Dispatches from the 80s #2

Lois Lowry's Anastasia At Your Service

“What I’d really like to do — and I’d be really good at, too — is to be a companion to an old lady. A really rich old lady. Like in mystery books by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Those really rich old ladies hire young girls — maybe not twelve, but I could do it just as well as someone older — to hang around and help them out with stuff. Read their mail to them. Make tea for them. Maybe polish their diamond bracelets and stuff like that. Of course, in the books they have to help solve mysteries, and I don’t supposed anyone in this town needs mysteries solved. But there are all sorts of things that I could do for a rich old lady.”

—Anastasia at Your Service, by Lois Lowry

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Book covers: Three paperback editions of Anastasia At Your Service

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Due to Severe Depression caused by Boredom and Extreme Poverty—as Anastasia puts it, “twelve-year-old, extreme, desperate, two-dollar-a-week-allowance kind of poverty”—Anastasia Krupnik hangs flyers up all around town advertising her services as a Ladies’ Companion.

Within twenty-four hours, she gets a call from one of the richest ladies in town, Mrs. Ferris Bellingham, and pretty much gets hired right over the phone. Anastasia is SO excited, and true to form, immediately starts daydreaming about her wonderful, shiny, romantic future:

Anastasia went directly to the back door. It seemed about three miles around the huge house, and it certainly would have been easier to ring the front doorbell. But she had decided, on her way, that it would be appropriate to go to the back on her first day. Later, after she was fully installed as Companion, of course she would enter by the front. Probably she would have her own key.

It doesn’t take long, though, for Anastasia to realize that there’s been a huge mistake: Mrs. Bellingham has hired her to be… A MAID.

And due to an incident with a garbage disposal and a silver spoon, after her first shift, she OWES Mrs. Bellingham an ungodly sum of money: Thirty-five whole dollars. So she can’t quit.

Even WORSE, Mrs. Bellingham has a granddaughter about Anastasia’s age, and Anastasia is expected to work at said granddaughter’s birthday party, which—for Anastasia—is basically the most excruciatingly embarrassing way of meeting a peer.

So she does what any rational twelve-year-old would do. She goes to work in disguise:

With grayish hair, dark eyebrows, pink lipstick, and the pantyhose bosom, she figured she looked about forty years old. From her mother’s closet, she borrowed a large black leather pocketbook and hung it over her shoulder. Now she definitely looked forty years old. She could be elected President of the League of Women Voters without any trouble at all.

When she sees Daphne, Anastasia is gutted—Daphne is wearing a classic Lacoste polo dress with the alligator torn off, which tells Anastasia that they’re kindred spirits—so she’s really glad she came in disguise. But through a sequence of events involving her pantyhose bosom and a platter of deviled eggs, she and Daphne DO meet. They IMMEDIATELY become friends, and make a pact:

They are going to Get Revenge on Mrs. Bellingham.

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This is another one that I read approximately 900 times as a kid, and two elements are absolutely seared into my brain. The first is when Daphne, who is a pastor’s kid who’s constantly trying to get into trouble by rebelling and never getting anywhere with it because her father just Never. Gets. Mad., gives Anastasia directions to her house:

“We’re practically neighbors! Come on over. It’ll take you about two minutes to get here. We’re the brick house right next door to the church. There’s a Nazi swastika mowed into the front lawn. I did it when I was supposed to cut the grass yesterday. My father forgave me, of course. But I have to mow it out tomorrow.”

Which, like, Holy 1982, Batman. (Even as a KID, I remember finding that shocking, and feeling that Daphne was Really Pushing It. Which is the point, but good lord.)

The second one also blew my mind as a kid—and obviously blows Anastasia’s as well:

“Daphne!” Anastasia was shocked. “That’s terrible! Being low income doesn’t mean being unwashed!”

“It does to my grandmother. Unless you wash with imported lilac soap from England, you’re unwashed. She says that every time we drive past that project: the Habitation of the Great Unwashed.”

So that’s bad enough, but as a kid, what made that all even worse is the moment where Anastasia, in an effort to be funny, does an imitation of Daphne’s impression of her snobby-ass grandmother for her parents. Predictably, it goes over like a lead balloon—they don’t realize she’s doing an impression—and even as an adult, when I saw the moment coming, my stomach dropped down to my toes and I did a full-body cringe and started moaning out loud: NOOOOOO DON’T DO ITTTTTT.

I want to crawl into a hole just thinking about it.

But she does it, and it’s brutal, and then her father brings her to the North End in Boston to show her where he grew up: because he grew up real poor. WOOF.

It is A. LOT.

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“You know, Daph, you’d be a really good actress. I can’t think of any professional actress who could do the imitation as well as you.”

“Bull. Jane Fonda could. Vanessa Redgrave could. Maybe Bo Derek couldn’t, though.”

—Anastasia at Your Service, by Lois Lowry

1. This made me laugh and laugh and laugh, what a moment in time.

2. Other pop culture/literary references in this book: Joan Crawford, Kojak, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Gone with the Wind, Henry James.

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Unfortunately, the whole poor ≠ bad thing is somewhat undermined by Daphne and Anastasia’s plan to embarrass Mrs. Bellingham: They steal a bunch of invites to this fancy party she’s about to have, and give them to all the folks in town that her grandmother has deemed “undesirables.” So, you know: unhoused people, alcoholics, folks with mental illness, drug dealers, people from the housing project that Mrs. Bellingham is so gross about.

Which, like: OH MY GOD. There are like 95 levels of problematic there.

There are, of course, a bunch of other things in here that we don’t see much in contemporary children’s books—overflowing ashtrays in a hospital waiting room, playing Indian, comparing being a maid to slavery—but those are all mostly one-off lines, whereas this one is baked right into the plot.

Obviously, the girls are thinking about embarrassing Mrs. Bellingham, but they’re not thinking about the prank’s possible effects on the people that they’re inviting. And that never comes up.

What DOES happen is that the party goes off without a snag—which is good because it turns out that the party is a fundraiser for the pediatric ward of the hospital, where Anastasia’s little brother Sam is after falling out a window. Or, well, it goes well for everyone except Anastasia and Daphne, who spend the entire party trying to identify the people they prank-invited so they can politely ask them to leave… and they can’t tell the difference between the “real” guests and the prank guests, which ultimately says something about their own inherent assumptions and snobbery. Lowry doesn’t hang a lampshade on it or explicitly spell it out, but it’s there.

What isn’t there is anything about Mrs. Bellingham having an epiphany about how HER attitude contributed to the whole mess—once we know that she’s raising money for the hospital, she kind of gets a pass for the rest of the book. And while I think that’s probably pretty realistic—people do still tend to give a Bigotry Pass to older people—I also think it would be handled differently in a newer book. (Example! In Harriet Spies, we see both Harriet and the Captain, an adult, have some realizations about how their actions affect each other, and we see them trying to be better. It’s subtle and lovely and great!)

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Two things I got from these books that I still do as an adult

1. Throw myself on the floor when I am in the Depths of Despair and want everyone to know it:

“Groan,” said Anastasia Krupnik feebly, and kicked the living room couch with one sneaker. She was lying on the living room floor. She was terribly depressed. She was so depressed that she had been acting out all the deathbed scenes she could think of.

2. Dramatic Capitals

I am definitely Lacking in Character, thought Anastasia.

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Previously:

Dispatches from the 80s #1