Anastasia Again! (4 page)

But her mother didn't seem to have that problem, talking to her father. Or talking to any of their men friends, in fact. Her mother could have said Fat Fanny pantyhose as if it were just an ordinary, funny thing to say.

What made it different, talking to Robert? Anastasia decided to read the
Cosmopolitan
article when she got home, the one about making spritely conversation, to see whether it explained why there are certain people that you have trouble saying stuff to, and why it feels, when you are with those people, as if your tongue is too big.

"You want to sit down and watch the boats?" asked Robert. They had walked quite a distance along the river. Robert had collected a few things: the
Playboy
that he thought she hadn't seen; a paperback copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, which he said he would give to his grandmother; a broken belt buckle, which he thought he could fix; and a whole batch of Popsicle sticks, which he said he used for building things like model airplanes. Anastasia only had the little plastic car in her pocket and a matchbook from the Hyatt Regency.

They sat down, and Robert began to fool with one of his sneakers. Anastasia began to pray. She did not pray very often—only when absolutely necessary—but it was absolutely necessary right now. She prayed that Robert was not going to take his sneakers off. Anastasia thought that feet were the grossest things in the whole world. If she had to look at Robert Giannini's feet, she would die, right there on the banks of the Charles River.

But he was only dislodging a pebble. Thank you, God, said Anastasia to herself.

"How is your family?" asked Robert politely.

"They're okay. My father's teaching a couple of summer school courses. And my mother just finished doing some illustrations for a book about seashells."

"Don't you have a baby brother? I remember when we were in fourth grade, your mom had a baby."

"Yeah. Sam. He's..." Anastasia hesitated. It was hard to describe Sam. "He's kind of weird," she said, finally.

Robert looked puzzled.

"He can talk okay," Anastasia said.

"Why is he weird, then?"

Good grief. It would be easy to explain, if she could tell about how Sam wasn't toilet trained. But she couldn't say
that,
to Robert, any more than she could say Fat Fanny
pantyhose. Then she remembered what her father had said about Sam.

"Some parts of him didn't develop as quickly as others," she told Robert. "His brain is in good shape. But some other parts of him aren't so good."

"Oh," said Robert. "I understand."

They sat silently and watched the boats. The river was dotted with small sailboats, heeled over in the breeze. Anastasia thought that it would be fun to be in a sailboat. She didn't know how to sail. But she thought that it would be fun just to be a passenger, just to be sitting in the boat, maybe trailing her fingers in the water, while Robert did the sailing...

Good grief. Anastasia almost blushed. She had actually been thinking about sailing with dumb Robert Giannini, the jerk. Probably he would bring his briefcase along on a sailboat, for pete's sake.

"You know," said Robert, "I've never told anybody this..."

Oh no, thought Anastasia. I don't want him to tell me something that he's never told anybody, for pete's sake.

"...but I have this cousin."

"So?"

"Well, my cousin Pete, he's sixteen years old. He's my aunt Marie's son?"

"Yeah."

"And he's retarded."

"That's too bad," said Anastasia politely.

Robert was poking the grass with a twig. "I mean, he's
really very severely retarded. He can't even live at home. He lives at a special place. Sometimes Aunt Maries takes him out for the day. Sometimes she brings him to our house. And he's just like practically a baby or something. He can't even feed himself."

"That's too bad," said Anastasia politely again. She felt genuinely sad about Robert's cousin Pete.

"So, well, the reason I told you that, is because you shouldn't feel too bad about Sam. Because you said his brain is okay, and that's really the important thing. It-doesn't matter that he's deformed. You shouldn't feel embarrassed about that or anything."

Deformed?
Good grief. Had she said that Sam was deformed? Why had she said
that?
And now that she had said it, and Robert had made that long speech about his cousin, and he had never told anybody else, for pete's sake, now she certainly couldn't say hey, I made a mistake, I lied, Sam
isn't
deformed.

"Yeah, well, I'm not embarrassed about it," she said miserably. "It's not that bad."

"And you know they can do a lot of good stuff at Children's Hospital. Probably your parents have already taken him there."

"Yeah, they have." That, at least, wasn't a lie. Sam had had X rays at Children's Hospital last year, when he tipped over his high chair and fell on his head. The X rays were negative. He was fine. It took a long time to wash the oatmeal out of his hair, though.

***

Robert said good-by to Anastasia at the corner near her house. He said he was going to go home and make something out of his Popsicle sticks. He also said two other things that made her feel strange.

One was, "If you move to someplace not too far away, I'll ride out on my bike to see you."

She answered, "Okay."

And the other was, "My family always donates money to the March of Dimes and stuff."

She couldn't figure out why he said that. "That's nice," she said, puzzled. "Mine gives money to the Civil Liberties Union."

"The March of Dimes goes to help crippled children, like Sam," Robert explained before he rode away.

Anastasia walked her bike down the block to where she lived. She decided that she would definitely read that article in
Cosmopolitan.
Maybe it would explain how some people got themselves into such dumb situations by simply opening their mouths. Maybe it would explain how to get
out
of those situations.

She wondered how she would go about hiding Sam if Robert did come to visit her in the suburbs.

***

It was all too complicated, too mysterious. She couldn't begin to make a title out of all the things that were mystifying in her life.

Maybe she should write a letter to "Dear Abby," instead.

"Dear Abby," Anastasia wrote, "There is this boy in my
class, I'll call him Richard to protect his identity, and the first thing that went wrong today was that Richard called me, and I said incredibly dumb things on the phone, and then..."

She stopped. Dear Abby would laugh. Anastasia had a sudden, horrible vision of Dear Abby, looking glamorous, sitting behind a mahogany desk, reading Anastasia's letter and wiping tears off her cheeks with a lace handkerchief, because she was laughing so hard that she cried. Then she would publish the letter in the newspaper, and everyone in Anastasia's school—everyone in Cambridge, in fact—would read it and would recognize who it was, because of course she would have to write about the briefcase. Everyone in Cambridge would laugh at her.

She turned to a new page in her notebook. "The Mystery," she wrote, thinking in titles again, "of Why Other People Always Think Your Very Serious Problems Are Hysterically Funny."

"Run a comb through your hair, sport. The real estate lady'll be here in half an hour. She's going to take us to look at a house."

"Daddy, I
told
you I don't want to go and look at houses.
Casablanca
is on TV this afternoon. I'm going to watch it over at Jenny's. You and Mom go look at the house with the real estate lady. I'll take Sam with me to Jenny's if you want."

"Nope. You and Sam are coming with us today. Your mom and I have already looked at seven houses..."

Her mother interrupted. "I looked at five others without you, Myron. I've looked at twelve altogether."

"Twelve, then. And this sounds like one that we want
you to see. And Sam, too. Where is Sam?"

Anastasia groaned and went to look for her brother. She found him sitting on his bedroom floor looking at a volume of
War and Peace.

"Good grief, Sam. Don't tell me you can
read
now!"

"Of course I can't read. I'm only two and a half years old. I'm looking for the pictures. Why doesn't this book have pictures?"

"I don't know. Probably pictures hadn't been invented yet, when it was written. Come on, Sam. Let me change your diaper. We have to go look at a house."

"Booorrrring," said Sam cheerfully.

"You're right:
boring.
Hey, listen Sam. Do you want to have a plot?"

"Okay."

"Well, you cry when you see the house, okay? Cry a whole lot, and say you hate it. Say you're
allergic
to it. Say it makes your eyes hurt, or something."

"Okay," said Sam cheerfully. He practiced a fake whimper.

"Yeah, that's pretty good," said Anastasia as she changed his diaper and buttoned him into a clean sunsuit. "Just keep doing that when you see the house. Maybe you can make real tears."

***

The real estate lady had bleached hair and a gross car with push-button windows. Sam fooled with the button on his window and mashed his fingers and began to cry.

"Not yet, Sam," muttered Anastasia. "Save it."

"I think you'll adore this house," said the real estate lady in a fake voice. "Good neighborhood, too. Wonderful schools. What grade did you say you were in, Anastasia?"

"I'll be in seventh."

"Oh, goodness, I thought you were older. Maybe because you're so tall for your age."

Terrific. Didn't anybody ever tell her how rude it is to mention somebody's
flaws,
for pete's sake? Was she going to mention her father's baldness next?

No. She was going to talk about the roof and the furnace. Wonderful old slate roof, needs no maintenance at all, lasts forever; wonderful brand new furnace, just put in last year, hardly uses any oil, blah blah blah. Anastasia could hardly believe that her mother had been through this twelve times already. She tried to think of the most boring thing she had ever done; going to an organ concert at the Catholic church with Jenny MacCauley's family came to her mind. She had almost fallen asleep. She imagined doing it twelve times. No way.

And this was just as boring, maybe even more so. Now the lady was babbling about the plumbing, the wonderful copper pipes, the woodwork, the wonderful woodwork, the interest rates, the wonderful interest rates.

Anastasia's interest rate in this conversation was zero percent. She leaned back on the gross plastic seat of the gross car and gazed through the window.

The trees and lawns were nice. It was sure a lot greener than Cambridge.

"Look, Sam," she said, and pointed. Some kids in bathing suits were running through a sprinkler in a yard.

Sam looked. "I would like that," he said thoughtfully.

"Yeah, because you like being wet, dummy," Anastasia said pointedly.

Anastasia was beginning to feel very odd. At first she thought maybe she was carsick. Then she realized what it was. It was because she liked what she was seeing through the windows of the car. She liked the trees and the lawns and the flowers. She liked the idea of running through a sprinkler, even with dumb Sam. She liked it that there were dogs and kids and bikes and a kind of nice-smelling quiet out here, wherever they were. But to like those things meant moving, and she loved Cambridge and the apartment. So there was a war going on in her stomach.

"Well, kiddos," said the real estate lady in her Barbie Doll voice, as she turned a corner, "here we are. This is it!"

Sam dutifully burst into fake tears. "I'm allergic to it!" he wailed.

Anastasia didn't even hear him. She was looking at the house, and her stomach felt as if she had been kicked by someone wearing cowboy boots. Her mother had once told her that it was painful to fall in love, and now, suddenly, she knew what that meant. She had expected to feel it for the first time when she fell in love with a
boy,
for pete's sake. But now she was feeling it—the pain in her stomach, her heart beating funny, Mantovani violin music in her ears, and aching behind her eyes as she tried
not to cry—because she was falling in love with a
house.

It was because the house had a tower.

***

And it happened to all of them as if it were a contagious disease. The main symptoms were speechlessness and silly grins.

The real estate lady didn't understand that. She thought something was wrong. She became confused when none of them said anything, and she began to apologize for the house.

The study was lined from floor to ceiling, on every wall, with bookcases. And it had a fireplace. Anastasia's father stood in the center of the study with a silly grin and said nothing.

"I know you wanted a study," said the real estate lady. "Of course this room seems small, I know. But you could have all these shelves torn out, and that would open up the room quite a bit and make it larger, and..."

Her voice drifted away in confusion, because no one was listening to her. Anastasia could read her father's mind. In his mind he was arranging all his books, alphabetically, in the shelves. In his mind, he had a roaring fire in the fireplace; he was sitting in front of it, smoking his pipe, reading.