As soon as she saw me, standing in the doorway, arms crossed, she knew what had happened.

            “You read my Wikipedia page, didn’t you?”  Her voice was quiet.  She bit her upper lip and looked at the floor.

            We stood in silence for a moment.  The low winter sun shined into the room through the door.  “This slant of light is sure oppressive, isn’t it?” I said a bit testily, if not in outright sarcasm.

            She furrowed her eyebrows and stared at me, then opened her mouth as if to say something, but nothing came.  She looked back at the floor.

            “I understand why you never said anything,” I said, feeling bad about my previous remark.  I didn’t want to sound like I was admonishing her, but I wasn’t ready to pardon her either.  “I know you wrote, ‘How dreary to be somebody—’”

            Suddenly, in pain, she shut her eyes, put her hands over her ears, and shrieked.  An instant later, she opened her eyes, looked at me, and said, breathing deeply, “Please, don’t do that.”

            “Don’t do what?”

            “Don’t recite my poetry.”

            There was an awkward silence.  I didn’t understand this, but I also didn’t understand how I could be dating a 178-year-old poet.

I looked at her.  She certainly didn’t look like a 178-year-old poet.  Her straight brown hair, parted down the center, was tied back, revealing an expanse of forehead devoid of any wrinkles.  And despite the familiar and perennially misleading dour expression, she didn’t look to me like the daguerreotype of the woman whose face on my internet browser caused me to drop a glass cup onto the hardwood floor.  Right now, she was my girlfriend, in a relationship that for the first time was running into trouble.  I realized that the way we were standing, me in the doorway, her in the middle of the room, was very confrontational.  “Maybe we should sit down,” I said, and she nodded.

            We sat next to each other on the sofa.  Closer to her now, I could see that her eyes were all red, in preparation for, or perhaps prevention of, tears.  There wasn’t much we could say about the situation.  It was fairly simple: she had kept an important secret about herself, I understood why, and I was hurt.  There was nothing to explain.  We needed to talk to each other, though, because silence implied discord.

            “Remember when we met?” I said softly.  She nodded.  “What were you doing at the Basketball Hall of Fame?”  The question made her smile, despite an emerging tear, which she promptly wiped away with her forearm.

            “I’ve been in western Massachusetts for a while, and there’s only so much to do.”  She sniffed.  “I mean, the Berkshires are pretty, but there’s only so much I can take.  They’re mountains.  They don’t change.  I used to like that, but it gets old.”  She sniffed again, but was no longer about to cry.  “So I was looking for new things to see and do, and this year, you know, with the Celtics doing so well and all, I was kind of getting into basketball.”

            I smiled.  “That’s funny, I wasn’t really interested in basketball.  It was my brother that wanted to go, since I was driving him to college—”  I stopped.  Suddenly, there was a question that needed to be answered.  I didn’t want to ask it.  Things were, for a second, the way they had been, with us talking, and I didn’t want to interrupt that by bringing us back to where we were.  But it was too late; I had stopped midsentence, and she knew something was coming.  She was bracing for the question.  “So… does this mean you’re not actually a graduate student at UMass?”

            Her eyes opened wide, and she started talking excitedly.  “Oh, I am!  I have a student ID here, and everything!”  She leaned over to reach for her purse, but I waved my hand to indicate I didn’t need to see proof.  “I never said anything that wasn’t true.  I just didn’t talk about the past.  And…” She paused.  “I didn’t want to hear you talking about my poetry.  I’m sorry.”  She put her hands on mine, and it started to feel like we were going to be alright.

            We were quiet for a little while, until she spoke again.  “It could be worse.”  She said it slowly, almost mischievously, and I knew a joke was coming.

            “Yeah?  How?”

            “I could be Emily Bronte.”

            “What’s wrong with Emily Bronte?”

            “Emily Bronte’s dead.”

            I put my hand over my face to hide a short laugh.  She picked up a newspaper from the floor, and turned to the comics page.  She took a pen out of the pocket of the gray UMass hoodie she was wearing and started working on the Sudoku puzzle.  I never knew she was into Sudoku, and it bothered me that she was putting her energy towards numbers, when the infinitely more lyric crossword puzzle was also on the page.  I leaned my head towards her to watch.  “How’s Garfield today?”

            “It’s Monday.”  Her eyes were fixated on the paper.

            “Garfield can’t be happy with that.”

             She didn’t respond.

            “Have you written anything new?”

            “This four, up near the corner here.”  She jotted in a few more numbers.

            “I meant new poetry.”

            Without a pause, she said, “No,” and wrote a few more numbers.

            I looked at the puzzle.  “You have two sevens in this row.”

            She turned her face towards me so our noses were an inch away from each other.  “I know.”  She smiled and said again, “I know.  I like to break the rules a little.  Sometimes I put in a subtly different number.  Sometimes I skip a box and just put in a dash.  I’ve always done it this way.”  She tossed the paper and the pen on the floor.

            “Done what?”

            “Just Sudoku.”  I rolled my eyes at her evasiveness.  Then I stood up, walked around the sofa once, and sat back down next to her.

Doubts were pouring in.  She had been around for almost two centuries.  I certainly wasn’t the first love interest in her life.  What happened to the others?  Were there many?  She was never married, not in her first 56 years, at least.  Was I just another fleeting romance?  Would she lapse into reclusion again?  Up until now, I had been getting to know my girlfriend in the traditional ways, like talking to and being with her.  Suddenly, I was getting my information about her on the internet.  Maybe that’s why she’d kept it a secret.

When I was small, I had a book called “The Cactus Flower Bakery” about a snake who no one would be friends with.  Even though she was very nice, all the other people were scared away by her being a snake.  One day, a mailman who’s an armadillo came to her home, and his glasses were broken, so he couldn’t see her, and she took him in and fed him, and let him stay with her until new glasses were to arrive in the mail.  They became best friends.  But then, his glasses arrived, and he saw that she was a snake, and he ran away in horror.  Maybe this was like that.

On the other hand, I was a little proud.  I was dating one of America’s preeminent poets.  That was pretty cool.  And even more astoundingly, she was dating me.  One of the great creative minds of all time had decided that I was worth her attention.

In any case, she wasn’t even wearing white.  If the internet was right about everything, she should be wearing white.  Which reminded me how this all started in the first place.

            “Happy birthday, Emily.”

            She looked at me confused.  Then she quickly lifted her eyebrows and said, “Oh, right, Wikipedia.”

            “When I found out who you, um, were, I decided to get you something.”  I reached into a bag I brought.

            “If that’s a rhyming dictionary, I swear, you won’t live to see tomorrow.”

            Actually, it was something worse, and I had a feeling that giving it to her would possibly upset the order of the universe.  Her universe, at least.  I took out an envelope and handed it to her.

            “An Amtrak ticket.”  She held it like it might be poisoned and bit the insides of her lips.  “A train ticket.”

            “If you don’t want to go anywhere, you can put it on your shelf of exotic things,” I said, trying to protect the gift from an awkward rejection.

            She looked up at me and asked, “Where can I go?”

            “New York, Washington, you name it.  You could visit me in Philadelphia.  If you’re not feeling adventurous, well, you could go to Connecticut.”

            She put the envelope down and puffed up her chest.  “I’ll have you know, I’m not such a—I’ve been to Philadelphia before.”

            “Really?  When?”

            “Eighteen fifty-five,” she conceded meekly.  “I thought you’d know that, wiki-boy.”

            My mouth opened halfway, and I inaudibly muttered, “Oh right.”  Philadelphia.  What’s-his-name.  That guy.  The pastor.

            “I keep falling for you Philly guys.”  Her vacant stare and tone of voice suggested she wasn’t talking to me.  I put my arm around her and she looked at me.  “Are you sure you’re not married?”

            “Do you think I could really hide something that big from you?  That would be like if you were to. . .okay, never mind.”  I sighed.  “So I guess I won’t be de-virginizing you if I take you out of Massachusetts.”

            “I’m afraid not.”  She shrugged and smiled.

            “It’s going to be difficult explaining you to my parents,” I said, gazing out the window.

            I didn’t stay much longer.  We both had work that needed getting done, and it was getting late.  Questions went unasked and unanswered as I kissed her goodbye.  After I walked out of her house, and closed the door behind me, I stood on her doorstep, feeling the early winter scene around me.  The bare trees, the low light, the incessant gray.  This was the Amherst December that she’d experienced hundreds of times, and written about even more.  And as I stepped forward, off the doorstep, I stopped again.  I thought I heard from inside the distinct tap tap tap ding! of a typewriter.  But I continued on my way, knowing from Wikipedia that everything she wrote was handwritten.