Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(11)

“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.





“Happy Tuesday, children,” Mrs. Darling said, and then she asked Kate to come to her office again.

This time Kate couldn’t leave her class during Quiet Rest Time, because Mrs. Chauncey was out sick. And on Tuesdays she was responsible for Extended Daycare once school was over. So she would be forced to stay in suspense from lunchtime until 5:30.

She didn’t have the slightest idea what Mrs. Darling wanted to see her about. But then, she seldom did. The etiquette in this place was so mysterious! Or the customs, or the conventions, or whatever…Like not showing strangers the soles of your feet or something. She tried to cast her mind back over anything she might have done wrong, but how much could she have done wrong between yesterday afternoon and noon today? She had made a point of keeping her interactions with parents to a minimum, and she didn’t think Mrs. Darling could have heard about her little tantrum this morning when she couldn’t get Antwan’s jacket unzipped. “Stupid goddamn-to-hell frigging modern life,” she had muttered. But it was life she was cursing, not Antwan, and surely he’d understood that. Besides, he didn’t seem like the kind of kid who’d go running off to tattle on people, even if he’d had the opportunity.

It had been one of those double-type zippers that could be opened from the bottom while the top stayed closed, and she’d ended up having to take the jacket off by yanking it over his head. She detested that kind of zipper. It was a presumptuous zipper; it wanted to figure out your every possible need without your say-so.

She tried to remember how Mrs. Darling had worded her threat from the day before. She hadn’t said anything about “Just one more offense and you’re out,” had she? No, it had been less specific than that. It had been something like the vague “or else” that grown-ups were always threatening children with, that children eventually realized was not as dire as it sounded.

The phrase “thin ice” had been involved, she seemed to recollect.

How would she fill her days if she had no job anymore? There was absolutely nothing else whatsoever in her life—no reason she could think of to get out of bed every morning.

Yesterday at Show and Tell, Chloe Smith had talked about a visit she’d paid to a petting farm over the weekend. She had seen some baby goats, she said, and Kate had said, “Lucky!” (She had a soft spot for goats.) She asked, “Were they doing that frolicking thing that goats do when they’re happy?”

“Yes, a few of them were just barely beginning to fly,” Chloe said, and it had been such a matter-of-fact description, so concrete and unsurprised, that Kate had experienced a jolt of pure pleasure.

Funny how you have to picture losing a thing before you think you might value it after all.

At 5:40, the very last mother collected the very last child—a Room 5 mother, Mrs. Amherst, late for her son’s whole career here—and Kate had given her very last fake smile, rigidly tight-lipped so that no unfortunate words could escape her. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath and headed to Mrs. Darling’s office.

Mrs. Darling was watering her houseplants. She had probably used up all other ways of killing time. Kate hoped she hadn’t let boredom turn her irritable, as it would have Kate herself if she had been the one waiting, so she began by saying, “I am really, really sorry I’m late. It was Mrs. Amherst’s fault.”