Anastasia Again! Read Free

might be living in the suburbs. She could feel the thought of it affecting her physically. The stomachache was coming back. She could feel her hair beginning to ooze oil, so she would have to wash it again before she went to bed, and she had already washed it that morning. She could feel a pimple beginning to grow on her chin. Her eyes, behind her glasses, began to blur. Terrific. Now she was going blind on top of everything else.
    Anastasia pictured herself in the suburbs: seven feet tall, with acne and greasy hair, and blind. She would get a Seeing Eye dog, a ferocious one, and name him Fang. If any boys ever made any remarks to her about her height, she would simply say in a low voice to Fang, "Kill."
    That wasn't a bad thought. It made her smile to herself. She pictured her Seeing Eye dog tearing Robert Giannini's briefcase to shreds with his teeth and then starting in on Robert Giannini himself. She grinned. Her vision came back.
    "So," said her father, taking out a notebook, "what we need to do is make a list."
    Anastasia groaned. Even her mother groaned. Dr. Krupnik was always making lists. Once, when Anastasia was younger,
she
had been a list maker, too. But then her life became too complicated.
    "House," wrote Dr. Krupnik at the top of the page. "Okay," he said. "Let's decide what kinds of things we want to look for in a house. Katherine, what's most important to you?"
    Her mother thought for a moment, chewing on a strand of her long hair. Her hair was always shiny, like a TV commercial for shampoo. She didn't even wash it every day. She told Anastasia that when she was a teen-ager, she had had oily hair, but Anastasia didn't believe her. Parents always tell you stuff to make you feel better, and when they do, it makes you feel worse.
    "Light," said her mother, finally. "Good light, and a room all to myself, where I can paint."
    That made sense. Anastasia had been afraid for a moment that her mother would say, "Coppertone appliances in the kitchen." Anybody who had a kitchen full of coppertone appliances would very soon start wearing big pink curlers and worrying about wax build-up.
    But light, good light, and a room where she could paint made sense. Anastasia's mother was a very good painter. Long ago, before she was married, she had studied art in New York. Even now some of her paintings hung in galleries in Boston and Cambridge. But her easel and paints were in the tiny room that had once been a pantry. She never complained about that, but it made Anastasia feel a little sad for her.
    "Light," wrote Dr. Krupnik on the page. "Room for painting," he wrote. "Anastasia?" he asked. "What is most important to you?"
    She was thinking. Now that her vision had unblurred, now that she wasn't going blind, she wouldn't need the Seeing Eye dog. Probably there was a law against having a Seeing Eye dog if you could see. Still, she did like the idea of a monstrous dog, straining at the end of a leash, to whom she could whisper, "Kill," if someone like Robert Giannini started making remarks.
    "You go next, Dad," said Anastasia. "I'm still thinking"
    "Study," he wrote next. "Bookcases," he wrote beside it.
    Well, that made sense, too. Dr. Krupnik was a professor of English. He also wrote poetry, and each time he had written enough poems to make a book, he sent them off to his publisher, and then a new book was published with his name on it. His picture was on the back of each of his books. Anastasia could never figure out why people didn't recognize him on the streets and rush up and ask for his autograph. But they didn't. He said he didn't mind; in fact, he said, he was
glad
that they didn't.
    People wrote to him, though. Strangers wrote to him: people who had read his books of poetry. Once, a year ago, Anastasia had gotten into a
lot
of trouble because of those letters. One night at dinner, when Sam was a much younger baby who kept them all awake at night because he howled and screamed a lot, so they were all
feeling tired, Dr.