Anastasia on Her Own Read online

  Anastasia squirmed uncomfortably. "Well, I sort of hear Mom at seven. But I don't really hear her till seven-thirty."

  "You mean she calls you again at seven-thirty?"

  "Yeah," Anastasia admitted. "At seven-thirty she yells, If you don't get your buns out of that bed this minute, you're going to be late for school!' Then I get up."

  "Should we put that on the schedule?"

  Anastasia frowned. "No," she said, finally. "I'll try to get up at seven."

  Her father wrote in the 7:00 A.M. activities. "Now we'll move ahead to eight, when you and Sam and I all leave."

  "Hold it."

  "What?"

  "Well, she has to help Sam get dressed, and she cooks breakfast. And when she remembers it, she gathers up the dirty clothes and takes them downstairs to the washing machine."

  "How does she have time to do all that?" asked Dr. Krupnik.

  Anastasia shrugged. "I don't know. I have enough trouble getting my buns out of the bed."

  "We should help more."

  "Yeah."

  Dr. Krupnik wrote some things down.

  "Okay," he said, "now it's eight o'clock and we're all gone and she's home alone. What does she do then?"

  "That's when she forgets to take something out of the freezer for dinner. She starts working, in the studio, and she loses track of everything else."

  "She won't," he said with satisfaction, "once she has this schedule in front of her."

  He wrote some more things down.

  "Hold it," said Anastasia. "You forgot the beds. She makes Sam's bed, and I guess she makes your bed, unless you do. Do you ever make your bed?"

  "No," Dr. Krupnik said guiltily. "I guess I should. Do you make your bed?"

  "Well, I'm supposed to. Sometimes I do."

  "I'll put that in," he said, and wrote it down. "Okay. Now she can go to work in the studio. She can work the rest of the morning. I'll write in a coffee break, too."

  "Hold it. What about the laundry?"

  "Can't she do that on her coffee break?" Dr. Krupnik asked.

  "That's a pretty crummy coffee break, if you ask me."

  "Yeah. Well, what if she does the laundry at noon?"

  "But that's when Sam comes home, and she fixes their lunch, and sometimes she and Sam go out then to do the shopping."

  Dr. Krupnik chewed on the end of the pen. "How about this? If she puts the clothes in the washing machine after lunch, then the clothes will wash while they're out shopping."

  "Okay. And then she can put them in the dryer when she gets home."

  He wrote that down. "Hey," he said, "we're up to two P.M. already."

  "Sam takes a nap then, and Mom works some more in the studio. After Sam wakes up, she plays with him."

  "This is great," said Dr. Krupnik. "This is so organized, it's fantastic. How do you like this idea? When Sam wakes up, he can help her take the clothes out of the dryer. Then they can play, and look—by then it's four P.M. By then you're coming home from school, right?"

  "Right," said Anastasia, "unless I stay late for something. Right about four P.M. is when she sinks into a depression."

  "Why does she do that?"

  "Because she realizes she forgot to defrost something for dinner."

  "Oh. Well, we took care of that, because we wrote it into the schedule in the morning. Now, she cooks dinner, and you and I come home, and we all eat—"

  "I set the table," Anastasia pointed out.

  "Right. And then we each take turns doing the dishes, and then at eight P.M. she gives Sam a bath, and—"

  "You do that sometimes."

  "Well, okay, somebody gives Sam a bath, and puts him to bed, and then we all just relax. The workday is over."

  "Hold it."

  "What did I forget?"

  "When does she vacuum? And wash windows and stuff?"

  Dr. Krupnik made a face. Then, after a moment, he brightened. "Saturdays," he said.

  With a flourish he made a note about Saturdays, and the schedule was finished.

  "Housekeeping is simple," Dr. Krupnik said.

  "Yeah," said Anastasia. "Any moron could do it. All you need is a schedule."

  2

  Thwack, thwack, thwack. Down the long school hallway, one locker door after another slammed shut with a metallic sound. Anastasia zipped up her parka, sorted out her books, collected the ones she needed for homework, and pulled on her knitted ski hat. At the locker next to hers, Sonya Isaacson muttered, "I really flubbed that English quiz. My parents are going to be mad."

  "Me too," Anastasia said. "I thought school would be called off today because of the snow. So I didn't even study. I think I got all the true-false, though."

  "Quick, turn around," Sonya whispered suddenly. "Here comes Norman. Pretend you don't see him."

  Automatically Anastasia obeyed, turning sideways toward her locker as if she needed more books. Sonya did the same until Norman Berkowitz had passed.

  Norman was Sonya's boyfriend. In the evenings he called her up and they had long conversations about nothing. On Saturdays they sometimes met at McDonald's, as if by accident, and sat around eating French fries for an hour, talking about nothing.

  Daphne did the same with Eddie. Meredith did the same with Kirby McEvedy. And Anastasia did the same with Steve.

  Since Steve Harvey lived just down the street from Anastasia, he sometimes even stopped by her house after school or on weekends. Steve got a kick out of playing with Sam.

  But the rules at school were different. Anastasia hadn't quite figured out why they were; but she knew that they were, and so she followed them. It was important, at school, to pretend that you hated the person you actually liked. Just a few minutes before, Steve had passed the girls in the hall; he had grabbed Anastasia's hat off her head and tossed it on top of her locker.

  "Harvey, you creep!" Anastasia had yelled. And Steve Harvey had sauntered away.

  "That turkey," she had muttered to Sonya as she retrieved her hat. But secretly she was pleased. If Steve had grabbed Sonya's hat, it would have meant everything was over between Steve and Anastasia. Only Norman Berkowitz could grab Sonya's hat.

  She and Sonya headed home together through the snowy streets.

  "Call me tonight, okay?" said Sonya.

  "Okay. I promised I'd call Daphne first, though."

  "And I'll see you at McDonald's tomorrow, right? But don't let me eat anything at McDonald's. I'm on a diet."

  "Again?" Anastasia grinned. Sonya was always on a diet.

  "Right. This time I'm going to stick with it, too, even though tonight'll be tough. My mother always makes a giant dinner on Friday night. I made her promise to give me only a little bit of skinless chicken, though. A microscopic piece. And no dessert."

  "You want me to call you right at dinnertime and remind you not to eat?"

  Sonya thought about it. "No. But restrain me at McDonald's. Arrrggghh!" she screeched suddenly. A form had darted past the girls; he had smashed a handful of snow against Sonya's bare neck.

  "You just watch it, Norman!" she yelled after the fleeing figure. "That Norman Berkowitz," Sonya muttered to Anastasia. "He's so asinine." She was flushed with pleasure.

  Anastasia glanced around the quiet street, but Steve was nowhere in sight. It was disappointing. She had hoped to get a handful of snow down her neck, too, so that she could scream the way Sonya had.

  "Tonight's going to be terrific at my house," she confided in Sonya. "My mother's on a new, organized schedule. I won't be surprised if when I get home, there's a whole batch of oatmeal cookies or something."

  "Oatmeal cookies? Your mother?"

  "Really," said Anastasia. "My father and I fixed it so that my mother's whole life is going to be different. She has no idea that keeping house can be so simple."

  No oatmeal cookies. Anastasia could tell, when she entered the kitchen, that there were no oatmeal cookies, though she noticed with satisfaction a package of defrosted pork chops sitting on the counter. Well, she
thought, Mom's still adjusting; soon there will be oatmeal cookies.

  "I'm home!" she called, after she dropped her schoolbooks on the table and drank a glass of apple juice.

  "Hi!" her mother called back from upstairs.

  Anastasia found her mother sitting on Sam's bedroom floor. She and Sam had constructed a large garage from blocks and were lining up Matchbox cars at the entrance.

  "They all need inspection stickers," Sam explained, and he drove a little red car into the garage.

  "Oh no," Mrs. Krupnik said in a gruff garage mechanic's voice, "bad brakes on this one."

  "Bad headlights, too," announced Sam. "This one flunks. Let's junk it."

  He drove the red car out of the garage and dropped it into a metal wastebasket with a resounding clunk.

  "That's the junkyard," Sam said.

  "How was your day, Anastasia?" her mother asked, standing up. "Any more problems with Steve?"

  "Actually, it was a pretty good day as far as Steve was concerned. At lunchtime he bumped into the table where I was sitting, so that my milk container tipped over. And at the end of school, he grabbed my hat and threw it on top of my locker."

  Mrs. Krupnik grinned. "Great," she said.

  "Rrrrrrr," said Sam, driving a green car out of the garage. He dropped it into the wastebasket junkyard. "No windshield wipers," he explained happily.

  Anastasia sat down on Sam's bed. "You know, Mom," she said, "you really amaze me sometimes. I don't think most mothers would understand about that stuff. Most mothers would probably think it was a bad thing, that a boy tipped over your milk and grabbed your hat. I bet Sonya Isaacson's mother would call the boy's mother to complain."

  Mrs. Krupnik sat down on the bed beside Anastasia. She smoothed the legs of her paint-spattered jeans. "Well," she said, "for some reason I remember what that was like. When I was in seventh grade—no, maybe it was eighth—I liked a boy named Freddy Valente. Freddy Valente was really neat; he had the longest eyelashes I've ever seen. Except maybe for Sam's."

  Sam looked up, grinned, and fluttered his long eyelashes.

  "Did he grab your hat?" Anastasia asked.

  Mrs. Krupnik blushed. "No, actually, what Freddy Valente was into was bra-snapping. He used to come up behind me in the hall and snap my bra."

  Anastasia giggled.

  "So of course I would shriek and scream and pretend to be outraged."

  Anastasia nodded. "Of course," she said.

  Sam had stopped junking cars and was listening with interest. "How do you snap a bra?" he asked.

  Mrs. Krupnik knelt on the floor with her back toward Sam. "Just pull it," she said, "and then let it snap back."

  Sam frowned, with his tongue between his teeth. Carefully he snapped his mother's bra.

  "Ouch," Mrs. Krupnik said.

  Sam giggled, and snapped it again.

  His mother stood up. "Enough," she said. "Somehow the thrill is gone. It was much more exciting when Freddy Valente did it."

  "I wonder what ever happened to him," Anastasia said. She pictured Freddy Valente grown up, a long-eyelashed bra-snapper, maybe looking like Burt Reynolds. Someone like that might have quite a glamorous career.

  "He's a dentist in Albany," her mother said. "Sorry about that."

  Outside, in the driveway, they heard the familiar sound of the Krupnik car arriving. It backfired three times between the street and the garage. Then it sputtered, coughed, and finally gave a long, noisy whine before it was quiet. Anastasia, Sam, and their mother all went to the window and looked down. In a moment they saw Dr. Krupnik emerge from the garage with his briefcase in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. His pipe was clenched between his teeth. At the rear of the car he turned and kicked the back bumper angrily. Then he headed toward the house.

  "He really hates that car," murmured Mrs. Krupnik. "I wish we could afford a new one."

  "Then we could junk this one," said Sam. "Rrrrrrrr."

  "I bet anything he swore at it," Anastasia commented. "I hope the neighbors didn't hear him."

  They all went downstairs. As usual, Dr. Krupnik was quite cheerful when he came through the back door. As soon as he was away from the car, his good disposition always returned.

  "Greetings," he said. He set his briefcase down, picked up Sam, and gave him a hug. "Hey, Sam, what on earth are you doing?" he asked. Sam had reached inside his father's coat.

  "I'm sneaking my arm around to your back," Sam explained, "because I'm going to snap your bra."

  Dr. Krupnik put Sam back down on the floor. "You're going to find that the world is full of disappointments, sport," he said. "Hey! Look at that! Do you see that, Anastasia?"

  He was pointing to the package of pork chops. Anastasia looked, and nodded.

  "I knew it," said her father as he hung up his coat. "Katherine, I knew it would work. We're going to have a great gourmet pork chop dinner, all because of that fabulous schedule, right?"

  "Actually," said Mrs. Krupnik, "wrong. We are going to have pork chops for dinner, true. But the schedule, to put it bluntly, stinks." She took a Pyrex dish from the cupboard and began to unwrap the pork chops. "Would you wash some potatoes, Anastasia?" she asked.

  Anastasia went to the pantry and took four baking potatoes out of the bag. She took them to the sink. "Why?" she asked. "Why does it stink?"

  "It was going like clockwork this morning," said her father. "We all got up at seven, right?"

  "Right," said Mrs. Krupnik as she sprinkled the pork chops with thyme.

  "I made our bed for a change, right?"

  "Right. Thank you."

  "Anastasia," said Dr. Krupnik, "did you make your bed?"

  Anastasia nodded. She poked the washed potatoes with a knife and put them into a pan. "I made it lumpy," she confessed, "but I did make it."

  "And Sam got dressed okay, even though his socks don't match."

  Sam looked at his feet. He was wearing one blue sock and one red one. "I wanted them that way," he explained.

  "And we all ate breakfast, and then Sam went off with his carpool, and Anastasia left for school, and I left for work, just the way the schedule said we should." Dr. Krupnik went on. "And obviously you remembered to take the pork chops out of the freezer. Let me take another look at the schedule."

  Anastasia took the paper from the kitchen bulletin board and handed it to him. She put the potatoes into the oven beside the pork chops.

  "Everything went absolutely perfectly up until eight o'clock," said Dr. Krupnik after he had examined the schedule.

  "Correct," Mrs. Krupnik said. She sat down at the kitchen table. "Now. Let's talk about after eight o'clock, when things began to fall apart."

  "Sam," said Dr. Krupnik, "would you go to the refrigerator and get me a beer?"

  Forty-five minutes later, Anastasia's father had made a lot of notes on the schedule. "I'll have to rewrite this, it's such a mess," he said.

  "The whole day was a mess," said Mrs. Krupnik.

  "Well, the pork chops smell good," Anastasia pointed out. "Want me to make a salad?"

  Her mother nodded. "Thanks," she said. "Be sure to use up that cucumber. It's really ancient, almost museum quality."

  "The problem is," announced Anastasia's father, "that there were a lot of unexpected events. Things we didn't anticipate when we made the schedule."

  "There always are," said Mrs. Krupnik. "Every day there are unexpected events."

  "That's true, Dad," Anastasia said, looking up from the chopping board where she was slicing the cucumber. "Even in school that's true. Marlene Braverman fainted in Chorus today. Whammo; right out cold on the floor when they were practicing 'Trees.' They got to the part about 'a nest of robins in her hair' and Marlene just keeled over. They took her to the nurse's office, and the nurse said it was because she hadn't eaten breakfast or lunch."

  "Maybe Marlene Braverman's mother doesn't have a housekeeping schedule," suggested Mrs. Krupnik, "and so she forgot to make breakfast."

  "I had an unexp
ected event in nursery school, too," Sam said. "I spilled my juice all over the table. It turned the cookies into moosh."

  "Well," Dr. Krupnik said, making some final notes on the housekeeping schedule, "Anastasia and I should have thought of that. But now I've redone the list, with special allowances for unexpected events. Things should run absolutely smoothly now, Katherine."

  She sighed.

  "I'll recopy this after dinner," he said, and went to tack it to the bulletin board again. He picked up the stack of papers he'd been carrying when he came into the house. "Here's the mail, by the way. You forgot to get the mail out of the mailbox today." He glanced through the envelopes, tossed a couple of them unopened into the wastebasket, and handed Mrs. Krupnik some others.

  "Look at this gorgeous salad," Anastasia announced. She displayed the wooden bowl. "I bet nobody in the whole world except me would have thought of putting sliced banana into a salad. I bet I'm going to be a really creative cook someday."

  "What're those little brown things?" asked her father, peering into the salad.

  "Peanuts!"

  "Peanuts and bananas in a salad?" he asked, frowning-

  "It'll be great," said Anastasia happily. "Don't you think it'll be great, Mom?"

  "What?" Her mother looked up from the letter she was reading. "Sure." She looked back down at the letter.

  "Maybe I should think about becoming a chef for a career," said Anastasia. "None of my other choices worked out very well. Ballet dancing, or being an author. But I think I have a real flair for cooking, don't you, Mom?"

  Her mother glanced up again with a distracted look. "A real flair for cooking," she said. "How do you feel about creative housekeeping in general?"

  Anastasia shrugged.

  "Think you could manage this household if you had a carefully thought-out nonsexist housekeeping schedule?" her mother asked.

  "Of course," Anastasia said. "Organized housekeeping is ridiculously easy, once you have a schedule."

  Her mother gave her an odd smile.

  "Why?" asked Anastasia suspiciously.

  But the telephone rang before her mother could answer. Dr. Krupnik picked it up. "Yes," they could hear him say, "she's here, but we're about to eat dinner. Could you call her back a little later?"