Don’t call her Emily, though some in jest, might. Not that there are many who know her or know of her existence because there aren’t. And it’s her own fault, really, not the snobs or cliquish kids who’ve never tried to make her acquaintance, for what kind of rapport can one develop if the subject refuses to leave the house for even a solitary occasion? Well, you tell me, playing the advocate of devils, there was the time she twisted her ankle in the basement, called up to her mother who promptly drove her to Emergency, where the doctors or medics or whoever they were tended her (not that she would have paid that much attention anyway), bandaged her up and sent her home with some painkillers.
Her mum, wise soul that she was, intuitive perhaps, tossed them out in the catatonia of night, fearful of what her daughter might do if tempted by a bottle of put-me-to-sleep-and-never-awake-again medicine (if used at a deliberately wrong dosage, of course).
I don’t think that Chantelle, the one her naysayers refer to as “that Emily girl” (after Miss Dickinson, the reclusive, spinster, 19th-century poet who rarely left her abode) would have been so bold. From what you tell me of her, she’s fearful of afterlife, of the Hells and Purgatories described to her by the Brothers of the Covenant, the eunuchs who reside in the monastery a trio of blocks away, who visited her Religious Studies class in 11th-grade, at Our Lady of Guadeloupe (not Acapulco as I’d previously thought; too vacation-esque and deceptively clean for the Virgin to visit). Despite the chance of freedom that death may proffer, she’s unlikely to take it, knowing “things can be even worse” if the Catholics are right and she spends forever in torment.
Okay, there was a second time she went to the Hospital, when her mother was away on an errand. She would have waited for her return, but the palm of her hand, singed on the stovetop (clumsy, yes, and inattentive, outside the norm for her but daydreams are the cause of such), demanded swifter-than- patient action, and a taxi cab was called (an ambulance garners much too much attention for the awkward and out-of-sorts who scribble of love in the guise of poetry), the nurses or interns or who-the- bloody-ever that balmed and gauzed her burn far too nosy with their
“What were you doing?”
“Do you live alone?”
“Are you sexually active?”
busybody inquiries leaving her to vow to stay indoors for decades and avoid the prying, the praying and the preying henceforth.
I hope the aforementioned is sufficient for the background, though I’ve neglected to mention siblings or a drunken father who guttered to his death when she was five (see how cleverly I’ve just slipped that in).
There are no siblings.
Chantelle’s poetry (there’s little else to talk about, other than her regular self-fondling to relieve her constant tension that the loneliness inevitably leaves – and I only guess that’s what the sounds from her bedroom are, our homes fairly close together, separated by a narrow, half-dead hedge) is the miserable kind you’d expect from a jaded juvenile, though at 33, we cannot classify her as such.
We have one of her poems in a scrapbook, the text of which reads:
Sprout four-score hands
and more, my lover,
feel my body stretch to yours,
ribs visible
breasts and thighs
thinned out
from lack of wanton touch.
Wet my lips with yours
and watch my shrivelled garden
grow.
Not wretched, mind you, and maybe somewhat stronger than what you’d hear in a junior high English class, but hardly shortlisted-for-the-awards material.
“I’ll always think of her as a kid,” you inject whenever we discuss her plight. And she’ll be that way at 44, 55, 66, and, if she lives that long, at 77, 88 and 99.
“If she dies rather young, she’ll be a hell of a lot more famous,” one of us predicts, a hypothesis based on history, as writers, painters, singers and actors become bigger-than-the-demigods they aspire to be when hit-by-a-bus, shot-at-gunpoint, crashing their sports cars into trees, or hanging themselves in the murkiest crannies of their basements (note how I left out the painkilling/sleeping pill scenario as we’d already mentioned that was out of the question for our poor poetess).
On the 1st of July, Two-Thousand something, Chantelle Quaig stepped onto her porch after twilight to peek at the paltry display of fireworks set off by her ambitious next-door neighbours (that’s us, by the way, the only ones close enough, as stated, to be able to tell her pathetic story, save her dearly departed mother who’s been gone for half-a-year). The funeral? No, there wasn’t one. Her mother collected a pension, and she herself only ventured outside her property for groceries, toiletries (a fancy word for soap and the like), her medication (an off- kilter heartbeat we surmise eventually did her in), and an annual indulgence (mass for the dead at the monastery, for the soul of her husband, though the Church doesn’t use that term – “indulgence” – anymore).
Being not overly patriotic, we haven’t tried another fireworks display in the years since our last attempt. You suggest inviting the neighbour over to watch if we decide on a second show, though we’re not sure if her phone’s plugged in, being that no one answers (we only know she’s still alive by the lights that blink both on and off behind the constantly closed curtains). On Instagram and Facebook? The very thought of her “social networking” brings a mutual chuckle.
I say I think I’ve heard her singing at one time, and that her kitchen window (or at least I believe that’s where her kitchen lies) was open, by a good half-a- foot; perhaps lyrics to Barber’s Adagio that she’d scribed as a poem. Her mother, a decade ago, boasted of her daughter’s prowess at writing (when we bumped into her on the way to the store), sneaking out a sample behind her back, pinning one up at the valu-mart, on the community events bulletin board, among offers to clean your carpets, shingle your roof, have your taxes done without ever leaving your home.
