Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Anne Tyler Page 0,29
up. “Oh,” he said, “it was nothing to do with you, Kate. Is that what you’re thinking? She was feeling low long before you were born. I’m afraid it might have been my fault, in part. I’m afraid our marriage may have had a deleterious effect on her. Everything I said, it seemed, she took the wrong way. She thought I was belittling her, behaving as if I were smarter than she was. Which was nonsense, of course. I mean, no doubt I was smarter, but intelligence is not the only factor to consider in a marriage. In any event, she couldn’t seem to rise above her low spirits. I felt I was standing on the edge of a swamp watching her go under. She did try various different types of therapy, but she always ended up deciding it wasn’t helping. And pills, she tried those. All sorts of antidepressants—SSRIs and so forth. None of them worked, and some of them had side effects. Finally a colleague of mine, a fellow from England, told me about a drug he’d invented that they’d begun using in Europe. It hadn’t yet been approved in the States, he said, but he had seen it work miracles, and he sent me some and your mother tried it. Well, she became a whole new person. Vibrant! Animated! Energetic! You were in eighth grade by then and she suddenly took an interest, started attending PTA meetings, volunteered to accompany your class on field trips. I had my old Thea back, the woman she’d been when I met her. Then she said she wanted another baby. She had always wanted six children, she said, and I said, ‘Well, it’s your decision, dear. You know I leave such matters up to you.’ Right away she got pregnant, and she went to her doctor to confirm it, and that’s when we found out that the miracle drug had damaged her heart. They’d already begun to suspect that in Europe, and they were taking the drug off the market; we just hadn’t heard yet.”
“That’s what caused her heart trouble?”
“Yes, and I accept full responsibility for it. If not for me, she would never have known about that drug. Or needed it either, your aunt always claims.” He drained off the last of his wine and set his glass a bit too firmly on the counter beside him. “Although,” he said after a moment, “I suppose it did provide valuable data for my colleague.”
“She went on field trips with me?” Kate asked. She was trying to wrap her mind around this. “She was interested in me? She liked me?”
“Why, of course. She loved you.”
“I missed her one good spell!” Kate said. It was almost a wail. “I don’t remember it!”
“You’ve forgotten how you used to go shopping together?”
“We went shopping together?”
“She was so happy, she said, to have a daughter she could do girl things with. She took you shopping for clothes and lunch, and once you went for manicures.”
This made her feel eerily disconnected. Not only had she mislaid the memory of experiences she thought she would have treasured all her life, but also, they were experiences that she assumed she would have hated. She couldn’t abide shopping! Yet apparently she had gone along willingly, and maybe even enjoyed herself. It was as if Kate the child had been a completely different entity from Kate the grown-up. She looked down at her blunt, colorless nails and could not make herself believe that once they had been professionally filed and buffed and painted with polish.
“So that’s why we have our Bunny,” her father was saying. There was a blurriness in his voice, perhaps due to the wine, and the lenses of his glasses were misting. “And of course I’m delighted we do have her. She’s so pretty to look at and so lighthearted, the way your mother used to be before we married. But she’s not, let’s say, very…cerebral. And she doesn’t have your backbone, your fiber. Kate, I know I depend on you too much.” He reached out to set his fingertips on her wrist. “I know I expect more of you than I should. You look after your sister, you run the house…I worry you’ll never find a husband.”
“Gee, thanks,” Kate said, and she jerked her wrist away from him.
“No, what I mean is…Oh, I always put things so awkwardly, don’t I. I just meant you’re not out where you could meet a husband. You’re shut away at home,