ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part Two, Chapter 73: The Unfamiliar

Barret’s a big, smooth-faced man a little older than I am.

“We want a five-minute bio,” he says, as he backs out of my building’s side drive. “Hit all the high notes.”

“Start with where you went to high school,” Bella says, sitting next to me in the back seat. “That’s all-important in this town.”

“I was kicked out of school at age fifteen for slugging the principal, after she objected to the shortness of my uniform skirt,” I say. A lie, of course, but I don’t want to talk about myself. “Where did you go to school, Barret?”

Barret went to an up East prep school, Taft. “The best three years of my life.” He adds: “My mother began boarding school at age seven.”

“Did she hate leaving home at such a young age?” I ask, remembering scenes from Jane Eyre.

“She never said anything either for it or against it.”

“Your name is . . . a family name? Your mother’s maiden name?”

He nods. “Way back, my family was in banking. Fairly prominent. Barret Avenue gets its name from my family.”

Our dinner party, which also includes Bella’s friends Vincent and David, settle at an iron table on the restaurant’s patio, where river birches provide a fluttery shade. Everyone orders the grouper. Barret and Lynda also order beer.

Bella told me Barret used to be a heavy drinker. She would know; she dated him for years. “I broke up with him because he drove with one hand on the steering wheel and one hand holding a drink. It was scary to me.” But Bella keeps her friends, even former boyfriends.

“When I go back to my Taft reunions, people still ask about you,” Barret tells Bella.

“It’s a gorgeous campus. I liked visiting there.”

Our dinner party breaks up before ten. Later, I’m in my kitchen, putting on the tea kettle, when a knock sounds on my door. It’s Bella.

“That was fun, wasn’t it?” she says, standing in the hall.

“I felt like such a phony. A fake. I don’t like to socialize.”

She backs farther away from me, shock on her face. “Have you forgotten how to have fun? You really prefer to sit on your living-room floor all by yourself, thinking your dark thoughts?”

“My thoughts won’t always be so dark. While they are, I want to register them. I have to know all that I hid from myself all these years.”

“Don’t say tonight was phony,” Bella says. “Rather, say tonight was unfamiliar to you. That’s more accurate. Words are very important. Our choice of words.”

Unfamiliar. A good way for me to describe me. Unfamiliar even to myself.