Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst

by Lois Lowry

  Anastasia scowled. "What's for dinner?" she asked.

  Her mother was blowing on the blue boxes to dry them. She looked up. "Dinner? What time is it?"

  "Almost five. I stayed late at school because stupid Daphne has a crush on a guy on the stupid football team, and she made me stay and watch stupid football practice with her."

  Mrs. Krupnik sighed and wiped her hands on a rag. "I forgot all about dinner, Anastasia. I forgot to take anything out of the freezer. I was so excited about making this train because I'd been saving the boxes for almost two years. This morning when Sam was at nursery school, I opened a closet door and all these oatmeal boxes fell out at me, and I realized I had enough, finally, and so when Sam got home, we—Sam, did we ever have lunch?"

  Sam was painting the Quaker Oats man industriously. His tongue was wedged between his teeth. There was an orange spot on his nose. "Yeah," he told her. "Hot dogs."

  Anastasia's mother put the rag down and stood up. "Dinner," she said. "Dinner. Let's see. You know what? In order to get that one last box, the one for the caboose, I emptied out a batch of Quaker Oats into a plastic bag. Maybe I could—"

  "MOM!" wailed Anastasia. "I don't want oatmeal for dinner! I hate oatmeal!"

  "I don't," said Sam cheerfully. "I love oatmeal, because it makes me get a train."

  Anastasia headed angrily toward the door of the studio. "I'm going to the kitchen," she announced, "and I'm going to examine the contents of the refrigerator, and there had better be something in there that we can have for dinner. Because it's against the law to starve your family, Mom. If I call this special phone number that I know about—this phone number you call if you know of a Very Troubled Family—they'll send social workers to investigate."

  Her mother laughed. "We have eggs," she said. "I'll make an omelet. I'll put cheese in it, and onions, and green peppers, and I think I have some mushrooms. Your social worker would arrive, Anastasia, and it would smell so good that she'd want to be invited for dinner."

  "Ketchup," said Sam. "Put ketchup on it, too."

  Anastasia sniffed. It was a sort of sniff that she'd been practicing in her room, a huffy sort of noise she could do with her nose, which meant "I am above this sort of thing." It was the kind of sniff that she imagined Queen Elizabeth would do if Diana asked her to change William's diapers.

  "Mother," she said, "I would like to have a private conversation with you. I would like to have it now, before Dad gets home, and I don't want Sam there, either, because it is a female conversation."

  Her mother sighed, dropped her paintbrush into a can of water, and said, "Sam, you keep doing the orange, okay? You can probably get two more boxes done before it's time to get cleaned up for dinner."

  Sam nodded solemnly, his tongue between his teeth again.

  Mrs. Krupnik followed Anastasia down the hall to the kitchen. Anastasia's feet went thump, thump, thump; partly because she was upset, and partly because she was wearing her very favorite heavy hiking boots. Her mother's feet made no sound at all because her mother was barefoot. There was bright blue paint on Katherine Krupink's toes.

  They sat down on two kitchen chairs, facing each other across the round table.

  "What's up?" asked Mrs. Krupnik cheerfully. "Got female troubles?"

  "No," said Anastasia in a grim voice. "You do."

  "Me? A healthy, happy, lovable person like me?"

  Even though she was still angry, Anastasia began to feel a twinge of sympathy. Her mother didn't even realize she had this problem. I'll be gentle with her, she decided.

  "Mom," she said as gently as she could, "I believe you are entering menopause."

  "Beer," her mother said, after a long silence. She stood up and opened the refrigerator. "I am going to have a beer."

  "Typical," murmured Anastasia. "Typical escape mechanism."

  Her mother opened the can with a hiss, took a drink, and made a face. "Yuck," she said. "I hate beer. But I hate this conversation even more. What on earth do you mean, Anastasia?"

  Anastasia picked up the salt shaker, sprinkled some salt in the palm of her hand, poked it with a finger, and licked her finger. It was a thing she always did when she was thinking; at least if she was thinking in the kitchen. You needed something to do with your hands if you were thinking heavy, painful thoughts.

  "Mom," she said finally, "you're becoming very weird."

  Her mother took another sip of beer and made another face. "Tell me what you mean by that," she said at last.

  "It's kind of hard to describe," Anastasia began.

  "I can imagine. Please try, though."

  "Well, I used to like you a whole lot. I thought you were a really neat mother. You used to be fun. But lately—"

  "Yes? Go on. Tell me about lately." Her mother sipped again. This time she didn't even make a face.

  "Well, your clothes, for example. They're embarrassing. You always wear jeans. I don't even like to walk beside you on the street because you don't look like a regular mother."

  "I see," said her mother tersely. "And what else?"

  "You're always doing stupid stuff. Like the fuss about my poor little gerbils, for example. The note on the vacuum cleaner. What if I'd had a friend with me? What if a friend of mine had seen that note on the vacuum cleaner? And for pete's sake, Mom, then I find you on the floor with a billion oatmeal boxes, making a dumb train. What if a friend had seen that? I can't even think about how embarrassed I would have been if I'd brought a friend home with me today. I don't want my friends to know the kind of stupid stuff you do." Anastasia licked a little more salt from her fingertip. She was beginning to feel perfectly miserable.

  "And all of this has just started lately, you say?" asked her mother.

  "Yeah. It's only been, oh, say the last couple of weeks."

  "But I told you that I'd been saving those oatmeal boxes for almost two years. Since Sam was just an infant. Wouldn't you call that weird and stupid ■—saving oatmeal boxes to make a train? But you said I was fine until recently."

  "Well, I just began to notice it recently," muttered Anastasia, looking at the floor.

  "And I've always worn jeans. I'm a painter, so it makes sense for me to wear jeans. You want me to wear a tweed suit while I stand at an easel?"

  Anastasia didn't know how to answer. Finally she said, almost in a whisper, "I wish you wouldn't be a painter. I wish you'd just be a normal mother."

  "Like who? Give me an example."

  "Well, Daphne's mother. She always wears a dress, and make-up—"

  "Make-up makes my face itch."

  "—and when we go to Daphne's house after school, her mother is always having tea with someone, or playing bridge. And she teaches Sunday school."

  "Anastasia, that's normal for Daphne's mother. She's the wife of the Congregational minister. But it wouldn't be normal for me. Normal is different for different people, don't you see that?"

  Anastasia kicked the table leg with her hiking boot. She sighed. "I don't like your kind of normal," she said miserably.

  Her mother leaned back in her chair. She scratched the sole of one bare foot by rubbing it across her jeans. She sipped her beer. She thought. She began to smile a little.

  "Anastasia," she said, "I believe I know what's wrong. I want you to think for a minute about your friends. And give me honest answers, promise?"

  "I'm always honest."

  "True. Okay. Think for a minute about Daphne Bellingham. Does she think her mother is terrific?"

  "No," Anastasia admitted. "She thinks her mother is weird and disgusting."

  "Meredith Halberg. What does she think of her mother?"

  Anastasia groaned. "She can't stand her mother. Because her mother has a Danish accent, and it's so embarrassing. She told her mother never to talk if she brings her friends home from school." Anastasia giggled.

  "One more. Sonya. What's her last name, that cute little friend of yours named Sonya?"

  "Isaacson. Well, her mother—good grief. Her mothe
r's fat."

  "Gross and embarrassing, right?"

  "Of course."

  Anastasia's mother started to chuckle. She put down her beer can, still almost full, as if she didn't need it anymore. "Sweetie," she said. "Let me explain to you what's wrong. I should have realized it much sooner than this. You say this all started just a couple of weeks ago?"

  "More or less. At least that's when I began to notice it."

  "Remember what happened a couple of weeks ago?"

  Anastasia shrugged. "Nothing much. I did lousy on a math test. I went to a garage sale with Sonya and Meredith, and Dad yelled at me because I spent five dollars on junk. There's another garage sale this Saturday, Mom, so I'm warning you that I may spend money on junk again."

  "Don't you remember that Dad and I took you to dinner at a Chinese restaurant?"

  "Yeah. So what? There was something in the sweet-and-sour pork that made you turn weird?"

  "Nope." Her mother grinned. "Why did we take you out to dinner?"

  "What is this, Twenty Questions? It was my birthday. My thirteenth birthday."

  "Right. And how old are your friends? How old is Daphne?"

  "Thirteen."

  "Sonya?"

  "Thirteen."

  "Meredith?"

  "Almost thirteen. What does that have to do with anything?"

  Her mother got up and began to take eggs out of the refrigerator. She was still grinning. "I'd forgotten. How can I be a mother and forget something so important?"

  "What, Mom? I hate it when you act mysterious."

  "It's something that happens around the time you become thirteen. It happened to me. I had a much worse case than you do; how can I have forgotten that? My mother and grandmother took me to New York City for the day when I was thirteen, and I wanted to die, I was so embarrassed. My mother had this coat with a fur collar, and it looked as if she had some kind of animal wrapped around her neck; it was so disgusting. And my grandmother wore a wig, and had a Russian accent. I walked as far away from them as I could, so that I could pretend they were strangers."

  "I don't know what you're talking about. People's mothers change and become disgusting when people are thirteen?"

  "Nope. The mothers stay the same, but the thirteen-year-olds change, and the mothers seem disgusting."

  "It happens to everybody?"

  "I'm sure of it. I bet anything that in Alaska, thirteen-year-old Eskimo girls get together and talk about how weird their mothers are. In China. Africa. Everywhere."

  "Why? Why does it happen?"

  Anastasia's mother was whisking the eggs together in a bowl. "Gosh, I don't really know. I bet it's hormones. When people begin to mature physically, all those hormones start rushing around, or something."

  "Well," said Anastasia angrily, "they ought to warn you. All those dumb books they give you to read, about getting your period and stuff. That's just normal stuff. Why don't they warn you about the abnormal stuff, like you'll start to hate your mother?"

  "You know what? I think they do. Wasn't there a chapter in that book you had? A chapter called 'Emotional Changes' or something like that?"

  Anastasia groaned. "Yeah," she acknowledged. "But I didn't read it, because it looked boring. The whole book was boring, but that chapter looked like the most boring of all, except maybe for the one called 'Personal Hygiene.' So I didn't even read it. And now it turns out that the most important stuff was in there."

  "Well," said her mother, "reading it probably wouldn't have helped much, because you would still feel that way anyway. You'd still hate me," she said cheerfully, and began chopping a green pepper.

  Anastasia stared at the floor. She was consumed with gloom. Completely consumed. "What can I do about it?" she asked. "Is there a cure?"

  "Time. Wait it out. In the meantime, sweets, would you go get Sam cleaned up for dinner?"

  Anastasia slammed the salt shaker down on the table. She stood up. "Why is it," she asked loudly, "that I always have to chase after that brat and change his yucky wet pants and wash his grubby hands? Nobody else's mother makes their kid do that kind of stuff. Nobody but you. Of all the mothers in the world, I had to get stuck with the only one who—"

  She stopped short. Her mother was shaking with laughter.

  "AND DON'T LAUGH!" roared Anastasia. She stomped out of the kitchen and up the stairs. At the door to her bedroom she stopped and gave the vacuum cleaner a swift kick that sent it thumping onto its side. She went into her room and slammed the door.

  Science Project

  Anastasia Krupnik

  Mr. Sherman's Class

  On October 13, I acquired two wonderful little gerbils, who are living in a cage in my bedroom. Their names are Romeo and Juliet, and they are very friendly. They seem to like each other a lot. Since they are living in the same cage as man and wife, I expect they will have gerbil babies. My gerbil book says that It takes twenty-five days to make gerbil babies. I think they are already mating, because they act very affectionate to each other, so I will count today as DAY ONE and then I will observe them for twenty-five days and I hope that on DAY 25 their babies will be born.

  This will be my Science Project.

  Day Three.

  My gerbils haven't changed much. They lie in their cage and sleep a lot. They're both overweight, because they eat too much, and they resemble Sonya Isaacson's mother, at least In chubbiness.

  In personality, they resemble my mother. They're very grouchy.

  Anastasia put her pencil down, and sighed. She glanced at the gerbils. They weren't as much fun as she had thought they would be. Maybe when Juliet had her babies in—Anastasia counted—twenty-two more days, if things worked the way they were supposed to...

  Sam knocked at her door. He poked his head inside.

  "You're supposed to get me cleaned up for dinner," he said. There was orange paint in his hair, on his clothes, and all over his face.

  Grudgingly Anastasia took his hand and headed with him toward the bathroom.

  "Why is the vacuum cleaner all tipped over in the hall?" Sam asked innocently.

  "I do not care to discuss it," said Anastasia in her Queen Elizabeth voice.

  3

  IT WAS amazing, Anastasia thought as she ate, how her mother could turn a lot of nothing into a decent dinner. After school, when she had found the piece of cold chicken to gnaw on, the refrigerator had looked almost totally empty to her. It looked like the kind of refrigerator that might belong to starving peasants in India: a couple cans of beer, a carton of eggs, and a few plastic containers of leftovers. In the shelves on the inside of the door were all those things that lived in refrigerators for centuries: mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, horseradish, and salad dressing.

  And in the drawer at the bottom, the drawer that said "crisper" on it, was nothing but a folder full of poems. Her father was almost finished writing a new book of poetry, and he always kept his unfinished manuscripts in the refrigerator drawer, the place where normal people kept lettuce. He said that if the house ever burned down, the refrigerator probably wouldn't burn, so his unpublished book would be safe.

  There had been a time—when she was younger and more naive—Anastasia had thought that was really neat. During that time she had always opened the refrigerator when friends were visiting, to show them the crisper full of poems, with great pride.

  "Oh," she would say casually, when her friends were surprised, "doesn't your dad keep his manuscripts in the refrigerator?" And they would say no, their dad didn't write poems; their dad was a computer programmer, or a lawyer, or an electrician. Closing the refrigerator again, Anastasia would respond politely: "Pity." Just the way Queen Elizabeth would.

  But lately she'd been embarrassed by the refrigerator drawer. She always hoped, when friends were over, that they would never go looking for a carrot.

  So it wasn't only her mother, Anastasia realized, who was a source of embarrassment now. It was her father, too. And Sam, of course. Sam was a huge, humongous humiliation. His pa
nts were usually wet, his face was always dirty, and—most humiliating of all—he had an IQ of about a billion. He was teaching himself to read, for pete's sake, and he was only three years old. And he could type. Talk about embarrassing!

  Once, shortly after school had begun, and Anastasia was beginning to make friends here in the new town that they had just moved to in the summer, Sonya Isaacson had come home with her in the afternoon. The door to the study had been closed, and through it they could hear the sound of typing.

  "Your father must be in there writing a book," Sonya Isaacson had said in awe, because Anastasia had bragged a bit about what a famous writer her father was.

  "I guess so," Anastasia had said. But she knew it wasn't true. Her father was teaching a seminar at Harvard that afternoon.

  She had tried to hustle Sonya past the study and up the stairs to her room. But the sound of the typing stopped, and Sonya hesitated. She wanted to be a famous writer herself, so she was dying to meet Anastasia Krupnik's father, who had been nominated for the American Book Award last year.

  Then the door to the study opened, and Anastasia could feel Sonya beside her, standing up straighter, ready to shake hands with the famous Myron Krupnik, who had been called Master of the Contemporary Image right on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

  Instead, out came Sam: barefoot, grubby, wet (though Anastasia thought maybe Sonya didn't notice the wet), and holding a piece of typing paper in his hand. He held the paper up and displayed it proudly. "I was writing a story," he announced, then he scampered off toward the kitchen.

  Anastasia had made a face and nudged Sonya on up the stairs. "That's just my stupid brother," she explained. "He fools with Dad's typewriter. He likes to make asterisks."

  But Sonya had gotten a good look at Sam's paper. "That wasn't asterisks," she said. "It said, 'airplane, sky. zoom. down, crash.'"

  "Probably didn't have any capital letters," said Anastasia glumly. "Sam's so dumb."

  But all the rest of the way up the stairs, all the way to the third floor where Anastasia's room was, Sonya had said in a loud, astonished voice, "DUMB? You call that DUMB?"