Even if I only wrote for myself, but seriously, it might give me the catharsis I needed.
Apparently, George took my avowal of being a writer at face value.
As he droned on with an idea he had for what I should write next, a story he was too lazy to write himself but that he felt someone should tell, I found myself wishing Mrs. Fairly were in the seat next to me instead, but she’d flown on to Iceland a few days before with Annette, saying it would be best if they got situated and the master grew accustomed to having two more in the new Iceland house before adding me as a third.
George seemed offended I didn’t jump at his novel idea, even though I suspected he would have sued me penniless if I’d ever dared to try.
“So,” he said, still enormously miffed, “if you’re not going to write Travels with George for your next novel, then what the hell are you going to write?”
What, indeed?
And, more importantly, WWNDD about my annoying companion?
Reading all fifty-six of those books, I’d fast learned that people always started telling Nancy everything…just as soon as they met her! And, before long, Nancy could always read their minds. She was like the ultimate Mistress of Empathy.
So, WWNDD?
She’d be nice to the nosy old geezer, she’d listen to every boring thing he had to say, she’d answer his questions with complete politeness without giving anything important away.
“I’m not sure what I plan to write,” I said honestly. “That’s part of what I’m going to Iceland to find out.”
And it was.
Ever since I was a young girl, I’d flirted with the idea of being a writer, had even written a long story, Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, a roman à clef if there ever was one. Writing, mostly in my journal, was my way of making sense of the world. More importantly, perhaps, it was a way of getting outside of myself, of living the lives I was not smart enough or talented enough or brave enough to live. I might not be able to sing on key, but maybe one day I could write a character who was an opera singer or a rock singer, beset by trials and tribulations but finding love where and when it mattered most. Best of all, if I were a writer, I could write my own endings, whether I was in the mood for tragedy or joy. I could kill those who deserved to be killed, I could kill those I loved best in my fictional worlds just for the sake of creating great drama, I could love without fear.
The only problem was, I had yet to come up with an idea that moved me. Even Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, once I’d read it through for the twelfth time, didn’t seem like something anyone else would ever pay good money for, unless it was because they wanted an example of writing that was howlingly awful.
I burned it in the fireplace, but I never forgot the one great line of my young heroine, Carly Bongstein: “If I ever get out of here alive, with God as my witness, I’ll never eat pork chops again.”
But I knew in my young heart I was destined to write something far more important than Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, even if it turned out to be the kind of book that sold meagerly, the critics raving or ranting for naught. It wouldn’t matter, because I would have written something true, something that really mattered, if to no one else, then to myself.
The only problem was, I had no idea what that book might be about.
And that was part of why, at age twenty, I’d applied for the position of nanny at Ambassador Keating’s house. I thought it might be good for my would-be writer’s soul to seek out low-level employment, cocooning as it were, until I knew what to write about.
And now, having not been able to come up with the inspiration for My Great Novel during my years in the Keating household, I was winging my way to a new household in Iceland in the hopes that a change of scenery would finally do the trick.
But I still hadn’t a clue as to what I would write about and had said as much to Mrs. Fairly, said as much to George now.
Mrs. Fairly had taken it better than George.
George seemed to be of a mind that I was holding out on him, that I was some kind of paranoid freak, fearful he might steal my ideas and use them for lucrative gain, just as he undoubtedly imagined I wanted to steal his.
“Well, if you want to be that way about it,” he huffed, reaching into the pocket hanging from the back of the seat in front of him in order to retrieve the reading material he’d stowed there earlier as insurance against the boredom of our long flight.
When he’d first put his reading material there earlier as we’d been settling in, I hadn’t bothered to take note of the specifics, concerned as I was at the time with arranging for my own comfort. Contacts out and glasses in to prevent dry eyes? Check. Shoes off to give my feet maximum comfort until such time as I might need to use the restroom with the no doubt urine-stained floor? Check. My copy of Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, the brass Poe bookmark—“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream by night,” the brass of which had set off the metal detector at airport security—firmly lodged at page 52? Check.
But now, for some reason, I was dead curious as to what George would deem appropriate in-flight reading material.
I stole a surreptitious glance.
It was Nancy Drew, #47, The Mysterious Mannequin.
He must have heard me gasp, because he looked up.
“Something wrong,” he asked, “Ms. Writer?”
“It’s just that…”
“Yes?”
“Oh. It’s just that I didn’t expect to see…”
“See what? Someone reading Nancy Drew on the way to Iceland?”
I hesitated, nodded.
“Ha!” he snorted, turned back to his book. “Shows how much you know.”
“What does that mean?” I pressed.
But my aisle mate was no longer interested in engaging in polite discourse with me. Apparently, I’d somehow managed to offend his delicate sensibilities one too many times.
“It’s just that,” he finally answered, not even deigning to lift his eyes from the dark print on the page, “if you’d ever been to Iceland before, you’d know better than to wonder about such things.”
I tried to immerse myself in Ms. Hazzard, but it just wasn’t cutting it. At the right time, I knew I’d love what I was reading, admire it intensely. But I was on a plane to Iceland, for God’s sake, had no idea what I was getting myself into, and probably the only reading that might have worked for me right then was brain candy.
Quickly, I learned that the SkyMall magazine was not the answer, either. And so, for a brief time I tried to read Nancy Drew over George’s shoulder, but he caught on fast, protectively hunching over the book and cradling the page with his right arm, like we were in grade school and he was the smart kid preventing the unprepared kid—that would be me—from cheating.
Sighing, I wished once again that Mrs. Fairly were my aisle mate instead of the dyspeptic George. True, they’d both recognized me as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, although I’d successfully deflected George into believing I was not—some success!—but at least Mrs. Fairly had remained cheerful about it throughout the whole thing, whereas George…
Of course, Mrs. Fairly had only been peripherally interested in me as a former commercial child star. Yes, more than her interest in me as that had been Mrs. Fairly’s interest in me as the woman who used to be employed by Ambassador Keating.
What had been the story behind my employment?