I wasn’t a reader of Nancy Drew or The Hardy Boys. I remember being little and going to the small local library with my mom and getting stacks of picture books, taking them home and going through them with such intense quiet delight. But there are no memories of books between that time and 6th grade. I must have been reading but I don’t know what. I didn’t read any of the The Great Brain books or any Roald Dahl.
I can see myself on my bed in my room in our new house in Houston, reading. The air-conditioner is on which is a new thing to me. There’s the intercom next to the door with a dumb built-in radio. That’s new too. There’s the small built-in desk across the way that I’ll never use, although I like the idea of it.
In that bed, I read Judy Bloom. I read Anne Frank’s diary. I read whatever dime store novel my dad had tossed aside or my sister had sitting around or that I picked up while with my mom at the grocery store. Rage of Angels. Flowers in the Attic. Hunt for Red October. No One Here Gets Out Alive. The Dead Zone. Sophie’s Choice. Night Chills. I don’t remember what year the Spenser novels came into our lives, but that was fun. First my dad read it, and then it was either my eldest sister or me, whoever happened to be in the right place at the right time to pick it up off from his nightstand or to have the book handed to them while passing by. I have so many memories of walking through the TV room and my dad being stretched out on the green velvet sofa, and as I pass by, he hands me a book he recently finished.
All of this is to say that there’s no having read this or something like it type of nostalgia about Donna Parker. But the book itself, the look, the art–the black and green– has plenty of wistfulness. I feel like I’m holding a part of my past. I did get a few used Nancy Drew books to read to M1 when she was little and tried to read one aloud, but the narrative stopping the way it did to detail Nancy’s outfits irritated me something awful and I closed that book and put it back on the shelf and went back to reading Frog and Toad because those books are goddamn poetry.
*I’ve looked at this cover so many times now that it no longer looks like he’s holding the post, but that he’s in motion to grab her tit. Then she’s going to stab him with the knife that’s in the garter under her skirt, wrap his body up with concrete blocks and dump him in the lake. He’ll rise from that lake and then murder everyone, saving her for last. They are at summer camp, after all. That’s what happens at camp. Sex and murder.
