"Thank you. Next?" Aunt Vera looked toward Henry.
"My name's Henry Peabody and I'm thirteen and I came because I wanted to learn something about maybe being a model. My aunt—that's my real aunt, not no fake aunt—said maybe I could be a model because I'm tall and thin. And if I could be a model I could earn enough money to go to college." She paused. Then she added, "My hair color's natural, too. So's my skin." She grinned.
Anastasia squirmed in her chair. She knew it was her turn next and she didn't know what to say. Aunt Vera smiled at her.
"Well, ah, my name's Anastasia Krupnik. I'm thirteen, same as Henry. And I'm tall and thin, too, same as Henry, but I guess I wasn't really thinking about actually being a model. I think I'm going to be a bookstore owner. I was just sort of hoping to, I don't know, maybe get more self-confidence."
"Good. Bobby?"
Robert Giannini stood up. Typical, Anastasia thought. Nobody else stood up, but Robert Giannini stood up. "That's Robert," he said, "not Bobby. I've never been called Bobby. I'm thirteen but I haven't achieved my full growth yet so I appear younger. I'm expecting a growth spurt anytime."
Anastasia put her head in her hands. Growth spurt. What a Robert Giannini-like thing to say.
"I enrolled," Robert went on, "just out of general interest. I haven't chosen a career yet. I'm considering metallurgy. I don't think of myself as a potential entertainer or anything, although there are several magic tricks that I do quite well. But I like to explore all kinds of possibilities. If I find that I photograph well, then of course television would be one of my options—"
Anastasia could tell that he was going to go on and on. Apparently Uncle Charley could tell that, too, because he interrupted Robert.
"Good," said Uncle Charley. "Now that we know each other, let's get started."
"You wanta go to McDonald's for lunch?" asked Henry."Or do you want to just walk over to the park and throw up?"
Anastasia giggled. They had just left Studio Charmante for their lunch break and were standing together on the windy street corner. Back at the studio, Robert Giannini had cornered Uncle Charley to discuss camera angles. Bambie Browne had disappeared someplace, probably to the ladies' room to repair her mascara, and Helen Margaret was sitting all alone in the waiting room, opening a paper bag of sandwiches that she had brought with her.
"I can't," Anastasia told Henry apologetically. "I have to meet someone for lunch. I'm sorry."
Henry's eyes lit up. "Some guy?"
"No, nobody interesting. A woman. But I'll see you back here at one o'clock, okay?"
"Okay. I'm going to get me a Big Mac and then I want to hang out at the record store. Maybe I'll listen to a little Shakespeare for this afternoon," Henry said, laughing. "I'll practice a few gestures."
Anastasia laughed too, said goodbye, and headed off in the opposite direction.
It had been a weird morning. So far, Uncle Charley had videotaped three of the kids—all but Henry and Anastasia; he would do them after lunch.
"Now, try to be natural," he had said. "This is just for the 'Before' part. At the end of the week, we'll do the 'After,' and you'll see what a difference has taken place. Let's start with you, Helen Margaret. I want you to stand up here in front and simply talk about yourself a little. Look toward the camera."
Helen Margaret walked to the front of the room as if she were made of wood. She stood in the place Uncle Charley indicated, looked at the floor, and was silent.
"Okay, sweetie," Aunt Vera said, "the camera's rolling. Tell us about yourself. Look up. We won't bite."
Helen Margaret, with her head still down, peered up through her straggly dark bangs. "I don't know what to say," she mumbled.
"You got any hobbies?" Uncle Charley called from behind the camera.
Helen Margaret bit her lip and shook her head. "No," she whispered.
"How about a boyfriend?" asked Aunt Vera.
"No."
Anastasia wanted to point out to Aunt Vera that she wasn't asking open-ended questions. But she decided that maybe it was a little early in the course to start correcting the head person. So she kept quiet.
The interview—or lack of interview—went on for ten minutes, with Helen Margaret mumbling one-word answers to questions while she looked at the floor. Anastasia felt sorry for her. I'm not going to like it when it's my turn, she thought, but at least I can stand up straight and say something. I can tell about my family and stuff.
Bambie went next. She posed in the front of the room and began her performance before Uncle Charley got the camera started. "Hold it," he called. "Start again."
Bambie tossed her head, smoothed her hair, and waited until the camera was on. "I'm doing the monologue that I did for Community Auditions," she announced. "This is Juliet's death scene."
Next to Anastasia, Henry groaned quietly. Anastasia squirmed in embarrassment as Bambie gestured with her hands, holding up an imaginary vial of poison. "'Shall I not then be stifled in the vault, to whose foul mouth no healthsome air breathes in,'" she intoned dramatically, "'and there die strangled ere my Romeo comes?'" She pretended to drink from the imaginary poison and began to sink to the floor. Mid-sink, she called to Uncle Charley, "Is the camera getting this? I don't have to go all the way to the floor. I could collapse across a chair. I practice it both ways."
Uncle Charley turned the camera off. "We got enough, sweetheart," he said.
"Robert?" Aunt Vera suggested. "How about you next?"
Robert Giannini picked up his briefcase and carried it to the front of the room. I wonder what he keeps in that briefcase, Anastasia thought.
I wonder what he's going to say.
If he makes his speech on Human Reproduction, I'm leaving. I'll forfeit my whole $119 if I have to, but I will never again in my life sit still and listen to Robert Giannini say, "Out of ten million sperm, only one will reach the ovum."
Robert cleared his throat, adjusted his tie, and began, "I am going to speak about the United States Space Program."
"Zzzzzzzzz." Henry faked a snore.
Anastasia sighed, remembering the morning, as she headed across the Boston Common toward Beacon Hill. Modeling school wasn't really what she had anticipated. Henry Peabody was the only good thing about it.
Walking, she tried to think of some open-ended questions for the bookstore owner. But her mind kept wandering instead, revising her paper on My Chosen Career.
Anastasia Krupnik
My Chosen Career
Sometimes, in doing the necessary preparation for your chosen career, you will encounter people that you wish you hadn't encountered.
Maybe they will be people from your past—people you hoped you would never see again under any circumstances ever.
Sometimes they may be people you have never met before, the kind of people who recite Shakespeare with gestures and then do a disgusting curtsy at the end.
I think there is probably no way to avoid this happening. Moving to an entirely new town doesn't seem to be the solution.
Maybe moving to another country would help.
5
Anastasia made her way through the Common, averting her eyes from the wino who sat slumped on a bench, slurping booze out of a bottle concealed in a paper bag. She stopped briefly to pat a tall, thin dog who came to her with a stick in his mouth and his tail wagging furiously, until the dog's master called, "Come, Sheba," and the dog reluctantly but obediently trotted away.
She walked around the State House with its glistening golden dome and found the street she was looking for. Here, on Beacon Hill, it was quieter, less crowded. The streets were narrow, lined with brick sidewalks, trees, and gaslights. There didn't seem to be any stores here, just tall brick houses close to each other.
Her father had told her that once, in the last century, these were all private homes. Now, though, most of them had been divided into apartments. Only a few people still owned entire houses on Beacon Hill. Rich people.
Anastasia checked the numbers and
began walking downhill. She had a horrible thought. What if the bookstore, Pages, was actually in someone's home? A rich person's home? What if the bookstore owner, Ms. Barbara Page, was old, rich, and grouchy?
She looked down at her legs and feet. Her hiking boots were coated with gray slush and the bottoms of her jeans were soggy. Great. She had a sudden, horrible vision of an old, rich, grouchy bookstore owner staring at her with hatred as she stood dripping on the polished floor of the bookstore.
She pictured a newspaper headline that said: JUNIOR HIGH STUDENT THROTTLED TO DEATH BY ENRAGED BEACON HILL BOOKSTORE OWNER.
She pictured a smaller headline underneath: "SHE GOT SLUSH ON MY RARE VOLUMES," EXPLAINS BARBARA PAGE.
And finally, Anastasia pictured a third, smaller, sadder newspaper caption: Justifiable homicide, says judge.
"Grab that leg!" a man's voice yelled suddenly, and Anastasia jumped. She backed away from the voice. Which leg did he mean to grab—her right or her left? Could she kick with the other?
Then she realized that the voice had come from the back of a truck which had the title great moves painted on the side. Two men were wrestling with a heavy green sofa. She remembered when her own family had moved from Cambridge, and that the moving men had wrestled the same way with their furniture. They had yelled, too. Actually, they had yelled things a lot worse than "Grab that leg," she remembered.
She paused and waited until the men, grunting, carried the sofa across the sidewalk and up the front steps of a house. Then she walked on and suddenly she was there.
Whew. It wasn't a whole house. It was a real store, a real bookstore, in the basement of an old brick building. A carved wooden sign that said pages was in the window.
Relieved, Anastasia took off her glove and pushed open the door. A bell attached to the top of the door tinkled, signaling her entrance.
"Hi. I'm Barbara Page, and you must be Anastasia Krupnik. Why don't you take off your boots?" the bookstore owner said. "Your feet must be freezing."
Anastasia said hi, knelt, and began to unlace her boots. Her feet were freezing, she realized. Then she realized something else. Something embarrassing. She looked up. "This is embarrassing," she said, "but the socks I have on ..."
Barbara Page looked, and laughed. "One's blue and the other's brown. That's okay. Leave your boots there in the corner and come on into the back room with me. I have some sandwiches there for us."
Anastasia followed the woman, looking around at the cluttered, colorful store. Bookstores were among Anastasia's favorite places; maybe they were even first on her list, or at least tied for first with libraries. She sometimes thought that she would like to live in a library, not even having a kitchen—just going out to eat, and spending all the rest of her life surrounded by books.
But maybe it would be even better to live in a bookstore. Heck, if you owned the bookstore you could even put a kitchen in the back—she could see now, entering the back room, that Barbara Page did have a coffeepot there, and a small sink—and you'd never have to leave at all. Just live surrounded by walls of bookshelves. Read and read and read, and sometimes stop to eat a little. What a great life.
Suddenly Anastasia began to feel very happy about her chosen career.
"Do you live here?" she asked.
Barbara Page nodded. "Sort of," she said. "Actually, my husband and I live upstairs, in the house part. But I just come down that little staircase over there every morning—" she pointed, and Anastasia could see the bottom of a narrow staircase behind a partly opened door—"and voila! I'm at work."
"That's neat."
Barbara Page uncovered some sandwiches that were waiting on a paper plate. She poured Coke into two plastic glasses.
"You're right," she said. "It is neat. Hey, how's your dad? I love your dad's books. Is he working on a new one?"
Anastasia nodded. "Yeah, but it won't be done for a long time. He's right at the point where he says he's going to burn the whole thing up and start a new career, maybe as a tennis pro."
"I didn't know he played tennis."
"He doesn't. But it doesn't matter, because he's not really going to be a tennis pro. It's just what he says when he's in the middle of a new book. After he says that, it's usually about six months before the book is done."
"Here. Eat." Barbara Page handed Anastasia half of a tuna fish sandwich, and Anastasia took a bite.
The telephone on the messy desk rang. The bookstore owner swallowed her own bite of sandwich, picked up the phone, and said, "Pages, good afternoon."
Anastasia listened while she ate her sandwich and sipped at her Coke. It wasn't really eavesdropping, she figured, because after all, she was sitting right there beside the telephone. And anyway, it was a business call, so it was a good way to get information about her chosen career.
"Well, Mrs. Devereaux, I'm really sorry to hear that," Barbara Page was saying. "It got great reviews, and I thought it was exactly the kind of book you'd like."
She listened for a moment, making a silent face at Anastasia, and then went on, "I wouldn't call it trashy, Mrs. Devereaux. The New York Times said it was hard-hitting and realistic, but they thought it was brilliant. And the author did win the Pulitzer Prize last year."
Finally, after listening again, she said politely, "Of course you can return it. I'll just credit your account. You drop it off next time you're down this way."
After she had hung up, she groaned. "That woman. Honestly. She buys books, reads them, and then returns them and asks for her money back. You'd think she'd go to the library instead.
"This is the third one she's returned since September. And she always spills coffee on them, too, so I can't resell them."
Anastasia was astonished. "But that's not fair!" she said.
Barbara Page chuckled. "It's the breaks," she said.
While Anastasia ate her sandwich and drank her Coke, she listened to Barbara Page answer the telephone three more times. She listened to her say to someone, "I don't carry cassettes, I'm afraid. But you could try Barnes and Noble."
Then she heard her say to someone else, "I do have that book here, Mr. Phelps. But to be honest, I don't think it would be the right birthday gift for your mother. She's had trouble reading since her cataract surgery. I think maybe a record album would be a better choice, at least until her eyes are stronger. I know she loves Bach. Why don't you get her a recording of The Magnificat?"
And finally, to the third caller, she said, "Gosh, that's been out of print for years. But I bet anything you could find it at the library, Mrs. MacDonald. Or if you want to own it, you could try a secondhand bookstore."
After the last phone call, Anastasia said, "I don't mean to be rude or anything, but how do you make any money? I mean, my dad said that you gave forty-seven people wine and cheese and only sold three books, and now you tell me that you let people return books with coffee spilled on them, and you tell them to buy records, and you send them to other bookstores, and I don't see how—"
Suddenly Anastasia looked around, through the door into the bookstore itself. It looked exactly the way a bookstore should, in Anastasia's opinion, look: walled with ceiling-high bookcases, vivid with the colorful jackets of novels, and in one corner she could see a child-size table and chairs beside the shelves that held children's books. A lavishly illustrated book lay on the bright yellow table, open to a page that showed rabbits in jogging shoes running along a country road.
But something was missing.
While Barbara Page watched, Anastasia adjusted her glasses, frowned, and peered through the door, trying to figure out what was missing.
Finally she turned back to the bookstore owner. "There aren't any customers," she said, puzzled.
Barbara Page shrugged, smiling. "Sometimes there are," she said. "Never very many, though, I'm afraid."
"But how do you make a living? How do you pay the rent?" Anastasia asked.
A man's voice interrupted their conversation. "Barb?" he called down the back stairs.
r /> "What, honey?" the bookstore owner called back.
"Where's yesterday's Wall Street Journal?" the man called.
"On your desk. You left it there last night," Barbara Page replied. Then she turned back to Anastasia with a sheepish grin. "That's how I pay the rent. There isn't any rent. We own the whole building—my husband and I."
"Oh."
"You look disappointed."
"No," Anastasia said, "not disappointed. Just confused. I mean, I'm glad you have a husband—he sounded like a nice guy—and I know lots of professional women have husbands. My mother does, for example."
"Why are you confused, then?"
"Well, what if when I grow up and start my chosen career, I don't have a husband who owns a building that I can put my chosen career in?"
"Then," Barbara Page said decisively, "you work hard and become successful and you buy your own building. I bet you could buy two or three buildings eventually, Anastasia. You look like a hard worker. Here—have some potato chips."
Anastasia took one and munched. She thought about it. It was true that she was a hard worker. She probably would be a successful bookstore owner. Heck, she could probably end up owning skyscrapers.
But it might help, she realized, to marry someone who also owned buildings.
"You know what?" she said to Barbara Page. "I think I have to leave my options open."
"What do you mean, exactly?"
"Well, I want to be an independent person and all that, and a hard worker, and a successful bookstore owner who buys skyscrapers, but—"
"But what?"