by Lois Lowry
But Anastasia realized that none of those things would keep Septimus Smith on his toes at all. She didn't have an occasional table; she didn't even know what an occasional table was. (A table that was there one day but not the next, so it was there only occasionally? That seemed totally weird.)
She didn't have a wine rack.
She couldn't afford flowers. And anyway, if she sent herself flowers, Septimus Smith wouldn't see them. She could mention in a letter that someone had sent her flowers, maybe.
Should she also mention that there was a masculine-looking toothbrush hanging next to hers in the bathroom? She didn't want to lie. Of course, she could go and get a masculine-looking toothbrush, hang it there, and then mention it in a letter. But it would look stupid, hanging there next to Sam's little yellow toothbrush with the Mickey Mouse head on the end of it. And her parents would ask whose masculine-looking toothbrush the new one was. Anyway, it would be hard to fit a paragraph about toothbrushes into a letter unless, of course, you had a reason to be talking about dental hygiene, and Anastasia couldn't think of one reason in the world to talk to anybody ever about dental hygiene. She even got bored when her own dentist, Dr. Dana, reminded her about flossing.
But she did, Anastasia realized, need to keep Septimus on his toes. And now, after her friends' visit, she thought she knew of a way. She pushed the three forgotten pink silk flowers to the corner of her desk, took out a piece of stationery, and began to write.
Dear Septimus,
I know you have not had a chance to answer my last letter, the one I wrote to tell you that I got a sloop. And of course since you have already had the problem of answering 416 letters, which required a computer since you didn't want to take a day off of work (what kind of work do you do, anyway?), I don't want to add to your burden of correspondence.
So you can just consider this page 2 of the letter I sent you the other day. the one about the sloop.
I just wanted to mention that if I should happen to receive a letter from you the first week in May, I will not be able to answer it for a few days. I am usually very prompt at answering my mail, but I will be very busy the first week in May with social events. In fact I recently had to go shopping for a fabulous gown which I will be wearing the first week in May.
I just happened to think of it while I was sitting here at my occasional table, admiring some flowers I received today.
Sincerely,
SWIFTY
(Sloop-owner With Innumerable Flowers: Tall, Young)
7
"I have to tell you, Anastasia, that Steve Harvey is a creep," Meredith muttered during homeroom. "Even if you do like him."
Anastasia shrugged. "I don't love him or anything," she whispered. "And I know he's a creep sometimes. But so are all the seventh-grade boys. Why is Steve any creepier than anyone else?"
"His mother called my mother last night," Meredith explained. "And she said that Steve doesn't want to come to the wedding if it means he has to wear a necktie. Creep."
Anastasia groaned. But she couldn't say anything else because the teacher was glaring at them both. They were supposed to be filling out a form from the Guidance Department.
NAME. First Middle Last. Anastasia Krupnik, she penciled in carefully, leaving "Middle" blank. Sometimes she wished that her parents had given her a middle name. She knew that across the aisle Meredith was writing "Anne" in that space. Anastasia Anne Krupnik wouldn't be bad at all.
Up in the front seat, Sonya would be writing "Sophia" in the middle-name space. Rats. To have no middle name was so boring.
Anastasia went on to the next line and printed her address and telephone number. She wondered why the Guidance Department needed that—surely they would never call her at home. She pictured herself answering the telephone and hearing a voice say, "Hello, this is the Guidance Department." Talk about gross.
SEX. She made a capital F, to indicate Female, which should have been perfectly obvious, since her name was Anastasia. The only person in the seventh grade who might possibly have presented a problem would be Jamie Seaver, who was female, but who could be a male Jamie, except that Jamie Seaver's middle name was Elizabeth, for Pete's sake, and the Guidance Department would see that, because Jamie would have written "Elizabeth" in the middle-name space.
To have a line for SEX there was so idiotic. The only thing it produced was a lot of boys snickering—as they were doing right now, right this minute; Anastasia could hear them—as they wrote in the word "Often" instead of M for Male.
Seventh-grade boys were immature creeps, she thought, and especially Steve Harvey. She wondered what would happen about the necktie. She did want him to come to the wedding, even if he was a creep, because she needed someone to dance with.
The teacher had looked away, so Anastasia whispered across the aisle to Meredith, "What did your mom tell Mrs. Harvey?"
Meredith wrote something quickly on a slip of paper and held it up so that Anastasia could see.
TURTLENECKS OK, it said. HE'S COMING.
Later, in the hall on their way to gym class, Meredith said, "All four of them are coming together: Steve, Kirby, Eddie, and Norman. They're all going to wear turtlenecks except Norman." Meredith giggled. "Norman Berkowitz likes wearing neckties!"
***
Sam appeared, wearing his pajamas, in the doorway of Anastasia's bedroom that evening.
"I had a very terrible bath just a few minutes ago," he announced in a disconsolate voice.
"How come?"
"No sloop."
"Oh. Well, sorry about that." Anastasia glanced at the toy sloop, which still sat on her windowsill.
Sam sighed. "If I open up my GI Joe bank, I can give you twenty-five pennies," he suggested. "Would you give me back my sloop for—"
"My sloop," his sister corrected.
His face fell. "Would you give me your sloop for twenty-five pennies?" he asked.
"Nope. It's not for sale. I need it."
Sam put his thumb into his mouth. He eyed the sloop sadly. Finally, pouting, he turned and trudged back down the stairs.
Anastasia opened her closet door and looked at the beautiful blue dress hanging there. She wondered if she would be truly beautiful herself, for the first time, when she was wearing the dress, carrying the bouquet of pink flowers, and walking down the aisle of the Congregational church.
There had been times in the past when Anastasia had thought: Now. Now is the time I am going to be beautiful. Then she had had a new haircut or something and looked in the mirror afterward, and it hadn't happened.
Her parents both said that they thought she was beautiful already. But parents always said that to their kids, so their opinions weren't trustworthy on that particular issue.
Thinking about beauty made Anastasia think of her promise to send Septimus a photograph. She groaned to herself and pulled open the top drawer of her desk, the drawer where she kept important junk.
Her mother had an Important Junk drawer in the kitchen. It was filled with bits of string, thumbtacks, receipts from the dry cleaner, warranty papers from the microwave and the Cuisinart, and recipes torn out of magazines (Anastasia had secretly thrown away the one for Chicken Livers Supreme).
Anastasia's Important Junk drawer was very different from her mother's. There was a deck of cards. Anastasia never played cards, but someone had pointed out to her that in this particular deck, the queens looked a lot like Anastasia, though they weren't wearing glasses.
She looked fondly at the queen of hearts. Then she sorted through the whole deck and tossed all the cards except the queens and kings (Sam called them the Qs and Ks) into her wastebasket. She really liked looking at the queens and picturing herself with contact lenses and fancy headgear. As for the kings—well, you never knew. They certainly didn't look at all like Steve Harvey, who had freckles and somewhat shaggy hair, not at all like the long, carefully curled hair of the kings. But they were quite handsome and might just be an omen of someone in her future.
Maybe
even Septimus Smith.
She put a rubber band around the eight Qs and Ks and returned them to the drawer.
She pulled out a crumpled piece of notebook paper and reread an essay she had once written for school. The assignment had been to write something called "Turning Point," about a time in her life which had been just that: a turning point. She had written about the birth of her brother and the death of her grandmother; both things had happened the same day, when Anastasia was ten.
Mr. Rafferty had given her an A+ for "Turning Point"; and Mr. Rafferty didn't give many A+'s, certainly not to Anastasia Krupnik. She had intended to frame the essay but somehow had never gotten around to it, because frames cost so much. But she thought she would probably keep it forever so that her children could read it someday.
She folded "Turning Point" carefully and replaced it in the drawer.
In the bottom was a collection of photographs. She spread them across her desk, stared at them, and sighed.
Anastasia, age twelve, sticking her tongue out at the camera. No way could she send that to Septimus Smith.
Anastasia, age eleven, dressed for Halloween with a stupid bright red wig on her head, a dumb checkered dress with a pinafore over it, and striped tights. Raggedy Ann. Gross. Someone named Septimus Smith had probably never even heard of Raggedy Ann. She pushed the photograph aside and picked up another.
Anastasia just last month, grinning into the camera and holding Daphne's cat. She looked at it carefully and decided she didn't look too bad, though she was wearing a sweatshirt that said CHARGE! across the front, with a picture of a MasterCard beneath the letters.
She made a face and set it aside. She didn't want Septimus Smith to think that she was into shopping. She didn't even like shopping, except at yard sales, where you could sometimes get neat stuff for a dollar.
Anastasia swept the group of snapshots back into the drawer and went downstairs.
Sam was already in bed, and her parents were in the living room. Her father was reading the newspaper, and her mother was sewing a patch on the knee of Sam's blue jeans.
"May I look at the photograph album?" Anastasia asked.
"Sure," her mother said. "You don't need to ask permission for stuff like that. It's on the bottom shelf beside the fireplace, in the study."
Anastasia brought the dark green leather album back to the living room, sprawled on the floor, and began to turn the pages from the back to the front. Her father glanced over. "I wonder why we always look at some things backwards," he commented. "I always leaf through Time magazine from back to front."
"It would be the right direction if we were Japanese," Anastasia pointed out. "I wonder if Japanese people read Time magazine from front to back."
"Well," said her father, wrinkling his nose to adjust his glasses, "we'll have to ask a Japanese person sometime." He looked back down at the Boston Globe.
"I read some things in little jumps," Mrs. Krupnik said.
Anastasia's father looked up again. "Little jumps?" he asked.
Mrs. Krupnik nodded. "Like War and Peace," she explained. "I only read the peace parts. I jumped from one peace part to the next. I never read the war parts."
Myron Krupnik put his newspaper down on the coffee table. It was extremely rare for him to put the Boston Globe down once he had picked it up. He stared at his wife. "You never read the war parts in War and Peace?" he asked in amazement.
She smiled and turned the leg of Sam's jeans around so that she could start on the next side of the patch. "No," she said. "I hate war parts."
"Me too," Anastasia said. "I hate war parts. I skipped the war parts in Johnny Tremain. Look, you guys, here's a nudie picture of Sam having a bath when he was two."
"Isn't that sweet?" Mrs. Krupnik said affectionately, leaning over to see.
Anastasia's father rolled his eyes. "I can't believe that you two—" he began.
"Oh, look at this!" Anastasia exclaimed. "I love this picture of me because I look like a werewolf. See how the flash gave me red eyeballs? Just like a werewolf."
Her mother chuckled, and her father picked up the newspaper again with a sigh.
I can't send Septimus Smith a werewolf picture, Anastasia thought. She turned the pages slowly backward through the album. There was Sam, wrapped in a blanket, the day they brought him home from the hospital after he was born.
There was her mother, pregnant with Sam, laughing and pointing at her own big belly. Anastasia peered intently at her mother's face in that photograph. Weird. Her mother looked like her, only older, of course, and pregnant.
What she wanted was a picture of herself looking mature. Her mother's face was exactly right. Maybe she could—no. Septimus Smith definitely would not be thrilled with a picture of a pregnant lady.
She flipped the pages again.
"I think I look pretty mature in this picture, don't you?" She pointed to a snapshot of herself with her hair gathered up into a bun on the top of her head.
Her mother looked. "Yeah. With your hair up that way, you looked very mature for an eight-year-old. You looked at least nine."
At least nine. Great. Anastasia pictured Septimus Smith looking intently at the snapshot and thinking, Wow. Swifty looks at least nine. I think I'll invite her to the Caribbean for a week.
As she continued turning pages, she grew younger and younger, smaller and smaller, in the photographs. It was a lost cause. There was no photograph that she could send to Septimus. Their relationship would end for Lack of Photograph. Cosmopolitan had occasionally given lists of reasons for relationships' ending: lack of love, lack of rapport, lack of honesty, lack of money, even. But they had never mentioned Lack of Photograph.
Now she was absent from the photographs entirely. She was back on the pages before she was born.
Here was another photograph, suddenly, of her mother's face looking like hers, but older and more mature. Maybe she could—no. It was a wedding picture. She couldn't send a wedding picture to Septimus.
A few loose photographs, not glued to pages, fluttered into her lap. She picked one up and looked at it, startled.
"Wow, look at this," she said to her mother.
Her mother glanced over and smiled. "That was the day I graduated from art school," she said. "I was twenty-two."
Anastasia studied the photograph of her mother at twenty-two. It was the face, she realized, that she would probably have at twenty-two. No glasses. By then, Anastasia was certain, her parents would let her get contacts.
Long hair, but not messy like Anastasia's hair.
A lovely smile, and beautiful teeth.
Anastasia ran her tongue over her own teeth. Maybe I will floss, she thought. Any day now. Before I'm twenty-two.
"This isn't glued in," she pointed out. "Can I have it?
"May," her father said.
"May I have it?" Anastasia said patiently.
"Sure, " her mother replied. "Just don't draw a mustache on it."
"Mom," Anastasia said, "I wouldn't dream of doing an immature thing like that."
She returned the album to the bookshelf and took the single photograph to her room. Sitting at her desk again, she stared at the lovely face that could be her own in nine years.
She took out a fresh sheet of stationery.
But she hesitated. It would be a lie. She didn't really want a relationship based on a lie. But—
Anastasia took out the one letter she had received from Septimus Smith. He sure isn't much of a correspondent, she thought. I've written him twice since I got this one, and he hasn't answered yet.
But maybe he's waiting for the photograph. Maybe he'll never write if I don't send a photograph.
She fingered the photograph of her mother tentatively.
But I've never been a liar, she reminded herself.
Slowly she reread his computer-written letter. And suddenly she realized something. He hadn't said, "PLEASE SEND A PHOTOGBAPH OF YOURSELF."
He had simply said, "PLEASE SEND A PHOTOGRAPH."
So that's what she would do. And it wouldn't be a lie at all.
Dear Septimus,
Please consider this page 3 of the letter I have already sent in two parts. I don't want you to think I am overdoing the correspondence.
You said in your letter to please send a photograph.
Enclosed is a photograph.
Sincerely,
SWIFTY
(So: What Is Forthcoming To Yours-truly?)
8
Two weeks before Kirsten Halberg's wedding, everything began going wrong for everybody.
Kirsten announced on Tuesday that she was thinking of calling the whole marriage off because she had just discovered, when they went to get the marriage license, that her fiancé's middle name was Neptune. There was no way, she said furiously, that she could be married to someone whose name was Neptune. What were they supposed to do: name their kids after planets? Was she going to have a son named Pluto?
Anastasia agreed with her completely, though she couldn't understand why someone would get involved with someone else romantically without knowing that person's middle name. She herself planned to ask Septimus his middle name the minute their relationship began to jell.
But she was desolate, for the two days that Kirsten's fury lasted, thinking of a called-off wedding, thinking of her beautiful gown unworn.
On Thursday Kirsten grouchily announced that she would marry Jeff anyway if he promised never to use his middle name. And no planet babies.
On Friday Sam announced that he would not go to the wedding unless he could wear blue jeans. Mrs. Krupnik said absolutely not; he would wear his white sailor suit. Sometimes before she had talked him into the sailor suit by pointing out that it made him look like Popeye.
Finally Sam said grouchily that he would wear the white sailor suit if he could have a ballpoint pen tattoo of an anchor on his arm.