Anastasia at Your Service (9 page)

"Me too."

"Even the Lord and Taylor's window. I'd even do that, without a ski mask."

Her mother chuckled. "Of course you would. We all would. But we don't even have to think about that. Old Sam is going to be okay."

"You know what
I
was thinking, in there, while we waited to see Sam?" asked her father suddenly.

"What?"

"I was thinking what a weird injury he has. A depressed skull fracture. Can you imagine a
cheerful
skull fracture?"

They couldn't. But thinking about it made them smile, and they decided they would tell Sam about it. When he woke up. When he was okay. Tomorrow.

***

"Anastasia," said her mother, after she hung up the phone the next morning, "the doctor says Sam is awake and doing just fine. And we can go to see him. But they have a rule about visitors. No one under fourteen."

Anastasia slammed down the dish towel that she was using to dry the breakfast dishes. "That's crummy! That's absolutely
crummy!
Everyone in the whole world is conspiring to get me! It's the one day I don't have to work, because Mrs. Bellingham is having people come to clean all the rugs and she's afraid I'll get in their way—which is idiotic—but I had the whole day free, and I was going to go and read to Sam, for Pete's sake. I was going to go to the library and get books about
airplanes and take them to the hospital to read them to old Sam. And now they say I can't do that unless I'm fourteen? My own, my
only
brother, and some jerk has made a rule that I can't even read to him when he has a depressed skull fracture? That's not fair! It's crummy!"

She picked up the dish towel and slammed it down again. It wasn't very satisfying to slam a dish towel. A dish would have been better. But the dishes they had used for breakfast were her favorites—yellow, with white flowers on them.

Her mother looked angry, too. "You're right, Anastasia. Sam would
want
to see you. Probably if you didn't come he would start to cry, and run a fever ..."

"And get a stomachache. It would be terrible for his health."

"Absolutely. It would be detrimental to Sam's entire recovery if you couldn't visit him. That is the
stupidest
rule!"

Dr. Krupnik appeared at the door to the kitchen. "What on earth is going on in here? You people are shouting and slamming and stamping your feet. You made the needle jump on the stereo."

Anastasia and her mother explained the hospital's rule.

"For heaven's sake," said Anastasia's father, "a rule like that is so dumb, it deserves to be broken. You're tall for your age, Anastasia. We'll just pretend you're fourteen. If they question us at the door I will swear a solemn oath, on pain of death, that you are fourteen years old."

"But Dad," said Anastasia, startled, "it would be a lie. Your whole philosophy of life is always to be honest."

"What's the date?" asked her father.

"August nineteenth."

Her father stood in front of the refrigerator, very straight and tall, with his hands at his sides. "On this date," he announced, in a loud, speech-making voice, "August nineteenth, Myron David Krupnik, Ph.D., honors graduate of several distinguished institutions of higher learning, member of the Authors Guild, Incorporated, vice-chairman of the English Department at Harvard University, noted author of several milestone volumes of poetry, contributor to the Civil Liberties Union and the Museum of Fine Arts, and general nifty person, declares that he has changed his entire philosophy of life. Drum roll, please."

Anastasia grabbed the frying pan that she had just dried, and beat on it solemnly with a wooden spoon. Her mother made some trumpet noises into the plastic funnel top of the coffee pot.

"Thank you," said Dr. Krupnik, and they stopped. "My
new
philosophy of life," he announced, "allows for the occasional posing of a five-foot, seven-inch, twelve-year-old girl as a fourteen-year-old girl, for the emergency purpose of cheering up her little brother, in the face of an idiotic bureaucratic rule."

He bowed. Anastasia and her mother applauded. Dr. Krupnik left the kitchen.

Maybe, thought Anastasia, it would help if I borrowed a bra again, and took some pantyhose, and...

No, she thought. Absolutely not. Her own philosophy of life, she decided suddenly, was never, under any circumstances, ever, to go anywhere again wearing a pantyhose bosom. You just could never predict when someone might ask you to pass a tray of deviled eggs.

***

When they stopped at the library on the way to the hospital, Anastasia found all sorts of airplane books.
All About Airplanes. Conquering the Sky. Flight Through the Ages,
which opened with a picture of Icarus and his wax wings, melting when he flew too close to the sun. She checked it out because it had some wonderful photographs of jets at the end, but the picture of Icarus made her feel funny, because it made her think of Sam, falling. For a minute she wished that Sam had taken up some hobby other than airplanes. But what if he had taken up submarines? Probably he would have drowned. What if he had become interested in animal training? Somewhere he would have found a wild rhinoceros and been eaten up.

She shuddered. Well, her father had spent the whole morning fixing the screens on all the upstairs windows. At least Sam would never fall from his window again. And from now on, she told herself, she would keep a very careful eye on her brother
all the time
so that he wouldn't have any more accidents, ever. She planned to be the very best sister in the whole world.

And she would start by being a wonderful hospital
visitor. She planned to sit by Sam's bed and say soothing things to him, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth now and then, reading to him in a soft voice, and saying, "There, there," now and then when he whimpered with pain.

Maybe, in fact, she would go to nursing school, or even medical school, when she grew up. If only they wouldn't make her wear those white stockings. She really hated the white stockings that nurses wore.

But Anastasia's image of Sam the Invalid faded even before she saw him. She could
hear
him when they were still outside in the hall approaching his room. Not because he was whimpering feebly with pain. He was singing, in his loudest voice, "The monkey he got drunk, and sat on the elephant's trunk..."

He stopped singing when he saw his family. He grinned, waved, and said, "Hi! Did you bring me anything?"

The nurse who was in his room grinned also, and said, "Hi, there. You have quite a boy here. His repertoire of songs beats anything I ever heard at a fraternity party!"

Sam's mother went to the bed and kissed Sam's little face where it poked out beneath the turban of bandages. So did his father. Sam wiggled and made a face. He didn't like being kissed.

Anastasia thought about kissing him, but she just squeezed his feet through the covers, and said, "Hello, old Sam."

"It's okay to squeeze my feet," said Sam. "But don't squeeze my arm, because I have ivy on my arm."

Good grief, thought Anastasia. His brain has been damaged.

"You have
what,
Sam?" asked her mother.

"Ivy," said Sam. He pointed with one finger to the needle in the back of his other hand. A tube ran from the needle up to a bottle hanging on a metal stand.

"Oh." Mrs. Krupnik laughed. "An IV."

"That's what I said," said Sam with satisfaction.

"That's how they feed you, Sam, until you get a little better," his father explained.

"Yep. They feed me poison. It's my poison ivy machine."

Anastasia groaned. Sometimes Sam was impossible.

***

Later, back at home, the telephone rang.

"Anastasia? Willa Bellingham here. I've tried to reach you several times today."

"Well, I wasn't home, Mrs. Bellingham, because my little brother had a very serious acci——"

But Mrs. Bellingham interrupted her. "The rug cleaners have just left, and I am completely dissatisfied with the job they did. It is simply impossible to find conscientious workers these days."

"I try to be conscientious, Mrs. Bellingham," said Anastasia pointedly, and as politely as she could. But it was hard to be polite. She was furious. Mrs. Bellingham had interrupted her in the middle of telling about Sam's accident. Mrs. Bellingham was an insensitive creep. She didn't have the slightest interest in anyone else's problems. All she cared about was her stupid Oriental rugs.

Secretly, Anastasia hoped that someday a huge, un-housebroken dog would visit Mrs. Bellingham's house. Hah. So much for the Oriental rugs.

"Yes," said Mrs. Bellingham. "Of course you do. Now I would like you here tomorrow at ten, promptly. I'm giving a large party next week and there's a great deal to be done. I won't be home because I have my volunteer work to do. Mrs. Fox will give you your instructions."

Good grief, thought Anastasia. Probably the silver all needs to be polished again. She groaned silently, and calculated quickly in her head. She would have paid back her debt to Mrs. Bellingham in just seven more hours. Then she could quit.

But in a million years she didn't want to miss that party next week. She wanted to
be
there when Mrs. Bellingham was humiliated. She decided she wouldn't quit until after the party. School would be starting the week after that, anyway.

"All right, Mrs. Bellingham," she said.

"You'll be here
promptly
at ten?"

Anastasia sighed. "Atcher service," she said.

Rachel and Gloria were washing all the slipcovers in the house. There seemed to be about three million slipcovers. But Rachel and Gloria didn't seem to mind. They trudged back and forth to the washing machine and dryer and the ironing board, and they were quite cheerful. They called "Hi!" to Anastasia when she arrived. Anastasia had been a little worried that they might comment about her bosom, but they didn't seem to notice that it had disappeared.

Neither did Mrs. Fox, who was very busy making lists. She sat at the kitchen table, writing long lists of foods for the party, and she had ball-point pen marks on her lips, because she kept chewing on her ball-point pen.

Please don't ask me to polish silver, thought Anastasia. Please.

And it worked.

"Books," said Mrs. Fox, when Anastasia asked her what she should do. "In the library. Dust all the books." Then she nibbled at the ball-point pen again. Her lips were turning quite blue, like a creature in a horror movie. It was a rather interesting effect, and Anastasia thought briefly that maybe if she became a writer someday she would write a novel about a fat housekeeper who secretly became a werewolf at times, and maybe ate raw liver out of the refrigerator. Thinking about it made her stomach feel queasy.

But working in the library was fun. It was a medium-sized room that opened off the front hall, and all four walls were lined with bookcases. In the center there was a large mahogany desk. Probably Mrs. Bellingham sat at that desk and counted her money.

Probably she sat there and wrote her will.

Probably, thought Anastasia uncomfortably, she would disinherit her granddaughter if she knew what Daphne was up to.

There was a photograph of Daphne in the study, a color photograph of Daphne looking happy and windblown, wearing a blue sweater, somewhere with ocean in the background. It was in a silver frame.

The smiling Daphne in the photograph didn't look like the sort of person who would hate her own grandmother.

In fact, until she had met Daphne, Anastasia had never known anybody who had hated her own grandmother. There had been times when Anastasia had gotten
mad
at her grandmother, but that wasn't the same. She had always loved her. Now that her grandmother was dead, she had her grandmother's wedding ring, which she kept in a small leather box. Sometimes she wore it to bed, because she thought that it might make her dream about the person she would marry. It hadn't worked yet, but it might, sometime.

Jenny MacCauley always went to her grandmother's house for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and her grandmother always made a miniature pumpkin pie just for Jenny.

Craig Robishaw had told her once that his grandmother had taken a ride on his trail bike, without even wearing a helmet.

Steve Harvey's grandmother lived in England, and when he had gone to visit her there, she hadn't made him go to museums or anything, but had gotten him a ticket to a rock concert.

Why was Mrs. Bellingham such a crummy grandmother?

Or—thought Anastasia suddenly—why was Daphne such a crummy granddaughter?

Anastasia took a rag from the bundle Mrs. Fox had given her and began to dust books. The books in Mrs. Bellingham's study weren't your ordinary Literary Guild Alternate Selection, best-seller sorts. And no trashy novels. These books were all leather-bound, deep blues
and reds, with gold printing on the covers. Classics, thought Anastasia. First editions. The kinds of books her father would love.

Her father had once said that he would kill for a first edition of something by Joyce James. Or maybe it was James
Joyce; she
couldn't remember.