Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst (3 page)

Anastasia didn't know how to answer. Finally she
said, almost in a whisper, "I wish you wouldn't be a painter. I wish you'd just be a normal mother."

"Like who? Give me an example."

"Well, Daphne's mother. She always wears a dress, and make-up—"

"Make-up makes my face itch."

"—and when we go to Daphne's house after school, her mother is always having tea with someone, or playing bridge. And she teaches Sunday school."

"Anastasia, that's normal for Daphne's mother. She's the wife of the Congregational minister. But it wouldn't be normal for
me.
Normal is different for different people, don't you see that?"

Anastasia kicked the table leg with her hiking boot. She sighed. "I don't like your kind of normal," she said miserably.

Her mother leaned back in her chair. She scratched the sole of one bare foot by rubbing it across her jeans. She sipped her beer. She thought. She began to smile a little.

"Anastasia," she said, "I believe I know what's wrong. I want you to think for a minute about your friends. And give me honest answers, promise?"

"I'm always honest."

"True. Okay. Think for a minute about Daphne Bellingham. Does she think her mother is terrific?"

"No," Anastasia admitted. "She thinks her mother is weird and disgusting."

"Meredith Halberg. What does she think of her mother?"

Anastasia groaned. "She can't stand her mother. Because her mother has a Danish accent, and it's so embarrassing. She told her mother never to talk if she brings her friends home from school." Anastasia giggled.

"One more. Sonya. What's her last name, that cute little friend of yours named Sonya?"

"Isaacson. Well,
her
mother—good grief. Her mother's
fat.
"

"Gross and embarrassing, right?"

"Of course."

Anastasia's mother started to chuckle. She put down her beer can, still almost full, as if she didn't need it anymore. "Sweetie," she said. "Let me explain to you what's wrong. I should have realized it much sooner than this. You say this all started just a couple of weeks ago?"

"More or less. At least that's when I began to notice it."

"Remember what happened a couple of weeks ago?"

Anastasia shrugged. "Nothing much. I did lousy on a math test. I went to a garage sale with Sonya and Meredith, and Dad yelled at me because I spent five dollars on junk. There's another garage sale this Saturday, Mom, so I'm warning you that I may spend money on junk again."

"Don't you remember that Dad and I took you to dinner at a Chinese restaurant?"

"Yeah. So what? There was something in the sweet-and-sour pork that made you turn weird?"

"Nope." Her mother grinned. "Why did we take you out to dinner?"

"What is this, Twenty Questions? It was my birthday. My thirteenth birthday."

"Right. And how old are your friends? How old is Daphne?"

"Thirteen."

"Sonya?"

"Thirteen."

"Meredith?"

"Almost thirteen. What does that have to do with anything?"

Her mother got up and began to take eggs out of the refrigerator. She was still grinning. "I'd forgotten. How can I be a mother and forget something so important?"

"
What,
Mom? I hate it when you act mysterious."

"It's something that happens around the time you become thirteen. It happened to
me.
I had a much worse case than you do; how can I have forgotten that? My mother and grandmother took me to New York City for the day when I was thirteen, and I wanted to die, I was so embarrassed. My mother had this coat with a fur collar, and it looked as if she had some kind of animal wrapped around her neck; it was so disgusting. And my grandmother wore a wig, and had a Russian accent. I walked as far away from them as I could, so that I could pretend they were strangers."

"I don't know what you're talking about. People's mothers change and become disgusting when people are thirteen?"

"Nope. The mothers stay the same, but the thirteen-year-olds change, and the mothers
seem
disgusting."

"It happens to everybody?"

"I'm sure of it. I bet anything that in Alaska, thirteen-year-old Eskimo girls get together and talk about how weird their mothers are. In China. Africa. Everywhere."

"Why? Why does it happen?"

Anastasia's mother was whisking the eggs together in a bowl. "Gosh, I don't really know. I bet it's hormones. When people begin to mature physically, all those hormones start rushing around, or something."

"Well," said Anastasia angrily, "they ought to
warn
you. All those dumb books they give you to read, about getting your period and stuff. That's just
normal
stuff. Why don't they warn you about the
abnormal
stuff, like you'll start to hate your mother?"

"You know what? I think they do. Wasn't there a chapter in that book you had? A chapter called 'Emotional Changes' or something like that?"

Anastasia groaned. "Yeah," she acknowledged. "But I didn't read it, because it looked boring. The whole
book
was boring, but that chapter looked like the most boring of all, except maybe for the one called 'Personal Hygiene.' So I didn't even read it. And now it turns out that the most important stuff was in there."

"Well," said her mother, "reading it probably wouldn't have helped much, because you would still feel that way anyway. You'd still hate me," she said cheerfully, and began chopping a green pepper.

Anastasia stared at the floor. She was consumed with gloom. Completely consumed. "What can I do about it?" she asked. "Is there a cure?"

"Time. Wait it out. In the meantime, sweets, would you go get Sam cleaned up for dinner?"

Anastasia slammed the salt shaker down on the table. She stood up. "Why is it," she asked loudly, "that I always have to chase after that brat and change his yucky wet pants and wash his grubby hands? Nobody else's mother makes their kid do that kind of stuff. Nobody but
you.
Of all the mothers in the world, I had to get stuck with the only one who—"

She stopped short. Her mother was shaking with laughter.

"AND DON'T LAUGH!" roared Anastasia. She stomped out of the kitchen and up the stairs. At the door to her bedroom she stopped and gave the vacuum cleaner a swift kick that sent it thumping onto its side. She went into her room and slammed the door.

Anastasia Krupnik
Mr. Sherman's Class

On October 13, I acquired two wonderful little gerbils, who are living in a cage in my bedroom. Their names are Romeo and Juliet, and they are very friendly. They seem to like each other a lot. Since they are living in the same cage as man and wife, I expect they will have gerbil babies. My gerbil book says that It takes twenty-five days to make gerbil babies. I think they are already mating, because they act very affectionate to each other, so I will count today as DAY ONE and then I will observe them for twenty-five days and I hope that on DAY 25 their babies will be born.

This will be my Science Project.

Day Three.

My gerbils haven't changed much. They lie in their cage and sleep a lot. They're both overweight, because they eat too much, and they resemble Sonya Isaacson's mother, at least In chubbiness.

In personality, they resemble my mother. They're very grouchy.

Anastasia put her pencil down, and sighed. She glanced at the gerbils. They weren't as much fun as she had thought they would be. Maybe when Juliet had her babies in—Anastasia counted—twenty-two more days, if things worked the way they were supposed to...

Sam knocked at her door. He poked his head inside.

"You're supposed to get me cleaned up for dinner," he said. There was orange paint in his hair, on his clothes, and all over his face.

Grudgingly Anastasia took his hand and headed with him toward the bathroom.

"Why is the vacuum cleaner all tipped over in the hall?" Sam asked innocently.

"I do not care to discuss it," said Anastasia in her Queen Elizabeth voice.

I
T WAS
amazing, Anastasia thought as she ate, how her mother could turn a lot of
nothing
into a decent dinner. After school, when she had found the piece of cold chicken to gnaw on, the refrigerator had looked almost totally empty to her. It looked like the kind of refrigerator that might belong to starving peasants in India: a couple cans of beer, a carton of eggs, and a few plastic containers of leftovers. In the shelves on the inside of the door were all those things that lived in refrigerators for centuries: mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, horseradish, and salad dressing.

And in the drawer at the bottom, the drawer that said "crisper" on it, was nothing but a folder full of poems. Her father was almost finished writing a new book of poetry, and he always kept his unfinished manuscripts in the refrigerator drawer, the place where normal people kept lettuce. He said that if the house ever burned
down, the refrigerator probably wouldn't burn, so his unpublished book would be safe.

There had been a time—when she was younger and more naive—Anastasia had thought that was really neat. During that time she had always opened the refrigerator when friends were visiting, to show them the crisper full of poems, with great pride.

"Oh," she would say casually, when her friends were surprised, "doesn't your dad keep his manuscripts in the refrigerator?" And they would say no, their dad didn't write poems; their dad was a computer programmer, or a lawyer, or an electrician. Closing the refrigerator again, Anastasia would respond politely: "Pity." Just the way Queen Elizabeth would.

But lately she'd been embarrassed by the refrigerator drawer. She always hoped, when friends were over, that they would never go looking for a carrot.

So it wasn't only her
mother,
Anastasia realized, who was a source of embarrassment now. It was her father, too. And Sam, of course. Sam was a huge, humongous humiliation. His pants were usually wet, his face was always dirty, and—most humiliating of all—he had an IQ of about a billion. He was teaching himself to read, for pete's sake, and he was only three years old. And he could
type.
Talk about embarrassing!

Once, shortly after school had begun, and Anastasia was beginning to make friends here in the new town that they had just moved to in the summer, Sonya Isaacson had come home with her in the afternoon. The door
to the study had been closed, and through it they could hear the sound of typing.

"Your father must be in there writing a book," Sonya Isaacson had said in awe, because Anastasia had bragged a bit about what a famous writer her father was.

"I guess so," Anastasia had said. But she knew it wasn't true. Her father was teaching a seminar at Harvard that afternoon.

She had tried to hustle Sonya past the study and up the stairs to her room. But the sound of the typing stopped, and Sonya hesitated. She wanted to be a famous writer herself, so she was dying to meet Anastasia Krupnik's father, who had been nominated for the American Book Award last year.

Then the door to the study opened, and Anastasia could feel Sonya beside her, standing up straighter, ready to shake hands with the famous Myron Krupnik, who had been called Master of the Contemporary Image right on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review.

Instead, out came Sam: barefoot, grubby, wet (though Anastasia thought maybe Sonya didn't notice the wet), and holding a piece of typing paper in his hand. He held the paper up and displayed it proudly. "I was writing a story," he announced, then he scampered off toward the kitchen.

Anastasia had made a face and nudged Sonya on up the stairs. "That's just my stupid brother," she explained. "He fools with Dad's typewriter. He likes to make asterisks."

But Sonya had gotten a good look at Sam's paper. "That wasn't asterisks," she said. "It said, 'airplane, sky. zoom. down, crash.'"

"Probably didn't have any capital letters," said Anastasia glumly. "Sam's so dumb."

But all the rest of the way up the stairs, all the way to the third floor where Anastasia's room was, Sonya had said in a loud, astonished voice, "DUMB? You call that DUMB?"

And now, at this very moment, Sam was sitting there at the table, boosted up by two volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
underneath him, and he was dumping ketchup all over a mushroom omelet. Talk about disgusting.

I need help, thought Anastasia. Mom said give it time. But
time
is not going to cure this situation.

"Dad?" she asked, looking up from her plate. "Did Mom tell you about the conversation she and I had before dinner?"

"A little," he acknowledged. "Sounds like a normal sort of problem to me. I remember having it myself when I was your age. It isn't confined to females."

Typical, Anastasia thought.
Typical,
that they don't even see the seriousness of this. "Dad," she said, "I am having a serious emotional crisis."

Sam looked up from his dinner. His face lit up with interest. "Emotional?" he asked. "I know about that!"

"Sam," said Mrs. Krupnik gently, "I don't think—"