Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(18)
Now Adam sauntered over to her and said, “Have you ever noticed that certain days are injury days?”
“Injury days?”
“That kid just now, with her elbow; and then this morning one of my boys sharpened his index finger in the pencil sharpener—”
“Ooh!” she said, wincing.
“—and just before lunch Tommy Bass knocked his front tooth out and we had to call his mother to come get him—”
“Ooh, that is an injury day,” Kate said. “Did you put the tooth in milk?”
“In milk.”
“You put it in a cup of milk and it has a chance of being re-implanted?”
“Gosh, no, I didn’t,” Adam said. “I just wadded it up in a Kleenex in case they wanted it for the tooth fairy.”
“Well, don’t worry; it was only a baby tooth.”
“How do you know about the milk trick?” he asked.
“Oh, I just do,” she said.
She couldn’t figure out where to put her hands so she started swinging her arms back and forth from her shoulders, till she remembered that Bunny had told her she looked like a boy when she did that. (Count on Bunny.) She stopped swinging her arms and stuffed her hands in her rear pockets. “I had a grown-up tooth knocked out by a baseball when I was nine,” she said. Then she realized how unfeminine that sounded and so she added, “I was just walking past a game on my way home? Was how it happened. But our housekeeper knew to put the tooth in milk.”
“Well, it must have worked,” Adam said, looking at her more closely. “You have great teeth.”
“Oh, aren’t you…isn’t it nice of you to say so?” Kate said.
She started drawing arcs in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. Then Sophia walked over, and she and Adam began discussing a recipe for no-knead bread.
During Afternoon Activity Hour, the ballerina doll and the sailor doll had one of their breakups. (Kate wasn’t aware that they had gotten back together.) This time they were breaking up because the sailor doll had been inappropriate. “Please, Cordelia,” Emma G. said, speaking for the sailor, “I’ll never be inappropriate again, I promise.” But the ballerina said, “Well, I’m sorry, but I have given you chance after chance and now you are walking on my last nerve.” Then Jameesha fell off a stepstool and developed a giant lump on her forehead, proving Adam’s point about injury days; and after Kate had managed to divert her, Chloe and Emma W. got into a shouting quarrel. “Girls! Girls!” Mrs. Chauncey said. She had a lower tolerance for discord than Kate did. Chloe said, “It’s not fair! Emma W.’s hogging the child dolls! She has Drink-and-Wet and Squeaky Baby and Anatomically Correct, and all I have is this dumb old wooden Pinocchio!” Mrs. Chauncey turned toward Kate, clearly expecting her to mediate, but Kate just told them, “Well, sort it out,” and walked off to see what the boys were doing. One of the boys had a doll as well (a child doll, she saw), and he was sliding it facedown along the floor and saying “Vroom, vroom” as if it were a truck, which seemed a waste, since child dolls were in such demand today, but Kate wasn’t up to dealing with it. The wounded feeling had spread from her chest to her left shoulder, and she wondered if she were having a heart attack. She would have welcomed it.
—
Walking home at the end of the day, she reviewed her conversation with Adam. “Ooh!” she had said, not once but twice, in that artificial, girlie way she detested, and her voice had come out higher-pitched than usual and her sentences had slanted upward at the end. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “Isn’t it nice of you to say so?” she’d asked. Mrs. Gordon’s miniature Japanese maple brushed her face as she passed, and she gave it a vicious swat. As she approached the Mintzes’ house their front door opened, and she speeded up so as not to have to speak to anyone.
Bunny wasn’t home yet. Good. Kate slung her bag onto the hall bench and went to the kitchen for something to eat. Her stomach had begun to notice that she had skipped lunch. She cut herself a chunk of cheddar and strolled around the kitchen as she munched on it, assessing what she would need to pick up tomorrow at the grocery store. If she cooked next week’s meat mash without the meat (which she had decided she would do, just to call Bunny’s bluff?), she would have to increase some other ingredient—the lentils, maybe, or the yellow split peas. Her father’s recipe was calibrated so that they finished the dish completely on Friday evenings. But this past week had been an exception: since Bunny had turned vegetarian she had not been doing her part, and even the addition of Pyotr on Tuesday, wolfish eater though he had been, had not made up for it. They were going to be left with extras tomorrow, and her father would be unhappy.
Reluctantly, she deleted stew beef from the shopping list. The list was computer-generated—her father’s work, the household’s usual supplies arranged according to their order in the supermarket aisles—and all she had to do every week was cross off what wasn’t needed. Today she crossed off the salami sticks Bunny ordinarily snacked on; she left beef jerky uncrossed and she added shampoo, which her father had not included in his prototype list because it was his opinion that a bar of plain soap would do the same job for a fraction of the price.
In the old days, when they still had their housekeeper, things had been less regimented. Not that Dr. Battista hadn’t tried; Mrs. Larkin’s easygoing ways used to drive him to distraction. “What’s wrong with just writing down what I want whenever I think of it?” she’d asked when he’d urged his list on her. “It’s not that hard: carrots, peas, chicken…” (Mrs. Larkin used to make a wonderful chicken potpie.) Out of his hearing, she had warned Kate not ever to let a man meddle with the housework. “He’ll get all carried away with it,” she’d said, “and your life won’t never be your own after that.”