How Nancy Drew Saved My Life (4 page)

“Who is my employer and what does he do?” I blurted.

“His name is Edgar Rawlings…” She smiled, as though I should know whom she was talking about. “He's to be the new United States ambassador to Iceland.”

Crap!
I thought.
Not another ambassador!

What were the odds? Then I remembered that the first time I'd found myself in the employ of an ambassador, an agency had placed me there. This time, on the other hand, I'd found the ad in the paper all on my own. I thought about the oddness of the coincidence, reeled at the notion of putting myself through this déjà vu. It was like the universe was playing a perverse trick on me, forcing me to repeat parts of my past. I supposed I could always turn down the position, provided it was even offered to me. But I had really liked Annette…

Mrs. Fairly misread the cause of my dismay.

“Don't all countries have an ambassador? Surely,” she said, “even Iceland needs an ambassador, doesn't it?”

She was asking me? I didn't even know anything about Iceland. I mean, I knew that it was supposed to be completely dark there part of the year, completely light another part, but I had no idea what part I'd be flying into or if I'd indeed be flying into anything, if I indeed had landed the job.

“And is there a Mrs. Ambassador Rawlings?” I asked.

“Oh,” she said sternly, “you don't need to know about her.”

Well,
that
sounded ominous.

“Now, then.” She leaned forward in her chair. “Why don't you tell me why it was you left your last position.”

I
celandair must be the greatest airline in the world. The flight attendants wear these soothing uniforms that are kind of cool, they're actually nice to the passengers and they give you real food, none of that “here's your one-ounce bag of peanuts you'll never be able to open and four ounces of soda and don't you dare ask for the whole can, what else could you possibly need?” crap.

I was just getting ready to tuck into my salmon and grilled baby vegetables when my aisle mate, an elderly gentleman with not much hair, steel glasses and a lot of polyester recognized me.

This still happened occasionally, even though it had been sixteen years since I'd made the last commercial. It was the hair, the unruly black curls, and the quirky curve to my smile the few times I still smiled. At age three, right after my father had left me with Aunt Bea, that quirky curve had been deemed visually precocious, hence the casting director's decision to select me as the face to represent Gubber Snack Foods. I was the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, had been spotted for my potential when Aunt Bea and I had been squashed next to the casting director on the subway.

“That child has amazing hair!” the casting director, Mort Damon, had enthused.

“If you like lots of hair on a little girl,” Aunt Bea had said.

“And that smile!” Mort Damon continued as he had begun. “It's like looking at the Mona Lisa if she were a dwarf!”

Mort had given Aunt Bea his card and Aunt Bea had reluctantly accepted it.

“Don't let this go to your head,” she'd cautioned after we'd answered the formality of a casting call and been called. “But this will be a way for you to earn your education. Not that I don't think your father would be willing to pay, but you never know what might happen with an archaeologist.”

Gubber Snack Foods was supposed to be the perfect organic alternative to the overprocessed, oversugared foods for kids that lined the supermarket shelves. And a new generation of moms, working harder all the time both in and out of the home, had gratefully reached for it.

My big line, the one I intoned at the end of each commercial, having made sixteen commercials for various products in the line from the time I started until the time I turned seven, the words bubbling out of my organic chocolate-smeared mouth?

“It's
Gubber
licious!”

Four years later, at age seven, despite the fact that I was small for my age, I was deemed too old to hawk the product. Personally, I think it was because I stopped being cute. But whatever the reason, I counted myself lucky. Unlike other child stars who had difficulty adjusting to a life where they were no longer treated as special I had never been allowed by Aunt Bea to be treated as special in the first place and so I had no overinflated ego to recover from.

The commercials were still aired occasionally, appealing to audiences in a nostalgic way, and I still received the odd residual check.

As I say, people still sometimes recognized me, based on the hair and curvy smile. It by no means happened often, but at least a couple of times a year, some stranger would say, “I know I've seen that smile before! But where…?”

As far-fetched as it might sound, that people could recognize you just from a smile, I understood it from firsthand experience. Home sick with mono for a month in high school, I'd watched more old movies than I'd ever watched in my life or would ever watch again. On my first day of freedom, I'd been walking down Broadway when I caught the eye of an older woman, meaning someone lots older than me, traveling in the other direction, and she smiled.

“I know you!” I'd shouted, unable to come up with a name.

If she'd been someone truly recognizable, like Meryl Streep, I would never have stopped her. I mean, how mortifying!

She stopped on the street, smiling indulgently.

I racked my brain, trying to place that familiar face.

“Toothpaste commercial?” I tried.

She shook her head, smiled wider.

It was that last smile that nailed it.

“Animal House!”
The way I jumped up and down, clapped my hands, you'd think I'd just beat Ken Jennings on Final Jeopardy. “You were the girl who was twelve but looked eighteen!” I shouted, talking to her like I was telling her something she didn't know. “You passed out at the frat house!”

She smiled again, nodded.

“Well,” I said, winding down now that the glitch-in-my-memory itch had been scratched, “that's just great. Thanks. And, hey, you really do have the best smile.”

I'd continued on my way, never even learning her real name. It wasn't until later that it occurred to me to wonder how often that happened to her.

I have to confess, I wasn't as consistently gracious as she was with me when confronted with the whole “I know I've seen that smile before! But where…?” situation. If I was in a good mood, I shyly answered, “Gubber Snack Foods.” If I was in a bad mood, I said, “It must have been when I body-doubled for Julia Roberts.”

They'd look at my non-tall, non-lithe body in confusion and say, “No, I don't think
that
was it…”

The reason I plucked Julia Roberts's name out of the air was no accident. It was because she had that same kind of smile: you could block out the rest of her face and with no other clue guess, “That's Julia Roberts!” Julia Roberts and I shared nothing else in common, but we did share that one thing: block-out-the-rest-of-your-face smiles.

Indeed, even Mrs. Fairly had recognized me, once she'd seen the Gubber Snack Foods gig on my résumé.

“
I
used to buy Gubber Snack Foods,” she'd said, just like everybody always says it, like they've performed some kind of accomplishment you should be impressed by and not the reverse. “Oh, not for myself,” she'd gone on, “but in a previous post, I'd had more direct responsibility for the children of the household. I tasted one of those Gubber Snacks once…” She leaned across conspiratorially. “Revolting.”

Indeed. But the checks had been good at least.

Now the man in the seat next to me, George Cranston from Staten Island, was saying pretty much the same thing, all of which I'd heard a thousand times before, or at least fifty.

“I can't wait to get home after my trip and tell my grandkids I sat for seven hours next to a beautiful somebody who used to be on television.”

And, for some reason, I was not in the mood to spend seven hours reminiscing about my years as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid. With my luck, he'd make me say my famous line, the line that other kids had teased me about at every phase of my schooling, once they'd figured out who I was.

“I'm not who you think I am,” I said impulsively.

“No?” He looked crestfallen. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

“Come on,” he said. “Say, ‘It's
Gubber
licious!' for me just one time. I'll bet you're her.”

“No, I'm not,” I said firmly. “I'm…I'm…I'm her doppelgänger. People just confuse me with her all the time, but I'm really not her. Hell, people probably confuse her with me all the time, for all I know.”

George Cranston from Staten Island pulled back at my use of “hell,” but he was curious enough that it didn't stop him for long.

“So,” he said, arms crossed, “who are you that people should confuse you with
her?
” He said “her” like the Gubber Foods Kid was Madeleine Albright or something.

“I'm a
writer,
” I countered the challenge without thinking.

Shit, where did that come from?
I asked myself timidly as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

Actually, I kind of knew where that had come from. Back when I'd been interviewed by Mrs. Fairly, I'd even intimated as much, shyly confessing a newfound ambition to one day write.

Well, I had to do something with my life, didn't I?

“Why would you want to do that?” she'd asked, stunned.

It's amazing how, if a person has no inclination to do a thing themselves, they have trouble understanding the attraction/fascination it might hold for others.

I recalled for her an article I'd read once in the
New York Times
—it's amazing how much trouble being an avid devotee of the
Times
has gotten me into—that said that eighty-one percent of people polled said they thought they had a book in them. What other career could boast that kind of attraction? Surely lots of people might say they want to be doctors, but it was more for the BMW and the nebulous help-humanity aspect of it than the desire to be up to their elbows in O.R. blood, I was sure of it. And surely eighty-one percent of people were not lining up to be systems analysts. I'll bet not even that many people wanted to be actors, despite the glamour, what with public speaking being the number-one phobia, up there ahead of death and spiders.

And yet so many people wanted to write, and not necessarily because they saw it as an easy path to fame and fortune, although surely there were those who thought that.

So why the high statistics?

It was, I thought, because of the almost universal desire to be heard.

I wanted to be heard, too.

But since I couldn't even hold my own interest with the scribblings in my diary, I knew I had my work cut out for me if I wanted to take steps in that direction.

I wondered at my own audacity, the notion that I might have something worth saying. But I also knew that enough had happened to me—the death of my mother, the absence of my father, the whole sorry affair with Buster—to infuse my voice, however naive it might be at times, with a precocious wisdom.

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.