Gym class was a severe humiliation. The only good thing about gym class was that the students got to wear jeans for a change, since their gym suits were all at home being laundered for the next day's demonstration.
But Ms. Willoughby didn't even let Anastasia try the ropes. She handed Anastasia the whistle, and put her in charge while her classmates climbed the ropes.
"Ms. Willoughby," Anastasia began, "I practiced last night in my garage, and I think maybe I can—"
But Ms. Willoughby—beautiful, sensitive, kind, thoughtful Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby—was already headed off for the other side of the gym to pick up some basketballs. She was determined that the gym look perfect for tomorrow.
Grouchily Anastasia turned toward the lines of waiting girls. She put the whistle's cord around her neck, lifted the whistle to her mouth, and blew. "Phweet!" Then she watched, dejected, while her classmates and friends all clambered up the ropes like chimpanzees.
***
She had begun to master the rope in the garage, Anastasia thought on her way home from school. Yesterday, with her mother cheering her on, she had gotten halfway up. If only Ms. Willoughby had stopped worrying about the appearance of the gym long enough to listen.
Anastasia shifted her schoolbooks from one arm to the other and began to daydream. There, in front of a whole group—maybe a hundred or more—of visiting international educators (all wearing uniforms, for some reason, in Anastasia's fantasy, and taking notes in small notebooks), Anastasia would step forward, still holding the hated whistle, after the rope-climbing exhibition was over.
"Now," she would say (and they would all look up, startled, from their notes), "one final demonstration!"
"Phweet! Phweet!" She would blow the whistle briskly, twice. In the corner, she could see Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby watching with amazement and awe.
"I owe this all to Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby," Anastasia would announce. Then she would remove the whistle and its cord from around her neck. "Everything that I am, I owe to Ms. Willoughby." Perhaps there would be a smattering of applause then, and Ms. Willoughby would blush and acknowledge it gracefully with a nod.
Anastasia would step forward to the rope. With one quick leap she would grasp it with both hands, and her sneakered feet would instantly find their grip. Up she would go: so smoothly, so lithely, so quickly that the audience would hold its collective breath. From high above them, she would hear the "Ooooooh" as she nimbly performed her most amazing feat, something never attempted before in the junior high gym. She would move from one rope to the next, and then the next: back and forth between the six ropes, like an acrobat, her toes pointed, twirling now and then, extending one arm gracefully, looking down with a poised smile.
A sequinned outfit with pink tights would be better, Anastasia realized, than a royal blue gym suit. But no matter. The costume wasn't the important thing. The important thing was the skill, the daring, the absolute fearlessness and agility with which she dazzled the crowd below.
"I dedicate this next stunt—" she would call. No, wait; "stunt" wasn't right. "I dedicate this next feat to that most illustrious gym teacher, Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby!"
Silence would fall upon the awed crowd. Anastasia would look down to see Ms. Willoughby's face, rapt with pleasure, pride, and delight, looking up at her.
Let's see. What would the feat be? Maybe she could leap, no hands, from one rope—somersaulting in the air—over to the top of the basketball backboard, soaring through the—
CRASH. Anastasia's daydream ended abruptly because she had stumbled on the back steps of her own house. Two months of math homework papers had flown out of her notebook into the rhododendron bushes. She had ripped one knee of her jeans, and her elbow felt scraped. The best sticker on the cover of her notebook was torn.
Hastily, from the spot where she was sprawled on the steps, Anastasia glanced around. Next door, Mrs. Steins curtains were drawn. Good. She hadn't seen it. No one was passing in the street or on the front sidewalk. The Krupniks' kitchen windows were empty; the garage doors were closed; Sam's tricycle was parked in a corner of the driveway, but he was nowhere in sight.
What a relief. No one had noticed what a colossal fool she had made of herself. Anastasia began to pick up the scattered books and papers quickly, before anyone could come along and ask what had happened. Just as she had thrust the last of the math papers back into her notebook, the kitchen door opened and Uncle George looked out.
"Oh, hi, Anastasia," he said. "Is everything okay? I was listening to your dad's Billie Holiday records and suddenly I heard a thump."
Anastasia stood up and smiled, even though her elbow and knee both throbbed. "Everything's just fine, Uncle George," she said. "I was just practicing a little precision marching routine that we do in gym class." Thump, thump; Anastasia held her head up high and marched firmly up the back steps and through the door, which her uncle was holding open.
"That's pretty good," Uncle George said in an admiring voice. "It reminds me of when I was in the Marines thirty-five years ago."
"Yes, well, I owe it all to my gym teacher," Anastasia replied. She continued marching right through the kitchen and into the bathroom to apply some wet Kleenex to her bleeding elbow.
***
That night, despite her still-aching wounds, alone in the garage, Anastasia did it. She got to the halfway point, the way she had the previous afternoon, and she just kept going. Somehow it was suddenly easy; her feet grabbed the rope just right, and her hands moved one after the other the way they were supposed to, and she didn't panic and didn't slow down—and it worked. She went all the way to the top, touched the beam up there by the ceiling, and lowered herself back down.
"I did it!" she shrieked, dashing into the kitchen where her parents and uncle were lingering over their after-dinner coffee. "Look!"
She held up her index finger, covered with dust from the top of the old beam. "I got all the way to the top!"
Her mother hugged her. "Congratulations!" she said. "I knew you could!"
"A-plus," her father said proudly. "I knew you could, too."
Uncle George shook her hand.
"I have to call Daphne," Anastasia said. "Excuse me." She went to the telephone in the study.
"Great," Daphne said when she heard the news. "I really felt sorry for you in gym, Anastasia. It's really crummy when everybody else can do something and you can't. I felt that way once at summer camp before I learned to swim. I was still in Advanced Beginners and every single other person my age was in Junior Lifesaving."
"Do you think I ought to call Ms. Willoughby and tell her, so that I won't have to do the whistle tomorrow when all those visitors are there?"
"Call a teacher at home? That's kind of a weird thought. I suppose you could, if she's in the phone book, but—hey, Anastasia, I have a better idea!"
"What?"
"Surprise her, and everybody. Just wait till everyone else has done it, and then—heck, you've got the whistle—just announce one final event, and it'll be you! That'll blow Willoughby's mind; she thinks you're so uncoordinated."
It was just like Anastasia's latest daydream. Imagine that, thought Anastasia: a daydream that can turn into reality. Boy, there aren't very many of those!
"Do you think she'd get mad?"
"Willoughby? Mad?" Daphne hooted. "She never gets mad, Anastasia. She'd love it."
Anastasia decided that Daphne was probably right. Maybe she would do it. Probably she would do it. Just like the daydream.
10
For once, Anastasia didn't wear jeans to school. The students hadn't been told to wear anything special on Wednesday, but most of them did anyway. The boys seemed to be wearing chinos instead of jeans, and sport shirts with creases ironed into the sleeves. Many of the girls were wearing dresses or skirts.
Lesley Ann Roth, who always, always, always wore the same Jordache jeans and a Brown University sweat shirt to school, was wearing a Laura Ashley dress. Anastasia looked with surprise at Lesl
ey Ann's legs, and whispered to Daphne, "She actually has skin! I thought she was completely made out of denim!"
Daphne whispered back, "That dress cost ninety-something dollars. I tried it on once at the store, but my mother wouldn't buy it for me. She said that ninety Ethiopians could eat for a month on that."
Anastasia giggled. She pictured Ethiopians munching on the flower-sprigged Laura Ashley dress, even though she knew that wasn't what Mrs. Bellingham had meant.
Anastasia didn't really like dresses herself. They made her feel self-conscious. But this year, in seventh grade, she had been observing Ms. Willoughby's layered look very closely; and at home, secretly in her room, she tried to imitate it. So far it hadn't ever worked. When she put on a leotard, and over it a denim skirt, and over that a paisley wraparound skirt (sneaked out of her mother's closet), and on top a turtleneck shirt, with a cotton blouse over that, and a suede vest (sneaked out of her father's closet) on top of that—well, she groaned when she looked into the full-length mirror on the back of her door. She looked like a bag lady. She looked like a sausage. She looked like a person wearing six layers of clothing—which was exactly what she was. But why did Ms. Willoughby look so glamorous when she wore six layers of clothing?
It was simply one of those life mysteries that Anastasia had begun to think might never be solved. Today she had given up her experiments and was wearing only her boring denim skirt with a boring striped blouse.
But she felt terrific. She felt terrific because she was somebody who was going to recite a terrific poem in front of a group of very important visiting European educators, and after that she was somebody who was maybe—if she decided to do it—going to surprise an entire gym full of people, including Ms. Wilhelmina Willoughby, by climbing a rope. "'O world,'" Anastasia murmured to herself, smiling, "'I cannot hold thee close enough!'"
There was no sign of the visitors in the school, no hint of their presence in homeroom while attendance was being taken. Maybe they didn't come, Anastasia thought anxiously. Maybe their plane was late.
But then the intercom crackled and the principal's voice began an announcement. "Good morning, students," she said much more politely than usual. "I know you all want to join me in welcoming today's visitors, the International Commission for Educational Excellence. Just think: two days ago they were in Brussels, Belgium, visiting a school, and tomorrow they will be in Indianapolis! Aren't we fortunate that they've chosen our school as their only stop in the New England area!"
Quit gushing, Mrs. Atkins, Anastasia thought. Go back to being your own normal sarcastic self. How about your usual big lectures about litter in the halls or graffiti in the bathrooms? How about announcing the lunch menu: canned wax beans and cold pizza slices, so that the International Commission for Educational Excellence might consider sending nutritional aid?
But Mrs. Atkins had disappeared from the intercom, and it was time for Anastasia to gather her books and go to English class.
Even Mr. Rafferty had dressed for the occasion, and instead of his usual rumpled, ink-stained clothing, he was wearing a neatly pressed dark suit and a necktie with tiny sailboats on it. "Good morning, class," he said nervously as the seventh graders filed in.
In the back of the room, against a little-used blackboard, six strangers, four men and two women, were standing. They were holding notebooks, exactly as they had in one of Anastasia's fantasies. But they weren't wearing uniforms. They were wearing ordinary clothes. They looked like ordinary people. Anastasia smiled shyly at one of the women, who seemed to be looking at her, and the woman smiled back.
"Today, class," Mr. Rafferty announced, "instead of our usual work on grammar and punctuation, I believe we will try some poetry recitation."
Several students snickered. Mr. Rafferty was trying to make it sound as if he had just casually decided on poetry. Actually, he'd been browbeating them for three weeks to get those assigned poems memorized.
"O world—" thought Anastasia. She knew the poem absolutely by heart. She could almost say it backwards. She hoped that Mr. Rafferty would call on her first.
But he didn't. "Emily Ewing?" he said.
Teacher's pet, straight-A, flawless-skinned, gets-to-go-to-Bermuda-every-Easter Emily Ewing went to the front of the room. Her long, straight dark hair was absolutely smooth and shiny. Once Anastasia had read an ad in a magazine, an ad for some strange religion run by a guy in California. R promised "Perfect Happiness." Anastasia remembered thinking, when she read it, that she didn't need to go to California and join that religion; she would have Perfect Happiness if only she could make her hair look like Emily Ewing's.
Emily Ewing smiled politely at the visiting educators grouped in the back of the room and began to recite her poem.
"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though..."
Anastasia yawned surreptitiously, cupping her hand over her mouth, while Emily went on and on through the verses of the poem. It was, actually, a pretty good poem. Anastasia wouldn't have minded if Mr. Rafferty had assigned it to her instead of "O World."
Emily did what Mr. Rafferty had suggested, speaking almost in a whisper since the poem was about snowy, quiet woods.
"'And miles to go before I sleep,'" she whispered at the conclusion. "'And miles to go before I sleep.'" Then she smiled again at the back of the room—good grief, Anastasia thought; she almost curtseyed—and went back to her desk.
Now maybe he'll call on me. Krupnik, Krupnik, Krupnik, Anastasia thought, attempting to use ESP on Mr. Rafferty.
But Mr. Rafferty didn't get a chance. One of the visiting educators—one of the men—spoke, in what sounded like a German accent. His w's all came out like v's.
"Ve vould like to qvestion Miss—vat vas it, Youving?"
Mr. Rafferty looked startled. Emily Ewing looked even more startled. She turned, in her desk, toward the back of the room.
"Vould you stand, please?" the man asked.
Emily Ewing stood.
"Tell us, please, vhy you tink dis poet repeated dat last line. Am I correct, no odder lines are repeated in dis poem?"
"Yessir, that's right," Emily said.
The man waited for her to respond to his question. Emily looked panic-stricken. The six educators all had their little notebooks and their pens poised.
Mr. Rafferty looked suddenly pale. His mouth formed a wan and sickly smile. "Emily?" he said.
"Well, ah, I guess Frost repeated that last line because all the other stanzas had four lines each, and if he hadn't said that line twice, then there would only have been three lines in that last..." Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
"But don't you see," the man went on, "dat makes for a different rhyme pattern in dat final stanza? Vhy vould he do dat? Maybe—" the man gave an odd little chuckle "—he vas a stupid poet?"
"Oh, no, I don't think so," Emily said miserably. "But I don't know why he did that with the last stanza."
"Tank you," the man said. He looked at his colleagues. They all nodded. They all made notes in their notebooks. Emily sat down.
Call on me, call on me, call on me, Anastasia ESPed to Mr. Rafferty. She could see that he was looking around the room, trying to decided whom to call on next. I know my whole poem perfectly, she tried to signal to him telepathically, and I can answer any question they ask me. I know I can.
But Mr. Rafferty called on Jacob Berman, the biggest wimp in the class.
Jacob shuffled to the front of the room, stood there with his miserable posture, adjusted his glasses, took a deep breath, and said in his sing song voice:
"The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair..."
The visiting educators all smiled with satisfaction and nodded, recognizing the poem. Anastasia groaned inwardly, recognizing it also, because it was the longest one that anyone had been assigned. Jacob Berman was noted throughout the seventh grade for two things: his disgusting habit of picking his nose and his phenomenal memory. Anasta
sia was quite certain that Mr. Rafferty had called on Jacob simply because he knew that Jacob wouldn't forget a line of that endless poem.
Rats. Jacob droned on and on and Anastasia glanced at the clock. They'd never have time to get through the entire class. She hoped she would be next.
"'Ah, love, let us be true to one another!'" Jacob intoned. The class snickered. Jacob Berman saying "Ah, love, let us be true to one another!" was the most ridiculous thing ever, and if all those European guests hadn't been in the back of the room, the students would have fallen out of their desks, laughing.
Finally he was finished. Now me, thought Anastasia. Now me.
But one of the women, a gray-haired lady in a flowered silk dress, said, "Mr. Berman is it?"
Jacob nodded awkwardly.
"An admirable presentation. But let us look now at the reference to Sophocles in stanza two," the woman said in a clipped, no-nonsense British accent. "Let's consider why Matthew Arnold might have used that reference."
Anastasia could see Mr. Rafferty tense up and then relax as Jacob started in on one of the thoroughly boring explanations that he drew from his incredible memory.
"Well, Sophocles was a Greek dramatist, of course; I think there are seven great tragedies attributed to him in the fourth century B.C.," Jacob began. "So he was no stranger to human misery—which of course Arnold refers to a few lines further along." Anastasia could see the educators scribbling furiously in their little notebooks.
The heck with human misery, Anastasia thought. How about human joy? How about "O world! I cannot hold thee close enough"?
"—and if you compare Sophocles' Antigone," Jacob was saying, "you'll find a surprising similarity of language, especially in line six of the Arnold poem..."
Mr. Rafferty was beaming and beaming and beaming. The educators were all hunched over their little notebooks. Emily Ewing was sulking at her desk. The other students all looked bored.
And then—Anastasia could hardly believe it, but she looked at the clock, and sure enough, it was time—the bell rang and the period was over.