Often
the first thing Lilliana thought of when she woke up was whether or not she
would speak to anyone that day, or whether it would be another day of seeing no
one all day long. That thought occurred to her when she woke up on Tuesday, but
with a slight gladness she realized she planned to go to the store that
afternoon to buy food. She preferred to shop at least a couple of times during
the week, to get out of the house and see people. Some of the clerks at the
supermarket were so nice she felt like they were friends, and she enjoyed
seeing them, trading a few comments.
After
lunch, before going to the store, Lilliana stood in the kitchen peeling an
apple, watching the leaves blowing through the backyard. She looked down and
began cutting the apple into pieces. Just at that moment she felt a strong
desire to speak to someone, not to say anything important, but just to speak,
to say “Don’t you think the peeling on an apple is bitter?” Living alone, you
often want to talk to someone and can’t. For a second Lilliana closed her eyes,
silently said Bless this food, then
opened them and picked up a piece of apple. Lilliana’s husband was dead, and for
years now death had been vanishing her friends, making unfillable holes in her
life, as the holes expanded to create a broader and broader emptiness. Thank
goodness for her daughter, Mary Louise, who still gave her some company.
Lilliana
looked at the piece of apple in her hand, holding it close, since she hated to
wear her glasses. You have to be careful with how much fruit you eat she
thought. When she finished the apple, she bundled up against the sharp January
cold, looking on the back of the closet door where her scarves hung. In
addition to the decent ones was a bright yellow scarf that someone at church
had just given her last month. Speaking aloud, she said, “Yellow is not a color
that looks good on anyone.”
At
the grocery store she bought what she needed to fix dinner for Mary Louise the
next day. Lilliana knew the clerk working checkout, who agreed with her that it
seemed colder than usual for a January. They also talked about how to cook the
fresh asparagus that Lilliana was buying. Every week Mary Louise came over to
have dinner with her mother, and it was always a pleasure for Lilliana to sit
and talk to her, to see how her daughter’s life was going. Often they began to
reminisce about old days, which Lilliana enjoyed. With Mary Louise they always
talked about things Lilliana liked talking about.
Wednesday
afternoon, Lilliana put the chicken to marinating, then sat down to play the
piano for a bit. She enjoyed playing, and in addition to the pleasure of making
music, as well as the pleasure of hearing music, the playing added a noise and
a life to the house that were missing much of the time. For a few minutes the
house filled up with “Amazing Grace” then “Hail, Queen of Heav’n, the Ocean
Star” and “Forever I Will Sing”. When she finished each song, she would lift
her hands off the piano and move them in the air for a few seconds as if she
were conducting, still hearing the music in her head. After blessing the house
with sacred hymns, Lilliana sat for a moment, then broke into “I’ve Got a Crush
on You”. Of course she could hardly sit down at the piano and not play
something by Frank Sinatra. She had loved her husband Andrew, of course, but
oh, Frank Sinatra. Even now, wasn’t that her heart beating just a bit faster
from thinking about him? Yes? After another Sinatra song she stopped, looked at
the piano and frowned. Going out of tune. She’d been thinking that for a week
or so, and no doubt about it now. She got up stiffly, with a twinge in her
knee, and went to call the piano tuner.
Thursday
morning Lilliana was remembering with pleasure the dinner with Mary Louise the
evening before. They had sat most of the evening, as usual, at the dining room table.
Mary Louise had laughed and told a story. “One of the girls I’m good friends
with at work thought another one was trying to steal her boyfriend.” Mary
Louise worked at 99¢ Dreams on Landis Avenue. “They were arguing in the back
about Ray, and another woman said to my friend ‘Are you trying to go out with
Ray?’” Mary Louise had stopped to laugh at her own story. “My friend’s
boyfriend is named Ray, so she said, ‘I went out with Ray last night’. The
other woman got mad and started to cuss, and my friend said, ‘Why are you
cussing at me for going out with my boyfriend?’ It turned out there’s two guys
named Ray, and somehow the other woman thought it was the same Ray.” Mary
Louise laughed some more, then took a drink of her iced tea.
“Some
people are so foolish,” Lilliana had said.
“Oh,
don’t get me started on foolish,” Mary Louise said.
While
remembering the conversation with Mary Louise, Lilliana pulled out the vacuum
cleaner to go over the carpet. It’s hard to keep a carpet clean, you’ve got to
work at it. Thursday was a day alone, and that evening Lilliana sat down in the
living room, massaged her achy knees, and turned on the TV. She used the TV to
help fill the evenings. She knew television was only an illusion of being with
people, but knowing that it was an illusion didn’t stop it from working, to see
another person on the screen, to hear their voice. Lilliana liked to watch the
kind of program where someone’s house, or wardrobe, or garden, or hair was
changed by other people. She knew these shows were an illusion as well, a
magical place where experts show up from nowhere and make things the way they
should be. You can’t fix your life that easily. Try it and see how far you get.
But still it was interesting to see a room or a yard go through a radical
change, to see what was done with it.
While
she watched TV, Lilliana sipped on a glass of red wine, one glass every day,
always, but no more. She felt it was good for her health, and when she drank
the wine she also remembered her husband Andrew, who had owned Brancatelli
Brothers winery just outside of Vineland. Andrew didn’t have a brother, didn’t even
have a sister, for that matter, but he thought the word “Brothers” sounded good
as part of the name of the winery. When Lilliana pointed out that it didn’t
seem completely honest, he said, “It’s just the name of the winery. If anybody
asks me, I’ll tell them that.” They never got rich from the winery, but they
lived comfortably, bought a simple brick house in Vineland where they raised
two children to adulthood, where Lilliana still lived. They also didn’t have many
vacations, but the shore was close and easy to go to. One time Andrew had gone
to a vintners convention in New York, and Lilliana had driven up with him. She
was able to go because they could get into Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel
and didn’t need to use a bridge. She was terrified of bridges, which made
leaving New Jersey more complicated. Then on their way home from the
convention, she had Andrew detour up into Hoboken and drive around for a while,
so she could see the town where Frank Sinatra grew up. The Hoboken memory
receded, and she focused attention again on the television, but also
remembering that she didn’t play the piano today because it was out of tune.
The
next morning the piano tuner came, and he looked to be a paunchy balding man in
his thirties, bundled up against the cold weather. “This isn’t bad out of
tune,” he said, “whoa, except for this key right here. How did just one key get
so far out of tune?”
“I
didn’t notice that one,” Lilliana said. “I guess it was what I was playing. I
like to play a lot of hymns.”
“You
might decide to play some different hymns and need a piano in tune. Let me get
these things off the top here.” A framed photograph of Lilliana and Andrew on
their wedding day stood on top of the piano, had stood there now for fifty-three
years. Beside it was a bowl of red silk flowers. The tuner picked up both
things and set them on the dining table.
As
he began to work, Lilliana went back
into the kitchen to check on a pot of water on the stove. Before the piano
tuner had arrived, she had gotten things ready to make tea, in case he’d like
some, and had opened a new bag of almond cookies and put them in a bowl. When
he had been at work for a while, she came out of the living room to where he
was working and asked, “Would you like to take a break? I’ve got some cookies
and could fix you a cup of tea if you’d like.”
“I’ll
take some cookies,” he said. “But I’ll just have a glass of water.” She set the
bowl of cookies on the table beside the silk roses, and he took two or three,
ate them quickly, then turned back to the piano. She brought him a glass of
water, which he thanked her for and continued to work on the piano, leaning
into it. Lilliana stood watching him for a few minutes, but it was clear he was
not going to break, not have tea, not sit and chat for a bit. She went back to
the chair where she’d been sitting in the living room and picked up her copy of
The Reader’s Digest, to continue
reading about why Americans are becoming more religious.
She
had stopped and was looking out the window when the ping ping ping of the
strings stopped, and in a minute the tuner came into the living room. “It
sounds like you just took it out of the box,” he said. “All done. I appreciate
the cookies, I get to needing a snack in the morning.” A few minutes later she
had written him a check, he was gone, and the house was empty the rest of the
day.
That
day she played only hymns, no secular music, and she spent longer than usual
praying, for the poor, for the sick, for the lonely, for people who had the
misfortune to live in other countries. Lilliana prayed for people in other
countries again on Sunday, this time for children in Russia. On Sundays she
attended mass at Our Lady of Pompeii Catholic Church on Dante Avenue, a church she
had always attended with Andrew. They both liked the church because it was
small, and they also liked the fact that it was out in the country, with fields
around. Our Lady of Pompeii was now where Andrew and their son Christopher lay
buried. On this Sunday the priest told the congregation that the church was
collecting money to send things to a Russian orphanage that one of the church
members had recently visited. Lilliana knelt down on the bench, although her
knees hurt, and prayed for the children in Russia, for things to get better for
them, and for the orphans to be adopted by a loving family. As she pulled
herself up uncomfortably to her seat, she thought of how hard the world was,
how much people suffer here. She sat on the church pew for a few minutes
thinking about people who were suffering and no one knew.
People
from other countries also lived next door to Lilliana. A Hispanic family lived
there now, and sometimes Lilliana would see them and wave, smile, wave some
more. In return they would also smile, wave, smile some more. They seemed very
nice, but she had tried to talk to them and discovered that they didn’t really
speak much English, so there was no real interaction there. On the other side
of Lilliana’s house was an empty lot
where ghosts would gather to talk about the past—no, that was just her
imagination playing. Actually, squirrels would fight over there, chase one
another, and in the summer a hawk had a nest up in one of the tall trees.
Lilliana
was reading in the Courier Post about
hawks nesting in buildings up near Trenton, which reminded her of the hawk in
the lot beside her. This was interesting, she thought, and wanted to tell
someone what she had read, but there was no one to tell. She took off her
glasses and looked around at her empty house, then back at the newspaper. She
thought she might remember to tell Mary Louise when they had dinner, but it
would have been more satisfying to tell someone right away, while she still felt
the interest of discovery. By the time Mary Louise came back for dinner on
Wednesday, the hawks in the newspaper were long gone from Lilliana’s memory.
Lilliana
had made meatloaf, along with baked potatoes, and she boiled brussel sprouts on
top of the stove.
“I’m
thinking of changing the carpet in the living room,” Mary Louise said when they
sat down to dinner.
“Do
you not like the color?” Lilliana asked. “It doesn’t seem that old.”
“No,
it’s not very old,” Mary Louise said. “But I just want a change.”
“Everyone
can use a change sometimes,” Lilliana said. “Do you have a color in mind.”
“Some
sort of white, I think.”
“White?”
Lilliana said with surprise. “That’s hard to keep clean.”
“I
know,” Mary Louise said. “I like white, but that’s definitely a problem. So I’m
not sure.”
“I
never would have had a white carpet when you kids were little,” Lilliana said.
“Of
course not,” Mary Louise said. “Who would have a white carpet with kids?”
Two
days later Lilliana was up early reading the Bible, reading about Jesus and the
multitude. Afterward she sat in the living room, looking out the window and
waiting for the mailman. Of course she didn’t need to take the mail directly
from his hands. He would leave it in the box just like he did for everyone
else, as he’d done so often, but she enjoyed going out and saying hello, and
once in a while he would stop and talk for a minute or two. Her coat was lying
nearby, ready to go out when she saw him. As she watched out the window her mind
drifted, back to a conversation she overheard at the grocery store, back to a
musical program she’d watched on TV a few weeks ago, to needing a new pair of
gloves, to sitting on the beach at Ocean City, to a vacation they all took one
year driving out to San Diego, to Andrew holding up bunches of grapes behind
the winery, to Christopher coming home in his uniform before he went to
Vietnam, to swinging with her sister, swinging...swinging...swinging...
Lilliana suddenly shook and looked around, awake and startled. She blinked her
eyes several times and glanced up at the clock. It was nearly 11. Then she
realized she had missed seeing the mailman, and she was surprised with how
upset she felt, angry and disappointed, almost like crying. She continued to
sit in her chair for a moment, feeling hurt, then shook her head. “Oh, Lord”
she said aloud. “What a foolish woman I’ve turned into.”
To
get rid of her drowsiness, she decided to have a cup of tea, her second cup today,
with a spoonful of sugar in it. The first cup was always without sugar, but if
she had a second one, she sweetened it. She had seen on one of the cooking
shows once, flipping through the channels, that there was someplace where
people used jam to sweeten their tea. That seemed odd. It would leave bits of
fruit and seeds in the cup. As the water kettle heated, Lilliana looked over at
her fruit basket. Two bananas. She kept very little fruit in the house, because
she felt that too much fruit is bad for you. In any case, she really didn’t like
fruit all that much.
When
the tea was ready, she moved to the dining room, thinking about Mary Louise
wanting to change her carpet. It probably didn’t really need changing, but
Lilliana’s own carpet definitely could use changing, it was getting old and
worn. What would she change it to? She sat down and looked at it. She’d always
been partial to cool colors, blues and greens, but lately she’d begun to like
red and orange more than before. She thought about the oddness of the way
tastes can change, for no apparent reason. This room was mostly done in green,
but now she thought it needed more lively color. That wall behind the piano,
for instance, it seemed too cold now. Her eye moved down to the wedding
photograph of her and Andrew. They looked so unbelievably young in that
picture. Maybe it was an illusion. Thinking about Andrew she made the sign of
the cross, just with her fingers, turning them in toward herself, unaware that she
did this.
Crimson
red couch, burnt orange wall, skyblue bedroom ceiling, green curtains with
yellow highlights. They came up with some interesting things on those
decorating programs. Saturday evening she sat down right after dinner to watch.
This had been another day when she didn’t see anyone else the entire day. Between
watching programs she was moving through the channels when her attention was
caught by a program showing boy scouts and girl scouts together, sometime back
in the summer apparently. It was a local channel, and the scouts were going
around to people’s houses giving out brochures, to get people to stop putting
so many pesticides on their yards, because the poisons washed off into the
rivers.
The
uniforms looked different from when Christopher and Mary Louise were in the
scouts. Thinking about the scouts reminded her of all the nights driving the
kids to meetings, giving them advice on collecting things, cooking things,
making things, as they worked on merit badges. And suddenly there in her mind
was Mary Louise’s butterfly collection and Christopher’s collection of baseball
pennants, covering the walls of his bedroom. Such pleasant memories of her
children, but those babies always grow up. What happened to that little boy and
little girl?
Dreams
were restless for Lilliana that night. She dreamed about her children, seeing
them come in from school, asked them in the dream if they had gotten smarter at
school that day and fixed them a snack. Then in the dream her children went
walking off across a field of early summer corn, still only a foot high. They
walked farther and farther, and even when Lilliana called them, they kept
moving away, until they walked so far she couldn’t see them anymore. In spite
of having restless dreams all night, Lilliana also had a feeling of not really
sleeping. Can you sleep and dream you’re awake, then wake up tired? When the
alarm went off Sunday morning, she felt tired, but got up slowly and went in to
turn on the water for tea. She must have made it wrong, however, because the
tea tasted bitter. Through the kitchen window she saw that it had snowed during
the night, and she wondered whether she should stay home from mass this
morning. But it was only two or three inches. She shouldn’t have a problem.
The
countryside was beautiful with the new white as she drove, but Lilliana was
turned inward on her own thoughts. Finally ahead of her she saw the sharp wings
of the church, a relatively small building designed like a starburst with a
bell tower in the center, and she turned into the parking lot. She had arrived
a little early, so she sat in the car for a few minutes. Beside the church she
saw the small graveyard, and in a moment she got out and walked across the
smooth even blanket of snow toward the graves.
In
her sleep she could have found the graves of Christopher and Andrew, plots side
by side over to the left. She walked to the graves and looked at Andrew’s stone.
Andrew Brancatelli, 1929-1993. It was quiet and tranquil standing in the snow,
and she felt glad that Andrew was in such a peaceful place. She turned to look
across the road at the fields, green and full of life in the summer, but flat
white sheets now. She turned back to the grave. The stone beside Andrew’s said
Christopher Brancatelli, 1952-1971. She looked at her son’s grave, then glanced
at the plot to his right.
The
stone said Mary Louise Brancatelli, 1955-2001. Looking at her daughter’s grave,
Lilliana’s mind went blank for a moment, then she turned and walked toward the
church.
Just
as she stepped out of the graveyard, she looked to her right. Set against a
tall row of shrubs was a statue of the Virgin Mary, around three feet high,
with her hands folded and looking down at a statue of a child kneeling before
her. Lilliana stopped, looked at the statue, and said, “Oh, Mary Louise, did
you just get here? Isn’t it cold today? I should have worn a scarf, I think.”
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