Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(36)
“What’s wrong with thirteen at the table?” she asked them. “Are you all really that superstitious? I don’t want any at the table! I don’t know why we’re doing this! I thought we were just going to have a simple little no-frills ceremony, Father and Bunny and Pyotr and me. Everything’s getting out of control here! I don’t know how this happened!”
“There, there, dear,” Aunt Thelma said. She stretched a hand across the table to pat Kate’s place mat, which was the only part of her she could reach. “Thirteen at the table will be fine,” she said. “I was just trying to observe the conventions, that’s all; we’re not the least bit superstitious. Don’t you trouble your head about it. It will all be taken care of. Tell her, Pyoder.”
Pyotr, who was seated next to Kate, leaned closer to sling an arm around her shoulders. “Do not worry, my Katya,” he said, breathing pink-peppercorn fumes.
“Sweet,” Aunt Thelma cooed.
Kate pulled away and reached for her water glass. “I just don’t like fuss,” she told them all, and she took a drink of water.
“Of course you don’t,” Aunt Thelma said soothingly. “And there’s not going to be any fuss; you’ll see. Louis, where’s that wine? Pour her a glass of wine.”
“We finished it, I’m afraid.”
“This is stress, that’s all. It’s bridal jitters. Now, Kate, I just want to ask you one more teeny, tiny question and then I’ll shut up: you’re not going away on the same day as your wedding, are you?”
“Going away?” Kate said.
“On your honeymoon.”
“No.”
She didn’t bother explaining that they wouldn’t be taking a honeymoon.
“Wonderful,” Aunt Thelma said. “I always think it’s such a mistake, starting a long demanding trip right on the heels of the ceremony. So this means we can have our little party in the evening. So much nicer. We’ll make it early, because you’ll have had a big day. Five or five-thirty or so, for the drinks. Now. That’s all I’m going to say. We’re going to change the subject now. Isn’t the chicken interesting! And you men did this? I’m impressed. Bunny, are you not having any?”
“I’m a vegetarian?” Bunny said.
“Oh, yes. Richard went through that stage too.”
“It’s not a—?”
“Thank you, Aunt Thelma,” Kate said.
For once, she really meant it. She found it oddly comforting that her aunt was proving so unflappable.
—
It wasn’t bridal jitters.
It was “Why is everyone going along with this? Why are you allowing this? Isn’t anyone going to stop me?”
The previous Tuesday—Kate’s day for Extended Daycare—she had returned to Room 4 after herding the last child into the last parent’s car, and all the teachers and all the assistants had jumped up from the miniature chairs shouting, “Surprise! Surprise!” In the short time that she had been gone, they had assembled from wherever they’d been hiding to cover Mrs. Chauncey’s desk with a paper tablecloth and set out refreshments and paper cups and a stack of paper plates, and on the Lego table an upside-down lace parasol spilled tissue-wrapped gifts. Adam was strumming his guitar and Mrs. Darling was holding court behind the punch bowl. “Did you know? Did you guess?” they kept asking Kate, and she said, “It never crossed my mind,” which was absolutely true. “I don’t know what to say!” she kept saying. They pressed their gifts on her with long-winded explanations: these mugs were ordered in blue but when they arrived they were green; this salad bowl was dishwasher-proof; she was welcome to exchange this carving set if she already had one. They settled her in the place of honor—Mrs. Chauncey’s desk chair—and served her pink-and-white cupcakes and homemade brownies. Adam sang “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” and Mrs. Fairweather asked if they could see a photo of Pyotr. (Kate showed them the restaurant photo on her cell phone. Several people said he was good-looking.) Georgina wanted to know if Kate was planning to bring him to Room 4 for Show and Tell, but Kate said, “Oh, he can’t possibly spare the time away from his research”—picturing, meanwhile, how Pyotr would have reveled in being put on display, how he would have turned the whole event into some kind of circus. And Mrs. Bower advised her to make it clear from the get-go that he should pick his own socks up.
It seemed they viewed her differently now. She had status. She mattered. All at once they were interested in what she had to say.
She hadn’t fully understood that before this, she hadn’t mattered, and she felt indignant but also, against all logic, gratified. And also fraudulent. It was confusing.
Would getting married have any effect on her probation? She couldn’t help wondering. She hadn’t been called to the office even once since she had announced her engagement, she realized.
Adam’s gift was a dream catcher. The hoop was made of willow, he said. He had wound it in strips of suede, and then he had added beads like those on the dream catcher he had given Georgina for her coming baby, and feathers like those on the dream catcher he had given Sophia. “Now, this open space at the center,” he said, taking it from Kate to demonstrate, “is supposed to let the good dreams slip through, and this webbing around the edge is supposed to block the bad dreams.”