one off the shelf. It was The Secret of the Old Clock. I turned it over, expecting there to be some description of the plot of the book, but all there was was some kind of all-purpose blurb about the series—“For cliff-hanging suspense and thrilling action…”—and a listing of the first six titles in the series, followed by the promise, “50 additional titles in hardcover. See complete listing inside.”
Fifty-six seemed like an awful lot of titles to have to live up to “cliff-hanging suspense” and “thrilling action,” particularly if they featured the same character time and time again. How good could Nancy Drew be? Was she really that exciting or was someone pulling the young consumer’s leg?
As I’d said before, I’d never read much Nancy Drew as a young girl, could only remember liking The Witch Tree Symbol, better known to whoever compiled that comprehensive list at the back of the book as #33.
I plucked #33 from the shelf, flipped through it, the memories flooding me. There was Nancy climbing on top of a tabletop, holding a lantern up to a ventilator and passing one hand in front of the light at intervals such that the S.O.S. signal would be transmitted, over and over again. (I’d have just screamed for help and then died before anybody came, because help was too far away to hear a scream but it could see a well-planned S.O.S. signal.) There was the young detective, at the end of the book, not thinking about what she’d just been through but rather turning her mind to the next mystery, with a ham-fisted authorial plug for The Hidden Window Mystery, #34.
I put the book back on the shelf. It all seemed so…kitschy.
But suddenly I found myself curious, curious to know what had attracted generations of readers. Even if I had always assumed her to be too retro for my tastes, year after year the books had kept selling. And, surely, if Maureen Dowd was touting her as the answer to the world’s problems…
It took several scoopings, but I scooped up all fifty-six books, everything from #1, The Secret of the Old Clock—and that clock on the cover really did look old, with Nancy sitting there on the ground at night, looking all intrepid in her green dress and sensible watch, legs tucked ladylike to the side as she prepared to do something unladylike to that clock with the handy screwdriver in her hand—to #56, The Thirteenth Pearl, with its vaguely pagodaish cover. So #56 was the last one? I thought. God, I hoped she didn’t die in the end. Even if I didn’t end up liking her any more than I had as a little girl, that’d just kill me after reading about her for fifty-six books. I was fairly sure that after reading all fifty-six books, I’d start feeling attached.
Then I noticed that there were other books on the shelves with “Nancy Drew” on their spines but with different packaging. So she did live on!
I hauled my armloads over to the nearest available register and plunked the books down.
“A completist’s present for some special young person?” the young man at the counter asked.
“Yes,” I said, opening my wallet to pull out the necessary cash. “Me.”
He raised a tastefully pierced eyebrow.
“My childhood wasn’t so good and adulthood hasn’t been much better so far,” I said, “so I’m doing a do-over here.”
He just shrugged. Apparently, he’d waited on weirder.
Fifty-six books at $5.99 each came to…
“Three hundred and thirty-five dollars and forty-four cents plus tax,” he said. “Cash or cre—?”
I handed over the cash.
Okay, so maybe I was an out-of-work and underpaid nanny looking to become an in-work and underpaid nanny yet again, but I did have cash left over from my commercial child-star days.
So then why, you may well ask, was I living off of Aunt Bea’s meager largesse when I could have afforded a place of my own?
Because when Buster had broken my stupid little heart, he’d shattered it completely, despite the justified anger I tried to cling to. I’d been absolutely shattered, having believed I’d found true love, only to have it smashed away—and the only place I’d had the strength to go to was home, such as it was; home to Aunt Bea.
Nancy and I have nothing in common, I thought, absolutely nothing, as I read the beginning of #1.
It said that Nancy Drew was an attractive girl of eighteen, that she was driving along a country road in her new, dark blue convertible and that she had just delivered some legal papers for her father.
Apparently, her dad had given her the car as a birthday present and she thought it was fun helping him in his work.
It went on to say that her father was Carson Drew, a well-known lawyer in River Heights, and that he frequently discussed puzzling aspects of cases with his blond blue-eyed daughter. Smug, I thought, Nancy was pleased her father relied on her intuition.
Nancy was nothing like me. She was five years younger, for one thing. She also drove, a convertible no less; I couldn’t even drive a donkey cart, had never even bothered getting my license. Who needed a car if you’d lived all your life in the city? It would only be a nuisance here, even a convertible in the summer. Besides, I was kind of terrified of driving, would rather poke a needle through my own eye than be responsible for powering a vehicle.
Nancy also had a father who trusted her to help him with things, while all I had was Aunt Bea to trust that I would fuck everything up and a father in Africa whom I rarely saw. I seemed to remember Nancy being motherless, like me, but somehow I doubted we’d lost our mothers in the same fashion.
Finally, there was that whole thing about her being blond and blue-eyed—wasn’t she supposed to be famously titian-haired? I seemed to remember that, too, and remembered thinking the word sounded glamorous but then thinking it icky when I’d learned the Webster’s definition of it was “of a brownish-orange color,” which hardly sounded attractive—which was in direct opposition to my own curly black hair and brick-brown eyes.
I hated her already.
The bitch probably didn’t even have any cheesy cellulite on the backs of her thighs. It would be nice to be able to say I was too young to worry about cellulite, but genetics will out and mine had outed itself post-puberty in an unpleasant way. Oh, nothing too major, just enough to make the idea of appearing on a beach in a bathing suit somewhat less than confidence-building.
Feeling more disgusted than I’d expected to feel, I put aside #1 and picked up #56, the one with the pagoda on the cover, and turned to page one again.
Nancy was discussing some drink called Pearl Powder with friends Bess and George.
I remembered being confused by George when I was a little girl. Obviously, George was a boy’s name, and yet whenever there were pictures of the girls with Nancy’s boyfriend Ned in the book, I’d always think Ned was George and wonder where Ned was and who was that other girl? It was years before I sorted George’s androgyny out.
I grumbled. I didn’t have any friends.
Before Buster, I’d had a few friends, at least people to do things with and people to talk to when times got rough. But after I succumbed to Buster’s charms, I committed the other cardinal sin that girls make: I made the man not just the center of the universe, but the entire universe, and I let everyone else drift off to different galaxies.
So maybe
