a tutor. I don’t even know what she told him we would pay him. Did she ask you about this?”

“Well, I believe she…yes, I seem to recollect she said she wasn’t doing well in Spanish.”

“Yes, and you said she should go ahead and find a tutor, but why didn’t she get in touch with that place that’s supplying her math tutor and her English tutor? Why did she hire a neighbor boy?”

“She must have had good reason,” her father said.

“I don’t know why you assume that,” Kate told him. She banged her spoon against the side of the pot to dislodge the clump of mash that was stuck to it.

It always amazed her to see how ignorant her father was about normal everyday life. The man existed in a vacuum. Their housekeeper used to say it was because he was so smart. “He has very important matters on his mind,” she would say. “Wiping out worldwide disease and such.”

“Well, that shouldn’t mean he can’t have us on his mind besides,” Kate had said. “It’s like those mice of his matter more to him than we do. Like he doesn’t even care about us!”

“Oh, he does, honey! He does. He just can’t show it. It’s like he…never learned the language, or something; like he comes from another planet. But I promise you he cares about you.”

Their housekeeper would have thoroughly approved of Mrs. Darling’s Something Nice rule.

“When I mentioned Pyoder’s visa the other day,” her father was saying, “I’m not sure you fully understood the problem. His visa is good for three years. He’s been here two years and ten months.”

“Gee,” Kate said. She turned off the burner and picked up the pot by both handles. “Excuse me.”

He backed out of the doorway. She walked past him into the dining room, where she set the pot on the trivet that waited permanently in the center of the table.

Although the dining room was decorated with formal, genteel furniture handed down by Thea’s ancestors, it had taken on a haphazard appearance after her death. Vitamin bottles and opened mail and various office supplies crowded the silver service on the sideboard. The unset end of the table bore a stack of receipts and a calculator and a budget book and a sheaf of income-tax forms. It always fell to Kate to do the taxes, and now she glanced guiltily at her father, who had followed on her heels. (They were perilously close to tax day.) But he was intent on his own line of thought. “You see the difficulty,” he said. He followed her back to the kitchen. She took a carton of yogurt from the fridge. “Excuse me,” she said again. He followed her into the dining room again. He had both fists balled up in the deep front pockets of his coveralls, which made it seem as if he were carrying a muff. “In two more months he’ll be forced to leave the country,” he said.

“Can’t you get his visa renewed?”

“Theoretically, I can. But it’s all about who’s applying for him — whether that person’s project is important enough, and I suspect that some of my colleagues think mine has gone off the deep end. Well, what do they know, right? I’m on to something here, I really feel it; I’m about to discover one single, unified key to autoimmune disorders. Still, Immigration’s going to say I should just get along without him. Ever since nine-eleven, Immigration’s been so unreasonable.”

“Huh,” Kate said. They were back in the kitchen. She chose three apples from the bowl on the counter. “So who will you get instead?”

“Instead!” her father said. He stared at her. “Kate,” he said. “This is Pyoder Cherbakov! Now that I’ve worked with Pyoder Cherbakov, nobody else will do.”

“Well, it sounds to me as if somebody else will have to do,” Kate said. “Excuse me,” she said again. She returned to the dining room, with her father once more following, and placed an apple above each plate.

“I’m ruined,” her father said. “I’m doomed. I might as well abandon my research.”

“Heavens, Father.”

“Unless, perhaps, we could get him an…adjustment of status.”

“Oh, good. Get him an adjustment of status.”

She brushed past him and went out to the hall. “Bunny!” she shouted up the stairs. “Supper’s on!”

“We could adjust his status to ‘married to an American.’ ”

“Pyotr’s married to an American?”

“Well, not quite yet,” her father said. He trailed her back to the dining room. “But he’s fairly nice-looking, I believe. Don’t you agree? All those girls working in the building: they seem to find different reasons to talk to him.”

“So could he marry a girl in the building?” Kate asked. She sat down at her place and shook out her napkin.

“I don’t think so,” her father said. “He doesn’t…the conversations never seem to develop any further, unfortunately.”

“Then who?”

Her father sat down at the head of the table. He cleared his throat. He said, “You, maybe?”

“Very funny,” she told him. “Oh, where is that girl? Bernice Battista!” she shouted. “Get down here this instant!”

“I am down,” Bunny said, arriving in the doorway. “You don’t have to blast my ears off.”

She plopped herself in the chair across from Kate. “Hi, Poppy,” she said.

There was a long silence, during which Dr. Battista seemed to be dragging himself up from the depths. Finally he said, “Hello, Bunny.” His voice had a mournful, hollow sound.

Bunny raised her eyebrows at Kate. Kate shrugged and picked up the serving spoon.