Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(38)
She wondered if Pyotr liked chess. He and she could play chess in the evenings, maybe.
“I blame that old popular song,” Uncle Theron was saying. “?‘Whither thou goest…’?” he started singing in a fine-grained, slightly quavery tenor.
“Bunny is too young to be at home without supervision,” Dr. Battista told Pyotr. “You of all people should be aware of my long hours.”
It was true. Bunny would have the house stocked with teenage boys as quick as a wink. Kate experienced a pang of loss as she saw the big, large, huge, sunny backyard slipping out of her grasp.
But Pyotr said, “You can hire a person.”
This was also true. Kate perked up.
Aunt Thelma said, “Can’t argue with that, Louis. Ha! Seems you’ve met your match.”
“But…wait!” Dr. Battista said. “This is not at all how I planned it! You’re talking about an entirely different setup here.”
Aunt Thelma turned to Kate and said, “It would be my pleasure to come to your apartment and give you two a free consultation. If this is some old Hopkins professor’s house, I’ll bet it has all kinds of potential.”
“Oh, yes, lots,” Kate said, because it would look suspicious if she admitted she had never laid eyes on the place.
—
Dessert was just store-bought ice cream, because neither Pyotr nor Dr. Battista had had any other ideas. When they’d looked hopefully at Kate, she had said, “Well, I’ll see what I can find.” So at the end of the meal she went out to the kitchen and took a carton of butter pecan from the freezer. As she was setting a row of bowls on the counter, the door to the dining room swung open and Pyotr walked in. He came up next to her and elbowed her in the ribs. “Quit that,” she told him.
“Is going well, no?” he murmured in her ear. “I think they like me!”
“If you say so,” she said, and she started scooping ice cream.
Then he flung an arm exuberantly around her waist and pulled her close and kissed her cheek. For a moment, she didn’t resist; his arm enclosed her so securely, and his fresh-hay smell was quite pleasant. But then, “Whoa!” she said, jerking away. She turned to confront him. “Pyotr,” she said sternly. “You remember what we agreed on.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, and he stood back and held up both palms. “Yes, nobody shall be crazy about anybody,” he said. “I can help you carry these bowls in?”
“Please do,” she told him, and he picked up the first two she’d filled and backed out the swinging door to the dining room.
It was true that they seemed to like him. She saw that while they were eating their ice cream—Uncle Barclay quizzing him about whether his country had hedge funds, Uncle Theron more interested in whether his country had ice cream, Aunt Thelma leaning toward him in an intimate way to suggest that he call her “Aunt Thelma.” (Which he immediately shortened to “Aunt Thel,” or more accurately, “Aunt Sel.”) Dr. Battista had been in a silent sulk ever since the housing discussion, but the three guests were acting quite animated.
Well, no wonder. They were happy to be getting rid of her.
She had always been such a handful—a thorny child, a sullen teenager, a failure as a college student. What was to be done with her? But now they had the answer: marry her off. They would never have to give her another moment’s thought.
So when Uncle Theron reminded her that she and Pyotr would need to apply for a marriage license, she said pointedly, “Yes, Father and Pyotr already saw to that. And Father has the form he wants me to fill out for Immigration.” And she sent a challenging look around the table.
This should have made her aunt and her uncles sit up and take notice, but Uncle Theron just nodded and then they all went back to talking. It was much more convenient to pretend they hadn’t understood her.
“Wait!” she wanted to tell them. “Don’t you think I’m worth more than this? I shouldn’t have to go through with this! I deserve to have a real romance, someone who loves me for myself and thinks I’m a treasure. Someone who showers me with flowers and handwritten poems and dream catchers.”
But she kept quiet and stirred her ice cream in her bowl.
A couple of days before the wedding, Pyotr drove over to the house after work so that he and Kate could load her belongings into his car. There weren’t all that many: just the clothes from her bureau, packed in a couple of suitcases, and a carton containing her shower gifts, and a garment bag filled with the clothes that had hung in her closet. The suitcases and the carton fit easily into Pyotr’s trunk. He laid the garment bag full length across the backseat.
Bunny had greeted Pyotr tepidly and then wandered off somewhere, and Dr. Battista was still at the lab. Kate suspected him of staying away to make a point. He had acted noticeably aloof ever since the decision about her new living arrangements.
Pyotr lived in one of those big old faculty houses within shouting distance of the Johns Hopkins campus, a white clapboard Colonial with faded green shutters. He parked at the front curb, although a driveway lay to one side. He told Kate that he wasn’t supposed to block Mrs. Liu’s exit; Mrs. Liu was Mrs. Murphy’s live-in attendant.
They moved everything into the house in one trip—Kate lugging the suitcases, Pyotr carrying the carton and the garment bag, which he had draped over his shoulder. On the stoop he set down the carton to unlock the front door. “After we carry things up we go to visit Mrs. Murphy,” he told her. “She is wanting to meet you.”