all the way in Reykjavik.” I wrinkled up my nose. “Do you know where Reykjavik is?” Usually, the nose-wrinkling is an affectation on my part, but not this time. “Isn’t it in Yugoslavia somewhere—is Yugoslavia even still there?—or Poland? Cities in those countries always end in ‘k,’ right?”
“Reykjavik doesn’t ring any strong bells?” Aunt Bea asked.
I shook my head.
“Reagan?” she prompted.
“I know who he was,” I admitted cautiously.
“Gorbachev?” she prompted some more. “Big summit there? Reagan proposed complete disarmament and the Pentagon went crazy because, at that time, the USSR had a huge conventional military superiority over NATO and the West needed its nuclear deterrent? Still nothing?”
I shook my head.
“What year was this?” I asked.
“Nineteen eighty-six,” she snapped, as though only a fool, or someone like me, wouldn’t know the answer.
“It was kind of before my time,” I said. “I’m fairly certain I was still mostly preoccupied with my Little People Farmhouse back then.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said, disgusted.
I shrugged. Maybe I didn’t.
“It’s in Iceland,” Aunt Bea said.
Crap, Iceland sounded cold. Oh, well.
“Oh,” I said. “I was kind of worried you’d say that.”
“You mean you asked me when you knew all along?”
“Let’s just say I had my suspicions. I was kind of hoping for mainland Europe somewhere. So,” I said. “Iceland.”
“Population one hundred and seventy thousand in Reykjavik, last time I checked,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. “Puny.”
“Whole country doesn’t have more than three hundred thousand, I don’t think,” she said.
“You wonder why they bother,” I said.
“So,” she said, handing the paper back to me, “what are you planning to do about this? Reykjavik is nice and far away…”
There was that Aunt Bea gleam, the gleam of the aunt who loved me so well.
“Well, it does have a fax number for résumés here…”
“What are you waiting for?” Aunt Bea demanded.
Your permission, I thought, since we both know that if I had used the fax first and asked later, no matter what the good cause, even if it had been to help starving children in the Third World, you’d have done something insane like deny me hot water for a month.
Home may have been the place where, when you’re desperate, they have to let you in. But some had creepy red rooms that were like mental torture chambers in the upstairs and some homes still sucked.
“Get going!” Aunt Bea shooed me.
I went, having gotten my own way the hard way.
I may have been down and out, but I was still perky and resilient. That’s one thing you should know about me: even when I’m not feeling at all brash and intrepid, I’ve always been perky and resilient.
As I fed my résumé facedown through the fax machine, I thought about what was on the business side of it: my name, Charlotte Bell; my address, here; my early schooling, unspectacular; my two years of business college, entered into upon and completed at Aunt Bea’s insistence, since she thought I’d never amount to much and wanted to make sure I embarked on a path that would ensure this would be so. After that, of course, there was my three years in Ambassador Bertram—Buster to his friends—Keating and Mrs. Keating’s home as nanny to their two kids.
I’d gotten the Keating job through an agency. Upon receiving my business-college certificate and having decided that I didn’t want to do anything remotely business related, and having Aunt Bea at my back pushing me to get a job that would earn me enough money to get me out of the house, I’d decided to kill all the birds with one stone: I’d take a job that would, by definition, get me out of the house twenty-four hours a day.
I’d be a live-in nanny.
How hard could it be?
Perhaps I’d read too many gothic novels as a young child and was romanticizing the job, but I pictured young children looking up to me and me loving them; I pictured feeling competent.
Okay, obviously I wasn’t thinking about anything by Henry James.
The way I figured it, though, being a nanny would be the perfect confidence-building thing to get me out of Aunt Bea’s house. And, so long as nobody noticed the gaps in my knowledge, like geography, everyone involved would be better for it.
I looked again, ruefully, at the résumé I was faxing.
Since the only job I’d ever held of any substance was in the household of a man I’d made the mistake of sleeping with during most of my three-year stint there, and since being an adulteress hardly qualifies one in the eyes of the world as being good for much of anything other than more adultery, you would think I’d be trepidatious at the notion of my future riding on so little.
But if you thought that, again you would think wrong.
And isn’t it amazing how close intrepid and trepidatious are when you look at them on the page like that? Hard to believe they could be such different things and that at different points in my life I was destined to be one or the other.
One thing I was sure about: Ambassador Buster would give me the greatest reference the world had ever seen, if only to get me out of town, so that he could stop feeling so damn guilty and stop worrying that I’d turn all Fatal Attraction on him, sneaking into his house and boiling a rabbit in his pot.
In addition to football, Buster also watched a lot of movies. Really, once TiVo had entered the picture, it was a wonder he got any ambassadorial work done at all.
Nope, I was more Buster’s worry than he was mine and, really, the one thing you never want to do is piss off the nanny.
Like I said, I’m nothing if not perky and resilient, even if I’m still a far way from intrepid.
chapter 2
Fax faxed, I took myself down to my local Barnes & Noble, a three-story building I treated like a second home, attending as many author readings there as I could, haunting the stacks for new books like a crack addict searching for her next fix.
Since I had read as many literary novels and commercial truffles as I could stand for the nonce, and since Maureen Dowd had put Nancy Drew on my mind, I made my way to the children’s department and looked around until I found the originals in the series: small jacketless hardcovers, with their bright yellow spines and blue lettering, the original old-fashioned
