How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  Eight

  I’m still in bed when the buzzer rings. I stick my head under the pillow. “Go away,” I yell. “I am retreating from the world.” Not that anyone can hear me. The buzzer keeps screeching like those car alarms that bring old ladies into the street wearing fuzzy slippers and waving rolling pins. Is it stuck? Now that I shall never leave my apartment, now that I shall never leave my bed, am I to be tormented by a jammed and insistent buzzer that will turn me into one more crazy hermit in a city full of them? Who could it be? I wonder. And the second I think this, I pounce on you-know-who. And dismiss that thought.

  Mailman? UPS? Someone soliciting for Common Cause despite the no solicitation signs stuck all over the downstairs hall? These rarely deter the kids putting themselves through college by selling magazine subscriptions to Auto Digest, though never Art & Antiques. Or the earnest souls collecting for disease of the month, terrorizing you into handing over five dollars lest tumors map your body and rot your skin. I touch my still-stinging face—rot has afflicted me already. Maybe it’s Clyde, who left behind in his ticketed car another doctoral thesis’s worth of apologies.

  I shall never answer my door, I decide. The minute I take this stance, the buzzing stops. What a sense of power I feel, the power of semipositive thinking. Too bad I can’t vanquish thoughts the way I can vanquish annoying visitors.

  But I’ve spoken too soon, for now there’s pounding at my door. Ceaseless, unrelenting pounding. Followed by the voice. “Abby, open up. I know you’re in there. I’ve already been at Objects of Desire. I know you’ve gone home. Open up. I am going to keep knocking until you let me in.”

  It’s Lavinia.

  “Go away,” I call again. But my heart’s not in it. I recognize a hopeless case when I see it, and Lavinia’s stubbornness and persistence are as immutable as the Berlin Wall—more, if you consider they tore the wall down.

  I force myself out of bed. My legs are weak; maybe my calf muscles have already started to atrophy. I pull on sweatpants over my plain white 100 percent cotton serviceable underpants. I’ve tucked away my Victoria’s Secret silk bikinis along with my hopes in the back of my bureau drawer. I have seen my bleak future. No sex. Bodily fluids as dry as my shriveled, shrinking skin.

  I open the door.

  “My God, what’s happened to your face?” Lavinia shouts.

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “Stress,” she diagnoses.

  “Actually some allergic reaction to a face cream,” I say. I do not admit rubbing toothpaste all over my delicate brow.

  “No wonder you’re hiding out.” She walks inside. Flings a jacket I have hung over the back of a chair onto the floor, pushes away a pair of jeans, and sits down. “Just so you know, some lady who lives in the building, on her way back from the market, let me in. You should have a rule. It’s hideously unsafe.”

  “If we had a rule, you wouldn’t be here now,” I reasonably point out.

  She brushes this off. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Is conversation between us permitted?” I ask. “Considering our lawyers.” Since my Bleak House legal problems, I’ve been watching even more Law & Order.

  “We’re friends.”

  Were, I start to amend, then slam my mouth shut.

  “Besides, we’re not jurors blabbing to the press.” She looks around my living room.

  I view my own four walls through her two eyes.

  She doesn’t say, What a dump, but I can read it on her face.

  I touch my own face. “I’ve been feeling so under the weather I haven’t got around to cleaning this up.”

  “With all this stuff, I can’t imagine you’d have room for anything more.”

  Does she mean room to fit a chamber pot? Does she mean room for our mothers’ antiques, ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of which she arranged to have crated and moved to her Concord house? “I’m sorting it out. Some of the stuff is going to my booth,” I lie.

  She studies my sofa, draped with my none-too-clean, all-too-practical underwear. “I’m getting married again,” she announces.

  I do a double take. She has stated this in the same way she’d say she was going to the store to pick up a jar of pickles. “Oh,” I remark, neutral as Switzerland. I feel a sadness for what, in a normal friendship, would have been the scenario to follow such news: the jumping up and down. The flinging of arms. The examining of the ring. The pulling out of photographs. The who, what, and where asked and answered with mounting excitement verging on gushiness.

  “Yes. And I want to start this marriage with a clean slate.”

  “Which has what to do with me?”

  “Everything. The chamber pot, for example.” She smooths her skirt. She points to my OUT OF IRAQ T. “Aren’t you a little too old to be wearing that?”

  “I feel strongly about the war.”

  “You’re not a college student anymore.”

  “Does that make me less of an involved citizen?” I stare at her. At her neat red suit and diamond studs and red-leather-trimmed pocketbook. “Omigod!” I exclaim. “Is your husband-to-be a Republican?”

  To her credit, she has the good grace to blush. “Political affiliations are private,” she snorts. “Besides, my forthcoming marriage is not the purpose of this visit.”

  “Explain to me again what the purpose is.”

  “To resolve the issue of this chamber pot.”

  “I assume your heavy-hitting Snodgrass X, Y, and Z law firm was in charge of this particular assault.” I pat my T-shirt. “These weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population unable to defend itself.”

  “Stop it, Abby. You’re becoming tiresome.” She sighs her long-suffering Lavinia sigh. “My lawyers, in fact, would not wish me to be here talking to you.”

  “You mean consorting with the enemy?”

  She ignores this. “They feel my case is the superior one. That my mother wanted me to have the chamber pot, herein stated same, and as such it rightly belongs to me. But even given the probable positive outcome of my case, I am, as you know, not a selfish person.”

  “Always thinking of others. Generous to a fault. Awash in the milk of human kindness.”

  All irony is lost on her, maybe because she keeps talking like a lawyer. “And, as a result, to avoid litigation insofar as I can focus on my upcoming marriage, this happy event—very happy event—I’ve decided to go against counsel’s advice and offer to sell the chamber pot and split the proceeds with you.” She looks at me with a self-congratulatory tilt of the chin.

  Am I supposed to melt at her feet into a puddle of gratitude?

  She waves her fingers in the direction of my underwear-upholstered sofa, my clutter of bric-a-brac and flea-market finds, my pizza boxes and Chinese food cartons waiting to be put out in the trash, my mottled lumpy face in desperate need of an ace dermatologist, my T-shirt and sweatpants begging for a fashion make over. “It seems to me you could certainly use the money,” she adds, noblesse oblige winning out over Let them eat cake.

  My spine, put through its character-building paces, gratifyingly stiffens. “The chamber pot was meant for me. It was my mother’s. I’ll never part with it.” I pause. “Besides, you didn’t want it until I took it onto Antiques Roadshow. It was my mother’s,” I repeat. “You rejected it. I kept it. Too bad.”

  “Well, then let me point something else out. How would you like your mother’s—and my mother’s—life together broadcast all over the Boston tabloids?”

  “Believe me, no newspaper would be interested in the domestic arrangements of two mousy academic wives.”

  “You wanna bet? When there’s a chamber pot that once belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning involved? When you stick yourself and it up on one of PBS’s most popular programs, broadcast on channels across the fifty-two states? With reruns shown more than twice a week, dare I calculate. Almost every time I turn on the TV—which isn’t often, as I prefer to use my few free moments to read—there you are with your eyes poppin
g out and your mouth agape. ‘You’re kidding,’ you scream.” She shakes her head. “Don’t be naïve, Abby. You asked for it. Boy, the media can’t wait to shove the knife into us Brattle Street Harvard types. The whole story of our lives will be right out there for every Tom, Dick, and Harry to read. Your grocer. Your dentist.”

  “Not to mention your new fiancé.” I was going to say Republican fiancé but I didn’t have the hard evidence. I paused. “Lavinia, it isn’t as though our story hasn’t been told before. It isn’t as though your brother didn’t publish his book.”

  “Which was a novel. Not a piece of mass-market yellow journalism.”

  “You were upset at the time.”

  “I got over it.” She waits. “Unlike you.”

  I don’t defend myself.

  But she defends Ned. “The book didn’t get the recognition it deserved. It sold zilch copies. Due not to Ned but to the bad marketing of his publisher. I’d rather keep our story in the family than let the newspapers make hay of our private affairs.”

  “Nothing changes my mind. You didn’t want it. Finder’s keepers.”

  She gets up in a huff. “I would have hoped you’d be reasonable. But why would I have thought that, as you’ve never been reasonable in your whole life.”

  “Not reasonable like you,” I say sweetly. “Not so unselfish as you, either.”

  She turns toward the door. Some of the upholstery in the chair must have ripped as feathers and bits of cotton batting dot the seat of her red skirt. I smile.

  “I don’t know why you’re smiling, Abigail. You’ve made a stupid mistake.” She sticks out her jaw like a toddler incubating a tantrum. “I’ll see you in court.”

  I keep smiling. “I bet you’ve always wanted to say those words.”

  She puts her hand on the doorknob. “Next will come the depositions.” She opens the door. She turns to me. “I assume Ned will be subpoenaed to testify.”

  Ned. Ned. I’ve delayed this part long enough. I’m not surprised you’re getting restless. I pour myself a glass of wine even though, as Uncle Bick would have said, the sun hasn’t passed over the yardarm yet. I get back into bed, where I promptly dribble wine on the pillowcase to join the Rorschach blots of pepperoni pizza and Buddha’s Delight. I take another, more careful sip.

  Here goes. I’ll try to make it fast in the way that, as with a Band-Aid, the quicker you pull the less it hurts. When I left off telling you Ned’s story, it was at the highest point of my life: St. Barnaby’s Chapel, Professor Thayer, glorious light, declarations of love. If I’ve learned anything in my thirty-three years, it’s that highs are often followed by lows. And the lows last longer.

  But the highs made it through the three more years it took Ned to finish his novel, the waiting period between the proposal and the day the actual event would occur. We’ll get married. Here. In this chapel. When I’ve finished my novel, was what he said. If all happy families are alike, so are all happy lovers. Our world blazed in Technicolor. Food never tasted so good; music never had so much charm to soothe a savage breast; our words were sonnets that spilled out. In bed we read to each other the poetry that as students we had scorned.

  I opened my heart to Ned. My most private thoughts, any secret I ever buried, I revealed to him. My deepest feelings about my friends, my insecurities about my place in the world, my guilt about my privileged Cambridge life and my failure to live up to it, my bewilderment over my mother’s lifestyle choices and my teenage confusions, my grievances against my father and my hopeless sense of having disappointed him. I came to understand that my lovemaking with Ned was a physical manifestation of this opening up, a dramatization, a choreography, a profound, creative expression, the stuff of an epic or a symphony. Sex with Tom, Dick, and Harry (and three was pretty much the extent of it) was thrilling and fun, but it was never like this, never like sex with the person you trotted after as a child and beheld, when you grew up, in a dazzling shaft of light. He wrote. I worked. We made plans for our future together.

  “Can I read the work in progress?” I’d asked Ned.

  “I’m superstitious. Wait till I’m done.”

  Months passed. More months passed.

  “How is it going?” I’d inquire. “Almost near the end?”

  “In a while,” he’d say.

  Then, “I’m getting there.”

  Then, “Soon. I’m starting to reach the home stretch.”

  It was a beautiful day when he finished. Afterward I remembered that. I wondered if things always went bad on glorious days. I thought of September 11. Not a cloud in the sky, just a hint of the crispness of fall, a day in which you’re sure all’s right with the world.

  Back then, when Ned finished, my mood was as sunny as the day. It was the middle of the afternoon, a summer afternoon, the two words Henry James called the most beautiful in the English language. A Sunday. I was on the Potters’ porch swing. The house was up for sale. Our mothers were in India. My father was in Hawaii fertilizing Kiki’s eggs. Uncle Bick had died the year before, and I’d moved in with Ned. Next door, in my old house, I could hear the cries of the young children of the new owners protesting being put down for their naps. Ned came out onto the porch carrying a typewriter paper box, a bottle of champagne, and two of Henrietta’s best Baccarat flutes. “I finished,” he said.

  It was a solemn moment. A hush in the cathedral. We were silent. I wondered what it must be like to complete something so big. We opened the champagne with no talk of whether the sun had passed over the yardarm. Ned poured. We each had a single glass that we raised in a toast. “To finishing,” he said.

  “To your novel,” I said.

  He passed the box to me. The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls was typed in bold across the top. “Cummings,” he said. “Though I’m sure you know.”

  I nodded. I lifted the title page. This book is dedicated to Abigail Elizabeth Randolph, soul mate and light of my life, I read.

  “Ned.” I started to sob.

  “Don’t cry yet,” he ordered. He held up a traffic-cop hand. “If you’re going to start it now,” he said, “I’ll have to leave the house.” He kissed me. He unlocked his bicycle from the porch rail. He put on his helmet and set off for Concord. To Lavinia’s.

  I settled back into the porch swing. I turned to Chapter One. I was high on joy. On hope for the future. On the realization that all the waiting was over. On dreams of St. Barnaby’s Chapel. On my life with Ned. On love for my fellow man. On love for one fellow man in particular. This is the most perfect moment of my life, I thought. My heart swelled.

  By page thirty my heart had shrunk into a tiny, hard, cold nub. Joy had turned to misery. Love to shock.

  Every little secret I had ever told Ned, every fear and embarrassment and doubt bellowed out there from the page. My troubles with my father; my worries about my mother; my own childhood crush on him, all wrapped up into a scathing critique of our Cambridge lives, our Cambridge friends, generic Cambridge ladies, and our own Cambridge mothers in particular. If you flipped through at random, here’s what you’d see: There I was dropping out of school. There was my first failed love affair. There was the scene where I stole two Snickers from Irving’s, illuminated by my abject confession and my father-edited note of apology. All building up to the crescendo of the moment when, in my pink-striped bedroom described down to my periodic table quilt, my mother told me about Henrietta, mother-daughter dialogue recreated almost verbatim from the conversation I’d revealed to Ned.

  Was the book any good? How could I tell? Why would I care? Who could see the forest for my barbed-wire, knife-edged, stiletto-branched trees? I was pierced, beaten, pounded, flattened, kicked so low I could have dropped to China through one of those holes we used to dig as children in the Potters’ backyard. This is the lowest day of my life, I knew.

  What should I do? My first instinct was to flee to Lavinia, who was still my best friend. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t go there. I packed a bag. I poured out the re
st of the champagne into the hydrangea bush. I left a note, weighted by a stone, on top of the manuscript box. Please don’t try to contact me, I wrote. Then crossed out the Please. I made a few phone calls and accepted the first offer of a living room couch. In two days I’d sublet the Inman Square apartment from a techie who’d decided to make a trek to Nepal. On day three I moved in. And, yes, just as you’d assume, I took to my bed. I threw out Ned’s letters without opening them. I monitored all calls. I refused to talk to Lavinia, who left unctuous and then increasingly angry messages on my answering machine. I didn’t go to my door except for the pizza delivery man and the plumber the superintendent sent to test the pipes.

  Finally, they stopped. The letters. The calls. Finally, I got out of bed.

  It took a year and a half for Ned’s book to be published. During that time our mothers had died in the earthquake in India. And I’d met Clyde. Typical rebound scenario, you’d diagnose. I’d have to agree. But for a while Clyde helped me, if not to forget, then to avoid the obsessional hand-wringing and chest-smacking that took over every second of my life since I opened Ned’s manuscript.

  The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls bombed.

  There were three local readings. Not well attended, reported my spies, except for a handful of brave It’s fiction family members, including Lavinia putting on a public face, and a couple of loyal friends scattered among the usual suspects showing up for the free coffee and shoppers stopping by to take a load off their feet.

  The reviews were lousy. The few there were.

  “Amateur writing,” wrote the critic in the Boston Globe. “Warmed-over Cambridge quiche. Nothing you haven’t heard, and heard better told, before.” He called the protagonists’ lives “boring and dreary,” their problems “tiny tempests in Wedgwood teapots.” “What reader could ever care about such people who lack vision and will?” he asked. “If this is all they can do with their Harvard educations, then they deserve each other.”

  I should have been glad Ned’s exploitative book got panned. I should have cherished the starless ratings on Amazon. The mean words. The speed at which his novel got moved from bookstores’ center tables and into the spine-out Siberia of back shelves. It was what the book deserved. Just deserts. The sweet smell of revenge. Bad deeds that did get punished.