Anastasia's Chosen Career by Lois Lowry Page B

the walls were pink, and decorated with posters of hair styles. There was a row of sinks, each with its own vinyl beauty-parlor chair, and a row of hair dryers.
    And there were three old ladies wearing pink smocks. They looked like triplets: gray-haired triplets.
    Once, Anastasia remembered, she had read that there was a special place where all old elephants went to die. Elephants walked for hundreds of miles, across the plains of Africa, when they were old, in order to die in this special secret place.
    It had never occurred to her before that there might also be a special secret place, upstairs over a Chinese restaurant in Boston, for ancient beauticians. She pictured them in distant cities—Cleveland and Phoenix and Boise—realizing that the time had come, packing up their plastic curlers and their styling brushes, and starting across the country on their long, final journey to the place where beauticians went to die.
    Nervously Anastasia's hand went to her knitted cap. She was almost afraid to take it off.
    "Okay," Aunt Vera said cheerfully. "Hang your coats up. Helen Margaret, Bambie, and Robert—well have them do you first. Henry and Anastasia? You can sit down over there while you wait."
    Anastasia noticed with some satisfaction that Robert and Bambie both looked just as nervous as she was. Helen Margaret, of course, looked nervous all the time, so her look hadn't changed.
    She watched Robert sit down apprehensively in one of the pink vinyl chairs. His briefcase was in his lap, and one of the old ladies covered it—and most of Robert—with a plastic cloth which she tied behind his neck like a bib. She removed his glasses and set them carefully on the counter.
    "I suppose you'll want to shape my sideburns," Robert said in a loud, panicky voice, "but you'll find that my sideburns are not very well formed yet because my facial hair is still somewhat sparse and—"
    He was cut off in midsentence because the old lady, with a surprising show of manual dexterity, had released a lever that tilted the chair backward. Robert suddenly went from vertical to horizontal; his feet, in their old-man lace-up leather shoes, shot out straight, and his head disappeared backward into the sink. The old lady turned on the water and began to shoot him with a rubber hose.
    "Lookit that," announced Henry Peabody. "She drowned him. Him and his facial hair both."
    Helen Margaret had met a similar fate silently; she too was horizontal, under a hose.
    Bambie, however, was resisting her fate with a monologue and gestures. "Wait, please," Bambie was announcing. "I want to be certain that you realize my hair
color
is natural—this red" (she gestured with a wave of her hand to indicate her head) "has come down through generations of my family. But the curls are created with special rollers that I sent away for, from a place in Calif—"
    Then Bambie, still talking, was tilted backward, and her specially created curls disappeared into the sink.
    Anastasia and Henry watched as Aunt Vera strolled around, peering into the sinks where Robert and Bambie were having their hair washed. Then she went to stand beside the old lady who was doing Helen Margaret.
    "This is one with real potential," Anastasia heard Aunt Vera say in a low voice to the old lady who was rubbing shampoo into Helen Margaret's hair. "I want to supervise this one when you start the cut."
    "Real potential?" murmured Henry in a low, surprised voice. "Potential for what? Miss Nervous America?"
    "Shhhhh," Anastasia said, giggling. She poked Henry. "Look. Watch Robert."
    Robert Giannini had been tilted upright again, and a towel had been wrapped around his head like a turban. Without his glasses, wearing a turban, Robert had been transformed. He looked ... well, thought Anastasia, he looked almost romantic. She remembered an old movie,
Lawrence of Arabia,
starring Peter O'Toole. Robert looked like that: Giannini of Arabia.
    But after she rubbed his head briskly, the old lady whipped off the