Home may have been the place where, when you’re desperate, they have to let you in. But some had creepy red rooms that were like mental torture chambers in the upstairs and some homes still sucked.
“Get going!” Aunt Bea shooed me.
I went, having gotten my own way the hard way.
I may have been down and out, but I was still perky and resilient. That’s one thing you should know about me: even when I’m not feeling at all brash and intrepid, I’ve always been perky and resilient.
As I fed my résumé facedown through the fax machine, I thought about what was on the business side of it: my name, Charlotte Bell; my address, here; my early schooling, unspectacular; my two years of business college, entered into upon and completed at Aunt Bea’s insistence, since she thought I’d never amount to much and wanted to make sure I embarked on a path that would ensure this would be so. After that, of course, there was my three years in Ambassador Bertram—Buster to his friends—Keating and Mrs. Keating’s home as nanny to their two kids.
I’d gotten the Keating job through an agency. Upon receiving my business-college certificate and having decided that I didn’t want to do anything remotely business related, and having Aunt Bea at my back pushing me to get a job that would earn me enough money to get me out of the house, I’d decided to kill all the birds with one stone: I’d take a job that would, by definition, get me out of the house twenty-four hours a day.
I’d be a live-in nanny.
How hard could it be?
Perhaps I’d read too many gothic novels as a young child and was romanticizing the job, but I pictured young children looking up to me and me loving them; I pictured feeling competent.
Okay, obviously I wasn’t thinking about anything by Henry James.
The way I figured it, though, being a nanny would be the perfect confidence-building thing to get me out of Aunt Bea’s house. And, so long as nobody noticed the gaps in my knowledge, like geography, everyone involved would be better for it.
I looked again, ruefully, at the résumé I was faxing.
Since the only job I’d ever held of any substance was in the household of a man I’d made the mistake of sleeping with during most of my three-year stint there, and since being an adulteress hardly qualifies one in the eyes of the world as being good for much of anything other than more adultery, you would think I’d be trepidatious at the notion of my future riding on so little.
But if you thought that, again you would think wrong.
And isn’t it amazing how close intrepid and trepidatious are when you look at them on the page like that? Hard to believe they could be such different things and that at different points in my life I was destined to be one or the other.
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,