Anastasia at This Address (6 page)

"Yuck," Daphne said after a moment. "What
are
they?"

Meredith had been taking off her sweater. She glanced over and giggled. "Oh," she said. "They got squooshed."

Anastasia cringed and looked quickly at her goldfish to see if he had heard the word, but Frank seemed to be daydreaming.

Meredith picked up the three pink things and fluffed them out a bit. "
Now
look," she said. "They're fake flowers. We're going to have real ones at the wedding, but these are just so you can vote for which kind you like the best, to carry for your bouquet. What would look best with our dresses? This one's a rose. " She held up a wrinkled pink silk rose on a green wire stem.

"And this is a snapdragon." She held up a longer, deeper pink silk flower.

"And this one is a tulip. What do you think? They'll all look better when they're real, my mom says."

"Why
pink?
" Sonya wailed. "Do they have to be pink? I told Kirsten I can't wear pink with my red hair!"

"You won't be
wearing
them," Meredith pointed out. "You hold them down at your waist. They won't be anywhere near your hair."

"Well," Sonya said grudgingly, "I like the roses."

"Tulips are more dramatic," Daphne said. "I want to look dramatic."

"I vote for snapdragons," Anastasia said. "Snapdragons are neat. You can snap them open and closed; my mom showed me when I was just a little kid."

Meredith sighed. "I knew this wouldn't be easy," she said. She held the three silk flowers in her hand and looked down at them with a frown. "Hey, look!" she said suddenly. "They look good all together."

The other girls nodded. "Can't we have all of them?" Sonya asked. "They call that a mixed bouquet."

"Great idea," Meredith said. "Is that a unanimous vote for a mixed bouquet?"

Everyone nodded, and Meredith dropped the flowers back on Anastasia's desk. "Now for the
tough
decision," she announced.

"Do you have anything to eat? Nonfattening?" Sonya asked. "I always need food when I discuss problems. Just last night my mother called a family meeting to discuss Lack of Help around This House, and it took two tunafish sandwiches for me to get through it.

"Sorry, Frank," she added apologetically, looking at the fishbowl. "Next time I'll have egg salad."

Anastasia handed her the open box of Ritz crackers that was next to the sloop on the windowsill beside her desk.

"Ready?" Meredith asked.

Sonya scooped a handful of crackers out of the box and offered them to the other girls. Everyone shook their heads no. "Okay. Ready," Sonya said, and nibbled at a cracker.

"Well, here's the deal. We have a moral decision to make," Meredith announced.

Anastasia, Sonya, and Daphne all stared at her.

"I'm against capital punishment," Daphne said firmly. "Even though I disagree with my parents on just about everything else, I agree with them on
that.
"

Sonya frowned. "About abortion?" she said. "I think I agree with a woman's right to make her own decision, but sometimes I—"

Meredith interrupted. "No, no, nothing like that," she said loudly.

"Shhhh," Anastasia said, and gestured meaningfully toward the goldfish bowl. "Quieter."

"Oh. Sorry, Frank." Meredith lowered her voice. "It's nothing like that. Not a political issue. It has to do with the wedding."

"I won't wear falsies," Anastasia said quickly and firmly. "Absolutely not. I
know
it might make the dress fit better, but it would be
fake,
and I won't do it."

"I will," Daphne said. "I think it'd be neat to wear falsies. Remember, Anastasia, the time you stuffed pantyhouse into a bra, and—"

Anastasia blushed, and all four of them giggled. Frank flicked his tail in disdain.

"It's not about falsies," Meredith explained. "It's about
boys.
"

"Boys?"

"Yeah, the opposite sex, the one we renounced, remember?"

"What about them?" Anastasia asked. She wondered for a second whether the mail had arrived yet. Not that the mail had anything to do with
boys.

"Well, last night we—me, my mom, and Kirsten—were addressing wedding invitations. They made me promise to use my very best handwriting before they let me do any."

"You have pretty good handwriting, Mer," Anastasia remarked. "Mine stinks. Mr. Rafferty made me rewrite my whole entire paper on
Johnny Tremain
because he couldn't read my handwriting."

"Yeah, I know. Yours is awful. Mine's not so bad, though. Anyway, we were doing the invitations last night. I did the ones for your families. We put Sam in, Anastasia, so he's invited, too. But we only did your parents, Sonya. You have too many brothers."

"That's okay," Sonya said, munching on a cracker. "I hate my brothers, anyway."

"You didn't invite my mom and dad together, did you?" Daphne asked in a horrified voice. "They don't even
speak
to each other since they got divorced."

Meredith shook her head. "Of course not, stupid," she said. "Your dad's the minister. He's
doing
the wedding. What do they call it? He's performing the wedding."

"Officiating," Daphne said.

"Right. He's officiating. So we didn't send him an invitation since he'll automatically be there. I addressed one to your mom, though."

Daphne rolled her eyes. "She won't come. Not if my dad's there. If that's the moral question, forget it. She won't come."

"If you'd just let me finish, please?"

"Sorry. I know she won't come, though." Daphne reached over and took a Ritz cracker from the box on Sonya's lap.

"Here's the moral question," Meredith said in a serious voice.

The other three girls were all silent, waiting.

"There are four invitations set aside, not addressed yet. There'll be dancing at the reception, and my mom thought we'd each like to invite a, well, a you-know-what."

"A boy," Sonya said. "Like Norman Berkowitz."

"A boy," Daphne said. "Like Eddie Cox."

"A boy," Anastasia said. "Like Steve Harvey."

"Yeah," Meredith acknowledged. "A boy. Like Kirby McEvedy."

They all sighed and were silent.

"We did give them up, you know," Sonya said.

In a slow, thoughtful voice, Anastasia pointed out, "We only gave up
chasing
them."

"This wouldn't be chasing them, would it?" Daphne asked. "Sending an invitation wouldn't be
chasing,
exactly."

"Well, that's what I thought," Meredith explained. "But I wanted to check with you guys. We
will
need someone to dance with. I don't want to end up dancing with my father and my grandfather."

"I sure don't want to dance with
Sam
" Anastasia said.

"This is a toughie," Sonya said in a serious voice. She reached into the box for another cracker. "Rats. It's empty already."

Anastasia twisted around in her chair, reached into a desk drawer, and handed Sonya an open box of animal crackers. "Sam left these here," she said. "He ate all the elephants."

"Thanks." Sonya tossed the empty Ritz box into the large wastebasket and started on the animal crackers. "Will there be any other guys there? People we could dance with?" she asked.

Meredith shook her head. "Just old guys," she said. "Friends of Kirsten and Jeff. And my uncle Tim is coming from out of town, to be an usher—he's real good-looking. But he's old, too. He finished college already."

"Well," Daphne said slowly. "It looks to me as if we have to make a sacrifice here."

"Sacrifice dancing? Not dance at all, at a wedding reception, with a live band, and we have those terrific dresses?" Sonya wailed.

"No, you idiot. I meant sacrifice our principles, just for one day," Daphne explained.

"I agree," Anastasia said. "It wouldn't be chasing. And it would help out the wedding, after all, so that if won't be a flop. We wouldn't want Meredith's family to have a flop of a wedding."

Meredith nodded. "Sonya?" she asked. "I don't want to do it unless it's unanimous."

Sonya sighed. "Okay," she said after a moment. "Let's invite them. Norman's address is—"

"I know Norman's address," Meredith said. She reached down to her pocketbook on the floor and pulled out a group of stamped, addressed envelopes held together by a rubber band. "Here they are. I lied when I said they weren't addressed yet."

Sonya began to laugh. She crumpled the empty box of animal crackers and tossed it at Meredith. "I'm starving," she said. "Moral decisions are very appetite-producing. Do you have anything else to eat, Anastasia? Nonfattening?"

Anastasia stood up and stretched. "Not up here," she said. "But let's go downstairs and get some bananas and watch cartoons."

***

Later, after her friends had gone home, Anastasia thought about Septimus Smith and the letter she had mailed to him a few days earlier. She wondered if he would think her pushy, bragging about the sloop. Of course he was very
interested
in sloops, so she had needed to tell him about hers. But still, she hadn't wanted to come across as overeager or anything.

She remembered an article she had read in
Cosmopolitan.
"Keep Him Guessing" it was called. Would Septimus Smith be guessing about her? Wondering whether she was interested in pursuing a relationship with him? The
Cosmo
article had made it quite clear that you should keep your man slightly mystified at all times, wondering whether he is really number one on your list. The article had even suggested little hints for doing that, like sending yourself fabulous bouquets of flowers with cryptic little notes saying things like "Thanks for last night" or simply "Love from You-Know Who. " Then the man in your life would see the flowers in your apartment, placed in a conspicuous place (the article had suggested on an occasional table, near the wine rack), but he wouldn't have the bad taste to
ask
about them—he would just
wonder.
It had also suggested hanging a masculine-looking toothbrush next to your own, in the bathroom.

But Anastasia realized that none of those things would keep Septimus Smith on his toes at all. She didn't have an occasional table; she didn't even know what an occasional table was. (A table that was there one day but not the next, so it was there only
occasionally?
That seemed totally weird.)

She didn't have a wine rack.

She couldn't afford flowers. And anyway, if she sent herself flowers, Septimus Smith wouldn't see them. She could
mention
in a letter that someone had sent her flowers, maybe.

Should she also mention that there was a masculine-looking toothbrush hanging next to hers in the bathroom? She didn't want to
lie.
Of course, she could go and get a masculine-looking toothbrush, hang it there, and
then
mention it in a letter. But it would look stupid, hanging there next to Sam's little yellow toothbrush with the Mickey Mouse head on the end of it. And her parents would ask whose masculine-looking toothbrush the new one was. Anyway, it would be hard to fit a paragraph about toothbrushes into a letter unless, of course, you had a reason to be talking about dental hygiene, and Anastasia couldn't think of one reason in the world to talk to anybody
ever
about dental hygiene. She even got bored when her own dentist, Dr. Dana, reminded her about flossing.

But she did, Anastasia realized, need to keep Septimus on his toes. And now, after her friends' visit, she thought she knew of a way. She pushed the three forgotten pink silk flowers to the corner of her desk, took out a piece of stationery, and began to write.

Dear Septimus,

I know you have not had a chance to answer my last letter, the one I wrote to tell you that I got a sloop. And of course since you have already had the problem of answering 416 letters, which required a computer since you didn't want to take a day off of work (what kind of work do you do, anyway?), I don't want to add to your burden of correspondence.

So you can just consider this page 2 of the letter I sent you the other day. the one about the sloop.

I just wanted to mention that if I should happen to receive a letter from you the first week in May, I will not be able to answer it for a few days. I am usually very prompt at answering my mail, but I will be very busy the first week in May with social events. In fact I recently had to go shopping for a fabulous gown which I will be wearing the first week in May.

I just happened to think of it while I was sitting here at my occasional table, admiring some flowers I received today.

Sincerely,
SWIFTY

(Sloop-owner With Innumerable Flowers: Tall, Young)

"I have to tell you, Anastasia, that Steve Harvey is a creep," Meredith muttered during homeroom. "Even if you
do
like him."

Anastasia shrugged. "I don't
love
him or anything," she whispered. "And I know he's a creep sometimes. But so are all the seventh-grade boys. Why is Steve any creepier than anyone else?"

"His mother called my mother last night," Meredith explained. "And she said that Steve doesn't want to come to the wedding if it means he has to wear a necktie.
Creep.
"