Anastasia at Your Service

"Daphne," said Anastasia slowly, "you know, we're really not being fair. All of those people have problems. But it isn't fair to call them undesirable."

  "I don't call them undesirable. I like them. I think they're the most interesting people in town. I even like that grubby old drunk. But my grandmother will think they're undesirable. And she's the one we want to humiliate, right?"

  "Right." Actually, it was beginning to shape up as a terrific plan.

  "There are a couple of guys who hang out in the park and smoke dope all the time. One of them was in jail once, I think, for selling drugs. I'll invite them."

  Inside the house, the telephone rang. It rang a second time.

  "Daphne, aren't you going to answer the phone?"

  Daphne shook her head. "It'll just be for my parents. Let it ring."

  "You're weird, Daphne. You're really weird," said Anastasia. She got up to go answer the telephone. But by the time she found it, after the fifth ring, there was no one on the other end.

  "It's almost nine. I have to go home, Daphne," she said when she went back to the porch.

  "Listen, don't worry about a thing. I'll get the invitations and I'll distribute them. They won't even have your fingerprints on them."

  "Daphne, is this against the law? Could we get arrested?"

  But Daphne just laughed. "Thou shalt not sweat it," she said.

  ***

  Something was wrong at home. Anastasia could tell when she turned the corner. All the downstairs lights were on, and if something wasn't wrong, all the downstairs lights wouldn't be on. Her father was always yelling about the electric bill.

  Then her heart sank. There was a police car in the driveway.

  How could the police know already about the revenge she and Daphne were plotting?

  I'll deny everything, she thought. Even if they put lighted matches under my fingernails. I'll say I never met Daphne Bellingham in my life.

  They have to read me my rights, she thought. I'm entitled to a lawyer. I won't say anything that can be used against me.

  It was an accident that I dropped the thing down the garbage disposal. And I've already paid back $17.50 of it.

  Anastasia tried to think of every bad thing she had ever done. Surely her mother wouldn't have noticed yet that one pair of pantyhose was missing. Anyway, her mother wouldn't call the police about one lousy pair of pantyhose.

  And the Billie Holiday records were two whole years ago. She shouldn't have reminded her father about them. But still, even though it had made him sulk at dinner, thinking about the Billie Holiday records, he wouldn't have called the police.

  Terrified, she opened the back door.

  "Anastasia!" said Mrs. Stein, their next-door neighbor. What on earth was Mrs. Stein doing in their kitchen at nine P.M.? Mrs. Stein never went out at night. She had all her favorite TV shows to watch. She even liked the summer reruns.

  "Sweetheart," said her mother, coming into the kitchen. "I tried to call you at Daphne's, but no one answered. You must have been outside. But I knew you'd be home in a few minutes. Thank God you're here."

  Her mother's eyes were red. Anastasia could tell that she had been crying.

  "What's wrong?" asked Anastasia in a small voice. Her stomach felt funny. She would confess, she knew. They wouldn't have to put the matches under her fingernails. She would tell everything: the plot, the pantyhose, even all the way back to the cupcake she had stolen when she was nine. If only her mother wouldn't cry.

  "There's been an accident," said her mother, and put her arms around Anastasia.

  "WWHERE'S DAD?" asked Anastasia. "WHAT'S HAPPENED TO DAD?"

  "Dad's okay," said her mother. "It's Sam. Dad's at the hospital with Sam. The police are going to take us there."

  Later, Anastasia could barely remember the ride to the hospital. It seemed like a blur, or a dream. But she remembered her mother holding her hand and telling her what had happened.

  They had put Sam to bed, with his ragged security blanket, which he always took to bed, and with his encyclopedia volume. He hadn't even wanted a bedtime story. He just wanted to read "airplane" to them once more, and then he kissed them good night, and they turned off his light and went downstairs.

  Later—much later—her parents were in the living room, reading, when they heard a crash.

  "Sam fell out of bed, right, Mom?" asked Anastasia, holding tightly to her mother's hand. "Dumb old Sam. He was fooling around with his crib, and he fell out of bed. He probably broke his arm or something, didn't he, Mom?" Funny, how when you wanted someone to laugh and say "Yes, that's right," you talked on and on, not giving them a chance to say it because secretly you were scared they wouldn't say it, but would say something else that you didn't want to hear.

  And finally her mother squeezed her hand back and said no. Sam had apparently gotten out of his crib and had taken his airplane book over to the window—they didn't know why, but they thought maybe he had wanted to look into the sky for airplanes—and when he leaned against the screen it had broken, and Sam had fallen from the window.

  Anastasia's stomach felt sick. The window. That was practically like the Empire State Building. Sam's window was very high. If they had only never moved from the apartment where they used to live—their first-floor apartment in Cambridge—if they had never moved to this enormous house—if only ...

  "Did it hurt?" she asked in a small voice. "Did he cry?"

  "Sweetie," said her mother, "he was unconscious. We think his head hit that tree stump, where the dead elm tree had been taken down."

  There was something else Anastasia wanted to ask, but she couldn't make her voice say the words. The police car was pulling up to the hospital entrance. Anastasia was still holding her mother's hand, and someone guided them in and put them in an elevator, and doors closed and doors opened, and suddenly she saw her father, sitting in an ugly green plastic chair, with his head down, looking at the floor. He looked up when he heard them, but he didn't smile; he just stood up, with his face sad and puzzled, and he reached out his arms.

  Anastasia ran to him, and she began to cry. She made her voice say the words, and she asked the question, but it was the most terrible question she had ever asked.

  "Daddy," she sobbed, "is our Sam going to die?"

  6

  No, they told her, but she didn't believe them. Sam is not going to die, her father told her, but she didn't believe him, even though he had never lied to her, not ever.

  She cried and cried, and she didn't care that her face was red and her hair was messy and her glasses were falling off because tears made them slippery.

  Then a nurse said it too, that Sam wasn't going to die, but she didn't believe the nurse, because nurses always said stuff like penicillin shots don't hurt, which was one of the most blatant lies in the whole world.

  She cried because they had called her at Daphne Bellingham's, and Daphne hadn't answered the phone. She cried because she had called him old dumb Sam, and it wasn't true: he was smart, and he was young, and he was the only brother she had, and she loved him more than anything, and now she was sure they were all lying and he was going to die.

  Once—more than once: often —she had hidden his blanky just to make him mad, just to tease him. She cried because she kept remembering that.

  They all kept saying it to her, and she kept not believing them. But finally a doctor came through a doorway, wearing the same kind of operating room clothes that doctors on soap operas wear, and he said it, too, that Sam wasn't going to die, and when he said it, her parents began to smile. And then she believed it, because of the smiles.

  Then she was able to stop crying, at last. The nurse gave her a little gray cardboard box of hospital tissues, and Anastasia blew her nose about a thousand times, and cleaned her glasses, and then she was able to listen to what the doctor was saying, because the inside of her head had stopped making crying noises.

  "Your boy had a depressed skull fracture," the doctor said to Anastasia's parents, and he pointed to
his own head to show them exactly where it was on Sam's, "and that's why we had to take him to surgery. But he's going to be just fine. At his age he'll heal in no time. You'll have him back home, oh, probably in a week or less."

  "Can we see him?" asked her mother.

  "Well, he'll be sound asleep for a good while. You folks may as well all go home and get some sleep yourselves. But if you want to wait twenty more minutes or so, you can peek at him while they wheel him to the recovery room. They'll be bringing him right along through here."

  "Can we give him this?" asked Anastasia's father, and he held up Sam's ragged yellow blanky.

  The doctor looked startled. "What is it?" he asked.

  "His security blanket."

  The doctor grinned. "Sure. Put it on the stretcher with him when they bring him out. Then he'll have it when he wakes up."

  The doctor turned to leave. "Sometimes," he said, "I could use one of those myself," and he chuckled at Sam's blanky, nodded his head in response to their thank-yous, and went back through the door.

  Anastasia, her mother, and her father, all sat down on the ugly green plastic chairs. Her father took his pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it with tobacco.

  "I suppose they'll hand me a pamphlet about smoking if I light this in here," he said guiltily.

  But there were ashtrays overflowing with the remains of other people's cigarettes. The Krupniks were the only ones in the waiting room. But Anastasia could tell that a lot of people had been there, worrying, that day. She wondered who they had been, and if they had all leafed through the same wrinkled People magazines on the table, and she hoped that they had all been as lucky as her family, and as lucky as Sam. She wondered if some of them had cried, and if the nurses had given them tissues.

  Sometimes, when they had to kill time, like in a dentist's waiting room, or on a boring drive someplace, she and her mother played a game they had invented. Her father would never play; he said it was demented. The game was called Choices. "If you had a choice," it always began. They tried to think of the most terrible choices they could for each other, and it was against the rules not to choose. The worst one was one that her mother had given her: If you had a choice, would you eat liver at every meal for the rest of your life, and you would live to be ninety-seven, or would you stand naked in Lord & Taylor's main window for two hours on a Saturday afternoon?

  She had tried, when her mother asked her that one, to narrow it down a little. To make it easier. Would the liver be raw? No, her mother said; it could be cooked. Could you wear a ski mask over your face in Lord & Taylor's window so that no one knew who you were? Well, said her mother, okay. You could wear a ski mask.

  Even then, it was an impossible choice.

  Now she began to pass the time, while they waited to see Sam, by asking herself: If you had a choice. But all of the choices centered on Sam.

  If you had a choice, she said to herself, would you have leprosy, and your nose would have to be amputated, or would you let Sam die?

  Leprosy, she told herself instantly. Nose and all.

  Well, she said to herself: If you had a choice, would you marry that jerk Robert Giannini, and also never wash your hair for the rest of your life, and also join the Ku Klux Klan— or would you let Sam die?

  I would do all that, she told herself, so that Sam wouldn't die.

  I would even, she realized suddenly, eat liver raw three meals a day, and also stand in Lord & Taylor's window naked, without a ski mask, before I would let Sam die.

  But he isn't going to, she thought happily.

  Then, suddenly, there he was, being wheeled past by two nurses, who stopped briefly so that they could all look down at him. He was sound asleep; and his head was bandaged; and there was a needle in one of his arms, going to a tube that went up to a bottle hanging on a rack. But none of that mattered. He was still Sam, still old dumb Sam, and he was okay. Her father gave the blanky to the nurse, who tucked it in under Sam's limp little hand, and then they wheeled him away.

  In the car, going home, Anastasia leaned against her mother. She was exhausted.

  "Mom," she said sleepily, "I was thinking, at the hospital, and I decided that if I had a choice, I would eat liver raw..."

  "Shhhh," said her mother, stroking her hair.

  "And," she murmured, "I would marry Robert Giannini, and I would have my nose amputated, and join the Ku Klux Klan..."

  "Mmmmm," said her mother.

  "I forget the rest, but I would do it all, just for old Sam."

  "Me too."

  "Even the Lord and Taylor's window. I'd even do that, without a ski mask."

  Her mother chuckled. "Of course you would. We all would. But we don't even have to think about that. Old Sam is going to be okay."

  "You know what I was thinking, in there, while we waited to see Sam?" asked her father suddenly.

  "What?"

  "I was thinking what a weird injury he has. A depressed skull fracture. Can you imagine a cheerful skull fracture?"

  They couldn't. But thinking about it made them smile, and they decided they would tell Sam about it. When he woke up. When he was okay. Tomorrow.

  ***

  "Anastasia," said her mother, after she hung up the phone the next morning, "the doctor says Sam is awake and doing just fine. And we can go to see him. But they have a rule about visitors. No one under fourteen."

  Anastasia slammed down the dish towel that she was using to dry the breakfast dishes. "That's crummy! That's absolutely crummy! Everyone in the whole world is conspiring to get me! It's the one day I don't have to work, because Mrs. Bellingham is having people come to clean all the rugs and she's afraid I'll get in their way—which is idiotic—but I had the whole day free, and I was going to go and read to Sam, for Pete's sake. I was going to go to the library and get books about airplanes and take them to the hospital to read them to old Sam. And now they say I can't do that unless I'm fourteen? My own, my only brother, and some jerk has made a rule that I can't even read to him when he has a depressed skull fracture? That's not fair! It's crummy!"

  She picked up the dish towel and slammed it down again. It wasn't very satisfying to slam a dish towel. A dish would have been better. But the dishes they had used for breakfast were her favorites—yellow, with white flowers on them.

  Her mother looked angry, too. "You're right, Anastasia. Sam would want to see you. Probably if you didn't come he would start to cry, and run a fever ..."

  "And get a stomachache. It would be terrible for his health."

  "Absolutely. It would be detrimental to Sam's entire recovery if you couldn't visit him. That is the stupidest rule!"

  Dr. Krupnik appeared at the door to the kitchen. "What on earth is going on in here? You people are shouting and slamming and stamping your feet. You made the needle jump on the stereo."

  Anastasia and her mother explained the hospital's rule.

  "For heaven's sake," said Anastasia's father, "a rule like that is so dumb, it deserves to be broken. You're tall for your age, Anastasia. We'll just pretend you're fourteen. If they question us at the door I will swear a solemn oath, on pain of death, that you are fourteen years old."

  "But Dad," said Anastasia, startled, "it would be a lie. Your whole philosophy of life is always to be honest."

  "What's the date?" asked her father.

  "August nineteenth."

  Her father stood in front of the refrigerator, very straight and tall, with his hands at his sides. "On this date," he announced, in a loud, speech-making voice, "August nineteenth, Myron David Krupnik, Ph.D., honors graduate of several distinguished institutions of higher learning, member of the Authors Guild, Incorporated, vice-chairman of the English Department at Harvard University, noted author of several milestone volumes of poetry, contributor to the Civil Liberties Union and the Museum of Fine Arts, and general nifty person, declares that he has changed his entire philosophy of life. Drum roll, please."

  Anastasia grabbed the frying pan that she had just
dried, and beat on it solemnly with a wooden spoon. Her mother made some trumpet noises into the plastic funnel top of the coffee pot.

  "Thank you," said Dr. Krupnik, and they stopped. "My new philosophy of life," he announced, "allows for the occasional posing of a five-foot, seven-inch, twelve-year-old girl as a fourteen-year-old girl, for the emergency purpose of cheering up her little brother, in the face of an idiotic bureaucratic rule."

  He bowed. Anastasia and her mother applauded. Dr. Krupnik left the kitchen.

  Maybe, thought Anastasia, it would help if I borrowed a bra again, and took some pantyhose, and...

  No, she thought. Absolutely not. Her own philosophy of life, she decided suddenly, was never, under any circumstances, ever, to go anywhere again wearing a pantyhose bosom. You just could never predict when someone might ask you to pass a tray of deviled eggs.

  ***

  When they stopped at the library on the way to the hospital, Anastasia found all sorts of airplane books. All About Airplanes. Conquering the Sky. Flight Through the Ages, which opened with a picture of Icarus and his wax wings, melting when he flew too close to the sun. She checked it out because it had some wonderful photographs of jets at the end, but the picture of Icarus made her feel funny, because it made her think of Sam, falling. For a minute she wished that Sam had taken up some hobby other than airplanes. But what if he had taken up submarines? Probably he would have drowned. What if he had become interested in animal training? Somewhere he would have found a wild rhinoceros and been eaten up.

  She shuddered. Well, her father had spent the whole morning fixing the screens on all the upstairs windows. At least Sam would never fall from his window again. And from now on, she told herself, she would keep a very careful eye on her brother all the time so that he wouldn't have any more accidents, ever. She planned to be the very best sister in the whole world.

  And she would start by being a wonderful hospital visitor. She planned to sit by Sam's bed and say soothing things to him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth now and then, reading to him in a soft voice, and saying, "There, there," now and then when he whimpered with pain.