Anastasia on Her Own (9 page)

"Don't even tell me what you're going to cook for your gourmet dinner," Sonya said, "because it'll make me hungry. All I had for lunch was an apple and two glasses of water. Practically zero calories."

"What're you going to wear?" Meredith asked.

"I don't know. I'm going to look through my mom's clothes and see if I can find something to borrow. It has to be purple. My color scheme is purple. Hey—that reminds me. I need some flowers. Do you guys know where I could find some flowers?"

They all glanced out into the snow-covered yard.

"There aren't any flowers this time of year," Sonya pointed out. "You'll have to use fake flowers."

"My sister has some fake flowers in her room," Meredith said. "Big ones, made of crepe paper. You want me to steal them for you?"

Anastasia thought about that. Crepe paper flowers didn't sound very romantic. She shook her head. "I don't think so. Only in an emergency. I'll call you if I need them."

Meredith sighed, and her breath made a puff of steam in the cold winter air. "You know, Anastasia," she said wistfully, "of the four of us—you, me, Sonya, and Daphne—you're the very first one to get into a real romance, with a dinner date and everything. We're all really jealous. You know how supercool Daph pretends to be? Well, even Daphne confessed during lunch that she wished she would have a real date, like you, instead of just yelling insults back and forth with Eddie at McDonald's every Saturday."

Anastasia nodded sympathetically. "The thing is, Steve just happened to become mature a little sooner than the other seventh-grade guys. They'll catch up pretty soon. Then we'll
all
have romantic dates every weekend."

She turned to Sonya. "Even Norman Berkowitz will become mature, Sonya. You wait."

Sonya stamped her feet up and down on the back steps. "I'm freezing," she announced. "My body chemistry is all screwed up since I haven't been eating anything. My body is living on my fat, and I'm freezing. My fat used to keep me warm."

"You're freezing because it's cold out," Meredith told her. "I'm freezing, too, and I ate two whole lunches—mine and yours."

"You'd better go," Anastasia said. "I'm freezing, standing here with the door open. Thanks for coming over."

She waved as her friends headed down the driveway, toward the street. Then she went back to the kitchen to write out her schedule for the next day. The bulletin board in the kitchen was becoming cluttered with revised schedules. But there was so much to do when you had a romantic date. She wondered how movie actresses and models managed—they had romantic dates
every night.

After Sam was in bed, and Dr. Krupnik was in the study reading the paper, Anastasia went to her parents' room and looked through the drawer where her mother kept make-up. Mrs. Krupnik didn't actually
wear
make-up very often; she said it made her face itch. But she had quite an assortment of things. Some of them, she had told Anastasia, were probably twenty years old.

Anastasia looked for everything that was purple.

Then she lined it all up on the table in front of the mirror and began the application.

First she took off her glasses and put deep purple eye shadow across her eyelids. With her glasses back on, though, she could hardly see it. If only she didn't have to wear glasses, Anastasia thought. Usually she liked the intellectual look that her glasses gave her—but for a passionate evening, she didn't want to look intellectual.

Maybe she could leave her glasses off on Friday evening. But when she removed them, experimentally, she realized once again that everything was a blur. It would never work. She wouldn't even be able to serve dinner. She would bump into the table, and she would spill things.

She sighed, and added more of the purple eye shadow so that it would show under the rims of her glasses.

There was no purple rouge, but she used the deepest red she could find, and smeared circles across her cheeks. Then she carefully applied purplish red lipstick, going slightly beyond the borders of her lips to give herself a mature, passionate look.

She opened her mother's jewelry box and found, to her delight, a pair of dangly earrings with some small purple stones. Wincing, she screwed them tightly onto her earlobes. Good grief. No
wonder
her mother never wore those earrings; they were excruciating.

Still, when she looked at herself in the mirror, tilting her head from side to side so that the earrings moved and jangled, the effect was terrific.

I
glitter,
Anastasia thought.

But the hair, she thought despondently; the hair stinks.

She brushed her long straight hair, bunched it up in her hand, and twisted it onto the top of her head. Firmly she adhered it there with bobby pins. That hurt, too. In fact, she was now in almost unbearable pain, both in her earlobes and on the top of her head.

But it's worth it, she thought, looking in the mirror at her new self, purple with make-up, glittering in the ears, and minus the long mane of tangled hair. I'm a new person. A new sophisticated, mature,
passionate
person.

Maybe I should show Dad, she thought.

No. Better to surprise him, when I appear on Friday night.

Quickly she undid her hair, removed the earrings, and went to the bathroom to wash off the make-up. A pink washcloth was ruined; she tossed it into the laundry hamper. She gathered up the make-up, the earrings, and the bobby pins to take them to her room. As an afterthought, she looked in the medicine cabinet and added a bottle of aspirin to her load. I may need that, she thought, to counteract the pain when I put on those earrings and bobby pins again.

Scrubbed, brushed, and in her pajamas and bathrobe, Anastasia went down to the study. Her father had started a fire in the fireplace, and there was music playing on the stereo. He looked up from the book he was reading when Anastasia came in.

"I want to talk to you, Dad," she said.

"Guess what," he said. "Some intruder was here. Someone with no taste."

"What do you mean? No one was here all day except me and Sam. Meredith and Sonya stopped by with my homework, but they didn't come in. Anyway, they have great taste. You should see the new sweatshirt Meredith has — punk city is written across the front, in rhinestones."

Dr. Krupnik laughed. "I'll argue that one with you some other time," he said, "in about five years. No, look; here's what I meant. Look what I found on the stereo."

He picked up the Rachmaninoff album and displayed it with a look of disdain.

"Dad,
I
was playing that. It's
great.
"

"Anastasia, I wish you'd learn to appreciate Bach. Rachmaninoff is schmaltzy."

Anastasia flopped on the couch beside him. "Wouldn't you say that it's romantic, Dad? I read in a magazine that that record is romantic, and so I tried it out, and it
is.
At least I thought so. It almost made me faint, listening to it."

"
Faint?
Did you forget to eat lunch?"

Anastasia thought. "Well, yes, I guess I did forget to eat lunch. I fed Sam, though. I gave him scrambled eggs."

Her father put the album back down. "Try to remember to eat, Anastasia. It's important, especially at your age. You're a growing girl."

"Dad, that's sort of what I want to talk to you about. About the fact that I'm growing up, and having a date Friday night and all that. And I want to talk to you, ah, about passion."

Her father put his book down. He lit his pipe. "About passion?" he asked, after he got the pipe going. "Help! Where's your mother? I need your mother. This is the kind of conversation thirteen-year-old girls are supposed to have with their
mothers.
"

Anastasia giggled. "Don't panic," she said reassuringly. "It's just that I'm kind of worried about you."

"About me?"

"I mean about you and Friday night. The problem is this: it's my very first date, as you know, and that's important, and I think I'm being a pretty good sport about not going to the movies so that I can be a chaperone for you and Annie—"

"'Good sport' isn't the term for it, Anastasia. You're a savior. You've absolutely saved my life, and my mental health, and my reputation. I was a nervous wreck, anticipating the evening with Annie. But look at me now: calm, cool. I'm not even worried about seeing Annie now, because of you. It won't be any big deal."

"But you see, I'm planning a passionate evening."

"You're planning a
what?
"

"I have this magazine article that tells about how to plan a dinner date, and so I'm following its directions on how to make it romantic, and I have a color scheme and all, and that's why I got that record out, because the article said it was passionate."

Dr. Krupnik glanced at the record with a wry look. "Oh," he said.

"But I have several problems. One is that I have to have flowers, and I don't have flowers."

"Well," said her father, "I can solve that one for you. There's a flower shop in Harvard Square. I'll bring home some flowers on Friday."

"Purple," Anastasia said.

"Purple?"

"Yeah, because that's my color scheme. Purple is supposed to be a passionate color."

"Just exactly how passionate is this evening supposed to be?" her father asked, with his forehead furrowed. "I thought it was going to be a casual dinner."

"Well, I want to discuss that in a minute. But first, I have another problem. Do you know what cheesecloth is?"

"No. Sometimes expensive cheese comes wrapped in a sort of disgusting clothlike stuff. Is that cheesecloth?"

"I don't know. But I need some. Do you think we have any?"

"Hold it. I
do
know how to do research. Hand me the dictionary, Anastasia."

She took the thick red volume from the bookcase and gave it to her father.

He flipped through the pages until he found the right one. "Here," he said. "'Cheesecloth. A coarse cotton gauze.'"

"Gauze? Like a bandage?"

"I guess so."

"I bet we have bandages. From the time Sam fell out the window last summer and hurt his head. Mom had to change his bandages. I think there are some left over, in the bathroom closet. Good. That's solved. Now we can talk about passion."

Dr. Krupnik groaned and put the dictionary on the floor. "I was afraid you were going to say that."

"Here's the problem. You and Annie are going to be there—"

"And Sam. Don't forget Sam, and Steve. I need all the chaperones I can get."

"Okay, but what I'm talking about is you and Annie. Now, as I told you, I'm going to have all this romantic stuff, the purple color scheme, and that record, and the French food, and the candles. But that's for me and Steve. I
don't
want you to be affected by it. I don't want you and Annie to start feeling romantic or anything. I thought about asking you to eat in the kitchen, with the fluorescent light on, but—"

Her father laughed. "Anastasia, you needn't worry about that. We'll eat in the passionately purple dining room, but frankly, all I'm planning to do is ask Annie about her life in Guatemala, and then I'll brag a bit about Katherine and my kids, and then she'll leave. And as for the romantic music—well, it may make you faint with passion, but frankly, it turns my stomach. So I'll probably have to excuse myself several times to throw up."

"Good. That's very unromantic. I hope Annie throws up, too.

"My only other problem is one that I guess you can't solve," Anastasia went on with resignation.

"What's that? Try me."

"Promise you won't tell Daphne, or Sonya, or Meredith."

Her father promised.

"Well, with all this passion and romance and my first date and everything, frankly, I have a horrible feeling that Steve Harvey is the wrong person."

"But you said he was your boyfriend."

"He
is,
but he's not at all romantic. He's so adolescent."

"Well, of course he's adolescent, Anastasia. He's thirteen years old."

"Yeah." Anastasia sighed. "Thirteen-year-old boys are so gross. I wish my first date was with Laurence Olivier.
That
would be romantic."

Her father almost choked on the stem of his pipe. "Laurence Olivier's probably eighty years old!" he said.

"He is
not.
I watch
Wuthering Heights
every time they show it on TV, and Laurence Olivier is just the right age for passion."

"Anastasia, they made that movie
years
ago. That movie's almost as old as I am!"

"It
is?
" Anastasia asked angrily. "Oh, RATS! That's
cheating!
Now I have to get a whole new fantasy!"

Her father yawned and tapped the ashes from his pipe into the ashtray. "Do me a favor, Anastasia," he said. "Wait till next week. I think we have enough to handle right now."