Anastasia Again! (2 page)

Now, angrily, she wrote, "The Mystery of Why Some
People Make Decisions without Consulting Their Twelve-Year-Old Children." Then she wrote, "Chapter One: Decisions about Moving to the (Ugh) Suburbs."

But she got so mad, just thinking about it, that she didn't write anything else. It was hard to write in a notebook while you were lying on a bed anyway. It was much easier just to lie back and sulk.

"Daddy?" asked Anastasia, as she stood in the bathroom door that evening, watching her father give Sam a bath. "Have you and Mom ever given serious thought to what a weird baby Sam is?"

It was true, what she said. Right now, for example, Sam was sitting in the bathtub, and he looked like any ordinary two-and-a-half-year-old baby. He had a fat stomach with a poking-out bellybutton, rosy cheeks, curly brown hair, brown eyes with long eyelashes, and he had soapsuds in his ears, which was kind of cute, A minute ago he had squirmed and wiggled and screeched when his father had washed his face, which was an ordinary two-and-a-half-year-old baby thing to do.

But then he had said firmly and with dignity, "Don't get soap in my eyes, please. My eyes are very sensitive."

That
was weird. The little boy next door could only say things like ma-ma, da-da, by-by, and ordinary baby things.

Sam had
never
said ma-ma or da-da or by-by. He had started talking like Walter Cronkite before he was a year old. Anastasia's mother
swore
that one day when he was four months old, he had said, "Thank you," when she fed him some strained apricots; but no one believed her, and she had no witnesses.

"He's not weird," said Anastasia's father, lifting Sam out of the tub. "It's just that people develop at different rates. For example, Anastasia, you are twelve years old, but you are already five feet seven inches tall..."

"I
know
that, Daddy. You don't really need to
remind
me of that, Daddy."

"I only bring it up because it is an unusual height for a twelve-year-old girl. You've grown fast, height-wise. But at the same time, your body is still quite straight, up and down. I mean, you haven't yet begun to mature much physically, except for height. You don't yet have
hips,
for example, or..."

"
Daddy. Don't be gross.
"

"There's nothing gross about hips. I was just pointing out that different aspects of people develop at different rates. Now in many ways, Sam is still a baby. Cut that out, Sam."

Sam was eating toothpaste.

"I like it," said Sam. "I like the flavor."

"Well, it costs a dollar fifty-nine a tube. Cut it out."
He began to dry Sam with a big blue towel.

"See what I mean, Anastasia? He's mischievous, like all toddlers. And he still wears diapers because he hasn't achieved the physical maturity to be toilet trained. I
wish
you would be toilet trained, Sam."

"No," said Sam, and smiled sweetly.

"And he still has his security blanket, like many babies..."

"Where is my blanky?" asked Sam. "I want it right now."

"Mom washed it while you were having your bath," said Anastasia. "It's in the dryer."

"Well, I want it when I go to bed," said Sam firmly.

Dr. Krupnik pinned on Sam's diapers and snapped up his pajamas.

"There you are, old buddy. Go find your mom."

Sam padded off down the hall.

"It's just that he is verbally precocious," said Anastasia's father, leaning over to scrub out the tub. "He's unusual, that way. But I wouldn't call him—what did you call him?—a weird baby."

"Well, okay then, he's unusual. Don't you and Mom realize what a
disaster
it would be to move an unusual baby like Sam to the suburbs? In the suburbs all babies are alike."

"You're sure of that?"

"Absolutely. All suburban babies ride around in shopping carts at supermarkets, and whine, and their mothers slap them."

"Their mothers
slap
them?"

"Absolutely. Their mothers all have pink curlers in their hair. Do you want that to happen to Mom, and to Sam?"

Dr. Krupnik sighed. "Anastasia, get me a beer from the refrigerator. As soon as your mom puts Sam to bed, we will talk some more about this move which we are going to make."

"Did I hear the last part of that sentence correctly?"

"Which we
are going to make.
"

"You once told me that this family was a democracy."

"Wrong. I said that this family is a benevolent dictatorship."

"Don't I get any part in the decision making? Is this a fascist state?"

"Not at all. You get a part."

"What part?"

"You're going to help us choose a house."

***

They sat around the table in the living room, which had once been the dining room table until the dining room had become Sam's bedroom. It was certainly true, Anastasia thought again, that the apartment was getting too small. Or maybe they were getting too big. Certainly
she
was getting too big. Five foot seven, for pete's sake. Probably the Celtics would be scouting her for their basketball team before she was fifteen. At this rate she would be almost seven feet tall by then. Already no boys liked her, because she was taller than they were. When she was seven feet tall, it would be even worse.

Not that she
wanted
any boys to like her. Anastasia hated all boys, especially all the boys in the sixth grade of the Bosler Elementary School, and most especially Robert Giannini, who carried a briefcase to school every day. She wondered what Robert Giannini did with his briefcase now that school was over for the summer.

Maybe there would be more interesting boys in junior high in the fall. Not that she cared, of course.

And by fall, they might be living in the suburbs. She could feel the thought of it affecting her physically. The stomachache was coming back. She could feel her hair beginning to ooze oil, so she would have to wash it again before she went to bed, and she had already washed it that morning. She could feel a pimple beginning to grow on her chin. Her eyes, behind her glasses, began to blur. Terrific. Now she was going blind on top of everything else.

Anastasia pictured herself in the suburbs: seven feet tall, with acne and greasy hair, and blind. She would get a Seeing Eye dog, a ferocious one, and name him Fang. If any boys ever made any remarks to her about her height, she would simply say in a low voice to Fang, "Kill."

That wasn't a bad thought. It made her smile to herself. She pictured her Seeing Eye dog tearing Robert Giannini's briefcase to shreds with his teeth and then starting in on Robert Giannini himself. She grinned. Her vision came back.

"So," said her father, taking out a notebook, "what we need to do is make a list."

Anastasia groaned. Even her mother groaned. Dr. Krupnik was always making lists. Once, when Anastasia was younger,
she
had been a list maker, too. But then her life became too complicated.

"House," wrote Dr. Krupnik at the top of the page. "Okay," he said. "Let's decide what kinds of things we want to look for in a house. Katherine, what's most important to you?"

Her mother thought for a moment, chewing on a strand of her long hair. Her hair was always shiny, like a TV commercial for shampoo. She didn't even wash it every day. She told Anastasia that when she was a teen-ager, she had had oily hair, but Anastasia didn't believe her. Parents always tell you stuff to make you feel better, and when they do, it makes you feel worse.

"Light," said her mother, finally. "Good light, and a room all to myself, where I can paint."

That made sense. Anastasia had been afraid for a moment that her mother would say, "Coppertone appliances in the kitchen." Anybody who had a kitchen full of coppertone appliances would very soon start wearing big pink curlers and worrying about wax build-up.

But light, good light, and a room where she could paint made sense. Anastasia's mother was a very good painter. Long ago, before she was married, she had studied art in New York. Even now some of her paintings hung in galleries in Boston and Cambridge. But her easel and paints were in the tiny room that had once been a pantry. She never complained about that, but it made Anastasia feel a little sad for her.

"Light," wrote Dr. Krupnik on the page. "Room for painting," he wrote. "Anastasia?" he asked. "What is most important to you?"

She was thinking. Now that her vision had unblurred, now that she wasn't going blind, she wouldn't need the Seeing Eye dog. Probably there was a law against having a Seeing Eye dog if you could see. Still, she did like the idea of a monstrous dog, straining at the end of a leash, to whom she could whisper, "Kill," if someone like Robert Giannini started making remarks.

"You go next, Dad," said Anastasia. "I'm still thinking"

"Study," he wrote next. "Bookcases," he wrote beside it.

Well, that made sense, too. Dr. Krupnik was a professor of English. He also wrote poetry, and each time he had written enough poems to make a book, he sent them off to his publisher, and then a new book was published with his name on it. His picture was on the back of each of his books. Anastasia could never figure out why people didn't recognize him on the streets and rush up and ask for his autograph. But they didn't. He said he didn't mind; in fact, he said, he was
glad
that they didn't.

People wrote to him, though. Strangers wrote to him: people who had read his books of poetry. Once, a year ago, Anastasia had gotten into a
lot
of trouble because of those letters. One night at dinner, when Sam was a much younger baby who kept them all awake at night because he howled and screamed a lot, so they were all
feeling tired, Dr. Krupnik had said, "There is a stack of mail on my desk that is giving me gray hair."

"Dad," Anastasia had pointed out, "you don't
have
any hair." That was true. The top of his head was quite bald.

"Well, my beard is getting gray, from that mail. When am I ever going to find time to answer it? I have to correct three hundred exams, and the publisher wants revisions on the new book..."

"Oh, don't worry," said her mother. "You'll get to it sometime. Those people don't expect answers anyway."

He had just groaned and stroked his beard.

Anastasia had thought about that. She
liked
to write letters, and she never had anyone to write to, because no one ever wrote to her. So the next day, using her father's portable typewriter, she had answered all of the letters. It was fun. To the man in Des Moines, who had sent three poems, asking Dr. Krupnik to read them and give his opinion, Anastasia wrote:

Dear Mr. Covington,

I read all of your nice poems. They are very nice. They are not as good as mine, but that is because I have worked a long time at it, and I am quite famous. Maybe if you work at it some more, yours will be better in the future. I certainly do hope so.

A girl had written a very peculiar letter from San Francisco. The letter said that Myron Krupnik's love poems had really spoken to where she was at, and she thought they had kindred souls, and she would like to
spend some time with him if he was ever in San Francisco. Anastasia answered her:

Dear Lisa,

I am a married man with two adorable children. And I never go to San Francisco. But thank you anyway.

A librarian in Detroit had written that Dr. Krupnik's new book was very popular in her library. It was amazing, she wrote, how often people checked it out. Anastasia answered the librarian:

...I don't think it is amazing at all. It is, after all, one of the finest collections of poetry published in the twentieth century. I wish you would suggest to them, though, that they
buy
the book. I don't make any money when they take it out of the library. If they buy it, I make 10%.

There had been twelve letters, and Anastasia had answered all of them, and she had mailed her answers. When she had told her father that night what she had done, she had planned to suggest that he might pay her a secretarial salary. It had taken her all day to write the letters. Even at minimum wage, it would be a good chunk of money for her savings account.

Instead, he had gone storming out of the house to the post office to try to get her letters back. The post office people had let him in, even though they were closed, but they wouldn't give him the letters. They told him that tampering with the mails was a federal offense. So he
came home and drank two beers, very fast, without offering Anastasia the foam—without even
speaking
to Anastasia, for that matter—and then he stayed up until 2:00
A.M.
writing letters to all the same people that Anastasia had just written to.

Anastasia had not figured out why her father was so upset until a few weeks later, when it became very clear. Robert Giannini had slipped her a note in school. The note said, "I like you. Do you like me? Check one: Yes. No. A whole lot. I hate you. I don't know." She had checked "I hate you" immediately; then she had decided that was cruel. So she erased her first check mark and checked, simply, "No." Underneath, she had written, Sorry.