Burial of the Dead

CY PRES - Mrs. Lilly Brando

MRS. LILLY BRANDO

Halfway to halfway to summer I’d say when I was a girl and it was this time of year. The night I came down here after the Wyman couple came for dinner was very cold, bitter cold really for this time of year, though maybe I just feel it more now. Even Mr. Brando said when I told him what I was up to, he said: Lilly, what’s wrong with you? You can bring that back later in the week, and I said: You saw the trouble she has walking with that hip out of joint and the limp she has. She must have bad pain with that, and she’ll need her pills, and he reminded me that we didn’t have her pills, but what she’d left behind was a pill box and even then it was empty. So I said: Never you mind, Lyle, I will bring it back and be done with it; after all, Mr. Brando, it’s the neighborly thing to do. After which he made some noise about neighbors and how he didn’t consider those two neighbors, and that even if he had, the best you can expect from neighbors is trouble, their trouble, which soon becomes your trouble. And I said: It’s not right you should feel that way about people, Lyle. Some people are good and good to be around too, and he didn’t answer me, but just looked at me with those eyes of his I’ve known since we were kids, and I can see through them and know he’s nowhere near as hard as he would like people to think, that he’s just shy in the way he can’t admit he’s shy, thinking it would mean he’s weak, and the more times he tries to hide it the worse it gets because there’s always somebody you’ve got to deal with or talk to and when you haven’t let yourself talk to anybody besides your wife for too long a time, it gets hard to be social, which was the problem that Saturday night when Mr. Wyman and his wife came for dinner.

Now, thinking about it, yes, I suppose I was curious about the O’Neal house too, about seeing the inside of it, and curiosity being what it is, a kind of itch that only gets worse for the scratching, until you see what you were looking for and then wonder why you were so curious in the first place. But I did want to see what the Wyman’s had done, if anything, to the inside of that place. It’s been such a long time since anybody’s lived there or even used it, all boarded up, though I remember the parties that Mr. O’Neal used to throw with his friends and the women, I do not know where they all came from, all I know is they weren’t from around here (New York City or New Haven I guess) with the way they looked, all dolled up and the cars they came in with the big fins and the colors like nobody around here would ever use, not wanting to stand out and be made the butt of conversation or ridicule.

A long time ago, when I wasn’t twenty yet and already engaged to Lyle, not pregnant like the way some of the other girls would hook a man, no matter what his parents accused me of at the time, Lyle told me (yes, he could be romantic then) - he told me he’d get us invited to one of Mr. O’ Neal’s Saturday night parties and we’d have a good time, the two of us, because there’s never been much around these parts in the way of fun - in fact people round here don’t even use the word all that much, as in talking about having fun, saying instead that they’re resting or doing nothing - fun being nothing more than not working. But when you’re young like we were you have so much energy, and the energy gives you such a hunger for everything, you’re liable to do things you shouldn’t, or would think better of if you were older, and it was the times too, when boys didn’t have to worry about fighting a war yet, though that came a little later on, and they worked on their cars and listened to Elvis and the Everly Brothers and then those others with all the hair and smoked cigarettes and drank beer, depending of course on what church you went to on a Sunday morning, and I’d never (believe me, I am telling the truth here) I’d never gone to a party in my life, at least not a dress-up party for adults, the kind where you have to get yourself ready for it, and I told Lyle that I didn’t even have a new dress, and he pulled this box from under his bed and laid it open on the bed for me to see, and there it was, a beautiful blue dress, his sister had made for me.