How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life

by Mameve Medwed

  “A pretty girl like you must have plenty of luck.”

  “Who couldn’t use more?”

  He nods. His ponytail flaps. “That’s the truth.” He sifts through the box. He studies the wrench. He clangs a couple of bolts. “You won’t be sorry. Take a gander at the ton of good stuff in here.”

  All I want to do is grab the box, throw money at Mr. Morgan, and hightail it out of there. But I’m a professional. I speak slowly. As if I have all the time in the world. As if I’m doing Mr. Morgan a favor by clearing out his barn, by hauling away some of his trash. As if my philanthropy alone will get his actuarial hide all the more quickly into his RV and onto the beaches of Florida. I swallow hard. “Will you take ten?”

  His face suffuses into a theatrical mask of disbelief. His eyebrows arch. His mouth drops open. “Come on, the wrench itself is worth more than such a piddling amount.”

  I point. I scowl. “This old thing.”

  “It’s got real age.”

  “That’s rust.”

  “Patina. Patina is what the professionals call it.”

  “Look, Mr. Morgan…”

  “Herbert.”

  “Look, Herbert.” My tongue trips dulcetly over the syllables of his name. “Just between you and me, this is an impulse buy.” I sigh. I shake my head. “This kind of junk isn’t anything I personally collect.” I pretend to walk away, though my hands clench the box, glue themselves to its corners. You’d need more than a rusted, aged wrench to ply each finger from its inch of claimed cardboard, its squatters-rights stake.

  “Ten bucks won’t put the gas in my RV.”

  I shrug. “Then forget it.”

  He throws up his hands. “Just because I like you. And I’m feeling softhearted today, let’s split the difference.”

  But Abigail Elizabeth Randolph takes no prisoners. “Eleven-fifty,” I order.

  Herbert Morgan pulls at his ear. “Split the difference and I won’t charge you tax.”

  I flash a gotcha! grin. “This is New Hampshire. Live Free or Die. No tax!” I click my tongue. “Besides, I have a dealer’s number.”

  “Okay. Okay. You drive a hard bargain. Twelve. It’s my final price.”

  I hand over the twelve with the kind of reluctance that implies I’ve given away the money that would buy me my last supper here on earth. “I’ll probably regret this,” I gripe.

  Mr. Morgan—Herbert—shoves a green garbage bag at me. I stick my box inside. “What’s done is done. Put those regrets behind you,” he advises.

  “Good luck in Florida. Slather on the sunscreen,” I call over my shoulder as I rush outside the barn.

  Across the field, I can just make out Todd, his straw hat askew, at the end of a long line of people waiting for the Porta Potti. Just as well, I decide. I’m not going to tell him of my suspicions, my second strike of lightning, until I have the curatorial proof. Then and only then will I award him the gift of a spectacular, she’s-done-it-again ending for his feature article on Abigail Elizabeth Randolph, ace detective, treasure hunter extraordinaire.

  I find an unpopulated tree. I plop down with not the slightest concern about the immaculateness of my clothes. I look around. I hug my bundle, a miser guarding his gold. No one’s watching me. A few yards away, a whole family has laid out a picnic. The mother is nursing a baby; her shirt discreetly curtains the infant’s face. Fat dimpled legs kick the air. The father is squirting squiggles of mustard on a row of hot dogs for two older boys. Just behind them, in a patch of sun, three gray-haired ladies chat on folding chairs. They wear floppy hats and clutch straw pocketbooks appliquéd with hot pink flowers. No muggers, thieves, or plunderers seem to be haunting this farmer’s field in Kerry, New Hampshire.

  I lean back against the trunk. It’s an ordinary maple, though for storytelling purposes and to close yet another circle in my amazingly circular world, I wish I could christen it a spreading chestnut. I pull up a dandelion puff. I blow on it. It vanishes. I want my work to resonate, Ned used to tell me after a morning of struggling with what he called nonresonating paragraphs. Right now, my own work, my own life, is resonating so much I’m vibrating like a tuning fork.

  Funny how bits of your past show up in future surprising places. How what you once interpreted as self-indulgence or irrelevance or avoidance or rebellion turns out to hold an entirely different meaning years later. I think of that sophomore course I took on the Writers of the Plains. Your choice of study seems arbitrary at best, my father would complain. Not to mention the lack of focus on a career.

  If only I could tell you that this urban Inman Square dweller had a passion for agrarian themes, vanished America, pioneer life. But—full disclosure—Writers of the Plains met at eleven in the morning Tuesdays and Thursdays—promising long weekends and indolent hours of extra beauty sleep. And it was a gut, according to the Harvard Confidential Guide, which noted the limited reading, few papers, and an absentminded professor about to become emeritus.

  Now I pull out the corn sheller. The horse shoe is wrapped around the handle of its crank. I detach this example of the smithy’s art. I lay it on the grass next to a tangle of unruly dandelions. I turn the corn sheller upside down. I look at the initials. I examine the Nebraska.

  And I know. Thanks to my sleep-craving, it’s-a-gut-seeking academic choices, I am so certain I’d bet my chamber pot on it. Eureka! I want to scream. Because what I am holding in my hand is a tool Willa Cather herself clasped in her own presumably callused farmer’s hand. Yes, Willa Cather, journalist, essayist, short story writer, poet, critic, novelist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

  I set out my case. The corn sheller is from Nebraska. Willa Cather grew up on a farm there. Her longtime companion was EL, Edith Lewis. Cather was also a great friend of Sarah Orne Jewett. From New Hampshire, where Cather is buried. This explains the location of a corn sheller from Nebraska in a farmer’s field in New Hampshire. Evidence piled upon evidence. Irrefutable evidence, even Mary Agnes Finch would agree. I have come across another literary artifact. Agricolae poetae sunt.

  There’s more. Connections that might not carry much weight in the marketplace but have personal meaning for me. Willa Cather and Edith Lewis were lovers. Like my mother and Henrietta. Wheels within wheels. Signs and more signs. I tap the horse shoe now on the grass next to my hip. I am grateful to my mother for taking me to flea markets; I am grateful to my education for bringing me to the literature of the plains. I am grateful to my character flaws that made possible the study of Willa Cather. I am grateful to my mother’s lesbian relationship for leading me to an appreciation of alternative lifestyles and, as a result, perhaps a subconscious interest in Cather herself. I am grateful to the chamber pot, which opened the door. To Clyde who shut it. To Todd whose interest brought me here. To Ned…

  Ned. I stop. What about Ned? His name has popped up in this trio of men as automatic as a breath. But he doesn’t enter into this particular equation. He’s history. I’ve put him behind me. I clutch my corn sheller to my heart. I run my hands over its blackened, well-used surfaces. I crank its wheel; I watch its little disk spin. Has there ever been an object more beautiful? And valuable? If I could tape it inside my bra, I would. If I could helicopter it to Mary Agnes’s vault, I would. If I could hire an armed Brinks van, I would. I look around again. I plant a kiss on the initials WC-EL. I put it back inside the box surrounded by its less worthy companions. I add the horse shoe. I knot the bag. I bend my knees, and tuck it under them.

  “Abby?”

  I look up. Todd is walking toward me carrying a tray. Fried dough, lemonade, hot dogs, onion rings, a pink cloud of cotton candy. Junk food for junk hunters. I smile. I wave. I am ravenous.

  It’s after six when we finally leave the field. Todd has interviewed more dealers. He’s bought three more knives and an old BB gun. “Boys’ toys,” he excuses with such unabashed glee as to make the peaceloving, guys-can-cook and girls-can-hammer enlightened males I’ve grown up with seem to be missing a key chromosome. In
the eight hours we’ve been here, I’ve delivered enough of a treatise on collecting, searching, digging, bargaining, verifying to qualify for a doctorate. Todd has gone through two notebooks on my words alone. It’s amazing how eloquent you can be when your every syllable is recorded, if not for posterity, then for a daily newspaper with a daunting circulation and an online version that people the world over could conceivably download. Whenever I sag, whenever I catch myself in an infelicitous phrase or dumb observation, I stop. “You’re not going to put that in?” I caution.

  “Not if you don’t want me to,” he assures. “But remember, it’s all good publicity for your booth.”

  If only my father could see me now, a woman overcoming her shyness and personal privacy for the sake of her booth. A woman with an eye on the prize who will not be derailed by misgivings, depositions, and the betrayal of an old and now-guttering flame. Even more, a woman who will never, in turn, betray that flame, however deserving of the spilled beans he himself has already spilled. Would I ever divulge a confidence? Would I ever reveal the secrets of those close to me? No! My father needs to take a long, hard look at his rod-of-steel backboned daughter. I am a woman in charge. A woman who can control her own spin.

  Not to mention a woman who’d never let a reporter down. For Todd Tucker’s sake, I’ve trudged from table to table putting on a good show, but with none of the fire in my belly for any other gewgaw or rusted artifact carefully laid out on an ironed cloth or varnished board. The corn sheller—favorite, pet, best-in-show—commands all my loyalty.

  Todd locks our purchases in the VW’s trunk. We collapse into the front seats. He tosses his hat into the back. He runs his arm across his brow. “Phew.” He sighs. “I’m in awe of you. How do you keep up this pace?”

  Has anyone ever been in awe of me? I allow myself a humble shrug. “This isn’t something I do every day,” I remind him. “Most of the time I’m sitting in my booth, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a sale.”

  “Thank goodness. Otherwise you’d qualify as some kind of god. Goddess,” he corrects. “Not that you don’t have goddesslike attributes.”

  Name them, I want to demand. List my attributes so that in some deep dark despairing night of the soul I might scroll through them like a self-help tape and feel buoyed. Instead, I shake my head. I shut my lips.

  Gestures that have no effect on Todd. Can he read my mind? He holds his right hand up. He snaps his fingers out, one at a time. His mouth flies open. “Let’s see. A great eye. A good appetite. Business acumen. Persistence. Endurance,” he reels off. Then he hoists his left hand. He taps his thumb. “Plus a love of poetry.”

  Is that all? a lesser person might ask. A person more susceptible to flattery. The kind of person who’ll fish for a compliment. “I suppose we should be getting back,” I say instead.

  He drops his head on the steering wheel. “I owe you dinner. But considering what we’ve just consumed…”

  “I, for one, will never eat again.” I groan.

  “Eating again should be delayed as long as possible.”

  I pat my stomach, now roiling with fried dough and lemonade and FDA-unapproved additives. I loosen my belt. “The later the better.”

  “Agreed. But the prospect of three hours on the highway…” He shudders. “Let’s get a drink first.”

  “Drink and drive?” I ask. Prissy words I regret the minute they’re out of my mouth.

  He grins. “I haven’t lost an interviewee yet. One drink. Lots of coffee. I know an inn nearby with a big front porch.”

  The porch is big. The inn is painted a blazing yellow with green shutters and petunias spilling out from window boxes. We sink into the kind of Casablanca wicker chairs that once might have supported Sydney Greenstreet’s white-suited, Panama-hatted corpulence.

  “I’ll have a mart,” demands Todd to the fresh-faced student-slash-waitress in khaki shorts and lime-green polo shirt.

  “Pardon?”

  “A martini,” he spells out. “Grey Goose. With an olive. And a twist.”

  “I’m not sure…” The waitress drops her pencil.

  Todd picks it up. “Never mind. Your standard martini, please.” He pauses. He points at me. “You, Abby?”

  “Pinot Grigio,” I answer. I look at the girl. “House white wine,” I amend.

  When the waitress comes back with our drinks, she sets them down on cardboard coasters printed with a Lake Winnipesaukee sunrise. Todd takes a sip. “Cheap gin. A country martini. A New Hampshire martini. Though it has its charms.”

  I drink my wine. “In the right setting, almost anything does.”

  He flashes me a boyish, aw-shucks grin. A bad-boy grin. His mother must have had a hard time resisting him, I imagine. Chocolate chip cookies between meals and unconditional use of the family car.

  “What a great day. I must admit when I first proposed shadowing you at a flea market, I looked at it like some kind of hardship duty. Muddy fields. Boring junk. Boy, was I wrong.”

  “It grows on you.”

  “Especially when you have a knowledgeable, savvy guide.” He drains his glass. He fishes out his olive. He places the pit carefully in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee’s rising sun. It looks like a belly button. “Thanks to you, Abby, I may have caught the bug. I may become a collecting fiend. It’s great how contagious another person’s enthusiasm can be. Yours in particular.”

  I feel a wave of dizziness. It’s the wine, I’m sure, and not the words going to my head.

  “Can we do this again? Can I come with you to your next tag sale?” He stops. He brightens. “Maybe there’ll be an auction. I’ve never been to one.”

  “Haven’t you got enough for your story?” I ask.

  “This would not be for my story.”

  I remind myself to check the flea market/tag sale/auction schedule the minute I get home. Now is the season. There are probably two a day. I could plan another excursion next weekend. Or even tomorrow if Todd were so inclined.

  He orders another drink. “How about you?” he asks.

  “Oh, I might as well,” I allow. “It has been a great day.” If bad luck comes in threes, why not good? I have a lot to celebrate—one, my corn sheller; two, the present company, who extols my virtues and has yet to discover my faults; three, who knows? I settle back in the wicker chair on the New Hampshire front porch, the world beyond its banisters suddenly rife with possibility.

  “Hungry?” my present company asks.

  “Not in the least.” By mutual junk-food-stuffed consent, the bowl of peanuts on our table stays untouched.

  He yawns. He stretches. “I’ve got an idea.”

  I lean forward.

  “Let’s get us a couple of rooms here for the night.”

  I look at my watch. “It’s just eight. If we leave now, we can make it home by eleven; at the latest, half past.”

  “I’m afraid my limbs don’t have the strength to hold the wheel, to press the gas.” He yawns again. His chest expands to show more adorable whorls of hair. “Unless you want to…”

  I shake my head. “I don’t feel comfortable driving someone else’s car.” Which is news to me, who has operated automobiles of friends, relatives, neighbors, and mere acquaintances over the almost twenty years since I first got my driver’s license. And who holds the best safety record of any client of Rent-A-Wreck. “And perhaps,” I say delicately, “we’ve both had too much to drink.”

  Considering his exhaustion, he jumps up with surprising pep. “Wait here. I’ll make the arrangements.”

  In five minutes he’s back, dangling a key. “There’s a bit of a hitch.” He peers up at me from under Princess Diana–style, bashful half-closed lids. “The desk clerk says there’s only one room left.”

  My eyes must widen in alarm because he rushes to add, “I can sleep in the car.”

  I picture his little yellow VW Bug. He’d have to sleep curled up, pretzeled arms and legs. Let’s face it—even summer nights in New Hampshire can get really cold.
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  “Unless…?” he offers.

  “Well…” I begin.

  “I’ll be a perfect gentleman,” he promises. He salutes. “Scout’s honor. I can stretch out on the floor.”

  As we head upstairs, we pass the reception desk. A middle-aged couple has just arrived, two suitcases in tow. “We don’t have reservations,” they apologize.

  “No matter,” the desk clerk consoles. He checks the computer. “We can offer you a choice of queen, king, or two twins. It’s a slow night.”

  Slow night for some people, you might snort. And expect me to call him on his lie. You’re a few steps ahead of me here. To you, it’s patently obvious there’s only one right response. You assume any sensible, ethical person will take appropriate action when she catches someone in a fib: rent a car. Call for a taxi. Get a bus schedule. Go to the front desk and demand her own room. Kick that good-for-nothing Todd Tucker out of her life. He’s not for you, you’ll tell me. You hardly know him, you’ll insist. A road-rage driver, a reporter, a dissembler, a heavy drinker (my two glasses of wine don’t count—good manners made me keep up), a flatterer. Look, you’ll point out, the column of negatives towers over the shallow pluses of good looks, charm, attentive interest, dog ownership, a burgeoning attraction to flea markets. It’s a no-brainer. Get rid of him.

  Okay, you’ve made your point. Now I ask you: What would a man do? Would a man not bed a woman because she lied about a room? Would a man need an emotional connection to have sex?

  Can I blame two glasses of wine for leading me to the Old Man of the Mountain Room? For collaborating with what you seem to see as the enemy? Can I blame my secret Willa Cather triumph demanding celebration? Can I offer the excuse of more wine? (He ordered a bottle sent up along with turkey club sandwiches.) One bed? Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” on the radio? The kissing couple in a poster of Chagall’s Birthday hanging on the wall across from us? Low self-esteem? High sexual desire?

  Just one of those things.

  So we do it. And may I inform you that Todd Tucker is to foreplay what Chippendale is to the mahogany claw-and-ball foot. He proceeds systematically. He takes off my clothes. Shirt. Jeans. Utilitarian underpants. Each item he folds into a tidy isosceles triangle like the American flag given to the widows of veterans. He’s a veteran. A veteran of sexual combat, a soldier on the Masters and Johnson front line. He removes my necklace. Detaches the hoops from my ears. Slides off my bracelet. Unbuckles my watch. “Friction,” he explains. He lowers a strap.