"Halloween was all over last month," laughed Washburn Cummings. "It's not cool, baby, to wear your monster costume after Halloween's all finished. Noooot coooool." He retrieved the basketball from the air somewhere, bounced it a few times on the sidewalk, wiggled his hips, and began to dribble his way toward school.
Anastasia decided that she could not go to school that day. Her stomach hurt too much. She stuffed her hairdo back into the ski hat and stopped at the drugstore on her way home to buy a new tube of shampoo. It cost her entire week's allowance. As she was leaving Belden's Pharmacy, the new issue of Cosmopolitan caught her eye. "Love—or Hate? Sometimes It's Hard to Tell," it said on the cover.
"You open it, you buy it, girlie," called Mr. Belden. He was watching her from the place where he measured out penicillin pills.
"Bug off, Mr. Belden," muttered Anastasia. She took her shampoo and her stomachache home, took a shower, washed her hair, and went to bed for the rest of the day.
"Call me if you throw up," said her mother. "I'll be doing the laundry."
But Anastasia didn't feel like throwing up. She sat on her bed and wrote, "I hate Washburn Cummings" in her notebook forty-three times until her stomachache went away. Then she read the Boston Globe, and found an article that told of a government research project which had found the average life span of a love affair to be five months.
"Mine was only three weeks," she thought. "But I'm young yet. And dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb again."
5
"Why did you have to give me the name Anastasia? None of the other kids can spell it, so when they have to vote for somebody by secret ballot, nobody ever votes for me. Like when I was nominated for Class Secretary, only four people voted for me, and the other twenty-two voted for Mary Ellen Bailey."
"The reason they didn't vote for you is because the Class Secretary has to have good handwriting. And your handwriting looks like hieroglyphics," said her father, looking up from the newspaper. "That time you tried to forge an absence excuse, you got caught right away, remember, because no parent—no adult, in fact—would get caught dead with handwriting like that."
"No adult would get caught dead with a name like Anastasia," Anastasia muttered, changing the subject back again, quickly, away from the handwriting and the absence excuse. "Why did you guys name me that?"
"Interesting question," said her father. "Choosing names is a fascinating procedure. Have you picked a name for the baby yet, Anastasia? What thought process did you go through to choose one?"
Anastasia pretended she hadn't heard his question. "If I didn't have such a dumb name, maybe Washburn Cummings would have liked me better," she said, even though the thought had not really occurred to her till that moment. But there was a possibility that it was true.
Her mother frowned and counted the stitches on her knitting needles. She was starting to make a baby sweater. "What's wrong with it, really? I think it's a lovely name."
"You have to pay extra, for pete's sake, to have it stenciled on a tee shirt. There are too many letters. That's one thing wrong with it.
"And another thing is that you can't make a nickname out of it. A nickname that ends in i." Anastasia glowered and picked some fuzz out of her belly button. She was sitting on the living room rug wearing last summer's bikini. She had been practicing standing on her head, until she fell and knocked over a lamp. Now she had a serious headache.
Her father scrunched his nose. "A nickname that ends in i? What on earth are you talking about?"
Anastasia sighed, lay on her back, and began raising her legs slowly one at a time. It was an exercise that ballet dancers did. It hurt a lot.
"The girls in my class started a club," she explained gloomily. "It's called the "i Club" and your name has to end in i. Everybody's in it but me. Jenni and Becki and Traci and Cindi and Suzi and Luci and..."
"Good grief," said her mother, and rolled her eyes upward. "Why would you want to belong to a club like that?"
"One. Because everybody's in it but me. Two. Because they're all getting tee shirts with their names on them."
"Well, look," said her father as he started in on the crossword puzzle, "if the tee shirt's that important, I'd be willing to fork over the extra money that a long name costs."
"Daddy," said Anastasia, sighing so hard that her shoulders lifted up and down. She stood up. "Look at me. I mean, look at my body."
He looked. "Not bad for ten years old," he said. "The legs are a little skinny, but I've seen worse."
"I mean look at my chest," said Anastasia. "And picture my name across it."
He looked for a long time. Finally he said, "You know, Anastasia, my mind works verbally. Your mother is the one with the visual imagination. Why don't you have her look at your chest?
"Does anyone know a four-letter word for ruler?" he asked, going back to the crossword puzzle.
"King," said Anastasia. "That's ridiculously easy."
"The New York Times wouldn't use king," her father grumbled, but he wrote it in lightly.
Anastasia went and stood in front of her mother. "Picture my name across my chest," she ordered.
"Wait till I finish this row." She knit for a minute. "Okay. Let me look."
Her mother looked at her chest for a long moment. Then she sighed. "Yes," she said. "I see what you mean."
"Into the armpits, right? The letters would go right into my armpits!"
Her mother nodded. "By the time you're sixteen you'll have a bigger chest," she said.
"Terrific. That's just terrific," said Anastasia. "By the time I'm sixteen I..."
"Czar!" interrupted her father. "I knew it couldn't be king. Not in The New York Times." He erased king and wrote in czar.
"As a matter of fact," he said, looking up. "Let me tell you something about your name. Anastasia was the youngest daughter of the czar of Russia. Czar Nicholas."
"Big deal," said Anastasia. "Did she have a tee shirt with her name on it?"
"And she was murdered."
"No kidding?"
"No kidding. The whole family was wiped out by the Bolsheviks, kids and all."
"Was she just a little kid?"
"I don't remember how old. A teen-ager. And they all got shot."
"Hey, that's cool."
Her father raised his eyebrows. "Well, I'm not sure I would call it cool. I don't suppose they thought it was cool at all. But here's an interesting thing: years later, some lady popped up out of nowhere and said she was Anastasia, that she hadn't been killed, really, just shot; and that later she escaped and grew up in hiding."'
"Better than growing up in Hoboken, ha ha," said Anastasia, doing her Groucho Marx imitation, which her father ignored. He hated her Groucho Marx imitation. He thought his was better.
"I'm sorry," she said politely, apologizing for the Groucho Marx. "Was she really Anastasia?"
"I'm not sure that anyone ever really knew. Some people thought she was, some people thought she wasn't."
"But there was a chance that the czar's kid didn't die?"
"Sure. There was that possibility."
Anastasia thought. She thought for a long time. She assumed the lotus position, which was supposed to be good for thinking, even though you practically had to throw your hips out of joint to do it.
"Mom," she said slowly, "you didn't do natural childbirth when you had me, right?"
"Right."
"They knocked you out cold, right? Whonk. Out cold."
"Well, that's overstating it. They gave me an injection of something and I went to sleep briefly."
"So it's fair to say that you didn't actually see me being born?"
"You sound like a district attorney."
"Well, this is important. You didn't see me being born?"
"I felt you about to be born. I was put to sleep. I woke up a short time later and saw you being cleaned up. You looked very repulsive and you were screaming and you peed all over the nurse's hand."
"But for those few moments when you were asleep, t
here was time actually for them to switch babies on you."
Her mother groaned. "Noway."
"You said that there were a few minutes..."
"Okay, so there were a few minutes when I was zonked out. Why would they switch babies? The only other baby born that day anyway, at that hospital, was Chinese. The parents had a restaurant over on Tyler Street in Boston. The father was terrifically handsome, I remember."
"But they could have switched babies! I might not even be yours!"
"The Chinese baby was a boy, come to think of it. They named him Stanley. I always wondered why they named him Stanley."
"I could be the real Anastasia!"
Her father stood up. "I need a drink suddenly," he said. "I need a cold beer."
Before he went to the kitchen, he said, "Anastasia, it was 1918 when she was shot. If you are she, you are remarkably well-preserved."
"Rats," said Anastasia.
"Know what?" said her father, when he came back with his beer and let her slurp the foam. "When your grandmother's here at Thanksgiving, you can ask her about the czar, and about Anastasia. I wasn't born then. But she was a young woman. She'd remember."
"Daddy," Anastasia pointed out, using the kindliest voice she had, because she was talking about his mother, "Grandmother doesn't remember anything.
"She doesn't even remember me, for pete's sake," she muttered, forgetting the kindly voice. And she got that strange feeling again, the feeling she always had when she smelled medicine and other nursing home smells. It was a feeling of being scared and sad at the same time.
6
"The Macy's parade is the most boring thing I have ever seen," said Anastasia gloomily, "and I hate Thanksgiving."
Her mother opened the oven door, poked a fork into the turkey skin so that juice ran out and made a hissing noise. "You like turkey," she said.
"Yeah. But we could have turkey any time. I hate the Macy's parade, and after that I hate the football games, and also I hate pumpkin pie. Why do you have to make pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving? Is there a rule somewhere that you have to make pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving? If you want to know the truth, pumpkin pie smells like throw-up. It's gross."
"Anastasia Krupnik, you are being gross, and if you don't get out of this kitchen I'm going to throw something at you, maybe a pumpkin pie. Go. Go talk to your grandmother."
Anastasia muttered something as she left the kitchen.
"What did you say?" her mother called.
"Nothing," she called back. What she had muttered was, "I hate my grandmother."
Anastasia's grandmother was ninety-two. Nobody else's grandmother was ninety-two. Robert Giannini's grandmother was fifty; she played the Hammond Organ in a bar and lounge. She wore false eyelashes, Robert said, and called out, "All riiiight," when the TV showed closeups of the cheerleaders during Thanksgiving football games.
Jennifer MacCauley's grandmother was fat, worked in a bakery, and brought home all the unsold cookies at the end of each day. "Weight Watchers here I come," Jennifer MacCauley's grandmother always said, and laughed.
But Anastasia's grandmother was ninety-two and lived in a nursing home. The wrinkles on the side of her mouth were scabby. She talked with her mouth full, and what she said usually didn't make any sense, and there were food spots on the front of her dress.
She made Anastasia feel sad, and scared. Who needed that?
Anastasia wandered into the living room where her father was asleep on the couch with the Boston Globe open across his chest. In the corner by the window, her grandmother sat in a big chair, smoothing her dress across her lap over and over again with her thin hands. There were veins like cat's cradles pulled tight on the backs of her hands.
Anastasia sighed, sat down on the floor beside her grandmother, and said, "Hello, Grandmother," politely. She had already said hello four times since her father had brought her from the nursing home. But her grandmother forgot things.
The scary, clawlike hands smoothed her hair. Funny how soft and nice that felt. If she didn't look at the hands it was okay. If she just looked at her grandmother's moist, kind eyes, everything seemed almost okay.
"What's your name? You have such pretty hair."
"Anastasia." She had already told her that, again and again. Most people remembered their grandchildren's names, she thought angrily, and also their birthdays.
"My boy's hair is this color. His name is Myron," said the old woman.
For pete's sake, thought Anastasia. Myron is forty-five years old, asleep on the couch, and he's bald.
"Myron is a good boy," her grandmother said dreamily. "Better than his brothers. Myron always does his homework. Do you do your homework, little girl?"
"Mostly I do. But I don't like arithmetic much."
"Myron is the youngest, so I spoil him a little. His brothers are all so much older and they like to tease." Anastasia glanced at her father and tried to imagine him little, being teased by big brothers. It was hard. His mouth was open, and he was snoring a little; his glasses were pushed up on his forehead, scrunching his eyebrows. His feet stuck out beyond the end of the couch, almost touching the Swedish ivy that grew in the deep blue pot. Dr. Myron Krupnik was six feet four inches tall.
"Your little boy Myron is my father," she said politely to her grandmother, hoping that her grandmother would understand.
But her grandmother just stroked her hair some more with the skinny hands, and stared out through the window. "Do you have a brother, little girl?"
Anastasia sighed. "Not yet," she said. "But in March I will. My mother and father said that I could name him. What names do you like, Grandmother?"
Not that it mattered. Anastasia still had the name that she had chosen, written in the secret place in the back of her green notebook. She hadn't changed her mind about the name. It would serve the baby right. Also her parents.
"Sam," said her grandmother. "Sam is a good name."
Yuck, thought Anastasia. Sam.
The old woman leaned forward suddenly and whispered. "Sam's hands fit around my waist," she said, "and do you know, he can pick me right up and swing me around in the air? Sometimes he tickles me on the back of the neck with his mustache.
"But he doesn't come back anymore. I wonder where Sam is," she said. "Do you know where he went?" She sat back stiffly, and looked around. "Is he invited? Is he coming today?"
"No," said Anastasia. "I guess he couldn't come."
Her grandmother looked back out through the window, leaning forward to see down the street. Her eyes were curious and almost happy. "He might come," she said. "Sometimes he surprises me."
She began to talk to herself, words that Anastasia didn't understand, and to smooth the lap of her dress once more. Anastasia got up and went back to the kitchen. Her mother was stirring gravy.
"Did you invite someone named Sam for dinner?" she asked her mother. "Grandmother says someone named Sam might come. There aren't enough places set."
Her mother tasted the gravy and added a little salt. "She's daydreaming," she told Anastasia. "Sam was your grandfather. He died before you were born. She forgets that."
"I forget it, too. Maybe I'm as bad as she is," said Anastasia, though she didn't believe it. "You want me to carry in the plates and put them on the table?"
"Sure. Put the one with the blue flowers at Grandmother's place. That's always been her favorite."
The plate with the blue flowers had a crack in it that was turning brown along its length. It had lasted a lot of Thanksgivings. But it was going to break one of these days.
"Are you going to have to mash up her turkey and then we all have to watch her mushing it around, like last year?"
"Your eating habits aren't that terrific either, my friend," her mother said.
"She dribbles cranberry sauce on her dress, and she talks with her mouth full. I hate that."
Her mother didn't say anything.
"And she forgets my name. I hate that, too."
Her mother didn't say any
thing. She put mashed potatoes into a yellow bowl. Anastasia started to cry. A salt-flavored tear came down the side of her face and into the corner of her mouth; she tasted it with the tip of her tongue, and waited for the next one.
"I don't hate grandmother," she said in a voice that had to find its way out lopsided, around the tears. "But I hate it that she's so old.
"It makes my heart hurt."
Her mother took a paper napkin from the kitchen table, knelt on the floor beside Anastasia, daubed at her wet cheeks with the napkin, and put her arms around her.
"All of our hearts hurt," she said. They went together to wake up Anastasia's father, and the three of them helped the grandmother to the table, where they sat her in the best chair, the one with arms. They all smiled when the old woman recognized her favorite plate, touched the blue flowers fondly, and said, "Forget-me-nots."
7
"Hey sport, you're on vacation, right?" Dr. Myron Krupnik asked Anastasia one morning.
"Right. Christmas vacation. Goes till January third," said Anastasia, stuffing her jeans into a pair of heavy socks so that she could pull on her boots.
"Got any plans for this morning?"
"Well, I made a list." Anastasia pulled a crumpled piece of paper from her pocket and read it aloud. "Thursday morning: Make a snowman if there is enough snow. Start making Christmas presents. See if Mom will let me make cookies." She wrinkled her nose. "Mom said no to that. She's out of flour. Actually, I used up the flour myself, making paste the other day. We had five pounds of flour. Now we have about fourteen pounds of paste, and it's beginning to smell bad."
"Well," said her father, "my vacation doesn't start until day after tomorrow. But I only have to teach one class this morning. Do you want to come along?"
"Will it be boring?"
Her father adjusted his glasses so that he could look down his nose at her. "Boring? Dr. Krupnik's English 202, required for English majors, eighteenth and nineteenth century poetry, three prelims, four papers, and a final exam, boring?" He sighed. "Yes. It will probably be boring."