Anastasia's Chosen Career (6 page)

"Grab that leg!" a man's voice yelled suddenly, and Anastasia jumped. She backed away from the voice. Which leg did he mean to grab—her right or her left? Could she kick with the other?

Then she realized that the voice had come from the back of a truck which had the title great moves painted on the side. Two men were wrestling with a heavy green sofa. She remembered when her own family had moved from Cambridge, and that the moving men had wrestled the same way with their furniture. They had yelled, too. Actually, they had yelled things a lot worse than "Grab that leg," she remembered.

She paused and waited until the men, grunting, carried the sofa across the sidewalk and up the front steps of a house. Then she walked on and suddenly she was there.

Whew. It wasn't a whole house. It was a real store, a real bookstore, in the basement of an old brick building. A carved wooden sign that said pages was in the window.

Relieved, Anastasia took off her glove and pushed open the door. A bell attached to the top of the door tinkled, signaling her entrance.

"Hi. I'm Barbara Page, and you must be Anastasia Krupnik. Why don't you take off your boots?" the bookstore owner said. "Your feet must be freezing."

Anastasia said hi, knelt, and began to unlace her boots. Her feet
were
freezing, she realized. Then she realized something else. Something embarrassing. She looked up. "This is embarrassing," she said, "but the socks I have on ..."

Barbara Page looked, and laughed. "One's blue and the other's brown. That's okay. Leave your boots there in the corner and come on into the back room with me. I have some sandwiches there for us."

Anastasia followed the woman, looking around at the cluttered, colorful store. Bookstores were among Anastasia's favorite places; maybe they were even first on her list, or at least tied for first with libraries. She sometimes thought that she would like to live in a library, not even having a kitchen—just going out to eat, and spending all the rest of her life surrounded by books.

But maybe it would be even better to live in a bookstore. Heck, if you owned the bookstore you could even put a kitchen in the back—she could see now, entering the back room, that Barbara Page did have a coffeepot there, and a small sink—and you'd never have to leave at all. Just live surrounded by walls of bookshelves. Read and read and read, and sometimes stop to eat a little. What a great life.

Suddenly Anastasia began to feel very happy about her chosen career.

"Do you
live
here?" she asked.

Barbara Page nodded. "Sort of," she said. "Actually, my husband and I live upstairs, in the house part. But I just come down that little staircase over there every morning—" she pointed, and Anastasia could see the bottom of a narrow staircase behind a partly opened door—"and voila! I'm at work."

"That's neat."

Barbara Page uncovered some sandwiches that were waiting on a paper plate. She poured Coke into two plastic glasses.

"You're right," she said. "It
is
neat. Hey, how's your dad? I love your dad's books. Is he working on a new one?"

Anastasia nodded. "Yeah, but it won't be done for a long time. He's right at the point where he says he's going to burn the whole thing up and start a new career, maybe as a tennis pro."

"I didn't know he played tennis."

"He doesn't. But it doesn't matter, because he's not
really
going to be a tennis pro. It's just what he says when he's in the middle of a new book. After he says that, it's usually about six months before the book is done."

"Here. Eat." Barbara Page handed Anastasia half of a tuna fish sandwich, and Anastasia took a bite.

The telephone on the messy desk rang. The bookstore owner swallowed her own bite of sandwich, picked up the phone, and said, "Pages, good afternoon."

Anastasia listened while she ate her sandwich and sipped at her Coke. It wasn't really eavesdropping, she figured, because after all, she was sitting right there beside the telephone. And anyway, it was a business call, so it was a good way to get information about her chosen career.

"Well, Mrs. Devereaux, I'm really sorry to hear that," Barbara Page was saying. "It got great reviews, and I thought it was exactly the kind of book you'd like."

She listened for a moment, making a silent face at Anastasia, and then went on, "I wouldn't call it trashy, Mrs. Devereaux. The
New York Times
said it was hard-hitting and realistic, but they thought it was brilliant. And the author
did
win the Pulitzer Prize last year."

Finally, after listening again, she said politely, "Of
course
you can return it. I'll just credit your account. You drop it off next time you're down this way."

After she had hung up, she groaned. "That woman. Honestly. She buys books, reads them, and then returns them and asks for her money back. You'd think she'd go to the library instead.

"This is the third one she's returned since September. And she always spills coffee on them, too, so I can't resell them."

Anastasia was astonished. "But that's not
fair!
" she said.

Barbara Page chuckled. "It's the breaks," she said.

While Anastasia ate her sandwich and drank her Coke, she listened to Barbara Page answer the telephone three more times. She listened to her say to someone, "I don't carry cassettes, I'm afraid. But you could try Barnes and Noble."

Then she heard her say to someone else, "I do
have
that book here, Mr. Phelps. But to be honest, I don't think it would be the right birthday gift for your mother. She's had trouble reading since her cataract surgery. I think maybe a record album would be a better choice, at least until her eyes are stronger. I know she loves Bach. Why don't you get her a recording of
The Magnificat
?"

And finally, to the third caller, she said, "Gosh, that's been out of print for years. But I bet anything you could find it at the library, Mrs. MacDonald. Or if you want to
own
it, you could try a secondhand bookstore."

After the last phone call, Anastasia said, "I don't mean to be rude or anything, but how do you make any money? I mean, my dad said that you gave forty-seven people wine and cheese and only sold three books, and now you tell me that you let people return books with coffee spilled on them, and you tell them to buy records, and you send them to other bookstores, and I don't see how—"

Suddenly Anastasia looked around, through the door into the bookstore itself. It looked exactly the way a bookstore
should,
in Anastasia's opinion, look: walled with ceiling-high bookcases, vivid with the colorful jackets of novels, and in one corner she could see a child-size table and chairs beside the shelves that held children's books. A lavishly illustrated book lay on the bright yellow table, open to a page that showed rabbits in jogging shoes running along a country road.

But something was missing.

While Barbara Page watched, Anastasia adjusted her glasses, frowned, and peered through the door, trying to figure out what was missing.

Finally she turned back to the bookstore owner. "There aren't any customers," she said, puzzled.

Barbara Page shrugged, smiling. "Sometimes there are," she said. "Never very many, though, I'm afraid."

"But how do you make a living? How do you pay the rent?" Anastasia asked.

A man's voice interrupted their conversation. "Barb?" he called down the back stairs.

"What, honey?" the bookstore owner called back.

"Where's yesterday's
Wall Street Journal?
" the man called.

"On your desk. You left it there last night," Barbara Page replied. Then she turned back to Anastasia with a sheepish grin. "
That's
how I pay the rent. There isn't any rent. We own the whole building—my husband and I."

"Oh."

"You look disappointed."

"No," Anastasia said, "not disappointed. Just confused. I mean, I'm glad you have a husband—he sounded like a nice guy—and I know lots of professional women have husbands. My mother does, for example."

"Why are you confused, then?"

"Well, what if when I grow up and start my chosen career, I don't have a husband who owns a building that I can put my chosen career in?"

"Then," Barbara Page said decisively, "you work hard and become successful and you buy your own building. I bet you could buy two or three buildings eventually, Anastasia. You look like a hard worker. Here—have some potato chips."

Anastasia took one and munched. She thought about it. It was true that she was a hard worker. She probably
would
be a successful bookstore owner. Heck, she could probably end up owning skyscrapers.

But it might
help,
she realized, to marry someone who
also
owned buildings.

"You know what?" she said to Barbara Page. "I think I have to leave my options open."

"What do you mean, exactly?"

"Well, I want to be an independent person and all that, and a hard worker, and a successful bookstore owner who buys skyscrapers, but—"

"But what?"

"But if I happen to fall in love with a very rich man along the way, I want to be prepared. I want to have poise and self-confidence and good posture and a sense of fashion, because a rich husband-to-be probably wouldn't get real turned on by these blue jeans and these dumb socks that don't match, right? But I'm already taking a course—I didn't tell you about this yet, but I'm taking a course in—oh, good grief, what time is it?" Anastasia pushed the sleeve of her sweat shirt back and looked at her watch. "It's almost one o'clock already! I have to go! Rats!"

"Hey, this was fun, Anastasia. I'm glad your dad sent you over. It gets lonely in here sometimes. I'm sorry you can't stay longer."

"But..." Anastasia looked at Barbara Page in dismay.

"But what?"

"I forgot to do the interview!" Anastasia wailed.

"So come back."

"Can I? I mean
may
I?"

"Sure. Not tomorrow, because every Tuesday I have a senior citizens group in here for lunch and a book talk, and let's see, Thursday's no good because every Thursday I have the local nursery school kids come in for a story hour—"

"Do they buy books? Do any of them buy books?"

Barbara Page laughed. "Occasionally. And they do
love
books; that's what matters. Come Wednesday, okay?"

"Okay. I'll come. And I'll do the interview for sure. And more than that—"

"More than that what?"

"I'll buy a book," Anastasia told her. "I really will. And in the meantime, I'll give a lot more thought to my project."

Anastasia Krupnik

My Chosen Career

Even if you are a good-natured person who loves your chosen career, and even if you happen to have a husband and together you own the building that your chosen career is in, still it is important to be a hard-nosed businessperson sometimes.

You cannot allow people to spill coffee on your stuff.

"You look tired," Mrs. Krupnik said as Anastasia came through the back door and flopped into a kitchen chair without removing her jacket.

"I am," Anastasia said, "I'm totaled. Hi, Dad. What on earth are you doing?"

Her father was at the kitchen table with a stack of magazines and a pair of scissors. He made a wry face. "I'm doing Sam's nursery school homework assignment. Why in the world do they tell a three-year-old kid to cut out pictures of trucks when he hasn't even mastered the use of scissors?" Dr. Krupnik turned a page, frowned at a picture of a moving van, and picked up the scissors. "How was your day? I hope they didn't give
you
any assignments that you can't handle."

"My day was wei —" Anastasia stopped. She remembered how much her father hated the word "weird." "It was odd," she said. "No, I don't have homework. I'm just supposed to practice poise. I'm supposed to speak distinctly and look people in the eye when I talk to them."

Her father, furrowing his eyebrows, was carefully cutting around the tires of the moving van. "Don't look me in the eye when I'm doing this," he said, "or I'll wreck it."

"Don't look me in the eye while I'm beating these egg whites," her mother said, "or I'll let the mixer run too long and ruin the meringue." She turned on the electric mixer.

Anastasia shrugged and began to take off her jacket. "Great," she said. "Where's Sam? I'll look Sam in the eye."

"Here I am," called Sam from someplace invisible. "Under the table."

"What are you doing under the table?" Anastasia asked. She picked up the corner of the tablecloth, peered in, and saw her brother huddled there.

"Playing cave man," Sam said happily.

Anastasia knelt and put her head under the tablecloth. "Look me in the eye, Sam," she commanded.

Sam stared at his sister.

Anastasia stared back at him. She looked him in the eye and spoke distinctly. "Cave man is a dumb game," she said. "It's boring to sit under a table."

"Yeah, I know," Sam said. "I'm quitting now." He crawled out from his cave.

"You know what else is boring?" Dr. Krupnik said, putting the scissors down and stroking his beard. "Cutting out trucks. Is this enough, Sam? I did eight."