How Nancy Drew Saved My Life

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “kidding is not something that I am prone to. Why, just last week, I called up the president and we had lunch together the very same day.”

  What a country. A chauffeur could call up the president and, rather than finding himself in someplace like Guantanamo, wind up with an invitation to eat.

  It seemed impossible. I wanted to accuse Lars Aquavit of kidding me again but remembered that it hadn’t gone over well the first time.

  “Wow,” I finally said, “the same day? That’s amazing.”

  He shrugged.

  “I suppose it helps,” he said, “that, of course, the president is my cousin.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “All right, my second cousin. But still a cousin, of course.”

  Of course.

  What a country. It was like Lilliput, except that everyone was tall.

  If I had been less exhausted and less jazzed—I’d left at six in the evening, hadn’t slept, and now it was the morning of a new day!—I’m sure I would have looked out the window some more, enjoyed the scenery, taken in my new surroundings.

  But I was beat and teetering on the edge of an “I’m starting a new life—HELP!” breakdown. All I had the ambition to do was lean back in the black leather seat, with the driver who was the second cousin to the president of the country steering the way, close my eyes and puff away until the nicotine rush transported me to a heady place. Iceland and I could get to know one another better at a later time.

  One other thing I’d noticed at Keflavik Airport, even while rushing to keep up with Lars at the time: in addition to all the big chocolate, all the ubiquitous cell phones, all the superfluous height, all the blinding blondeness and beauty, an inordinate number of Icelanders had been walking around with copies of Nancy Drew books in their hands.

  What was up with that?

  Up until a couple of months ago, Nancy Drew had been no more than a dim memory from my childhood. I’d managed to live basically without her all my life. But now, it was as though she was everywhere!

  So, really, what was up with that?

  I took another puff and sighed.

  I would figure out that mystery later.

  The United States embassy was on Laufasvegur 21.

  When I walked through the front door, Mrs. Fairly was there to greet me, dressed in what I now assumed was her ever-present black, every single blue strand of hair perfectly in place.

  I had opened my eyes long enough on the drive from the airport to note that Reykjavik was a low-lying city, which to me meant no tall buildings like I was used to, and that the houses were all close together, all painted white but with sloping roofs that were painted in bright jewel tones: reds and blues and greens and yellows and purples. It was somehow tropical looking, like what you’d expect to find in the Caribbean, not on a place with a cold and unforgiving climate, one whose name had even been taken from the word to describe what results when the temperature drops below 32ºF or 0ºC for that matter—ha! I was learning conversions!

  As soon as I saw Mrs. Fairly in her black clothes and blue hair, it occurred to me how strongly she must stand out against the foreign landscape we found ourselves in and I resolved, as soon as I had the time and energy, to take to task my own not-too-great wardrobe so that even if my curly black hair made me stand out, I could at least just a little bit fit in.

  “Come in, dear…” She opened wide the door, more grandmotherly than she had been upon our first meeting. “The master is away at one of those weather summits to which he’s always getting called away and I think that perhaps is a very good thing.”

  I entered, looked around: a higher ceiling than expected from the outside, but, other than that, just another entry hall.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  Lars brushed politely past me and I followed the progress of my bags as he took them up the narrow staircase to an upper floor. I wondered where he was going with them. Wasn’t it my naptime yet?

  Reluctantly, I turned back to Mrs. Fairly.

  “Of course it’s a good thing,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to be meeting the master after a long plane flight, what with you being all jet lagged and everything.

  “You’ll do much better meeting him,” she continued, “after you’ve had a good night’s sleep, preferably two, and have a chance to get acclimated to your new surroundings and responsibilities. It wouldn’t hurt, either, if the weather summit were to go well and he returned home in a better mood than the one in which he left.”

  She made him sound so…charming.

  “When do you expect him back?” I asked.

  It was then Tuesday.

  “Ohhhh—” She pressed her lips together, furrowed her brow and thought long and hard on it. “I would guess that Thursday would be soon enough.”

  Her lack of enthusiasm for his return should have been another red flag, but then Annette came in, bursting with six-year-old energy, grabbing my hand and pulling me along behind her.

  “Miss Charlotte!” she cried in a voice that tinkled like the upper scale of a piano. “Come and see your new room!”

  She kept tugging and pulling until I was hurrying to keep up with her as she led me up the stairs.

  If Mrs. Fairly looked no different than she had in Manhattan, Annette was like a new little girl here. Gone were the puffy pink dress and white apron, the frilly trappings of overcuteness. Oh, she was still cute, but what with her sturdy jeans and vivid knit sweater, in varying shades of Paris green and lilac and salmon, she looked ready to brave both the elements and adventure. With her dark head of curls, she looked as if she could have been my daughter, outside of the fact that she seemed braver than I felt.

  The room she led me to at the far corner of the upper story—how well I knew far-corner rooms from my time at the Keating household—had walls that were a match for the lilac in her sweater, the trim painted in a high-gloss white.

  “And look at the bed!” she cried.

  It, too, was a bright white, painted over simple yet elegantly curved pieces of wood, far larger than my bed in the Keatings’ had been. It had a lacy blanket that looked as though it had been crocheted for a bridal trousseau, the whole looking more like the dream bed of a girl with princess aspirations than the mean lodgings one would expect for the nanny.

  Annette plopped herself down on the edge of the bed and proceeded to bounce. She got quite a lot of action going before she stopped herself, her expression one of dismay.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Is it okay that I do this?” she asked.

  There was always something vaguely French about Annette when she spoke, an unnaturally precocious stiltedness for a little girl, as though her father’s previous posting might have been in mainland Europe.

  “I suppose,” she went on, “that I should have asked your permission before I commenced to bounce on your bed.”

  “It’s quite all right,” I laughed.

  There was also something about Annette that made a person’s spirits soar, an unrepressed joy about her that led you to believe she’d never known an unhappy day, despite some of her more seriously earnest speech patterns and the fact that her father, “the master,” sounded as if he might be a stern taskmaster.

  “You can bounce away,” I told her. “It’s what some beds are for, I think.”

  She bounced a little longer, tentatively at first, then with more energy, then she let it die down.

  “Look what else!” she cried, jumping up and running over to a glossy white desk and chair, set up in one corner of the room facing a wall, but at an angle such that someone sitting there could see through the filmy white curtains to the view beyond.

  Annette pulled back the curtains, showed me the side-by-side long narrow panes of the window with their latch in the center. She climbed up on what was to be my chair, turned the latch and pushed one of the windows outward, letting in a gust of wind so powerful it
slammed the window shut almost immediately. She let the curtain go, sat back down in my chair.

  “Mrs. Fairly says you wish to be a great writer,” she said, “so I told Papa he must make sure you had a great desk!”

  I was surprised at…everything, really: the consideration for my comfort, the fact that my new employer had done any of this at all, the fact that the genesis of it had obviously come from this small and delightful child.

  Everything about the room was perfect, even the cream braided rug on the dark-stained hardwood floor, especially the absence of any distracting TV. For I had come to realize that the reason for my lack of productivity in the Keating household had been due to too much golf.

  I liked the room; loved it, in fact.

  “I knew that lilac must be your favorite color!” Annette exulted.

  Impulsively, I hugged her, missing Stevie and Kim even as I did so, hoping, knowing that I would one day love her as much.

  “How did you know that?” I asked.

  “Because it is mine!” she said, turning to laugh at her own reflection in the long antique mirror that occupied one corner.

  Mrs. Fairly had interrupted us, calling Annette away, telling her that she needed to give me some breathing room to unpack and begin the process of acclimating myself.

  I was both sorry and not sorry to see Annette go: she was great company, but she also had more energy than Stevie and Kim combined. And it had been months now since I’d been responsible for the care of small children. It would take me a bit to get up to the speed of a speedy young person again.

  Mrs. Fairly perched on the edge of my bed, watching as I unpacked and put away my things in the large white wardrobe. It made me feel uncomfortable to be watched so, as though she was judging every fashion decision I’d ever made in my life and finding me wanting. And it made me wonder: where was my breathing room?

  “It looks like you brought things for a Manhattan summer,” she said, eyeing my shorts and tops with a critical eye, “not an Iceland one.”

  “I suppose—” I shrugged “—when I get some time off, I can shop for more appropriate things.”

  “Time off?” she said. “Yes, I did want to talk to you about your schedule now.”

  “Good,” I said, removing a sheer snow-white linen nightgown, floor length, with long lace-edged sleeves and a tie at the neck, that I favored for sleeping in summer. At home, it had been the perfect thing to wear in the overly cool atmosphere of Aunt Bea’s excessively air-conditioned house. I knew it was old-fashioned, but I loved that nightgown.

  Mrs. Fairly tut-tutted.

  “Another inappropriate garment,” she said. “You’ll freeze here at night in that.”

  “I’ll put another blanket on then.” I smiled.

  I was beginning to like the facility with which I was turning all of her negatives into positives. It wasn’t like me at all to parry so well and I liked that just fine.

  Of course, I hated being cold, but I tamped that unpleasant thought down. After all, I couldn’t very well be squeamish about little things if I was determined to be plucky.

  “Suit yourself,” Mrs. Fairly said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Now, about your schedule…”

  “Yes?”

  “It probably won’t be as arduous as what you were accustomed to in the Keating household. I believe there you were expected to be on call seven days a week?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “With only three discretionary hours to use as you would on Saturday afternoons?”

  “Yes,” I said, trying not to think about what I used to do with those three hours, unable to stop from thinking about it all the same, those time slots I’d spent with Buster.

  “Well,” she said, “I think you’ll be pleased to find then that Ambassador Rawlings is a far more reasonable master, at least in that regard. He won’t be expecting you to be a slave.”

  Nice, I thought, a master who won’t be expecting someone beneath him to be a slave.

  “Oh, of course,” she said, “you’ll need to take charge of Annette’s schooling.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You mean to tell me she won’t be going to the school here?”

  Mrs. Fairly looked shocked.

  “Whyever would she do that?” she asked. “And why would we ever hire a governess, only to send the little one to school?”

  “But your ad said nothing about hiring a governess. It said you wanted a nanny.”

  “They’re not the same thing?” she wanted to know.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  I had thought I would only be supplementing Annette’s education, not providing all of it.

  “Will that be a problem?” Mrs. Fairly asked.

  I couldn’t see where I could back out now.

  “No, of course not,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, as to your schedule—you’ll be expected to be with Annette on weekdays from breakfast time at eight-thirty through dinnertime at six-thirty. After that, if her father is at home, he’ll want her with him until her bedtime. If he’s not here, it’ll be your job to keep her entertained.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “The extra time really isn’t that much,” she said. “The little one goes to bed at eight o’clock sharp, so you’ll still have some time afterward for whatever you might want to do. You can even go out if you’d like. I’m always here at night, plus Cook, so we’ll always be around should Annette need anything.”

  “All right,” I said again.

  “On weekends, you’ll have alternating days off: one week you’ll be off on Saturday, the next week you’ll be off on Sunday.”

  “All right.”

  “On the Sundays you work, you’ll be expected to take Annette to church.”

  That sounded so…un-Jewish.

  “Church?” I said.

  “Yes, is that a problem?”

  I shook my head. In for a penny, in for a krona, or whatever the currency was here.

  “It’s a nice church,” she said, “called Hallgrimskirja.”

  “That’s a mouthful,” I said. “What kind of church is it?”

  “Who knows?” she laughed.

  That startled me.

  “I just assumed,” I said, “that it must be whatever denomination the Rawlingses belong to.”

  “Oh,” she laughed again, “Ambassador Rawlings doesn’t care about the denomination. He just thinks his daughter should be seen going to church.”

  How odd.

  I wondered what Annette’s mother thought of those nondenominational arrangements.

  Then I wondered about Annette’s mother, period, remembering that when I’d asked about her during my interview in New York, Mrs. Fairly had said something obscure to the effect about me not needing to know about her.

  I decided to try again.

  “What religion does Mrs. Rawlings belong to?”

  Now it was her turn to look startled.

  “Whoever said anything about a Mrs. Rawlings?” she demanded.

  Who, indeed? Had Annette’s mother died? Were they divorced?

  But I could see that she wouldn’t say any more on the subject and so I resolved to wait for a time when she might be more forthcoming.

  “I guess you’ve told me everything I need to know about my schedule,” I said, placing the last pair of socks in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe. “I guess I’ll go find Annette and get started.”

  “Get started with what?” she asked.

  “Why, with my work with her,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “What kind of cruel people do you take us for?”

  Well, they had advertised for a nanny when what they really wanted was a governess, a far more difficult job. And the head of the household was referred to as “the master,” causing the Marquis de Sade to dance sugarplums in my head every time I heard him referred to thus. I wanted to say those things but, this being my first day, I didn’t.


  It didn’t matter. Mrs. Fairly was of a mind to answer her own question.

  “You can have the remainder of today to acclimate yourself,” she said, “tomorrow, too. I’ve kept Annette busy this long and I suppose I can keep her busy a while longer. There’ll be time enough for you to start Thursday morning, get a full day in before the master returns for dinner. In the meantime, you might want to do some of that shopping you mentioned earlier—” she looked at my shorts pointedly “—and get the things you’ll be needing here.”

  I was suddenly tired of company. After months of being almost entirely left alone in Aunt Bea’s household, where the four principal members would rather not talk at all than talk to me and only spoke to me when they were in the mood to insult my wardrobe, between George, Lars and Mrs. Fairly, I was unused to so much talk directed at me in one day. But I knew so little as yet of my new employer that I convinced Mrs. Fairly to stay for a bit, in the hopes of drawing her out a bit more.

  But she was not to be drawn.

  I asked her, “What kind of man is the…master?”

  “You’ll be finding out soon enough.” She smiled.

  That wasn’t helpful.

  “Yes, I’m sure I will,” I said. “But you’ve known him far longer and I’m naturally curious. Is he kind? Is he a tough man?”

  At this, she laughed outright. “He is a kind of tough man,” she said when she had at last recovered herself. “Yes, I suppose you could safely say that of him.”

  I had to ask: “Do you think he and I will get on?”

  “You will no doubt please him in some ways,” she said, then regarded me, making me feel as though she was regarding everything about me, for a long moment. “In other ways, undoubtedly, you will not.”

  This was hard for me to hear. Like most women, my chief concern was in being liked, loved, having approval. It is a peculiarly defensive posture to live like that. Suddenly, hearing my words to her and her response, I rejected that posture. I wanted to no longer live a life where I worried if the world approved of me; I decided to reverse the tables so that what should matter most was whether or not I approved of the world that surrounded me.