Anastasia at Your Service (12 page)

"Repeat that, please," said her mother, staring at her. "I want to be certain I heard you correctly, Anastasia."

Good grief, thought Anastasia.
Big
trouble. She looked at her plate, where one bite of a pancake snowman still lay soggily in some syrup.

"Thehabitationof thegreatunwashed," she finally repeated, mumbling miserably. "I was only—"

"
That,
" interrupted her father angrily, "is the stupidest, most uneducated, mindless, bigoted remark I have ever heard you say!"

"But—" began Anastasia.

"
Snobbish,
" said her mother. "I can't believe it. You, of
all
people, turning into a
snob!
"

"What I meant was—-"

"What you
said
was 'unwashed.' Is that correct? Did I hear you correctly?" asked her father.

"Yes." Anastasia sighed. "You heard me right. Unwashed. But I was only—"

"Do you have any understanding of what low income means?" her father demanded.

Anastasia looked him in the eye. Now
she
was mad. "Dad," she said, "I myself am low income. So far this week, at work, I earned forty dollars, out of which I had to pay thirty-five for a bockle, so that my take-home pay was five dollars. Plus the extremely low-income allowance that you give me. Don't talk to
me
about understanding poverty, for Pete's sake. I
live
it."

"And do you consider yourself 'unwashed'?" Her father said the word with distaste.

"No. My jeans are unwashed, but—"

"And do you consider
poor
to be synonymous with
unclean?
"

Anastasia could see that she was doomed to lose a war she hadn't intended to start. "No," she said.

"Or the underprivileged to be lacking in human dignity?"

"No. Definitely not."

Her mother had gone back to the crossword puzzle. "It was just a thoughtless remark, Myron," she said.

Unfortunately her father didn't have a crossword puzzle, and he had apparently finished the article about the defense budget. He set the newspaper aside.

"You haven't ever seen where I grew up, have you, Anastasia?"

"You grew up in Boston," Anastasia said.

"I grew up in Boston. I also grew up in
poverty.
My mother, my father, my four brothers and I all lived in a four-room apartment." Her father stood up and took his plate and coffee cup to the sink.

Anastasia poked unhappily at the last bit of her soggy pancake. She didn't want it. But she didn't want to hear a lecture, either, about the millions of underprivileged people who aren't fortunate enough to have pancakes for breakfast. She gulped down the last bite.

"The bathroom was down the hall," her father said.
"We shared it with two other families." He rinsed his plate. Back at the table, her mother sighed and erased another mistake in the crossword puzzle.

Anastasia carried her own plate to the sink and held it under the running water. Her father watched her, meaningfully.

"We didn't have hot water," her father said. "My mother heated water on the stove."

Ho-hum, thought Anastasia. But she nodded politely.

"B
UT WE WERE NOT UNWASHED
!" said her father. "Can you get that through your head?"

Not if you yell at me, thought Anastasia. All I get through my head if you yell at me is an Excedrin headache.

But she nodded again. "Yessir," she said.

Dr. Krupnik stroked his beard. He looked more cheerful all of a sudden. "You know what?" he said. "It's Saturday. And it's a beautiful day. Let's go for a ride, Anastasia. I'll show you where I lived when I was a kid."

Anastasia stifled a groan. There was nothing she wanted to do
less
on a Saturday than take a trip down Memory Lane with her father. But she smiled sweetly, and said, "Sure, Dad."

I brought it on myself, she thought, and went to brush her teeth.

"Mom," said Anastasia, as her father got the car out of the garage, "up in my room, on my desk, is a big feather. Would you take it to Sam when you go to the hospital? I promised him."

"Sure."

Out in the driveway, her father honked the horn. Anastasia sighed. "He really knows how to ruin someone's Saturday," she said.

Her mother picked up the crossword puzzle again. "Good for you, Anastasia!
Ruin!
Four down. The clue was 'to devastate.'"

"Right. That's what I meant. He's completely devastated my Saturday." She went glumly out to the car.

"My father never had a car," announced Dr. Krupnik as he pulled into a Boston parking garage. "Never in his whole life did my father own a car. If he
had
owned a car, he would never have been able to afford six dollars for parking in a garage. Six dollars would have fed our whole family for a week, back in 1935."

Anastasia tried to look interested. Actually, she was bored stiff. Though she had never seen her father's childhood home before, she had heard all his dull poverty stories. Every twelve-year-old kid had, she was quite sure. Every twelve-year-old kid in the entire world had to listen to things like "When I was your age I walked five miles to school in my bare feet." Or, "When I was your age I had to milk twenty-three cows by hand before the sun came up, in the middle of winter." Or, "When I was a kid, all we got for Christmas was an orange and a pair of mittens." Probably even Rockefeller kids had to listen to things like that.

Anastasia vowed that when she had children she would never ever tell them what a deprived childhood she had had. That she had had to work as a maid when she was only twelve. That she had lived in a house with
an old refrigerator that couldn't make reliable ice cubes. That she had never in her entire childhood been taken to Disneyland.

She looked around as they left the garage.

"Dad!" Anastasia said. "This is Quincy Market, for Pete's sake! I've been here before! I
hate
Quincy Market! It's all tourists! Did you live here when you were a kid? Did your father run a boutique or something?"

Her father looked at her in surprise. Then he looked around at Quincy Market: at the restaurants, art galleries, gift shops, pubs, and clothing stores. He began to laugh.

A middle-aged couple, each carrying a camera, glanced at Anastasia and her father, and frowned. Nearby, a young man with a scraggly mustache tuned his violin and began to play; someone tossed a coin into his violin case, which was open on the brick sidewalk.

"Of course I didn't live here. This wasn't even here when I was a kid. I mean, the
buildings
were here—you can see that the buildings are very old—but in those days, when I was a boy, this whole area was..." He stopped talking, scrunched his nose, moved aside to let a throng of tourists pass, and tried to think of the right word.

"The pits?" asked Anastasia, beginning to get the picture.

Her father grinned. "Yes. It was definitely the pits. Anyway, where I lived was over this way. Come on."

He guided her across a street, under an underpass—she could hear the cars zooming overhead—and onto
the sidewalk in front of an Italian meat market. A burly dark-haired man wearing a white apron called to them from the doorway. "You want chicken? We got lotsa chicken parts on special today! Eighty-nine cents a pound!"

"No, thanks," her father called back. "Not today."

"Lamb chops?" the butcher called. "Loin lamb chops?"

But they were already around the corner. Anastasia's father was guiding her as he looked for street signs.

"Salem Street," he said, almost to himself. "If we go down Salem Street, and then turn right, I think ..."

She trotted beside him, dodging the people. Children darted here and there, calling to each other. From upper windows women leaned, calling to the children. In storefront doorways, men stood, calling to the women in the windows.

One of the men called to Anastasia, "Hey, Blondie, you and your papa wanta pizza?"

Actually, Anastasia would have loved a pizza, as long as it didn't have anchovies. Anchovies always made her think of her goldfish. She had always suspected that unsold goldfish ended up as pizza anchovies.

But her father was striding ahead of her, looking down side streets. She said, "No, thank you," politely to the pizza man and ran to catch up. "Maybe later," she called back, over her shoulder, but the pizza man was already calling to someone else.

From an open window above her somewhere she could hear familiar music. Anastasia looked up. A
woman was reaching from the window, hanging diapers on a clothesline that stretched across to the next building. The music was coming from behind the woman.

"Dad," she said, pulling at his sleeve. "Listen. Someone's playing that opera that you always play."

He stopped walking, listened for a moment, and then looked up at the woman, who was snapping diapers straight as she pinned them to the line.

"Puccini, eh?" her father called. Ordinarily, Anastasia was grossed out when her father spoke to total strangers in public. But somehow it seemed okay here. The woman grinned down from her window and called something back to Dr. Krupnik, in another language.

He smiled, waved, and called, "
Ciao!
"

"Chow?" said Anastasia. "That sounds like a good idea. All these restaurants smell terrific."

"No:
ciao.
That's Italian. It's just a greeting."

Two little boys ran past, chasing each other, almost knocking over a woman pushing a baby carriage, and disappeared into a candy store. The woman with the baby called after them angrily and then turned to jounce her baby back to sleep. Anastasia couldn't understand what she was saying.

"Dad," Anastasia said, "
everybody's
speaking Italian!"

"It's their native language," her father explained. "They know how to speak English. If they were talking to us, they'd speak English. But to each other they speak Italian. Here: I think we want to turn down that next street. It's been so long since I've been back here."

They turned to the right, down a twisted, crooked street so narrow that she didn't see how a car could possibly get through. One had, though, and had parked, and it had a ticket that said
VIOLATION
, in big letters, on the windshield. Shabby buildings rose on either side and shadowed the street. Old women sat knitting, in lawn chairs, right on the sidewalk. Two men played checkers at a card table set up in a doorway; a dog by their feet yawned and scratched at a flea. Children scampered and giggled and chased each other. Babies cried; mothers scolded; a cat slept, unconcerned, in a window.

Even the graffiti spray-painted on the side of a building were in Italian.

"There it is!" said her father triumphantly, and he pointed to an undistinguished brick building on the corner. "Third floor rear!"

They climbed the three cement steps that led to the doorway, and peered inside. A row of metal mailboxes was attached to the wall. Anastasia read the names aloud: "Castelucci, De Luca, Ronzoni, Di Benedetto.

"It sounds like the cast of a Fellini movie," she said.

Then she looked around again, at the tiny street throbbing with life, at the children, the grandmothers, the cats, and dogs. She listened to the noises: doors slamming, radios playing, the shouting, arguing, laughing, singing. "As a matter of fact," she said, "being here is like being in a Fellini movie."

Her father grinned. "I love it," he said.

"I love it, too," Anastasia admitted. "I thought it
would be boring, coming here, but it isn't. But there's something I can't figure out, Dad. Were you
Italian
when you were a kid?"

He laughed. "Anastasia, do I
look
Italian?"

She studied his face carefully. A little chubby. Head bald on top; remaining hair red and curly, with some streaks of gray on the sides. Pink nose, with dents in it because his glasses had slid down a bit, the same way hers did when it was hot and her face got slippery. Curly beard.

"No," she said finally. "You don't."

"My parents came here from Czechoslovakia. This whole area, when I was young, was a place where immigrants from many different countries settled. My father came here first. Then, after he'd saved enough money, he sent for my mother."

"What about you? What about your brothers? Did she come alone, and leave you behind in Czech—— in Czech——I can't say it."

"Czechoslovakia. No, no. We were all born right here. Third floor rear."

"Not in a
hospital?
"

"Hospitals were too expensive. I told you, Anastasia, my family was
poor.
"

She cringed, waiting, but he didn't say anything about unwashed.

He was wrinkling his forehead, looking around, remembering. "My father was a tailor. At first he worked for someone else. But I don't know where that was. It was before I was born. By the time I came along, he had
his own shop; it was around the corner and down about half a block."

He looked around the corner and down. But there was nothing except an Italian restaurant, a dry cleaner, and a pastry shop.

"Well," he said finally, "it's gone now, of course. But in the summer, when I wasn't in school, I used to carry his lunch down to the shop every day."

"Were there other people around from Czech—— from Czech——
Rats,
Dad; I
still
can't say it."

"Czechoslovakia. Sure there were. Lots. A whole community. Some of them were even old friends from the same village back in the old country."

"Where did they all go? Why aren't they here now?"

"Let's walk, and we'll find a place to have some lunch." He put his arm around her shoulders, and they turned onto another street, walking slowly. "Where did they go? Different places, I guess. They all worked hard, and saved, and looked for good places to raise their children. I think they looked for places that reminded them of the old country. My mother and father eventually bought a little house farther out, where they could have a yard and my mother could have a garden."

"But he never ever had a car," Anastasia mused. "I thought everybody in the suburbs had to have a car."