Anastasia Again!

  Anastasia Again!

  Lois Lowry

  * * *

  Decorations by Diane deGroat

  * * *

  Houghton Mifflin Company Boston

  * * *

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Lowry, Lois.

  Anastasia again!

  Sequel to Anastasia Krupnik.

  Summary: Twelve-year-old Anastasia is horrified at

  her family's decision to move from their city apartment

  to a house in the suburbs.

  [1. Moving, Household—Fiction. 2. Family life—

  Fiction] I. Title.

  PZ7. L9673Am [Fic] 81-6466

  ISBN 0-395-31 147-0 AACR2

  Copyright © 1981 by Lois Lowry

  All rights 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

  VB 20 19 18

  * * *

  To Laura Beard

  1

  "The suburbs!" said Anastasia. "We're moving to the suburbs? I can't believe it. I can't believe that you would actually do such a thing to me. I'm going to kill myself. As soon as I finish this chocolate pudding, I'm going to jump out the window."

  "We live on the first floor," her mother reminded her. "You've been jumping out of your window for years. The first time you jumped out of your window was when you were three years old and didn't want to take a nap any more."

  "Yeah," said Anastasia, remembering. "You thought I'd been kidnapped, when you came to my room to wake me up and I was gone. Actually I was outside picking all your tulips."

  "I could have killed you for that. It was the first time I'd ever grown really terrific tulips."

  "I wish you had killed me for that. Because there isn't any point in living if you have to live in the suburbs."

  Her father put down the magazine he was reading, The New York Review of Books. He was reading an article called "Morality and Mythology." Anastasia didn't have any idea what that meant; but she liked it that her father knew what it meant and that he liked reading about it, and she was absolutely certain that there wasn't a single person in the entire suburbs of the United States who would ever in his entire life read an article called "Morality and Mythology."

  "How on earth," asked her father, "can you be so sure you would hate the suburbs when you have never lived anyplace but this apartment?"

  "Daddy," Anastasia pointed out. "I read. You know that. You yourself taught me to read when I was four years old. I read books about the suburbs. I know what people who live there are like."

  "Oh? And what are they like?"

  "Not like us, that's for sure. One, they live in split-level houses with sets of matching furniture. Can you imagine that? Rooms of cute matching furniture? Good grief. I mean, think for a minute about our living room here in this apartment. Think of all the neat stuff we have in it."

  They thought. "Books," said her mother.

  "Right. Millions of books. There aren't any bookcases in split-level houses. Right where the bookcases should be, people in the suburbs have a huge color TV instead."

  "We have a TV," said her father. "In fact, I'm about to miss the first inning of the Red Sox game."

  "Daddy, we have an ancient, small black-and-white TV. And there are books on top of it, books behind it, books in front of it. That's not the same. I'm talking about a monster color TV, and on top of it is a bowl of fake fruit."

  "Fake fruit? Are you sure of that, Anastasia?"

  "Absolutely. Just look in the Sears ads in the paper. But forget that for a minute. Think some more about our own living room."

  "Paintings," said her mother. "I think people in the suburbs have paintings on their walls."

  "Wrong," said Anastasia. "The paintings on our walls are real. We have some of your paintings, Mom. And we have that one that I did of a rooster, when I was five. And we have that really neat one by your friend Annie, Dad..."

  "I wish you'd get rid of that, Myron," said Anastasia's mother.

  "Annie was a fine painter," muttered her father. "And a fine person. You would have liked her. You will like her if she ever comes back from Central America. We'll have her for dinner."

  "Over my dead body we'll have her for dinner," said Anastasia's mother.

  "Mom. Daddy. You're missing the point. The point is hat we have meaningful paintings on our walls."

  "And people in the suburbs do not?"

  "No, they definitely don't. They have pictures of the Sierra Nevadas, painted-by-number. Or else pictures of kittens with big eyes, playing with balls of yarn. It goes with the matched set of furniture."

  "Actually," said her mother, "our furniture is pretty awful, some of it."

  "No, it isn't! We're the only people in the whole world who have a white couch with a big sunflower embroidered on it!"

  "Anastasia, the only reason for the sunflower is because I had to do something to cover up the spot where Sam threw up."

  "But that's okay! I mean it's okay in the city. But if we lived in a split-level house in some development, people wouldn't understand it."

  "ANASTASIA," said her father, in the booming voice that he used only when he was beginning to be quite annoyed with something, "YOU'RE MAKING ASSUMPTIONS."

  "I am not. I never make anything. I didn't make the school basketball team, even."

  "You are making assumptions."

  "I don't even know what assumptions are. I can't even make decent brownies."

  "Premature assumptions!"

  "I didn't make the finals in the sixth-grade spelling bee. I can't make anything."

  "YOU ARE MAKING HASTY JUDGMENTS! IDIOTIC PREMATURE ASSUMPTIONS! AND YOU ARE ALSO MAKING ME MISS THE RED SOX GAME ON TV!"

  Now Anastasia knew that he was really getting mad. She scowled. "I hardly ever even make my bed," she muttered. "The last thing I ever made in my life was a dumb potholder, in third grade. I never made a premature assumption. If I did, it would come out crooked."

  Her mother sighed. "I'll tell you what you make, Anastasia. You make life very difficult sometimes." She began to pick up the chocolate pudding bowls from the table. "Let's let your dad watch the ball game. I'm going to wash these dishes. You want to help, or do you want to get Sam up from his nap? We can talk about all of this later."

  "I'll go get Sam. Unless maybe he's already jumped out the window. He's getting old enough to figure stuff like that out."

  She wandered down the hallway of the apartment, thumping the walls as she went. It made a nice, hollow, echoing sound in the dark hall. Anastasia had noticed that for the first time when she was three or four and had been thumping the walls ever since. There were handprints way down low, from when she was very small; handprints higher up, from when she was bigger (and a dark stain at that height: she had squashed a tomato there when she was nine and very angry about something); and now that she was twelve and beginning to be quite tall, her handprints were appearing at a level that had never had handprints before.

  The whole apartment had a history, and it was her history and her parents' history and beginning to be Sam's. She had planned to show Sam how to thump the walls with that hollow sound very soon. The thought of moving made her stomach ache.

  "And we didn't even have a chance to talk about the other stuff!" she called back toward the kitchen, where she could hear her mother washing the dishes. "That we would have to have a car, for pete's sake! We would have to pollute the atmosphere with a car! And I would have to do dumb suburban stuff. Probably I would have to be a Girl Scout!"

  There wasn't any answ
er from her mother. In the living room, she could hear her father turn the volume up on the TV to drown her out.

  "You could never ever wear jeans any more, you know, Mom!" she called. "Ladies in the suburbs only wear cute cotton dresses from Lord and Taylor's!"

  No answer. She stood still for a minute outside Sam's door.

  "And they play bridge every afternoon! And have affairs with the neighbors' husbands! Do you realize that?"

  No answer. Her mother was washing the dishes very loudly, which meant that she was getting pretty mad. In a minute she would probably throw a dish.

  "Oh, rats," muttered Anastasia to herself, and opened the door to her brother's room. Once, before Sam was born, it had been the dining room. It was true that they were outgrowing the apartment. But it didn't matter. Not as much as the other things mattered.

  "Hi, Sam," said Anastasia. Her brother was sitting in his crib with a blanket over his head, chuckling. "Quit being so cute," she said. "I have terrible news." Sam took the blanket off his head and looked at her. His face had sleeping wrinkles on it.

  "Frank Goldfish is going to die," said Anastasia sorrowfully. "Goldfish can't survive things like moving to the suburbs. Suburban goldfish are different, anyway. They have tanks with all that plastic junk in them: castles and little fake divers. Frank just likes his little ordinary city-goldfish bowl. I am quite certain that Frank will not survive this."

  Then she realized that Sam didn't care about that. It was Sam who had flushed Frank the First down the toilet.

  "And also," she told him sadly, "I know that your blanky won't survive. Moving men absolutely refuse to move grubby old blankies. I'm sorry to tell you that, Sam." She lifted him out of his crib and took his faded yellow blanket away from him. He grabbed for it, missed, and burst into howls.

  "It's really too bad about your blanky, Sam," Anastasia said in a soft, mournful voice. "I suppose we'll have to put it out for the trash men to pick up."

  Sam stamped his small bare feet. "Gimme my blanky!" he roared, grabbing for it. Anastasia held it up higher.

  "I'm so terribly sorry, Sam," she said in a stricken tone that she was imitating from an old movie that had been rerun on TV recently. George Brent telling Bette Davis that she had a brain tumor.

  Sam's howls turned into shrieks, and he threw himself on the floor and began to kick.

  "Mom? Dad?" called Anastasia. "I just told Sam the news! Can you hear him? He doesn't want to move to the suburbs either!"

  ***

  Anastasia went to her room to sulk. She always left the door open when she was sulking. She had perfected the art of sulking, and one of the essential points was that people had to know you were doing it. So it was important to leave the door open.

  She lay on her bed, which was the best place for sulking, and was visible from her open door. But when no one was walking past her room, sulking was boring. So, to pass the time, she got out the notebook in which she intended to write a mystery novel. She had been intending to write it for almost a year, as soon as she could think of a title. She had decided to write a mystery after she began to think that Nancy Drew mysteries had no relationship to real life. Whose real life, after all, included haunted houses, spiral staircases, or twisted candlesticks? Yet real life—especially Anastasia's real life—was full of mysteries. For almost a year, she had been making notes about the mysteries of her own existence. None of them yet seemed to lend themselves to an entire book. "The Mystery of Why I Am Not Allowed to Go to X-rated Movies Even Though I Have Known All the Facts of Life Since I Was Six," for example, was a legitimate mystery of real life; but she couldn't seem to go on to write a novel about it.

  Now, angrily, she wrote, "The Mystery of Why Some People Make Decisions without Consulting Their Twelve-Year-Old Children." Then she wrote, "Chapter One: Decisions about Moving to the (Ugh) Suburbs."

  But she got so mad, just thinking about it, that she didn't write anything else. It was hard to write in a notebook while you were lying on a bed anyway. It was much easier just to lie back and sulk.

  2

  "Daddy?" asked Anastasia, as she stood in the bathroom door that evening, watching her father give Sam a bath. "Have you and Mom ever given serious thought to what a weird baby Sam is?"

  It was true, what she said. Right now, for example, Sam was sitting in the bathtub, and he looked like any ordinary two-and-a-half-year-old baby. He had a fat stomach with a poking-out bellybutton, rosy cheeks, curly brown hair, brown eyes with long eyelashes, and he had soapsuds in his ears, which was kind of cute, A minute ago he had squirmed and wiggled and screeched when his father had washed his face, which was an ordinary two-and-a-half-year-old baby thing to do.

  But then he had said firmly and with dignity, "Don't get soap in my eyes, please. My eyes are very sensitive."

  That was weird. The little boy next door could only say things like ma-ma, da-da, by-by, and ordinary baby things.

  Sam had never said ma-ma or da-da or by-by. He had started talking like Walter Cronkite before he was a year old. Anastasia's mother swore that one day when he was four months old, he had said, "Thank you," when she fed him some strained apricots; but no one believed her, and she had no witnesses.

  "He's not weird," said Anastasia's father, lifting Sam out of the tub. "It's just that people develop at different rates. For example, Anastasia, you are twelve years old, but you are already five feet seven inches tall..."

  "I know that, Daddy. You don't really need to remind me of that, Daddy."

  "I only bring it up because it is an unusual height for a twelve-year-old girl. You've grown fast, height-wise. But at the same time, your body is still quite straight, up and down. I mean, you haven't yet begun to mature much physically, except for height. You don't yet have hips, for example, or..."

  "Daddy. Don't be gross."

  "There's nothing gross about hips. I was just pointing out that different aspects of people develop at different rates. Now in many ways, Sam is still a baby. Cut that out, Sam."

  Sam was eating toothpaste.

  "I like it," said Sam. "I like the flavor."

  "Well, it costs a dollar fifty-nine a tube. Cut it out." He began to dry Sam with a big blue towel.

  "See what I mean, Anastasia? He's mischievous, like all toddlers. And he still wears diapers because he hasn't achieved the physical maturity to be toilet trained. I wish you would be toilet trained, Sam."

  "No," said Sam, and smiled sweetly.

  "And he still has his security blanket, like many babies..."

  "Where is my blanky?" asked Sam. "I want it right now."

  "Mom washed it while you were having your bath," said Anastasia. "It's in the dryer."

  "Well, I want it when I go to bed," said Sam firmly.

  Dr. Krupnik pinned on Sam's diapers and snapped up his pajamas.

  "There you are, old buddy. Go find your mom."

  Sam padded off down the hall.

  "It's just that he is verbally precocious," said Anastasia's father, leaning over to scrub out the tub. "He's unusual, that way. But I wouldn't call him—what did you call him?—a weird baby."

  "Well, okay then, he's unusual. Don't you and Mom realize what a disaster it would be to move an unusual baby like Sam to the suburbs? In the suburbs all babies are alike."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Absolutely. All suburban babies ride around in shopping carts at supermarkets, and whine, and their mothers slap them."

  "Their mothers slap them?"

  "Absolutely. Their mothers all have pink curlers in their hair. Do you want that to happen to Mom, and to Sam?"

  Dr. Krupnik sighed. "Anastasia, get me a beer from the refrigerator. As soon as your mom puts Sam to bed, we will talk some more about this move which we are going to make."

  "Did I hear the last part of that sentence correctly?"

  "Which we are going to make."

  "You once told me that this family was a democracy."

  "Wrong. I said that this family is a b
enevolent dictatorship."

  "Don't I get any part in the decision making? Is this a fascist state?"

  "Not at all. You get a part."

  "What part?"

  "You're going to help us choose a house."

  ***

  They sat around the table in the living room, which had once been the dining room table until the dining room had become Sam's bedroom. It was certainly true, Anastasia thought again, that the apartment was getting too small. Or maybe they were getting too big. Certainly she was getting too big. Five foot seven, for pete's sake. Probably the Celtics would be scouting her for their basketball team before she was fifteen. At this rate she would be almost seven feet tall by then. Already no boys liked her, because she was taller than they were. When she was seven feet tall, it would be even worse.

  Not that she wanted any boys to like her. Anastasia hated all boys, especially all the boys in the sixth grade of the Bosler Elementary School, and most especially Robert Giannini, who carried a briefcase to school every day. She wondered what Robert Giannini did with his briefcase now that school was over for the summer.

  Maybe there would be more interesting boys in junior high in the fall. Not that she cared, of course.

  And by fall, they might be living in the suburbs. She could feel the thought of it affecting her physically. The stomachache was coming back. She could feel her hair beginning to ooze oil, so she would have to wash it again before she went to bed, and she had already washed it that morning. She could feel a pimple beginning to grow on her chin. Her eyes, behind her glasses, began to blur. Terrific. Now she was going blind on top of everything else.

  Anastasia pictured herself in the suburbs: seven feet tall, with acne and greasy hair, and blind. She would get a Seeing Eye dog, a ferocious one, and name him Fang. If any boys ever made any remarks to her about her height, she would simply say in a low voice to Fang, "Kill."

  That wasn't a bad thought. It made her smile to herself. She pictured her Seeing Eye dog tearing Robert Giannini's briefcase to shreds with his teeth and then starting in on Robert Giannini himself. She grinned. Her vision came back.