Anastasia Krupnik

  "Okay," said Anastasia, "I'll come. But wait while I change to my poetry outfit."

  Anastasia's poetry outfit was quite simple. She put a black turtleneck shirt on with her jeans, replaced her owl's eye-shaped glasses with dark glasses, and undid her pony tail. She combed her hair straight and flat. If she had had time, she would have painted her fingernails crimson.

  That was what the visiting lady poet who had come to their class had worn. She had also worn a cape. But Anastasia had no cape; she covered her poetry outfit with her green ski jacket, and walked with her father to the university.

  She had never gone to one of her father's classes before. She had been to his office, in the same brick building, where his name—Dr. Krupnik—was impressively etched in a brass nameplate attached to the door. She had run her fingers over the letters, liking the way they felt, thought briefly about asking for an A. Krupnik nameplate for her own bedroom door at home, decided it would be ostentatious (a word she had written on page seven of her green notebook), at age ten, and discarded the idea. She would have a nameplate when her name was more important, she decided: maybe by the time she was twelve.

  The classroom was not much different from the fourth grade classroom of the J. Henry Bosler Elementary School. There was no cage of smelly gerbils, no portrait of George Washington, no alphabet marching across the top of the blackboard, and no fire-resistant Christmas wreath. But it had the same large windows, the same blackboards, the same metal wastebasket, the same clock with nervous, jumpy hands, and the same smell of chalk dust and overflowing pencil sharpeners.

  Someone had written "I work very hard for my Marx" on the board, but her father erased that with the side of his hand when they entered the room.

  "We have about five minutes," her father said, "before it is feeding time at the zoo. Here, read this while we wait." He gave her a mimeographed poem called "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud."

  Anastasia sat down in one of the front-row desks and read the poem. It was not a difficult poem. It was easier to understand than some of the ones that her father wrote. There were only two words that she didn't understand: jocund and pensive, and she underlined them carefully the way Mrs. Westvessel had taught her to do. She could look them up when she got home. If they were any good, she could put them on the word list in her notebook.

  The students began to enter the classroom. Anastasia was startled at their loudness—at the J. Henry Bosler Elementary School students were not allowed to shove the desks around, or talk to each other when lessons were starting; and although the issue hadn't been raised in the fourth grade, she suspected they would not be allowed to smoke cigarettes, which some of her father's students were doing—but she was pleasantly surprised that they were all wearing variations of poetry outfits, so she felt she would blend in nicely. She wished that she had Frye boots, though.

  "Who's the midget, Dr. K?" asked one of the students, a boy. She thought it was a boy, at least; it was a little hard to tell, but the voice was rather deep for a girl.

  Her father stood up. "Before we start, class, I would like you to meet my daughter, Anastasia, who is visiting today."

  "All riiiggghht," said the girl in the desk next to Anastasia's, and smiled at her.

  Dr. Krupnik lit his pipe. "Today we will continue with Wordsworth. Since Christmas vacation is upon us and we are busy, I gave you quite a simple assignment. Is it fair, or safe, to assume that you have all read and given some thought to an analysis of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud"?

  Anastasia nodded gravely and said, "Yes." The rest of the class hooted and laughed. Mrs. Westvessel would have sent them all to the principal's office. Her father only grinned a little, and sighed.

  "McAllister?" he said. "Let's hear from you. Tell us what you think of the poem."

  The boy who had asked who the midget was groaned. "Frankly, Dr. K," he said, "I think it's a crock of shit." Then he sat up straighter, looked embarrassed, glanced at Anastasia, and mumbled, "I'm sorry."

  Her father puffed on his pipe for a moment. "I'm sure my daughter has heard the word shit before," he said, "although I expect she is as surprised as I am to hear it in a classroom."

  Anastasia giggled. Actually, she had heard it that very morning, from her own father, when he realized that his pen had leaked ink on the pocket of his favorite shirt.

  "Would you explain why you find the poem offensive, McAllister?" her father asked.

  The boy looked at his mimeographed sheet. "Well, like, look at lines fifteen and sixteen. I mean, like, it's not enough that he has to write about all those flowers fluttering around, but then he has to come out and tell us 'A poet could not but be gay'? Come on. And jocund. What's that mean?"

  "Jocund means cheerful, McAllister," said Anastasia's father. "Surely you have access to a dictionary? Would you use it occasionally, please?" Dr. Krupnik sounded annoyed.

  McAllister slumped back in his desk. He cracked his knuckles. Anastasia winced. So did her father.

  "Miss Eisenstein? Would you tell us, please, which line or lines convey to you the theme of the poem, and what that theme might be?"

  A fat girl dressed entirely in black—a super-poetry-outfit—adjusted her glasses.

  "Well, I couldn't pick out any one or two lines, you know? You have to look at it in its entirety. And then you see the dichotomy..."

  Anastasia's father interrupted. "Remember, Miss Eisenstein, we sort of had a friendly agreement that you wouldn't use the word dichotomy in this class any more? Because it has become a bit of a victim of overuse?"

  The fat girl frowned. "Well, look at it this way, you know? Wordsworth is talking about two different things: like solitude, and also community? I mean, see how the flowers are all in a group, dancing, but in the last stanza the poet is lying on his couch all alone?"

  That was interesting, Anastasia thought. Her father wrote "Solitude—Community" on the board.

  "That is interesting, Miss Eisenstein," said her father. But he said it with the same voice that he used when Anastasia described in detail the plot of a television program. It meant that he didn't find it terribly interesting at all.

  "Anyone else want to give it a try?" asked her father. "Miss Cameron?"

  Anastasia turned around to look at the back of the classroom. A girl in the rear corner desk was at least six feet tall, dressed in a black leotard with a denim wraparound skirt tied loosely around her waist. Her hair was red and very, very long; it hung below the beginning of the skirt.

  She yawned, unwrapped her thin leotarded legs from the legs of the desk, stretched her arms, and said, "To me the salient lines appear throughout the poem. 'Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.' 'Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.' 'The waves beside them dance.' 'And dances with the daffodils.' The whole thing flows, you know? Can you get with the flow? I'd say the theme is like movement as joy. Do you feel what I mean: 'movement as joy'?" The girl moved one of her thin arms across the air. The whole class watched her, puzzled.

  "Ah, yes, Miss Cameron," said Anastasia's father. He wrote "Movement as joy" on the blackboard. "That's interesting. I'm not sure that Wordsworth would have known what you meant, or gotten with the flow, but it's, ah, interesting.

  "Anyone else?" he asked. "Wilder? How about you?"

  A heavyset boy with very curly hair had his head down on his desk. He raised his head and looked around with half-open eyes.

  "Futility of life," he said.

  There was a long silence. Finally Dr. Krupnik said, "Do you want to add anything to that, Wilder?"

  "No."

  "I find it fascinating, Wilder, that you have selected 'futility of life' to be the theme of the work of, so far, Pope, Gray, Cowper, Blake, and Burns. Now Wordsworth, too?"

  "Yeah," said Wilder.

  Anastasia's father wrote "futility of life" on the board.

  "Others?" he asked.

  The boy named McAllister called out, "Why don't you ask your daughter?"

  Dr. Krupnik puffed on his pipe. Anastas
ia recognized it as a beginning-to-get-very-irritated style of puff.

  "Because my daughter is not a registered member of this class," he said.

  He paused for a long time and puffed again. "As a matter of fact," he said, finally, "let's call it a day. Go home, everybody, and have a good Christmas. Read over vacation, please. Read anything."

  That seemed an odd thing to say, thought Anastasia. At home he was always saying to her, "Are you reading again? Don't you ever do anything but read?"

  The students all shuffled to their feet and out of the classroom. Some of them said "Merry Christmas."

  Someone called "Merry Christmas, Wilder!" Wilder was the only one who hadn't left. He had his head back down on the desk and appeared to be sound asleep. Maybe dead.

  Anastasia held her father's hand as they walked home for lunch. She liked the feeling of his leather glove around her mitten. In a funny way that she didn't really understand, she felt bad for him.

  "Daddy," she said shyly, "I think I understood a little bit of the poem. At least, I liked some parts of it."

  He smiled and squeezed her hand. "What did you like?"

  "'The inward eye,'" she confessed. "I liked where it said about 'the inward eye.'"

  He quoted the line as if it were an old friend. "'The inward eye which is the bliss of solitude.'"

  "Tell me what it means," said Anastasia. Inside, she pictured a head with a spooky eye.

  "Well," said her father thoughtfully, "'the inward eye' can mean memory. Solitude means being alone. And bliss means happiness. So what do you think the whole line means?"

  She put it together like a puzzle. "Memory is the happiness of being alone?" she asked.

  "Not a bad thought, is it?" asked her father, in a soft voice.

  "No," said Anastasia, a little puzzled. "But my trouble is that I don't have very many memories yet. And I'm not alone very much. So I guess I don't need 'the inward eye,' yet, to be happy."

  He smiled at her.

  "But probably I will, someday," she said. "Probably everybody does sometime, right, Daddy?"

  "Right," he said. She could tell he was thinking.

  "Daddy," she said, "I didn't understand some other things in your class. Like the boy named Wilder who was asleep. What did he mean when he said 'futility of life'?"

  Her father thought about that. "Some people think that there's nothing to look forward to in life. Nothing important. Nothing that has any meaning for them.

  "Feeling that way makes them bored and grouchy and lonely. Then they want to put a label on why they feel that way. Wilder's label is 'futility of life.' And he sleeps all the time in class because he stays up all night drinking beer and talking about how life has no meaning."

  "That's dumb."

  "Of course it's dumb." He squeezed her hand.

  "You want to know something sad that I just thought of, though?" Anastasia asked.

  "Sure."

  "Grandmother, She doesn't have anything left to look forward to Grandmother has futility or life.' Maybe she should go out and[drink beer all night."

  Her father looked thoughtful for a minute. Then he said, "No. because your grandmother has something else that keeps her from being bored and grouchy and lonely. Can you guess what it is?"

  Anastasia thought for a long time, about what her grandmother had. "Arthritis," she said finally, "and varicose veins. A pot of geraniums beside her bed at the nursing home, and twelve different kinds of pills. I don't think any of that's so terrific, for pete's sake."

  "Nope," said her father. "None of that is terrific at all. But your grandmother has what we just talked about. She has memories. The people at the nursing home tell me that she lives in the past, and that she's happy."

  " The inward eye'!" said Anastasia, understanding suddenly. "Grandmother has 'the inward eye'!"

  "'Which is the bliss of solitude,'" quoted her father, and tucked her hand into his coat pocket beside his own.

  They were almost home. They walked along without saying anything for a moment.

  "Daddy?"

  "What?"

  "I thought your class was kind of boring," Anastasia confessed.

  "It was." He laughed. "It was hideously, horribly, horrendously boring."

  "But Wordsworth was okay."

  "Yeah," he said. "Good old Wordsworth. He's definitely okay."

  8

  "Nothing interesting ever, ever happens to me," said Anastasia gloomily. "No wonder I don't have any memories yet."

  "What on earth do you mean? I can think of lots of interesting things that have happened to you," said her mother.

  "Name three."

  "When you were two years old you ate ant poison and had to have your stomach pumped."

  "That's one. And I don't even remember it."

  "Well, when you were four you wandered off when we were in Harvard Square. And finally I called the police, and when they finally found you, you were way down on Green Street, walking with an old lady who was wearing army boots and had a Tupperware bowl on her head."

  "Yeah, that was neat. She said she always wore that bowl when she went out because it kept radioactivity from getting into her brain. She was going to take me home and we were going to live together and she said she would teach me to avoid all the filth and danger in the world. She needed me to help her wash the doorknobs in her apartment. She had to do them all three times a day."

  "Well, that was sure an interesting thing that happened to you."

  "It's only two. Name a third."

  Her mother thought and thought. "The second grade field trip to the Franklin Park Zoo?"

  "Yuck."

  "Well, what sort of thing did you have in mind?"

  "I was reading this newspaper at the drugstore. Just on the first page—the first page alone— I read about a man and his son in South America who were transported to another planet by a UFO; and a five-year-old girl in Idaho who had four kidneys, all of them working; and a pair of eight-year-old twins in New York who had lived all alone in an apartment for four months after their mother ran away with a guy who sold cosmetics door-to-door. And I didn't even get to read the second page because Mr. Belden told me that if I even flicked that newspaper open I had to pay for it."

  "For that kind of reading I think I would have paid and nicked."

  "I couldn't. I didn't have any money. Not only do I not have interesting things happen to me, but also I never have any money."

  "Go ask your dad for your allowance. He's in the study looking through the closet for the Christmas tree decorations."

  "I will in a minute. But tell me something, first: has anything interesting ever happened to you?"

  "Like being taken to another planet? Nope."

  "No, I don't mean like that. But how about—well, for example, did you ever have a love affair? After you were grown up?"

  "Not since I married your dad."

  "But before? Did you before you got married?"

  Her mother blushed. "Anastasia, that is a very personal question."

  "Well, you're my mother, for pete's sake. You're supposed to be able to ask your mother personal questions."

  "Yes."

  "Yes what?"

  "Yes, I once had a love affair. Before I even met your father."

  "With who? I mean with whom?"

  "Oh, goodness, Anastasia, no one you know. His name was John. He was a lawyer in New York when I was an art student."

  "Was he married so that you had to meet secretly and maybe there would be a detective watching?"

  "Good heavens, of course not. He was just a young lawyer, not married, and I..."

  "Handsome? Was he terrifically handsome?"

  Her mother blushed again. "Yeah," she said, laughing a little. "He was terrifically handsome."

  "And did you do wildly romantic, crazy things?"

  "Sure."

  "Like what?"

  Her mother grinned. "Well, one time we drove all the way out to Montauk Point in the middle of the
winter and found a place to spend the weekend, and we walked on the beach in a raging snowstorm. After that we had dinner and drank a lot of wine and listened to Beethoven on a little radio that had a lot of static. And we hugged and kissed a lot. Is that the kind of thing you want to know about, Anastasia?"

  "Just romance. Just the romantic parts are what I want to know about."

  "Well, here's a romantic part. Once he had to go to Charleston, South Carolina, on business. Some kind of legal thing he was doing. And he asked me, on the spur of the moment, to go along. So we flew to Charleston—it was spring, by then—and the whole city smelled like azaleas and gardenias. We stayed at a hotel where there were fresh flowers everywhere, so that every time, even now, when I smell those Southern spring flowers, I still think of that time. And that night, we had dinner in the hotel, and there was candlelight, and after dinner we had tea, and we were happy and laughing and we read each other's fortunes in the tea leaves."

  "Yeah. That's romantic. What fortune did he give you?"

  "He looked in my teacup and told me that I would be a good painter, and that he could see me ten years in the future, and I would be barefoot, with a smudge of paint on my ankle and another on my nose, and I would be laughing."

  "That was nice. You liked that fortune, didn't you?"

  "Yes. I liked it."

  "And what was his?"

  "Well, then I looked in his teacup and told him that I could see him in ten years, and he was a very successful lawyer, carrying a briefcase filled with important papers, and he was wearing a three-piece suit and being considered for a judgeship, and he had a big house in Scarsdale."

  "And he liked that."

  "He liked that."

  "Then what?"