Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(17)
On her way to Room 4 she gave no more than a nod to any teachers or assistants she saw conversing in the corridor. She said hello to Mrs. Chauncey and she stowed her belongings in the supply closet. As the children entered the room they raced over to catch her up on some piece of urgent news—a pet’s new trick, a scary dream, a present from a grandmother—and often several were speaking at once while Kate stood in their midst as still as a tree and said, “Really. Huh. Just imagine.” It felt like the most tremendous effort, but none of the children seemed to notice that.
She went through the motions of Show and Tell, Story Time, Activity Hour. She took a break in the faculty lounge, where Mrs. Bower was debating cataract surgery or Mrs. Fairweather was asking whether anyone else had ever had bursitis, and they would all pause to greet her and Kate would mumble something like “Mmph” and let her curtain of hair fall forward as she proceeded to the restroom.
Room 4 seemed to be passing through a particularly contentious period, and all the little girls stopped speaking to Liam M. “What did you do to them?” Kate asked him, and he said, “I don’t know what I did.” Kate believed him, too. Sometimes very complicated machinations went on with those little girls. She told Liam M., “Well, never mind, they’ll get over it by and by,” and he nodded and heaved an enormous sigh and threw his shoulders back bravely.
At lunch she would stir her food listlessly around her plate; everything smelled like waxed paper. On Friday she forgot her beef jerky—or rather, she found the drawer at home empty although she could have sworn she still had some—and she didn’t eat a thing except a couple of grapes, but that was okay; she felt not just lacking in appetite but overstuffed, as if that swollen heart of hers had risen in her throat.
At Quiet Rest Time she sat behind Mrs. Chauncey’s desk and stared into space. Ordinarily she would have flipped through Mrs. Chauncey’s discarded newspaper or tidied up some of the more clutter-prone play areas—the Lego corner or the crafts table—but now she just gazed at nothing and racked up points against her father.
He must think she was of no value; she was nothing but a bargaining chip in his single-minded quest for a scientific miracle. After all, what real purpose did she have in her life? And she couldn’t possibly find a man who would love her for herself, he must think, so why not just palm her off on someone who would be useful to him?
It wasn’t that Kate had never had a boyfriend. After she graduated from high school, where the boys had seemed a little afraid of her, she’d had a lot of boyfriends. Or a lot of first dates, at least. Sometimes even second dates. Her father had no business giving up on her like that.
Besides, she was only twenty-nine years old. There was plenty of time to find a husband! Provided she even wanted one, and she was not so sure that she did.
Out on the playground on Friday afternoon, aimlessly kicking a bottle cap across the hard-packed earth, she tortured herself by rehashing all that her father had said to her. He liked the fellow, he’d said. As if that were sufficient reason to marry his daughter off to him! And then the part about how Pyotr’s leaving the project would be such a loss to mankind. Her father didn’t care the least little bit about mankind. That project had become an end in itself. To all intents and purposes, it had no end. It just went on and on, generating its own spinoffs and detours and switchbacks, and no one except other scientists even knew what it was, exactly. Recently, Kate had begun to wonder whether even other scientists knew. It seemed possible that his sponsors had forgotten he existed; that they continued funding him purely from force of habit. He’d been phased out of teaching long ago (she could just picture what kind of teacher he’d made) and stuck away in that series of steadily shrinking and peregrinating laboratories, and when Johns Hopkins established a dedicated autoimmune research center he had not been invited to join. Or maybe he had refused to join; she wasn’t entirely sure. In any case, he just went on working away by himself without, apparently, anyone’s bothering to investigate whether he was making any progress. Though who knew? Perhaps he was making all kinds of progress. But at this particular moment, Kate couldn’t invent a single result that would justify sacrificing his firstborn.
She mistakenly kicked a tuft of grass instead of the bottle cap, and a child waiting for his turn at the swings looked startled.
Natalie might be succeeding in winning Adam’s affections. She looked so pretty and poetic, crouching to console a little girl with a scraped elbow, and Adam stood next to her watching sympathetically. “Why don’t you take her inside for a Band-Aid?” he asked. “I’ll supervise the seesaws,” and Natalie said, “Oh, would you? Thank you, Adam,” and she rose in one graceful motion and shepherded the child toward the building. She was wearing a dress today, which was unusual among the assistants. It swished around her calves seductively, and Adam gazed after her longer than he needed to, it seemed to Kate.
Once, a couple of months ago, Kate had tried wearing a skirt to school herself. Not that it was swishy or anything; actually it was a denim skirt with rivets and a front zip, but she had thought it might make her seem…softer. The older teachers had turned all knowing and glinty. “Somebody’s making a big effort today!” Mrs. Bower had said, and Kate had said, “What, this? It was the only thing not in the wash, is all.” But Adam hadn’t seemed to register its existence. Anyhow, it had proved impractical—hard to climb a jungle gym in—and she couldn’t shake the image of the reflection she had glimpsed in the faculty restroom’s full-length mirror. “Mutton dressed as lamb” was the phrase that had come to mind, although she knew she wasn’t really mutton; not yet. The next day, she had gone back to Levi’s.