How Nancy Drew Saved My Life

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  What I also did do on the second day was I began my duties with my new charge.

  So, really, when you think about it, the only thing the two days had in common was that at either end of each, I did in point of fact brush my teeth.

  It has been said that having the care of a small child is something akin to watching paint dry. I do not doubt the boredom of the task for many. I can only say that for me, perhaps because I had never had a child of my own, it was more a delight than a burden to see the changes, the growth, in one who looked to me to help with her interpretation of the world.

  And Annette was a good child, none better that I had known, for unlike Stevie and Kim, who had already had something of the skeptic bred into their small lives, whatever unhappy event had rendered Annette the sole property of her papa had failed to similarly make her jaded. She was more like a sun that would never burn out.

  Still, though, as enjoyable and fulfilling as her company was for me, as dutiful day piled upon dutiful day, I yet found I had a need for adult company.

  And Mrs. Fairly, pleasant as she was to me, just wouldn’t do.

  Since I had been told repeatedly that I could go out anytime at night once Annette had finished with her supper, my duties for the day discharged, I at last took advantage of this generosity.

  I had heard that Broadway at Hotel Island was the largest restaurant and dance hall in Iceland, capable of holding more than one thousand guests at a time. It seemed like a good place for me to go in order to get lost. It offered a great advantage, in that I could be among a large quantity of people, giving the illusion of company, and I might yet remain alone.

  As an aside, I had become aware of a change in my own tone of voice, even the tone I thought in, since coming to Iceland, specifically since my first disastrous meeting with Ambassador Rawlings. I was much more formal, more stiff than I had ever been in New York. I suppose it should have puzzled me more, troubled me even, but I guess I’ve always been something of a chameleon. Too many Southern novels in a row and my vowels always had a tendency to soften. Read too many hard-boiled mysteries and I’d start to swear. I guessed that now, so much in the company of stilted Annette who had got it from her stilted papa, I’d gone a bit European.

  Or maybe I was just changing, just becoming possessed by the place.

  No, too fanciful.

  Enough.

  Ever since my arrival in Iceland, I had been trying to figure the place out; more specifically, the people. I, of course, remembered what I had read about Icelanders being the longest-lived people on the planet, but that wasn’t the most salient feature about them. Having come into contact with many of them during my daily outings with Annette—through wind and rain, we must always go out, at least once every day—I had noticed that there was something different about them than the people I had come into contact with back home: they were more placid and laid-back. It was almost as though, having to contend with a geology that meant that at any given moment a volcano or geyser might erupt, that geological uncertainty had instilled in them a calm that was the emotional embodiment of laissez-faire.

  I had also read somewhere that the vast majority of Icelanders, when polled, admitted to believing in “hill people,” or, to put it another way, trolls.

  This little bit of whimsy pleased me greatly, leading me to think, however erroneously, that if they could believe in trolls, and some of them obviously put great faith in Nancy Drew by reading her books, then they might also one day be persuaded to believe in the worth of one governess from New York.

  One could only hope.

  If my intention in going to Broadway at Hotel Island had been to hide in plain sight, I couldn’t have made a worse decision. No sooner did I enter the place, and hear the loud music all around me, than I found myself flanked on both sides by blond giantesses, determined that they would become my dear friends.

  Their names were Britta and Gina.

  And they refused to believe me when I said that I had come there, essentially, to be alone.

  “Nobody comes to Broadway to be alone!” laughed Britta.

  “You need us!” said Gina.

  I asked them if they were sure they were Icelanders.

  Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted them. What Would Nancy Drew Do, in similar circumstances, were she to find herself alone in a bar in Iceland?

  She’d make a couple of friends, of course. Nancy Drew always had friends.

  Wasn’t it high time that I, essentially friendless for so long, should at last make some friends?

  Not that Britta and Gina gave me much choice in the matter.

  No one had ever found me exotic before, except perhaps for Annette—and Buster Keating had seemed to, but I knew now that was just part of his seductive act.

  But Britta and Gina certainly found me exotic—was it my dark coloring? My lack of any significant height?—and it soon became apparent that nothing would do but for me to spend the evening at the bar, letting them buy me round after round of these drinks that seemed harmlessly fruity enough but that I fast suspected were strong enough to make a sailor walk funny.

  I suspected that because they were making me very drunk.

  And, as I got drunk, my tongue got looser.

  At first, I had played it safe, letting them do all the talking.

  If I asked them what they did for a living, they were happy to oblige me at length:

  Something to do with working at the library, but nothing so basic as standing at the circ desk punching out summer-reading lists. I don’t know. I think it might have had something to do with translating ancient texts that had already been translated many times before, in the hopes of either deconstructing them or reconstructing their original meaning and intent. Like I say, it was confusing to me.

  If I asked them how old they were, they said things like:

  “Older than you, to be sure!”—Britta.

  “But not so old that we forget that girls just want to have fun!”—Gina, who kind of had a taller version of Cyndi Lauper-thing going on.

  If I asked them where they lived:

  Britta told me all about living with her parents, three brothers, two dogs and cat, and what each did for a living. Well, not the dogs and the cat.

  Gina told me about how she missed living with her parents, two sisters, one dog and three cats, what everyone’s main occupation was, including the pets—the dog was a big barker, the cats spent a lot of time sleeping. “Living alone can be too much like living without people,” she concluded wistfully.

  They made me wonder just what exactly were these ancient texts they were working on and just what exactly awful kinds of things they were doing to them.

  Not that I didn’t like them, of course. What wasn’t to like? For the first time in I couldn’t say how long, someone was talking to me who was: 1) not my relative, 2) not my employer, 3) not my charge. And there were two of them! How lucky could a lonely girl get?

  I’ll tell you one thing: I swear, I did not bring up the topic of men.

  “So,” said Britta, surveying the bar scene, “what do you think of the men?”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  “They’re not women,” I said.

  “Ha!” Gina howled. “That is so good, it should be on a T-shirt! ‘Men: they’re not women’—ha!”

  “You have been…burned,” Britta said.

  This was when I started feeling the non-fruity part of the fruity drinks kicking in.

  “Burned is such a strong word,” I said. “And so limiting.”

  “Then what would you say, if you wanted to be more accurate?” Britta led, clearly doing her best to get me to deconstruct myself.

  “Objectively?” I asked.

  They nodded.

  “I would say,” I said reflectively, sucking on my straw, “that I had my heart stalked, then it was seduced, then, once the seducer had secured it, it was ripped out of my chest, thrown in the dust and stomped on until there was barel
y anything beating left.” I stopped, gave the matter one more moment’s reflective thought, nodded, shrugged. “That’s pretty much it, more or less.”

  They shook their pretty, big heads in sympathy.

  “Man,” said Britta, “men really aren’t women, are they?”

  This last made me feel uncomfortable. Even though I had been the originator of the whole “Men: they’re not women” thing—destined for a T-shirt near you—I had never been one for the whole “women, yes; men, no” school of thought that filled so much of popular culture, in particular self-help books and daytime talk TV.

  What can I say? In the Keating household, the wife had kept a lot of those kinds of books lying around the house; and when Stevie and Kim were in school, there wasn’t much else to do, since I wasn’t doing any writing, than to watch daytime television.

  And what I’d seen, I’d never much liked. How can one gender blame another for all of its problems? It would be like me blaming Britta and Gina because they were blond and I was not.

  Okay, so maybe it wouldn’t be the same thing at all, but the fruity drinks persuaded me it was close enough, so still.

  “I’m sure,” I sighed wearily, “that the other side could just as easily get T-shirts printed up that say, ‘Women—they’re not men’.”

  “Aha!” Gina snap-pointed at me. “Then you admit there is something that can be called ‘the other side’?”

  “Who do you work for, really, Oprah?”

  “The real question is,” said Gina, “who do you work for? As yet, all you have done is get us to talk about ourselves.”

  “That’s not exactly true,” said Britta. “She did tell us about her heart being ripped out and stomped on.”

  “Yes,” said Gina, “but then she went ahead and defended the other side.”

  “Whoa!” I put up my hands. “Who is this ‘she’ you keep talking about? Am I even sitting here?”

  They had the grace to look positively mortified at least.

  “Sorry,” said Britta, looking into her drink and taking a sip. “Too many of these, perhaps.”

  “We get carried away with curiosity sometimes,” Gina admitted. “It is a real treat for us to meet someone who is so…foreign.”

  That was rich. Still…

  “It is only natural,” said Britta, “that we would then want to learn everything we possibly can about you.”

  Okay, maybe it was all kind of weird. But what person, unless the person has the personality of a turtle, doesn’t relish having other people take an interest in the circumstances of their life and thoughts? I admit it: I was flattered. Here were these two gorgeous blond women, who surely had better things to do with their time—didn’t they?—and all they wanted to do was hear about me. If I were a man, I would have been in heaven.

  And so I caved. I, who had never really confided anything to anybody, caved to telling my story to interested ears.

  I told them about my upbringing.

  “You have overcome adversity,” said Britta.

  “A less strong woman would not have become so strong,” said Gina.

  I told them about my early job on TV.

  “You were the Gubber Snack Foods Kid?” said Britta.

  “You?” echoed Gina.

  A less strong woman might have taken offense at their surprise.

  But a smart one would have been incredulous that they’d even seen the commercials.

  “How…?” I wondered.

  “American TV gets exported everywhere eventually,” said Britta.

  “And don’t you remember,” said Gina, “you did a guest spot on that show about the boarding school, The Fats of Life?”

  “The Facts of Life,” I automatically corrected.

  “You played yourself as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, at six years old,” said Gina, “falling in love with George Clooney’s character.”

  “My tastes have changed since then,” I said.

  “You said your famous line from your commercials,” said Britta.

  And both at once, they said, “‘It’s Gubberlicious!’”

  “Of course, we never saw the actual commercials,” said Gina.

  “And we’ve never eaten Gubber Snack Foods, either,” said Britta. “They never made it here. Are they as good as they sound?”

  “They suck,” I said.

  “Ah,” said Gina, looking embarrassed for me, “capitalism at work. Well, I at least did like the way George Clooney gently let you down when he had to explain that he was looking for a girlfriend closer to his age.”

  “Yeah,” said Britta. “That man can really wear a tool belt.”

  What do you say to that?

  I went on.

  I told them about Ambassador Buster Keating’s house and everything that happened to me there.

  “You have had your heart broken,” Britta sniffed.

  “You have had your heart ripped out and stomped in the mud,” Gina sniffed so hard she had to blow her nose.

  Just then, a trio of men who’d been seated at the end of the bar made their way over to us. They were a weird combination of bluff arrogance and high-school awkwardness, like they thought we should be grateful for their attentions but were insecure that we might not be.

  “Buy you fine ladies a drink?” offered the tallest of the three. They were all tall, of course, but he was the tallest.

  Gina whirled on him.

  “What is wrong with you?” she demanded.

  “I, um, thought you might be thirsty,” he stuttered.

  “God,” said Britta. “Can’t you see there’s an emotional crisis going on? We’re bonding here!”

  “Shoo,” said Gina, as though he were the family cat.

  Was she the one who lived with her family or was that Britta? I looked into my drink for inspiration, found none, shrugged, took a sip. I could no longer remember.

  “Scat!” Gina said more vehemently, when her “shoo!” failed to elicit the desired response.

  “I hate that,” said Gina.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Every time you go to a bar, some guy thinks you’re going to a bar to meet a guy.”

  Suddenly, the idea of meeting a guy sounded appealing.

  “Hey!” I called after the retreating trio. But they’d already moved on to other girls.

  “You have had your heart crushed.” Britta covered my hand with hers.

  She was right, I realized glumly. I was a pathetic loser.

  “The last thing you need,” said Gina, covering my other hand, “is to get into another situation where you are subordinate to some dominating…man.”

  She was right, too.

  “Then what do I need?” I sighed morosely.

  Gina’s eyes lit up like two bright blue moons. “You need to become a devo!”

  “A what?” I snatched my hands back.

  “A devo!” she went on excitedly. “You know, like one of those women, Cher or Madonna but definitely not Britney Spears, who get the world to lie at their feet while they insist on getting perfect lighting and an endless supply of tiny pitted olives, imported from some country no one has ever heard of.”

  “Oh,” I said, the dawn breaking, “you mean a diva.”

  “Yes! Yes!” she said. “One of those!”

  “I’m afraid it would never work,” I sighed again.

  “Whyever not?” she asked.

  “I’m just not diva material. Even if I were a character in a Nancy Drew book, I’d never be Nancy. I’d be the maid. Or the family dog. Did they even have a dog?”

  Gina no longer cared about dogs.

  “You are a fan of Nancy Drew, too?” she asked, at which point Britta opened her handbag and exultantly extracted a copy of #41, The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes.

  “What is it with you people, you Icelanders, and Nancy Drew?” I asked.

  They looked hurt, stunned.

  “Why,” said Britta, “she is the greatest heroine of all time.”

  “So plu
cky,” said Gina, “so sure of herself.”

  “And she has great hair,” said Britta.

  “You must admire her, too,” said Gina, recovering from her hurt. “After all, you brought her up, so she must be important to you.”

  I explained how, in the wake of my bust-up with Buster, I’d read all the Nancy Drew books before coming to Iceland.

  “…hoping to mend your broken heart,” Britta finished up for me. “So, how long are you planning on vacationing here?”

  I couldn’t believe we had been talking for so long, had covered so much ground, that I knew what they did for a living and yet they had still to learn what I was doing in their country.

  “I’m not on vacation,” I said.

  “You’re not?” Gina looked wounded again. “But I thought you were here to mend what had become of your brokenheartedness.”

  “That, too,” I said, “but I’m also working.”

  “Doing what?” asked Britta.

  I explained about the governess job I had.

  “Oh my goodness!” said Gina. “You work for Ambassador Rawlings?”

  I might have been surprised at their recognizing his name so readily. Back in the United States, people never knew who any ambassadors were unless there was some kind of sex scandal. But then I remembered where I was: underpopulated Iceland, where a chauffeur could call up his cousin the president to do lunch.

  “Why?” I asked, referring to Gina’s apparent surprise that I worked for who I worked for. “Is that shocking somehow?”

  “Why,” said Britta, “he is the sexiest man alive!”

  What?

  “What?” I shouted. “No, he’s not.”

  “Oh, but he is,” said Gina. “He is so…all man, plus he is such an American.”

  “No, he’s not,” I said again. I thought of his formal speech patterns that had seemed so European to me, so stilted when compared to the casualness of most Americans. “He sounds more like…you than me.”

  “Oh, but he is so arrogant,” said Britta. “You know, that’s really sexy in a man.”

  “What’s he like to work for?” Gina asked eagerly.

  I told them a bit about the household and how in most of my dealings with him, he was so, well, arrogant.