Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare)(41)

“I know you think you’re just doing a little something on paper to fool Immigration,” Bunny said, “but this guy is starting to act like he owns you! He’s telling you what last name to use and where to live and whether to go on working. I mean, I do think it would be nice if I could have a bigger room, but if the price for that is my only sister getting totally tamed and tamped down and changed into some whole nother person—”

“Hey. Bun-Buns,” Kate said. “I appreciate the thought, but do you not know me even a little? I can handle this. Believe me. It’s not as if I haven’t dealt my whole life with an…oligarch, after all.”

“An…”

“I’m not that easily squashed. Trust me: I can take him on with one hand tied behind me.”

“Okay,” Bunny said. “Fine. If your idea of fun is sparring and squabbling, so be it. But you’re going to have to be around him all the time! Nobody’s even mentioned how soon you’ll be allowed to divorce him, but I bet it’s a year at least and meanwhile you’re sharing an apartment with someone who doesn’t say please or thank you or smile when you’d expect him to and thinks ‘How are you?’ means ‘How are you?’ and stands too close to people when he talks and never tells them, ‘I think maybe perhaps such-and-such,’ but always, flat-out, ‘You are wrong,’ and ‘This is bad,’ and ‘She is stupid’; no shades of gray, all black and white and ‘What I say goes.’?”

“Well, part of that is just a matter of language,” Kate said. “You can’t always be bothered with ‘please’ and ‘maybe’ when you’re struggling to get your basic message across.”

“And the worst of it is,” Bunny said, as if Kate hadn’t spoken, “the worst is, it won’t be any different from the fix you’re in here—living with a crazed science person who’s got a system for every little move you make and spouts off his old-man health theories every chance he gets and measures the polyphenols or whatever in every meal.”

“That’s not true at all,” Kate said. “It will be a lot different. Pyotr’s not Father! He listens to people, you can tell; he pays attention. And did you hear what he said the other night about how maybe I’d want to go back to school? I mean, who else has ever suggested that? Who else has even given me a thought? Here in this house I’m just part of the furniture, somebody going nowhere, and twenty years from now I’ll be the old-maid daughter still keeping house for her father. ‘Yes, Father; no, Father; don’t forget to take your medicine, Father.’ This is my chance to turn my life around, Bunny! Just give it a good shaking up! Can you blame me for wanting to try?”

Bunny looked at her dubiously.

“But thank you,” Kate thought to add, and she sat forward and patted Bunny’s bare foot. “You’re nice to be concerned.”

“Well,” Bunny said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Not until she’d left the room did Kate realize that Bunny hadn’t ended a single one of her sentences with a question mark.

—

It felt strange to have their father home in the daytime. He was sitting at the breakfast table when Kate came downstairs, a cup of coffee at his elbow and the newspaper spread before him. “Morning,” Kate told him, and he glanced up and adjusted his glasses and said, “Oh. Good morning. Do you know what’s going on in the world?”

“What?” Kate asked him, but he must have been referring to the news in general because he just waved a hand despairingly toward the paper and then returned to his reading.

He was wearing a pair of his coveralls. This was fine with Kate, but when Bunny walked into the kitchen a moment later she said, “You are not going to the church dressed like that.”

“Hmm?” her father said. He turned a page of his paper.

“You have to show some respect, Papa! This is some people’s house of worship; I don’t care what you believe personally. You need to at least put on a regular shirt and trousers.”

“It’s Saturday,” her father said. “Nobody else will be there, just us and your uncle.”

“What kind of photo will it make for Immigration, though?” Bunny asked. She could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion. “You in your work outfit. Sort of obvious, don’t you think?”

“Ah. Yes, you have a point,” he said. He sighed and folded his newspaper and stood up.

Bunny herself was wearing her angel-winged sundress, and Kate—motivated by a vague sense that she owed it to Uncle Theron—had put on a light-blue cotton shift that dated from college. She wasn’t accustomed to wearing pale colors and she felt uncomfortably conspicuous; she wondered if she seemed to be trying too hard. Apparently Bunny approved, though. At least, she offered no criticisms.

Kate took a carton of eggs from the fridge and asked Bunny, “Want an omelet?” but Bunny said, “No, I’m going to make myself a smoothie.”

“Well, be sure you clean up, then. Last smoothie you made, the kitchen was a disaster.”

“I cannot wait,” Bunny said, “till you are out of this house and not breathing down my neck all the time.”

Evidently she had overcome her concern about palming off her only sister.