Anastasia at Your Service (5 page)

"Yes," her mother said finally. "A couple of years ago a publisher in New York called and asked if I was interested in illustrating a book about Houston rockets. They were paying a lot of money. I said sure, I thought I could do that very well. So they asked me to work up some sample drawings and bring them down to show to the author.

"I was lying when I said I could do that very well. I didn't know anything at all about rockets. But I got a lot of books about rockets and missiles and the space industry. And I spent about a week making rough sketches of jets and guided missiles and engines and launching pads and satellites and various kinds of rockets. Then I put them all in my portfolio and went off to New York. I really thought they were pretty good."

"What happened? Weren't they any good? Did the people laugh when they saw them?"

"Well, we all met in a fancy room at the publishing company. A couple of editors and the art director and the author. They were all sitting around a mahogany table. I was wearing my tweed suit, I remember. I don't think I've worn that since," her mother said.

"What
happened?
"

"I opened my portfolio and took out all those sketches and spread them out on the table. I was really pretty proud of them. But there was a terrible silence."

"Why? Why was there a terrible silence?"

"And then one person started to laugh. Then another. In a minute they were all laughing. They couldn't stop laughing. The fat one—the art director, I think it was—had tears rolling down his cheeks. Someone had to bring him a glass of water, because they were afraid he was going to have a heart attack from laughing."

"Why were they laughing? You're a good artist, Mom!" Anastasia felt terribly sorry for her mother, being humiliated that way.

Her mother began to laugh. "Because they were doing a book about a basketball team! The Houston Rockets is a basketball team!"

"I knew that," said Sam. "I see them on TV."

"Oh, Mom!" said Anastasia. "The rats! That wasn't fair! They should have told you! They shouldn't have laughed!"

"Well," said her mother, "it was humiliating. But I survived it. They found someone else to do the basketball book. And they gave me a job doing a book about the astronauts."

"How about you, Dad? Have you ever been humiliated?" Somehow it was making Anastasia feel better, knowing that other people had been humiliated.

Her father blushed. You could always tell when he was blushing, because he was bald. When he blushed, the top of his head turned red.

"Of course I have," he said with dignity. "No one lives to be forty-seven years old without being humiliated a few times."

"What happened?"

He was still blushing. "I don't want to talk about it," he said.

"That's not fair. Mom told about hers. And I told you about what happened to me today."

He groaned. "Promise you won't ever tell anyone."

"I promise."

Her father looked around the dining room to make sure there were no spies listening. He looked down at his plate for a minute, embarrassed. Then he looked up.

"Last semester I gave an hour-long lecture on Social Comedy in Eighteenth-Century England. The students—there were eighty-seven students in the lecture hall—kept laughing."

"But that was okay. You were lecturing about comedy," said Anastasia.

"That wasn't why they were laughing." Her father began playing with his fork.

"Why were they?"

He leaned his elbows on the table and put his face into his hands. The top of his head was bright pink.

"My fly was unzipped," he said after a while. "The whole hour. I didn't realize it until afterward."

"Dad! That's terrible! Someone should have
told
you! That wasn't fair, for them to laugh!"

But next thing she knew, Anastasia was laughing herself. So was her father. And her mother. Sam wasn't; he was busy trying to make an airplane out of a piece of lettuce.

"Well," said her father, still chuckling. "I survived, just as your mother did."

"I guess I will too, then," said Anastasia. "I'll survive being a maid."

"What are you going to say to Mrs. Bellingham when you go to work tomorrow?"

Anastasia thought. "I'll smile," she said, "and I'll say, 'Anastasia Atcher Service.'"

***

But much later, as she was going to bed, she thought of something else. Not that she would say. But that she would
do.

The worst part of the problem, Anastasia had realized, thinking about it the night before, was not the humiliation of being a maid. She could survive that, the way her mother and her father had survived their humiliations and had even been able to laugh about them afterward. Someday Anastasia would be able to tell her own children about the summer she was a maid, and she would be able to laugh about it.

What she might not survive was being a maid in front of Daphne Bellingham, who would be her classmate in seventh grade this fall.
That
was the problem she would have to solve.

And she had decided to solve it by going to work in
disguise. She would disguise herself as a middle-aged woman.

***

By ten in the morning, no one was at home except Anastasia. Her father was off teaching his summer school class, and her mother had taken Sam to visit the nursery school he would be going to in the fall.

Dumb old Sam didn't understand about nursery schools. He thought that he was going to learn to read. He had insisted on going off with Volume One of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in his stroller with him. He wanted to learn to read the part about airplanes.

Well, thought Anastasia with some satisfaction, maybe today Sam will be humiliated. Maybe the nursery school people would laugh.

Anastasia went into her parents' bedroom and opened one of her mother's bureau drawers. She felt a little guilty, because she wasn't ordinarily a sneaky sort of person.

But this was a very necessary part of her disguise.

She took out one of her mother's bras. Then she went into the bathroom and put it on. Carefully she stuffed each side of it with Kleenex. Then she put on the white blouse that Mrs. Bellingham had told her to wear.

But when she looked at herself in the mirror from different angles, she realized the Kleenex didn't work. It looked lumpy and gross.

So she took the Kleenex out and threw it away.

She thought for a minute and went back to her
mother's bureau. This time she snitched two pairs of pantyhose.

Back in the bathroom, she put a pair of pantyhose into each side of the bra. They were rounder, softer, more natural-looking than the Kleenex.

But when she looked at herself sideways in the mirror, she groaned.

It looked like Dolly Parton.

Also, it made her feel funny. She couldn't even see her feet, because she had to look over the mountain of pantyhose. So she took them out and thought some more.

After a few minutes, feeling even more guilty, because now she was going to owe her mother at least $1.49, she found a pair of scissors and cut one pair of pantyhose in half. She stuffed one rolled-up half into each side of the bra.

Now she looked into the mirror and smiled. It was perfect. She walked around the bathroom a bit to make sure the pantyhose didn't come loose or shift around, but they seemed quite secure. Maybe because her blouse buttoned so tightly over them.

Next, she opened the bathroom drawer where her mother kept make-up.

She took out the mascara and took off her glasses in order to color her eyelashes.

But she couldn't see without her glasses. Her face in the mirror was blurred.

She put her glasses back on. Now she could see her eyelashes, but she couldn't reach them with the mascara.

"Rats," said Anastasia to herself, and she sat down on
the rim of the bathtub to think. How on earth did Helen Keller put on mascara?

Braille.

Anastasia took off her glasses, and put mascara on her eyelashes without looking. Then she put her glasses back on. It didn't look too bad.

She darkened her eyebrows with an eyebrow pencil, reaching around the rims of her glasses. When she leaned forward toward the mirror, her pantyhose bosom bumped into the bathroom sink and squashed; but Anastasia noticed that it puffed right out again when she stood back. Much better than Kleenex.

Finally, very carefully, she sprinkled Johnson's Baby Powder on her hair and smoothed it in with her hands. Then, with a rubber band and a handful of bobby pins, she twisted her hair into a bun and pinned it at the back of her head. Her light hair looked gray from the powder.

She dabbed a little pink lipstick on her lips, straightened her blouse and skirt, and went to stand in front of the full-length mirror that was on the back of her parents' bedroom door.

With grayish hair, dark eyebrows, pink lipstick, and the pantyhose bosom, she figured she looked about forty years old. From her mother's closet, she borrowed a large black leather pocketbook and hung it over her shoulder. Now she definitely looked forty years old. She could be elected President of the League of Women Voters without any trouble at all.

It was twenty of eleven. Anastasia Krupnik, age forty,
with the black pocketbook thumping against her hip, got on her bike and rode to Bellmeadow Farm.

***

"Good," said Edna Fox at the back door, "you're right on time. There's lots to do. You can hang your purse in that closet there. You don't have a lot of money in it, do you? I'm not going to take the responsibility if ..."

"No," said Anastasia, and rolled her eyes. Good grief. In debt for thirty dollars, working as a maid in order to pay back thirty whole dollars, and someone asks if you have a lot of money in your purse. If she had a lot of money, for Pete's sake, she'd pay it to Mrs. Bellingham for her crummy bockle, get on her bike, and be gone so fast they'd never know what had happened.

Too bad she had to put her pocketbook in the closet. It was part of her middle-age disguise. Still, maids didn't usually carry their pocketbooks around while they served lunch, Anastasia realized.

Edna Fox handed her an apron.

Good grief, thought Anastasia. Yesterday's apron had covered her whole body. She didn't want to hide her pantyhose bosom. It would ruin the whole effect.

But the apron was a tiny white one, one that tied around the waist and had no top to it. Good. She tied it carefully, with her back to Mrs. Fox, and to Rachel and Gloria, who were at the sink. She had to hold the bosom up with one hand while she arranged the waistband of the apron. The bra was a little loose. The bosom was a
little lower than she would have liked. Still, maybe that would make her look even older. Anastasia had noticed that old ladies' bosoms began to be pretty low sometimes. Maybe she looked fifty instead of forty. Fifty was even better.

"You look different," said Mrs. Fox. "Are you okay?"

"I'm just wearing my hair differently today," said Anastasia. "I'm fine." But she realized that Mrs. Fox was looking at the bosom, not the hair.

Well, tough. It was not, Anastasia thought, unheard of for a girl to grow quite quickly in that respect. Once, years ago, she had had a baby-sitter named Marcia, who practically
overnight,
for Pete's sake, had changed from flat-chested to—

But Mrs. Fox interrupted her thoughts.

"The company's all here," she said. "They're on the terrace, having cocktails. You can start taking trays of food to the dining room table."

Anastasia carried a large silver platter of sliced turkey and ham into the dining room. Wide glass doors were opened onto the flagstone terrace, and she could see the people sitting there. She could see Mrs. Bellingham, her arch enemy, sitting in a wrought-iron chair that resembled a throne. Typical, thought Anastasia.

She moved quietly to the side of the glass doors and stood where she was hidden by the folds of an opened drape. Peeking out, she found Daphne Bellingham, who was sitting on the stone steps, sipping a Coke and looking very bored.

Anastasia had been secretly hoping that Daphne Bellingham would be very ugly, with crooked teeth and Troubled Skin. But she wasn't. She had short, curly blond hair, and tiny gold earrings in pierced ears. She wasn't beautiful. But she was kind of cute.

Rats. Anastasia's parents wouldn't let her have her ears pierced. Not till she was thirteen, they said. She had tried to do it herself once, anyway, with a needle, but her hands kept getting sweaty and the needle slid around too much.

Daphne Bellingham was wearing a yellow-and-white-striped jersey dress, and there was a funny little mark on it. Anastasia squinted at the mark. Of course. The dress had had an alligator on it once, and Daphne Bellingham had pulled the alligator off.

Oh,
rats.
Daphne Bellingham was someone Anastasia would
like.

Anastasia kicked the carpeting angrily and went back to the kitchen for another tray of food.

"Here," said Edna Fox, and put a large platter into Anastasia's hands. "Hors d'oeuvres. Pass these around, will you? Don't forget to serve the women first."

"I know about stuff like that, Mrs. Fox," said Anastasia with an icy smile.