Aunt Thelma would refer to her mother without using the word “poor.”
Maybe her father felt the same way, because he interrupted to ask, “Isn’t it time to get supper on the table?”
“Yes, Father,” Kate said.
As she stood up, Uncle Theron was asking Pyotr whether he was allowed to practice religion in his country. “Why I would want to do that?” Pyotr said, looking honestly curious.
Kate felt glad to be leaving the room.
The men had done the cooking earlier that afternoon—sautéed chicken on a bed of grated jicama, drizzled with pink-peppercorn sauce since the other evening’s maple syrup had not been deemed a success. All Kate had to do was set the platter out on the table and toss the salad. As she walked back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she caught snatches of the talk in the living room. She heard Uncle Theron utter the phrase “premarital counseling,” and she stiffened, but then Pyotr said, “Is so confusing, the two types of ‘counsel.’ I am mixed up how to spell them,” and Aunt Thelma was delighted to jump in and give him an English lesson, so the moment passed. Kate wasn’t sure whether he’d changed the subject on purpose.
He could surprise her sometimes, she had found. It had emerged that it was dangerous to assume that he wouldn’t catch her nuances; he caught a lot more than he let on. Also, his accent was improving. Or was it just that she had stopped hearing it? And he had started beginning his sentences with a “well” or an “oh,” on occasion. He seemed to take great delight in discovering new idioms—“jumped the gun,” for instance, which had sprinkled his conversations for the past several days. (“I was thinking the evening news would be on, but I see that I…” and then a weighty pause before “jumped the gun!” he finished up triumphantly.) Now and then, an expression he used would strike her as eerily familiar. “Good grief,” he said, and “Geez,” and once or twice, “It was semi-okay.” At such moments, she felt like someone who had accidentally glimpsed her own reflection in a mirror.
He was still undeniably foreign, though. Even his posture was foreign; he walked in a foreign way that was more upright, shorter in stride. He had the foreigner’s tendency toward bald, obvious compliments, dropping them with a thud at her feet like a cat presenting her with a dead mouse. “Even a fool can see you’re after something,” she would say, and he would affect a perplexed look. Hearing him now in the living room, pontificating about the hidden perils of ice water, she felt embarrassed by him, and embarrassed for him, and filled with a mixture of pity and impatience.
But just then a pair of sharp heels came clicking across the dining room. “Kate? Do you need any help?” Aunt Thelma called in a loud, false, carrying voice, and a moment later she slipped through the kitchen door to put an arm around Kate’s waist and whisper, on a winey breath, “He’s a cutie!”
So Kate was being too critical, clearly.
“With that golden cast to his skin, and his eyes tilting up at the corners…And I love that ropy yellow hair,” her aunt said. “He must have some Tartar in him, don’t you think?”
“I have no idea,” Kate said.
“Or is it ‘Tatar.’ ”
“I really don’t know, Aunt Thelma.”
—
Over supper, Aunt Thelma proposed that she should take charge of the reception. “What reception?” Kate asked, but her father drilled her with a narrow stare. She could guess his meaning: he was thinking that a reception would look so convincing to Immigration.
“I have to admit that this must be a genuine marriage,” the black-and-white detective would report to his superiors, “because the bride’s family threw a big shindig for them.”
Immigration often used 1940s slang words, in Kate’s fantasies.
“It’s just selfish not to let your friends and relations be part of your happiness,” Aunt Thelma was saying. “Why, what about Richard and his wife?”
Richard was Aunt Thelma and Uncle Barclay’s only child, a blow-dried, overconfident type who worked as a lobbyist in Washington and had a habit of drawing himself up and taking a deep, portentous, whiskery-sounding breath through his nose before delivering one of his opinions. He couldn’t have cared less about Kate’s happiness.
“I suppose it’s your decision if you don’t want us all at the ceremony,” Aunt Thelma told her. “I’m not pleased about it, but this is not about me, I suppose. However, we