How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (33 page)

I can’t. I’m no writer. And Ned, who once was, is not a writer anymore. Thank God.

So, in that spirit, while I’m not about to give you details, neither am I going to obfuscate with coy train-enters-the-tunnel imagery or the corny waves-crashing-to-shore symbolism and especially not that overused Hemingway earthmoving cliché.

Just know that every second, every word, every touch, every breath—all of it is absolutely wonderful.

Now Ned and I lie postcoitally in bed, fingers laced, legs as latticed as a cherry pie. Ned is making lists, counting sugarplums. “So we’ll get married at St. Barnaby’s; we’ll honeymoon at Casa Guidi…” he begins.

I put my finger to his lips.
Shhh,
I want to warn.
It’s too soon. Let’s stay in the present. Let’s take it one day at a time
.

But I don’t. Maybe you can make a case for throwing caution to the wind, for daring a risk, for tossing away your crutches and hazarding a leap, for rising from your bed and running off to Italy with the one you love. Knowing your father wouldn’t approve, knowing you’d stir his wrath.

Our
fathers, however—Ned’s and mine—would grant us a solemn nod of endorsement.
Well done,
they might allow. Our mothers, on the other hand, would be turning cartwheels on the bridges over the Arno, along the columned arcades of the Taj Mahal. Their screams of delight would sail past red-tiled roofs, Gothic towers, ridged pagodas, across oceans and deserts and into our bedroom windows in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with no diminution in decibels. Right now I sense them looking down on us, beaming, nodding, saying we told you so. Saying we knew it all along.

“Our mothers would be so happy,” Ned affirms. “I feel they’re here with us.” He laughs. “Well, not precisely
right
here,” he qualifies.

Once more he rolls over onto me. “Darling,” he whispers. “Abby.” He sighs. We begin again—tunnel, waves, Hemingway—you know the routine by now.

Our bed sways and creaks. Like an old Viking boat at sea in a terrible storm. Maybe louder, maybe in a different way from before. But it’s a sound that registers only in the deepest recesses, a sound we, otherwise engaged, pay no attention to.

Until there’s a startling crack: the bed frame splinters apart. Our mattress and its platform of plywood slats crash to the floor. Bringing on the pounded broomstick of the man downstairs.

Dumbfounded, we just lie there, our voices stopped, our limbs frozen; victims of traumatic shock, stunned in the wake of a bomb. This explosion, this
bedwreck,
is so surprising, so sudden, that it takes me, the princess on the pea, a few seconds to realize our landing is not flat, that we have crashed on top of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s chamber pot.

We get up. We start to move, sifting through the rubble that once was our bed. We pull away the tangled, wood-stabbed sheets, we kick away spears of splintered oak; we slide the mattress to the side, pry up the broken boards.

And stare at the lopsided aftermath.

“Maybe the Bubble Wrap…?” I start, trying to grab onto a raft of hope.

Ned shakes his head. His voice is gentle, the kind of tone calibrated for the delivery of bad news. “Not even a chamber pot tucked inside Mary Agnes Finch’s vault would have survived this”—he bends over—“this debacle.” He starts to peel off the Bubble Wrap the way a surgeon might unwind his patient’s bandages, all the while fearing a the-operation-was-a-success-but-the-patient-died result.

Ned pulls me to him. We survey the ruins of the chamber pot now lying in shards against its failure-to-thrive, failed-to-protect Bubble Wrap.

“Poor Abby,” Ned laments. “After what you went through for this. The fight. The money. The stress. The…All the plans you had for it.”

I bend down. I pick up a sliced-off handle. I study the broken pieces. What were my plans? Hoard it under my bed as some kind of talisman? Sell it? Donate it to Casa Guidi? Give it to the Schlesinger Library? Agonize about its safety? Feel residual guilt over how I lied to Lavinia? Wonder forever if Henrietta really did mean for Lavinia to have it? If it really belonged to her?

“You must be devastated,” Ned says now.

I start to nod. An automatic response to a natural or unnatural disaster. Then I stop. A bulb sparks. It’s not devastation I feel. Only an extraordinary lightening.
Relief
. The chamber pot is no longer worth anything to anybody. Only to me. I can keep it. Nobody else will want it.

“Where’s the glue?” Ned asks. “Let me try to mend it. I’m good at such things.”

I touch the scar on my knee. “I know you are.”

He holds up his hands. “My bike mechanic’s hands. I’m pretty sure I can put this Humpty-Dumpty back together again.” He pauses. “Not the same as new.” He smiles. “But good enough.”

“Sometimes good enough is more than enough.” I reach for his bike mechanic’s hands. “More than good enough.”

I find the glue. Ned untangles a blanket from a knot of sheets. He spreads it across the living room floor. He sits down on it. One by one he lays out the pieces. He scrutinizes each separate porcelain bit. He shifts the fragments around like jigsaw puzzle parts. He tries one combination. Then another. Until he has set out a blueprint in mosaic of the chamber pot.

I think of antiques, of objects of desire, how the hair-line crack in an old vase, the foxing in an old print, the clouded glass of an old decanter mark the passage of time, commemorate the history of people’s lives.
This has age,
one of my colleagues might boast to a customer, extolling its greater value over the shiny and pristine. How much easier it is to live with flaws than perfection. How much more comfortable. Scars and nicks—Ned’s novel, my bad choices, our silence and time apart—can have value in human terms, too, not just in china, glass, silver, old manuscripts. Flaws can reveal growth, authenticity. Can show that two people have lived and learned.

Now I watch Ned naked, hair falling over his forehead, forehead wrinkled in concentration, arrange the pieces to reconstruct the chamber pot. I think of the day Ned taught me how to ride my bike; “Ride to me!” he’d yelled. “You can do it,” he’d cheered. I remember how I’d looked at the back of his head as he cleaned and patched up my knee. We’ve come full circle, I realize. I touch the old scar. I rub its faint ridge. In spite of the nicks and scratches, our diverging paths along the way, Ned’s return to my life, his place in my apartment, his place in my heart, makes everything once broken now whole. I’ll still have the chamber pot that belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning; mended, it will seem more fully mine. Mended like me and Ned. We are glued back together—in a different way perhaps, changed perhaps—but here we are.

Now Ned holds a fragment of porcelain up to the window. He turns it this way and that. He examines it. From the faint brown lines, I see that it’s half of Flush’s ear. Ned squeezes a coil of glue along its crooked edge. He wipes off the excess. Tenderly, carefully, he joins the broken piece to its other half, back to where it belongs.

Acknowledgments

M
y thanks, yet again, to my wonderful, steadfast agent, Lisa Bankoff, whose firm hand and big heart, not to mention incomparable wit, continue to guide me through the geography of publishing. My editor, Lucia Macro, is a pure delight. Her boundless enthusiasm for this book has meant everything to me. Thanks also to Tina Wexler and Esi Sogah, who field questions and run interference with remarkable good humor and awesome aplomb. And to the fabulous Dee Dee DeBartlo and her assistant, Lucinda Blumenfeld, for getting the word out there.

Andrea Kramer gave me a crash course on depositions and kept this legal novice on the right side of verisimilitude. My in-house lawyers, Daniel and Howard, provided backup at every turn. As always, Jono saved me from embarrassing myself musicwise. Nikki Rosengren got me up to snuff on baton twirling. Novelists Joan Wickersham and Sara Lewis read the manuscript and offered just the right finely tuned combination of advice and encouragement. I am grateful to John Aherne for his continuing and valued friendship beyond the call of duty. To Frederick Olsen for coming up with the perfect cover. And to my sister, Robie Rogge, for cheerleading and fabulous parties. Much appreciation, as well, to the staff of Antiques on Cambridge Street.

My first reader, Elinor Lipman, is the sine qua non. She’s the dearest and most exceptional of friends and the dearest and most exceptional of critics. Not a page of this novel has escaped her loving, flinty, and brilliant eye.

My friends and family and my circle of fellow writers are an endless source of comfort and joy, especially Daniel and Sharissa and Jono and Marnie. This book is dedicated to my husband, Howard, whom—as I’ve mentioned before but it bears repeating—I met in nursery school. In all our years together, he never once said to me, “Go get a job.”

Reading Group Guide

How Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Saved My Life
Mameve Medwed

Introduction

Abby Randolph, a thirty-three-year-old Harvard dropout, is a reluctant dealer indeed, renting a booth at a Boston antiques mart, although it was always her ex-lover who was interested in selling their wares. But when Abby is encouraged to go on the
Antiques Roadshow
to discover the value of a chamber pot her late mother has left to her, she is shocked to discover that not only is it worth a whole lot of money, but it also belonged to none other than Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Yet it’s more than money that Abby receives from this discovery. And it’s more than a lawsuit for the pot itself, slapped on her by her ex-best friend and daughter of her mother’s (female) lover. Rather, Abby embarks on a journey of rediscovery of self, of disputes both legal and romantic, of friendships dissolved and gained, of love and sex spurned and welcomed…and all because of a sickly nineteenth-century poet known for a famous lover and a dog named Flush. Who could have imagined that a chamber pot could offer the kind of education you can’t get at Harvard?

Questions for Discussion

1. 1.
   Not only has Abby Randolph never forgotten her first love, but she has also barely survived its loss. Are first loves the most indelible? And can you ever recapture those early feelings when you reconnect with your first love many years later?
   
2. 2.
   Though not sisters, Abby and Lavinia certainly experience sibling rivalry. Is this the inevitable result of personality differences or something else? After what happens between them, is the friendship salvageable?
   
3. 3.
   There are a lot of betrayals in this story—Clyde, Todd. Yet for Abby, Ned’s is the ultimate betrayal. Can any of these characters’ actions be excused or even forgiven?
   
4. 4.
   If Abby and Ned, the boy next door, had known earlier that their mothers’ dream was for them to end up together, would that realization have put the kibosh on any romance?
   
5. 5.
   Can the reader understand why Abby lets Todd seduce her? Is she deluding herself? Can she—and the reader—justify her behavior? Discuss what, if she’d had her wits about her, she should have done.
   
6. 6.
   In Ivy League Cambridge, the expectations of academic star parents are a burden each of their children has shouldered in his and her own way. How have such impossible standards affected Abby, Ned, and Lavinia? How do these characters balance the hopes of their parents against what they want?
   
7. 7.
   Is Abby a wimp? Why is her first instinct not to take what is rightfully hers? How do you explain the choices Abby makes?
   
8. 8.
   Mameve Medwed wanted to write about an object in contention. She originally considered something belonging to Freud, Marie Antoinette, Albert Einstein or Mark Twain. She picked the chamber pot because the object is funny in and of itself and because of its juxtaposition with such a frail poetess. Do you agree with this choice? Or can you come up with other possibilities?
   
9. 9.
   As we know, the mother/daughter relationship is often fraught. What effect does the mother/mother relationship have on the bonds of both Abby and Lavinia? And how do the different ways these young women view their mothers and their mothers’ lifestyle reflect their own characters?
   
10. 10.
    How would this book change if it were written from Ned’s point of view? Or Lavinia’s? Would the reader’s empathy for the characters shift depending upon who is telling the story?
    
11. 11.
    Objects carry a lot of weight in this novel. How can what people collect define or complete them? How might possessions determine the choices they make in careers, friendships, lovers? What do your collections say about you?
    
12. 12.
    What is the role of humor in this book? The author has suggested that comedy is often viewed as the stepchild in literature, that a funny, entertaining book will by its very nature be dismissed as “lite.” Despite this unwarranted second-class citizenship, she claims that comedic writers deal with the same subject matter as heavy-duty novelists—love, life, death, divorce, children, marriage, morality. What are the universal themes in this novel and how are they changed—or not changed—by a comic rendering?
    
13. 13.
    Because the Randolph and Potter dinner-table talk is literate to the nth degree, do the references to EBB, E.E. Cummings, and Virginia Woolf underscore and compliment the families’ world? Are these references an intrinsic part of the story and characters or simply a layer of local color?
    
14. 14.
    Did EBB really save Abby’s life? Was the chamber pot a literal vessel of change or a piece of good luck?
    
15. 15.
    Do you think Abby and Ned are headed for happily ever after or a rockier marital road?
    
16. 16.
    If there were a movie of this book, how would you cast it?