Anastasia Again! (8 page)

This
wallpaper was old, with dumb flowers. In some places, in the corners, it was peeling a little.

Anastasia clattered down the stairs and found her mother arranging the kitchen cupboards.

"Mom, I miss Stanley and Sybil."

Her mother frowned at a souffle dish and finally put it into the cupboard beside the refrigerator.

"Who are Stanley and Sybil? I thought you would miss Jenny MacCauley."

"I
do
miss Jenny. But I'm going to call her on the phone. Stanley and Sybil are the people on my wallpaper."

Her mother smiled. "Oh, of course. I forgot they had names. Stanley had that sexy little mustache. I'm not surprised that you miss them."

"My room doesn't feel like mine. I
like
it. But it's strange, still."

Her mother took a heavy bowl out of the packing carton. "If you were a yellow pottery bowl with squiggle designs on your sides, where would you want to live?" she asked.

Anastasia thought, and then pointed to a cupboard. "There," she said.

Her mother put the yellow bowl into that cupboard. "I have an idea," she said.

"What?" Usually her mother had pretty good ideas.

"I could find out if they still make that Stanley-and-Sibyl wallpaper. And if they do, we could have your room papered with it. We were going to wallpaper that room anyway."

Anastasia thought. "I chose that paper when I was eight. You don't think it would be dumb to still want it when I'm twelve?"

"No. It wouldn't be dumb. It was pretty grown-up paper. I remember thinking when you were eight that it was a sophisticated choice."

"No kidding?"

"No kidding."

Anastasia grinned. "Okay. I'd really like that, to have Stanley and Sibyl back."

Her mother nodded and put away a few more dishes. "I forgot to tell you something. I'm sorry. Someone named Robert called, while you were off buying the goldfish."

"
Robert
called?"

"Yes. Who's Robert?"

Anastasia groaned. "Did he have a sort of squeaky voice?"

"Well, maybe it was a little squeaky. He sounded very pleasant, though."

Good grief. It was dumb Robert Giannini.
Typical
of
that jerk Robert Giannini to sound
pleasant
to somebody's mother.

"It's a guy who was in my class at school."

"Oh. Well, he wants you to call him back. I wrote his number on that pad of paper by the phone."

Anastasia made a face. "I can't call him. What would I say?"

Her mother looked surprised. Sometimes her mother didn't understand
anything.
"You would say, 'This is Anastasia. My mother said you called while I was out.'"

Good grief. What a dumb thing to say. Anastasia made another face and wandered off to the telephone. She stared at Robert Giannini's number for a while. She already knew what it was. She had looked it up in the phone book about a hundred times. Just because she was bored. Not for any other reason.

"Robert," she said, when he answered the phone, "this is Anastasia. My mother said you called while I was out."

"Yeah. Hi. I got your number from information."

"What did you call for? Is anything interesting happening in Cambridge? Have you collected any new stuff?"

"Cambridge is the same as ever. Everything's pretty boring here. It's hot. It's even too hot to ride down to the river."

"Yeah, it's hot here, too."

"Have you made any new friends?"

"Robert, I've only lived here for three days. I haven't had time. I've only made a couple of new friends." It was
only a partial lie. She had met Gertrustein, anyway. And she had
seen
some kids on the block, even though she hadn't met them.

"Girls or boys?"

Good grief. Robert was the kind of person who wanted to know
details.
It was awfully hard to give details when you were telling partial lies.

"One girl and one boy," Anastasia said. "The girl is actually a woman. She lives next door. And the boy lives down the street."

Now she would have to go down the street to where the boy was mowing the lawn and introduce herself. Then it wouldn't be a lie at all.

"Oh," said Robert. "How old is the boy?"

"I don't know. About thirteen or fourteen, I think."

"Oh." Robert didn't say anything else for a minute. Finally he said, "Guess what, Anastasia. I invented a system to tell the future."

Now
that
was interesting. All her life, Anastasia had wanted to be able to know about the future. The horoscopes in magazines and newspapers weren't good enough. They never gave details. But if Robert Giannini, the Detail Freak, had invented a system—well, that could be interesting. Anastasia sat down on the floor.

"Tell me about it," she said.

"You need a pencil and paper."

"I have some right here."

"Okay. First, write down the alphabet, and then write down numbers by the letters. 1 is A, and 2 is B. Like that, all the way through the alphabet. Z is 26."

That was easy enough. Anastasia did it on a piece of paper. "Okay," she said, when she was finished.

"All right. Now here's what you do. I'll tell you how I did mine and how it came out. First you write down your age. I'm 12, so I wrote down 12."

"Okay. I'm 12, too." She wrote it down.

"Then you write down the day of the month your birthday is on. Mine's September 20th, so I wrote down 20.

"Mine's 9. October 9th."

"Now add those together. Next you add today's date."

"What's today?"

"The 16th. Add 16."

"Okay."

"Now add your favorite TV channel. Mine's 5."

"Mine's 56. I like the old movies on Channel 56."

"Okay, add 56."

"Then what?"

"This is the last one. You add the last three numbers of your phone number. Mine are 058."

"I know," Anastasia said. "I just dialed them."

"Now," said Robert triumphantly. "Look at the number you end up with—and then look at the alphabet. There's your future!"

"I don't understand."

"I came out with 111. So look at letter 1 and letter 11. A and K. Your initials, Anastasia!"

Anastasia made a face. "You're weird, Robert."

"What number did you get?"

Anastasia checked her addition. "370." She looked at
the alphabet. "C and G. Big deal. I don't know a single person with those initials. Unless Clark Gable is going to come back from the grave."

There was a silence. "Well, maybe if you liked some other TV channel. Walt Disney's on Channel 4 on Sunday nights. Don't you like Walt Disney?"

"Yuck. Robert, this is really a dumb system you invented."

"Well, it worked for
me.
" She could tell from Robert's voice that he was mad.

"I'll do it again tomorrow when the date is different. Maybe by tomorrow I'll like a different TV channel, too."

"Okay," Robert muttered.

"I have to go now, Robert."

"I might ride my bike out to see you. I looked on the map, and it's not too far."

"Okay," said Anastasia. "But call first. Because I might be busy with my new friends or something."

She felt like a rotten person after she hung up. But honestly. Robert was such a jerk. Your age. The date. Your favorite TV channel. Your phone number. All of those things
change,
for pete's sake. How could anybody know anything about the future
ever,
when everything changes all the time?

Anyway, she thought suddenly, if you
did
know the future, there wouldn't be any
surprises
left.

Back in the kitchen, her parents were measuring the windows so that her mother could make curtains.

Once, several years ago, her parents had had a huge fight about sewing. Anastasia's mother had suddenly
said, one day, that she didn't see why she automatically did all the mending and sewing. She was sewing some buttons onto something at the time and had just pricked her finger with the needle, and she had the tip of her finger in her mouth, sucking it, when suddenly she got mad.

"This is the most sexist household in Cambridge," she had announced angrily. "Why is it that the wife gets stuck with the sewing? Myron, you do some of the
cooking.
Will you tell me one good reason why you don't
sew?
"

"Because I don't know how," Dr. Krupnik had said, chewing on his pipe.

"I'll teach you, then."

"Thank you, but I don't
want
to know how to sew."

Her mother sat there for a minute, sucking her finger, looking madder and madder. "In that case," she said, finally, "thank you, but I don't want to do any laundry anymore. Ever."

"In
that
case," said her father, "I don't think I want to be an English professor anymore. I have always, if you must know, wanted to be a beachcomber. So I think that from now on I will walk on empty beaches—all alone, by the way—and recite poetry to myself. Of course that means that there will be no more paychecks."

Anastasia's mother folded the shirt which was still missing two buttons, very neatly, and laid it on the table. "As a matter of fact,
I
have been wanting for a long time to go to the Cotswolds and live in a small cottage with a thatched roof—all alone, by the way—and paint."

Anastasia had scurried away to her room, terrified. If her father became a beachcomber—all alone—and her mother went to the Cotswolds, whatever the Cotswolds were—all alone—what would happen to Anastasia?

But after a while, she heard her parents laughing. When she went back to where they were, her mother was giggling and had her father's pipe in her mouth, and her father was sewing a button on his shirt.

Since then, her mother had always done all the sewing. Anastasia couldn't figure it out. It was something like item number 124 in her list of things she absolutely didn't understand.

Now her mother was about to make curtains for the kitchen. The fabric, bright blue with yellow and orange suns and moons and stars all over it, was unfolded on the kitchen table.

"Those curtains are going to be weird," Anastasia said cheerfully.

Her father turned, with a tape measure dangling around his neck, and said loudly, "That's
it.
"

"
What's
it, Dad?"

"That word. Weird. I have heard you use the word
weird
at least four thousand times in the past week."

"But..."

"Anastasia, this is a household of verbal, articulate, intelligent people. We have an entire room filled with bookcases. In those bookcases there are dictionaries. Encyclopedias.
Roget's Thesaurus.
Anthologies of obscure Elizabethan poetry. There are a
hundred
words—at
least
a hundred words—that you could substitute for
weird.
"

"Name some."

He got a beer from the refrigerator. "
Strange,
" he said. "
Dreadful. Formidable. Ghastly. Unearthly. Demoniacal...
"

Anastasia could tell, when he got to
demoniacal,
that he was going to go on for quite a while. She grabbed a cookie and began to back out of the room.

"I'm going to take Gertrustein her goldfish," she muttered.

"
PHANTASMAGORICAL!
" said her father, and took another gulp of beer.

Anastasia closed the door quietly. Sam appeared on the stairs with wet diapers and rosy cheeks, coming down from his room after his nap. "What's the matter with Daddy?" he asked.

Anastasia shrugged and gave Sam half of her cookie. "He's being weird," she said.

***

"Frank, I'm going to take your buddy next door. I hope you won't miss him too much," said Anastasia. But Frank kissed the side of his bowl and wiggled his behind. He didn't mind.

Her novel in her notebook was open on her desk. Anastasia picked up her pencil and read what she had written so far, concluding with the footnote. It seemed enough for Chapter 1.

"Chapter 2," she wrote on the next page.

"The young girl decided," she wrote, "that one way to adapt to a new house was to make friends. And one way to make friends was to take them a gift.

"A lot of people find that food is a good gift to take to someone. Sometimes people make an apple pie, or a macaroni and cheese casserole, and they take it next door to their neighbors, and after that they are friends.

"But the young girl didn't know how to cook..."

Then she crossed that out. It was a novel, after all. It didn't have to be the complete truth.

"But the young girl didn't care much for cooking, although she was very good at it. Also, it was ninety degrees outside, and too hot to turn on the stove. So she decided to take her next-door neighbor a fish. It was not a
cooked
fish."

She read over what she had written, and it didn't sound just right. Anastasia scowled and tore the whole page out. Good grief : it was really
hard
to write a novel, even after you had a good title.

It was not easy to push the doorbell without spilling the goldfish bowl, but after a moment Anastasia managed a good shrill ring. After another moment, she could hear Gertrustein's shuffling footsteps and then her voice: "Who's there?"