How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  How

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Saved My Life

  Mameve Medwed

  For Howard

  Let me count the ways….

  the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

  the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds (also, with the church’s protestant blessings daughters, unscented shapeless spirited) they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead, are invariably interested in so many things—at the present writing one still finds delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles? perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D…the Cambridge ladies do not care, above Cambridge if sometimes in its box of sky lavender and cornerless, the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

  —E. E. Cummings, May 1922

  Contents

  Epigraph

  One

  It’s mid afternoon on a Monday, too quiet here at…

  Two

  I get to the Hynes Auditorium at 7 a.m. Gus has…

  Three

  The buzzer wakes me. I glance at the bedside clock.

  Four

  Two backpacked students hold the door of the Harvard Bookstore…

  Five

  I’ve procrastinated long enough. I owe Lavinia a chapter. I’ll…

  Six

  I’m back in my booth. The place is deserted. Everyone’s…

  Seven

  I’m back in my apartment. I’ve drawn the shades. Unplugged…

  Eight

  I’m still in bed when the buzzer rings. I stick…

  Nine

  Mary Agnes Finch calls me. “The deposition’s been set for…

  Ten

  I get up at six. Enough time to take a…

  Eleven

  I wrap the farm implements in tissue paper. I use…

  Twelve

  By the time I make it home from the bank,…

  Thirteen

  This morning’s the deposition. I didn’t sleep all night. I…

  Fourteen

  The first thing I do when I get home is…

  Fifteen

  Those who say time heals are right. I’m the perfect…

  Sixteen

  Here’s Bergson’s theory of time again: in the way that…

  Seventeen

  Ned calls me from the road. “I’m in Hartford,” he…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reading Group Guide

  Praise

  Other Books by Mameve Medwed

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  It’s midafternoon on a Monday, too quiet here at Objects of Desire. And too gloomy. Those cruel calendar pages have flipped to January. Short days. Endless dark nights. After months of ho-ho-ho to assault a bah-humbug soul. The fluorescent tubes ringing my booth flicker and buzz. The shepherd and shepherdess lamps that flank the faux mantel—$129 a pair, nineteenth-century English, a real bargain—lack bulbs. Their wiring is faulty. Clyde promised to fix it. He promised a lot of things. I look at the sign—A&C ECLECTIBLES. I should have painted over the C when Clyde ran off with that woman whose goods he appraised a month ago. But a eclectibles offends my grammarian’s soul.

  I pick up the New York Times crossword puzzle. Four-letter lake in Africa. Starts with M. Clyde was good at geography. He collected old maps. I toss the paper in the coal shuttle—solid brass, eighteenth century—which serves as wastebasket. You never finish anything, I can hear Clyde say.

  Not true, I’d protest. It’s just that I don’t like putting periods on the ends of sentences; I prefer to keep things open. Have many experiences. A lack of focus, my father would diagnose. My mother would have said I was finding myself. She’d found herself in her fifties when she left my father, the world-renowned R. Griffin Randolph, the holder of the Epworth chair in humanities at Harvard. She ran off with Henrietta Potter, the wife of Bickford Potter, the Harvard economist, near Nobel laureate. Henrietta had been her roommate at Smith. You go on finding yourself until you die, my mother said.

  It comforts me to remember that my mother, having found herself, also found happiness before she and Henrietta died last year in that earthquake in India. You saw the photos in the newspaper. Tattered, soot-showered children buried under the rubble. Sari-wrapped keening mothers. Cows and goats flattened by collapsed walls. In such a landscape, who could ever picture my tidy mother and no-nonsense Henrietta with their scrubbed rosy faces, their neat gray pageboys, their sensible Birkenstocks, their money belts and multipocketed safari vests ordered from the Travelers’ Catalogue? Their natural self-effacement struck an incongruous note against such high drama. But when a postcard came a month later, Sunset over the Taj Mahal, I realized the niche I’d put my mother in couldn’t contain her. I have at last discovered true joy. Pure ecstasy, my mother had written.

  Now that my mother’s not around to defend me, or Clyde to defend myself against, I have to admit that Clyde had a point about my not finishing things. I’d quit Harvard four credits short of my B.A. I joined the Peace Corps and dropped out before the posting at Rwanda. I headed for a banking internship on Wall Street but turned back at Hartford.

  At thirty-three, though, I figured I was starting to settle into a career as a partner in A&C Eclectibles. The A for Abigail. The C for…Well, it doesn’t take a Harvard degree to figure that out. In spite of my starts and stops, I’d always liked everybody’s leavings, the discarded and dented bits and pieces of other people’s lives. Even as a kid, I’d look forward to trash-collection mornings the way my lower-school mates anticipated opening day at Fenway Park. The old books, chipped china, frayed lamp shades I’d rescued from Brattle Street barrels threatened to turn my room into a Collyer Brothers annex. Our Abigail’s a pack rat, my father would opine as I’d tiptoe past his study with yet another box of salvage. Everything’s a learning experience, my mother would soothe.

  My mother took me to flea markets and auctions before I could walk. She scored the Lincoln portrait in my father’s study while I was in utero. When I was seven, I bid on a yarn-haired, gingham-pinafored doll at a farm house auction in Maine, where we rented a lakeside cottage. I’d squirreled away five crisp birthday dollars. All the other bidders dropped off when they saw my grubby hand shoot up in ten-cent increments. All except a burly man sporting a billed trucker’s cap who raised me a dollar to my every dime. Let the little girl have it, chimed an angry chorus, the summer people and locals for once in accord. A great big bruiser like you, somebody scolded, shame slapping him down into his seat.

  The victory of that moment trumped my successes to date: winning the neighborhood scavenger hunt and guessing, within twenty, the number of jelly beans in a mayonnaise jar. I was hooked.

  I met Clyde two years ago at the Brimfield flea market when our hands grabbed at the same time for a copper bed warmer stamped plymouth, mass and on sale for a song. He tugged; I tugged. He wouldn’t let go; neither would I.

  “Ladies first,” I said, a feminist not opposed to using nonfeminist wiles. My grip tightened on the splintered wood.

  “All’s fair in love and war.” He yanked.

  “This isn’t either,” I said, though I could hear the roaring of far-off tanks. “And may I point out that I won the badge for arm wrestling in Girl Scout camp.”

  “Not to one-up you,” he one-upped, “but I myself have wrestled steers to the ground in a rodeo.” He smiled. His eyes crinkled. Just as I was thinking, He’s cute, he said, “Though let me add, I’ve never wrestled someone quite
so cute.”

  I felt my grip loosening. I couldn’t help myself.

  He pulled. I held on. “Do you ever read those wedding columns in the New York Times about how people met?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I lied. I who ignore the news, flip past Sports and Business, and turn to the Styles section the second the Sunday papers hit my front door.

  “Well, there was one recently about this couple who met at the Chelsea flea market while fighting over a pink pasta canister.”

  “Oh,” I said, feigning the indifference of someone who’d just heard East Asia’s weather report. I remembered that column; I’d memorized the groom’s toast to his bride: Who knew in looking to furnish my apartment I ended up furnishing my heart and soul. “So?” I asked.

  He ducked his chin. “Not that I’d dare presume. Not that it would ever happen to us.”

  “Of course not.” I was about to add that such things don’t happen in real life. According to the Times, however, they did. Who could dispute the authenticity of all the news that’s fit to print? I stroked the dented copper of the warming pan. I admired the patina that guaranteed age.

  “Why don’t we see if the dealer will put this aside for an hour to let us settle ownership issues over a drink.”

  We squeezed onto the end of a picnic bench next to two fanny-packed collectors on one side; on the other, their just-purchased spinning wheel and four-foot-tall Elvis made out of beer cans. Clyde bought lemonade and fried dough. By the time our fingers were shiny with grease and powdered with confectioners’ sugar, I’d learned this: He’d just moved to Cambridge. He had a room at the Y while looking for a place he could afford.

  “What a coincidence!” I exclaimed. I who’d lived my whole life in a Cambridge Victorian on Brattle Street had just rented a needs-work walk-up in Inman Square a few blocks from the Y. For reasons I won’t go into, I was lonely. I was miserable.

  Well, as you already know, this is no reader-I-married-him scenario. No met-cute-and-now-keeping-the-copper-polished-for-our-grandchildren bit of nostalgia. But as you must have guessed, we rushed back to the booth and bought that bed warmer together. Split it right down the middle with Clyde supplying the extra penny for the tax.

  Within a month, that bed warmer was warming the wall in my Inman Square apartment over our shared Sealy Posturepedic the way other couples might hang those kissing lovers in Chagall’s Birthday. Until we sold it for double what we paid for it. We rented the booth together at Objects of Desire. Spent weekends and mornings trawling for treasure at flea markets and auctions and junk stores. Clyde, a graduate of an aggie college in the Midwest who grew up with Barcaloungers and dinettes and fifties bad taste before it was fashionable, had an inordinate reverence for earlier centuries and for all things New England, especially my parents’ separate effects, their rooms full of Chippendale, their minor Hudson River painters, their leather-bound first editions, their silver grape shears, their China trade demitasse sets. Her father holds the Epworth chair, he used to say when introducing me. I guess I—Abigail her-father-holds-the-Epworth-chair Randolph—was the vanishing perspective point in the big picture. Even so, I must confess we got as far as discussing theoretical wedding plans. We were keen on the subjunctive. “If I were to get married, I’d pick a rocky beach in Maine,” I said.

  “If I were ever to tie the knot, it would have to be the Harvard Faculty Club,” he said.

  I’d taken him there once when the line for Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage snaked down the sidewalk and onto the steps of the Harvard Bookstore. The only benefit was no cash changed hands; I could sign my father’s name. “If you remember, we both agreed the food stinks. If I were to choose, I’d like a clambake. With corn on the cob cooked in its husk. And blueberry pie.”

  “If it were up to me, I’d go for the Faculty Club’s saumon en croûte,” he said. “The perfect wedding dish.” He hesitated. “If there were a wedding,” he hastened to add.

  I’d had the saumon en croûte at Lavinia Potter’s nonsubjunctive first wedding. It was a soggy mess. Like her marriage. But I didn’t say so. What I said was, “How about Brimfield? That patch of grass next to the concession that makes fried dough. If one were looking for a sentimental setting…”

  He was not touched. He was not amused. Not even theoretically. “It needs to look good. Appearance matters,” he instructed.

  This turned out to be the truth. You can’t say I wasn’t warned when he ran off with that woman whose silver he appraised. “What chair does her father hold? Louis Quatorze?” I asked Clyde when he dropped the news.

  “It was not that she was sexier or more accomplished,” I told my friends, who loyally claimed they had never liked Clyde anyway—too eager to please, too quick to laugh at their jokes, to compliment their Cambridge jeans and vintage Bakelite bracelets. “It was that her stuff had better hallmarks than mine.”

  I don’t even miss him that much, I remind myself. I miss our treasure hunts, our mutual love of distressed pine and foxed lithographs and flaking mercury glass and crazed porcelain. Can I confess that our mutual exhilaration over a bargain turned out to be more of an earthmover than our near-mutual orgasms. Not that the sex wasn’t fine, too. As was the simple comfort of another body to warm my cold toes on a gloomy night, to attack the cockroaches in the silverware drawer.

  It would be nice to replace that body with a spare held in reserve like the backup roll of paper towels under the sink. No such luck. There aren’t many prospects in my business. They’re either gay, or antique themselves, or pudgy, tracksuit-wearing, comic-book-collecting husbands married to pudgy, tracksuit-wearing, Hummel-collecting wives. Or, worse, men so slick you want to slide right away from them. My neighborhood doesn’t offer many possibilities either; Portuguese family men and beer-swilling off-duty cops. Most of my friends who haven’t already nabbed significant others spend their nights in bars looking for them, then want to fix me up with their discards. “It’s not that you’re that fussy, Abby,” my former college roommate once pointed out. “Look at Clyde.”

  “Clyde had his charms,” I protested. But she and I both knew my argument was weak.

  These days I’m trying to resign myself to the possibility of all-out spinsterdom. Even though I’m considered acceptable in the looks department, even though I long got over my fears of inheriting my mother’s midlife proclivities once I realized I wasn’t the only one at Girl Scout camp to fall in love with Miss Garnett. (I was a mere spear-carrier in the mass crush on our exercise instructor, who had danced with Martha Graham and was recovering from a nervous breakdown when she came to test the restorative waters by leading us in jumping jacks.) Don’t get the wrong impression. While mine’s hardly a Sex and the City life (we Cantabridgians frown on that—who could wear such shoes on New England cobblestones?), I’ve had my share of romance. I’ve slept more than adequately with four men; one I thought I loved. But better not bring that up. Besides, I’ve completely gotten over him.

  Still, it’s on low consumer Mondays like these that the quiet and the loneliness take their toll. I shift sideways to avoid the lumpy spring in the Victorian chair of ripped tapestry and arms that end in dragon’s heads. FIFTY PERCENT REDUCED declares a yellow tag that hangs from a twist of mahogany flame shooting from the dragon’s mouth. If I don’t sell this soon, it will be reduced to the price of a subway pass and will end up in my doll-sized Inman Square apartment squeezed next to other misguided purchases, stools made of antler’s horns and vases you couldn’t stuff a tulip’s stem in—my own personal salon des refusées. What ever I inherited from my mother, after I wrestled a few items from Henrietta’s kids, my ex-friend Lavinia in particular, went directly to those big storage vaults out near Alewife.

  Boy, did Clyde want to stick his hands on my mother’s stuff. While pretty much everything was of a higher quality than our cut-above junk, it’s their sentimental value I treasure. I will never sell them, I promise myself. Even if starvation looms. At Clyde’s urging—an amicus brief
on behalf of shabby chic—I did bring in a couple of Henrietta’s chipped bowls and a cracked platter with a drawing of Eliot House that my mother and Henrietta used to serve cheese and crackers on. Lavinia didn’t want these, although it was her father who had been master of Eliot House. And I can understand why Ned, her brother, didn’t even bother to put in a claim.

  After Clyde left, after we split the stock, I had to bring in a few bits and pieces to fill the holes. A half-empty booth is never inviting, especially one that looks like it’s been excavated in the aftermath of a heavy-duty division of spoils attendant on a divorce. But these were things—pots and plates and platters—no one would buy.

  Now I lean over to take a year-old mint from a battered pewter plate and catch my sleeve on a slivered shard of wood. Clyde and I had discussed getting the chair refinished and reupholstered; the springs tied. We’d discussed, subjunctively again, recaning a stool, regilding the chips of a gold-leafed frame. Around us, other booths were set up like living rooms, polished and primped, smelling of beeswax and bowls of potpourri; magazines fanned out on coffee tables, pillows plumped. If we spiffed up our booth, maybe our sales would improve, was the theory we floated. But we were purists, we boasted. Shabby chic was coming back. And when it came down to it, we were cheap.

  Now I hear some scraping, furniture being moved, a carpet shifted from the booth next to me. A partition separates us. Clyde and I painted our side white. We hung a few Currier & Ives lithographs on it. Reproductions, dismissed the Fogg Museum’s curator of prints, who stuck his head in during a semi annual scouting mission. On Gus Robideau’s side, called Les Antiquaires de Versailles, though he’s Québécois, the walls are covered in brocade; anchored to them are gold sconces topped by fat cavorting cupids whose dimpled fists clutch arrows. The sconces sell like hotcakes. Anointed “one of a kind,” they are immediately replenished from an unending supply. People go big for cupids and cats and dogs, Gus has pointed out more times than I can count. You need to know your customers.