Anastasia Has the Answers (3 page)

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 backwards 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.

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 suggested. "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.