And they had lived happily ever after, thought Anastasia, and would even win a disgusting Mr. and Mrs. Happy Marriage Contest if there were one.
But now Annie was back.
"Don't scratch, Sam," Anastasia said again automatically when she saw her brother's hand sneaking up behind his ear.
"Dad," she asked, "how long has it been since you've seen Annie?"
He calculated. "Sixteen years?" he suggested uncertainly. "I'm not sure. A long time, though."
"Why on earth would she call up someone she hadn't seen in sixteen years?" asked Anastasia angrily. "That's stupid. She shouldn't have called you."
He sighed. "No, it's not. She and I were friends."
Anastasia looked at him skeptically. "That's not the way you used to tell it. You were in love with each other, that's what you told me before."
"Well, we were friends, too," he said defensively. "I'm glad she called. I just wish your mother were here. Then I could introduce the two of them and they'd be friends, too."
"Hah," said Anastasia, who was quite sure that her mother had zero interest in becoming friends with Annie. "Anyway," she went on, "what do you mean you have a date?"
He sighed. "She's coming here for dinner Friday night."
"Why on earth did you ask her to do that?"
Dr. Krupnik frowned. "I didn't. It was odd. She talked so much on the phone—I don't remember Annie being that talkative; she used to be a quiet sort of person—that I never had a chance to say much. Probably I would have asked her to come over to my office and I would have had a cup of coffee with her, or something—"
"Yeah, that would be okay, Dad. Not even Mom would mind—at least she wouldn't mind much—if you had a cup of coffee with Annie. Like for ten minutes or something. Instant coffee, maybe."
"But before I knew what was happening, she announced that she was coming for dinner Friday night. She even knew our address—she'd found it in the phone book."
"Well, that's rude, Dad. You don't just tell people that you're coming for dinner. I mean, what if they'd forgotten to take something out of the freezer?"
"It is sort of rude, isn't it? Funny, I don't remember Annie being rude. She was always very sweet."
"Well," said Anastasia firmly, "she's obviously turned into a rude person. So you can be rude back. You can call her and un-invite her. Tell her that you're going bowling."
"Anastasia, I've never gone bowling in my life."
Anastasia thought. "Tell her you're planning to listen to one of your complete sets of opera records, then. What's a real long opera?"
"Wagner. The Ring. It lasts for hours and hours and hours."
"Good. Tell her that you're listening to that Friday night, and it will take hours and hours and hours, so she can't come to dinner."
Dr. Krupnik finished his beer and set the can aside. "I can't call her. Even if I thought up a terrific excuse, I couldn't call her. She didn't tell me where she was staying."
"Oh, RATS. She conned you, Dad."
He nodded. "I think she did."
Anastasia sat silently for a minute, thinking. Finally she said, "We'll make it a real quick dinner, then. We'll have—let's see. What's the quickest thing there is, to eat?"
Sam looked up. "Hot dogs," he said. "I can eat a hot dog real fast."
"Okay. We'll have hot dogs. I'll have them all cooked when she gets here—what time is she coming? Or was she too rude to tell you?"
"Seven," her father answered.
"Okay. I'll have four hot dogs all cooked at seven o'clock. When she gets here, I'll hand her one, and we'll each have one, and we'll stand around and eat them real fast. Maybe I won't even get the mustard out. Then, the instant she finishes her last bite, we'll say, 'It was nice of you to come, Annie,' and we'll hold the door open so she'll leave. Maybe she won't even have time to take her coat off."
"But she said that we had all those years to catch up on."
"Between bites. Do it between bites. The whole thing shouldn't take longer than fifteen minutes."
Suddenly Anastasia thought of something. "Oh, RATS!" she wailed.
"What?" her father asked.
"Dad, I won't be here Friday night. I have a date."
"You have a what?"
"I told you, but you weren't listening because you were depressed about Annie. I have a date to go to the movies with Steve, Friday night. My very first date, ever."
"Anastasia," her father said, "it's going to be bad enough when your mother finds out that Annie was here when she was in California. But if you're not here, too—well, I'm not sure what your mother will say to Annie being here when no one else was home."
"I'll be here," Sam pointed out cheerfully. "I don't have a date. I have chicken pox."
Anastasia and her father looked at Sam. Green ink lines crisscrossed his face, going from spot to spot.
"I guess," said Anastasia sadly, "I'm going to have to break my very first date. Talk about disaster. Probably he won't ever ask me again, he'll be so insulted."
"Anastasia," her father suggested, "why don't you invite Steve to dinner Friday night?"
Anastasia pondered that. Actually, it wasn't a bad idea. "I don't want to just hand him a hot dog," she said. "He seems to be hungrier than that, most of the time. Even at McDonald's, he always has at least two Big Macs."
"Well, maybe we could make it a sort of dinner party. Then somehow it wouldn't seem so awkward, having Annie here."
Anastasia nodded. "It would be more chaperones."
"And tonight, when Mom calls," Dr. Krupnik said hesitantly, "I think it would be a good idea if maybe we just didn't mention Annie—"
"We're already not telling her I have chicken pox," Sam reminded them.
"And we're already not telling her that I'm not going to school this week, or that we're using paper plates," Anastasia said. "What can we talk about when she calls?"
"I'll talk about my trucks," Sam said, and pushed his yellow dump truck across the floor.
"And I'll ask her about recipes," Anastasia said, "since I'm in charge of the cooking."
"And I," said Dr. Krupnik, "will talk about the weather, and maybe the car."
They all sighed with resignation. "We sure are going to be boring conversationalists," Anastasia pointed out.
Anastasia dumped a can of baking powder into Sam's bath water. Sam watched with interest.
"It's burping!" he said.
And it was. The water bubbled and made small explosions here and there. "Well," Anastasia said, "I guess it's supposed to do that. Climb in, Sam. It'll make your itching go away."
Sam giggled and climbed into the tub. "I'm having a burp bath," he announced.
"Well, stay in there and soak real good. I have to make some phone calls."
Anastasia kicked off her shoes and stretched out on her parents' bed beside the telephone. First she called Steve. She knew it was poor taste for a girl to call a boy, because Ann Landers had said so, and generally Ann Landers gave pretty good advice. But she called Steve anyway.
"Well," Steve said, after Anastasia had explained (although she didn't go into detail about Annie), "I guess I could come for dinner. What're you having for food?"
Anastasia was quite sure that Ann Landers would consider that a rude response. But she didn't want to louse up her date with Steve by commenting on his manners. And she knew that food was important to Steve; he always gave special instructions for his Big Macs.
"I don't know yet. But it'll be good. I'm going to spend the rest of the week preparing for Friday night, since I can't go to school anyway. Did anything interesting happen in school today?"
"Yeah," Steve said, "you got a new name. Anachronism. Anachronism Krupnik."
"Thanks a lot. What does it mean?"
Steve chortled. "Look it up in your dictionary," he said, using the English teacher's high-pitched voice. "Use it three times and it will be yours."
Anastasia glowered. "I'll see you on Friday night," she said, "at seven."
/> "Sure," Steve replied before he hung up.
Anastasia lay on the bed, listening to Sam singing a song he had just composed about burping, as he splashed in the tub. It was weird, thought Anastasia, her very first date. She liked the idea of it. But Steve was obnoxious. Somehow it wasn't what she had envisioned. Being picked up in a taxi, having a corsage pinned to the shoulder of a shimmering gown, listening to violin music in a dimly lit restaurant, and clinking champagne glasses together while gazing into each other's eyes was what she had always daydreamed about. "What're you having for food?" didn't seem to fit into her daydream. "Anachro———" What was that word? It didn't fit, either. "Darling" was what you should be called on your daydream date.
Then she remembered something that her mother had once told her. Her mother had said that people have to make their own daydreams come true.
Anastasia tucked that away in her mind to think about some more. She still had three days left before her first date. If she worked at it, maybe she could create the scene that she had daydreamed. Also, she would have to create a new housekeeping schedule in order to prepare.
She reached for the phone again and called Daphne. It was important, in talking to Daphne, to be supercool. After some casual chat about school ("Marlene Braverman has mono," Daphne announced; "Boooring," Anastasia replied), she said, "I gotta go. I have to call Sonya and Meredith, still. Oh, by the way, I have a date Friday night."
Gleefully she heard Daphne's stifled gasp. Daphne had been hanging around with Eddie Fox all year, but they had never had a real date.
Then Daphne pulled herself together. "With who?" she asked in a bored voice.
"Whom, Daph," Anastasia corrected. "With whom. It's with Steve."
"That turkey."
"Yeah," yawned Anastasia.
Next she called Sonya. You didn't have to be supercool with Sonya. Sonya was constitutionally incapable of being supercool. Sonya's chubby face turned bright pink when she was excited, and she overflowed with excitement most of the time.
"Guess what, Sonya!" Anastasia squealed into the phone. "Steve called and asked me for a date!"
There was a shriek and a thump on the other end of the telephone. Anastasia waited, grinning.
"Here I am again," Sonya announced breathlessly. "I fell on the floor in a faint. You are sooooo lucky, Anastasia! That jerk Norman Berkowitz will probably never ask me for a date, at least not until I lose ten pounds and have a whole new body with sex appeal. And right at this very instant I'm eating a Nestle Crunch bar."
"I thought you were on a diet."
"I am. But it makes me hungry."
"Use will power, Sonya," Anastasia said.
She could hear the rustle of candy bar wrapper over the phone. "There," Sonya told her. "I wrapped the rest of it up. I am going to use will power, Anastasia. Call me tomorrow night and remind me. I wish you could come to school, so you could remind me at lunch."
"Throw the rest of it away, Sonya. Right this instant."
There was a silence. "Well," Sonya said, "I'll put it in the freezer, behind the hamburger. I'm not strong enough yet to actually throw it away."
Anastasia was in the middle of her third phone call, to Meredith, when Sam came shivering in from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. Anastasia said a hurried good-bye and turned to her brother.
"The water got cold," Sam explained. "And it stopped burping."
"It didn't get the green lines off," Anastasia said, examining him. "Those must be indelible markers. But at least it cured your itching, didn't it?"
"No," Sam said mournfully. "I still itch."
Anastasia sighed. "I bet it was baking soda I was supposed to use. Well, try not to scratch, Sam. We'll try baking soda tomorrow."
She combed Sam's damp hair—carefully, because his head was covered with chicken pox—and put his pajamas on. They found their father in the study, listening to music and reading the newspaper.
"It's almost time for Mom to call," Anastasia said, looking at her watch. "You stay here, Dad, and I'll be by the phone in the kitchen, and Sam, you go up by the phone in Mom and Dad's room, so we can all talk to her.
"But remember, everybody," she added, "there are certain things that we don't mention."
"Annie," her father said.
"Chicken pox," Sam said.
"Or paper plates," Anastasia said. "Can you remember that, Sam? We'll have a blood oath that we won't mention anything that might upset Mom."
"Yeah," Sam said with delight. "Bludoth."
The telephone rang at that moment, and Sam and Anastasia dashed to their extensions while their father answered.
"I'm exhausted," Mrs. Krupnik was saying when Anastasia got to the phone, "but it's such fun. Everybody's so nice, and so helpful—"
"Do they glitter?" Anastasia asked. "I'm on the extension in the kitchen," she explained. "Sam's upstairs. Say hi, Sam."
"Hi, Mom," Sam said. "I'm only going to talk about trucks."
Their mother laughed. "I really miss you guys," she said. "Some people seem to glitter a little, Anastasia. But mostly they're just ordinary. And my clothes seem to be fine."
"That's a relief. I was really worried about that, Mom."
"But I want to hear about you," Mrs. Krupnik said. "Is everything going okay? How's the housekeeping schedule working?"
"The weather wasn't bad today," said their father. "And the car is okay."
"How was nursery school today, Sam? Is it fun going for a full day?" his mother asked.
"Blood oath, Sam," muttered Anastasia into the phone.
"I'm only going to talk about trucks," Sam said.
Mrs. Krupnik laughed. "Did you play with trucks at school today?"
Sam was silent for a minute. "Blood oath, Sam," Anastasia murmured.
"The yellow dump truck goes 'Rrrrrrrrr,' " Sam said.
"You should see the trucks in California," Mrs. Krupnik said. "Boy, do they speed along the freeways!"
"How's the weather out there?" asked Dr. Krupnik.
"Gorgeous. Sunny and warm. My hotel has a pool, and of course I'm too busy all day to use it, but there are a lot of people who lie around the pool all day—glittering, I think, Anastasia. How's the food holding out, by the way? Don't forget you can call the store and have things delivered if you need anything. What did you have for dinner tonight?"
"Chicken," said Dr. Krupnik.
"Hamburger," said Anastasia at the same moment.
"Hot dogs," said Sam along with them.
But apparently Mrs. Krupnik didn't notice. "They're taking me out to dinner tonight," she went on. "It's three hours earlier here, remember? So I've just finished work and I'm getting ready to go out to dinner. You guys ought to treat yourselves to a dinner out, too—maybe Friday night, at the end of the week," she suggested.
"Well, ah," began Dr. Krupnik.
"Bludoth, Daddy," muttered Sam.
"What was that?" asked Mrs. Krupnik. "I couldn't hear what Sam said."
Sam said, "I'm only talking about trucks."
"You know what?" Mrs. Krupnik went on cheerfully. "There are palm trees everywhere out here. It almost looks like that painting in the living room, you know that one I sometimes wish you would throw away, Myron? It looks like that scene. Where is it that Annie lives?"
Anastasia covered the mouthpiece of the kitchen phone with her hand and yelled toward the study: "BLOOD OATH, DAD!"
She put her ear back to the phone and heard her father mumble, "Guatemala."
"Right. Well, I ought to hang up because I have to change my clothes. It's just about your bedtime there in Massachusetts, Sam; have you had your bath?"
"Yeah," said Sam, "I had a burping bath with baking—"
"Blood oath, Sam!" Anastasia and her father roared together into the phone.
"This is an odd connection," Mrs. Krupnik said. "But even so, it's great hearing your voices and knowing that everything's okay." She made some kissing noises into the phone. "Love you all," she said.
When everyone had hung up, Anastasia went back to the study. Her father was sprawled on the couch, looking drained and miserable. "I'm a nervous wreck," he announced. "A basket case."
"Hang in there, Dad," said Anastasia. "Only eight more days to go, till Mom gets home."
Sam came down the stairs and appeared in the doorway of the study. He looked puzzled. "Anastasia," he asked, "what is a bludoth?"
6
Now it was interesting and exciting, all of a sudden, being in charge of a house. There was laundry, but Anastasia didn't do it. There were dirty pots and pans in the sink, but she didn't wash them. Those things didn't seem important anymore. The important thing was that she had three days to make a daydream come true: the daydream of her very first date.
On Wednesday morning, she looked through the drawers in the pantry and found a pair of purple candles. High on a shelf she found a pair of silver candlesticks.
One of the articles she had read—the one called "Creating a Romantic Evening"—had recommended a color scheme. Purple was not one of Anastasia's favorite colors. In fact, she had always despised purple. But the article had rated colors according to romance, and purple had rated very highly. Purple, the article said, was the color of passion.
All right, thought Anastasia when she found the two purple candles, passion it is.
She put the candles into the candlesticks and arranged the pair in the center of the dining room table, for a tryout. It didn't look very passionate. In fact, Anastasia decided, it looked stupid. But maybe that was because there was a stack of Sam's coloring books on the table, and Sam's crayons and her father's pipe, in an ashtray, and Anastasia's old blue sweatshirt was hanging on the back of one of the dining room chairs.
She removed all of those things and looked at the table again. It still didn't look very passionate. It needed a tablecloth.
Anastasia went to the linen closet and poked through the stacks of things that her mother stored there. There was an orange-and-white-striped plastic tablecloth, which they used in the summer when they ate on the picnic table in the yard. Obviously that wouldn't do.