How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (12 page)

It’s a picture of Ned and me and Professor Chauncey Coolidge Thayer in front of St. Barnaby’s Chapel in Kerry, New Hampshire. The leaded windows sparkle with the sun. The spire rises amid red and yellow autumn leaves. Professor Thayer stands between us. He has his arms around each of our shoulders. We are all smiling. I remember who took the picture. A fourth former wearing a maroon blazer with a gold school crest on his pocket and a beanie on his head. He had chapel duty, he explained. He called us “sir” and “ma’am.” He didn’t bark out the usual Say cheese. But we all grinned cheese anyway. I was bursting with joy. It was the day, the hour, the minute, the second I realized my longtime childish crush on Ned had turned into full-blown love.

And it was the day, the hour, the minute, the second that, miracle of miracles, Ned told me he felt the same.

Let me backtrack a bit here. As I’ve described to you, our houses abutted, our families were friends; at least four out of seven of the group, at various stages, were more than friends. To us kids, the Potter house hold was the place to hang out. Henrietta was always ready to stick another lamb chop in the broiler for an extra mouth. There were sleeping bags for overnight visitors rolled into a corner of the third floor. I, however, got a season’s pass to the second maple four-poster in Lavinia’s room wallpapered with urns and the columned temples of ancient Greece.

My father was more like Mr. Barrett; he barely tolerated my friends. Though he talked about undue influence, a lack of seriousness, the truth was he couldn’t stand any disturbance to his routine. In his own curmudgeonly way, he did accept the presence of Lavinia and Ned and other faculty brats whose parents held long-tenured and lauded positions in Harvard’s more prestigious departments. It was a tenure system for kids. A college of intellectual snobbery my father was chancellor of.

Uncle Bick was a dictator, too, but a benevolent one. Unlike my father, he enjoyed the muffled chorus of our voices, not to mention the pitter-patter of our not-so-little feet. If you were walking by his study, he’d invite you in for a drink. A drink, however, for which you’d have to fetch the bottle, find the glasses, chip the ice from the old-fashioned Frigidaire. He gave me my first port when I was ten, clinking my goblet with an untranslatable toast. He’d ask about our studies, our interests, what we wanted to be when we grew up, in the kindly but distracted way of an absentminded professor. We knew to avoid the topics of baseball, TV programs, pop songs, movie stars. Instead, we discussed math projects, music lessons, the Shakespeare for Children our mothers had dragged us to.

Ah, yes. Ah, yes,
he’d say, brushing crumbs from his lunch-stained shirt. When I was little, I was convinced he was Santa Claus.

The Potter welcome was not so effusive as to fit the protesting-too-much category that set off any kid’s antennae for the dishonest and the uncool. It just existed like dust motes in the sun and geraniums on the windowsill. That, and my designated best friend Lavinia, kept me running through their door. But, looking back, I think what drew me the most was an only child’s—and a girl’s—curiosity about Ned. What were these creatures called boys? What were their manners, habits, habitats? How did they talk and walk and do innumerable things to a ball? Why did they pinch and tickle and tease their sister, then ignore her? Why were their voices so loud? Their feet so big? Their smells so distinct? Why were their rooms stuffed with old rocks, broken bicycle parts, notebooks of Little League box scores? And how about their bodies? What was it like to have all those messy things hanging off you while we girls were so nicely and neatly tucked up inside? Even at an early age, I was savvy enough to know that my father didn’t qualify. Had my father ever been a boy? Though he started many sentences—usually ones that would end in criticism of contemporary life—with
When I was a boy,
I never believed he hadn’t been born full-grown with a beard and a watch chain clutching
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
.

While I spent more time studying Ned than I did on my homework assignments, Ned hardly seemed to notice me. I was simply Lavinia’s friend, the girl next door, Abby underfoot, no more remarkable than the table in the corner that had been there since he was born.

Except for one occasion. On the most thrilling day of my childhood, he taught me how to ride a two-wheeler. In retrospect I’m sure this gesture of generosity had less to do with me than with my bike. Ned was obsessed with bikes the way some of us preadolescent girls were with horses. He was always out in the backyard tinkering with his brakes, polishing the fenders, shining the handlebars, hanging streamers, tilting the seat, sticking cards on the spokes of his wheels.

I was ten, inching along the sidewalk on my embarrassing training wheels, when Ned spun by on his own shiny red Schwinn like Prince Charming atop his Arabian steed. He was doing wheelies; a box of new baseball cards peeked out of an Irving’s bag. He actually noticed me; he actually stopped. “Why don’t we take off those baby things and I’ll teach you really how to ride, Abby,” he offered.

In seconds he’d whipped out his tool kit; with two deft twirls of a screwdriver, the training wheels were lying in the pachysandra. He gave me a couple of go-team-go! instructions; he adjusted the height of my seat. He stepped a few feet in front of me; he held out his arms. “Now ride to me!” he commanded.

How could I not? So I did. Over and over. As he backed farther and farther away. “You can do it!” he cheered. “One more time.”

One more time too many. Maybe I was cocky. Maybe I was showing off, but I hit a rock and went flying. I scraped my knee. I looked at the bloody mess of gravel and blood and mauled skin. I tried not to cry.

“All bikers have falls,” Ned soothed. “Let me clean up that cut.” He went into his house, came back toting the Potter family first-aid kit. With the same kind of care I’d watched him lavish on his Schwinn—maybe in that instance he saw me as an extension of his bicycle—Ned examined the gash, picked the pebbles out of my knee, daubed at the scrape, and applied the Band-Aid in a precise horizontal that covered every bit of damaged flesh. I inspected the lovely back of his neck. I studied his silky hair. I felt his breath on my knee. I’d never been this close. “Are you going to be a doctor when you grow up?” I’d asked.

“Dunno. Dad expects I’ll end up a Harvard professor. You’ll probably have a scar.”

I have a scar. And when I touch it, I can remember Ned, how he taught me to ride, how he made me get back up on that seat, the way he picked, one by one, the pebbles out of my wound, and especially the sweet back of his head as he bent over me.

You’d hardly be surprised that from that day on, I held him in even greater awe. When he’d talk to me—
How’s it going, Abby?
he’d ask. Or
What are you girls up to today?
Or simply
Hey
as he passed in the hall—I was so thrilled I barely noticed he never bothered to wait for the answer poised flightless as a dodo bird on the tip of my preteen tongue. “Ned spoke to me,” I’d report to my mother in the incredulous tones of the pauper invited into the palace of the prince.

“Well, of course he did,” she’d say with a laugh. “You are a charming, intelligent human being.” She was working on the build-your-daughter’s-self-esteem resolve of a woman who was perhaps starting to doubt her own reliance on a man.

Although I worried that she might disapprove of my crush, for lesbian, feminist, political reasons, she was actually pleased. I once overheard her and Henrietta in our kitchen, heads bent together conspiratorially, Emily drying, Henrietta rinsing, their dialogue going something like this:

“What if Ned and Abigail…?”

“Could we even dare hope?”

“She has such a crush on him.”

“No wonder. He
is
your son.”

“They suit each other. He’ll come to see that eventually.”

“It would be so perfect.”

“So perfect that we have to be careful not to let them sense that’s what we want for them.”

“The kiss of death.”

“I quite agree.”

“They need to discover this for themselves.”

“They have so much in common. Someday they’ll realize it.”

What did we have in common? I wondered. A neighborhood, a city, a childhood, genus, species, kingdom trapped under the bell jar of academia? Years later, I managed to figure it out. In our own separate ways, in our own separate families, neither of us was quite up to snuff. My father would call my academic slump, failure. Ned’s would call his a march to a different drummer. But tomayto or tomahto, neither of us was the golden apple of anybody’s eye.

Like me, Ned was a dropout. He decided he wanted to be a writer. “What decent writer could even begin to pen a single sentence on a single page without a thorough grounding in literature?” the Professors Randolph and Potter would snort, each in his own way.

“Let them find themselves,” chimed the Greek chorus of our mothers in perfect harmony.

I was working part-time in an antiques/junk shop in Central Square. I hoped to learn the business. Mainly I drank coffee and folded the vintage T-shirts bannered with the names of rock bands that had broken up. At night, I waitressed in a Greek restaurant where the waiters all wanted me to marry their sons.

Ned was writing in the old third-floor sleeping-bag room. He’d found a three-days-a-week job driving around a famous retired law professor who had a bad hip.

We were both living in our parents’ houses for lack of funds. We were both depressed. At loose ends. Those of our friends nearby seemed set on a straight trajectory smack-dab into the professions; the others had slung backpacks over their shoulders to travel as far away from home as possible. If only we had stayed in school, our fathers complained. “Where’s Abigail?” “Where’s Ned?” a colleague might ask. “Harvard.” “Princeton,” they could reply with a certain puff of pride.

Now what did a father say? Chauffeuring? Waitressing? Passing off plastic bracelets as Bakelite?

The mothers both said, of course, writing. Studying antiques. Having life experiences. On-the-job training for finding themselves.

But if we weren’t finding ourselves, we were finding each other. How could I not help bumping into Ned? How could Ned avoid me? Two outcasts with odd hours living next door burdened with the disappointments of fathers and even more deflated by the perky hopes of our mothers. “How’s it going?” Ned would inquire, he leaving for his job, me coming home from mine.

“Don’t ask.”

And we’d nod in understanding, our eyes mirrors of each other’s misery.

“Maybe we could have a coffee sometime?” he suggested one rainy morning as we fished our damp
Boston Globe
s from the sidewalk hedge.

“Maybe,” I answered. I made my voice noncommittal, not from flirting, coyness, or adherence to
The Rules,
but simply from depression and the long drumming unrequitedness of my feeling for Ned so settled into my bones that to imagine anything else was impossible.

“You’re both at loose ends,” my mother advised. “Why not spend time together?”

“That’s all I need,” I said. Is that what I need? I wondered.

“A cup of coffee doesn’t mean a wedding, Abigail.”

“Mother!” I screeched, like a thirteen-year-old.

We had the cup of coffee. And another. Pizza. A movie. Bookstore reading. Long talks on the Potters’ porch swing. Bike rides along the Charles. A gradual accumulation of spending time together like steady increments of an inoculation so you don’t notice that you’ve gotten over your allergy. Soon I was washing my hair every day, shaving my legs, and standing at the kiosk in Harvard Square thumbing through
Vogue
while next to me my Cambridge sisters were buying up the
London Review of Books
and
Scientific American
. When Anastasio Aloupis, the maître d’ at the restaurant, brought his son Damien—a hunk with a Greek-god build and a newly minted M.B.A.—in to meet me, I declined sharing a baklava and a retsina in the corner booth.
I’m seeing someone,
I told Damien, and knocked three times on the Formica countertop. Don’t get your hopes up, I’d warn myself. It’s proximity. Convenience. The girl-next-door syndrome. Just wait till he sells a story, gets his own apartment, meets somebody else, just wait till he’s out of here.

“I can’t believe this. My kid sister’s bratty friend whom I’ve known forever. You grew up,” he marveled.

“That happens. Not that you ever noticed me thrusting my training bra and Maybellined eyelashes in your face.”

“I was a slow developer.”

“You’ve caught up.”

He took my hand. “Just like they say, search the world over and find what you’re looking for right in your own backyard.”

I wanted to ask, Have you? But I was too afraid to ruin the spell.

Though, later, the spell wasn’t so much ruined as obliterated. An atomic bomb that laid waste a whole relationship. Considering how it all turned out, what’s the point of giving you much more of Abby and Ned, the early days. I think you can pretty much fill in the blanks with your own experience of young love. Needless to say, our colluding mothers found excuses to be away from home when our fathers were in their offices, pleading errands (camouflage, I now imagine, for their own trysts) and giving us the run of the many bedrooms nestled in Cambridge Victorians. As far as the sex, I plead Yankee reticence. Besides, if you take into account what’s going on—or rather not going on—in the present, past fabulous sex is irrelevant. Just know that while the things you wait for so often turn out to be disappointing, this wasn’t. Not in the least.

So in the interest of moving the narrative along, let’s skip to Ned and me and Chauncey Coolidge Thayer, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “What does he teach?” I asked Ned.

“Estates and Future Interests.”

“Which is…?”

“Estates, you can figure out. Future Interests involves the right to own property after a death or expiration of a specific term of years.”