Anastasia on Her Own (10 page)

On Thursday morning Anastasia realized that her father, despite his insistence that he was no longer upset about the coming evening with Annie, was actually very, very nervous. Panic-stricken, in fact. Anastasia had never seen her father panic-stricken before. Always, in the midst of dire emergencies and horrendous catastrophes, her father had remained calm.

When Sam had fallen out of the second-story window—right on his head—last summer, her father had not only called the ambulance but had also ridden in it with Sam to the hospital.

When Anastasia's eleven gerbils had escaped from their cage and disappeared all over the house, her father had just chuckled and helped Anastasia and Sam collect the wiggling little rodents and return them to captivity.

When a water pipe had burst in their basement, sending a geyser as big as Old Faithful right across the Ping-Pong table with such force that it knocked over the net, her father had simply gone to the telephone very calmly and called the plumber.

But now, on Thursday morning, her father came down to the kitchen with shaving cream on his neck. When Sam pointed it out, Dr. Krupnik looked startled, and went back up to the bathroom to finish shaving.

When he reappeared, he was in his stocking feet.

"Dad, where are your shoes?" Anastasia asked.

"Shoes?" her father said, and looked at his feet. "Oh yes, shoes." And he went back upstairs to find his shoes.

When the telephone rang, Dr. Krupnik jumped as if he had heard a shot. "You answer it, Anastasia," he said in a nervous voice.

Anastasia was already up from the table. "Hello," she said, and then listened to the salesman on the other end. "Just a minute," she said.

"Dad? Are you interested in taking tap-dancing lessons? It's a special discount offer. The first lesson's absolutely free."

"Taking what? Tap-dancing lessons? I don't know. Maybe. I guess—well, no, I don't think so. But I can't decide." Her father stared at her.

"I don't think you are. You hate dancing," Anastasia pointed out.

"Yes, right. I hate dancing," her father said in the same confused voice.

"I like to dance," said Sam, and he twirled around the kitchen. "But I don't want to take dancing lessons. I want to take karate lessons."

"Maybe
I
should take tap-dancing lessons," Anastasia said. She tried tap-dancing across the floor, but her hiking boots were too heavy, and one was untied. She tripped and stumbled against the refrigerator. Rubbing her bruised hip, she went back to the phone.

"Would you call back later?" she asked politely. "I can't decide right now."

Her father stood up, put on his coat, and started out the door. "I have to go," he said. "I'm teaching a class at nine. I'm giving a quiz on—"

He stood still, and thought. "I'm giving a quiz on something," he said. "I can't remember what."

Anastasia and Sam stared as he went out without saying good-bye. They watched through the window as he went to the garage, turned, and came back.

He laughed apologetically when he reappeared in the kitchen. "Forgot my briefcase," he said, and picked up the pile of schoolbooks that Meredith and Sonya had brought the afternoon before.

Anastasia stopped him in the open door. She took her math and history books gently from his arm and replaced them with his briefcase. He left again, and after a moment they saw the car back out, spewing smoke, and then disappear down the street.

"Daddy's weird today," Sam said. "Can I make a salad bar out of my oatmeal?"

Sure.

Sam went to the cupboard and gazed at the contents. Then he removed some raisins, some peanuts, some brown sugar, some shredded coconut, a crumbled Ginger Snap, and some instant coffee. Carefully he added each ingredient to his oatmeal, picked up his spoon, and began to eat.

"Okay," Anastasia said aloud to herself after she had added the breakfast dishes to the pile of dirty things in the sink, "now I have to get organized.

"First I'll do the tablecloth." She glanced again at the directions on the bottle of dye. She turned the water on in the washing machine, opened the bottle, and dumped the contents in.

"Yuck," she said, peering in after it. "It looks
black.
" Cautiously she reached in, dipped one fingertip into the water, and examined the color when she took it out. "Good. It's purple." She unfolded the white tablecloth, added it to the machine, and closed the lid.

"Next, the Ragout de Veau aux Champignons." She opened the cookbook to the correct page and reread the beginning of the recipe to confirm what she had read before: that it was okay to make it a day in advance.

"'Dry the veal on paper towels,' " she read. "Okay." She took the package of veal which Mr. Fortunato had sent, opened it, and made a face. "I didn't know it would be
pink
" she muttered.

Sam looked up from the kitchen table where he was coloring a picture. "Pink's a good color," he said. "I think I might color this elephant pink."

Anastasia ignored him. Pink was a good color, she thought, maybe for underwear or something, but it looked kind of gross when it was raw meat. It looked suspiciously like newborn gerbils. She pulled some paper towels from the roller and dried the veal.

"'Salt and pepper,' " she read, and sprinkled the meat . with salt and pepper. "Some people think gourmet cooking is hard," she confided to Sam, "but that's just because they haven't tried it. If you follow the directions, it's easy.

"Now," she said, and read some more from the recipe, "'roll it in flour.' How on earth do you roll it in flour?"

Sam didn't answer. His tongue was between his teeth, and he was busily coloring a picture of an elephant.

Anastasia shrugged. She dumped some flour into a bowl, and rolled the pieces of veal, one at a time. In a corner of the kitchen, the washing machine was churning away.

"There," said Anastasia when all of the pieces of veal were covered with flour. "Now. 'Heat oil in a pan until hot but not smoking.' Simple."

She opened the bottle of olive oil, but couldn't find a pan.

"Rats," she said when she realized that all of the pans were in the sink. She fished one out, examined it, and decided that it needed washing. It would have been okay for another batch of hamburgers; but for a gourmet dinner, it needed washing. Hastily she washed it, added oil, and put it on the stove to heat.

"Timing is the secret to good cooking," Anastasia told Sam. "Like right now, while the veal is browning in that pan, I have to cook the onions in a different pan, at the same time. Rats. I don't
have
another pan." She sighed, and went to the sink to wash a second pan.

The first pan began to smoke. Hastily, Anastasia turned the heat down and added the veal. She went back to the sink and finished washing the second pan.

"Do you think it's okay for an elephant to have one orange ear and one blue ear?" asked Sam.

"Sure." Anastasia added oil to the second pan and put it on the stove.

"Whoops," she said, "I forgot to chop the onion." Quickly she found a knife in the sink, examined it, decided it could survive without being washed, and began to chop an onion. "People who wear glasses, like me, Sam," she said, "are really lucky because they can chop onions without crying. The glasses protect their eyes."

"That other pan is smoking," Sam said.

Anastasia ran to the stove, turned the heat down, and finished chopping the onion. She put it into the second pan.

"Timing is the key," she said again.

The telephone rang.

"This is Ralph at the Good Times Dance Studio again," the man said. "You asked me to call you back. Have you thought about the tap-dancing offer? First lesson's absolutely free."

"Well, I've sort of been thinking about it. But I have some questions. Is it important to be graceful? I don't seem to be a very graceful person. I bump into stuff a lot, and knock things over. Right when I was talking to you before, I tried dancing across the kitchen, and I bumped into the handle on the refrigerator door."

"Sounds as if you're just the right kind of person for dancing lessons," the man said. "Dance lessons turn an awkward person into a graceful person, give self-confidence, increase poise."

"Well, I
could
use an increase in poise. And I'm not real big on self-confidence, but my mother said that self-confidence is something that increases naturally with age."

"We've had students who arrived for their first lesson absolutely quaking with shyness, and by the end of only
one
lesson, their inhibitions were lessened, their natural grace was enhanced—did I tell you that the first lesson is free?"

"Yeah. Oh, HOLD IT! My onions are burning! Call me back later, would you?"

Anastasia hung up the phone and ran to the stove to rescue her onions.

She scraped at the bottom of the pan with a spatula. "Only the bottom ones are burned," she said. "And actually, I
like
the taste of burned onions."

"Me too," said Sam.

"Good. Then it doesn't matter that they got burned. The meat looks okay." Anastasia stirred the browning veal with a wooden spoon. "In fact, it looks much better, now that it's not pink."

She read the next part of the recipe. "Now I add the veal to the onions, and I put the wine into the veal pan and mix it with the meat juices. Heck, that's simple. I wonder why people think gourmet cooking is hard."

She transferred the meat to the pan where the onions were. She got out the bottle of wine that Mr. Fortunato had sent.

In the corner of the kitchen, the washing machine clicked and changed from wash to rinse. Anastasia examined the bottle of wine. "Good," she said, "right on the label it says 'extra-dry.' Just what the recipe wants." She tried to remove the cap from the bottle.

"That's weird," she said to Sam. "This cap won't unscrew."

Sam glanced over. "Daddy uses that special thing," he said.

"
What
special thing?"

Sam sighed, climbed out of his chair, and went to the top drawer of the cupboard. He took something out, handed it to Anastasia, and went back to his elephant picture.

Anastasia turned it over and over in her hands. Her index finger, she noticed, was still purple. "What is this thing, Sam?" she asked. "It looks like a lethal weapon. How does it work?"

Sam shrugged. "I don't know." He began to color the elephant's left leg green.

The telephone rang. Anastasia answered it with the weapon in her hand.

"Did you save your onions?" the man asked. "This is Ralph, at the Good Times Dance Studio, calling back."

"Yeah, the onions are okay," Anastasia said. "But I'm glad you called. Do you know how to open a bottle of wine?"

"Sure. Do you have a corkscrew?"

"Is that the thing with a curly metal part, and two weird handles on the sides?"

"Right."

"Well, I've got one right here. How does it work?"

"You'll need both hands," said the man. "Can you wedge the phone on your shoulder?"

"Yeah." Anastasia wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder, and followed Ralph's instructions carefully. She screwed the corkscrew into the cork, and then carefully lowered the two raised handles. With a squishy
pop,
the cork emerged.

"Hey, that's neat!" she said to the man on the phone. "Thank you. I bet I could do it all by myself next time."

"See how with proper instruction, your self-confidence increases? The same thing is true, of course, with tap-dancing lessons."

"Yeah, well, listen, I don't feel ready to make a decision about tap-dancing when I'm in the middle of all this gourmet cooking. Could you call me back in about an hour?"

"Will do," Ralph said, and hung up.

Anastasia added a cup of wine to the pan the veal had cooked in; she swished it around with the remaining scraps of meat, and then added the mixture to the veal and onions, as the recipe instructed. Carefully she added the herbs, tomatoes, and a canful of chicken broth.

"Now," she announced, "this is a hard part, coming up."

"Me too," said Sam. "Now I do a giraffe." He turned a page in his coloring book.

"I have to put this veal marrow—yuck; look at it—and the knucklebones into cheesecloth, and add them to the rest of the stuff. First I have to find the cheesecloth. Sam, do you know where the bandages are, the ones left over from your head last summer?"

"On my bear," said Sam. "I made him into a mummy."

"Oh, rats. Well, can I un-mummy your bear? I really need the bandages."

"Sure," said Sam agreeably.

Anastasia found Sam's teddy bear on the floor of his closet, wrapped from head to toe in gauze bandages. Only his ears stuck out. After she unwound him, she had several yards of narrow gauze. She took it back to the kitchen.

"How on earth can I wrap these bones and stuff in this gauze? You could wrap a leg, or something, but how can you wrap a whole pile of stuff like this?"

Sam shook his head. He didn't know, either.

Anastasia stared at the yards of gauze, and the mound of bones and marrow. Not even an orthopedic surgeon would be able to do this, she thought. Defeat. Utter defeat. She had gotten this far in her very first gourmet dinner, and now she was defeated by a bandage.

Finally she picked up the telephone book, leafed through the yellow pages until she found what she wanted, and dialed.

"Good Times Dance Studio," the man's voice said.

"I'm really sorry to bother you right in the middle of your tap dancing and all, Ralph," Anastasia said, "but you helped me with the corkscrew, so I thought maybe you could help me figure out how to wrap knucklebones in a long skinny bandage."

The man was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Knucklebones ?"

Anastasia explained. It took quite a long time to explain, but the man was very patient.

"Geezum," he said finally, "I don't think that bandage is going to work. Lemme think. I'm thinking."

Anastasia waited.

"Pantyhose," he said finally. "Do you have pantyhose?"

"Yeah."

"Well, cut off one foot. Then you'll have like a little bag, see? And put your knucklebones and marrow into that. Then tie the top closed, with a shoelace or something. That ought to work."