Anastasia Again! (13 page)

Anastasia was tempted to burst out laughing and to tell her mother that the "kids" were all Senior Citizens and that Edna and Morris and Ernest were all in their seventies or eighties. But she was mad at her mother. She was mad at her for worrying about her ability to make friends, for pete's sake.

"They have a kind of club," said Anastasia airily. "I was walking past where their clubhouse is, and I just decided to stop in. They were all in there playing cards. So we got to talking, and I invited them over. I have a knack for making friends, you know," she added meaningfully.

"What do you mean, a kind of club? What do you mean, they were in there playing cards? Were they playing poker or something? Have you gotten yourself involved with some sort of
gang,
Anastasia Krupnik?"

Anastasia looked angrily at her mother. "I suppose you
could call it that. You could call it a 'gang' if you want to. I myself don't like to make that kind of stereotyped statement."

"Anastasia Krupnik, if those fourteen people arrive here Saturday on
motorcycles...
"

Now Anastasia almost
did
laugh. But she was still mad at her mother. She looked down her nose, which was not hard to do because of her height.

"I don't believe any of them will arrive by motorcycle," she said haughtily, and turned to go back upstairs.

Sam ambushed her on the landing.

"FLASH!"

"MOM!" Anastasia yelled. "
Why
is Sam blinding everybody with that blasted flashlight?"

"Sam, put your light away for now," said her mother. "He and Mrs. Stein have a plan," she explained to Anastasia. "They're going to flash lights at each other from their bedrooms after dark. Don't ask me why."

"Ask
me
why," grinned Sam.

"Why, dummy?"

"Because we're playing Flasher. Gertrustein used to play Flasher when she was a little girl, and she had a friend who lived right in this house."

"Yeah, I know about her friend. Edward Evans. Some friend. He grew up and married someone else, and now all she has is a goldfish."

Sam wasn't listening. He had unscrewed the end of his flashlight and was examining the batteries.

"Anyway, dummy, you know what a
real
flasher is?"

"What?"

"Some jerk of a man who goes out wearing nothing at all but a raincoat, and then he jumps out unexpectedly and opens up his raincoat at people."

"Oh," said Sam, with interest. "Does he say 'Flash'?"

"How should I know? I never saw one."

"Well,
I
say 'Flash,'" said Sam, losing interest. "I'm a flasher with a flashlight. FLASH!" He shone the light in Anastasia's eyes again and ran off when she made a halfhearted attempt to grab him.

Anastasia let him go and plodded back up to her bedroom to peel more wallpaper.

***

But the telephone rang again. This time it was for Anastasia. Her mother called her from downstairs. She could tell from her mother's voice that she was still mad. Well, that was okay. Anastasia was still mad, too.

"Is it the motorcycle gang? Did they ask for the gun moll?" Anastasia asked her mother sarcastically.

"It's Steve Harvey," said her mother coldly. "I should have told him you were out stealing hubcaps."

"Ha ha. Very funny." Anastasia took the phone and disappeared into a closet with it.

"Hi, Steve."

"Hi. Listen, my mom had an idea. She's been wanting to welcome your family to the neighborhood. So she thought maybe your family and mine could go together for a picnic on Saturday. Maybe to Sturbridge or someplace."

Oh, rats. Oh,
rats.
Anastasia had been dying to meet
Steve's family. His father was a sportscaster who actually knew a lot of famous athletes personally. His mother was a lawyer with the district attorney's office, and she had prosecuted an ax murderer once. And his older sister, who was home for a visit, was almost six feet tall, Steve said. She was a ballet dancer in New York. Her real name was Anne, but she went by the name Anya professionally. Anastasia thought that was the most terrific, wonderful thing she had ever heard.

Anastasia had once wanted to be a ballet dancer herself. She had taken lessons when she was nine and ten, but her feet never seemed to work right. One day she had tried to show her mother the dance she was practicing for a recital. She had twirled around on one toe, and her other leg knocked over a floor lamp, which hit the TV and bent the antenna; the antenna knocked a picture off the wall, and the picture hit a cup of coffee, which overturned on a book called
Treasures of the Louvre.
Anastasia grabbed for the book, but she tripped on a wrinkle in the rug and fell against the coffee table, breaking one of the table's legs and spraining her own ankle. She had to have X rays and to wear an Ace bandage for three weeks, and she had missed the dance recital and quit taking ballet lessons.

Her father had said, at the time, that she should be in the
Guinness Book of World Records
because she had done three hundred dollars worth of damage in twenty-seven seconds. But she had checked in the
Guinness Book of World Records
and found that a tornado in Hastings, Nebraska, had beaten that record in 1947.

Still, she was dying to meet Anne Harvey. She was dying to meet a female who was almost six feet tall and hadn't become a professional basketball player.

But instead, on Saturday, instead of going to Sturbridge with the remarkable Harvey family, Anastasia was going to be serving Kool-Aid to fourteen senior citizens, and to creepo Robert Giannini, and to traitor Jenny MacCauley, who had gone to see
Casablanca
without her.

She felt like having a tantrum, the way Sam did sometimes, kicking the floor and shrieking.

But twelve was too old for that; and anyway, she didn't want Steve Harvey to hear her kicking the floor and shrieking. Steve had already said, once, that she seemed very sophisticated for twelve.

She had explained, when he said that, that probably it was because she grew up in Cambridge, which was a more sophisticated place than the suburbs.

Steve had agreed. But then he had said something surprising. He had said that before he met Anastasia, he had thought everyone who lived in Cambridge was weird. He had thought that they were all intellectuals who sat around in the evenings drinking rose hip tea and playing recorders.

Anastasia had confessed that before she met
him,
she thought that everyone who lived in the suburbs was boring and preppy, that they all wore shirts with alligators and went to Bermuda for spring vacation.

Steve said that he'd never been to Bermuda in his life, and that he always ripped the alligators off his shirts.

Anastasia said that she hated rose hip tea more than anything in the world except liver.

It had been kind of nice to find out that they were wrong about each other, that they had—it now occurred to her—made premature assumptions.

So she certainly wasn't going to screech and kick the floor now, even though she sure felt like it.

Instead she said, "I'm really sorry, Steve, but we won't be able to on Saturday. I have a couple of friends from Cambridge coming out to visit that day, and there are some other people stopping by, too."

"Well, maybe some other time," Steve said cheerfully.

Sure,
thought Anastasia glumly. She happened to know that his sister was going back to New York on Sunday, to start rehearsals for a new ballet. Probably with Nureyev, for pete's sake.

"My life is ruined, and it's all your fault," she muttered to her mother, who was in her studio again, painting different shades of blue onto a large canvas. She had a blue daub on her chin.

"Why
my
fault?" called her mother after her, as she headed back up the stairs.

Anastasia didn't really have an answer for that. Since Steve Harvey couldn't hear her, she gave a very unsophisticated answer.

"Because I didn't
ask
to be born!" she bellowed.

And her mother had a very unsophisticated answer to
that.
"Nyah nyah," she called, and stuck out her tongue.

***

"Who was the young man with the mysteriously blinking light?" wrote Anastasia, at the beginning of Chapter 4.

"And what role was the cruel, subversive woman with blue paint on her chin going to play in all of this?" she went on.

It didn't seem fair to leave out her father. So she continued Chapter 4 by writing, "The tall, bearded stranger sipped thoughtfully at a beer, with his eyes closed, listening to Mozart."

In an Agatha Christie book, Anastasia realized, there had always been at least one murder by Chapter 4.

So she wrote ominously, "Mozart was dead."

Anastasia woke up early on Saturday morning, and before she opened her eyes, she heard a sound that sounded like Frank Goldfish.

"Frank?" she said sleepily. "What are you doing? Cut it out. It's too early to be playing. Go back to sleep."

But the sound continued, and Anastasia woke up a little more, opened her eyes a tiny bit, and realized it was raining. High up here, in her tower room, wet tree leaves were blowing against her windows.

Anastasia grinned. Terrific. Robert and Jenny wouldn't be able to ride their bikes out here in the rain. Probably her dad would be willing to drive Gertrustein down to the beauty parlor. Maybe the Harveys wouldn't go to
Sturbridge, and maybe Anastasia could walk over and meet Anne, at least, before she went back to New York. And in the afternoon, all the Senior Citizens could come; Fran McCormick would bring them in the van that was painted with a gross name: Oldster Roadster.

She turned over, hugged her pillow, and went back to sleep.

But when she woke again, later, the rain had stopped.

***

Downstairs, her mother was brushing Sam's hair.

"Sam's going with Mrs. Stein to the beauty parlor," she said, "so I thought he'd better look glamorous."

"Don't let them cut your hair, Sam," said Anastasia, buttering a piece of toast.

"Do my curls look pretty?" asked Sam anxiously.

Good grief. There was so much that Sam didn't know yet.

"Not pretty, Sam," Anastasia told him. "Handsome. Boys aren't supposed to look pretty, only handsome."

"Oh."

"You're not taking your flashlight, are you?"

"No, it's in its hiding place. Tonight we play Flasher."

Anastasia's mother looked out the window. "It looks as if it might rain again. The sky's pretty gray." She went to the closet, got Sam's little raincoat, and buttoned him into it. "There you are, old buddy. Your stroller's over at Mrs. Stein's. Have a nice time. And behave yourself."

They watched through the window as Sam trotted
across the yard and climbed the steps to Gertrustein's porch.

"Now. What's next? Kool-Aid." Anastasia's mother got the Kool-Aid out of the cupboard. "Might as well make it now, so Robert and Jenny can have some when they get here. Be sure to tell them to leave plenty for the Mafia."

"
Mom!
"

Her mother chuckled. "Okay, I'm sorry. I'm sure your new friends are actually very nice, Anastasia. I was just in a rotten mood yesterday. I've been working on a painting for a week now, and it just isn't going very well. You know how grouchy your father gets when he's writing a poem that doesn't seem to work? And he blames us, even though we've never even seen the poem?"

Anastasia laughed. "Yeah. I've been writing a novel for about three months now, myself. It took me 2½ months just to think of a title. And now the novel doesn't seem to have much connection to the title."

"Goodness. That would be a problem."

"Also, I'm having a hard time getting all the ingredients in."

"Ingredients?"

"Mmmmm. It's a mystery novel. I finally put in lots of mysterious characters. Then I remembered I needed a dead person. So I got that in, at the end of Chapter 4. But there's no sex yet."

"Sex? Are you sure you need sex in a mystery novel?"

Anastasia thought. Nancy Drew books had no sex.
Nancy's boyfriend was a little retarded that way, Anastasia thought. He was old enough to
drive,
for pete's sake, but he went on for book after book after book, without ever developing any interest in sex. But that was one reason that Nancy Drew books were boring.

Agatha Christie books had hints of love affairs, but nothing explicit. Anastasia wanted her mystery novel to be even more interesting than Agatha Christie's.

"Yes," she said. "I need some explicit sex. Maybe in Chapter 5."

"Stir."

"Stir my novel?"

"No, dummy. Stir the Kool-Aid."

They filled several old cider jugs. "There," said her mother. "We can add ice cubes when we serve it."

"Probably my gangland friends will sneak some vodka in, too."

"
Anastasia.
You're not serious, are you?"

Anastasia groaned. "No, Mom. I was only kidding."

***

Watching from the front window, Anastasia saw them as they came around the corner. She grinned. Actually, it would be fun to see Jenny again. She had missed Jenny. Probably, if the situation had been reversed, she would have gone to see
Casablanca
herself, she had to admit.