Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst

by Lois Lowry

  "And guess what?" she added. "I have a psychiatrist!"

  Half an hour later, after an ice-cube treatment, Anastasia's bump had disappeared, leaving only a pinkish bruise. And Freud, after a treatment of Elmer's glue, had his nose back. Anastasia carried him upstairs toward her room.

  She found Sam sitting unhappily on the stairs to the third floor. He was sucking his thumb, and his old security blanket was wrapped around his arm. Now that Sam was three, he rarely needed the yellow frayed blanket that had been his constant companion when he was younger. Anastasia knew that something must be terribly wrong.

  "Hey, old Sam," she said, "what's the matter?"

  He looked at her fearfully. "Don't go up to your room," he said.

  "Why not? I have to take my friend Freud up there."

  Sam sucked harder on his thumb.

  Anastasia knelt beside him. "Were you in my room?" she asked.

  He nodded miserably.

  "Did you do something bad?"

  Tears began to stream down Sam's cheeks. Anastasia set Freud on the step. "Tell me what you did, Sam."

  "I broke the gerbils," Sam sobbed.

  Anastasia started up the stairs. Behind her, Sam followed, still crying and trying to explain. "I just only reached in to pat them, and I was very very gentle like you told me to be, and they just broke! There are a million pieces of gerbil all over the cage!"

  Anastasia put Freud on her bed temporarily and then went to the gerbil cage under the window. Sam stood apprehensively behind her.

  There was one furry gerbil in its nest in one corner of the cage; and there was the other furry gerbil in its nest in the other corner. But surrounding each of them were numerous squirming pink creatures.

  "Sam!" said Anastasia happily. "They're not broken! They had babies!"

  Sam took his thumb out of his mouth and peered around her, into the cage. "Even the father had babies?" he asked.

  "Well, I guess I was wrong. Instead of a father and a mother, we had two mothers." She thought briefly about her Science Project. This was certainly going to complicate her Science Project.

  "They sure had millions of babies," said Sam in an awed voice, looking at them.

  "Let me count." Anastasia leaned over the cage and checked the number of babies. "Romeo has four," she announced. "And Juliet has four. So there are eight babies. No, wait—there's one more. Juliet has five. Altogether there are nine. Good grief, we have to think of nine new names."

  "Can I name them?" asked Sam. "Because you got to name the first two."

  "Sure," said Anastasia. She went to the bed and picked up Freud. She looked around the room, decided on her desk, and placed him there, beside her schoolbooks. Sam squatted by the gerbil cage very intently. Finally he looked up.

  "Okay," he said. "I got names."

  Anastasia took a pencil and paper to write them down. "What are they?" she asked.

  "Happy is one."

  "That's a good name. What else? Eight more."

  "Sleepy and Dopey and Sneezy and Grumpy and Bashful and Doc."

  Anastasia grinned. "Terrific, Sam. But that's only seven. We need two more."

  "Snow White," said Sam.

  Anastasia wrote it down. "Good," she said. "One more."

  Sam beamed. "Prince," he said.

  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.

  Day Three Continued.

  People who have serious emotional problems sometimes have difficulty doing real good gerbil-observation because they suffer from inability to concentrate. I myself have serious emotional difficulties so I have this problem.

  As part of my Science Project I will talk about serious emotional problems. I will tell you what someone named Freud says about this.

  The division of the psychical into what is conscious and what is unconscious is the fundamental premise of psycho-analysis; and it alone makes it possible for psycho-analysis to understand the pathological processes in mental life, which are as common as they are important, and to find a place for them in the framework of science.

  Day Five.

  My gerbils gave birth to premature babies. Instead of twenty-five days, it took them only five days to have babies.

  Now I have eleven gerbils, and their names are Romeo, Juliet, Happy, Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Bashful, Doc, Snow White, and Prince.

  I also have a psychiatrist. His name is Freud. He is dead. But there is no need to be grossed out by that because with some psychiatrists It doesn't seem to matter much If they are alive or dead.

  5

  "Freud," said Anastasia, as she lay on her bed early one evening, her Math homework spread out around her, "I really need your advice."

  She glanced over at her desk. Freud stared at her with his blank plaster eyes. His nose, she noticed, was a little crooked.

  "Would you rather be called Dr. Freud?" she asked politely.

  He stared blankly into space.

  Anastasia sat up, cross-legged on her unmade, bookstrewn bed, and gazed across the room at her psychiatrist. She tilted the lampshade on her bedside lamp so that Freud was illuminated a little better and the shadows across his face were gone.

  "Or would you mind if I called you by your first name?" she asked. "I know doctors like to be called 'Doctor'—at least Sonya's father does; he likes to be called 'Dr. Isaacson'—but it seems to me that since it's just the two of us here, and we're in my bedroom, not in an office or anything, that we could be kind of informal."

  Freud stared blankly across the room.

  On a whim, Anastasia took the blue marking pen that she'd been using for Math. She brought Freud's head to her bed where the light was better, and carefully, with the marker, drew blue centers in Freud's plaster eyes. Then, with the tip of a black pen, she drew dots in the middle of each blue circle.

  As an afterthought, she used the fine-tipped black pen at the corners of Freud's mouth, turning the edges of his lips upward a bit. She replaced him on the desk and went back to her bed.

  She moved her books aside and lay on her back, her arms crossed behind her head.

  "Sigmund?" she said shyly, and glanced over at him. He was looking directly at her, and smiling.

  "All riiight," murmured Anastasia. "Now we're in business."

  It was November already, and nothing much had changed. Life was boring; her parents were boring; Sam was boring; and the gerbils were the most boring of all. She hadn't even added anything to her Science Project, she realized guiltily. Probably Norman Berkowitz had completed 25 percent of his computer by now, in November, and Anastasia only had two notebook pages about gerbils.

  "Sigmund," she said, "I know that probably I'm supposed to tell you about my childhood and all. But what I really want to talk about is my current problems. Is that okay?"

  She looked over. Freud smiled. It was okay, apparently.

  She sighed. Where to begin? "My friend Daphne Bellingham," she said. "That's a problem. Daphne used to be my really good friend. Daphne and Sonya and Meredith and I used to do everything together.

  "But then Daphne got a crush on this dumb boy
—this football player. And now she never wants to hang out with me and Meredith and Sonya anymore. She just hangs out around the school football field, watching dumb practices."

  Anastasia frowned. "Why do you think that happened, Sigmund?"

  He smiled. If her mother had smiled that way, the smile would have meant: "What do you think, Anastasia?"

  "I think," she went on, "that Daphne has entered Stage Two of Adolescence. The stage where you chase guys."

  Anastasia sighed. "I guess I'm not at Stage Two yet. I suppose I'll catch up with her sometime."

  An explosion of noise erupted in the gerbil cage. Anastasia glanced over, even though she knew what she would see: the gerbils were fighting again.

  "Sigmund," she wailed, "I have TOO MANY gerbils!"

  Freud grinned knowingly.

  "I know, I know. It's my own fault. And I can't get rid of them. Nobody wants gerbils. I was the fifth person Meredith offered them to. And anyway, I need them for my dumb Science Project."

  She sat up and turned the pages of the calendar on the table beside her bed. It told her what she already knew.

  "It's Day Twenty-five today," she muttered. "This is the day they were supposed to have babies. Instead, the babies are three weeks old, and the cage smells bad, and they make a lot of noise, and I spend half my allowance on gerbil food."

  She noticed that Freud was still smiling, so she got up and turned him around. It wasn't amusing, the gerbil problem.

  "I'll see you at my next appointment, Sigmund," she said. "Thanks for the help."

  "Anastasia!" her mother's voice came up the stairs.

  "What? Come on up!"

  "You know I can't do that. I can't come in your room, not as long as—well, you know," her mother said. "I don't want to be in the same room as those two things. You come down here to the second floor. I want to talk to you for a minute."

  Those two things my foot, thought Anastasia as she started down the stairs. Would you believe those eleven things?

  In a million years she couldn't tell her mother that there were now eleven gerbils. Her mother would truly freak out. Anastasia had sworn Sam to secrecy.

  She had even vacuumed her own room a couple of times.

  She found her mother in the second floor bathroom, rubbing Sam dry with a big towel after his bath. There were fourteen plastic boats churning around in the bath water as it drained.

  "What's up, Mom?" Anastasia asked.

  "Look at Sam," her mother said, with a worried frown. "Turn around, Sam. Show Anastasia your behind."

  Sam turned around dutifully. On his rear was a bruise.

  "That kid Nicky Coletti did that to him," Mrs. Krupnik explained.

  "Whacked me with a dump truck," said Sam. "Whammo. During Juice Time."

  "Brush your teeth, Sam," said his mother. Sam climbed onto his special wooden stool and reached for his toothbrush.

  "What do you think, Anastasia? I know what your father thinks, that they have to work it out themselves. But I'm beginning to get very angry about this. Give me some productive advice."

  "Well, for starters, if I were you, I wouldn't let Sam squeeze his own toothpaste," said Anastasia. "Take a look."

  Mrs. Krupnik looked. Sam had squeezed a mountain of Crest onto his little blue toothbrush. "I like my toothpaste to be cheeseburger size," he explained.

  His mother sighed.

  Sam inserted the mound into his mouth. "Iwahong Anashtashis topuhmy tube ed," he said.

  "He wants me to put him to bed," Anastasia translated for her mother.

  "Cuzh I godda sheecred fo Anashtashia," he said, through the toothpaste.

  "Because he has a secret to tell me," she explained.

  "Okay," said her mother. "You tuck him in. But give it some thought, about what I should do, okay?"

  "Okay," said Anastasia.

  "Gimmea kish?" Sam asked his mother.

  She hesitated, and then kissed him good night on his ear, avoiding the toothpaste.

  "What's the secret?" asked Anastasia, as she tucked Sam, de-toothpasted, into his bed. "Something about your rotten friend Nicky Coletti?"

  "No," Sam said, shaking his head. "About the gerbils."

  "What about them?"

  "I want you to spell them for me," he said. "So that I can write 'gerbil' with blocks, at nursery school."

  "Oh, that's no problem. Here." Anastasia got a pencil and paper from Sam's little desk. She wrote "gerbil" on it and showed it to him.

  Then she thought for a moment. "Uh-oh," she said. "Sam, you have to be very careful that Mom doesn't see this paper. She doesn't even want to see the word 'gerbil.' It might make her freak out."

  "Okay," Sam said. "I'll keep it in my pocket."

  Anastasia picked up his jeans, which were folded over the back of a chair. "I'm putting it right here, Sam," she told him, "in the pocket of your jeans."

  He nodded, and snuggled into his covers. "Tomorrow at school," he said, "I'll write 'gerbil' a million times, with blocks."

  He frowned sleepily. "Then," he said in a resigned voice, "probably Nicky Coletti will throw them all at my head."

  After she had turned off Sam's light and closed her door, Anastasia went back up to her room. She turned Freud's head back around so that it faced her bed.

  "Sigmund," she said, "I have to go talk to my mom in a minute, so this will be a short appointment."

  He smiled agreeably.

  "I have this problem with my mother," Anastasia grumbled. She looked at her psychiatrist.

  "You think that's funny?" she asked him angrily.

  "Well," she said, after a long silence. "Maybe it is sort of funny. My mother certainly seems to think it is. She finds it wildly amusing that adolescent people hate their mothers."

  Freud smiled benignly from the desk.

  "I don't really hate her," Anastasia went on. "But she bugs me. Right now it's bugging me that she wants my advice about a complicated problem. How on earth is a thirteen-year-old person supposed to be able to solve a problem that a thirty-eight-year-old person can't solve?"

  She looked quizzically at Freud. "How old are you?" she asked.

  He smiled.

  "Well, okay, I know that's not the sort of question you're supposed to ask your psychiatrist," Anastasia acknowledged.

  "I wish you could talk," she sighed. Then she caught sight of the book that was still on the floor beside her bed. Now that she had taken over the cleaning of her room, Anastasia had begun vacuuming around things. It didn't make any sense to her, the way her mother did it; her mother picked things up, vacuumed, and then put the things back down. Anastasia just went around them; it seemed more logical.

  She flipped through the pages of the book on Freud. The phrase "dependent relations" caught her eye. It sounded appropriate. She was a "dependent," she knew; her father had told her that. He listed her as a "dependent" on his income tax every year.

  And she was certainly a "relation." She figured she was her mother's closest relation, except maybe for her father.

  "Sigmund," she suggested, "I would like you to tell me something about my relation, Mom, since I am her dependent."

  She looked again in the book, at the place where she had seen the phrase "dependent relations."

  ...the derivation of the super-ego from the first object-cathexes of the id, from the Oedipus complex, signifies even more for it. This derivation, as we have already shown, brings it into relation with the phylogenetic acquisitions of the id and makes it a reincarnation of former ego-structures which have left their precipitates behind in the id.

  She read it through a second time. She glanced over at Freud. His smile looked, suddenly, a little like a smirk.

  You ratfink, Sigmund, she thought. What kind of help is that?

  Anastasia closed the book, adjusted her glasses, and looked through them down her nose at her psychiatrist. What would Queen Elizabeth say, she wondered, to a psychiatrist who laid a trip on her?

  "Your views are interesting," s
he said to Freud in her Queen Elizabeth voice. "I'll give them some thought, when I find time.

  "Right now, though," she added, "I have more important things to deal with."

  She found her parents in the study. Her father, as usual, was reading. Her mother was knitting a sweater. Anastasia made a fervent secret wish that the sweater would not be for her.

  She hated her mother's hand-knit sweaters. Everybody she knew wore store-bought sweaters from Sears or Jordan Marsh. But her mother wouldn't buy sweaters; oh no, nothing that ordinary for Mrs. Krupnik. She had to knit these horrible sweaters—with cables in them, of all things. Talk about preppy. Yuck.

  Her father was even wearing one, at this very moment. He didn't even mind that he had to wear gross handmade sweaters, with cables. Maybe if she could save up enough money she would someday, for his birthday, buy him a decent Orion sweater at Sears.

  "I was thinking about what you said, Mom," said Anastasia, flopping down on the couch. "And I consulted Freud. Is it okay if I talk about it in front of Dad?"

  "Sure," said her mother. "He and I don't agree on how to deal with Nicky Coletti, but we'd both be interested if you can come up with some great scheme."

  Her father put down his paper and lit his pipe. "Does it really help, to consult a plaster psychiatrist?" he asked.

  "Sure," said Anastasia. "Freud is very helpful."

  "That's fascinating. And you actually asked him about the problem with Sam's friend?"

  "Dad" explained Anastasia impatiently, "you don't consult someone like Freud about nursery school problems, not specifically. You ask Freud general sorts of questions about human relationships. Like—well, like this evening for example, I was discussing dependent relations with him."

  "Dependent relations? You ought to ask him what to do about your Uncle George." He turned to Mrs. Krupnik. "Did I tell you that George wrote and asked me for another loan? He wants to invest in a kiwi-fruit farm."

  "Your brother George is a kiwi-fruit, if you ask me," said Katherine Krupnik.