How Nancy Drew Saved My Life by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

retrieved. Had we been happy in the dream? Was it after he had made me so miserable?
    Buster was like a book taken from my personal library, a slot left on the shelf. One day, a new book would be placed there, the others crowding around it to fill the gap.
    But again, that day was not this day.
    When that day finally came, I would at last be saved from this hell I’d found myself in, a hell created by loss of love. And how would I avoid hell in the future? I asked myself and answered with a laugh: keep putting one foot in front of the other, remember to inhale and exhale, and never love again.
    Drying my eyes on the back of my hand, I rose and went to the window. Through the sheer curtains a bright light streamed and I parted them to see a day that glittered like a present. Apparently, the one fine day for the entire month that the guidebooks had promised me would be today, and I wasn’t about to waste it.
    Behind me, I heard a sound, an animal sound that made me start.
    At the end of the bed, curled up in my discarded bedsheets, was a black-and-white cat.
    â€œHey!” I said, gently tickling him under the chin. “Where did you come from?”
    â€œMeow!”
    â€œOh, I see,” I said.
    He stretched his neck upward, letting me know what he wanted most in this world.
    If only human beings were so easy.
    â€œWhat’s your name?” I asked.
    â€œMeow!”
    â€œFine, then I’ll call you Steinway.”
    â€œMeow!”
    â€œToo Jewish for you?” I said. “Well, too bad. Then you should have told me your real name when I asked the first time.”
    Â 
    American women react to tragedy, particularly tragedies involving loss of love, in one of two ways: either we stuff ourselves, hoping to fill the void, or we try to starve ourselves into oblivion. I had always been a member of the latter group.
    And that’s what I had been doing since the loss of Buster: starving myself. Had I lived in an earlier century, undoubtedly I would have eventually died of consumption.
    Hitherto, for months now, I had experienced no appetite. But as I went down to breakfast, last summer’s style of shorts now loosely hanging from my hipbones, I smelled the aroma of warm food and for the first time in a long time, felt real hunger.
    I wondered, with half a mind, what had happened to American women to change us so: If previously women had wasted away in times of trouble but now they were split between those who wasted and those who stuffed, what had caused the change in eating fashion?
    Mrs. Fairly and Annette were already eating when I entered the sunny yellow breakfast room. And so eager was I to eat, myself, I practically had my fork up before I even sat down.
    Outside of the eggs, nothing looked too familiar as being breakfast food. There were grilled vegetables and some kind of fish I didn’t recognize.
    I’d never thought of having fish for breakfast before.
    Despite the oddness of it, I ate some of everything, quite a lot of everything actually.
    â€œWhat are you going to do with your day of leisure?” Mrs. Fairly asked when I had at last dabbed at my mouth and laid my linen napkin aside.
    What Would Nancy Drew Do?
    She’d go out and get appropriate clothes.
    Of course, Nancy Drew would have done her research ahead of time and packed accordingly.
    I recalled from the fifty-six books I’d read, more than one time coming across the phrase “becomingly dressed” in reference to how Nancy Drew looked when she left the house and, in particular, one time when she had been “becomingly dressed”…to go clothes shopping! In my case, I had to shop because I was never becomingly dressed. Why would someone who was already becomingly dressed ever need to shop? I wondered. Why risk screwing it up?
    â€œFirst,” I said with a smile, “I think I’d better shop. Don’t you agree?”
    And why was I always so obsessed with what Nancy Drew