Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler Page B

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 think?’ they said. ‘Whoever heard of a bride not wearing white?’ ”
    “And Georgina said, ‘Well, I’m sorry, but I’ve always looked washed out in white,’ ” Mrs. Chauncey said.
    Sometimes, Kate was downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4.
    It was Mrs. Chauncey who announced the wedding to Kate’s class. “Children! Children!” she said, clapping her plump hands together as soon as they’d finished the “Good Morning” song. “I have wonderful news. Guess who’s getting married!”
    There was a silence. Then Liam M. ventured, “You, maybe?”
    Mrs. Chauncey looked distressed. (She had been married thirty-five years.) “Miss Kate, that’s who!” she said. “Miss Kate has gotten engaged. Show them your ring, Miss Kate.”
    Kate held out her hand.