Nancy Drew

44 the minnesota review Trish Rucker Nancy Drew You wore gloves, of course. You had a blond pageboy. You looked like someone's perfect daughter, the student body president. You never entered the 1960's, never wore purple mini skirts and fringed vests, never wore your hair long and straight, swinging over your shoulders like a Coppertone ad. You were a model girl, but not like Jeanie Shrimpton or Edie Sedgewick. You were anyone's ideal, a literate Miss America, a prom queen with initiative. In your spare time you went to afternoon teas, to fraternity parties. What could be more normal? You trained yourself to excel at everything, or perhaps it just came naturally: swimming, flying airplanes, driving motorboats. You acted, you danced, you swam, you wrote short stories, you were an expert on modern art. Barbie never had it so good, not even with her pink dune buggy, her bendable limbs, her candystriper dress, her nightclub gowns, her perfect, molded plasticity. But Barbie seemed to belong with Ken in a way you could never belong with Ned Nickerson. Ned was an accessory, like Barbie's majorette boots, her rustling red pom poms. Not that you really needed a man, not even your father, the noble lawyer Carson Drew. You never girltalked with George and Bess, your partners in detection. You never went to slumber parties, never called boys and giggled, never experimented with Passion Fruit lip gloss, never spun records of the Beatles, the Kinks, the Stones. You never jerked or ponied, never played Mystery Date, never waited breathlessly to learn Will he he a dream or a dud? Nancy, you were made of stronger stuff. Drew 45 My favorite part was the details. How well you prepared me for gothics, with all those crumbling manors, the Twisted Candles Inn, the hunts for secret caves, the cobwebbed attics, castle towers, dank cellars. Hidden chambers everywhere. Warning voices, phantom footsteps, a giant wooden puppet that danced across the lawn. Hexes in Lancaster, seances in New Orleans. At night it always rained. It was perpetually a dark and stormy night. And there was always a mysterious man involved, you were always finding clues for him. He was usually a down-and-out aristocrat, with a tweed jacket, an accent. Your own Cary Grant or Charles Boyer. He showed you the old house, the family estate, the beautiful garden overgrown with weeds. The genteel old family down on their luck. Nothing to worry your pretty little head about. You never worried about anything, never saw men walk on the moon, never held your breath, thinking that their spaceships might fall out of orbit, or worse yet, orbit forever like the Robinsons on Lost in Space. You never saw the march to Selma, never watched t.v. at all, so how could you know about all those men who were assassinated? Nancy, they only sold Seventeen and Young Miss at the local pharmacy, you were never riveted by those photos in Life or Look, those wrenching photos in vivid color. You must have been happier that way. You looked like a president's daughter, a Lynda Bird or Tricia. And no one could stop you, not even Hector Keep or Fred Bunce, with their villainous ain'ts and double negatives, their clashing colors, their plaids and stripes together. The clues almost seemed to find you, your own River Heights deus ex machina. Even the clues were romantic: a secret diary, some velvet slippers, a pair of twisted candlesticks. Everything took on the magic of a fairytale. And it was always one of these artifacts that you were rewarded with. I used to imagine your room. A photo of Ned, perhaps, or a sepia picture of your parents, maybe even a River Heights High School pennant, but then there would also be the antique books, the sterling Victorian mirrors, 46 the minnesota review the hand-tinted maps. It was a ten-year-old girl's dream. How often you graced the pages of the River Heights newspaper. Everyone knew you, you had your fifteen minutes of fame again and again. And for all those years you were like Peter Pan, you never took...