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Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize winner and American master Anne Tyler brings us an inspired, witty and irresistible contemporary take on one of Shakespeare's most beloved comedies.
Kate Battista feels stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she's always in trouble at work - her pre-school charges adore her, but their parents don't always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner.
Dr. Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There's only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr, all would be lost.
When Dr. Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he's relying - as usual - on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he's really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men's touchingly ludicrous campaign to bring her around?
Author Notes
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota on October 25, 1941. She graduated from Duke University at the age of 19 and completed graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a librarian and bibliographer.
Her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, was published in 1964. Her other works include Saint Maybe, Back When We Were Grownups, Digging to America, Noah's Compass, The Beginner's Goodbye, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Vinegar Girl. She has won several awards including the PEN Faulkner Award in 1983 for Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist, and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Breathing Lessons. The Accidental Tourist was adapted into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. In 2018 her title, Clock Dance, made the bestsellers list.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the latest of Hogarth's Shakespeare series, Pulitzer-winner Tyler transposes the famously shrewish Kate and her would-be master Petruchio to Tyler country-Baltimore's genteel Roland Park neighborhood. There, preschool assistant Kate Battista takes care of her widowed father and much younger, conventionally prettier sister, both of whom take her for granted-that is, until her scientist father decides that the way to keep Pyotr, his research assistant, from losing his visa is for Kate to marry him. Considering Dr. Battista's maladroit personality and Pyotr's blunt and sometimes overly literal approach, Kate, who is less shrewish than plainspoken, actually seems quite patient. Though farcical in parts, Shakespeare's play has a dark strand-Petruchio is borderline abusive, and critics are divided about whether Kate's speech calling for women to obey their husbands is meant to be sincere, ironic, or perhaps a sign of love. In Tyler's version, Kate's speech is supportive of Pyotr, and defensible. Which makes sense, since Kate and Pyotr, despite their untoward and hasty courtship, clearly like and appreciate each other. Ultimately, the tale succeeds as the kind of love story in which the most surprised people are the protagonists-which, arguably, could be said of the original as well-but Shakespeare's powerful emotions are absent here. It is not the shrew who is tamed, but the tale itself. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death, the Hogarth Shakespeare project invites prominent novelists (future participants include Margaret Atwood, Tracy Chevalier, and Gillian Flynn) to retell the stories of his indelible plays. Resplendent storyteller Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015) is perfectly paired with The Taming of the Shrew. In Tyler's present-day improvisation on this tale of a coerced marriage, the widower father is Dr. Battista, a monomaniacal medical researcher who depends on his older, dagger-tongued, whip-smart, renegade daughter, Kate, to run the household. Having abandoned college in an intellectual huff, she now channels her botanical ardor into gardening, while trying to keep boys away from her cute, flirty younger sister and working reluctantly at a preschool, seeding dissent among her little charges. The eccentric family couldn't be more insular, until Dr. Battista brings his precious lab assistant home for dinner, clumsily attempting to strike a spark between obliging Pyotr and outraged Kate. Whatever is her father up to? Could it be that he's seeking a solution to Pyotr's impending deportation back to Russia? Surely a woman as resolutely independent as Kate wouldn't compromise her freedom for a green-card scheme? Deeply and pleasurably inspired by her source, Tyler is marvelously nimble and effervescent in this charming, hilarious, and wickedly shrewd tale of reversal and revelation.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE KING AND QUEEN OF MALIBU: The True Story of the Battle Tor Paradise, by David K. Randall. (Norton, $15.95.) In the late 19 th century, Frederick Rindge headed West with his wife, May, and bought an enormous secluded ranch, which they thought would guarantee them eternal privacy. When nearby homesteaders began clamoring for rights along their private beach, the conflict devolved into an acrimonious battle whose legacy is still felt. THE NORTH WATER, by Ian McGuire. (Picador, $16.) An opium-addicted Irish surgeon, his reputation ruined during the siege of Delhi in 1857, joins the crew of a whaling ship, where he encounters a psychopathic harpooner motivated by violence. McGuire's novel, one of the Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2016, is "propelled by a vision that is savage, brutal and relentless," our reviewer, Colm Toibin, said. WE WERE FEMINISTS ONCE: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement, by Andi Zeisler. (PublicAffairs, $16.99.) Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch magazine, chronicles the movement's relation to mainstream culture, from when the "f-word" was largely taboo to now, when brands co-opt the term. Today's "glossy, feel-good feminism," she says, threatens to divert attention from the real issue: systemic inequality. TRAVELERS REST, by Keith Lee Morris. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) When a snowstorm derails their travel plans, to bring home an uncle from rehab, the Addisons seek refuge at a hotel in Good Night, Idaho, an eerie town where little is as it appears to be. The family are soon separated in the town and must try to find their way back to each other. Morris "has an adroit hand for characterization and atmosphere; the people feel real even when they actually are stand-ins for the uncanny," our reviewer, N. K. Jemisin, said. DEATH'S SUMMER COAT: What the History of Death and Dying Can Tell Us About Life and Living, by Brandy Schillace. (Pegasus, $16.95.) The reluctance to discuss death in modern Western societies is a relatively new development, Schillace notes. She investigates other cultures' mortality rituals, from "death cafes" to mourning practices in Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge's mass killings, as a way to lend new perspectives about grief. VINEGAR GIRL: William Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew" Retold, by Anne Tyler. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $15.) In Tyler's reimagining, Kate - a preschool teacher loved by her students but unpopular with their parents - is roped into a green card marriage plot: Her father, a biologist working on a project his colleagues have all but dismissed, is desperate to keep his research assistant in the country.
Guardian Review
A brusque nursery school teacher is pitted against a Russian lab assistant in this intelligent revamp of The Taming of the Shrew Dysfunctional family relationships are Anne Tyler 's forte, and her retelling of The Taming of the Shew, part of the Hogarth Press's initiative to give Shakespeare plays a prose remodelling to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, gives her plenty to work with. In Tyler's revamping, the shrew is Kate Battista, an acerbic preschool teacher with a bad hairdo and an unapologetic line in abrasive truths ("I hate small children ... They're not very bright, if you've noticed"). Once a "thorny child" and a "sullen teenager", Kate is now housekeeper and general dogsbody to her scientist father, the controlling and selfish Dr Battista, and her nubile teenage sister, Bunny. When a prestigious research project of Dr Battista's is threatened by the imminent deportation of his brilliant Russian lab assistant, Pyotr Cherbakov, he decides to marry his eldest daughter off to get the young man a green card. Tyler gives what appears to be a simple pre-feminist fable a number of adroit tweaks. Shakespeare's blunt shrew-tamer, Petruchio, is one of his more problematic male characters. In a neat twist, Tyler rewrites his boorishness as foreignness. With his article-less speech and habit of intoning snippets of gnomic Russian wisdom, Pyotr is as much an outsider in polite society as Kate: "In my country we have proverb," Pyotr was saying. Don't they always, Kate thought. "We say, 'Work when it is divided into segments is shorter total period of time than work when it is all together in one unit.'" "Catchy," Kate said. Next to saccharine, faddishly vegetarian Bunny, Kate -- who chomps on a stash of beef jerky she keeps in her pocket -- seems like a "viperish, disapproving old maid". But Kate knows perfectly well that Bunny, who "could be surprisingly crafty, on occasion", is not what she pretends to be. Her sweetness and her convictions are both strategic. Or as Pyotr -- the one man who is immune to Bunny's appeal -- puts it, "she is puffing her hair and blinking her eyes and abandoning animal proteins" in order to trap a mate. While not being supposed to date, Bunny is surrounded by a swarm of boyfriends, including the pothead boy next door, whom she sneaks in under the pretext that he is giving her Italian lessons. Kate's cussedness stems from anger at having to operate in a world that falls for such manipulations. Other women get ahead by using their sexual wiles, but Kate refuses to play. Just how undesirable is Kate really? Like Petruchio insisting that his is "the prettiest Kate in Christendom", Pyotr falls into raptures, which are increasingly unfeigned, over Kate's "hair that avoids beauty parlours" and her foot stamping, which makes her "resemble flamingo dancer". Her family are appalled by her outspokenness; Pyotr finds her bluntness comical. Tyler has fun spelling out what Shakespeare implies: that the shrew, despite her lack of conventional feminine appeal, is in fact beautiful, witty and honest, and that only the eccentric Pyotr has the originality to see this. The battle between them is watered down, but there are ripples from the original play for those who care to look. The comfortless country house to which Petruchio takes Katharina becomes a run-down bedsit, the stumbling horse on which he conveys her there, a clapped-out Volkswagen. The newlyweds' verbal sparring ramps up in a series of heated exchanges about the fate of Pyotr's lab mice, which are kidnapped in a subplot involving Bunny's dodgy suitor. Kate boasts that she can take Pyotr on "with one hand tied behind me", but she is drawn to the challenge and the chance of freedom he represents. In all of this, Tyler draws out the warning implicit in the play: that if men will persist in finding weakness and deviousness in women sexually attractive, they are going to get the half-formed partners they deserve. At her school Kate is often "downright astonished by how much the women in the faculty lounge sounded like the little girls nattering away in Room 4". Other men make Kate "feel too big and too gruff and too shocking", but Pyotr is "the kind of person who liked her true self, for better or for worse". By taking him as her husband, the shrew doesn't surrender her moxie, but rather finds a counterweight to her own strength. The balance of power the two Kates and their Petruchios achieve is the basis of a successful marriage. This sparky, intelligent spin on Shakespeare's controversial classic demolishes the old saw that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar with a simple question posed by Pyotr. That may be true, he says -- but why would you want to catch flies? - Elizabeth Lowry.
Kirkus Review
As her contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare project, Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread, 2015, etc.) takes on the thankless task of modernizing The Taming of the Shrew. You don't have to think Shrew is irredeemably sexistShakespeare's take on gender roles is always more nuanced than it seemsto quickly tire of its knockabout humor. But once you get rid of Kate's storming and Petruchio's boorishness, what's left? In Tyler's version, a sharp-tongued preschool assistant, Kate Battista, whose scientist father is convinced his dead-end research will soon break throughif only he can hang onto his lab assistant, Pyotr Shcherbakov, whose O-1 visa is about to expire. That's right, Dr. Battista wants Kate to marry Pytor to keep him in the country: after all, he points out, she doesn't exactly have men flocking after her like her airhead sister Bunny, and she's still in high school. Kate is hurt by her father's thoughtless cruelty, and already these characters have more depth than Shakespeare allows his broadly drawn protagonists. What they don't have is much energy; Pyotr in particular moves tentatively through the story, never quite sure (as he tells Kate in a rather touching scene) that he's correctly reading the cultural cues in this strange country. The real drama is between Kate and her widowed father, who depends on her without really valuing her; even self-absorbed Bunny turns out to have more appreciation for her sister than the selfish Dr. Battista. That's sort of the point, we see, in Tyler's version of Kate's submission speech from Shrew, transformed here into a lecture on how pathetic men are. Tyler can't help but invest this mishmash with a good deal of her own rueful humor and tart compassion for her bewildered characters, but her special qualities as a writer don't make a very good fit with the original. Neither a faithful retelling nor a trenchant countertale, though agreeable enough as an afternoon's entertainment. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The third installment of the Hogarth Shakespeare series transfers the 16th--century comedy The Taming of the Shew, set in Padua, Italy, to Tyler's familiar territory, a contemporary Baltimore neighborhood. The Bard's obdurate, would-be lovers Katherina and Petruchio become Kate Battista, a temperamental, small children-averse preschool assistant on probation, and Pyotr Shcherbakov, the much-favored brilliant lab assistant of Kate's autoimmune disorder-fighting scientist father. As independent as Kate believes herself to be, she feels plenty put upon taking care of her absent-minded dad and her sought-after younger sister (Shakespeare's Bianca morphs into popular high schooler Bunny). When Kate discovers that Dr. Battista's plans to keep Pyotr employed beyond his three-year visa specifically include her.well, the shrew's taming is about to ensue. While Tyler clearly draws on the centuries-old original, her updated version could easily stand alone as an entertainingly eccentric family love story. Popular reader Kirsten Potter narrates with her usual energy, although the indeterminable accent she bestows on Pyotr feels unnecessarily heavy, even contrived. VERDICT That quibble aside, Tyler groupies will appreciate access to multiple formats to enjoy new work from a favorite author. Recommended. ["The Taming of the Shrew meets Green Card in this delightful reinvention that owes as much to Tyler's quirky sensibilities as it does to its literary forebear": LJ 5/1/16 starred review of the Hogarth: Crown hc.; June 2016 -LibraryReads top pick.]-Terry Hong, -Smithsonian BookDragon, -Washington, DC © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER ONE Kate Battista was gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister's voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. "Hi-yee! It's us? We're not home, looks like? So leave a--" By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated "Tcch!" She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. "Kate," her father was saying, "pick up." She lifted the receiver. "What," she said. "I forgot my lunch." Her eyes went to the counter beside the fridge where, sure enough, his lunch sat precisely where she had set it the night before. She always used those clear plastic bags that supermarket produce came in, and the contents were plainly visible: a Tupperware sandwich box and an apple. "Huh," she said. "Can you bring it?" "Bring it now?" "Right."' "Jesus, Father. I'm not the Pony Express," she said. "What else have you got to do?" he asked her. "It's Sunday! I'm weeding the hellebores." "Ah, Kate, don't be like that. Just hop in the car and zip over; there's a good girl." "Sheesh," she said, and she slammed the receiver down and took the lunch bag from the counter. There were several strange things about this conversation. The first was that it had happened at all; her father distrusted the telephone. In fact, his lab didn't even have a telephone, so he must have called on his cell phone. And that was unusual too, because his only reason for owning a cell phone was that his daughters had insisted. He had gone into a brief flurry of app purchases when he first acquired it--scientific calculators of various types, for the most part--and after that had lost all interest, and avoided it now altogether. Then there was the fact that he forgot his lunch about twice a week, but had never before seemed to notice. The man did not eat, basically. Kate would get home from work and find his lunch still sitting on the counter, and yet even so she would have to shout for him three or four times that evening before he would come to dinner. Always he had something better to do, some journal to read or notes to go over. He would probably starve to death if he were living alone. And supposing he did feel a bit peckish, he could have just stepped out and bought something. His lab was near the Johns Hopkins campus, and there were sandwich shops and convenience stores everywhere you looked. Not to mention that it wasn't even noon yet. But the day was sunny and breezy, if cool--the first semi-decent weather after a long, hard, bitter winter--and she didn't actually mind an excuse to get out in the world. She wouldn't take the car, though; she would walk. Let him wait. (He himself never took the car, unless he had some sort of equipment to ferry. He was something of a health fiend.) She stepped out the front door, shutting it extra hard behind her because it irked her that Bunny was sleeping so late. The ground cover along the front walk had a twiggy, littered look, and she made a mental note to spruce it up after she finished with the hellebores. Swinging the lunch bag by its twist-tied neck, she passed the Mintzes' house and the Gordons' house--stately brick center-hall Colonials like the Battistas' own, although better maintained--and turned the corner. Mrs. Gordon was kneeling among her azalea bushes, spreading mulch around their roots. "Why, hello there, Kate!" she sang out. "Hi." "Looks like spring might be thinking of coming!" "Yup." Kate strode on without slowing, her buckskin jacket flying out behind her. A pair of young women--most likely Hopkins students--drifted at a snail's pace ahead of her. "I could tell he wanted to ask me," one was saying, "because he kept clearing his throat in that way they do, you know? But then not speaking." "I love when they're so shy," the other one said. Kate veered around them and kept going. At the next street she took a left, heading toward a more mixed-and-mingled neighborhood of apartments and small cafés and houses partitioned into offices, and eventually she turned in at yet another brick Colonial. This one had a smaller front yard than the Battistas' but a larger, grander portico. Six or eight plaques beside the front door spelled out the names of various offbeat organizations and obscure little magazines. There was no plaque for Louis Battista, though. He had been shunted around to so many different buildings over the years, landing finally in this orphan location near the university but miles from the medical complex, that he'd probably decided it just wasn't worth the effort. In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Inside she glimpsed a trio of women grouped around a desk where a fourth woman sat dabbing her eyes with a tissue. (Always something going on.) Kate opened another door at the far end of the hall and descended a flight of steep wooden stairs. At the bottom she paused to punch in the code: 1957, the date Witebsky first defined the criteria for autoimmune disorders. The room she entered was tiny, furnished only by a card table and two metal folding chairs. A brown paper bag sat on the table; another lunch, it looked like. She set her father's lunch next to it and then went over to a door and gave a couple of brisk knocks. After a moment, her father poked his head out--his satiny bald scalp bordered by a narrow band of black hair, his olive-skinned face punctuated by a black mustache and round-lensed, rimless spectacles. "Ah, Kate," he said. "Come in." "No, thanks," she said. She never could abide the smells of the place--the thin, stinging smell of the lab itself and the dry-paper smell of the mouse room. "Your lunch is on the table," she said. "Bye." "No, wait!" He turned from her to speak to someone in the room behind him. "Pyoder? Come out and say hello to my daughter." "I've got to go," Kate said. "I don't think you've ever met my research assistant," her father said. "That's okay." But the door opened wider, and a solid, muscular man with straight yellow hair stepped up to stand next to her father. His white lab coat was so dingy that it very nearly matched Dr. Battista's pale-gray coveralls. "Vwouwv!" he said. Or that was what it sounded like, at least. He was gazing at Kate admiringly. Men often wore that look when they first saw her. It was due to a bunch of dead cells: her hair, which was blue-black and billowy and extended below her waist. "This is Pyoder Cherbakov," her father told her. "Pyotr," the man corrected him, allowing no space at all between the sharp-pointed t and the ruffly, rolling r. And "Shcherbakov," explosively spitting out the mishmash of consonants. Pyoder, meet Kate." "Hi," Kate said. "See you later," she told her father. "I thought you might stay a moment." "What for?" "Well, you'll need to take back my sandwich box, will you not?" "Well, you can bring it back yourself, can you not?" A sudden hooting sound made both of them glance in Pyotr's direction. "Just like the girls in my country," he said, beaming. "So rude-spoken." "Just like the women," Kate said reprovingly. "Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties." She gave up on him. "Father," she said, "will you tell Bunny she has to stop leaving such a mess when she has her friends in? Did you see the TV room this morning?" "Yes, yes," her father said, but he was heading back into the lab as he spoke. He returned, pushing a high stool on wheels. He parked it next to the table. "Have a seat," he told her. "I need to get back to my gardening." "Please, Kate," he said. "You never keep me company." She stared at him. "Keep you company?" "Sit, sit," he said, motioning toward the stool. "You can have part of my sandwich." "I'm not hungry," she said. But she perched awkwardly on the stool, still staring at him. "Pyoder, sit. You can share my sandwich too, if you want. Kate made it especially. Peanut butter honey on whole-wheat." "You know I do not eat peanut butter," Pyotr told him severely. He pulled out one of the folding chairs and settled catty-corner to Kate. His chair was considerably lower than her stool, and she could see how the hair was starting to thin across the top of his head. "In my country, peanuts are pigs' food." "Ha, ha," Dr. Battista said. "He's very humorous, isn't he, Kate?" "What?" "They eat them with the shells on," Pyotr said. He had trouble with th sounds, Kate noticed. And his vowels didn't seem to last long enough. She had no patience with foreign accents. "Were you surprised that I used my cell phone?" her father asked her. He was still standing, for some reason. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his coveralls. "You girls were right; it comes in handy," he said. "I'm going to start using it more often now." He frowned down at it for a moment, as if he were trying to remember what it was. Then he punched a button and held it in front of his face. Squinting, he took several steps backward. There was a mechanical clicking sound. "See? It takes photographs," he said. "Erase it," Kate ordered. "I don't know how," he said, and the phone clicked again. "Damn it, Father, sit down and eat. I need to get back to my gardening." "All right, all right." He tucked the phone away and sat down. Pyotr, meanwhile, was opening his lunch bag. He pulled out two eggs and then a banana and placed them on the flattened paper bag in front of him. "Pyoder believes in bananas," Dr. Battista confided. "I keep telling him about apples, but does he listen?" He was opening his own lunch bag, taking out his apple. "Pectin! Pectin!" he told Pyotr, shaking the apple under Pyotr's nose. "Bananas are miracle food," Pyotr said calmly, and he picked his up and started peeling it. He had a face that was almost hexagonal, Kate noticed--his cheekbones widening to two sharp points, the angles of his jaw two more points slanting to the point of his chin, and the long strands of his hair separating over his forehead to form the topmost point. "Also eggs," he was saying. "The egg of the hen! So cleverly self-contained." "Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed," Dr. Battista said. "She's very domestic." Kate blinked. "Peanut butter, though," Pyotr said. "Well, yes." "Yes," Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. "But is certainly pretty enough." "You should see her sister." Kate said, "Oh! Father!" "What?" "This sister is where?" Pyotr asked. "Well, Bunny is only fifteen. She's still in high school." Okay," Pyotr said. He returned his gaze to Kate. Kate wheeled her stool back sharply and stood up. "Don't forget your Tupperware," she told her father. "What! You're leaving? Why so soon?" But Kate just said, "Bye"--mostly addressing Pyotr, who was watching her with a measuring look--and she marched to the door and flung it open. "Katherine, dearest, don't rush off!" Her father stood up. "Oh, dear, this isn't going well at all. It's just that she's so busy, Pyoder. I can never get her to sit down and take a little break. Did I tell you she runs our whole house? She's very domestic. Oh, I already said that. And she has a full-time job besides. Did I tell you she teaches preschool? She's wonderful with small children." "Why are you talking this way?" Kate demanded, turning on him. "What's come over you? I hate small children; you know that." There was another hooting sound from Pyotr. He was grinning up at her. "Why you hate small children?" he asked her. "Well, they're not very bright, if you've noticed." He hooted again. What with his hooting and the banana he held, he reminded her of a chimpanzee. She spun away and stalked out, letting the door slam shut, and climbed the stairs two at a time. Behind her, she heard the door open again. Her father called, "Kate?" She heard his steps on the stairs, but she strode on toward the front of the building. His steps softened as he arrived on the carpet. "I'll just see you out, why don't I?" he called after her. See her out? But she paused when she reached the front door. She turned to watch him approach. "I've handled things badly," he said. He smoothed his scalp with one palm. His coveralls were one-size-fits-all and they ballooned in the middle, giving him the look of a Teletubby. "I didn't mean to make you angry," he said. "I'm not angry; I'm . . ." But she couldn't say the word "hurt." It might bring tears to her eyes. "I'm fed up," she said instead. "I don't understand." She could believe that, actually. Face it: he was clueless. clueless."And what were you trying to do back there?" she asked him, setting her fists on her hips. "Why were you acting so . . . peculiar with that assistant?" "He's not 'that assistant'; he's Pyoder Cherbakov, whom I'm very lucky to have. Just look: he came in on a Sunday! He does that often. And he's been with me nearly three years, by the way, so I would think you would at least be familiar with his name." "Three years? What happened to Ennis?" "Good Lord! Ennis! Ennis was two assistants back." "Oh," she said. She didn't know why he was acting so irritable. It wasn't as if he ever talked about his assistants--or about anything, in fact. "I seem to have a little trouble keeping them," he said. "It may be that to outsiders, my project is not looking very promising." This wasn't something he had admitted before, although from time to time Kate had wondered. It made her feel sorry for him, suddenly. She let her hands drop to her sides. "I went to a great deal of effort to bring Pyoder to this country," he said. "I don't know if you realize. He was only twenty-five at the time, but everybody who's anybody in autoimmunity had heard of him. He's brilliant. He qualified for an O‑1 visa, and that's not something you often see these days." "Well, good, Father." "An extraordinary-ability visa; that's what an O‑1 is. It means that he possesses some extraordinary skill or knowledge that no one here in this country has, and that I am involved in some extraordinary research that justifies my needing him." "Good for you." "O‑1 visas last three years." She reached out to touch his forearm. "Of course you're anxious about your project," she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. "But I bet things will be fine." "You really think so?" he asked. She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. "I'm sure of it," she told him. "Don't forget to bring your sandwich box home." Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass. Excerpted from Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
