How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  I take my pad Thai to the kitchen; I nuke it in the microwave. I eat it straight from the box. For only the most fleeting of seconds do I wonder if Emile Lambert—lam-bear—really is the spitting image of Brad Pitt.

  After I’ve made coffee and watched the news, I check through my mail. How did I ever get on the list for every catalogue and mail-order house in the universe? I sort notices of auctions, a collector’s fortieth anniversary, an announcement of the opening of a pizza shop. I stop. I fish out a thick, cream-colored envelope. I hold it up. There’s my name, street, city, zip code calligraphied on the front. On the back flap, in tinier but equally elaborate letters, is Lavinia’s return address. I tear it open. We’re getting married, it announces, and gives a date four weeks hence, Sunday noon at the Faculty Club. Why would she hold her second wedding at the same place where she had her first? Why would she invite me, her former maid of honor, her ex-friend and current legal adversary? Who is now hard pressed to find any good words to say about her.

  I remember my parents once returning from the funeral of the wife of a colleague, the colleague beloved, the wife despised. She was a mean, small-minded bigot who alienated everyone, even her own children. “What did the rabbi come up with for the eulogy?” I asked.

  My father smiled. “That she was a regular and loyal reader of the daily newspaper and had supper on the table every night by six.”

  Now I study the engraved couple-to-be: Lavinia Potter-Templeton and John Cuthbert Tompkins. Will she become Lavinia Potter-Templeton-Tompkins? I wonder. If you’re known professionally in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Crain’s, and Fortune as Lavinia Potter-Templeton, you can’t just up and dump part of your name. I turn over the invitation. A Post-it is attached. Though hardly your ordinary yellow Staples off-the-counter brand. This Post-it is pearl gray scripted in maroon: From the desk of Lavinia Potter-Templeton trails down the left side.

  Dear Abby, she has inscribed in her all-too-familiar anal hand. It would mean so much to me for you to attend. We have lost too many family members. Can’t we forgive and forget for old times’ sake? Our mothers would have wanted it.

  I stare at the Dear Abby. I need to write in to Dear Abby herself. What is my obligation to attend an ex-friend’s wedding? I want to ask. A person I was tempted to pay a needless thirty-seven thousand five hundred dollars to for something that clearly belonged to me. And yet if time heals, time also tamps down the red-hot flame of rage. Dear Puzzled in Cambridge, Do what your mother would want you to do, I’m more than sure Dear Abby would advise.

  Before I can change my mind, I check salmon on the preferred-main-course reply card and seal the envelope.

  I click on the television. I flip through the channels: reality TV, Extreme Make over…I stop. I need an extreme make over. But not the sort documented by the bruised and bandaged woman in front of me on the screen. Liposuction, cheek implants, nose job, eye job, chin implant, breast implants, a voice-over reports. What about a heart implant? I want to ask, a hard-heart implant?

  I wrap myself in my heart-appliquéd quilt. Even if time can put a distance between me and Ned, time can’t stuff that once-upon-a-time rabbit back in the hat without a twinge or two. He’ll be at the wedding. Holding the hand of the tenure-track Columbia Ph.D. professor who shares his apartment and—presumably—his bed. I change channels again. Another reality show. What are the signs here? Time for me to face reality? Abigail Elizabeth Randolph has a nice, full life now. Without the encumbrances of a man. Time to move on.

  I move on. To a movie channel. When Harry Met Sally…A man and a woman meant for each other who don’t hook up until after a lot of near misses and way too many years. I make a bowl of popcorn. I can barely eat a kernel. I am too angry. How dumb can you be, I want to scream at Harry and Sally, not to notice you belong together? Though it’s pegged as a comedy, I don’t laugh. Even during the I’ll-have-what-she’s-having scene. I pause. I ponder. Would I choose to have what the Columbia tenure-track woman is having? Is that—Ned—something I want?

  No you don’t, my superego weighs in. Remember what Ned did to you.

  You’re right, I agree.

  I watch Harry and Sally mature and head toward wedding bells. You’re wrong, I correct.

  Forget about it.

  I want this.

  No you don’t.

  Yes I do.

  No you don’t.

  Back and forth wages the battle with myself like the duet in the Annie Oakley musical. Finally a third voice kicks in: Yes I do, no I don’t are both beside the point, it concludes, because No you can’t! I dump the popcorn in the garbage and go to bed.

  Sixteen

  Here’s Bergson’s theory of time again: in the way that what you dread shows up faster than what you eagerly await, four weeks have flown right by. Today is Lavinia’s wedding day. I’m getting dressed, putting on my new frock, new shoes, combing my newly shorn and for-a-small-fortune highlighted locks. Talk about extreme make over. Along with its even more extreme cost: the sale of two ironstone pitchers, a pine blanket chest, a silver-headed walking stick, three Godey prints, and a pair of brass candlesticks. Money that should have gone for rent, health plan payments, my estimated tax, charity.

  No matter. Once in a while a person needs to be frivolous. Looking good, girl, I salute myself. I went to Saks and, for the first time ever, didn’t flick away those cosmetics-counter ladies who swoop down on us blank canvases like Picasso on commission, rapacious as a vulture with an unlipsticked carcass in its sights. I bought enough products that the lady, “Krystal with a K,” threw in a paint-by-numbers manual that should have carried the warning Hazardous: Don’t try this at home. Still, after I practiced for a week, I managed to come up with an acceptable and diluted version of Krystal’s thickly applied, over-the-top transvestite mask. The last time so much gunk clogged my pores was during my appearance on Antiques Roadshow. And you know how that turned out. Speaking of which, I would have been better off putting my efforts into an astrological chart: Don’t make any rash purchases, yesterday’s Sagittarius report warned. From the amount of money, time, care I’ve put into preparing myself for Lavinia’s wedding, you’d expect me to be the bride.

  Now I admire my enhanced skin and scarlet lips. My spruced-up self. I adjust the collar on my bias-cut pale green silk. Have I ever looked this glittering? This glamorous?

  Immediately I blush with shame. I’m a traitor to my class. The Randolphs and the Granbys are cut from the same cloth as those Boston Brahmins who, so the legend goes, never buy their hats, they simply have them. They frown on style, on fashion; as far as personal adornment is concerned, they make do. Perhaps it’s a matter of geography: cold New England winters, understated New England architecture, distrust of the new.

  Now that’s he’s in La Jolla, my father’s certainly adapted to the more flamboyant scenery. Would I ever in a million years have pictured him in those garish parrot-and-palm-tree shirts, driving a red MG, a bright blue swimming pool stamped on his envelope-shaped backyard? I thought I had my father typecast: tyrannical Harvard professor. Dour New England intellectual. Set in stone. Dyed in the wool. Immutable. Immovable. And now he’s turned into what? A Zelig figure who takes on the colorations of his new landscape and mouths the pop phrases of those who inhabit it.

  Unlike my mother. For years my mother bought her winter coat at Max Keezer’s near Harvard Square, an ordinary secondhand clothing store. She stopped when other people’s discarded sweaters and skirts were upgraded to vintage, when Keezer’s advertised antique attire and began to specialize in tuxedos, when rich college kids started raiding its bins and prices soared to parallel the increased cachet. And yet even with my mother, there were surprises. Hadn’t I also slotted her? Hadn’t I characterized and dismissed her as the Harvard professor’s wife, the smart sturdy helpmate who stood by her man and never complained? Would I ever have dreamed she’d run off with Henrietta? Would Mr. Barrett ever have imagined the invalid Elizabeth would leave her bed, let
alone elope to Italy with Robert, a poet six years younger?

  Can you ever know anybody? Let me qualify this: Can you ever know anybody, especially when that person is under the power of a great love? Maybe it’s not the landscape that changes you but love. It happened to my father. It happened to my mother. I shake my head at my mirrored self. Not that it will ever happen to me.

  Still, as an homage to the past, I decide to clip on the pearl earrings my father bought my mother for their fifteenth anniversary. After the cake and champagne, he’d handed them over in their Shreve, Crump & Lowe purple velvet box. Oh, how lovely! my mother had exclaimed. But much too extravagant, dear. She snapped the box shut. As far as I can remember, she never wore them. Not even once.

  After she left, my father passed them on to me. You might as well have these, he said, sighing, then tossed the by-default gift in my direction as you would a tennis ball to a dog.

  The earrings are somewhere here in the jewelry tray I not so long ago neatened up. Though I’ve made an amazing assault on the clutter in the process of washing that inner wimp right out of my hair, my surroundings will never qualify for House Beautiful. I remember a couple from an outer suburb who, years ago, moved into our neighborhood. Painters suited up the minute the clapboard started to fleck. The wife scrubbed the front steps. Her husband washed their Mercedes every Saturday afternoon. Invited in for get-acquainted tea, we were ordered to take off our shoes. The white carpeting, our hostess explained. Magazines squared off at right angles; each vase contained one single perfect rose. If you dropped a crumb, a handheld vacuum appeared at your feet to suck up any trace.

  Obsessive cleanliness is a sign of the lower classes, my father, back in his own cracked and stained leather chair, declaimed, contrary to Dickens’s depiction of the great unwashed. I looked around our rambling house, our shabby rooms. I took in our threadbare rugs, our chipped china and distressed wood, the old portraits with the flaking gold leaf, the out-of-date L.L. Bean catalogues our parents ordered their wardrobes from.

  Within months our disapproving neighbors sold at a loss and moved away.

  And I realized I had developed a love of the old, the used, the chipped, a love of everything, if not everyone, I grew up with.

  I have to search through three drawers before I find the earring box. It’s hidden under a pile of old-fashioned black-and-white elementary-school composition books. At random, I stick my hand in and choose one. Across its cover loops my own name in my childish red-crayoned scrawl. I flip it open to the middle. My Trip titles the top of the page. Illustrated with a rudimentary drawing of a cow and pig. I had fun, I read. I patted a reel gote. Following this riveting account is a list of people on the trip. I study the names. Some faces rise up bright as diamonds; others have vanished into the past. Peeple I reely like are underlined, I wrote. Peeple half underlined I don’t hate that much. I check the list again. I may not have been the kind of stellar student to win a spelling bee, but I was people—peeple!—smart. Ned’s name is fully underlined; Lavinia’s only half.

  And in another fifty minutes I’ll be seeing both of them. One really liked; the other, not hated that much. Plus ça change…I put on the earrings. I admire myself in the mirror. All my efforts were worth it, I decide—I wipe some lipstick off my teeth—if only to give me the confidence to get through the hours ahead.

  The wedding takes place in the Faculty Club library. Which looks just as you’d expect: leather armchairs, dark paneling, twin globes flanking a fireplace, vellum-bound volumes, portraits of former college presidents, a Gilbert Stuart Washington, a seventeenth-century map of Harvard Yard, a framed page from the Gettysburg address. The guest list is tastefully second-wedding-appropriate: a small scattering of businessmen and -women in their severe, expensively cut suits. I spot the groom by the lily in his lapel. He’s standing in front of the mantelpiece, a tall thin man wearing a bow tie whose skimpy patch of mousy-colored hair is receding at the temples. He’s flanked by a group of other soon-to-be-middle-aged men sporting assorted variations on the same theme of blue blazer, gray flannel pants, button-down shirt, rep tie; they look like a gathering of Dartmouth fraternity brothers who’ve barely outgrown Animal House; they’re tossing back highballs, even before the I do’s.

  I decline the offer of a drink; I wave away an approaching tray of white wine. I’ll need to keep my wits about me. To get through the ceremony. To figure out how quickly I can escape. I’m doing this for the sake of our mothers, I repeat. Our mothers would have wanted this. Just as I’m extolling my unselfishness, my superhuman effort to fulfill duties I would never set for myself, I hear a niggling inner voice: Cut the crap, Abby, it says. Our mothers wouldn’t have given a damn about all the effort—on their so-called behalf that you took to look this good. I spy Ned over in the corner talking to an elderly couple, colleagues of Uncle Bick’s and my father’s, whose names have disappeared into a gray sea of ancient professorial blur. I scan the rest of the room again. I wonder which one of the enormously competent and attractive women is Ned’s heart’s desire.

  Ned sees me. He lifts his hand. He waves. And flashes me a smile of such blinding delight I’m sure that I’ve inadvertently stepped inside the path of a beam directed toward somebody else. I turn to see who’s standing behind me, but it’s only a waiter helping old Professor Moran off with his coat.

  I take a little gilded bamboo seat in the back row. The ceremony itself is appropriately short and minus frills. Lavinia, in beige, a hers-to-match-his lily tucked behind her ear, appears from a side door to stand next to her groom. I breathe a sigh of relief. I’m spared watching Ned walk her down the aisle. There are no Emily Dickinson poems or Bach études, no write-your-own vows. Faster than the speed of light, Lavinia Potter-Templeton-Tompkins and John Cuthbert Tompkins-Potter are declared bride and groom. The groom plants a kiss somewhere left of center on the bride’s mouth. Everyone claps. Professor Moran snores.

  A well-brought-up wedding guest can’t avoid the receiving line. When I reach Lavinia, she hugs me. “Abby!” she exclaims. “I’ve never seen you look so good. It means so much to me that you agreed to come.” She squeezes my shoulder. “I’ve put you between Professor Moran and Professor Lowenthal for lunch. They were such friends of your parents, I knew you’d be pleased.”

  John Cuthbert Tompkins-Potter pumps my hand. “A pleasure,” he says. “Livvy has told me so much about you.” I’m a little flattered until I hear him say the exact same thing to the man whose hand he pumps right after mine.

  But when I make my way to my table (the farthest from the bridal party, the closest to the kitchen—why am I not surprised?) I find Ned in the seat where I’d expected Professor Moran to be getting more zzz’s.

  He pops up. He pulls out my chair. “I switched the place cards.” He grins at me.

  “Lavinia will be pissed.”

  “Screw Lavinia.”

  I am inordinately pleased. I sit down. It’s clear table nine has been designated Faculty Club headquarters of the AARP—white hair, hearing aids, canes hooked over the backs of chairs, someone’s digitalis tablets set out next to the water glass. Place setting by place setting, you’ll spot nobody under seventy except Ned and me.

  I look around. False teeth and partial plates and cataracts and thick lenses blink up at me. “Where’s…?” I begin. I don’t even know her name.

  “Who?”

  “Your”—I pause—“significant other. Lavinia told me you were living with someone. A professor. At Columbia. That it was serious.”

  “Lavinia.” He spits out the name like a sour lemon. “She, Juliet, has flown the coop. I must confess I’m rather relieved.”

  Me, too, I think, though the relief of one Abigail Randolph hardly amounts to a hill of beans. So she’s Juliet, I marvel. Leaving Romeo with what? The rent? A too-big bed? A broken heart? Somehow Ned doesn’t look that brokenhearted. And I know for a fact he’s not the actor his sister is. But maybe I’m deluding myself. “What happened?” I ask. “Not t
hat it’s any of my business,” I add with fake humility.

  “When my publisher dropped me…” he begins.

  I lean forward. “Your publisher dropped you?”

  He nods. “As you are well aware, my first book bombed. Rightly so.” He stops. “Abby, I feel so rotten…”

  I steel my heart. “Go on,” I order.

  “I had a two-book contract, which required the publisher to look at and approve what I wrote next. I’m afraid the second book was even more of a disaster. I knew it. I didn’t bother to finish it.” He straightens the silverware. He lines up the salt and pepper.

  I watch his graceful hands. I picture Elizabeth and Robert’s “tiny, but iconic” plaster clasp. I look at my own fingers splayed across the tablecloth.

  Ned clears his throat. “If, as they say, everybody has one book in him, I’m proof. I wrote The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls as therapy. It was a young man’s book, by a callow twenty-something who tried to make sense of his life, to work out his problems with his family, to record all the joy of his first love…” He stops. He looks away.

  I hold my breath.

  He turns toward me. “Abby, I’m no novelist. And when it was clear to Juliet there’d be no more books, no money, and no fame, and that I was going to leave New York for Cambridge…”

  I clutch my fork. I dig the tines into my palm. “You’re coming back?”

  He nods. “With my advance for The Cambridge Ladies, I bought a bicycle shop in Kendall Square. You know how I love bikes, how I was always tinkering…”

  I nod my head. I remember those bikes locked to the rails of the front porch. The derelicts ready to be rehabilitated. The shiny new ones, multicolored streamers flaring from their gleaming chrome. I see Ned with wrenches and screwdrivers making adjustments, spinning wheels. As a kid, he was always fastening bells on handlebars, attaching cards to spokes. Later, he’d hold out for himself the carrot stick of rides along the Charles after a day’s writing. Then burst out the front door like a trapped animal just sprung from captivity. I can still freeze-frame the joy mapping his face when he climbed on his bike, when he set out on the path to Concord. I picture his thighs in their tight black Lycra shorts. His cute little butt. My throat closes. I make myself stop.