Anastasia Again! by Lois Lowry Page A

switched the stereo to Off. He wiped his damp face with his handkerchief.
    "I'm always too exhausted to conduct the next section after I sing that section," he said. "How did I sound?"
    "Pretty good. You're getting better, I think."
    "
'Inter oves lacum praesta et ab haedis me sequestra,'
" he said. She recognized them as some of the words he had sung. "Know what that means?"
    "Nope."
    "You will after you study Latin. It means, 'Give me a place among the sheep and separate me from the goats.'"
    Anastasia laughed. "Okay. You're among the sheep."
    "So are you. In fact, I don't know anybody who is among the goats."
    "I do. Gertrude Stein."
    Her father put his handkerchief away and looked at her in astonishment. "Don't tell me you've become familiar with Gertrude Stein!"
    "Yeah. Just today. Do you know her already?"
    "
Know
her! I teach her in a graduate seminar. Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Henry James."
    Anastasia wrinkled her forehead. "She's awfully
old
to be going to school still."
    "No, no. She's not a student. She's a
writer.
I teach my students about her writing."
    "That's funny. She didn't tell Sam and me she was a writer."
    "What are you talking about? How could she tell you and Sam anything? She's dead."
    Good grief. Anastasia's stomach felt funny. She's a
ghost. I'm living in a ghost story. Gertrustein is dead. No wonder she looks so awful.
    "Anastasia," said her father suddenly, "I have a feeling that you and I are talking about two different Gertrude Steins."
    "The one I'm talking about lives next door to us. She looks like a witch."
    "Oh. Well, the one I'm talking about is dead, and she looked like a car mechanic."
    Anastasia started to laugh. "If Gertrustein next door were a car mechanic, maybe she could fix our car so it wouldn't backfire."
    Her father chuckled. "Maybe so. Now scoot. I want to conduct this last section of the Requiem."
    "After you do that, could you drive me to the dime store? I want to buy Gertrustein a goldfish."
    One of the things that Anastasia loved most about her father was that when you said something like you wanted to buy a goldfish for the next-door neighbor who looked like a witch, he didn't say "why." He said, "Okay," switched on the stereo, closed his eyes, and began to wave his arms in the air.
    ***
    Anastasia looked again at the title she had written on the day the movers came. "The Mystery of Saying Good-by." It still seemed, as it had that day, a wonderful title. She chewed on her pencil eraser for a while.
    Then she began the first paragraph of her book.
    "Once there was a young girl," Anastasia wrote, "who had had, in her short life of twelve years, to say good-by many times. Her grandmother had died. And her goldfish had been flushed down the toilet and was irretrievable even though plumbers had been called.
    "She had said good-by to her grandmother two ways. One, by going to the funeral, which was okay even though it was sad. And two, by keeping her grandmother's wedding ring, which was given to her, and looking at it now and then, which made her remember her grandmother in a nice sort of way.
    "And she had said good-by to her goldfish by holding memorial services over the toilet bowl, and playing taps on a harmonica. Her father had sung 'Many brave hearts are asleep in the deep.'
    "But one day, she had to say good-by to the house she had lived in all her life. Actually it was an apartment, but apartments can
feel
like houses, and this young girl's apartment had always felt like a house to her.
    "That was the hardest good-by of all, because there was no funeral, no souvenir to keep, no memorial service, no harmonica music, no final flush.
    "Also, it became complicated, because at the same time she had to adjust to a
new
house. This young girl was not a very adjustable person."
    Anastasia read that again, and then she crossed out the last two sentences. She didn't like the word
adjustable.
It sounded like a training bra.
    "...she had to
adapt
to a new house.