How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (18 page)

“You’ve thought of everything.”

He shifts gears. He pulls out onto Cambridge Street. “It’s a long drive,” he says.

A glut of traffic is leaving town all at once. I’m grateful. Between that and the coffee and the many road narrows, construction ahead, form single lane signs, our conversation is safely desultory. “I’m not great in the morning,” Todd admits. He speeds up to keep a signaling car from cutting in. “I really come awake at night.”

I look at him. Does dinner count as night? Should I be nervous about a whole day and evening with someone I hardly know? In a car? In a farmer’s field? In a restaurant? An apt setting for Colonel Mustard at a tag sale with a farm implement. And you know the outcome of
that
scenario.

What have I done? I’ve climbed into a car with a stranger. One of the first
don’ts
you learn as a child. We’re setting off to cross the state line. Those hazard lights were blinking for a reason. Why didn’t I do a background search, a criminal records check on the Internet? Even though I did call the
Globe,
did I bother to verify? Did I ask to see his reporter’s badge the way any sensible victim of crime, any knowledgeable criminal, any intelligent witness demands to inspect a
Law & Order
cop’s ID?

I’ve worked myself into a state when I realize we are indeed on the road to New Hampshire, the doors aren’t locked, and Todd’s got a folder marked
The Boston Globe
on the backseat of the car. “Do you mind reaching into the glove compartment for my sunglasses?” he asks.

It’s not the voice of a serial killer, I reassure myself. Not even the voice of a serial apology compiler. I open the glove compartment. There on the top, next to his glasses, is a photo of a dog. I bring it out.

Todd slides on the glasses. Instant movie star. He should be gliding along Hollywood Boulevard rather than rolling past New Hampshire discount liquor stores. He nods at the photograph. “That’s Wordsworth,” he informs. The cocker spaniel is reddish gold with beseeching eyes. Except for his tartan collar, he could be the clone of Flush. “My pride and joy.” He sighs.

He passes two trucks on the right and cuts in front.

The driver honks.

“Your mother, too,”
Todd shouts. Then, nodding to me, appends, “Pardon my French.”

I think of my family’s every-ten-years turnover of stately Volvo wagons. “The safest car, studies show,” my father would claim, driving at his funeral-procession pace. He once got stopped by a trooper for going
below
the highway minimum. “I’m a Harvard professor,” he announced, to my mortification and my mother’s tsking disapproval.

The trooper shoved the citation through the window’s one-inch-open slit. “Buddy, I don’t care if you’re Einstein.”

“Einstein couldn’t drive worth a damn,” my father lectured him.

I’m sure by now my father owns a sports car that he races at terrifying speeds, though never with his children. No doubt Kiki will mention this in her next Christmas letter:
Professor R. Griffin Randolph treated his midlife crisis to a bright red sports car. The boys and I give it a wide berth. It’s Daddy’s toy, I explain. And truth to tell, he looks so adorable in it and is having such a good time I can’t begrudge my darling this particular mistress (initials MG!). Enclosed is a photograph…

Now Todd weaves across three lanes, his hand on the horn. “There’s nothing like a dog to spice up your life,” Todd goes on. “I can totally understand Elizabeth’s devotion to Flush. Do you know there’s a dating service called Date My Pet dot-com?”

“To fix up dogs?”

He laughs. “For pet owners to meet people who share their love of cocker spaniels, for instance.” He flips down the sun visor. He flicks his hair out of his face. “But mostly it’s to make sure the person you date is approved of by your pet.”

“Have you tried Date My Pet dot-com?”

“No way. Personally, I’d never use a dating service.”

“I didn’t mean to imply…” I stammer.

“Not that I wouldn’t, if I ever felt that was the only method of meeting someone suitable. So far the old-fashioned technique works just fine.” He switches his eyes from the road to wink at me. “I just brought this up to point out, in a rather convoluted manner, that Wordsworth would quite approve of you.”

I shake my head. I know this type. A man who flirts with women the way others salivate at a side of fries. Still, I turn my face to the window so he won’t glimpse my silly pleasure at this remark. When I look out, I see a green roadside sign.
ST. BARNABY’S CHAPEL, EXIT
8, I read. All pleasure disappears. My chin drops. My shoulders sink.

Todd swerves to avoid a fallen-off hubcap straddling two lanes. I bump my head against the glass. Which seems to knock some sense into me. My despair passes. Besides, the St. Barnaby’s sign, like my sadness, I remind myself, is now half a mile behind me. A dot in the dust. A symbol of a fading memory.
Put it behind you
is the mantra of the twenty-first century, meaning scandal, war, misdeeds, bad choices, lost love.

“We’ll be there soon,” Todd says now. “I’m sure you’re relieved that I haven’t continued our interview in the car. It seemed unfair. Captive prisoner and all. Plus I couldn’t exactly take down your answers in my trusty notebook.”

“I’m glad for a break.”

“Enjoy it now. I’ll have a million questions once we get to Kerry, once I see you in action.” He pauses. He reaches for the radio dial. “Would you like to listen to the radio?”

“Sure.”

But when he switches it on, I don’t hear the familiar tones of Renée Montaigne, Scott Simon, Bob Edwards, or Terry Gross on NPR. No
The Connection,
no
BBC World Service,
no
Fresh Air,
no Boston Symphony, no cutting-edge jazz, no left-of-the-dial alternative rock. It’s an FM Lite station, oozing the kind of music that bombards you in supermarkets, elevators, beauty salons, and dentists’ offices. Everywhere but Harvard Square, that is.

For the rest of the ride, Todd Tucker’s clear tenor rings out—word-perfect, pitch-perfect—tripping lightly through the lyrics of “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Misty,” “When You Walk Through a Storm.”

And “Memories.”

A number of vans, pickup trucks, SUVs, and cars toting roof racks and pulling trailers are already parked in haphazard zigzags on the farmer’s field when we get there at exactly five of ten. The minute I step out of the car onto the patches of mud, tufts of grass, dried bristles of hay, I tremble with the frisson of excitement I always feel right before the chase. My hunter-gatherer instinct is on full alert. I am cavewoman with club, calculator, and magnifying glass. At flea markets, auctions, tag sales, all things are possible (even romance, cf Clyde). Buried treasure lurks under the junk. Somewhere one particular item will speak to me and change my life. It has already happened of course. But that time it was my mother’s sharp eye (perhaps a bit of Henrietta’s, too) that deserved full credit for the chamber pot. This time I’ll flaunt my own discernment, my own professional expertise to Todd Tucker, to the readers of the
Boston Globe,
to my colleagues in the antiques field, to my father who insisted I couldn’t set foot in the world without a Ph.D., to my lawyer, to my legal adversaries. And to one adversary in particular. Let the world know that the treasure-tapping gene has been passed down in my DNA. Not that, to be fair, one could ever overlook the element of luck.

“Are you feeling lucky, Abby?” Todd asks. He’s got on a tattered straw hat a scarecrow might sport. His notebook and pen stick out of his shirt pocket. I notice his pen has leaked. A black amoeba-shaped blob marks his heart. I think of
The Wizard of Oz
. The missing heart. Yet it wasn’t the heart the Scarecrow lacked, I correct, but a brain. There’s nothing wrong with Todd’s brain, however. Proved by a man who’s both a poet and a reporter, yin and yang, a man who loves the Brownings, who knows
Flush,
whose dog is called Wordsworth, a man who reads E. E. Cummings in bed. “You’ve got that dog-on-the-scent look,” he declares.

I laugh. Since what matters is context, I’m more than happy to be compared to a dog. “And you…” I begin.

He snaps up a stick of hay. He jabs it into the side of his mouth. He chews on it.

“And you,” I repeat.
“Agricolae poetae sunt.”

For a second I hear Ned’s voice:
Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.
I picture his face in the Thayers’ living room. He’s smiling. He’s balancing a glass of sherry on his knee. He’s holding a bowl of toasted almonds. I listen to my own voice quote
Amo, amas, amat
. I love. You love. He loves. So long ago. Another place. Another me. Once upon a time when those words meant everything.

“Come again?” Todd asks.

“It’s Latin.”

“Which is all Greek to me.”

“It means farmers are poets.” I stop. “You never studied Latin?”

He shakes his head. Clumps of straw fall off his hat. “But now I will.” He bangs his hand over his ink-stained heart. “I swear on it.”

Picnic tables heaped with glass, china, yellowing linens, headless, armless dolls, rusted nails, broken clocks—a community’s discards—ring the barn. Furniture, orphaned and forlorn, dots the grass: chairs missing a leg or a seat, chairs whose ripped and unraveled caning hangs in shreds like the torn hem of a skirt. Over there lies a toppled washstand minus its basin. Here, a chest of drawers, knobs Scotch-taped to its bowed front. A row of small porcelain sinks bolted together might have arrived intact from a grammar school. In fact, two old-fashioned school desks, with holes for inkwells and entwined initials carved into its scarred oak, stand ready for girls in smocked pinafores and boys in short pants to open their composition books. I spot a box of toasters, entrails spilling out. Another, of ancient radios. A man is carrying away a sled and a rusted rake. “I’m not sure about this,” Todd ventures.

“First appearances don’t count,” I lecture. “It takes a practiced eye to appreciate the beauty that lies beneath an unlovely surface.” I’m back to Ned again, my childhood idol. I look at Todd. “And sometimes it’s vice versa. What’s beautiful turns out to be worthless.” I hold up a pedagogical finger. “Lesson number one. Write it down. First impressions are irrelevant.” I pause. “In antiques, if not in life,” I amend.

“That I’ll remember. No need to take notes.” He grabs a child’s tricycle marked $5. It has streamers attached to the handlebars and a shiny silver bell. “This isn’t bad,” he says.

“Do you have a kid in mind?”

He puts the bike down. “Not really.” He takes a few steps back. He twists around. “Over there.” He points. “Chamber pots.”

We walk across the patch of dried mud to where five chamber pots have been laid out on a frayed quilt. “Aren’t you proud of me?” Todd asks. “I can now identify the real thing—not as the washbowls or planters I would once have taken them for.”

“If I had a gold star, I’d paste it on your forehead right here and now.”

He chuckles. “You needn’t go to extremes.” He picks up one of the pots by its rim. He holds it away from his body. As if it’s something nasty. As if it’s about to bite.

“It won’t bite,” says a plump woman sitting on a stool and waving a tattered
Reader’s Digest
back and forth in front of her red face. She balances a pad of receipts on her lap. A fanny pack clipped with an elastic extension ties around her waist. This holds change, which rattles as she flaps her arm. Dollar bills stick up from the half-closed zipper like a clot of snared cloth.

Todd sets the pot back on the quilt. He pulls out his notebook. “Can you tell me the history of this particular object?” he asks.

“Sat under the bed before indoor plumbing. Could’ve been used by some founding father for all we know.” She laughs. “George Washington pissed here.” She slaps her
Reader’s Digest
against her massive thigh. “Folks use ’em for planters these days. I’ve even seen them set out at church suppers filled with molded salads or franks and beans.”

She must notice Todd shudder because she stops in mid-fan. “They’ve been cleaned out, dear,” she soothes. “Scrubbed and sterilized. Not to worry. I’ll sell you the one you just had in your hands for twenty-five bucks.”

“Thank you. I’ll think about it.” He turns to me. “Anything, Abby, that catches your eye?”

I study the chamber pots. Porcelain. Tin. Ironstone. Flowered. Plain. Inside a pale blue-sprigged vessel, curlicued script limns a proverbial
Please keep me clean so I won’t tell what I have seen
. For a minute I linger over that one. I picture it in my booth. A classic example of the genre. After all, as the high-profile chamber-pot lady, don’t I need it for a talisman? But when I turn it over, I see a large chip. I point at it. “This decreases the value,” I enlighten Todd. “Signs of age, crazing, fading, discoloring, are good. But actual chips and cracks lower the worth.”

“Ten dollars,” says the woman on the stool to a lady who has come up behind me.

Arpège wafts around her blond pageboy. She’s wearing a pantsuit with double rows of brass buttons and inappropriate little heels that dig into the dirt. Thanks to my vast experience of the species, right away I nail her as a decorator, the kind whose silver sang its siren song to Clyde. She pulls ten dollars out of a black quilted purse swinging from a double gold chain.

“I’ll take it,” she says. “Isn’t it sweet? It’s perfect for my client’s new laundry facility. I can just picture it filled with tulips. Or fat pink peonies.”

“Wait one minute,” orders Todd. He places his hands on his hips. He stomps his feet apart. He looks like one of those G.I. Joes lined up on a shelf at Irving’s, the toy soldiers all the boys in the neighborhood craved and all their peace-marching parents forbade.
Here’s a little plastic Buddha,
a mother might coax.
Or how about this darling action figure of Martin Luther King Jr.?

Todd turns to the woman, who is already cradling the chamber pot, now swathed in old newspapers. “We were here first,” he warns.