How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life (2 page)

“Why don’t we see if the dealer will put this aside for an hour to let us settle ownership issues over a drink.”

We squeezed onto the end of a picnic bench next to two fanny-packed collectors on one side; on the other, their just-purchased spinning wheel and four-foot-tall Elvis made out of beer cans. Clyde bought lemonade and fried dough. By the time our fingers were shiny with grease and powdered with confectioners’ sugar, I’d learned this: He’d just moved to Cambridge. He had a room at the Y while looking for a place he could afford.

“What a coincidence!” I exclaimed. I who’d lived my whole life in a Cambridge Victorian on Brattle Street had just rented a needs-work walk-up in Inman Square a few blocks from the Y. For reasons I won’t go into, I was lonely. I was miserable.

Well, as you already know, this is no reader-I-married-him scenario. No met-cute-and-now-keeping-the-copper-polished-for-our-grandchildren bit of nostalgia. But as you must have guessed, we rushed back to the booth and bought that bed warmer together. Split it right down the middle with Clyde supplying the extra penny for the tax.

Within a month, that bed warmer was warming the wall in my Inman Square apartment over our shared Sealy Posturepedic the way other couples might hang those kissing lovers in Chagall’s
Birthday
. Until we sold it for double what we paid for it. We rented the booth together at Objects of Desire. Spent weekends and mornings trawling for treasure at flea markets and auctions and junk stores. Clyde, a graduate of an aggie college in the Midwest who grew up with Barcaloungers and dinettes and fifties bad taste before it was fashionable, had an inordinate reverence for earlier centuries and for all things New England, especially my parents’ separate effects, their rooms full of Chippendale, their minor Hudson River painters, their leather-bound first editions, their silver grape shears, their China trade demitasse sets.
Her father holds the Epworth chair,
he used to say when introducing me. I guess I—Abigail her-father-holds-the-Epworth-chair Randolph—was the vanishing perspective point in the big picture. Even so, I must confess we got as far as discussing theoretical wedding plans. We were keen on the subjunctive. “If I were to get married, I’d pick a rocky beach in Maine,” I said.

“If I were ever to tie the knot, it would have to be the Harvard Faculty Club,” he said.

I’d taken him there once when the line for Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage snaked down the sidewalk and onto the steps of the Harvard Bookstore. The only benefit was no cash changed hands; I could sign my father’s name. “If you remember, we both agreed the food stinks. If I were to choose, I’d like a clambake. With corn on the cob cooked in its husk. And blueberry pie.”

“If it were up to me, I’d go for the Faculty Club’s
saumon en croûte,
” he said. “The perfect wedding dish.” He hesitated. “If there were a wedding,” he hastened to add.

I’d had the
saumon en croûte
at Lavinia Potter’s nonsubjunctive first wedding. It was a soggy mess. Like her marriage. But I didn’t say so. What I said was, “How about Brimfield? That patch of grass next to the concession that makes fried dough. If one were looking for a sentimental setting…”

He was not touched. He was not amused. Not even theoretically. “It needs to look good. Appearance matters,” he instructed.

This turned out to be the truth. You can’t say I wasn’t warned when he ran off with that woman whose silver he appraised. “What chair does
her
father hold? Louis Quatorze?” I asked Clyde when he dropped the news.

“It was not that she was sexier or more accomplished,” I told my friends, who loyally claimed they had never liked Clyde anyway—too eager to please, too quick to laugh at their jokes, to compliment their Cambridge jeans and vintage Bakelite bracelets. “It was that her stuff had better hallmarks than mine.”

I don’t even miss
him
that much, I remind myself. I miss our treasure hunts, our mutual love of distressed pine and foxed lithographs and flaking mercury glass and crazed porcelain. Can I confess that our mutual exhilaration over a bargain turned out to be more of an earthmover than our near-mutual orgasms. Not that the sex wasn’t fine, too. As was the simple comfort of another body to warm my cold toes on a gloomy night, to attack the cockroaches in the silverware drawer.

It would be nice to replace that body with a spare held in reserve like the backup roll of paper towels under the sink. No such luck. There aren’t many prospects in my business. They’re either gay, or antique themselves, or pudgy, tracksuit-wearing, comic-book-collecting husbands married to pudgy, tracksuit-wearing, Hummel-collecting wives. Or, worse, men so slick you want to slide right away from them. My neighborhood doesn’t offer many possibilities either; Portuguese family men and beer-swilling off-duty cops. Most of my friends who haven’t already nabbed significant others spend their nights in bars looking for them, then want to fix me up with their discards. “It’s not that you’re that fussy, Abby,” my former college roommate once pointed out. “Look at Clyde.”

“Clyde had his charms,” I protested. But she and I both knew my argument was weak.

These days I’m trying to resign myself to the possibility of all-out spinsterdom. Even though I’m considered acceptable in the looks department, even though I long got over my fears of inheriting my mother’s midlife proclivities once I realized I wasn’t the only one at Girl Scout camp to fall in love with Miss Garnett. (I was a mere spear-carrier in the mass crush on our exercise instructor, who had danced with Martha Graham and was recovering from a nervous breakdown when she came to test the restorative waters by leading us in jumping jacks.) Don’t get the wrong impression. While mine’s hardly a
Sex and the City
life (we Cantabridgians frown on that—who could wear such shoes on New England cobblestones?), I’ve had my share of romance. I’ve slept more than adequately with four men; one I thought I loved. But better not bring
that
up. Besides, I’ve completely gotten over him.

Still, it’s on low consumer Mondays like these that the quiet and the loneliness take their toll. I shift sideways to avoid the lumpy spring in the Victorian chair of ripped tapestry and arms that end in dragon’s heads.
FIFTY PERCENT REDUCED
declares a yellow tag that hangs from a twist of mahogany flame shooting from the dragon’s mouth. If I don’t sell this soon, it will be reduced to the price of a subway pass and will end up in my doll-sized Inman Square apartment squeezed next to other misguided purchases, stools made of antler’s horns and vases you couldn’t stuff a tulip’s stem in—my own personal
salon des refusées
. What ever I inherited from my mother, after I wrestled a few items from Henrietta’s kids, my ex-friend Lavinia in particular, went directly to those big storage vaults out near Alewife.

Boy, did Clyde want to stick his hands on my mother’s stuff. While pretty much everything was of a higher quality than our cut-above junk, it’s their sentimental value I treasure. I will never sell them, I promise myself. Even if starvation looms. At Clyde’s urging—an amicus brief on behalf of shabby chic—I did bring in a couple of Henrietta’s chipped bowls and a cracked platter with a drawing of Eliot House that my mother and Henrietta used to serve cheese and crackers on. Lavinia didn’t want these, although it was her father who had been master of Eliot House. And I can understand why Ned, her brother, didn’t even bother to put in a claim.

After Clyde left, after we split the stock, I had to bring in a few bits and pieces to fill the holes. A half-empty booth is never inviting, especially one that looks like it’s been excavated in the aftermath of a heavy-duty division of spoils attendant on a divorce. But these were things—pots and plates and platters—no one would buy.

Now I lean over to take a year-old mint from a battered pewter plate and catch my sleeve on a slivered shard of wood. Clyde and I had discussed getting the chair refinished and reupholstered; the springs tied. We’d discussed, subjunctively again, recaning a stool, regilding the chips of a gold-leafed frame. Around us, other booths were set up like living rooms, polished and primped, smelling of beeswax and bowls of potpourri; magazines fanned out on coffee tables, pillows plumped. If we spiffed up our booth, maybe our sales would improve, was the theory we floated. But we were purists, we boasted. Shabby chic was coming back. And when it came down to it, we were cheap.

Now I hear some scraping, furniture being moved, a carpet shifted from the booth next to me. A partition separates us. Clyde and I painted our side white. We hung a few Currier & Ives lithographs on it.
Reproductions,
dismissed the Fogg Museum’s curator of prints, who stuck his head in during a semi annual scouting mission. On Gus Robideau’s side, called Les Antiquaires de Versailles, though he’s Québécois, the walls are covered in brocade; anchored to them are gold sconces topped by fat cavorting cupids whose dimpled fists clutch arrows. The sconces sell like hotcakes. Anointed “one of a kind,” they are immediately replenished from an unending supply.
People go big for cupids and cats and dogs,
Gus has pointed out more times than I can count.
You need to know your customers
.

There’s not a cupid or cat in all of A&C Eclectibles, though I once thought I could make out a rubbed-away sketch of a dog on one of my mother’s pots. My problem, I guess, is that I
don’t
know my customers. Unlike Clyde, who got to know one of them a little too well.

“No customers?” Gus now feels the need to state the obvious. “How you doing, Abby?” He saunters into my booth. He leans his considerable weight against the faux mantel, but I don’t say anything. If it cracks, it’ll just give it more age. He’s wearing a suit with vest and foulard tie. His mustache is waxed to curl up at the ends. And his glasses are antique pince-nez refitted. I can see the bifocal line. I’m in jeans and an old Gap T with a stretched-out neck. His brow is knitted with concern. The kind of look you’d give someone slumped on a Victorian chaise like an invalid with a wasting disease.

“Always slow on Mondays,” I say.

“Not always,” he corrects. “An hour ago I sold a set of girandoles for three times what I paid for ’em. One of those decorators,” he adds.

I nod. The decorators are usually blondes with lacquered pageboys secured behind one ear by a tortoiseshell barrette, French manicures, chic bouclé suits, and needle heels that pockmark the planked wood floors like acne scars. We all pretend to disdain them, those who want to match a painting to a sofa, to buy books that look well read for clients who will never open them—but without these ladies, well, we might not be able to afford the occasional jug of wine to go with our day-old loaf of bread.

Gus points. “How about moving that pot around so the design’s in the front,” he suggests. Before I can answer, he leans over and turns an inch of rim against the wall. He straightens the fake fern I have put inside it. I’m embarrassed. The fern is not to my taste. Or Clyde’s. We hated fake flowers, plastic plants, silk begonias. But because the booth is an interior one, no windows, no natural light, the pot looked forlorn without the hint of greenery, however man-made.

“What have we here?” Gus asks. Gus bends lower; he pulls out a stemmed champagne flute from the Styrofoam moss and pebbles that nobody would mistake for soil. “Must be from the party last night.” He chuckles.

I sit up. “What party?” I ask.

He has the good sense to blush. He blots his forehead with a matched-to-tie foulard handkerchief. “Well, it
was
last-minute,” he explains. “Rankin had a case of champagne. He finally unloaded that Biedermeier sideboard. Buyer didn’t even try to bargain. Paid full price.”

I lean back into my chair. My wallflower’s chair.

“I guess people figured you wouldn’t be in the mood, considering Clyde and all,” he goes on.

“It was a while ago. I’m over that.”

“You may think you are.”

“What does that mean?”

He doesn’t answer. He turns away from me and pretends interest in my demoted Currier & Ives. He moves a few plates aside, taps a dented umbrella stand. “That son of a bitch who doesn’t know a priceless object when he sees it,” he insists with a good-walls-make-good-neighbors loyalty. “You’re one hell of a fine-looking woman. And nice,” he adds as an afterthought.

“Thanks.” I lower my eyes. “Really.”

“It’s nada.” He shoves his handkerchief back in his pocket. “For starters, let’s take this hideous fern out of this perfectly saleable pot.” He picks up the fern, scoops out the Styrofoam and pebble soil, and dumps it into the coal shuttle, first rescuing the page of the
Times
with the half-filled crossword puzzle. “What’s this?” he asks.

“Four-letter lake in Africa. Starts with
M
.”

He crumbles the paper. He rubs the inside of the pot. Looks closer. Then spits into it.

“Gus, this isn’t a cuspidor.”

He ignores me. He rubs again, harder. The paper squeaks.

“What are you doing? Trying to raise a genie?”

“Very funny. If you’d take time to clean your merchandise…a little spit and polish.” He taps the bottom. “I mean, what’s
this
?”

“It’s a chamber pot,” I say.

“I know that.” Gus sighs like someone bravely bearing an insult. He turns the pot upside down.

“It was my mother’s,” I explain. “One of my mother’s old things I brought in after Clyde left, to spiff up our inventory. Nothing special,” I add.

“Its
provenance
?” Gus demands. He gives the word the theatrical French spin of an Hercule Poirot.

“Marked
Made in Portugal
. Which means, of course, it’s not old.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Gus is studying the chamber pot; he takes his pince-nez off; he puts them on. He turns the bowl over and around.

“Gus, you of all people know how things are ‘antiqued’ for the tourist trade.”

“Hmmm,” he says. He sticks his face all the way in. I shudder even though it’s clean and its purpose long obliterated by de cades of indoor plumbing. “There’s some faint sketch of a dog here,” Gus mumbles.