by Lois Lowry
"So," said her father, taking out a notebook, "what we need to do is make a list."
Anastasia groaned. Even her mother groaned. Dr. Krupnik was always making lists. Once, when Anastasia was younger, she had been a list maker, too. But then her life became too complicated.
"House," wrote Dr. Krupnik at the top of the page. "Okay," he said. "Let's decide what kinds of things we want to look for in a house. Katherine, what's most important to you?"
Her mother thought for a moment, chewing on a strand of her long hair. Her hair was always shiny, like a TV commercial for shampoo. She didn't even wash it every day. She told Anastasia that when she was a teen-ager, she had had oily hair, but Anastasia didn't believe her. Parents always tell you stuff to make you feel better, and when they do, it makes you feel worse.
"Light," said her mother, finally. "Good light, and a room all to myself, where I can paint."
That made sense. Anastasia had been afraid for a moment that her mother would say, "Coppertone appliances in the kitchen." Anybody who had a kitchen full of coppertone appliances would very soon start wearing big pink curlers and worrying about wax build-up.
But light, good light, and a room where she could paint made sense. Anastasia's mother was a very good painter. Long ago, before she was married, she had studied art in New York. Even now some of her paintings hung in galleries in Boston and Cambridge. But her easel and paints were in the tiny room that had once been a pantry. She never complained about that, but it made Anastasia feel a little sad for her.
"Light," wrote Dr. Krupnik on the page. "Room for painting," he wrote. "Anastasia?" he asked. "What is most important to you?"
She was thinking. Now that her vision had unblurred, now that she wasn't going blind, she wouldn't need the Seeing Eye dog. Probably there was a law against having a Seeing Eye dog if you could see. Still, she did like the idea of a monstrous dog, straining at the end of a leash, to whom she could whisper, "Kill," if someone like Robert Giannini started making remarks.
"You go next, Dad," said Anastasia. "I'm still thinking"
"Study," he wrote next. "Bookcases," he wrote beside it.
Well, that made sense, too. Dr. Krupnik was a professor of English. He also wrote poetry, and each time he had written enough poems to make a book, he sent them off to his publisher, and then a new book was published with his name on it. His picture was on the back of each of his books. Anastasia could never figure out why people didn't recognize him on the streets and rush up and ask for his autograph. But they didn't. He said he didn't mind; in fact, he said, he was glad that they didn't.
People wrote to him, though. Strangers wrote to him: people who had read his books of poetry. Once, a year ago, Anastasia had gotten into a lot of trouble because of those letters. One night at dinner, when Sam was a much younger baby who kept them all awake at night because he howled and screamed a lot, so they were all feeling tired, Dr. Krupnik had said, "There is a stack of mail on my desk that is giving me gray hair."
"Dad," Anastasia had pointed out, "you don't have any hair." That was true. The top of his head was quite bald.
"Well, my beard is getting gray, from that mail. When am I ever going to find time to answer it? I have to correct three hundred exams, and the publisher wants revisions on the new book..."
"Oh, don't worry," said her mother. "You'll get to it sometime. Those people don't expect answers anyway."
He had just groaned and stroked his beard.
Anastasia had thought about that. She liked to write letters, and she never had anyone to write to, because no one ever wrote to her. So the next day, using her father's portable typewriter, she had answered all of the letters. It was fun. To the man in Des Moines, who had sent three poems, asking Dr. Krupnik to read them and give his opinion, Anastasia wrote:
Dear Mr. Covington,
I read all of your nice poems. They are very nice. They are not as good as mine, but that is because I have worked a long time at it, and I am quite famous. Maybe if you work at it some more, yours will be better in the future. I certainly do hope so.
A girl had written a very peculiar letter from San Francisco. The letter said that Myron Krupnik's love poems had really spoken to where she was at, and she thought they had kindred souls, and she would like to spend some time with him if he was ever in San Francisco. Anastasia answered her:
Dear Lisa,
I am a married man with two adorable children. And I never go to San Francisco. But thank you anyway.
A librarian in Detroit had written that Dr. Krupnik's new book was very popular in her library. It was amazing, she wrote, how often people checked it out. Anastasia answered the librarian:
...I don't think it is amazing at all. It is, after all, one of the finest collections of poetry published in the twentieth century. I wish you would suggest to them, though, that they buy the book. I don't make any money when they take it out of the library. If they buy it, I make 10%.
There had been twelve letters, and Anastasia had answered all of them, and she had mailed her answers. When she had told her father that night what she had done, she had planned to suggest that he might pay her a secretarial salary. It had taken her all day to write the letters. Even at minimum wage, it would be a good chunk of money for her savings account.
Instead, he had gone storming out of the house to the post office to try to get her letters back. The post office people had let him in, even though they were closed, but they wouldn't give him the letters. They told him that tampering with the mails was a federal offense. So he came home and drank two beers, very fast, without offering Anastasia the foam—without even speaking to Anastasia, for that matter—and then he stayed up until 2:00 A.M. writing letters to all the same people that Anastasia had just written to.
Anastasia had not figured out why her father was so upset until a few weeks later, when it became very clear. Robert Giannini had slipped her a note in school. The note said, "I like you. Do you like me? Check one: Yes. No. A whole lot. I hate you. I don't know." She had checked "I hate you" immediately; then she had decided that was cruel. So she erased her first check mark and checked, simply, "No." Underneath, she had written, Sorry.
But she had thought, suddenly, while she was answering it, about how her father might have answered if he had tried to do it for her. Her father didn't believe in what he called "terse negatives." That meant that he didn't like simple nos. He probably would have written some long boring response, beginning "Dear Robert, you are in many ways a fine person, but at this particular time..."
Thinking about it, she had begun to realize that people just can't answer other people's mail.
Her parents were looking at her, and she realized that she had been daydreaming again, and not even about the right thing, not about the new house. What a horrible thought, a new house. Even thinking about Robert Giannini was better than thinking about a new house.
"What would happen," she asked slowly, "if we made this list about what we want in a house, and then we couldn't find a house that had those things?"
"Well," said her father, "I suppose we'd have to give up and stay here. But I think we can probably find what we want. Look: we've put down a room for your mom to paint in, with lots of light. And a study for me, with bookcases. While your mind was drifting there, off in space somewhere, we added a yard, for Sam. Can't you think of anything that you want, Anastasia?"
"Yes," said Anastasia, realizing suddenly that she had solved everything, that they would not have to leave the apartment, not have to live in the suburbs after all. "A tower. I want a house where I can have a room in a tower."
To her surprise, her father wrote that down.
***
"The Mystery of the Girl Who Lived in a Tower," Anastasia wrote dreamily.
Then she looked at that title. Good grief. It sounded like a Nancy Drew title. Probably on the library shelf of twelve thousand Nancy Drew books, there was already one called "The Mystery of the Tower Room" or something.
&
nbsp; She tore that page out of her notebook and threw it away. It was much harder to write a book than she had ever realized it would be.
3
"Telephone for you, Anastasia!" her mother called from the kitchen.
Anastasia put down her book and walked toward the kitchen, thumping her hand along the wall.
"Who is it?" she asked her mother,
"I don't know. I didn't ask,"
"Boy or girl?" What a dumb question. Boys never called her.
"Girl." Of course,
She took the receiver and stretched the cord so that she could take the phone into the pantry.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Anastasia. This is Robert."
"Who?"
"Robert Giannini."
"Oh. I thought it was a girl."
Good grief. What an incredibly dumb thing to say. It wasn't Robert Giannini's fault that his voice still sounded like a girl's. Anastasia sat down on the pantry floor and wanted to die on the spot.
"No, it's Robert." Maybe he hadn't noticed the incredibly dumb thing she had said.
"Hi, Robert."
"Hi."
If only she had paid more attention to the Cosmopolitan article on being a spritely conversationalist. It had had a section about Phone Flirtation. Not that she cared.
Robert wasn't very spritely at conversation either, for pete's sake. Now they had each said hi twice, and no one was saying anything.
"I was just wondering the other day," Anastasia said, finally, "what you do with your briefcase in the summertime." Good grief. What an idiotic thing to say. As if she'd been thinking about him, or something.
"I keep stuff in it. I collect stuff."
"Oh."
"You want to go collect stuff with me?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, do you want to go ride bikes and maybe go down by the river and see if there's any interesting junk lying around?"
"Oh. Well, okay."
"Today do you want to do it?"
"Yeah, okay."
"I'll meet you down at your corner. In about an hour, okay? I could come sooner but I have to take a shower first."
"Okay. Good-by."
Anastasia groaned after she hung up the phone. If only he hadn't said that about the shower. The absolutely last thing in the entire world that Anastasia wanted to know was that Robert Giannini was taking a shower, for pete's sake. It was the most embarrassing thing she had ever heard.
She wandered back into her bedroom, looked around at the clothes strewn on the floor, and had a horrible thought. She had nothing to wear. The jeans she was wearing had paint on one knee. Everything on the floor or the bed or the chair—or in the closet, for that matter—was either too small, or incredibly ugly, or else Robert Giannini had already seen her wearing it.
Maybe she should call him back and tell him she couldn't go. But then he would ask why, and she would have to say she had no clothes, and that would be too embarrassing.
She wandered back to the kitchen. Her mother was defrosting the refrigerator. Sam was sitting on the floor, wearing only a diaper and sucking on chunks of ice that had come loose from the freezer.
"I'm eating ice," said Sam matter-of-factly. Sam had a knack for saying things that were already completely obvious, like, "I wet my diapers," or "I'm eating my dinner," or "I'm wearing my pajamas with clowns on them."
"I can see that you're eating ice, Sam," Anastasia said sarcastically. "Mom, you haven't by any chance bought me any new clothes recently and forgotten to tell me, have you?"
Her mother brushed back her hair from her eyes with one hand. "Nope. Why would I do that?"
"I don't know. I just hoped that you had. I don't have anything to wear."
"Are you going someplace?"
"Yeah, I'm just going out to ride bikes with a friend of mine. No big deal."
"What's wrong with what you're wearing?"
"Yuck. Look: paint on my knee. And this shirt has a torn sleeve."
"Well, it's pretty hot out. Why don't you wear your jogging shorts?"
"Mom. You can see my legs in them."
Her mother looked puzzled. "Of course you can see your legs in them. You can see anybody's legs in jogging shorts."
"Well, my legs are too skinny, if you must know."
Her mother sighed. "There's a clean pair of jeans in your drawer. If those won't do, I don't have any other suggestions. Unless you want to wear a dress."
Anastasia thumped back down the hall, into her room, and unfolded the clean jeans from her drawer. She put them on. They weren't too bad. She pulled a shirt out of the drawer, started to put it on, suddenly realized what it said, and wadded it back into the drawer. "Boston is for Lovers" was what the shirt said. Good grief. What if she had actually worn a shirt that said "Boston is for Lovers" across the front when she went to meet Robert Giannini, the jerk? It made her face feel hot to think about it.
Now she was quite sure that a pimple was starting on her chin. Her chin felt huge. She looked in the mirror; nothing on her chin except a couple of ugly freckles. Well, she was sure it was there, lurking, under the freckles. Probably it would appear just as she met Robert. She would be standing there and all of a sudden, right when he was looking at her, this thing would come bursting out of her chin. Probably he would say something about it, that jerk.
Anastasia found a shirt she didn't hate too much, one with a hideous frog on the front, and she pulled it on over her head. Now her hair was a mess. No time to wash her hair. She had washed it last night but already it felt as if she had washed it in Crisco Oil.
Anastasia groaned, called "See you" to her mother and to Sam, and went off to get her bike out of the garage.
***
"Hi."
"Hi."
Terrific. It was going to be just like the telephone conversation.
"Have you been having a good summer, Anastasia?" Robert sounded just like her great-aunt who called sometimes from Milwaukee.
"Okay, I guess. I think we're going to move."
"You're going to move? Where are you going to move to?"
"Someplace out in the suburbs, I guess. We're looking for a house."
Robert wrinkled his nose. Anastasia wasn't sure if he was making a face about moving to the suburbs, or if he had to wrinkle his nose to adjust his glasses. Sometimes she did that to adjust her glasses, especially if it was hot.
"That's lousy," Robert said sympathetically. "You'll have to go to a new school and everything, and you won't know anybody. You won't have any friends."
Boy. Some people really know just what to say to cheer you up.
"I don't think I want to talk about it," said Anastasia glumly.
"Well, come on then," said Robert. "Let's ride down to the river." They got on their bikes. Robert had his briefcase hooked onto the back of his. Typical, thought Anastasia, looking at the briefcase. Typical.
The Charles River separated Cambridge from Boston. From their side, they could look across and see the skyscrapers of the city. Anastasia loved Boston, but she loved her side of the river more, where the old brick buildings of Harvard stood. Her father taught at Harvard. He rode a bike to work each day, and he carried a briefcase with him on his bike, but that was okay because he was forty-seven.
Her mother's bike had a little seat for Sam, and that was okay, too. In fact, her parents were perfect Cambridge people, Anastasia thought. Lots of Cambridge men had beards, as her father did, and rode bikes to work. Lots of Cambridge mothers wore jeans and rode bikes with baby seats to the grocery store, as her mother did. Nobody stared, in Cambridge, at her mother's clothes, like the French tee shirt with the picture of the chicken, and under the chicken an oval with the word oeuf in it. Oeuf meant "egg" in French. Anastasia's mother spoke French. She had spent a year in Paris, painting, before she was married.
Not one single person in the suburbs would know what oeuf meant. Anastasia was absolutely certain of that.
The banks of the Charles were filled with peopl
e. There were always lots of people there on warm days, all sorts of people. College students lying on blankets, reading. Families with babies and small children. Black people, white people, Chinese people, people who spoke other languages. Anastasia liked looking at the Indians best; the women wore long, flowing dresses that were not really dresses at all, but pieces of bright cloth wrapped around them in a complicated way. Some of them had a single red spot decorating the center of their forehead. Their husbands wore turbans and had bushy beards and mustaches that came to points at the sides. Two of the turbaned men were throwing a Frisbee back and forth, and between them a dark-skinned baby toddled, wearing Pampers.
Anastasia wondered if there were drugstores in India, with shelves of Pampers and Vitalis and Crest toothpaste.
She and Robert leaned their bikes against a tree. Near them, two girls speaking French were trying to put a kite together. They were doing it wrong, and Anastasia could have told them how to do it right, but the only French she knew was oeuf and merci.
Robert had unhooked his briefcase, and she saw him pick something up from under a bush and stash it away quickly in the briefcase.
"What was that?" she asked.
"Nothing. Just junk."
Liar. She had seen that it was a Playboy magazine.
"What kind of stuff do you usually find?"
"Last week I found a piece of rope and a plastic wine glass. Once I found a dollar bill."
A dollar bill. That wouldn't be so bad. She walked along beside Robert. There were a lot of things on the grass, but none of them very interesting. Squashed beer cans. Paper napkins. Flattened cigarette packs. A little plastic car with the wheels missing: she picked that up. Sam would like it. She put it in her pocket.
"Robert, you want a sock?"
Robert looked startled, as if she were going to hit him. "What for?"
"No, I don't mean I'm going to sock you. Do you want a sock, the kind you wear? There's one lying over there."
"What color?" He didn't see it.
