How Nancy Drew Saved My Life

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  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? What had it been like there? Why had I left?

  As I mentioned earlier, I had sought out employment in the Keating household as a refuge from both my claustrophobic situation in my aunt’s house and as a way to bide my time until a novel grew inside my brain.

  My interview with Mrs. Keating had been far different than the one I’d more recently survived with Mrs. Fairly. Mrs. Keating, a tennis-playing tax attorney staunchly committed to loopholes and her weak backhand, had drilled me like she was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I was someone who had applied for the job of, w
ell, ambassador.

  Alissa Keating was pretty enough, but only in the way of women who have enough time and money to ensure they look that way. Without the bells and whistles and bows, she’d have just looked like anybody else who wasn’t really such a much.

  Not that I’m trying to be catty here, just stating fact.

  Anyway, Alissa needed a new nanny for her two kids because the last one “had left under unpleasant circumstances.”

  Her face got all pinched when she said that, kind of like a golden raisin, and I suppose I should have questioned her further on it, but I just assumed that my predecessor had been a thief or incompetent or both. Since I was not a thief, and hopefully not incompetent, I figured I would suit the Keatings just fine.

  Then Alissa brought in the kids for me to meet them.

  Stevie, the girl, named for the sultry singer from Fleetwood Mac, who Alissa claimed her husband adored, was five at the time and was cute and bouncy, all blond curls and laughing glee. Children of neglectful parents—and I would indeed come to learn over the next three years that the Keatings were neglectful parents—are often sad little creatures, cynical before their time. But I’d long known there was the rare exception to that rule, kids who remained perky and resilient despite a cruel or indifferent upbringing. I knew these characteristics, could recognize them in another, because I possessed them myself.

  The boy’s name was unfortunately Kim, ill advisedly named after the Kipling character by his mother, who obviously had not stopped to think that her literary pretensions might get the crap beaten out of her son later on in life. Kim was three at the time, a dour towhead with sad blue pools for eyes with too-long lashes who had not managed to become as resilient as his sister.

  I liked the kids well enough on first meeting and they seemed to like me, with even Kim allowing a single tentative smile in my direction, like maybe he thought, Okay, so you’re being nice now, but how long will that last? How long will you last?

  Alissa said I’d be expected to make sure the kids ate breakfast and dinner, make sure they got off to school okay and to all their extracurricular activities—there was a lot of ballet and soccer and that early-violin thing all the rich New York kids go to that I can never remember the name of, Samurai or something—and that when at home, she did not want them watching TV; she wanted me teaching them more important things all the time.

  “Um, I’m not very good with math or geography,” I confessed, figuring it was best to get that out of the way so she could decide against me without wasting any more time.

  That brought her up short for a minute, but only a minute, since three years earlier a good nanny had been hard to find, unlike now when a good position was hard for a nanny to find.

  “I suppose that could be okay,” she finally said. “They can get some geography from their father. I’m pretty sure he keeps a map of some kind in his office. And they’re already the genetic recipients of good math from me.”

  Alissa stressed that she wanted someone who would live in, that she needed someone seven days a week because she and her husband went out a lot and she did not want to disrupt the children by having them handed off to different sitters all the time.

  I said that would be fine and it was. I wanted to get out of Aunt Bea’s house but, despite my own money, did not feel ready to live on my own. At least in the Keating household there would be the distraction of a job to do. Plus, I loved children.

  “I don’t want a nanny,” said Alissa, “who is more interested in her own social life than in taking care of my children.”

  I could have said that it seemed that she was more interested in her own social life than in taking care of her kids, but I held my tongue in an effort to come across as employable. So instead I said:

  “That won’t be me. I have no social life.”

  She gave me a once-over that said she was hardly surprised, for I had indeed worn the most sensible clothes plus no makeup for the interview, but then all of a sudden she did look surprised, snapping her fingers three times, as if she was trying to come up with something.

  “The Gubber Snack Foods Kid, right?” she accused, pointing to me on the last snap.

  In the instant after Alissa snapped and pointed, it was clear from her look that she thought I’d come down in the world, lookswise, since my last commercial. Well, that had been sixteen years ago.

  “I guess they have someone come in and do makeup and stuff for those things, huh?” she said, in words that could have implied sympathy but didn’t.

  I just shrugged.

  But I could see in the next minute, by the acquisitive gleam in her eye, that if nothing about my résumé had clinched the job for me earlier—surely my lack of geography and math hadn’t exactly won me points, nor had her children’s immediate liking of me seemed to make an impression on her in any way—this had. Alissa Keating would enjoy nothing more than having friends and colleagues learn that she kept a former child star—even if all I’d done was make a few stupid commercials—as a subordinate in a tiny bedroom in her household.

  I could just hear her at the tennis club now.

  “Can you believe it?” Alissa would ask. Thwack! “‘It’s Gubberlicious!’” Thwack! “Yup! I’ve got her right up in my attic!” Thwack!

  And, okay, I hadn’t actually seen the tiny bedroom at that point, but I could certainly guess.

  Not long after her victorious gleam, the master of the household entered the kitchen where she had been interviewing me, walked by us without a glance, retrieved a foreign beer from the refrigerator and, with one testosterone-charged flick of the wrist, used a bottle opener to shoot off the cap. Turning, bottle to his lips, he took me in for the first time and I him.

  It’s no overstatement to say that Buster Keating was the most beautiful man I’d seen in person up until that life-changing moment of my life. The rich dinners he’d undoubtedly consumed at diplomatic get-togethers had done not a trace of damage to his tall, muscular physique, and whatever tennis he himself played had only served to strengthen the structure into hardness, like a da Vinci model—I’m talking about the carved men of the sculptures here—every line and sinew defined. He had a shock of dark hair that defied the well-trimmed look one would expect in a diplomat, instead giving him the perpetual appearance of someone who had just climbed out of bed, a bed in which he and whoever his lucky partner was had no doubt had great sex. His brown eyes were to die for, his jawline like something a superhero couldn’t dent. When he smiled, the flash of white was almost obscene, both in intensity and implied invitation.

  Of course, Buster was about twenty years older than me, but that didn’t matter. Why should it? Anyone could see that he was in a league I could only dream about, a league I’d never even seen before.

  “Hey, you’re new,” he said before taking a slug of his beer.

  It never occurred to me, in that moment, that his reaction could be anything more than that of the habitual flirt. I’d met people like Buster Keating before. Not necessarily bisexual, they couldn’t help themselves from flirting with every single person they came across, man, woman or animal. He probably flashed that same smile at his secretary, whether she was hot or not, at the carrier boy who delivered important papers to his office, at the schnauzer on the corner. For him, such a thing was merely a Pavlovian response; I was sure of it. There was nothing special to be read in his reaction to me; I was sure of that, too.

  Alissa Keating was apparently sure of it, as well, for, without even turning to look at her husband, she said, “That’s right, Buster. Charlotte is the new nanny.”

  And so it started, both my job in the Keating household and my ruinous affair with Buster.

  Oh, I don’t mean to imply that it started right that minute. The onset took much longer than that. But, really, it kind of did.

  The first several months there, I had hardly any contact with Buster at all, nor with Alissa for that matter. Since Buster spent a large part of every year either in Washington or at
the foreign embassy to which he had been posted, he was mostly at home only on weekends and sometimes not even then. As for Alissa, she was too busy being everything but a mother to be a mother; that’s what she had me for. And so, most of my dealings with them were through the daily notes Alissa left for me on the butcher block in the kitchen, a knife always stuck in the top of the note so that no stray wind could ever blow her precious words away, notes filled with instructions on nutrition and scheduling recommendations for Stevie and Kim.

  “Five fruits and vegetables each and every day, Charlotte. Even with your math-challenged mind, you can count that high…right?”

  “Fifteen minutes of TV in the morning and fifteen at night. That’s it. They don’t call it the idiot box for nothing…right?”

  “That last piece of chocolate cheesecake is mine…right?”

  There were times I thought there must be better uses for that sharp note-stabbing knife than the purpose it was being used for.

  And so, before another day had passed following my interview with Alissa, my life began to be filled with the education of small children, with shopping for birthday parties and making sure granola bars and juice boxes were in backpacks, with tutus and Samurai violin lessons.

  It didn’t take many more days to pass before I started to fall in love with those kids. It wasn’t so much that they were particularly charming, certainly Kim wasn’t, but there was something so vulnerable about their orphans-within-a-two-parent-household circumstances. If their parents would not pay enough attention to them, then I would let Stevie play with what little makeup I owned, I would learn how to play games involving balls and things so I could teach Kim how to play, too.

  It may not have been anybody’s idea of the Ideal Life, but it had become my life and it was sufficient.

  The bedroom they gave me was in the far corner of the penthouse, a tiny box of a room—see? I had guessed that would happen!—that I suspected had been meant as an extra storage closet. It wasn’t so bad, though, not like what I imagined would be the airless, lightless, spiderweb-infested lodgings of any nanny living in the suburbs. I had a bed, a lamp to read by, there was even a TV, if I were so inclined, which I rarely was. So what if the room was a shade of yellow I detested; I was too timid to complain.