Anastasia at Your Service (8 page)

"Deinstitutionalized psychotics. Crazy people, but they're not dangerous, so they don't have to be in an institution anymore. I'll give them some."

"Daphne," said Anastasia slowly, "you know, we're
really not being fair. All of those people have problems. But it isn't fair to call them undesirable."

"
I
don't call them undesirable. I
like
them. I think they're the most interesting people in town. I even like that grubby old drunk. But my grandmother will think they're undesirable. And she's the one we want to humiliate, right?"

"Right." Actually, it was beginning to shape up as a terrific plan.

"There are a couple of guys who hang out in the park and smoke dope all the time. One of them was in jail once, I think, for selling drugs. I'll invite them."

Inside the house, the telephone rang. It rang a second time.

"Daphne, aren't you going to answer the phone?"

Daphne shook her head. "It'll just be for my parents. Let it ring."

"You're weird, Daphne. You're really weird," said Anastasia. She got up to go answer the telephone. But by the time she found it, after the fifth ring, there was no one on the other end.

"It's almost nine. I have to go home, Daphne," she said when she went back to the porch.

"Listen, don't worry about a thing. I'll get the invitations and I'll distribute them. They won't even have your fingerprints on them."

"Daphne, is this against the
law?
Could we get arrested?"

But Daphne just laughed. "Thou shalt not sweat it," she said.

***

Something was wrong at home. Anastasia could tell when she turned the corner. All the downstairs lights were on, and if something wasn't wrong, all the downstairs lights wouldn't be on. Her father was always yelling about the electric bill.

Then her heart sank. There was a police car in the driveway.

How could the police know
already
about the revenge she and Daphne were plotting?

I'll deny everything, she thought. Even if they put lighted matches under my fingernails. I'll say I never met Daphne Bellingham in my life.

They have to read me my rights, she thought. I'm entitled to a lawyer. I won't say anything that can be used against me.

It was an
accident
that I dropped the thing down the garbage disposal. And I've already paid back $17.50 of it.

Anastasia tried to think of every bad thing she had ever done. Surely her mother wouldn't have noticed yet that one pair of pantyhose was missing. Anyway, her mother wouldn't call the police about one lousy pair of pantyhose.

And the Billie Holiday records were two whole years ago. She shouldn't have reminded her father about them. But still, even though it had made him sulk at dinner, thinking about the Billie Holiday records, he wouldn't have called the
police.

Terrified, she opened the back door.

"Anastasia!" said Mrs. Stein, their next-door neighbor.
What on earth was Mrs. Stein doing in their kitchen at nine
P.M
.? Mrs. Stein never went out at night. She had all her favorite TV shows to watch. She even liked the summer reruns.

"Sweetheart," said her mother, coming into the kitchen. "I tried to call you at Daphne's, but no one answered. You must have been outside. But I knew you'd be home in a few minutes. Thank God you're here."

Her mother's eyes were red. Anastasia could tell that she had been crying.

"What's wrong?" asked Anastasia in a small voice. Her stomach felt funny. She would confess, she knew. They wouldn't have to put the matches under her fingernails. She would tell everything: the plot, the pantyhose, even all the way back to the cupcake she had stolen when she was nine. If only her mother wouldn't cry.

"There's been an accident," said her mother, and put her arms around Anastasia.

"W
WHERE'S
D
AD
?" asked Anastasia. "
WHAT'S HAPPENED TO
D
AD?
"

"Dad's okay," said her mother. "It's Sam. Dad's at the hospital with Sam. The police are going to take us there."

Later, Anastasia could barely remember the ride to the hospital. It seemed like a blur, or a dream. But she remembered her mother holding her hand and telling her what had happened.

They had put Sam to bed, with his ragged security blanket, which he always took to bed, and with his
encyclopedia volume. He hadn't even wanted a bedtime story. He just wanted to read "airplane" to them once more, and then he kissed them good night, and they turned off his light and went downstairs.

Later—much later—her parents were in the living room, reading, when they heard a crash.

"Sam fell out of bed, right, Mom?" asked Anastasia, holding tightly to her mother's hand. "Dumb old Sam. He was fooling around with his crib, and he fell out of bed. He probably broke his arm or something, didn't he, Mom?" Funny, how when you wanted someone to laugh and say "Yes, that's right," you talked on and on, not giving them a chance to say it because secretly you were scared they wouldn't say it, but would say something else that you didn't want to hear.

And finally her mother squeezed her hand back and said no. Sam had apparently gotten out of his crib and had taken his airplane book over to the window—they didn't know why, but they thought maybe he had wanted to look into the sky for airplanes—and when he leaned against the screen it had broken, and Sam had fallen from the window.

Anastasia's stomach felt sick. The
window.
That was practically like the Empire State Building. Sam's window was very high. If they had only never moved from the apartment where they used to live—their first-floor apartment in Cambridge—if they had never moved to this enormous house—if only ...

"Did it hurt?" she asked in a small voice. "Did he cry?"

"Sweetie," said her mother, "he was unconscious. We think his head hit that tree stump, where the dead elm tree had been taken down."

There was something else Anastasia wanted to ask, but she couldn't make her voice say the words. The police car was pulling up to the hospital entrance. Anastasia was still holding her mother's hand, and someone guided them in and put them in an elevator, and doors closed and doors opened, and suddenly she saw her father, sitting in an ugly green plastic chair, with his head down, looking at the floor. He looked up when he heard them, but he didn't smile; he just stood up, with his face sad and puzzled, and he reached out his arms.

Anastasia ran to him, and she began to cry. She made her voice say the words, and she asked the question, but it was the most terrible question she had ever asked.

"Daddy," she sobbed, "is our Sam going to die?"

No, they told her, but she didn't believe them. Sam is not going to die, her father told her, but she didn't believe him, even though he had never lied to her, not ever.

She cried and cried, and she didn't care that her face was red and her hair was messy and her glasses were falling off because tears made them slippery.

Then a nurse said it too, that Sam wasn't going to die, but she didn't believe the nurse, because nurses always said stuff like penicillin shots don't hurt, which was one of the most blatant lies in the whole world.

She cried because they had called her at Daphne Bellingham's, and Daphne hadn't answered the phone. She cried because she had called him old dumb Sam, and it wasn't true: he was smart, and he was young, and he
was the only brother she had, and she loved him more than anything, and now she was sure they were all lying and he was going to die.

Once—more than once:
often
—she had hidden his blanky just to make him mad, just to tease him. She cried because she kept remembering that.

They all kept saying it to her, and she kept not believing them. But finally a doctor came through a doorway, wearing the same kind of operating room clothes that doctors on soap operas wear, and he said it, too, that Sam wasn't going to die, and when he said it, her parents began to smile. And then she believed it, because of the smiles.

Then she was able to stop crying, at last. The nurse gave her a little gray cardboard box of hospital tissues, and Anastasia blew her nose about a thousand times, and cleaned her glasses, and then she was able to listen to what the doctor was saying, because the inside of her head had stopped making crying noises.

"Your boy had a depressed skull fracture," the doctor said to Anastasia's parents, and he pointed to his own head to show them exactly where it was on Sam's, "and that's why we had to take him to surgery. But he's going to be just fine. At his age he'll heal in no time. You'll have him back home, oh, probably in a week or less."

"Can we see him?" asked her mother.

"Well, he'll be sound asleep for a good while. You folks may as well all go home and get some sleep yourselves. But if you want to wait twenty more minutes or
so, you can peek at him while they wheel him to the recovery room. They'll be bringing him right along through here."

"Can we give him this?" asked Anastasia's father, and he held up Sam's ragged yellow blanky.

The doctor looked startled. "What
is
it?" he asked.

"His security blanket."

The doctor grinned. "Sure. Put it on the stretcher with him when they bring him out. Then he'll have it when he wakes up."

The doctor turned to leave. "Sometimes," he said, "I could use one of those myself," and he chuckled at Sam's blanky, nodded his head in response to their thank-yous, and went back through the door.

Anastasia, her mother, and her father, all sat down on the ugly green plastic chairs. Her father took his pipe out of his pocket and began to fill it with tobacco.

"I suppose they'll hand me a pamphlet about smoking if I light this in here," he said guiltily.

But there were ashtrays overflowing with the remains of other people's cigarettes. The Krupniks were the only ones in the waiting room. But Anastasia could tell that a lot of people had been there, worrying, that day. She wondered who they had been, and if they had all leafed through the same wrinkled
People
magazines on the table, and she hoped that they had all been as lucky as her family, and as lucky as Sam. She wondered if some of them had cried, and if the nurses had given them tissues.

Sometimes, when they had to kill time, like in a dentist's waiting room, or on a boring drive someplace, she and her mother played a game they had invented. Her father would never play; he said it was demented. The game was called Choices. "If you had a choice," it always began. They tried to think of the most terrible choices they could for each other, and it was against the rules not to choose. The worst one was one that her mother had given her: If you had a choice, would you eat liver at every meal for the rest of your life, and you would live to be ninety-seven, or would you stand naked in Lord & Taylor's main window for two hours on a Saturday afternoon?

She had tried, when her mother asked her that one, to narrow it down a little. To make it easier. Would the liver be
raw?
No, her mother said; it could be cooked. Could you wear a ski mask over your face in Lord & Taylor's window so that no one knew who you were? Well, said her mother, okay. You could wear a ski mask.

Even then, it was an impossible choice.

Now she began to pass the time, while they waited to see Sam, by asking herself: If you had a choice. But all of the choices centered on Sam.

If you had a choice, she said to herself, would you have leprosy, and your nose would have to be amputated, or would you let Sam die?

Leprosy, she told herself instantly. Nose and all.

Well, she said to herself: If you had a choice, would you marry that jerk Robert Giannini, and also never wash your hair for the rest of your life, and also join the Ku Klux Klan— or would you let Sam die?

I would do all that, she told herself, so that Sam wouldn't die.

I would
even,
she realized suddenly, eat liver
raw
three meals a day, and also stand in Lord & Taylor's window naked,
without
a ski mask, before I would let Sam die.

But he isn't going to, she thought happily.

Then, suddenly, there he was, being wheeled past by two nurses, who stopped briefly so that they could all look down at him. He was sound asleep; and his head was bandaged; and there was a needle in one of his arms, going to a tube that went up to a bottle hanging on a rack. But none of that mattered. He was still Sam, still old dumb Sam, and he was okay. Her father gave the blanky to the nurse, who tucked it in under Sam's limp little hand, and then they wheeled him away.

In the car, going home, Anastasia leaned against her mother. She was exhausted.

"Mom," she said sleepily, "I was thinking, at the hospital, and I decided that if I had a choice, I would eat liver raw..."

"Shhhh," said her mother, stroking her hair.

"And," she murmured, "I would marry Robert Giannini, and I would have my nose amputated, and join the Ku Klux Klan..."

"Mmmmm," said her mother.

"I forget the rest, but I would do it all, just for old Sam."