Free How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed

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