How Nancy Drew Saved My Life Read online

  One thing I was sure about: Ambassador Buster would give me the greatest reference the world had ever seen, if only to get me out of town, so that he could stop feeling so damn guilty and stop worrying that I’d turn all Fatal Attraction on him, sneaking into his house and boiling a rabbit in his pot.

  In addition to football, Buster also watched a lot of movies. Really, once TiVo had entered the picture, it was a wonder he got any ambassadorial work done at all.

  Nope, I was more Buster’s worry than he was mine and, really, the one thing you never want to do is piss off the nanny.

  Like I said, I’m nothing if not perky and resilient, even if I’m still a far way from intrepid.

  chapter 2

  Fax faxed, I took myself down to my local Barnes & Noble, a three-story building I treated like a second home, attending as many author readings there as I could, haunting the stacks for new books like a crack addict searching for her next fix.

  Since I had read as many literary novels and commercial truffles as I could stand for the nonce, and since Maureen Dowd had put Nancy Drew on my mind, I made my way to the children’s department and looked around until I found the originals in the series: small jacketless hardcovers, with their bright yellow spines and blue lettering, the original old-fashioned artwork still on the front.

  Feeling pluckier already, I plucked the first one off the shelf. It was The Secret of the Old Clock. I turned it over, expecting there to be some description of the plot of the book, but all there was was some kind of all-purpose blurb about the series—“For cliff-hanging suspense and thrilling action…”—and a listing of the first six titles in the series, followed by the promise, “50 additional titles in hardcover. See complete listing inside.”

  Fifty-six seemed like an awful lot of titles to have to live up to “cliff-hanging suspense” and “thrilling action,” particularly if they featured the same character time and time again. How good could Nancy Drew be? Was she really that exciting or was someone pulling the young consumer’s leg?

  As I’d said before, I’d never read much Nancy Drew as a young girl, could only remember liking The Witch Tree Symbol, better known to whoever compiled that comprehensive list at the back of the book as #33.

  I plucked #33 from the shelf, flipped through it, the memories flooding me. There was Nancy climbing on top of a tabletop, holding a lantern up to a ventilator and passing one hand in front of the light at intervals such that the S.O.S. signal would be transmitted, over and over again. (I’d have just screamed for help and then died before anybody came, because help was too far away to hear a scream but it could see a well-planned S.O.S. signal.) There was the young detective, at the end of the book, not thinking about what she’d just been through but rather turning her mind to the next mystery, with a ham-fisted authorial plug for The Hidden Window Mystery, #34.

  I put the book back on the shelf. It all seemed so…kitschy.

  But suddenly I found myself curious, curious to know what had attracted generations of readers. Even if I had always assumed her to be too retro for my tastes, year after year the books had kept selling. And, surely, if Maureen Dowd was touting her as the answer to the world’s problems…

  It took several scoopings, but I scooped up all fifty-six books, everything from #1, The Secret of the Old Clock—and that clock on the cover really did look old, with Nancy sitting there on the ground at night, looking all intrepid in her green dress and sensible watch, legs tucked ladylike to the side as she prepared to do something unladylike to that clock with the handy screwdriver in her hand—to #56, The Thirteenth Pearl, with its vaguely pagodaish cover. So #56 was the last one? I thought. God, I hoped she didn’t die in the end. Even if I didn’t end up liking her any more than I had as a little girl, that’d just kill me after reading about her for fifty-six books. I was fairly sure that after reading all fifty-six books, I’d start feeling attached.

  Then I noticed that there were other books on the shelves with “Nancy Drew” on their spines but with different packaging. So she did live on!

  I hauled my armloads over to the nearest available register and plunked the books down.

  “A completist’s present for some special young person?” the young man at the counter asked.

  “Yes,” I said, opening my wallet to pull out the necessary cash. “Me.”

  He raised a tastefully pierced eyebrow.

  “My childhood wasn’t so good and adulthood hasn’t been much better so far,” I said, “so I’m doing a do-over here.”

  He just shrugged. Apparently, he’d waited on weirder.

  Fifty-six books at $5.99 each came to…

  “Three hundred and thirty-five dollars and forty-four cents plus tax,” he said. “Cash or cre—?”

  I handed over the cash.

  Okay, so maybe I was an out-of-work and underpaid nanny looking to become an in-work and underpaid nanny yet again, but I did have cash left over from my commercial child-star days.

  So then why, you may well ask, was I living off of Aunt Bea’s meager largesse when I could have afforded a place of my own?

  Because when Buster had broken my stupid little heart, he’d shattered it completely, despite the justified anger I tried to cling to. I’d been absolutely shattered, having believed I’d found true love, only to have it smashed away—and the only place I’d had the strength to go to was home, such as it was; home to Aunt Bea.

  Nancy and I have nothing in common, I thought, absolutely nothing, as I read the beginning of #1.

  It said that Nancy Drew was an attractive girl of eighteen, that she was driving along a country road in her new, dark blue convertible and that she had just delivered some legal papers for her father.

  Apparently, her dad had given her the car as a birthday present and she thought it was fun helping him in his work.

  It went on to say that her father was Carson Drew, a well-known lawyer in River Heights, and that he frequently discussed puzzling aspects of cases with his blond blue-eyed daughter. Smug, I thought, Nancy was pleased her father relied on her intuition.

  Nancy was nothing like me. She was five years younger, for one thing. She also drove, a convertible no less; I couldn’t even drive a donkey cart, had never even bothered getting my license. Who needed a car if you’d lived all your life in the city? It would only be a nuisance here, even a convertible in the summer. Besides, I was kind of terrified of driving, would rather poke a needle through my own eye than be responsible for powering a vehicle.

  Nancy also had a father who trusted her to help him with things, while all I had was Aunt Bea to trust that I would fuck everything up and a father in Africa whom I rarely saw. I seemed to remember Nancy being motherless, like me, but somehow I doubted we’d lost our mothers in the same fashion.

  Finally, there was that whole thing about her being blond and blue-eyed—wasn’t she supposed to be famously titian-haired? I seemed to remember that, too, and remembered thinking the word sounded glamorous but then thinking it icky when I’d learned the Webster’s definition of it was “of a brownish-orange color,” which hardly sounded attractive—which was in direct opposition to my own curly black hair and brick-brown eyes.

  I hated her already.

  The bitch probably didn’t even have any cheesy cellulite on the backs of her thighs. It would be nice to be able to say I was too young to worry about cellulite, but genetics will out and mine had outed itself post-puberty in an unpleasant way. Oh, nothing too major, just enough to make the idea of appearing on a beach in a bathing suit somewhat less than confidence-building.

  Feeling more disgusted than I’d expected to feel, I put aside #1 and picked up #56, the one with the pagoda on the cover, and turned to page one again.

  Nancy was discussing some drink called Pearl Powder with friends Bess and George.

  I remembered being confused by George when I was a little girl. Obviously, George was a boy’s name, and yet whenever there were pictures of the girls with Nancy’s boyfriend Ned in the
book, I’d always think Ned was George and wonder where Ned was and who was that other girl? It was years before I sorted George’s androgyny out.

  I grumbled. I didn’t have any friends.

  Before Buster, I’d had a few friends, at least people to do things with and people to talk to when times got rough. But after I succumbed to Buster’s charms, I committed the other cardinal sin that girls make: I made the man not just the center of the universe, but the entire universe, and I let everyone else drift off to different galaxies.

  So maybe I messed up that metaphor, but so what, because in that moment, I realized I no longer had any friends, not like Nancy did, not even a friend of not-readily-determinable sexual orientation like George.

  You could say I felt sorry for myself. I knew my own choices and actions had led me to where I was, but I still felt sorry for myself.

  If things had somehow worked out with Buster—not that I’d ever been able to define for myself, even before the bust-up, what would constitute things “working out” with a married man plus two kids—would I still be feeling sorry for myself at this point?

  Probably, I figured. Because I would have still reached that critical state in a relationship where you realize you’ve let all your friendships die and all you have left is the one relationship.

  Not that I’d had any other experience with relationships.

  Come to think of it, I’d had limited experience with friendships, too.

  I glanced down that first page of #56 and saw that—omigod!—Nancy was still eighteen! How was such a thing possible? I was pretty sure that even Sherlock Holmes, over the course of his many adventures, had aged a few years. So how had Nancy managed to age not one year over the course of fifty-six mysteries? I quickly did the math.

  Okay, I went to find my calculator.

  Figuring it wasn’t a leap year—because what are the odds? Something like one in four?—I did the division. Let’s see…365 divided by 56 is…6.5178571. 6.5178571??? This…teenager was solving mysteries at the rate of one every six and a half days? What kind of a girl was she? Oh, man, was I sooo not her.

  Talk about an overachiever.

  But then, after I was annoyed for a really long time, I started to think, How cool!

  Imagine having one incredibly long year, the most stretched-out year imaginable, with enough time to get right everything a person needed to get right. What would I do with such a year? I couldn’t change the past. But maybe in changing my present, I could change my future?

  I looked at the calendar on the back of my bedroom door, kittens in Greece, the sole present I’d received from Aunt Bea for my birthday: it was April 26. So, calculator time again, I had already lost 116 days so far that year—it wasn’t a leap year—meaning I’d already blown the chance to solve 17.846153 mysteries. But hey, there were still 249 days left, so there was still the opportunity for me to solve the remaining 38.153847 mysteries.

  Whatever they were.

  If only I could get up to speed real fast.

  Actually, I was beginning to think that even I should be able to solve .153847 mysteries. It was the 38 part, I suspected, that would be the problem.

  For the remainder of the two months until it was time for me to get on the plane to Iceland, I could read a book a day of Nancy Drew, leaving me five days at the end for shopping, packing and biting my nails to the quick.

  Except for the day I went for the job interview, of course. Even someone desperate for a nanny who was willing to leave her life and go to Iceland wasn’t going to hire that nanny without first meeting her in person…. No matter what kind of wonderful things Ambassador Buster had said about her.

  chapter 3

  Then came the call. It was by one Mrs. Fairly, definitely a Mrs. who would never allow herself to be addressed as Ms., who requested I come to her master’s—master’s?—Park Avenue home for an interview. Clearly, this was a step up from Ambassador Buster Keating’s home, where I’d originally been interviewed and hired by his disinterested wife. I was now to be hired by a minion, which I figured meant I was moving up in the world.

  Trying to answer that ever-popular euphonious question, WWNDD—What Would Nancy Drew Do?—I searched my practical wardrobe for the perfect persuasive costume to wear. Rejecting the casual allure of slacks and the confidence-inducing appeal of a dressy dress, I at last settled on a sensible plaid skirt and short-sleeved turtleneck I found in the back of my closet. I had no idea where these garments came from, could not for the life of me remember purchasing them, but when I looked in the mirror I saw they were doing the trick. Adding my mother’s pearls and unassuming flats to the picture, even though the flats gave me none of the height I so badly needed, I was ready to roll.

  But first I had to run the gauntlet of Aunt Bea’s children.

  “You look boring,” said Joe, the oldest at fifteen. “I’d never date you.”

  “That’s a hideous combination,” said Elena, thirteen.

  “Who would ever wear pearls with plaid?” sniffed Georgia, nine.

  I was tempted to tell her that I was pretty damn sure Nancy Drew would wear plaid and pearls on an interview—hell, Nancy, who always wore gloves when she went out, but for entirely different reasons than why I ever did, would have undoubtedly worn gloves, too—but I didn’t want her to think I was crazier than she already clearly thought me. Plus, I still awaited Aunt Bea’s verdict.

  She looked at me long.

  “I…like it,” she finally said.

  And that scared the shit out of me more than anything that had gone before.

  When someone whose taste you don’t respect thinks that whatever you are wearing is the bee’s knees, chances are you’re making a fashion faux pas from which your image is unlikely to recover.

  I grabbed a leather bag, black with brown suede trim, that was more satchel than purse, and was gone.

  The living room I was led into by an actual liveried servant was big enough to fit Aunt Bea’s entire first floor into and it was quickly obvious that someone around here had an overly enthusiastic appetite for French furniture. Not that I’m particularly heavy, carrying no more extra baggage than the obligatory all-American extra ten, but when the servant indicated a Louis-something chair to me, and I felt the skinny legs wobble back and forth on the slippery marble floor beneath me, I found myself wishing for something more sturdy.

  Mrs. Fairly turned out to be as old as Aunt Bea looked, with a staid black dress and her own pearls on—ha! Thank you, Nancy Drew!—that somehow reflected back the glow of her bluish white hair. She also carried an extra twenty pounds to my ten and was shorter than me, which is always a shocker.

  I’ve spent my life thinking of my height more in terms of the technical—“I am a short person”—rather than in practice, because I’ve always felt taller and indeed all my life have been told, except by my family, that I don’t look that short, and that I have a much taller personality, whatever that means; even people who remember the commercials I made as a child, upon meeting me, never fail to comment, “You didn’t look like a short child!” Again, whatever that means.

  “What religion are you?” she asked.

  I would have guessed it was against some kind of law to ask a prospective employee about religious affiliation, unless of course you were hiring a bishop or a rabbi, but questioning the legality of her business ethics right off the bat hardly seemed the best tactic to secure me the position I wanted.

  “Jewish,” I said.

  “I see,” she said.

  I wondered what she was seeing, endeavored to at least look like I was waiting patiently for some kind of elucidation.

  “It’s just that,” she hesitated, “Iceland is such a…not-Jewish place.”

  “Is that a problem?” I asked, wanting to kick myself even as the words were leaving my stupid, stupid mouth. Did I want the job or didn’t I? Why raise the issue, why say the word problem for her? Let her do it if she was going to do it.

  “Oh, no, no,” she
pooh-poohed. “I mean, after all, with that hair alone, not to mention the lack of height—” she eyed me up and down in no time at all “—you’re bound to stand out.”

  This from a woman who was shorter than me and had blue hair?

  But I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “Challenges can be good,” I said, “for me and for Iceland.”

  She smiled for the first time.

  “You’re a little plucky,” she said, “aren’t you? I kind of like that.”

  “Are Icelanders prejudiced?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

  “Not at all,” she said. “They’re just all tall. And blond. And not Jewish.”

  Until she’d brought up the subject of my religion, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder that it might be strange to be a short, dark-haired Jew in Iceland. Maybe I hadn’t thought about the last so much because Judaism had never been a salient feature of my existence and was more like one of the less prominent lines on my résumé, like my high-school job at Dunkin’ Donuts.

  In fact, it wasn’t until I was eight that I even learned I was Jewish and even then it was by accident.

  Aunt Bea had just given birth to Joe, her first, and they were getting ready to baptize him. I was curious about the process, having never seen one before.

  “Why would you know anything about it?” Aunt Bea had asked me in a rare unguarded moment. “Your mother was Jewish.”

  I had known so little about my mother, other than that she’d died while having me. Women aren’t supposed to die in childbirth anymore, all the books tell you that it just doesn’t happen, but sometimes it does.

  A decade before, I’d been a fan of the TV program E.R., until one night when I saw an episode called “Love’s Labors Lost.” It was about a woman who goes into the hospital to have a baby and everything goes wrong, one thing after another, until the woman dies. It was like they were playing the story of my birth, and after that I could never watch the show again, had no interest in any medical show or movie of any sort.