Anastasia Krupnik Read online

  Anastasia Krupnik

  Lois Lowry

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Company Boston

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Lowry, Lois.

  Anastasia Krupnik.

  SUMMARY: Anastasia's 10th year has some good things

  like falling in love and really getting to know her grand-

  mother and some bad things like finding out about an

  impending baby brother.

  I. De Groat, Diane. II. Title.

  PZ7.L9673An [Fic] 79-18625

  ISBN 0-395-28629-8

  * * *

  Copyright © 1979 by Lois Lowry

  All lights reserved. For information about permission

  to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue

  South, New York, New York 10003.

  Printed in the United States of America

  EB 25 26 27 28 29 30

  * * *

  For Kip

  1

  Anastasia Krupnik was ten. She had hair the color of Hubbard squash, fourteen freckles across her nose (and seven others in places that she preferred people not to know about), and glasses with large owl-eyed rims, which she had chosen herself at the optician's.

  Once she had thought that she might like to be a professional ice skater. But after two years of trying, she still skated on the insides of her ankles.

  Once she had thought that she might like to be a ballerina, but after a year of Saturday morning ballet lessons, she still couldn't get the fifth position exactly right.

  Her parents said, very kindly, that perhaps she should choose a profession that didn't involve her feet. She thought that probably they were right, and she was still trying to think of one.

  Anastasia had a small pink wart in the middle of her left thumb. She found her wart very pleasing. It had appeared quite by surprise, shortly after her tenth birthday, on a morning when nothing else interesting was happening, and it was the first wart she had ever had, or even seen.

  "It's the loveliest color I've ever seen in a wart," her mother, who had seen others, said with admiration.

  "Warts, you know," her father had told her, "have a kind of magic to them. They come and go without any reason at all, rather like elves."

  Anastasia's father, Dr. Myron Krupnik, was a professor of literature and had read just about every book in the world, which may have been why he knew so much about warts. He had a beard the color of Hubbard squash, though not much hair on his head, and he wore glasses for astigmatism, as Anastasia did, although his were not quite as owly. He was also a poet. Sometimes he read his poems to Anastasia by candlelight, and let her take an occasional (very small) sip of his wine.

  Katherine Krupnik, her mother, was a painter. Very often there was a smudge of purple on her cheek, or a daub of green on one wrist or elbow. Sometimes she smelled of turpentine, which painters use; sometimes she smelled of vanilla and brown sugar, which mothers use; and sometimes, not very often, she smelled of Je Reviens perfume.

  In the bookcases of their apartment were four volumes of poetry which had been written by Myron Krupnik. The first one was called Laughter Behind the Mask, and on the back of the book was a photograph of Myron Krupnik, much younger, when he had a lot of hair, holding his glasses in one hand and half-smiling as if he knew a secret. Anastasia's father hated that book, or said that he did. Anastasia sometimes wondered why he kept it in the bookcase if he hated it so much. She thought it must be a little like the feeling she had had when she was eight, when she hated a boy named Michael McGuire so much that she walked past his house every day, just to stick out her tongue.

  The second book of poetry by her father had a photograph of him with slightly less hair and a mustache; it was called Mystery of Myth. Her father liked it. But her mother didn't like it at all. The reason her mother didn't like it at all was because on one of the inside front pages it said, "For Annie." Anastasia didn't know who Annie was. She suspected that her mother did.

  The third book was her mother's favorite, probably because it said, inside, "For Katherine." It was called Come Morning, Come Night and was filled with love poems that Anastasia found very embarrassing.

  But the fourth book was her favorite. Her father's photograph showed him bald and bearded, the way she had always known him. The poems were soft sounding and quiet, when he read them to her. The book was called Bittersweet; and it said, inside, "To someone special: Anastasia."

  Sometimes, when no one was in the room, Anastasia took Bittersweet down from the shelf, just to look at that page. Looking at it made her feel awed, unique, and proud.

  Awed, unique, and proud were three words that she had written on page seven of her green notebook. She kept lists of her favorite words; she kept important private information; and she kept things that she thought might be the beginnings of poems, in her green notebook. No one had ever looked inside the green notebook except Anastasia.

  On page one, the green notebook said, "My name is Anastasia Krupnik. This is the year that I am ten."

  On page two, it said, "These are the most important things that happened the year that I was ten:"

  So far, there were only two things on the list. One was, "I got a small pink wart." And the other was, "My teacher's name is Mrs. Westvessel."

  Mrs. Westvessel wore stockings with seams up the back, and shoes that laced on the sides. Sometimes, while she sat at her desk, she unlaced her shoes when she thought no one was watching, and rubbed her feet against each other. Under the stockings, on the tops of her toes, were tiny round things like small doughnuts.

  Anastasia described the toe doughnuts to her mother, and her mother nodded and explained that those were called corn pads.

  Anastasia wrote "corn pads" on page twenty-seven of her notebook.

  Mrs. Westvessel also had interesting brown spots on the backs of her hands, very large and lop-sided bosoms, and a faint gray mustache.

  "I think Mrs. Westvessel is probably over one hundred years old," Anastasia told her parents at dinner. "Probably about one hundred and twenty."

  "Nobody lives to be one hundred and twenty," said her mother as she poured some mushroom gravy over Anastasia's meat loaf. "Unless they're in Tibet."

  Her father wrinkled his forehead. "Perhaps Mrs. Westvessel is a mutant," he said.

  "Yes," agreed Anastasia. "Mrs. Westvessel is a mutant, I believe."

  Later she wrote "mutant" on page twenty-seven, under "corn pads." Anastasia was a very good speller; she sounded out the syllables of "mutant" correctly on the first try.

  Anastasia didn't like Mrs. Westvessel very much. That made her feel funny, because she had always liked—sometimes even loved—her teachers before.

  So she wrote in her green notebook, "Why don't I like Mrs. Westvessel?" and began to make a list of reasons. Making lists of reasons was sometimes a good way to figure things out.

  "Reason one:" wrote Anastasia, "Because she isn't a good teacher."

  But then she crossed out reason one, because it was a lie. Anastasia wasn't crazy about telling lies, even to herself; she did it, sometimes, but it always gave her a stomachache.

  Mrs. Westvessel, she knew, was really a pretty good teacher. At any rate, she had taught Anastasia to remember the difference between minuends and subtrahends, which was not a particularly interesting thing to know; and also how to say "I love you" in both French and German, which was not only very interesting but might come in handy someday.

  "Reason two:" wrote Anastasia, after she had crossed out reason one, "Because she is so old."

  That wasn't a lie, so it didn't give her a stomachache; but it was a reason that Anastasia f
elt a little strange about. Anastasia felt a little strange about old people in general. Probably it was because of her grandmother, who was the oldest person she knew. Her grandmother was so old that she lived in a nursing home; and Anastasia didn't like to visit her there. The nursing home smelled of medicine and Polident, a bad combination of smells.

  But Mrs. Westvessel smelled of chalk dust and Elmer's Glue, which was not a bad combination at all. And Mrs. Westvessel, although she was old, never acted old. When they were studying Ireland in geography, Mrs. Westvessel had done an Irish jig in her laced-up shoes, with her bosoms bouncing. That, thought Anastasia, wasn't an old thing to do.

  So she slowly crossed out reason two. Then she couldn't think of any others.

  Finally she wrote, "Reason three: Because I am dumb."

  Not dumb in school. Anastasia, particularly after she had finally mastered the difference between minuends and subtrahends, was actually a very good student.

  "I'm dumb," said Anastasia sadly to herself, "because sometimes—too many times—I don't feel the same way about things that everybody else feels.

  "I was the only one at Jennifer MacCauley's birthday party," she remembered gloomily, "who thought green ice cream was nauseating. Everybody even said I was dumb, for that.

  "I'm the only person in the world," she reminded herself, "—the whole entire world—who likes cold spinach sandwiches. That's really dumb.

  "And now," she thought, "I'm the only kid in the fourth grade who doesn't like Mrs. Westvessel."

  So reason three seemed to be the reason. "Because I'm dumb." She left it there, frowned, and closed her green notebook. "Sometimes," she thought, "maybe it isn't a good idea after all to make a list and find out the answer to a question."

  But when Mrs. Westvessel announced one day in the fall that the class would begin writing poetry, Anastasia was the happiest she had ever been in school.

  Somewhere, off in a place beyond her own thoughts, Anastasia could hear Mrs. Westvessel's voice. She was reading some poems to the class; she was talking about poetry and how it was made. But Anastasia wasn't really listening. She was listening instead to the words that were appearing in her own head, floating there and arranging themselves into groups, into lines, into poems.

  There were so many poems being born in Anastasia's head that she ran all the way home from school to find a private place to write them down, the way her cat had once found a very private place—the pile of ironing in the pantry—in which to create kittens.

  But she discovered that it wasn't easy. She hung the Do Not Disturb sign from the Parker House Hotel on the doorknob of her bedroom door. She thought that might make it easier.

  She got herself a glass of orange juice with ice in it, to sip on while she worked. She thought that might make it easier.

  She put on her Red Sox cap. She thought that might make it easier.

  But it still wasn't easy at all. Sometimes the words she wrote down were the wrong words, and didn't say what she wanted them to say, didn't make the sounds that she wanted them to make. Soon her Snoopy wastebasket was filled with crumpled pages, crumpled beginnings of poems.

  Her mother knocked on her bedroom door and called, "Anastasia? Are you all right?"

  "Yes," she called back, taking her pencil eraser out of her mouth for a minute. "I'm writing a poem."

  Her mother understood that, because very often Anastasia's father would close the door to his study when he was writing a poem, and wouldn't come out even for dinner. "Okay, love," her mother said, the way she said it to Anastasia's father.

  It took her eight evenings to write one poem. Even then, she was surprised when she realized that it was finished. She read it aloud, alone in her room, behind the Do Not Disturb sign from the Parker House Hotel; and then she read it aloud again, and smiled.

  Then she read it aloud one more time, put it into the top drawer of her desk, took out her green notebook, and added to the list on page two under "These are the most important things that happened the year that I was ten," as item three: "I wrote a wonderful poem."

  Then she flipped the Do Not Disturb sign on her doorknob to its opposite side, the side her mother didn't like. "Maid," said the opposite side, "please make up this room as soon as possible."

  Her poem was finished just in time for Creativity Week.

  Mrs. Westvessel was very, very fond of Weeks. In their class, already this year, they had had Be Kind to Animals Week, when the bulletin board had been filled with newspaper clippings about dogs who had found lost children in deep woods, cats that had traveled three hundred miles home after being left behind in strange cities, and a cow in New Hampshire that had been spray-painted red during hunting season so that she would not be mistaken for a deer.

  During My Neighborhood Week, one entire classroom wall had been covered with paper on which they had made a mural: each child had drawn a building to create My Neighborhood. There were three Luigi's Pizzas; two movie theaters, both showing Superman; one Red Sox Stadium; a split-level house with a horse tied to a tree in the yard; two Aquariums; two Science Museums; one Airport control tower; three State Prisons; and a condemned apartment building with a large rat on the front steps. Mrs. Westvessel said that it was not what she had had in mind, and that next time she would give better instructions.

  Creativity Week was the week that the fourth grade was to bring their poems to school. On Monday morning Mrs. Westvessel took them on a field trip to Longfellow's home on Brattle Street. On Tuesday afternoon, a lady poet—poetess, she should be called, according to Mrs. Westvessel; but the lady poet frowned and said she preferred poet, please—came to visit the class and read some of her poems. The lady poet wore dark glasses and had crimson fingernails. Anastasia didn't think that Longfellow would have liked the lady poet at all, or her poems.

  Wednesday was the day that the members of the class were to read their own poems, aloud.

  Robert Giannini stood in front of the class and read:

  I have a dog whose name is Spot.

  He likes to eat and drink a lot.

  When I put water in his dish,

  He laps it up just like a fish.

  Anastasia hated Robert Giannini's poem. Also, she thought it was a lie. Robert Giannini's dog was named Sputnik; everyone in the neighborhood knew that; and Sputnik had bitten two kids during the summer and if he bit one more person the police said the Gianninis would have to get rid of him.

  But Mrs. Westvessel cried, "Wonderful!" She gave Robert Giannini an A and hung his poem on the wall. Anastasia imagined that Longfellow was eyeing it with distaste.

  Traci Beckwith got up from her desk, straightened her tights carefully, and read:

  In autumn when the trees are brown,

  I like to walk all through the town.

  I like to see the birds fly south.

  Some have worms, still, in their mouths.

  Traci Beckwith blushed, and said, "It doesn't rhyme exactly."

  "Well," said Mrs. Westvessel, in a kind voice, "your next one will be better, I'm sure." She gave Traci Beckwith a B plus, and hung the poem on the wall next to Robert's.

  Anastasia had begun to feel a little funny, as if she had ginger ale inside of her knees. But it was her turn. She stood up in front of the class and read her poem. Her voice was very small, because she was nervous.

  hush hush the sea-soft night is aswim

  with wrinklesquirm creatures

  listen (!)

  to them move smooth in the moistly dark here in the

  whisperwarm wet

  That was Anastasia's poem.

  "Read that again, please, Anastasia, in a bigger voice," said Mrs. Westvessel.

  So Anastasia took a deep breath and read her poem again. She used the same kind of voice that her father did when he read poetry to her, drawing some of the words out as long as licorice sticks, and making some others thumpingly short.

  The class laughed.

  Mrs. Westvessel looked puzzled. "Let me see that, Ana
stasia," she said. Anastasia gave her the poem.

  Mrs. Westvessel's ordinary, everyday face had about one hundred wrinkles in it. When she looked at Anastasia's poem, her forehead and nose folded up so that she had two hundred new wrinkles all of a sudden.

  "Where are your capital letters, Anastasia?" asked Mrs. Westvessel.

  Anastasia didn't say anything.

  "Where is the rhyme?" asked Mrs. Westvessel. "It doesn't rhyme at all."

  Anastasia didn't say anything.

  "What kind of poem is this, Anastasia?" asked Mrs. Westvessel. "Can you explain it, please?"

  Anastasia's voice had become very small again, the way voices do, sometimes. "It's a poem of sounds," she said. "It's about little things that live in tidepools, after dark, when they move around. It doesn't have sentences or capital letters because I wanted it to look on the page like small creatures moving in the dark."

  "I don't know why it doesn't rhyme," she said, miserably. "It didn't seem important."

  "Anastasia, weren't you listening in class when we talked about writing poems?"

  Anastasia looked at the floor. "No," she whispered, finally.

  Mrs. Westvessel frowned, and rubbed her jiggly bosom thoughtfully. "Well," she said, at last.

  "Well. Anastasia, when we talked about poetry in this class we simply were not talking about worms and snails crawling on a piece of paper. I'm afraid I will have to give you an F."

  An F. Anastasia had never had an F in her entire life. She kept looking at the floor. Someone had stepped on a red crayon once; the color was smeared into the wood forever.

  "Iworkedveryhardonthatpoem," whispered Anastasia to the floor.

  "Speak up, Anastasia."

  Anastasia lifted her head and looked Mrs. Westvessel in the eye. "I worked very, very hard on that poem," she said, in a loud, clear voice.