How Nancy Drew Saved My Life by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page A

would do? Because, in the wake of Buster, in a strange land among strange people, she was the most solid thing I had.
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    I had been offered the car with Lars Aquavit at my disposal, since the master was away, but I declined in favor of my feet and public transportation. Eventually, I would need to find my own way around; might as well start now.
    The air was cool against my bare arms, and I rubbed my skin for warmth, but at least there was no wind today. It took me a while to figure out the bus system, but I eventually was able to use it to get myself to Kringlan Mall.
    No, I do realize that a mall wasn’t the most romantic destination for my first outing in Iceland—wouldn’t small boutiques be more romantic, more glamorous?—but I wanted to be able to get everything I needed at once, under one roof, and have done with it.
    And as I mentioned before, I’m an American. When we are not sure exactly where to go, we find a mall. Someday, we earthlings will colonize Mars and as our first official capitalist endeavor, we’ll open a K-Mart.
    I had lived all my life in a city where I was not a minority, where the breadth of human differences was so vast that no one could be a minority. There were even a few short adults in Manhattan. But here it was as though I were a stranger from another planet. As at the airport the day before, I was so outnumbered in height and blondeness and beauty, it was like I was an alien. With the exception of other tourists, I was a person completely apart from everything around me.
    I wondered again what had brought me to such a place in time.
    What had I wanted after leaving the Keating household? What did I want in coming here?
    I would have said I wanted liberty, liberty from the pain I had acquired in my last post and the vacuous aftermath that had been my half life in Aunt Bea’s house.
    But then why come here?
    I had wanted change, surely I had wanted that.
    But why exchange one situation for a remarkably similar one?
    I saw then that what I had wanted most to achieve here was neither liberty nor change. I saw now that what I wanted most was another chance, an opportunity to do over the past and make it right again.
    Could such a thing be possible? Would such a thing be possible?
    Pushing away the sense of my own foreignness, I proceeded about the business I had come here for: the necessity of shopping. Unlike most women, shopping has never felt like a luxury to me. It was something I did only when the things I owned had become too worn through repeated washings to withstand any more wearings; or when, being a natural klutz, I had torn some needed garment; or when my underwear had reached the point that to not replace it, should some accident befall me, risked the ambulance driver’s embarrassment at my lack of any fashion finesse.
    With that mind-set, then, I located a shop that looked as though it would have everything I needed in one convenient stop and entered.
    I think the shopgirl was surprised at the quantity of things I selected: most tourists probably only bought one or two items as souvenirs—the sweaters were both the most beautiful and the most expensive I had ever seen—but here I was trying on enough that it would be easy to conclude that I had come to stay. Perhaps she thought I was another irritating patron, that I would try on fifty items only to buy one cheap thing, or perhaps none at all.
    She was even more surprised when I came out of the dressing room, a purple sweater replacing my T-shirt—Annette was right about me and the color purple—and a pair of tailored jeans hanging on my hips, and asked if she had a pair of scissors so that I could cut the tags off, that I wanted to wear the outfit right away rather than having her put it in a bag.
    I had picked out jeans that were too large on purpose: recovering my appetite, I thought that if I bought things that fit me today, they might no longer fit me in a month or two…or