by Lois Lowry
Her mother nodded and put away a few more dishes. "I forgot to tell you something. I'm sorry. Someone named Robert called, while you were off buying the goldfish."
"Robert called?"
"Yes. Who's Robert?"
Anastasia groaned. "Did he have a sort of squeaky voice?"
"Well, maybe it was a little squeaky. He sounded very pleasant, though."
Good grief. It was dumb Robert Giannini. Typical of that jerk Robert Giannini to sound pleasant to somebody's mother.
"It's a guy who was in my class at school."
"Oh. Well, he wants you to call him back. I wrote his number on that pad of paper by the phone."
Anastasia made a face. "I can't call him. What would I say?"
Her mother looked surprised. Sometimes her mother didn't understand anything. "You would say, 'This is Anastasia. My mother said you called while I was out.'"
Good grief. What a dumb thing to say. Anastasia made another face and wandered off to the telephone. She stared at Robert Giannini's number for a while. She already knew what it was. She had looked it up in the phone book about a hundred times. Just because she was bored. Not for any other reason.
"Robert," she said, when he answered the phone, "this is Anastasia. My mother said you called while I was out."
"Yeah. Hi. I got your number from information."
"What did you call for? Is anything interesting happening in Cambridge? Have you collected any new stuff?"
"Cambridge is the same as ever. Everything's pretty boring here. It's hot. It's even too hot to ride down to the river."
"Yeah, it's hot here, too."
"Have you made any new friends?"
"Robert, I've only lived here for three days. I haven't had time. I've only made a couple of new friends." It was only a partial lie. She had met Gertrustein, anyway. And she had seen some kids on the block, even though she hadn't met them.
"Girls or boys?"
Good grief. Robert was the kind of person who wanted to know details. It was awfully hard to give details when you were telling partial lies.
"One girl and one boy," Anastasia said. "The girl is actually a woman. She lives next door. And the boy lives down the street."
Now she would have to go down the street to where the boy was mowing the lawn and introduce herself. Then it wouldn't be a lie at all.
"Oh," said Robert. "How old is the boy?"
"I don't know. About thirteen or fourteen, I think."
"Oh." Robert didn't say anything else for a minute. Finally he said, "Guess what, Anastasia. I invented a system to tell the future."
Now that was interesting. All her life, Anastasia had wanted to be able to know about the future. The horoscopes in magazines and newspapers weren't good enough. They never gave details. But if Robert Giannini, the Detail Freak, had invented a system—well, that could be interesting. Anastasia sat down on the floor.
"Tell me about it," she said.
"You need a pencil and paper."
"I have some right here."
"Okay. First, write down the alphabet, and then write down numbers by the letters. 1 is A, and 2 is B. Like that, all the way through the alphabet. Z is 26."
That was easy enough. Anastasia did it on a piece of paper. "Okay," she said, when she was finished.
"All right. Now here's what you do. I'll tell you how I did mine and how it came out. First you write down your age. I'm 12, so I wrote down 12."
"Okay. I'm 12, too." She wrote it down.
"Then you write down the day of the month your birthday is on. Mine's September 20th, so I wrote down 20.
"Mine's 9. October 9th."
"Now add those together. Next you add today's date."
"What's today?"
"The 16th. Add 16."
"Okay."
"Now add your favorite TV channel. Mine's 5."
"Mine's 56. I like the old movies on Channel 56."
"Okay, add 56."
"Then what?"
"This is the last one. You add the last three numbers of your phone number. Mine are 058."
"I know," Anastasia said. "I just dialed them."
"Now," said Robert triumphantly. "Look at the number you end up with—and then look at the alphabet. There's your future!"
"I don't understand."
"I came out with 111. So look at letter 1 and letter 11. A and K. Your initials, Anastasia!"
Anastasia made a face. "You're weird, Robert."
"What number did you get?"
Anastasia checked her addition. "370." She looked at the alphabet. "C and G. Big deal. I don't know a single person with those initials. Unless Clark Gable is going to come back from the grave."
There was a silence. "Well, maybe if you liked some other TV channel. Walt Disney's on Channel 4 on Sunday nights. Don't you like Walt Disney?"
"Yuck. Robert, this is really a dumb system you invented."
"Well, it worked for me." She could tell from Robert's voice that he was mad.
"I'll do it again tomorrow when the date is different. Maybe by tomorrow I'll like a different TV channel, too."
"Okay," Robert muttered.
"I have to go now, Robert."
"I might ride my bike out to see you. I looked on the map, and it's not too far."
"Okay," said Anastasia. "But call first. Because I might be busy with my new friends or something."
She felt like a rotten person after she hung up. But honestly. Robert was such a jerk. Your age. The date. Your favorite TV channel. Your phone number. All of those things change, for pete's sake. How could anybody know anything about the future ever, when everything changes all the time?
Anyway, she thought suddenly, if you did know the future, there wouldn't be any surprises left.
Back in the kitchen, her parents were measuring the windows so that her mother could make curtains.
Once, several years ago, her parents had had a huge fight about sewing. Anastasia's mother had suddenly said, one day, that she didn't see why she automatically did all the mending and sewing. She was sewing some buttons onto something at the time and had just pricked her finger with the needle, and she had the tip of her finger in her mouth, sucking it, when suddenly she got mad.
"This is the most sexist household in Cambridge," she had announced angrily. "Why is it that the wife gets stuck with the sewing? Myron, you do some of the cooking. Will you tell me one good reason why you don't sew?"
"Because I don't know how," Dr. Krupnik had said, chewing on his pipe.
"I'll teach you, then."
"Thank you, but I don't want to know how to sew."
Her mother sat there for a minute, sucking her finger, looking madder and madder. "In that case," she said, finally, "thank you, but I don't want to do any laundry anymore. Ever."
"In that case," said her father, "I don't think I want to be an English professor anymore. I have always, if you must know, wanted to be a beachcomber. So I think that from now on I will walk on empty beaches—all alone, by the way—and recite poetry to myself. Of course that means that there will be no more paychecks."
Anastasia's mother folded the shirt which was still missing two buttons, very neatly, and laid it on the table. "As a matter of fact, I have been wanting for a long time to go to the Cotswolds and live in a small cottage with a thatched roof—all alone, by the way—and paint."
Anastasia had scurried away to her room, terrified. If her father became a beachcomber—all alone—and her mother went to the Cotswolds, whatever the Cotswolds were—all alone—what would happen to Anastasia?
But after a while, she heard her parents laughing. When she went back to where they were, her mother was giggling and had her father's pipe in her mouth, and her father was sewing a button on his shirt.
Since then, her mother had always done all the sewing. Anastasia couldn't figure it out. It was something like item number 124 in her list of things she absolutely didn't understand.
Now her mother was about to make curtains for
the kitchen. The fabric, bright blue with yellow and orange suns and moons and stars all over it, was unfolded on the kitchen table.
"Those curtains are going to be weird," Anastasia said cheerfully.
Her father turned, with a tape measure dangling around his neck, and said loudly, "That's it."
"What's it, Dad?"
"That word. Weird. I have heard you use the word weird at least four thousand times in the past week."
"But..."
"Anastasia, this is a household of verbal, articulate, intelligent people. We have an entire room filled with bookcases. In those bookcases there are dictionaries. Encyclopedias. Roget's Thesaurus. Anthologies of obscure Elizabethan poetry. There are a hundred words—at least a hundred words—that you could substitute for weird."
"Name some."
He got a beer from the refrigerator. "Strange," he said. "Dreadful. Formidable. Ghastly. Unearthly. Demoniacal..."
Anastasia could tell, when he got to demoniacal, that he was going to go on for quite a while. She grabbed a cookie and began to back out of the room.
"I'm going to take Gertrustein her goldfish," she muttered.
"PHANTASMAGORICAL!" said her father, and took another gulp of beer.
Anastasia closed the door quietly. Sam appeared on the stairs with wet diapers and rosy cheeks, coming down from his room after his nap. "What's the matter with Daddy?" he asked.
Anastasia shrugged and gave Sam half of her cookie. "He's being weird," she said.
***
"Frank, I'm going to take your buddy next door. I hope you won't miss him too much," said Anastasia. But Frank kissed the side of his bowl and wiggled his behind. He didn't mind.
Her novel in her notebook was open on her desk. Anastasia picked up her pencil and read what she had written so far, concluding with the footnote. It seemed enough for Chapter 1.
"Chapter 2," she wrote on the next page.
"The young girl decided," she wrote, "that one way to adapt to a new house was to make friends. And one way to make friends was to take them a gift.
"A lot of people find that food is a good gift to take to someone. Sometimes people make an apple pie, or a macaroni and cheese casserole, and they take it next door to their neighbors, and after that they are friends.
"But the young girl didn't know how to cook..."
Then she crossed that out. It was a novel, after all. It didn't have to be the complete truth.
"But the young girl didn't care much for cooking, although she was very good at it. Also, it was ninety degrees outside, and too hot to turn on the stove. So she decided to take her next-door neighbor a fish. It was not a cooked fish."
She read over what she had written, and it didn't sound just right. Anastasia scowled and tore the whole page out. Good grief : it was really hard to write a novel, even after you had a good title.
8
It was not easy to push the doorbell without spilling the goldfish bowl, but after a moment Anastasia managed a good shrill ring. After another moment, she could hear Gertrustein's shuffling footsteps and then her voice: "Who's there?"
"It's Anastasia again."
The door opened, and Gertrustein peered out. "Anastasia Again? It looks like Anastasia Krupnik to me! Hah!" The "hah" was a hiccuppy sort of laugh, which was more of a laugh than her dumb joke deserved, Anastasia thought.
"I brought you something. A goldfish."
Gertrustein looked at the goldfish and the goldfish bowl for a moment. Then she nodded and invited Anastasia inside. That was a relief. Anastasia had thought that she would have to explain about the goldfish. I guess when you get old, she thought, you get over being surprised by stuff. So when someone brings you a goldfish, you don't even ask why.
They put the goldfish bowl on a table in the living room next to a plastic vase of artificial flowers. Gertrustein leaned close to the bowl and watched intently as the fish swam in circles, flipping his tail. The little diver stood on the bottom of the bowl, tilted slightly, wearing his huge plastic helmet.
Suddenly Gertrustein began to laugh. Anastasia thought that was rude, to begin to laugh at a gift before you had even said thank you.
"What are you going to name your goldfish?" asked Anastasia politely, pretending not to notice that Gertrustein was laughing.
But she just laughed harder.
"My goldfish is named Frank," said Anastasia. "I don't know if yours is male or female, though."
Gertrustein looked at her, still chuckling. "It's male, of course. It's the funniest thing I've ever seen. I'll name him Mr. Stein. He looks exactly like my husband. The same popeyes."
Anastasia glanced around the room for signs of a husband. At her house, there were always pipes lying in ashtrays or size-twelve sneakers in a corner. But there was no indication of a Mr. Stein.
"Where is your husband?" she asked.
"Oh, goodness. I haven't any idea. He's been gone for forty years. He ran off with a lady mandolin player who wore bright blue shoes."
"Well," said Anastasia uneasily, "I'm very sorry he did that."
But Gertrustein was laughing again. "Oh, don't be. He looked like a goldfish, although I never realized it until this afternoon. I was glad when he ran off. I never should have married him."
"Why did you, then?"
"I was a spinster. Do you know what a spinster is?"
"Yeah. I think I'm going to be one, because I'm so tall, and everything. Boys don't like me, except one boy, and I don't like him."
"Nonsense. Give yourself time. How old are you?"
"Twelve."
"Well, I was over thirty, and not married. Lived right in this house, the same house where I had been born. Lived here all alone because my parents were both dead by then. And along came Mr. Stein one day, selling cookware door to door..."
"Did you buy any?"
"Bought the whole batch. Still have it. It outlasted Mr. Stein."
"Excuse me, but why do you call him Mr. Stein? My mother calls my father Myron."
Gertrustein began to laugh so hard that the sofa on which they were sitting wiggled.
"His name was Lloyd," she sputtered. "Lloyd Stein. But I'll have to tell you what happened on our wedding night..."
Good grief. Anastasia liked reading about people's wedding nights in Cosmopolitan magazine or in Gothic novels. But she certainly didn't want to hear about a real persons wedding night.
Gertrustein took a deep breath so that she would stop laughing. Then she said, "The night that we were married, Mr. Stein said to me, 'Gertrude, are you familiar with the word which is spelled L-L-A-M-A?' I thought for a moment, and then I said, 'Of course. Llama. It's an animal with a sad, smiling sort of face.'"
Anastasia nodded. It was the same way she would have described a llama.
"Then he said, 'Gertrude, your description is correct, but your pronunciation is wrong. When a word begins with a double L, the double L is pronounced as Y. Therefore the correct way to say llama is, in fact yama, don't you see? Very few people know that,' he said. 'Well,' I told him, 'I certainly never knew that.'"
"I didn't either," said Anastasia.
"Then he told me, 'So you can see, of course, that the correct pronunciation of Lloyd is, actually, Yoyd. I would prefer that you pronounce my name correctly, now that we are man and wife. Please call me Yoyd from now on.'"
"Good grief," said Anastasia, beginning to giggle.
"Good grief indeed. How on earth can you call someone Yoyd? I wanted to hit him over his silly, pompous, popeyed head with one of the aluminum saucepans that he had sold me. I didn't, of course. But you can see that it was somewhat fortunate that the mandolin player came along. In three years I had never called him by name. He hated laughter. And I could never have said Yoyd without laughing. When I had to speak to him at all, I called him Mr. Stein."
"A magazine that I read a lot would call that a Brief and Unfortunate Marriage."
"Yes. It was certainly a Brief and Unfortunate Marriage."
"Did yo
u ever look up llama in the dictionary? To see if maybe he was right?"
"Of course not. Of course he wasn't right. He was an idiot with goldfish eyes."
"Well, I'm sorry that you married him."
"Me too. But it was understandable, I guess. I was over thirty, after all, and all alone. I liked his aluminum cookware. And the man I loved had married someone else."
Now that was romantic and interesting.
"What was his name?"
Gertrustein looked a little bit sad. "Edward Evans. We had grown up together. As a matter of fact, Anastasia, Edward lived in your house, when he was a boy."
It was always hard to imagine old people being young. Anastasia looked for a long time at Gertrustein and just couldn't see even the smallest fragments of a young face. Sam had been right; she really did look like a witch.
"I don't mean to be rude or anything," Anastasia said, "but you know, Gertrustein, you really would look much nicer if you would fix your hair differently."
Gertrustein held up her hands. They were twisted and misshapen. "It's all I can do to hold a hairbrush," she explained. "My arthritis is so bad."
"Well," said Anastasia, "tomorrow, when you take Sam for a walk, why don't you walk down past the drugstore? And buy some curlers, and when you come back, I'll fix your hair for you!"
Gertrustein thought about that, frowning. "All right," she said, finally. "We'll give it a try, now that there is a new Mr. Stein in the house."
In his bowl, the new Mr. Stein gazed out with bulging eyes, swished his tail, and swooped around the plastic diver. Anastasia, who was an expert on goldfish emotions, could tell that he was quite happy.
***
"Mom, I have something important to talk to you about."
"How do you like the curtains so far?"
One of the new curtains was hanging at one window. The others were still spread out on the kitchen table beside the sewing machine.
"Fine. They look pretty good. Can you stop sewing for a minute?"
"Sure. What's on your mind?"
Anastasia sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, opposite her mother, and wrapped her feet around the rungs. "This is sort of embarrassing," she said. "Promise you won't tell anyone."