How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (10 page)

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.

“And what of the reverse?” I asked her boldly. “Do you think he will please me?”

She herself looked completely pleased with me for the first time.

“I suppose,” she answered, “that remains to be seen.”

 

I spent the remainder of the day investigating my new home.

One thing I knew about Nancy Drew, after reading fifty-six books about her, was that she was inquisitive. And, if
she
was inquisitive,
I
was going to be inquisitive.

On the second story, where my own bedroom was, were several other bedrooms—the building was deceptively small from the outside—both for family and staff: Annette's girlish one, not much different from my own, but with the addition of an army of stuffed animals and a legion of pretty dolls, remarkable in that they all retained their heads and limbs, unlike what I was used to from Stevie, who was known to commence decapitation with each new Barbie bought for her; Mrs. Fairly's austere room, so austere that it looked as if she took the word
bed
room seriously, having not much more in it than that; rooms for other servants; and two rooms with the doors locked. I presumed one to be that of Ambassador Rawlings. The other, I had no idea. Turning the handle, only to realize it was to be part of the no-go zone here for me, I thought I heard an unrestrained laugh on the other side. I startled at the sound, but then remembered the wind outside and concluded it must be that. I mean, really: Why would anyone be unrestrainedly laughing behind a locked door?

The ground floor was a combination of family living area and official rooms in which Ambassador Rawlings conducted his business. There was a sunny breakfast room and a much larger formal dining room, with heavy furniture, dark painted walls and an ornamental sideboard loaded with china and silver. There was a recreational room, completely modern with large-screen TV and all the electronic gadgets anyone could wish for who was of such a mind; the room could have as easily existed in New York as here. In the back of the ground floor there was an office for the ambassador, behind the desk of which were two flanking flags, one I recognized as my own Stars and Stripes, the other I assumed to be that of the country I now found myself in; Mrs. Fairly said I was only to go into that room if invited.

Next to the recreational room was a large library, an absolute dream of a room, as far as I was concerned, with floor-to-ceiling books on three of the walls; the fourth wall had floor-to-ceiling books shelved on either end but, in the center, there was a massive fireplace. Indeed, all the rooms had fireplaces as though in a land remarkable for its ice, there could only ever be one solution. The furniture in this room was more to my taste than that in the other rooms, being all moody darks and comfortable, but it was the books that were my chief interest. Mrs. Fairly said it was this room in which Ambassador Rawlings liked to receive Annette in the evenings—he hated the TV in the other room, although he recognized it as a necessary evil of modern life—and that I could use this room to my delight when he was not in residence but must leave it to him when he was.

I barely heard her words. Looking around me at all the books, I thought about how happy I would be here.

 

In the middle of the night, a night that was tough for me to accept as being night because it was still so strangely light out, I woke to a howling rainstorm, the eerie sound of screeching so loud I heard it even in my dreams before I fought my way to consciousness.

One of the windows had come loose—perhaps I had failed to shut it firmly enough when Annette had been with me earlier in the day?—and it took extra strength to fight the wind in order to get it pulled back into its proper place.

As I crawled back beneath the cool sheets, I remembered that screech in my dreams, realized that what sleep I'd gotten had been uneasy.

That screech really was the wind…wasn't it? Surely no human being could make such a sound.

What Would Nancy Drew Do? I wondered.

I got out of bed once more, lifted the side of the mattress, ran my hand underneath to see if someone had left a pea there to devil me.

What can I say? I'd gone almost a day and a half without decent sleep. I was desperate.

But there was no pea there, nothing to explain why, when I should be sleeping like a log, I was sleeping like an insomniac.

I lay back down one last time, punched the pillow more viciously than it deserved.

Damn Nancy Drew!

So far, she wasn't solving squat for me.

E
ver since the split from Buster, I had felt myself to be in a state of mourning. It was worse than any loss I had suffered, an extreme form of death. Although I now knew, on an intellectual level, that he was not worthy of me, never had been, his absence left a great hole in my life. When I had believed him to love me, I had been special. Now I no longer was. It didn't matter that what I had believed to be true about us wasn't, it didn't matter that I would never go back to him, having been betrayed, having learned that he wasn't who I thought he was. The hole was still there and nothing could fill it. I no longer thought about him, ached for him every second of the day, but each day since the split, I'd gone to sleep with a sadness and woke the same way. I knew the day would come, had to come, when the Earth would spin on its axis one entire turn without me thinking of him once.

And somehow, in its own way, that day would be the saddest day of all.

But that day still lay in my future and I awoke on my first full day in Iceland with tears in my eyes, the memory of whatever I'd been dreaming about him the night before already drifting its smoke trail into my subconscious, from which it could not be retrieved. Had we been happy in the dream? Was it after he had made me so miserable?

Buster was like a book taken from my personal library, a slot left on the shelf. One day, a new book would be placed there, the others crowding around it to fill the gap.

But again, that day was not this day.

When that day finally came, I would at last be saved from this hell I'd found myself in, a hell created by loss of love. And how would I avoid hell in the future? I asked myself and answered with a laugh: keep putting one foot in front of the other, remember to inhale and exhale, and never love again.

Drying my eyes on the back of my hand, I rose and went to the window. Through the sheer curtains a bright light streamed and I parted them to see a day that glittered like a present. Apparently, the one fine day for the entire month that the guidebooks had promised me would be today, and I wasn't about to waste it.

Behind me, I heard a sound, an animal sound that made me start.

At the end of the bed, curled up in my discarded bedsheets, was a black-and-white cat.

“Hey!” I said, gently tickling him under the chin. “Where did you come from?”

“Meow!”

“Oh, I see,” I said.

He stretched his neck upward, letting me know what he wanted most in this world.

If only human beings were so easy.

“What's your name?” I asked.

“Meow!”

“Fine, then I'll call you Steinway.”

“Meow!”

“Too Jewish for you?” I said. “Well, too bad. Then you should have told me your real name when I asked the first time.”

 

American women react to tragedy, particularly tragedies involving loss of love, in one of two ways: either we stuff ourselves, hoping to fill the void, or we try to starve ourselves into oblivion. I had always been a member of the latter group.

And that's what I had been doing since the loss of Buster: starving myself. Had I lived in an earlier century, undoubtedly I would have eventually died of consumption.

Hitherto, for months now, I had experienced no appetite. But as I went down to breakfast, last summer's style of shorts now loosely hanging from my hipbones, I smelled the aroma of warm food and for the first time in a long time, felt real hunger.

I wondered, with half a mind, what had happened to American women to change us so: If previously women had wasted away in times of trouble but now they were split between those who wasted and those who stuffed, what had caused the change in eating fashion?

Mrs. Fairly and Annette were already eating when I entered the sunny yellow breakfast room. And so eager was I to eat, myself, I practically had my fork up before I even sat down.

Outside of the eggs, nothing looked too familiar as being breakfast food. There were grilled vegetables and some kind of fish I didn't recognize.

I'd never thought of having fish for breakfast before.

Despite the oddness of it, I ate some of everything, quite a lot of everything actually.

“What are you going to do with your day of leisure?” Mrs. Fairly asked when I had at last dabbed at my mouth and laid my linen napkin aside.

What Would Nancy Drew Do?

She'd go out and get appropriate clothes.

Of course, Nancy Drew would have done her research ahead of time and packed accordingly.

I recalled from the fifty-six books I'd read, more than one time coming across the phrase “becomingly dressed” in reference to how Nancy Drew looked when she left the house and, in particular, one time when she had been “becomingly dressed”…to go clothes shopping! In my case, I had to shop because I was never becomingly dressed. Why would someone who was already becomingly dressed ever need to shop? I wondered. Why risk screwing it up?

“First,” I said with a smile, “I think I'd better shop. Don't you agree?”

And why was I always so obsessed with what Nancy Drew would do? Because, in the wake of Buster, in a strange land among strange people, she was the most solid thing I had.

 

I had been offered the car with Lars Aquavit at my disposal, since the master was away, but I declined in favor of my feet and public transportation. Eventually, I would need to find my own way around; might as well start now.

The air was cool against my bare arms, and I rubbed my skin for warmth, but at least there was no wind today. It took me a while to figure out the bus system, but I eventually was able to use it to get myself to Kringlan Mall.

No, I do realize that a mall wasn't the most romantic destination for my first outing in Iceland—wouldn't small boutiques be more romantic, more glamorous?—but I wanted to be able to get everything I needed at once, under one roof, and have done with it.

And as I mentioned before, I'm an American. When we are not sure exactly where to go, we find a mall. Someday, we earthlings will colonize Mars and as our first official capitalist endeavor, we'll open a K-Mart.

I had lived all my life in a city where I was not a minority, where the breadth of human differences was so vast that no one could be a minority. There were even a few short adults in Manhattan. But here it was as though I were a stranger from another planet. As at the airport the day before, I was so outnumbered in height and blondeness and beauty, it was like I was an alien. With the exception of other tourists, I was a person completely apart from everything around me.

I wondered again what had brought me to such a place in time.

What had I wanted after leaving the Keating household? What did I want in coming here?

I would have said I wanted liberty, liberty from the pain I had acquired in my last post and the vacuous aftermath that had been my half life in Aunt Bea's house.

But then why come here?

I had wanted change, surely I had wanted that.

But why exchange one situation for a remarkably similar one?

I saw then that what I had wanted most to achieve here was neither liberty nor change. I saw now that what I wanted most was another chance, an opportunity to do over the past and make it right again.

Could such a thing be possible?
Would
such a thing be possible?

Pushing away the sense of my own foreignness, I proceeded about the business I had come here for: the necessity of shopping. Unlike most women, shopping has never felt like a luxury to me. It was something I did only when the things I owned had become too worn through repeated washings to withstand any more wearings; or when, being a natural klutz, I had torn some needed garment; or when my underwear had reached the point that to not replace it, should some accident befall me, risked the ambulance driver's embarrassment at my lack of any fashion finesse.

With that mind-set, then, I located a shop that looked as though it would have everything I needed in one convenient stop and entered.

I think the shopgirl was surprised at the quantity of things I selected: most tourists probably only bought one or two items as souvenirs—the sweaters were both the most beautiful and the most expensive I had ever seen—but here I was trying on enough that it would be easy to conclude that I had come to stay. Perhaps she thought I was another irritating patron, that I would try on fifty items only to buy one cheap thing, or perhaps none at all.

She was even more surprised when I came out of the dressing room, a purple sweater replacing my T-shirt—Annette was right about me and the color purple—and a pair of tailored jeans hanging on my hips, and asked if she had a pair of scissors so that I could cut the tags off, that I wanted to wear the outfit right away rather than having her put it in a bag.

I had picked out jeans that were too large on purpose: recovering my appetite, I thought that if I bought things that fit me today, they might no longer fit me in a month or two…or less, if I ate even more. So my selections were parsimonious insurance against the weight I would undoubtedly regain.

She let me have the requested scissors and I happily snipped away, considering it a small triumph when I showed rare coordination and didn't nick myself in the process.

Ringing me up, she placed my other purchases in a bag: several more pairs of jeans, a few pairs of cords for dressier occasions, a half dozen sweaters, all in the same simple but elegant style, and two weeks' worth of warm socks. When she moved to put my old things in the bag, my T-shirt and shorts, I stopped her, asked her to throw them away instead. I no longer wanted anything from the life I had lived before. I would get rid of the remainder when I returned home.

I was almost out of the store when I saw a rack of dresses I hadn't noticed earlier and remembered Mrs. Fairly telling me that part of my duties would be to take Annette to church every other week. Back home, even though I didn't attend religious services myself, I was aware of a change in the attire of those who did. When I was young, religious services had been a more formal affair, with men and boys in suits, women and girls in dresses. A lot of the women even wore hats, although most of them looked silly, not being Princess Diana. People tried to look their best. But in recent years, when I saw people exiting churches on Sundays and synagogues on Fridays and Saturdays, I'd noticed that there were hardly ever ties or jackets, that the women almost never wore dresses and sometimes you even saw young people in jeans.

But I knew enough to know that respect in terms of dress here would still be more the standard than the exception. With that in mind, then, I reached for the rack of sweater dresses and selected a delicate, off-white one with a cowl neck that, when I held it to me, looked to be about the right size.

“You don't want to try it on first?” the shopgirl asked when I handed it to her along with my credit card for the second time.

“No,” I said. “I'm sure it'll be fine, not that it matters.”

I knew she must find me puzzling at best, but I didn't particularly care.

Before leaving the mall, I stopped at a shoe store, where I was able to get both hiking boots and a pair of heels to go with the dress, plus a few pairs of stockings.

It wasn't until I was on the bus back to Laufasvegur 21 that I realized I had once again forgotten to get anything to protect myself from that rain that was sure to come again before too much more time had passed.

 

Back at the house, I had a light meal—okay, so maybe it was more substantial than light; how hungry I was now!—before commencing to decide what to do with the remainder of my last day as a free nonmastered woman.

Mrs. Fairly had plans for me.

“Come,” she said. “There's a couple of more things about this house that you have not yet seen.”

I thought she must mean the master's bedroom or perhaps that other bedroom door, behind which I'd imagined I'd heard laughter, but that wasn't the case.

Instead, she led me upstairs to my own bedroom.

“What?” I said, looking around me, not understanding: everything was as familiar to me as it had already become in my short time there.

“Look upward,” she smiled, looking upward herself.

I followed her gaze.

At first, all I saw was the wide expanse of the high white ceiling. But then, in the corner of the room, above my new writing desk, at which I had yet to do any writing, I saw there was the outline of a trapdoor with a cord extending down from it.

“A secret trapdoor!” I said, charmed.

“Not so secret,” she laughed. “It's right there.”

How had I not noticed that before?

Again, it was as though she read my mind: “People see mostly what they expect to see,” she said, “and only that. You expected to see a regular room with no surprises and that's what you saw.”

“Where does it lead?” I asked, my eyes still on that dangling cord.

“Why don't you find out?” she said.