How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (7 page)

“Why couldn't they just name me Dirk?” he sobbed.

I had no answer but to hold him tighter.

Alissa and Buster were the kind of couple, not necessarily hating each other but with so little kinship or kindship between them, that when you looked at them and their children, you could only conclude:
Well, at least on two separate occasions, everyone closed their eyes, gritted their teeth and thought of England.

And, of course, I understood Buster where she didn't; he thought so and so did I. I was never cold. If not completely as warm as I could be yet, I was growing warmer all the time.

It was a few months before he traced the back of my hand with his strong finger; he was that patient.

It was another two weeks after that before we had our first kiss and then it was me initiating it. At this point, I had dreamed about doing so for so long, I could no longer wait for him to decide the matter for me. What if he never did? What if he remained content to have a woman who would listen to him? What if he remained content to have a woman to whom he enjoyed listening?

I'd tell him stories, shyly at first, about growing up in Aunt Bea's house.

“I was eight when Joe was born,” I said. “I was so excited about having a new baby in the house. I thought, ‘Great! I've finally got a brother!' But Aunt Bea pointed out that he wasn't my brother. Well, of course, he wasn't, not really. But then she said, ‘And don't go getting any ideas that you're equal. This is Joe's house, not yours.'”

“Ouch!” Buster said. “What a bitch!”

Somehow, it was the perfect thing to say.

And when I told him about wanting to write, he made me feel understood.

At least that's the part I let myself remember.

And I'd tell him what the kids had been doing during the week.

“Stevie and Kim helped me bake cookies. They said they'd never baked anything before. They were supposed to be chocolate chip, but they ended up being charred chip because we forgot to set the timer and got caught up playing Don't Spill the Beans.”

He looked at me admiringly. “You take such good care of them,” he said. “We're so lucky to have you,” he said.

Sometimes, it felt as though
I
were their mother!

Oh, what a wonderful thing for a woman, any woman certainly but this woman in particular, to be listened to raptly by someone who in turn interested her.

I was in love with him, falling, free-falling through the sky without ever stopping to wonder about consequence.

He said no one would ever say we were bad people. He said two people so rarely fall truly in love, the sin would be in not pursuing our feelings to wherever they might take us. He said that one day—no, not soon, probably, but one day—he and I would be together publicly, as well we should be. He wanted us to have a baby together. Not then, most definitely not then, but someday.

He was shocked to learn I was a virgin. To him, who had been having sex longer than I had been alive, it was a shock to think that anyone over the age of consent could still be a virgin.

But he loved the idea.

You'll laugh when I say I was a virgin, but I swear I was, a twenty-one-year-old virgin. And you can laugh again when I say that I had been saving myself for that one true love that would be worthy of the greatest gift I had left to give.

Perhaps in preparation for an event I hoped would come, I wrote a short story about a young woman's first time and showed it to Helen and Grace on a night out. They, far more experienced than I, marveled at what they called the to-the-bone authenticity of the lovemaking scene.

“Pretend I'm Roger Ebert,” laughed Helen, assuming a masculine voice. “‘You can almost feel the body fluids.'”

“And I'm the other guy,” giggled Grace, also going baritone. “‘Better than a modern Harold Robbins—I think I just wet myself!'”

“That's great,” I said. “But I don't think those guys review books, too.”

“Oh, well…” Helen shrugged. “We don't know any book reviewers.”

“But it really is good,” Grace said, handing the loose pages back to me. “You must be getting more action than I thought.”

Oh, if they had only known how little experience the author of that hotly erotic scene had ever had.

It really is amazing what you can learn in books. From Judy Blume, I'd learned how to deal with my first period. And from countless other books, I'd culled enough to know what exactly I would like from a sexual experience, enough so that I could fake a written simultaneous orgasm with the best of them, powerful enough to make Grace, imitating the reviewer who reviews with Roger Ebert, wet her pants.

I never minded that Buster was so much older than me. I know some will look at these events, set them beside what they know of my childhood and Freudianly conclude, “Ah, it is so obvious—she was looking for a father figure.”

But people who would think that seem to me to be the same kind of people who ironically conclude that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A cigar is never just a cigar.

For the permanent record, I did mind calling a grown man Buster. Hell, I wouldn't want to call a
young
boy Buster. But the one time I tried to call him Bertram it just didn't feel right, either. So for better or worse, “Buster” it was.

Making love with Buster, when it finally happened, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Oh, there was pain to be sure, but it was so much more than pain. It was beauty and it was love and it was a closeness I'd only previously known through writing.

I never felt sorry for Alissa. I could see how cold she was, had no problem believing Buster that for her it had always been a marriage of convenience, the cachet of being married to the attaché.

And so the Saturdays piled up, whenever he wasn't out of town on diplomatic business. The Saturdays piled up until there were nearly three years of them from when we had begun. And during those three hours a week, it was like we were the only two people in the world, a small yellow world with bad TV reception.

Sleep with someone in haste, repent at your own damn leisure, I always say. Well, I always say it now, at least.

Long into our third year together, I missed my period. If I'd been another woman, I never would have panicked so quickly, being just a couple of days late. But I'd always been regular, reliable like calling Western Union for the exact time. If I'd been a more practical and less in-love woman, I might have concluded that the delay in my period had to do with the anorexia I'd been flirting with, the lack of appetite brought about by my advanced state of in-loveness leading to a dramatic weight loss that had disturbed the tides of my regular cycle.

I told Buster, not too trepidatiously. After all, wasn't this what we had been intending all along? Okay, so maybe this was a bit sooner than we would have liked, but did it really matter so very much if we'd jumped the gun by just a smidgen?

And that was when Buster offered me money to go away and have an abortion. I was crazy to think we could do this thing, he said. It would destroy his career, he said. His wife would take him to the cleaners, he said.

How quickly you can go from thinking someone is the greatest person who lived to thinking they don't deserve you, never deserved you in the first place. Sometimes, the freefall out of love is quicker than the fall into it.

I didn't want Buster's money, of course, didn't need it. But I also had no intention of aborting his child. I'm not trying to take a moral stand here on what's right, pro-choice or pro-life, but if you push me I'll tell you I'm pro-choice and only wish that more people, me included, were more careful about their choices ahead of time. But I couldn't see destroying something that had been conceived in what I could still only think of as love. I had loved Buster, Buster had loved me, and any child of ours would have a great set of brains.

Okay, so maybe he or she would suck at math, but with my verbal skills—written, more than oral, “I guess” I'd have to say—and Buster's sense of geography, any child of ours would still have a great set of brains.

Buster was livid, said if I was going to talk like a crazy woman, I should leave sooner rather than later.

And that was when I got the cramp, not a convenient miscarriage cramp as you might think, just a delayed-period cramp, so severe because of the delay, the buildup.

As soon as Buster realized what it was, he was contrite. Wouldn't I stay? Wouldn't I forgive him? Surely I understood: he had merely panicked at the suddenness of everything. If I hadn't dropped the news on him so suddenly, so out of the blue, he would not have reacted so. If I were to tell him the same thing right now, he would most definitely react differently. Couldn't we just make love to reseal our faith and love in one another? After all, we'd made love while I was on my period many times before…

I packed my things the same day.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged that just because you're sleeping with your charges' father, it doesn't mean you can't be a good mother to kids. But I wasn't a good mother to Stevie and Kim, of course. I was a great mother. And when it came time for me to go, it killed me to leave them behind. I would have liked to stay on long enough to help them grow up all the way—they were eight and six at the time I left. But one of the most important lessons life teaches you is to tell when a thing is over and it's time to move on.

I did not want to see Buster ever again, but I knew he would give me a good reference. After all, he wouldn't want to risk my wrath, not knowing what my wrath might be.

Loving Buster had made me feel spectacular, special, and now I was back to being as ordinary as dirt.

Well, I certainly wasn't going to tell Mrs. Fairly
that.
So instead, I lied.

When she'd asked about the conditions under which I'd left my previous position, I eschewed the pregnant-nanny story and told her instead that it was simply time to move on, that with Stevie now eight and Kim now six, they seemed too old, too involved with their own worlds to need me so much, and the position had become no longer sufficiently challenging.

“But Annette is already six,” Mrs. Fairly objected to my reasoning. “Will you find that she too doesn't need you enough, that she is insufficiently challenging?”

“Oh, no,” I allayed her fears in cockeyed fashion. “The Keating children were New York children. After a certain point, what more could they possibly need? But Annette will now be an Iceland child. I'm sure she'll need all kinds of things in her new situation and will prove challenging for some time to come.”

Well, it worked for me.

What Would Nancy Drew Do?

I was convinced that, in similar circumstances, being the nanny in an ambassador's home, there were a lot of things I did that Nancy would never do. But I was sure she would hug and kiss those two dear children goodbye and tell them she loved them and was proud of them and was only a phone call away should they ever need her, and I did all that. I don't know if Nancy would have cried when she hugged and kissed Stevie and Kim goodbye, but I did that, too.

 

The flight from New York to Reykjavik takes seven hours, more than enough time for a person to relive the biggest mistake of her life while sitting next to an old man who now hates her guts because she won't tell him what ideas she has for what she wants to write about, because she doesn't know, nor will she steal his.

But all bad things must come to an end.

Or so I thought.

Just as I was envisioning the plane touching down without incident, the copilot emerged from the cockpit, tool kit in hand, as the pilot made an announcement.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a slight problem with the landing gear…”

“Slight problem?” George gulped beside me, his old eyes suffused with fear as the copilot bustled past us and proceeded to cut a big rectangle out of the carpeting.

“I'm sure everything is fine,” said the pilot, “probably just a malfunction on the landing-gear light.”

“Malfunction?” George looked as if he was going to be sick.

I felt sick, too.

Why had I ever gotten on this plane?
my mind shrieked. Sure, people said that flying was safer than driving a car, but that was for other people who were not control freaks like me who never felt safe unless she could feel the earth. Besides, I didn't even drive a car!

I was about to go into a panic, like most of the people around me, when I saw how truly upset George was, silently praying to himself as he watched the copilot disappear down into the plane.

What Would Nancy Drew Do? I wondered frantically.

I pictured that titian-haired retro girl and suddenly I knew exactly what she'd do: she'd remain calm on the outside, no matter what thoughts were going through her head, and she'd offer comfort to anyone who needed it.

I put my hand over George's wrinkled one.