How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (8 page)

When we came in with our parents, we were treated like precious little Shirley Temples and enchanting Lord Fauntleroys.
How Abigail has grown,
Irving would coo.
Pick yourself out a lollipop, sweetheart,
Doris would offer, and reach across the Matchstick cars to pat my pigtails and adjust my barrettes.

Once, however, my mother sent me in alone to return a plaster of Paris make-your-own-ballet-dancer kit. The plaster had solidified and cracked, its gray mass so dense there was no way you could follow the instructions and pour it into the ballet-dancer molds.

“You’ve used it wrong,” Irving complained. “You’ve ruined it. Don’t they teach you how to read directions at that fancy school of yours?”

“You broke it,” Doris seconded. No smiles, no pats, no lollipops. “We have so much shoplifting from you spoiled brats, who can tell if you even paid for it.”

I ran home in tears. My mother brought me back. “Oh, Mrs. Randolph,” Irving oozed, “what an unreliable manufacturer. We’ll order little Abigail another box immediately.”

“How can you even suggest we’d accuse this adorable child of stealing or lying,” Doris chimed in. “Obviously she has the overactive imagination of all creative types. She’s one of our favorites.” She reached for my braids. “Here, honeybunch,” she said. “Pick out
two
lollipops.”

What did I learn? Some people are nice to grown-ups and mean to kids.

That was Lavinia. Even as a kid.

Let me give you a couple of scenes from our childhood to illustrate this point.

Our families were neighbors. Our backyards abutted. We held duplicate keys to each other’s houses. On summer nights our parents poured gin and tonics from the Potters’ porch swing. In the winter, they filled brandy snifters in my father’s library. We kids knew where the Potters kept the Ritz crackers and the Randolphs the Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. We knew the exact number and kind of toys in each other’s rooms. We knew where to find the photographs of naked tribesmen in the books on Africa. We knew what encyclopedia volume hid
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Though Ned, three years older, kept himself age appropriately aloof, Lavinia and I were born two weeks apart. All the stars aligned, all the fates conspired to make us best friends.

As I’ve already pointed out, the world of adults admired Lavinia’s perfect manners, good grades, and charming personality. Far too clever to play Eddie Haskell—the ingratiating friend of Beaver’s older brother Wally—a boy so transparently oily even grown-ups could see through his wiles, she was subtle enough to win over legions of natural skeptics and experts in early childhood development. She’d visit spinster aunts, slide drawings and thank-you notes through the mail slots of people who served her lemonade or offered a few branches pruned from their lilac trees. She was so persuasive that perfect strangers bought raffle tickets and Girl Scout cookies even though they’d tacked notes above their bells saying
NO SOLICITING
. She tithed her dollar allowance for the Save the Children Fund while the rest of us blew every cent at Irving’s the morning we received it. She baked cookies for the sick, sipped tea in the kitchens of the boring. She practiced the piano for a full hour every afternoon no matter how temptingly the sun shone. She was appointed student representative to every parent-teacher committee from kindergarten on; she asked for extra work, read the optional selections on the reading list, her hand shot up as soon as anyone asked “Have I a volunteer?”

Where did I stand in relation to this saint who I might have scorned as a goody-goody if I hadn’t been so clearly inferior? I was less concerned with the nameless others than with myself and my own small circle. I had trouble looking adults in the eye. My fish handshake needed work. My compositions were messy. My leadership qualities were not even incipient. But I was a good foil.

“You are my best friend,” Lavinia declared over and over.

“And you are mine,” I pledged. I slapped my hand against my heart.

“Let’s mix our blood to prove it,” she suggested.

She got a needle from her mother’s sewing kit.

“Shouldn’t we sterilize it?” I asked. I’d been looking at bugs in my father’s entomology books.

“That’s for babies. You go first.”

I scrunched my eyes shut.

She pricked my finger. She squeezed it.

“Ouch,” I yelled. Two bright red drops bubbled up on my thumb. My knees buckled. I grabbed the needle. “Your turn,” I said.

She thrust out her hand. As soon as I reached for her wrist, she pulled it back. “You know,” she said, “since I’m thinking about becoming a concert pianist, I’d better not take a risk of harming my fingertips.”

One day much later, when we were in the middle grades of elementary school, our pediatrician appointments turned out to be scheduled back-to-back. We sensed inoculations were in order. Tetanus? Maybe diphtheria? Our mothers promised strawberry ice cream sodas afterward. They sat on the bench chatting. Two Wonder Woman dolls from Irving’s were nestled inside their serviceable pocketbooks.

I went first. Okay, I confess, I cried. Not
that
loud. But it hurt. As soon as my sobs settled into sniffles, I got to choose a plaid Band-Aid and a Snoopy pin. “Who’s your best friend?” Dr. Sherry asked. At the time I thought it was a casual question to distract me from my pricked arm and my acting-like-a-baby shame. Now I realize this question was another kind of probe: a diagnostic test of the is-my-patient-a-social-misfit? sort.

“Your best friend?” he repeated.

“Lavinia Potter,” I replied. “Who else?”

My best friend Lavinia Potter’s turn was next. I joined my mother on the bench. She put her arm around me.

“That hurt,” I whined.

“I’ll say. I heard you wail in there even though the door was shut.”

When Lavinia went in, the door, stuck on a piece of swollen linoleum, stood slightly ajar. I couldn’t see her. But I could hear her. Correction: or would have been able to. When Dr. Sherry gave her her shot, she didn’t make a peep.

“What a brave girl,” he marveled.

“How could I cry when the underprivileged children in Africa can’t even get these shots to keep them dying from diphtheria?” she answered.

I waited.

“And who’s your best friend?” I heard him ask.

She didn’t pause. “Megan Parmenter,” she said.
Emphatically
.

Well, I won’t put you through our high school years, our college experiences (her Princeton summa, her Stanford Ph.D., her dates five nights a week and for Sunday brunch). I’ll spare you my maid of honor role at her wedding at the Faculty Club. I know you’ll think I’m petty when I tell you that the pink taffeta concoction I was forced to wear was something I’m sure she picked deliberately to be unflattering. Let’s just say, in the whole history of our friendship, our roles never changed, she the queen bee, I the worker, the eager-to-please drudge. Why did I never question my role? Or, rather, when I did, why didn’t I do anything about it?

I plead extenuating circumstances. Our parents’ friendship; our physical proximity; Lavinia’s dazzling charm when she cared to exercise it; my own weak self-image, which made me sufficiently content to touch the hem of her dress. Besides, being part of her circle—no matter how far from the center—brought prestige. Some of her gold rubbed off on me. Any friend of Lavinia’s…

Or maybe I put up with it simply out of inertia. Or because old habits die hard. Or for the comfort of the familiar.

And then there was Ned. The sand in the oyster that, if I hung around long enough, I hoped would become a pearl.
My
pearl. As Lavinia’s best friend, I could run through her house all hours of the day and night. I could sit next to him at the dinner table, in the breakfast nook. I could hear his music play from his bedroom across the hall from hers and copy down the names of his favorite groups. I could eavesdrop on his arguments over car privileges and curfews and agree his parents were being unfair. I could pick up the telephone and tell a honey-voiced cheerleader he wasn’t available. I could pat his damp towels, the sweatpants tossed over the shower rail in the bathroom he and Lavinia shared. Pathetic, you might conclude. You don’t know the half of it.

But Ned’s out of the picture now. Except for the chamber pot. Which I, grateful for your patience, promise I’m getting to.

After the earthquake in India, after the memorial service in Appleton Chapel, after the funeral baked meats at the Faculty Club, after what was deemed a suitable period of mourning (because a lifetime of missing someone can’t be quantified), after their landlord produced a new tenant and a list of repairs, it fell to Lavinia and me to clean out our mothers’ apartment, divide our mothers’ spoils. My father, already with Kiki in La Jolla and producing sons, had no interest in his former life. And Bickford Potter? I guess I forgot to tell you, but five years before, he’d had a massive fatal heart attack at the end of a lecture on Thoreau. It was the best lecture of his career, noted the memorial minute in the
Harvard University Gazette
.

Ned sent a letter endorsing his sister as his representative. She showed it to me. He was in New York, a forty-five-minute shuttle flight away, a four-hour Amtrak ride. A publishing deadline, he pled. Plumbing work in his apartment that he had to stay on-site for. He could as easily have been in China or Siberia. I didn’t care. It was just as well. At the memorial service, he had sought me out even though I had managed to stick myself in the middle of my father’s consoling colleagues, my mother’s grieving friends. “Abby,” he said. He grabbed my hand. His fingers curled around mine the way they always had. His eyes were soulful.

I tried not to look at them. I pulled my hand away.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

I nodded.

“For everything.”

Though a lump the size of a zeppelin was ballooning in my throat, I wouldn’t let myself cry. “Excuse me,” I said. “Professor Morelli wants to have a word.”

Lavinia and I met outside our mothers’ apartment building on Remington Street. We each had keys. She was still living in the house in Concord though she was now divorced. She was working as a thinker for a think tank out near MIT. She wore a snappy suit, white silk blouse, medium-high heels. She carried a briefcase. I wore jeans and a sweatshirt that said go aggies go. It had been Clyde’s; I’d salvaged it from the Goodwill bag. I’d stuffed my wallet and keys into the kangaroo pocket of Clyde’s shirt. I looked at Lavinia. We were cleaning out a house, for God’s sake.

We hugged each other. I smelled a perfume I couldn’t recognize. Something new, I figured. Trendy. Expensive. Sold in a bottle of cutting-edge design.

“This will be tough,” she said.

“I know.”

“And sad.”

I nodded.

“But we’re in it together.” She squeezed my arm. “I’m so glad I have you.”

“Me, too,” I managed to get out. “To have you, I mean.”

We took the elevator to the fourth floor. Above the buttons someone had scrawled
A hates B
. Childish handwriting, but it seemed a sacrilege.

“The building’s going to pot,” Lavinia said. “And at the rent they paid.” She adjusted a diamond stud. “These situations are stressful. Whole families have broken up over silly things like who gets Aunt Mabel’s blender and Uncle Horace’s baseball bat.”

“But not us.”

“Never us. We’re both such good friends. We’re both so reasonable.”

And both distraught. The emptiness hit us the moment we opened the door. It wasn’t that anything had been taken away; it wasn’t that a single thing had been moved. No dust filmed the mahogany. No tarnish mottled the silver. No cobwebs laced the moldings, no Miss Havisham decay to underscore our emotional distress. Mrs. Leahy, the cleaning woman, had kept up her weekly ministrations all the time they were away, all the time after they’d died. And yet.

“Oh God,” gasped Lavinia.

“I know,” I said. We clasped hands, grateful for our deep enduring bond of sisterhood.

Which didn’t last.

Lavinia dragged out a dining room chair. She set her briefcase down on the table. She opened it. She pulled out a sheaf of papers neatly clipped, a thick notebook, a manila folder, some sheets of waxy paper dotted with red stickers, the kind that mark Sold on works of art at gallery openings and fund-raising benefits.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I did a little research ahead of time.”

“You did? What kind of research?”

She smiled. Her old Lavinia cat-got-the-mouse smile. “You know me. Always prepared.”

I sat down next to her. My knees trembled. Adrenaline pumped. I recognized the old fright-or-flight response. I was damned if I’d let her see I was concerned.

But nothing got by Lavinia. “Don’t be concerned,” she said. “I did it for your benefit.”

“Did what? For what benefit?”

“I made a list of our mothers’ things. I called in an appraiser for the more valuable stuff.”

“You what?” (I know, I know. Usually I’m more articulate.)

She fanned some pages out in front of me. There were photographs of the very furniture that now surrounded us. Valuations listed underneath. And in the margins, notes written in Lavinia’s distinctive, unmistakable pinched hand.

“Without telling me?”

“As you know, Abby, I am a businesswoman. I’m used to taking charge. I’m organized, efficient. I have a job that demands those qualities. And you…” She turned toward me. Her eyes swept my for-cleaning-out-someone’s-apartment jeans and sweatshirt. She wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something bad. “Well, you’re the artistic one.” With this she smiled her near–Eddie Haskell smile. “I know how you hate the details; I knew you would prefer to leave them to me.”

“And you never thought to ask?”

“What was the need? When we are so close. When we know each other so well.” She paused. But before I could begin to sputter out some answer, she jumped right in and cut me off. “Let’s face it, you are a bit scattered. If it were up to you, we’d never get this done.”

She had a point there, about my not wanting to get this done. But just this. Dismantling my mother’s apartment. Removing all trace of her until these bare walls, these scrubbed floors could have belonged to just anybody. Who’d want to hurry to do that? Who’d want to rush to get that done?