She found Sam standing in the hall, his hair damp and matted, his face bright pink, his yesterday's clothes wrinkled and wet.
"I want my pajamas!" Sam yowled.
Anastasia took his hand and led him to his bedroom. "It's morning, Sam. Time to put on clean clothes for school. You can't wear pajamas to school, silly."
"I don't want to go to school," Sam whined as she began taking off his clothes. "I hate school."
Never get sucked into an argument with a three-year-old, Anastasia remembered her mother saying. Because you can't win one. An adult will lose against a three-year-old every time.
"I know," she said soothingly. "Sometimes I hate school, too. But we have to go anyway. There's a law that says you have to go to school." She pulled his shirt off over his head. "Now stop crying, because it makes you all sweaty."
Then she stared at him. "Sam," she said, "what are all these spots?"
Sam looked down at his own bare chest dotted with pink. It was so interesting that he stopped crying. "I've turned into a polka-dot person," he said. "Look at me, poking the dots." He began to poke each one with his finger.
Anastasia turned him around. His back, too, was covered with spots.
"Dad?" she called through the closed bathroom door. "Something's wrong with Sam. Something bit him! Could we have bedbugs?"
Sam grinned. "Bedbugs," he said. "Millions of bedbugs."
Dr. Krupnik came out of the bathroom, tying his tie. "Of course we don't have bedbugs," he said. Then he looked at Sam. "Holy—"
"Holy moley." Anastasia completed it for him. She finished undressing Sam. "Look. Every inch of him."
Now that he was the center of attention, Sam was completely happy. "Every single inch," he announced proudly. Naked, he began to dance around his bedroom. "Puff, the magic bedbug," he sang, "lived by the sea—"
"What's his doctor's name?" Anastasia's father asked. "Didn't your mom leave a list with all the important phone numbers on it? Where is it? I'd better call the doctor."
"He's my doctor, too, Dad," Anastasia said. "Dr. Nazarosian. I'll call him. He's in his office early. The list's right by the phone in your bedroom."
Sam was still prancing around.
"Do you feel okay, Sam?" Anastasia asked. "I need to tell the doctor all your symptoms."
"Tell him I'm like a leopard," Sam suggested. "A spotted leopard." He began to crawl across the rug, growling. "Lookit me, being a leopard," he said. He grabbed the corner of the rug between his teeth and shook it back and forth with a ferocious growl.
"Dr. Nazarosian," Anastasia said on the phone, "this is Anastasia Krupnik. I'm calling because—"
"Anastasia!" he said heartily, interrupting her. "How are you? I haven't seen you in ages. You're one of my favorite patients because you're never sick. Don't tell me you're sick!"
"No, I'm not. But my mother is in California, so—"
"California! Getting a little sunshine, is she? Can't say I blame her. I'm getting pretty sick of this snow. Of course if I had time to take a vacation and do a little skiing, I might feel differently. Do you ski?"
"No," said Anastasia, looking at her watch. She was going to be late for school again. "I'm calling because I'm in charge, and it's about Sam. Sam's -—"
He interrupted her again. "Good old Sam—my very favorite patient, in all due respect, Anastasia. Remember the time Sam fell out the window and—"
This time Anastasia interrupted him. "Dr. Nazarosian," she said, "Sam's entire body is covered with pink spots."
He chuckled. "Not surprising," he said. "Not at all surprising."
Anastasia was taken aback. Not surprising to be covered with pink spots? She found it surprising. What on earth would surprise Dr. Nazarosian? Blue spots, maybe? Green?
"They're even on his ears," she went on.
"How old is Sam now—three?" the doctor asked. "Let me get his chart out. Here it is. Three years old, like I thought. Does he go to nursery school?"
"Yes," said Anastasia. She told him the name of Sam's school.
"I should have guessed. Half the kids in that nursery school have it. The other half will by next week. Except for a few. There are always a few who for some reason seem to be immune. We've never been able to figure that out. And then sometimes the ones who don't get it when they're three suddenly come down with it as adults, for some reason, even though they were undoubtedly exposed to it when they were young—"
"Exposed to what?"
"Chicken pox," the doctor said. "Sam has chicken pox."
Anastasia's father came into the room and looked at her quizzically. He pointed to his watch at the same time.
"I don't need to see him, unless he has special problems," the doctor was going on. "Give him a little baby aspirin for the fever. And if he itches—well, that was a foolish thing to say; of course he itches—add some baking soda to a bath and let him soak in that. He'll feel fine in a day or two. But of course he'll have to stay out of school until the lesions heal. Well, that was a foolish thing to say, too; they're probably going to close that school down for a couple of weeks. Can't run a school when everybody has chicken pox, now, can you?" He chuckled.
Anastasia looked up at her father and mouthed the words "chicken pox."
"Chicken pox?" her father mouthed back.
"Now, let me just get out your chart and see if you've had chicken pox, Anastasia," the doctor was saying.
"I had it when I was—"
"Here we are. Krupnik, Anastasia. You were right in the filing cabinet next to your brother. Let's see, you're thirteen now. Pretty soon you won't even need a pediatrician. For heaven's sake, look at this—"
"I had chicken pox when I was—"
"I'd forgotten all about that time we had to pump your stomach when you were two. You ate ant poison. Well, that's nothing compared to what some toddlers eat. I had one who drank a whole bottle of Windex once. Wouldn't you think it would taste terrible? Now, let's see, you had an ear infection that same year, and—"
"I had chicken pox when I was four years old."
"Here we are. You had chicken pox when you were four years old, Anastasia."
Anastasia sighed.
"Well, kiddo," Dr. Nazarosian went on, "I'd love to chat with you a bit longer, but you know how it is. Duty calls. Half the mothers in this town are trying to get me on the phone right at this very minute, and you know why?"
"Because their kids have—"
"Because their kids have chicken pox, that's why. Now you call again if Sam has any complications. But he should be just fine, maybe a little irritable until the fever goes down, that's all."
Anastasia heard a sound and glanced over. Sam had wandered into the room, still naked, holding a Magic Marker. He was carefully drawing green lines from one pink spot to the next across his chest. He looked up and grinned. "Follow the dots," he said.
Anastasia said good-bye politely to the doctor and hung up.
Sam handed her his underpants and socks. "Help me get dressed for school," he said.
Anastasia sighed. "We can't go to school," she told him. "You can't go to school because you have chicken pox, and I can't go to school, unless—" She looked hopefully at her father.
But he shook his head. "I'm sorry, Anastasia," he said, "but I have a lecture scheduled at nine o'clock, and a department meeting after that, and I'm giving an exam at one, and—well, I'll try to get home early. I'm sorry."
Sam's face puckered and he began to cry again. "There's a law that you have to go to school!" he wailed. "I want to go to school! I want to show everybody my dots!"
"Well, you can't," Anastasia said irritably. She wandered into his room and picked up his clothes from the floor. She began to pull the wet sheets off his bed.
"I guess I'll do laundry this morning," she muttered. "And good grief, we haven't even had breakfast yet."
The telephone rang.
"Good morning," said a spirited voice. "This is the National Telephone Survey Association. Do you have a f
ew minutes to spare to participate in an important poll?"
Anastasia sat down with the laundry in her lap and balanced the phone on her shoulder. "I guess so," she answered grudgingly. At least it would be more interesting than laundry.
Then she gave her opinion on various political issues for fifteen minutes while Sam sat at her feet and connected the dots on his legs with green ink.
By four in the afternoon Anastasia was rewriting the entire housekeeping schedule. She was exhausted. And she was mad.
She had done all the laundry, and after she had done the laundry, she had decided to vacuum, even though it wasn't Saturday. And when she ran the vacuum cleaner under her parents' bed, it had made a strangling noise and died.
"It ate something it wasn't supposed to," Sam said solemnly. She had been trying to keep Sam in bed—she had even dressed him in his pajamas—but he kept getting out.
So she took the vacuum cleaner apart, unwound a wire coat hanger and poked it through the vacuum cleaner hose, and out came three of Dr. Krupnik's socks. She peered under the bed, and there were at least six others that the vacuum cleaner hadn't eaten.
Then she found her father's pajamas behind a chair, on the floor.
So she had a whole new stack of laundry and made another trip to the washing machine. No wonder she was exhausted. And no wonder she was mad. She was mad at her father for leaving his dirty clothes all over the place; but mostly she was mad at the telephone. It had been ringing all day. Total strangers had been calling her all day.
Now, at four o'clock, just when she was about to relax with a cup of hot chocolate with a marshmallow in it, the phone rang again.
Angrily she picked it up and began talking before the other person had a chance.
"No," Anastasia said assertively. "I do not want to be part of an important political poll.
"I do not want to have my family's photographs taken even if it is a special offer and includes a gold-painted plastic frame.
"I have absolutely zero interest in a full set of encyclopedias.
"I do not want to test a new gelatin dessert, even if it is free of charge.
"I have all the magazine subscriptions that I need, and furthermore"—she took a deep breath — "I am not going to donate money to anything even if it is a good cause, because I don't have any money."
She was about to slam the receiver down when she recognized the voice at the other end.
"Well," said Steve Harvey sarcastically, "I suppose that means you don't want to go to the movies Friday night, either, even though I was willing to pay."
Anastasia gulped. "Hi, Steve," she said in a meek voice.
"Why weren't you in school?"
"My brother is sick, and my mother's away, so I'm in charge, and—" Anastasia talked on, explaining to Steve, but her mind was on what he had said. Had he asked her to go to the movies Friday night? And he would pay? Didn't that make it a date?
Anastasia had never had a date in her life. She had daydreamed about having a date, and she had even daydreamed about having a date with Steve Harvey. Sure, she had played tennis with Steve in the summer; and sure, she and he had gone to the movies with groups of kids; and once or twice they had even gone, just the two of them—but she had always paid her own way, so it didn't count as a date.
Sam was watching her with interest. He had finished his own hot chocolate and was starting on hers. Good thing she'd already had chicken pox, Anastasia thought, because Sam was slurping chicken pox germs right into her cup. Well, that wasn't important. What was important was that Steve Harvey was actually calling and asking her for a date—the first one of her life—and she was worried about what she would wear, how she would act, what they would talk about, whether he would put his arm around her in the movie theater, and...
"Anastasia? Are you still there?" Steve asked.
"Yeah."
"Will you be in school tomorrow?"
She sighed. "I won't be there all week. I have to stay with Sam and take care of him and the house. Next week my father's going to do it until my mom gets home next Wednesday, and..."
Good grief. She was babbling, and being boring. If she was that boring when they had a date, he would never ask her for another date; he would probably ask someone like Marlene Braverman, and her whole life would be .. .
"Well, can you go to the movies Friday night?" Steve was asking.
"Sure."
"My dad'll drive us and pick us up afterward."
"Okay. Fine." Anastasia tried to sound casual, as if this happened all the time.
"Sam!" she squealed, after she had hung up. "Guess what! I have a date Friday night with Steve Harvey!"
Sam glanced up from the cup of hot chocolate. "Watch this," he said. "It's like the vacuum cleaner, with Daddy's socks." He consumed the melted marshmallow with a loud sucking noise.
Well, thought Anastasia, Sam's too young to understand the significance. Wait till Dad gets home and I tell him.
But when her father came through the door at five, he was not his usual cheerful self. His shoulders sagged, and his face had a terrible look. He put his briefcase down, hung up his coat slowly, and sat down on a kitchen chair.
"How's Sam?" he asked, finally, in a disheartened voice.
"Fine," said Anastasia. "Just look at him."
Sam was running a truck around the kitchen floor. His chicken pox spots were all connected by green ink lines, even on his face, which he had done in front of the mirror, and he was making truck noises very happily.
Dr. Krupnik stared gloomily at the floor after glancing at Sam. Wait'll I tell him my news, thought Anastasia with glee. Wait till we tell Mom on the phone tonight. They'll both be so excited. It's the first time one of their children has ever had a real date.
"Did you have a bad day, Dad?" Anastasia asked sympathetically. She was feeling so happy that she decided not even to tell him about her bad day, with the endless phone calls from strangers wanting to sell her things. She wasn't even going to bug him about his dirty socks under the bed, or show him the new housekeeping schedule that she had made in a fit of anger.
"I don't want to talk about it," he muttered.
Anastasia tried to remember what her mother would do at times like this. She went to the refrigerator and got her father a can of beer. She took out a box of crackers and some cheese, and put them on the table beside him. She ran to the study, put a record on the stereo, and turned it up loud enough so that they could hear it in the kitchen.
Her father brightened a little, and sipped at the beer. "Vivaldi," he said.
Wait'll I tell him; wait'll I tell him, thought Anastasia, almost shivering with delight.
"Dad," she started, "guess what!"
He stared at her and took another sip of beer. "What?" he asked, finally.
"I have a date Friday night!" Anastasia said with pride, and waited for his reaction.
But to her surprise, he didn't smile. He didn't move. He only stared into the beer can as if he were trying to memorize the ingredients of Miller Lite for a quiz.
Finally he looked up. "So do I," he said in a voice filled with despair.
5
"Dad," Anastasia said, "don't be ridiculous. You can't have a date. You're a married man."
"I know," he said miserably.
"You're a happily married man." She stared at him. "Aren't you? Aren't you happily married?"
"Of course. I'm just about the most happily married man in the whole world. Probably if they had a Mr. and Mrs. Happy Marriage Contest, your mother and I would win."
"Yuck," said Anastasia. She hated the Miss America contest more than any other program on TV. Every year she stayed up late to watch it, just because she hated it so much. The thought of a Mr. and Mrs. Happy Marriage Contest was so disgusting she could hardly stand it. Still, it was reassuring to know that her parents would win.
"Sam, don't scratch," she said, glancing at Sam, who had stopped driving his truck across the floor in order to scratch a chicken pox s
pot on his neck.
"Well, I itch," Sam said matter-of-factly.
"After dinner I'll give you a bath in baking powder, like the doctor said." Then Anastasia thought about it. "Or did he say baking soda? Are they the same thing?" she asked her father.
He shrugged. "I suppose so," he said gloomily.
"Dad, cheer up. We have all these good leftovers for dinner: hot dogs, chicken, and hamburger. Quit looking so depressed. Why did you even say that, that you had a date? If you were joking, why aren't you laughing?"
"Anastasia, I wasn't joking. Annie's back. This afternoon I got a phone call at my office, and it was Annie."
"ANNIE!" Anastasia sat down and stared at her father. He wasn't joking, then. Even Sam stopped scratching and looked up with interest. Even Sam knew about Annie.
Annie had been Dr. Krupnik's first love. It had been years and years ago, before he ever met Anastasia's mother. But he had dedicated his first book of poems to Annie—it was still there, on a bookshelf in the study—and when Mrs. Krupnik showed her husband's poetry to people, she never bothered taking that book down.
Annie was an artist. They still had one of her paintings hanging in the living room. Every now and then, Mrs. Krupnik would say, "I wish you'd get rid of that, Myron."
And Dr. Krupnik would glance at the painting and say, "Annie was a fine painter. She was a fine person, too. You'd like her, Katherine."
Katherine Krupnik would make a noise that sounded like "Hmmpph."
Annie had broken Dr. Krupnik's heart, years ago, when she went off to Guatemala to paint. She had wanted him to go with her. But Dr. Krupnik was afraid of snakes, and he read somewhere that there were a lot of snakes in Guatemala. Also, he couldn't speak Spanish, which is what they speak in Guatemala.
So he didn't go, but his heart was broken, he had told Anastasia. His heart was broken for about six months, and then it was mended because he had met another artist, and this one was named Katherine, and he had married her because she was afraid of snakes, too, and would never want to go to Guatemala.