"Phweet!" The whistle blew, and six girls ran forward and climbed the ropes. Meredith was one, and she moved like a monkey all the way to the top and then back down again in no time.
It must be because her parents are Danish, Anastasia thought gloomily.
"Phweet!" Six more girls, squealing and giggling, climbed the ropes. Anastasia shuffled forward in line.
"Phweet!" This time Sonya was one of them. Maybe it's because she's plump, Anastasia thought—she would never even have thought the word "fat" about one of her best friends—maybe plump people get better leverage or something.
"Phweet!" Ms. Willoughby blew the whistle a final time, and Anastasia ran forward dutifully toward her enemy rope. She leaped and grabbed. Her grab was good and high because Anastasia was one of the tallest seventh graders. But her feet just dangled.
She looked to either side. The other girls had all managed to wind their legs around the rope the way they were supposed to. Ms. Willoughby had shown them how at least a billion times. But Anastasia's feet dangled. When she tried to grab the rope with her feet and legs, it began to swing in circles.
"Hold the rope for her, Sonya," Ms. Willoughby called, and Sonya ran forward and held the bottom of Anastasia's rope. But it didn't help. Her feet kicked in space and her arms ached. Around her, the other girls were already starting back down their ropes.
"Phweet!" Everybody landed on the floor, including Anastasia, who hadn't gone anyplace at all, who had simply dangled in the air. She flushed in embarrassment.
"Get the basketballs, girls!" Ms. Willoughby called. "Anastasia," she said more quietly, "come over here for a minute."
Anastasia walked miserably over to Ms. Willoughby. She was looking at the floor. The other girls were all at the opposite end of the gym, shouting and thumping and bouncing the basketballs.
"I can't do it," Anastasia said in a quavery voice. "I try, but I can't do it."
Ms. Willoughby put her arm around her. "Don't feel bad," she said. "You always try hard. That's the important thing."
"But everybody else can do it," Anastasia said. Embarrassed, she felt a warm tear slide down her cheek.
"One of these days you'll amaze yourself. You'll leap up there and you'll just keep going, all the way to the ceiling."
"You think so?" Anastasia asked, sniffling.
"Sure I do. I know so. And you're great at basketball. How about being captain of one team this period?"
"Okay," said Anastasia, beginning to feel a little better.
Ms. Willoughby blew her whistle once again, and Anastasia followed her to the other end of the gym to form the teams.
***
Sam was playing with Mrs. Stein when Anastasia got home from school. They had built a tower of blocks on the living room floor.
"Hi, Sam," said Anastasia. "Hi, Gertrude."
"Gertrustein and me are playing 'Bash the Castle,'" Sam explained. "Watch!" He ran to the other side of the room. "Ready, Gertrustein?" he called.
"Ready!" Gertrude Stein called back, and she moved out of the way. Anastasia stood back, too. She had played "Bash the Castle" with Sam herself and knew how lethal it could be.
"BASH!" Sam came zooming across the room, and the tower flew in all directions.
"Good one, Sam," said Gertrude. "But time to pick up the blocks, now. I'm going to start dinner."
"I invented that game," Anastasia said, as she knelt to help pick up the blocks. "I invented that game when I was three years old, just the age Sam is right now. I probably should have patented it and copyrighted it and sold it. I would be a millionaire by now."
"I invented blue milk from food coloring," Sam said. "Could I be a millionaire from that?"
Anastasia shrugged. "I dunno. What about you, Gertrude? Did you ever invent anything?"
Mrs. Stein thought. "Crawling on the floor playing with blocks at the age of seventy-six, as a cure for arthritis. How about that?"
"I don't think it'll sell," Anastasia told her regretfully.
3
Sam was asleep, and Anastasia had helped Gertrude with the dishes. Now that Gertrude was ensconced in front of the TV with her favorite program on, Anastasia went to the garage.
It was dark outside, and she turned on the light inside the garage and looked around. There was her parents' battered old car—they had taken a cab to the airport—and there was her father's workbench, with a few scattered tools.
Anastasia grinned. Her father was a terrible handyman. He hit his thumb if he tried to hammer a nail; and if he happened to hit the nail, it bent. He had to squint through his glasses, aiming a screwdriver at the head of a screw, and even then, he rarely hit it right.
Once, they had decided that Sam would enjoy a tree house. So Anastasia and her father went to the lumberyard and bought wood.
The boards were still there, leaning against the wall of the garage.
The nails were still there, in ajar.
The hammer was still there, lying on the workbench.
The book with pictures of wonderful tree houses—the same book that had given them the idea—was still there, very dusty, on a shelf in the garage.
And the tree was still there, in the yard.
But they never could quite figure out how to build the tree house.
She looked around some more. There was the lawn mower, standing in the corner, waiting for summer. There was the snow shovel, standing beside it. There were her mother's gardening tools and a few flowerpots. A plastic gas container. Two gallons of paint—one of these days, her father kept saying, he would paint the trim on the house. Sam's tricycle. Sam's plastic wading pool, deflated. And there—there it was, what Anastasia had been looking for.
A rope.
Anastasia looked up. The cobwebbed ceiling of the garage was nowhere near as high as the ceiling of the school gym. But there were beams up there, strong enough to hold a rope, and if she could figure out how to tie the rope around one of them, she would have a place to practice.
Anastasia was absolutely determined that she would learn to climb a rope and that the day would come when Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby would look at her with awe and delight instead of pity.
She could see that awed and delighted face, brown and cheekboned, poking up out of the neck of a Vassar sweat shirt, in her imagination.
"Anastasia Krupnik!" Ms. Willoughby would say. "I have never in my entire life known a young girl as determined and energetic and dedicated and (well, why not, since it was just a fantasy, anyway?) gifted at rope-climbing as you!"
Anastasia picked up the heavy, coiled rope and eyed the distance to the roof of the garage warily.
Her fantasy continued. A headline in the Boston Globe: BOSTON'S GOLD MEDALIST RETURNS FROM OLYMPICS. In smaller letters: ANASTASIA KRUPNIK TAKES GOLD IN ROPE-CLIMBING. A picture: Anastasia smiling graciously, humbly, wearing her gleaming medal. The caption: "I owe my success to my seventh-grade gym teacher, Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby." And another picture in the center spread after the reader had turned the pages for the rest of the article: Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby herself, hugging Anastasia warmly, and beaming with pride. Caption: "'I always knew this girl could do it! She was my very favorite student!' says former gym teacher, now personal manager for famed athlete Krupnik."
Anastasia threw the rope in the air toward the rafter. It went a few feet into the air and then thumped heavily onto the wooden floor of the garage and lay there in a heap.
Okay. So she couldn't throw a big rope that high. Who could? Nobody but Superman. Time to use the old brains instead of the muscles.
Anastasia draped the rope over her shoulder and climbed onto the hood of her father's car. The metal creaked ominously. Carefully she planted her sneakers and stood up, steadying herself by holding onto the radio antenna.
She was still too far from the beams. She could tell without even throwing the rope this time.
Okay. Onward to plan 3-C. Anastasia sat down on the roof of the car, with her legs in front of the windshield. Carefully she skootched ba
ckwards and over the luggage rack until she was sitting like Buddha in the center of the car roof. She could feel it give a little, as if the roof might be starting to sag.
"Crummy Detroit cars," Anastasia muttered. "If we were rich he could buy a BMW and it would withstand anything."
Very slowly she stood up, with her sneakered feet apart for balance and the rope still draped over her shoulder. She measured the distance to the beam with her eyes. It looked manageable.
She uncoiled the big, bristly rope and arranged it in a throwing position. She aimed, watching the rafter high above her. Then she threw.
And it worked! Now she had the rope up there, one end dangling over the beam. Very carefully she maneuvered the end she still held, shaking it gently so that the dangling end moved downward slowly.
There was a shriek. "Anastasia!" The door to the garage burst open. "ANASTASIA! STOP! Suicide is never the answer!"
Anastasia turned toward the door in surprise. The rope fell to the floor.
"Rats," she said, glaring at the tangled heap of rope. "Hi, Daphne."
***
"Did you walk over?" Anastasia asked, when she and Daphne were in the kitchen, sipping hot chocolate with marshmallows. "Does your mom let you wander around like that after dark? Mine wouldn't."
Daphne shrugged. "It's only a few blocks, and I told her I'd be back in an hour. She thought I was going to see my dad, so of course she let me go. She wants me to act as a spy and tell her everything that's going on."
Anastasia felt sad. The house where Daphne used to live—the house where Daphne's father still lived—was right around the corner from the Krupniks. In the good old days—before the Bellinghams separated—Anastasia and Daphne had run back and forth between the two houses all the time.
"Anyway," Daphne went on, "my mom's so depressed she hardly notices what I do. She says things like, 'Comb your hair' or 'Do your homework' the way all mothers do, but then she never checks to see if I've done it. I could go out with my hair a big disgusting mess and she'd never even—"
"You did, Daph."
"Did what?"
"You went out without combing your hair. It's pretty gross, Daphne," Anastasia said, and giggled.
Daphne felt her hair and laughed. "Yeah. Well, I forgot. My mom used to notice stuff like that, but now that she's so depressed—"
"What about your father? Isn't he depressed, too?" Anastasia asked. She remembered that when her parents had a fight, as they did occasionally, both of them were pretty miserable until they made up.
But Daphne shook her head. "Not really, because he's dating this woman. She teaches the fourth-grade Sunday school class. I remember she used to make really neat shadow boxes of Bible stories. Daniel in the lion's den and stuff, with little toy lions, all in a shoe box. She borrowed the plastic palm tree from my turtle bowl."
"Is he going to marry her?" Anastasia asked. She tried to imagine what it would be like if her parents married other people. The thought of her father liking a woman who put plastic palm trees into shoe boxes was so foreign that she couldn't even dream up a fantasy about it.
"No, I don't think so. But he says he likes having a woman friend, and it keeps him from being depressed." Daphne finished her hot chocolate and poked her finger into the cup to stab the melted marshmallow.
"That's what your mom needs then, too. A man friend."
"Hah. She has my Uncle Bill. He comes over for dinner sometimes. And she works for this lawyer, Mr. McDonald. But she's still depressed. Honestly, Anastasia, if my mother was in the garage with a rope around the rafters, you know she wouldn't be practicing rope-climbing."
"Those aren't friends, though. An uncle, and a guy she works for. She needs a date," Anastasia said.
"Who needs a date? Me?" Gertrude Stein shuffled into the kitchen, wearing her terry-cloth slippers. "I smelled hot chocolate. May I join you?"
"Sure," Anastasia told her. She introduced her to Daphne and poured another cup of hot chocolate. "We were talking about Daphne's mother. She's all depressed because she's getting divorced and she doesn't have a man friend."
"She says she hates all men," Daphne explained. "She says Dad's a sanctimonious creep."
"Is he?" asked Gertrude Stein with interest.
"I don't know." Daphne giggled. "I don't know what 'sanctimonious' means."
"How old is your mother?" Gertrude asked.
"Old," Daphne said. "Thirty-six."
Gertrude wiped her chocolate mustache with a paper napkin. She chuckled. "Well, I can see that it would be a problem, finding a man friend for someone that old."
"You know what?" A thought had just occurred to Anastasia. "Here we are, you and me, Daphne, both of us thirteen, and we worry because we don't have boyfriends. And there's your mother, thirty-six, and she's depressed because she thinks she hates all men, which of course isn't true—it's just that she doesn't have a man friend. And here's Gertrude—who's seventy-six. How about you, Gertrude, does it bother you because you don't have a boyfriend?"
"Maybe she does," Daphne pointed out.
"No, she doesn't," Anastasia said. "There was a guy at the Golden Age Club who asked her out for dinner once, but he turned out to be a jerk. Right, Gertrude?"
Gertrude nodded. "Right. He was a vegetarian, for one thing, and wouldn't let me order steak. I really wanted steak. On top of that, he was boring."
"Well, does it bother you, not having a man friend?" Anastasia asked again. "Or is seventy-six too old for that?"
Gertrude rubbed one hand with the other. Her knuckles were knobby and swollen, from her arthritis. "No," she confessed, almost shyly. "It's not too old. I do wish I had a man friend. Someone to do things with occasionally, maybe a movie now and then. I wanted to see Tootsie, but not all alone."
"So," Anastasia went on, "you see? All of us worrying, at all these different ages, because we don't have boyfriends. There's probably only one brief fleeting time in your life when you don't have that worry, that time when you're adult but still young, glamorous, and interesting, that time when you're—well, like Ms. Willoughby, for example."
"Our gym teacher?" Daphne asked in surprise. "That Ms. Willoughby?"
Anastasia nodded. "The very one. Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby," she said dreamily.
"That's our gym teacher," Daphne explained to Gertrude Stein. "Anastasia has a crush on her."
"I do not," Anastasia said. "But honestly, wouldn't it be neat if only we could all be tall and thin and black, with high cheekbones and a crew cut and beautifully shaped ears, gifted at rope-climbing and owning a layered-look wardrobe? Then we wouldn't have to worry about boyfriends. Or man friends. Then our phone would be ringing all the time, with rich and handsome men with mustaches calling—"
"But Anastasia," Daphne interrupted, "Ms. Willoughby doesn't have a man friend. She told me. We had a conference the other day, Ms. Willoughby and me, because I've been skipping gym so much, and we got to talking about life's disappointments. One of Ms. Willoughby's disappointments is that she doesn't have a man friend. She can't figure out where the men are all hiding."
Anastasia looked at Daphne in astonishment. "Ms. Willoughby? Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby?" she said. "No man friend? You're sure?"
Daphne nodded.
"Rats," said Anastasia.
4
Anastasia trudged home from school on Thursday afternoon. It was nice that her parents would be back that evening—she and Mrs. Stein planned to cook a special welcome-home dinner—but that was really the only nice thing about the whole day.
She had gotten her Johnny Treinain test back, with a C+ on it. Anastasia always got A's in English, so a C+ was a real disappointment. Mr. Rafferty had met with her after school, to discuss it. But there was really nothing to discuss. She hadn't liked Johnny Tremain, so she hadn't read it very carefully; and she had been thinking about Gone with the Wind during the test.
She had tried to explain that to Mr. Rafferty. "I think you ought to assign Gone with the Wind instead," she s
uggested. "At least for the girls. Let the boys read Johnny Tremain."
Mr. Rafferty looked very startled. He was an ancient, elderly man, probably about sixty, Anastasia thought, with gray hair. The only interesting thing about Mr. Rafferty was that he wore colorless nail polish. Or at least Anastasia thought he did. Maybe his fingernails were naturally glistening—but she was pretty certain he wore nail polish. She pictured him at home, at night, preparing English quizzes for the seventh grade—making up sentences with misplaced modifiers—and polishing his nails at the same time, holding them up to see how they looked, blowing on them so they would dry. It seemed very weird.
"Gone with the Wind?" Mr. Rafferty said, startled. "But, Anastasia, that book has some, well, some unsuitable—"
"Sex?" she asked. "It doesn't, really. Not explicit."
Mr. Rafferty began to shuffle the papers on his desk nervously, and Anastasia realized that she had made a terrible blunder, saying the word "sex" to someone so old. But now, having said it, she was stuck with completing her explanation.
She tried to describe it very tastefully. "When Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs," she said, "and into the bedroom, the book doesn't tell a single thing after the door closes. They might have been playing Scrabble in the bedroom, Mr. Rafferty." (Secretly, Anastasia was absolutely certain that Rhett and Scarlett had never played Scrabble in their lives. Ashley and Melanie—they played Scrabble, the wimps.)
"Well," Mr. Rafferty said, "ah, I don't—well, what I mean is—"
Anastasia sighed. She knew that Mr. Rafferty would never, ever assign Gone with the Wind to the seventh grade.
"Can I take the Johnny Tremain test again?" she asked. "I know I can do better if I take it again."
Mr. Rafferty looked relieved, and he scheduled a make-up test for Anastasia and the other students who had done poorly.
"And your poem, Anastasia?" he asked. "You have your poem memorized? We'll start rehearsing on Monday. Don't forget that it's Wednesday when the visitors will be here."
"No problem," she assured him. Mr. Rafferty was such a worrywart.