Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(40)

Standing back again to let her leave the room first, he drew himself inward to allow an exaggerated amount of space for her to pass, as if to make it clear that he would not presume. Evidently she hadn’t managed to hide the awkwardness she was feeling.

—

Mrs. Murphy was a heavyset, gray-haired woman in a lace-trimmed dress and orthopedic shoes. Mrs. Liu was tiny and wiry, and like many older Asian women she wore what could have been men’s clothes: an untucked khaki work shirt and boxy brown trousers and blindingly white sneakers. The two of them seemed embedded among the antimacassared chairs and the fussy little tables and the shelves of bric-a-brac, and they emerged only by degrees, Mrs. Liu pushing Mrs. Murphy’s wheelchair forward several seconds after Pyotr and Kate stepped through the door. “Is this our Kate?” Mrs. Murphy called out.

Kate almost looked behind her for someone else; it seemed so unlikely that she could be “our” Kate. But Mrs. Murphy was holding out both hands, forcing Kate to step closer and take them in her own. Mrs. Murphy’s hands were large and thick-fingered and meaty. She was so large all over, in fact, that Kate wondered how Pyotr could lift her. “You look just the way Pyoder described you,” Mrs. Murphy was saying. “We thought maybe he was overstating out of smittenness. Welcome, dear Kate! Welcome to your new home.”

“Well…thanks,” Kate said.

“Has he given you the grand tour yet?”

“I have showed her everywhere except yard,” Pyotr said.

“Oh, you have to see the yard, of course. We hear you’re going to be planting up a storm.”

“Well, um, if that’s all right with you,” Kate said. It occurred to her that she had no idea if Mrs. Murphy had been consulted.

“It’s more than all right,” Mrs. Murphy said, at the same time that Mrs. Liu put in, “Will be flowers, though, yes?” Although Mrs. Liu’s accent was very different from Pyotr’s, she seemed to have the same trouble with pronouns. “This Pyoder is all useful things! Cucumbers, cabbages, radishes! She has no poetry.”

“He has no poetry,” Pyotr corrected her. (Not even Pyotr confused his genders.) “Kate will plant flowers and vegetables both. Maybe will someday be botanist.”

“Good! You should be botanist too, Pyoder. Get outdoors in sunshine. See how pale?” Mrs. Liu asked Kate. “He is like mushroom!”

If Mrs. Liu were standing closer to Pyotr, she would have nudged him in the ribs, Kate suspected. In fact, both women were looking at him with amusement and affection, and Pyotr was positively basking under their gaze. He wore a serene half-smile and he slid his eyes toward Kate as if to make sure she appreciated his position here.

“But enough about our mushroom man,” Mrs. Murphy announced. “Kate, you’ll have to tell us what you need for the apartment. Besides a desk, that is; we already know you need a desk. But how about in the kitchen? Did you find enough utensils?”

“Oh, yes,” Kate said. She hadn’t so much as opened a drawer in the kitchen, but somehow she felt the urge to live up to Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her. “Everything looks great,” she said.

“You should check our kitchen for duplicates,” Mrs. Murphy told Mrs. Liu. In turning, she let one foot slip off her footrest, and Pyotr bent without her noticing to lift it back into place. “I know we have at least two electric mixers,” she was saying. “The stand mixer and the handheld one. Surely we don’t need both.”

“Maybe not…” Mrs. Liu said in a doubtful tone.

“We will go see yard now,” Pyotr decided. “Talk about mixers some other time.”

“All right, Pyoder. Come visit us again, Kate! And you be sure to let us know about any little thing that’s lacking.”

“Sure,” Kate said. “Thanks.” And then—evidently still under the spell of Mrs. Murphy’s notion of her—she stepped forward and gave Mrs. Murphy both her hands again.

Out on the stoop, Pyotr said, “You liked them?”

“They seemed really nice,” Kate said.

“They liked you,” he said.

“They don’t know me!”

“They know you.”

He was leading the way around the side of the house now, toward the picket fence that separated the front yard from the rear. “In garage,” he said, “are garden tools. I will show you where I hide key.”

He lifted the latch of the gate and then stepped back to let her go through. Again he allowed far more space than she needed, but it crossed her mind now that it might be for his sake as much as for hers. Both of them, for some reason, seemed to be feeling a little shy with each other.





On her wedding morning, Kate opened her eyes to find Bunny sitting at the foot of her bed. “What, are you checking out my window seat?” she asked, although Bunny wasn’t even looking at the window seat. She was sitting tailor-fashion in her baby-doll pajamas, staring at Kate intently as if willing her to wake up.

“Listen,” she told Kate. “You don’t have to do this.”

Kate reached behind her to prop her pillow against her headboard. She glanced toward the sky outside; there was a whiteness to the light that made her wonder if rain might be on the way, although the forecast was for sunshine. (Aunt Thelma had been reporting the forecast throughout the past week, because she was hoping to serve drinks on her patio before the “wedding banquet,” as she had taken to calling it.)