Anastasia Has the Answers (5 page)

"It's good and tight!" Uncle George called from the top of the ladder. He yanked at the rope a few times. "Look at that! It would hold an elephant!"

Sam appeared at the garage door. "An elephant can't climb a rope," he remarked. "Maybe a snake could, or a monkey. But not an elephant."

George laughed and started down the ladder while Anastasia's father held it steady. "Where did you come from, Sam?" he asked. "You should have seen me up there, like an acrobat."

Sam sat down on the floor of the garage and pulled off one sneaker. He tilted it and dumped out some sand. "I was in my sandbox," he explained to his uncle. "I was making a sedentary in my sandbox. Here, look." He reached into the pocket of his overalls and pulled out GI Joe. "This is poor dea—"

Anastasia interrupted hastily. "Thanks, Uncle George. Thanks, Dad. Now I can practice. Maybe I'll get a decent grade in gym if I learn to climb a rope."

"We used to have to climb ropes in gym," Mrs.
Krupnik said. "I wonder if I can still..."

She put down the flowerpot she was holding, eyed the rope, and leaped upward suddenly. It was the most amazing thing Anastasia had seen in a long time: her mother leaping into the air, grabbing the rope, and dangling there for a moment. Then she wrapped her legs around, caught the rope in her feet—exactly the way Ms. Willoughby demonstrated,
exactly
the way Anastasia couldn't do it—and up she went, all the way to the ceiling.

"
The Ascent of Woman,
" Anastasia's father said. "What a great book title!"

Back down came Katherine Krupnik, and she jumped off the rope, panting. "What do you think?" she asked proudly. "Great athlete here, or what?"

Anastasia didn't say anything. But no one noticed.

"My turn!" her father said. And off he went, and up he went—in about two seconds. He was so tall that he got a head start. Back down, he dropped from the rope, laughing, and took his pipe from his pocket. "It's all this pipe-smoking that keeps me in such great shape," he said. "How about you, George? You're a former U.S. Marine!"

Uncle George took a deep breath, brushed his hands together, measured the rope with his eyes, and jumped and grabbed. In a flash he was up at the ceiling and back down.

Anastasia still hadn't said anything.

"Now me!" called Sam. He put his GI Joe on the floor and held up his hands. "Now me!"

Mrs. Krupnik picked Sam up and held him so that he could grab the rope.

Okay, thought Anastasia. This is it. First my nonathletic thirty-eight-year-old mother climbs the rope. Then my nonathletic, slightly overweight, nicotine-addicted forty-eight-year-old father climbs the rope. Then my grief-stricken fifty-something-year-old uncle climbs the rope. If my three-year-old brother climbs that rope, I will have to leave home. I'll change my name and go to work in a leper colony somewhere and never return.

But Sam just dangled for a moment and then yelled "Help!" His mother lifted him back down.

Whew.

Later, when they had all gone off to do other things, Anastasia made certain that the garage door was closed so that no one would see. And then she tried.

And tried.

And tried.

***

"Sometimes I wish Sam would just disappear," Anastasia said grouchily to her mother that night. "Sometimes I wish Sam had never been born."

They were doing the dishes together after dinner. "Well," her mother responded cheerfully, "I can understand that. He's a pain in the neck sometimes."

Rats. Anastasia attacked a freshly washed pot angrily with the dish towel. Her mother was supposed to
argue
with her. Then
she
could say what a pain in the neck Sam was. If her mother agreed right off, then there wasn't any argument, and what was the point of—

"You know what?" her mother said. "George is ten years older than your dad, the same as you're ten years older than Sam. On the plane, coming back from California, they got to talking about old times. And George said pretty much the exact same thing. He thought your dad was a pain in the neck when he was little. He wished he had never been born."

"No kidding?" Anastasia walked to the pantry to put the pot away. "I can't imagine Dad being a pain in the neck, not even when he was little."

Her mother was laughing. "George said, 'Myron, you were such a pompous little show-off.' Apparently your dad was always trying to get attention. But no wonder. You know, he was the youngest of five boys. He probably would have gotten lost in the crowd if he hadn't been a pompous little show-off!"

"Sam's sort of a show-off, too, and he doesn't even have an excuse. He's the only boy. He gets plenty of attention."

Mrs. Krupnik put the last dish away and sat down at the kitchen table. "Are you feeling as if you're not getting enough attention, Anastasia? It has been kind of hectic around here, with Rose's death..."

Anastasia pulled out a chair and sat down beside her mother. "No, it's not that. It's that dumb rope. I hate it that I can't climb that rope. When you climbed it, Mom, I was so jealous of you. And I feel that way about every single girl in my gym class, even my best friends."

Mrs. Krupnik reached over and stroked Anastasia's hair. "I think the practicing will do it. I bet you'll be out there some afternoon in the garage and all of a sudden, when you least expect it, ZOOM! There you'll be, up at the top of the rope, amazed at yourself."

Anastasia grinned. "That's what Ms. Willoughby said."

"Who's Ms. Willoughby? Your gym teacher?"

"Yeah." Anastasia felt very shy, even in front of her own mother, who had known her ever since she was born. She wanted to tell her about something, but she felt too shy.

Suddenly she decided that maybe the dishes in the pantry needed rearranging, so she went to the pantry and began to move them around. She moved the cups from one shelf to another; then she unstacked the plates and restacked them in a different place.

"Mom," she called, from the pantry, "I know this girl at school, and guess what? This is really weird—"

"What? I can't hear you. Why are you clanking all the dishes?"

Anastasia leaned around the doorway. "I know this girl at school," she said. "She's just my age, thirteen?"

"Yes? What about her? Is it someone I know?"

Anastasia's head disappeared. "No," she called. "You don't know her. You never met her. You don't even know her name." Quickly she moved two plates off their stack and put a soup bowl in their place.

"Oh. Well, what about her? Did you want to tell me something about her?"

Anastasia poked her head out again. "It's really
sick.
This girl, who you don't even know her name? She, ah, she has a crush on a teacher." She ducked back into the pantry and rearranged a sugar bowl and a tea cup.

"Why is that sick? Lots of your father's students have crushes on him. I think that's fairly typical."

"It's a
woman
teacher!" Anastasia wailed. "Isn't that
gross?
"

"Oh," Mrs. Krupnik said. "I see." She got up from the table and came to the pantry. Anastasia was standing with her back turned and her head down, but she could hear her mother coining. Her mother put her arms around her.

"It isn't gross at all," she said softly. "You can tell your friend that it isn't gross at all. And I'm an authority on that."

"You are?" Anastasia lifted her head a little. "How come?"

"Well, because when I was your age—and the age of this girl you know—thirteen, I had a crush on my piano teacher. A woman. Miss Hermione Fitzpatrick."

"
Hermione?
"

"Sorry about the name. But I adored her despite it. She was young and she was beautiful and she was a good musician, and—well, what can I say? I loved her. I even had fantasies about living with her after I grew up."

"What happened?"

Her mother shrugged. "Nothing. I got older. I got bored with piano lessons. Hermione Fitzpatrick married an oboe player. I haven't even thought of her for years and years."

"So it didn't have any long-lasting bad effect on you, or anything?"

"Anastasia," her mother said dramatically, "take a look at me." She walked across the kitchen, stood in the center, and posed there, like a model. "Did I turn out okay, or not?"

Anastasia looked. Her mother was wearing jeans with paint smeared on one knee. There were sneakers on her feet, and one yellow sock and one white sock. She was wearing a sweat shirt that said
GOD ISN'T DEAD, SHE'S COOKING DINNER
across the front. Her hair was tied up in two ponytails, one on each side of her head, both of them a little crooked.

"Yeah," Anastasia conceded. "You turned out okay."

"So. There's your answer."

"So you think that this girl I know, she might get over it? And it doesn't mean that she's weird or anything?" Anastasia came out of the pantry.

"She's not weird at all. What it
does
mean is that she's very normal, very sensitive, very capable of loving. I think I would probably like her a whole lot."

"If you knew her," Anastasia said quickly.

"Yes, of course. If I knew her. Now, are you through rearranging dishes? Would you consider coming into the living room and maybe watching a movie on TV with Dad and Uncle George and me?"

"Yeah, okay, in a minute. Or maybe five minutes. Save me a place on the couch." Anastasia headed for the back door.

"Where are you going? It's dark out," her mother said in surprise.

"To the garage. I'm just going to try the rope one more time," said Anastasia.

Anastasia groaned when she woke up on Saturday morning and looked out the window. The weather was terrible. The big trees in the yard were blowing in the wind, and heavy rain was falling in sheets, splattering her window. There were already deep puddles in the driveway.

Rats.

Anastasia had planned to go over to Daphne's to see the new apartment where Daphne was living with her mother. But it was raining so hard that she couldn't possibly walk or ride her bike.

"Frank," she asked, peering over into the bowl where her goldfish was swimming in circles, "how do you stand being wet all the time?"

Frank Goldfish swirled and twitched his tail. He smiled and said something, his lips moving silently against the side of the bowl.

"I know," Anastasia said, and sighed. "For you, wetness is normal. Here—eat your breakfast." She tapped the fish food box lightly over the bowl, and Frank came up to the surface greedily. "Don't
gobble,
" Anastasia scolded him, but he paid no attention.

She dressed in a pair of jeans that she always saved for Saturdays because her mother said they were too disgusting to wear to school, a turtleneck sweater (because her mother had said her neck was long and skinny—which was true—and she was testing various ways to disguise that), and her hiking boots with red laces. Then she brushed her hair briefly.

Anastasia frequently made resolutions to brush her hair a hundred strokes in the morning and a hundred strokes at night. But never once had she actually done it. A hundred strokes was a
lot.

It was similar, she thought, to the resolution her father was always making about his pipe. "I'm not going to light this pipe again," he would say after supper, "until midmorning tomorrow."

But two hours later he would casually pick up his pipe again and begin filling it with tobacco. Anastasia and her mother would stare at him meaningfully. Anastasia would hum "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

"Well," Dr. Krupnik would say defensively, "until midmorning tomorrow is a
long time.
"

It was the same with hair-brushing, Anastasia thought, and put the brush down after stroke fourteen. Her arm got tired. Probably overuse wasn't good for the brush, either.

She put on her glasses, thought briefly about making her bed, decided not to, and left her bedroom. She thumped down the stairs. Her parents weren't crazy about the noise that her hiking boots made on the stairs, but Anastasia kind of liked it. And it was another Saturday thing, like her torn, grubby jeans.

"
Rrrrrrrr,
" said Sam. He was on his hands and knees in the hall, arranging another long line of cars. "Watch out, Anastasia. Don't step on my cars. I'm having a—"