How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (11 page)

I ignore the sermon. “So I gather you’ve been on the road?” I encourage.

“Not totally. Some of my wrongees, if you will, high school friends, family back home, I had to e-mail my amends. It was just too far, unfortunately. If it hadn’t been for the twins, I would definitely have made the effort, though.” He points to his car illegally hugging the curb. He smiles. “It would be a gas to press that pedal to the metal on the open highway.” His face turns serious. “Naturally, the recommended way to right wrongs is face-to-face. Like us. Like now.”

“I see.”

“You sound skeptical. That’s okay. Many people are at first. But when I’m done, you’ll
really
see.”

“I’m all ears.”

“In that case, then, why don’t I just get to the business at hand.”

“Good idea.” I order another coffee ice cream parfait. A girl needs her strength to face being amended to.

Clyde clears his throat. “In no particular order…”

“You mean you don’t go from the least to the worst?”

“It’s all relative. What I personally find the most egregious, to the other party may, in the catalogue of sins, be hardly worth mentioning.” He looks at his watch.

“You have another wrongee scheduled after me?”

He nods. “In Cambridge. Near Porter Square. I just may be able to fit her in if I get through this fast…”

I don’t tell him you can’t hurry repentance. I don’t exclaim, Another her in the city of my birth? Instead, I say, “Shoot.”

Clyde looks me in the eye. He studies his list. He looks me in the eye again. His head is bobbing up and down like one of those spring-necked figures on the dashboards of pothole-seeking taxicabs. “In no particular order,” he repeats. “Here goes:

“I should never have grabbed that bed warmer. You got there first. You had first dibs. I apologize.

“I should never have moved into your apartment without paying my half of the rent. I apologize.

“I should never have complained about your cooking when I wasn’t willing to do it myself. Ditto your cleaning. Ditto your laundry and ironing. Ditto the way you made the bed. I apologize.

“I should never have slept in our bed with somebody else. I apologize.

“I should never have borrowed and not returned and then subsequently sold some of your smaller, not jointly owned antiques. I apologize.

“I should never have fallen asleep those two times—well, maybe more—in the middle of sex. I apologize.

“I should never have been more attracted to your family background, your family’s house than I was to you. I apologize.

“I should never have bad-mouthed your antiques acumen to other members of our profession and in the place of our business. I apologize.

“I should never have hidden away invitations to parties for the two of us and gone myself. I apologize.

“I should never have picked up other women at those parties. I apologize.

“I should never have thrown into the trash letters addressed to you from other men who weren’t your relatives. I apologize.

“I should never have told you something looked good on you when it didn’t. I apologize.

“I should never have complained about your small breasts. I apologize.

“I should never have forgotten to give you certain telephone messages. I apologize.

“I should never have joked about your mother’s lesbian relationship behind your back. I apologize.

“I should never have lied that I read all of
Ulysses.
I apologize.

“I should never have implied to others that you inherited your mother’s sexual proclivities. I apologize.

“I should never have pretended at restaurants that I left my credit card at home. I apologize—”

I hold up my hand. “Stop!” I start to yell. “I’ve heard quite enough.”

“But there’s more.”

“I get the gist.”

He checks his watch again. “Well, maybe if I leave you the list, you can go over the rest. In fact, you can study the whole thing at your leisure. And realize how humbly and profusely and honestly I need to apologize.”

I take the list. Its gazpacho drips make it look as if someone has bled all over it. Probably me. Except for the stains, it could be an official document, computer-generated. Laser-printed. And bulleted. “I’ll save it for a rainy day. I’ll save it for when I’m
really
depressed.”

All irony is lost on him. He looks relieved. He jumps up from the table. Behind us a meter maid is slapping a ticket on his windshield. “Thank you. Thank you.” He genuflects. “I feel so much better.”

At least one of us does. I order my third ice cream parfait. Maybe I should have sent in for that Lourdes water after all.

Obviously he’s reached the next level because he thanks me four more times. He pumps my hand. “You can see how much of a changed man I am!” he exclaims.

He smiles at the meter maid, grabs the ticket from behind the windshield wiper, then thanks her. He jumps into his car. Rolls down the window. Turns on the radio. Zooms away.

Who’s sorry now. Whose heart is aching for breaking each vow.

He’s a changed man, all right. But not so changed he hasn’t left me with the bill.

S
even

I
’m back in my apartment. I’ve drawn the shades. Unplugged the phone. Although it’s a warm May afternoon, I’m in my bed piled with every coverlet I can find. The minute I got home, I gulped down three aspirin. I brewed a pot of herbal tea. Right now my wrist feels too weak to lift the translucent (early) Haviland cup from my night table to my parched and cracking lips.

If this domestic interior—woman with the vapors in darkened room—reminds you of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I’m not surprised. She took to her bed because of bad lungs, a frail spine, and a domineering father. Okay, my lungs are healthy—knock wood—and my father’s far enough away to give my healthy lungs some breathing room. Plus, as I’ve already told you, I’m building up my once-wobbly backbone with serious reinforcements of just-say-no grit. Still, doesn’t my current prognosis sound glum?

I wouldn’t want you to assume that EBB and I are in competition for the most impressive reason to stay in bed for the rest of our lives. Or that we’re one-upping each other over who’s got the hardest situation to deal with in a situation room full of them. Nevertheless, a frail poetess in a Florentine villa is bound to beat out a flea-market fiend in a third-floor Cambridge walk-up, particularly if you take the historical, more literary view. Just let me point out that EBB benefited from the mitigating circumstances of a great and lasting love. Don’t I deserve a little affirmative action here? Wasn’t what Clyde just did to me no less an affliction than the torment that forced Elizabeth to barricade herself inside her own four walls? Except for our nightwear—hers, I imagine, a gossamer silk gown edged in Alençon lace; mine, a T-shirt advocating out of iraq—we could be twins.

For a long time I was sure she was a fellow Sagittarian. You only have to read her sonnets, or see her through Flush’s eyes, or take in a revival of
The Barretts of Wimpole Street
to recognize those Sagittarian adjectives: Loyal. Generous. Original thinker. Optimistic even though hopes are dashed. When I found out she was born in March, I was hardly fazed. I didn’t need a Carol from
Antiques Roadshow
to tell me what I already knew—however different our signs, they were fated to be complementary ones. Anyway, just because we’re not twins of the Edda and Rune sort doesn’t mean we’re not twins in suffering.

I roll over onto my stomach. I bury my face in my pillow. My brow burns as feverish as that of any delicate English poetess confined to the shades-drawn mausoleum of a boudoir. I am never going to leave this room. I will call friends to bring round bowls of nourishing bouillon; I will fill in with takeout menus and bicycle deliverers. I will stack newspapers and magazines up to the stained and flaking ceiling until my subscriptions expire.

Outside my darkened window, traffic hums. The skateboards of kids just released from school spin and clank. Women call to each other in Portuguese. A dog—cocker spaniel?—barks. Squirrels scrabble under the eaves. Life goes on. Inman Square, Cambridge, New England, America, the world, the universe, is oblivious to the agony of Abigail Elizabeth Randolph.
Clyde?
my father once asked.
How could you take up with a boy with a name like that? Sounds like a criminal
.

Little did he know. I groan. I moan. I touch my forehead. I’m not kidding, I’m really sick. I will concede, however, that three coffee ice cream parfaits might account for a portion of the nausea now keeping me pinned to my mattress and swearing off nourishment. I clutch my stomach. Just in case, I’ve slid a wastebasket underneath my bed the way Elizabeth once kept her chamber pot. At least she couldn’t blame a lover—or ex-lover—for making her ill. Don’t you agree that Clyde’s twelve-step program of righting wrongs face-to-face is far worse than the behind-my-back wrongs he needed to right?

Under my pillow lies Clyde the Criminal’s list. Compulsively I’ve been reading it. Masochistically I’ve been scrolling though the litany of apologies. From top to bottom. From bottom to top. And what stands out, like the one suppurating sore in a pockmarked brow, like the most decayed apple in a crate of rotten Granny Smiths, worse than infidelity, worse than theft, is this:

I should never have thrown into the trash letters addressed to you from other men who weren’t your relatives. I apologize
.

And this:

I should never have forgotten to give you certain telephone messages. I apologize
.

I groan again even though it’s pretty sad to hear the cry of my lone mewling voice in the wilderness. I have never felt so cut off from everyone. What if Ned had telephoned me? What if Ned had written me?

Because so much time has passed, maybe Ned figured a new appeal to my senses might start to melt my steely heart and bend my stiffened backbone. Not that anything could weaken my resolve. Though I will never be deterred from my hatred of him for what he did to me, I’m still curious about any flimsy excuse he’s managed to concoct. Let’s face it, you want to receive the invitation even when you’re compelled to send your regrets.

But more likely, it’s not the old wound at all, but the new, rawer sore now resting in Mary Agnes’s vault. What if he’d committed to paper or my answering machine his personal and heartfelt opinion—not filtered through the legalese channels of Snodgrass, Drinkwater, et al.—on the subject of the chamber pot? I’m on your side. It’s yours. You have first claim. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Your mother picked it out. Lavinia gave it up. You deserve it.

And if so, how would Ned then have interpreted my lack of response?

Damn Clyde!

My first impulse when I staggered into my apartment was to ring Clyde on his cell phone in the middle of righting another wrong. What letters? What messages? I wanted to ask. Any return address, any
Abby please telephone Ned
marring that clean slate of yours? I hesitated. It was too late now for damage control. And besides, I knew how selective his memory could be. Maybe I’d just tell him off.
Asshole! Asshole!
I’d scream so loud his next apologee couldn’t help hearing. But before I finished dialing, I imagined his zealot’s joy at knitting my anger into another layer of his hair shirt. You’re right. You’re right, he’d shake, rattle, and roll. Go ahead, call me every name in the book!

Now sweat drips from my brow and stings my face. My meeting with Clyde has driven me nuts. The fact is, Clyde was long gone before any chamber-pot issues surfaced. But not, I remind myself (igniting more anger flames), before possible state-of-the-union, state-of-the-relationship, abject
I’m sorry
calls and messages from Ned. I get up. I stagger to the bathroom. I run cold water. I squeeze into my palms a hefty dollop of CVS apricot liquid cleanser, highly recommended by the
Allure
survey I tore from the dentist’s waiting room. I wash my face.

I stop. I gasp. My skin feels burned, chafed, sandblasted, scoured. As if I’ve rubbed gravel all over it. I check the mirror. Big welts are rising on my cheeks; one eye is swelling shut; my jaw looks like it has been hacked by a rusty razor. Oh, God! What do I do? Call 911? Am I having an allergic reaction to my life? Has too much of Clyde and too little of Ned sent me into anaphylactic shock? I wait for my throat to close up, my body to crash to the floor. But nothing happens. What ever it is seems confined to my stinging skin. Calm down, Abby, I tell myself. Calm down. I take deep breaths. If Clyde were here he could lead me in meditation, suggest a suitable mantra, help me reach the next level.

Which is what?

They’ll be sorry, I crow, imagining my dramatic end, the tears at my funeral, the died-young-before-reaching-her-f-potential eulogies. I’d hate to miss the ceremony.

As soon as I realize that death is not imminent, I search for clues to my distress. It doesn’t take long. I have mistaken the orange bottle of toothpaste, with its teeth-whitening touch of citrus, for the apricot bottle of apricot scrub. In a few minutes, my complexion will be cavity-free and whiter than white. This doesn’t cheer me. I goop half a jar of aloe onto my assaulted, inflamed epidermis. I feel assaulted, inflamed. But not from the toothpaste. Not completely. I smell like orange Kool-Aid.

On the way back to bed, I pass my desk. I open the bottom drawer. There, under school reports and family documents and old postcards and canceled checks is the hard-to-miss blue envelope with its interlaced hearts, lipstick kisses, and border of
x
’s and
o
’s. I tried to throw it away. I really did. But at least give me credit for burying it in this drawer, for not looking at it for a whole year and a month. And for taping it shut.

I take it into bed with me. I arrange my pillows. I turn on the lamp. I rip the tape off with a fingernail file. I pull out the photograph.