Vinegar Girl (Hogarth Shakespeare) - Anne Tyler Page 0,31

flower girl at some point in the recent past. She held forth at length on the concept of the ring-bearer, the bouquet-tossing, and the “skyscraper wedding cake” while the other girls listened, spellbound. It didn’t seem to occur to them to consult Kate about these details, although word of her upcoming wedding was what had set all this in motion.

Kate had thought at first that she just wouldn’t tell anyone. She would get married on a Saturday—the first Saturday in May, less than three weeks from now—and come in to school the following Monday, nobody any the wiser. But her father was disappointed when he learned that she wasn’t spreading the word yet. Immigration was bound to inquire at her place of employment, he said, and it would look mighty suspicious if her coworkers thought she was single. “You should go ahead and announce it,” he said. “You should walk in tomorrow all smiles, flash a ring about, make up some good story about your long, slow courtship, so that Immigration will hear every detail if they start asking around.”

Immigration was the family’s new bugaboo. Kate envisioned Immigration as a “he”—one man, wearing a suit and tie, handsome in the neutral, textureless style of a detective in an old black-and-white movie. He might even have that black-and-white-movie voice, projected-sounding and masterful. “Katherine Battista? Immigration. Like to ask you a few questions.”

So she arrived at school the next morning, a Tuesday, wearing her great-aunt’s diamond ring, and before she had even checked into Room 4 she went to the faculty lounge, where most of the teachers and a few assistants were standing around the tea kettle, and she silently held her left hand out.

Mrs. Bower was the first to notice. “Oh!” she squawked. “Kate! What is this? Is this an engagement ring?”

Kate nodded. She couldn’t quite manage the “all smiles” part, because Mrs. Bower taught Room 2—the room where Adam assisted. She was certain to go straight back to Room 2 and tell Adam that Kate was engaged.

Kate had been thinking about the telling-Adam part ever since she had gotten herself into this.

Then all the other women clustered around her, exclaiming and asking questions, and if Kate’s behavior seemed subdued they probably chalked it up to her usual unsociableness. “Aren’t you the sly one!” Mrs. Fairweather said. “We didn’t even know you had a boyfriend!”

“Yeah, well,” Kate mumbled.

“Who is he? What is his name? What does he do for a living?”

“His name is Pyoder Cherbakov,” Kate said. Without planning to, she pronounced it the way her father pronounced it, making it sound less foreign. “He’s a microbiologist.”

“Really! A microbiologist! Where did you two meet?”

“He works in my father’s lab,” she said. Then she glanced toward Mrs. Chauncey and said, “Gosh, nobody’s watching the Fours,” trying to find an excuse to escape before they could ask more questions.

But of course they didn’t let her off that easily. Where was Pyotr from? (He must not be a Baltimore boy.) Did her father approve of the match? When would the wedding take place? “So soon!” they said when they learned the date.

“Well, he’s been in the picture three years,” Kate said. Which was true, strictly speaking.

“But you’ll have so much planning to do!”

“Not really; it’s going to be very low-key. Just immediate family.”

This disappointed them, she could tell. They had imagined attending. “When Georgina got married,” Mrs. Fairweather reminded her, “she invited her whole class, remember?”

“This won’t be that kind of wedding. We are neither one of us much for dressing up,” she said—the unaccustomed “we” sounding as odd to her ears as if she had just popped a stone in her mouth. “My uncle who’s a pastor is going to marry us in a private ceremony. Just my father and my sister as witnesses—I’m not even letting my aunt come. She’s having conniptions about it.”

That it was taking place in a church at all was a compromise. Kate had wanted a quickie affair down at City Hall, while her father had wanted a full-dress ceremony that would photograph well for Immigration. And clearly her coworkers agreed with him; they exchanged sad looks. “The children sat in the pew just behind Georgina’s closest relatives, and each of them carried a yellow rose, do you remember that?” Mrs. Fairweather asked Mrs. Link.

“Yes, because Georgina’s gown was yellow, the prettiest, palest yellow, and her husband wore a yellow tie,” Mrs. Link said. “Both of the mothers were scandalized that she wasn’t wearing white. ‘What will people