by Lois Lowry
"Doesn't that take a lot of your time, sleuthing around like that?"
Daphne sighed. "Every waking minute. I miss a lot of good stuff on TV. And it's why I didn't have time to finish Johnny Tremain for English class. I couldn't explain that to Mr. Rafferty, of course, so I had to tell him that I lost the book."
"See?" Sonya said loudly. "Every one of us, we're sacrificing our lives for this stupid pursuit of men. Meredith, if you didn't spend all your time thinking about Kirby, you could think about clothes instead, or something else equally worthwhile. And Daphne—you could have gotten an A on the Johnny Tremain test if you hadn't been spying on Eddie Cox instead. And Anastasia—
"Forget it," Anastasia interrupted her. "I already figured it out for myself, Sonya. And I hadn't told you guys yet, but I've already given up the pursuit of Steve Har——? Harcourt? Hartley? See? I can't even remember his last name."
Her friends began to laugh. They had reached Sonya's house and stopped at the end of the long driveway.
"I'll see you guys in the morning," Sonya said. She looked at her watch. "Four o'clock. Great. I have time to do my homework, start reading a book for extra credit, wash my hair, make some brownies, iron my gymsuit. Maybe I'll paint my bedroom. In the old days, of course, I would just be holed up in my room, plotting and scheming, writing Norman Berkowitz's name all over my notebook. What a relief to be finished with such adolescent pursuits."
Anastasia, Meredith, and Daphne watched Sonya walk up the driveway toward her house.
"Look," Anastasia pointed out. "She has a new, ma ture look to her. A more self-confident walk. A self-assured way of holding her shoulders."
"What a woman," Daphne murmured in an awed voice. "I admire her."
"I'm going to do it, too," Meredith announced. "This is it, guys. I've given up men." She took a deep breath. "I'm trembling. It was tough. But I think I'm going to make it."
"Good for you, Mer," Anastasia said. "It is tough. I know, because I already gave up Steve What's-his-name."
"That leaves only me," Daphne said. "And I suppose I should join you. You know, my mother's given up men. Ever since she and my dad got divorced and she became a feminist. She quit curling her hair and everything. She doesn't even wear lipstick anymore. She says makeup is just a stupid ploy to attract men. She threw all her Revlon products away."
"I admire that," Anastasia said fervently.
"What about deodorant?" Meredith asked uncertainly. "Can you still use deodorant if you give up men?"
Daphne nodded. "Yeah. My mom does. Deodorant's okay. But no perfume."
They began to walk toward the apartment building where Daphne lived with her mother. Each afternoon, after school, the four girls took a circuitous route so that they could see each other home. Today was the day that Sonya Isaacson's house was first and Anastasia's was last.
Sometimes they arranged their route so that they would pass the houses of Eddie Cox, Steve Harvey, Kirby McEvedy, and Norman Berkowitz. On the days when they casually walked past all the boys' houses, they didn't reach their own homes until almost dark.
"Look at that," Daphne said, standing on the steps to her building. "See the clock on the front of the bank over there? Four-twenty. Look at the time we save if we don't prowl around looking for men! That does it. I'm joining up. No more pursuit of Eddie Cox."
"Your mom will be proud of you," Anastasia told her. "But, Daph—and Meredith—could we call them boys? I mean, instead of men?"
They pondered that.
"No more pursuit of boys," Daphne said. "Yeah, okay. I never pursued men, anyway."
"Okay," Meredith agreed. "We've given up boys. We can do our homework for a change."
"And watch Wheel of Fortune," Daphne pointed out, grinning. She waved and went inside her building.
Anastasia and Meredith trudged on, talking about how their grades would improve, how they'd be more helpful around the house, how proud Mother Teresa would be if she only knew, how they could get involved in community projects now that every waking moment wouldn't be consumed by thoughts of boys.
At the Halbergs' house, Meredith's older sister, Kirsten, was just pulling away from the curb in her ancient red Volkswagen. She waved at the girls and beeped her horn in greeting.
Meredith shook her head in disgust, looking after the departing car. "She's probably going to go pick up Jeff at work and then they'll go out to dinner and discuss wedding plans. That's all they do, she and Jeff. Wedding plans, wedding plans. Sick."
"I remember that your sister was once a fine young woman," Anastasia said sadly. "Intelligent and ambitious."
"A waste of a young life," Meredith acknowledged mournfully.
Anastasia said goodbye and walked the remaining two blocks to her own house alone. She realized that she felt a little guilty. No, actually, she felt more than a little; she felt massively guilty. It was true that she had given up her pursuit of Steve Harvey. It was true that she, like her friends, would become a better person: more scholarly, more family-oriented, better read, more civic-minded and politically aware, now that she would not be wasting her time trying to get an idiotic seventh-grade boy to pay attention to her.
But men? That was something else again. She had not given up on SWM.
Anastasia had been calculating very carefully: the number of days it might take for her letter to reach New York; the number of minutes, maybe even an hour or two, for SWM to compose his reply; the number of days for his reply to make its way from Manhattan to the Krupnik mail slot in a Boston suburb.
It might—just might—be today.
She hurried up the steps to her house, opened the front door, and called, "Hello! I'm home!" at the same time that she was scattering the stacked mail on the hall table, looking for a letter addressed to Swifty.
But it was not there. Not yet.
Dear SWM,
I know that it is just the tiniest hit rude to write a second time when I have not yet received your answer to my first letter.
But I saw on the TV news (I am very interested in current events and things of international interest. like for example rumors of marital trouble between Charles and Diana) that a postal vehicle in New York collided with a truck carrying live chickens. Peter Jennings on the news made it sound like a funny event, and they showed pictures of live chickens running around the street, with people chasing them.
But I didn't find it at all amusing. For one thing, the chickens looked very scared and the people chasing them didn't look too thrilled either.
And also: Peter Jennings didn't even mention the possibility of mail getting lost as a result of that accident.
I thought I had better write again just in case my first letter was on that truck and got mixed in with all those chicken feathers and was lost.
Or maybe you are sick. The news also said that there's a lot of flu around. I really am concerned for you.
I want to tell you. also, that I did have a relationship in my life. I concealed it from you before. But now it is completely over, so it need not come between us in any way. His name was Steve. He was also a SWM.
Take aspirin and drink lots of liquids, if you have flu. It is okay to write letters even if you have a slight fever. My brother had a slight fever when he had chicken pox but he was able to do a lot of coloring and follow-the-dots with no problem.
Sincerely,
SWIFTY
(Single Waiting Impatient Female: Tall, Young)
3
It was a usual sort of Thursday evening dinner at the Krupniks' house. Anastasia's parents were arguing, in a friendly fashion, about a novel they had both been reading. Myron Krupnik was really an expert on books, since he was a professor of literature, so he made a long almost-speech, as if he were standing in front of his Harvard classroom, and he helped himself to more pot roast at the same time.
"The futuristic setting's effective, I'll grant you," he said, carefully lifting a slice of meat from the serving plate to his own, "but it's too distracting. It's se
lf-indulgent. The entire theme would have been enhanced if she—whoops. Sorry." He began to dab with his napkin at the splotch of gravy he had dripped on the tablecloth.
"That's okay. Leave it," Anastasia's mother said. "Sam, do you want some more meat while Daddy's slicing it?"
Anastasia's brother looked up from his plate, where he had carefully arranged four pieces of carrot in a line, like the cars of a train. "One square piece, for a caboose," he said. "Please," he added politely.
Dr. Krupnik used the point of the carving knife to create a small square of pot roast. He lifted it to Sam's plate and placed it neatly at the end of the train. "You know," he said thoughtfully, looking at the arrangement on Sam's plate, "if we took a good-size potato and dug through it with a spoon, we could make a heck of a tunnel for that train."
"Myron," Mrs. Krupnik said in a meaningful voice.
"Sorry," he replied. "I lost my head. Sam, old sport, eat your train so that you can have some dessert."
"I will," Sam told him. "In a minute." He had taken a large potato from the serving bowl and was about to dig a tunnel through it.
Anastasia, watching her family as she ate her own dinner, was thinking. Mainly she was thinking about marriage. If it was true, what she and her friends had agreed on this afternoon, that the pursuit of boys took up valuable time which could be better spent on more worthwhile activities, then what about marriage, for Pete's sake? Marriage was even more time-consuming.
Look at her father at this very moment, for exampie. He had degrees from several famous universities, and he taught at a very famous university, and he had published several pretty famous books of poetry. But at this very moment, when he had begun to make a profound statement about literature, his attention had been diverted. And now—Anastasia glanced over again, and it was true—now her father, forty-eight years old and balding and bearded, was hunched over, helping a three-year-old dig a tunnel through a potato as if it were the most important enterprise in the world.
Marriage had done that to him.
And look at her mother, too, Anastasia thought. Look at Katherine Krupnik, graduate of art school, award-winning illustrator of children's books. Had she, today, worked industriously on a painting that would catapult her to fame in the art world? Had Katherine Krupnik created anything today? Anastasia asked herself the question and answered it, sadly, for herself as well. She felt a huge twinge of pity for her talented mother.
The only thing Katherine Krupnik had created today was a pot roast. A pretty good pot roast, to be sure; but nonetheless, a pot roast.
Marriage had thwarted her mother's life.
"I have decided that I'm against marriage," Anastasia announced to her family.
"That's another thing," her father said, looking up from the potato. But he wasn't talking to Anastasia; he was talking to her mother. Anastasia realized he was referring to the book they'd been discussing. "Granted, she's making her point through satire. But she's taken the basic institution and completely perverted it through a warped, feminist eye."
"You're an absolute idiot, Myron," Anastasia's mother said, "if you see that novel as feminist."
"I see myself as a feminist," Anastasia said loudly. "I'm giving up makeup and other stuff that is just designed to attract boys."
Sam burst into tears suddenly. "It fell in!" he bellowed. "My dumb tunnel just fell in!" He stabbed the broken potato angrily with his fork.
"And perfume, too," Anastasia said over Sam's wails. "Not deodorant, but perfume. I've renounced it, along with marriage."
"Well," her mother said tensely, "I do hope you haven't renounced dishwashing. Because tonight's your turn. Yours and your dad's.
"Sam," she said firmly, "you are off to bed this instant, without dessert. Your table manners are deplorable.
"And I," Mrs. Krupnik added, "am going to take a long bath and I'm going to finish reading this brilliant novel that some morons can't appreciate." She glared meaningfully at her husband, then picked up Sam, who was still howling, and headed toward the hallway and the stairs.
"See what I mean about marriage?" Anastasia asked her father as they cleared the table.
He grinned and ate the remains of Sam's train.
***
The telephone rang just as Anastasia handed the last washed plate to her father, who was wearing a plaid apron, holding a soggy striped dishtowel, and smoking his pipe.
"Hello?" Anastasia tucked the receiver against her shoulder and held it there with her head while she dried her hands.
"It's for me," she told her father. "It's Meredith Halberg."
She listened to her friend's voice for a minute.
"She what?" Anastasia said in gleeful amazement. "Really? She's not just kidding?"
She tilted her head toward her father, who was putting the final plate into the cupboard. "Guess what! Meredith's sister, Kirsten? She wants—wait a minute, Dad—I have to get more details.
"Meredith? When is it? Where is it? And how does it work? I mean, tell me absolutely everything!"
Dr. Krupnik hung his dishtowel on the rack to dry. He wiped the kitchen counter with a sponge, turned off the light over the sink, took a pear from the bowl of fruit on the table, and left the kitchen, still smoking his pipe and tossing the pear back and forth between his hands.
Two seconds later, Anastasia sped past him in the hall as he headed toward his study to watch the evening news on TV.
"Excuse me, Dad. I have to find Mom and tell her the most exciting news I've maybe ever had in my whole life!
"You can go watch Peter Jennings talk about world events if you want to, Dad," she continued as she bounded up the stairs, "but in all honesty, the most interesting news in the whole world is happening right here, right in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts, and it's happening right to your very own daughter. So if I were you, Dad, I'd forget Peter Jennings for just one night and come upstairs and listen to what I'm about to tell Mom!
"Mom!" Anastasia called from the stairs. "Guess what!"
Myron Krupnik, still holding a pear and with his pipe clenched between his teeth, stood in the doorway of the study. He eyed the television set. He never missed Peter Jennings and the evening news. He wanted very much to know what had happened today in China, and in Kuwait, and in Rumania. His Boston Globe was in the study, too, folded on his desk where he had dropped it when he got home from work; and he very much wanted to read the Globe and see if the Celtics had won the night before and what the weather would be; and he wanted to read "Doones-bury," and...
Myron Krupnik took a last look at his study, sighed, and headed up the stairs after his daughter.
"Mom, sit down so you don't faint when I tell you this," Anastasia was saying dramatically.
Katherine Krupnik stared at her. "Anastasia, I'm in bed. I'm already lying down."
That was true. Mrs. Krupnik had taken a bath after dinner and she was in bed, leaning against a pile of pillows with her book propped on her knees. She was wearing the oversize Harvard T-shirt that she usually wore instead of a nightgown.
Anastasia sat down on the end of her parents' bed. Her father leaned against the doorframe and puffed on his pipe.
"Meredith called," Anastasia explained. "You know her sister Kirsten is about to get married? Her parents used to be really upset about that because Kirsten hasn't finished college yet, but they've finally adjusted to it because Jeff—Kirsten's fiancé—is a really nice guy, and he has a good job and everything, and Kirsten promised she'll go back and do her senior year, and she won't have babies right away, and—"
Myron Krupnik looked at his watch. It was just about time for Peter Jennings's first commercial break. "Could you get to the point a little more quickly, Anastasia?" he suggested politely.
Katherine Krupnik's eyes flickered down to the paragraph she'd been reading. She turned a page of her novel. "Mmmm," she said. "I know all of that already, Anastasia."
"Well, here's the thing," Anastasia went on. "She's being married at the Congre
gational church at the beginning of May, and she's hoping that the lilacs will be in bloom, because she really wants the church decorated with white lilacs, but if they're not blooming that week, it'll cost a fortune to get lilacs from some other place, and her parents aren't sure they'll be willing to do that. So she might have to settle for some other kind of flowers—"
Dr. Krupnik glanced at his watch. Mrs. Krupnik glanced at her book.
"—and the reception's at the country club. Dinner, for two hundred people. Probably chicken. They had a couple of choices, but filet mignon is just out of the question, Mr. Halberg said, because it costs so much, and anyway, people don't expect filet mignon at a wedding reception. Heck, they don't really care what they eat, so chicken's all right, don't you think? I do."
"Anastasia," her mother said in an exasperated voice, "please get to the point."
"Well," Anastasia squealed, "the point is: Jeff has two sisters who were going to be the bridesmaids, and now both of them are pregnant and their bridesmaid's dresses don't fit anymore, so they had to back out, and Kirsten had an absolute tantrum, Meredith said. She was so upset, because the wedding's only six weeks away, and then her mom had a great idea, and guess what it is!"
"What?" her mother asked.
"She wants me to be a junior bridesmaid!"
"A what?" her mother asked.
"A junior bridesmaid! Me and Meredith and Sonya and Daphne! All four of us! And it's just the same as bridesmaid. Really, Mom, you get to wear a long dress and carry flowers and be in the official photographs, and your name is in the paper. And it's not babyish like being a flower girl, Mom, don't think that for one minute!"
"Excuse me," Myron Krupnik murmured. "I want to catch the last of the news." He went downstairs, leaving a little cloud of pipe smoke behind in the doorway.
"Anastasia," her mother said, "just tonight, at dinner, barely an hour ago, you said that you had renounced marriage. I remember your saying that."
Anastasia sighed. Sometimes her mother missed the point of things completely.