The Undertaker's Daughter

I wrote the following character sketch after reading James Joyce's "The Dead" a 5th or 10th or 20th time,(I don't keep track anymore). I wondered what Lily was like. 

The Undertaker's Daughter

Lily was having a rough day. The rash on her shoulder continued to itch every 18 minutes, as scheduled. Her heart was still broken from the year before. Her future had been sold away while she was busy serving her family. To make matters worse, that morning, she dropped her breakfast on the floor.   

She stared at her eggs and toast and potatoes and tried to recall in her memory of what transpired in the last forty-five seconds that led to such a tragedy.  Was it her inattention, her imagined palsy, her greasy fingers, her self-destructive tendencies? Or was it some trickster ghost or spirit or fairy?  She didn’t care enough to search for the truth about her eggs or herself or whether ghosts were real and had the capacity to push a plate off of a table.  Towards the end of her stare, she realized that she was not depressed enough to eat food off the floor again.  But she was far too miserable to make a proper breakfast again.  She could not conceive of how her food ended up on the floor. But it was there.  Eggs, toast and frozen-in-the-middle hash browns, staring up at her, with a smirk created out of splattered ketchup. 

She had decided months ago, after seeing a program on television, to make a real breakfast every morning as a way to cherish herself, to give back to herself, to nourish herself. It would replace the daily donut that ate into her once good health. Like anything good in life, she fought it. The program said to set goals. In full self-defiance, she dared herself and set a goal: One breakfast a week. Then, after a month of that, she would bump it up to two a week. So forth and so forth until Month Seven completed her chrysalis and she would break forth and fly, a butterfly caught in a hurly-burly gust of pancakes and smoothies, muffins and omelets.  This story takes place in the third week of the second month of breakfastmaking. 
She had already made two breakfasts that week.  This would have been the third breakfast. Two weeks ahead of schedule.  She did not have to think about making a third breakfast, and she did not plan it.  It sort of happened. When the toaster dinged she had an inkling about her great progress in life.  Her plan would take care of itself.  She smiled. She felt some kind of happiness. There was a change in the air. A change in the empty cavern that she fancied was within her. Things would finally be working out.   

But, then, it was three o’clock in the afternoon and the food was still on the floor of her kitchen. She was in her office downstairs. She had abated her hunger with coffee and breath mints and stupid magazines. The lack of sugar in her blood combined with a decade-long adrenal fatigue, put her on edge. She had not been rude yet, though no one had come into her office. She was slow on her feet and slow to answer the questions coming through the phone. The world was fortunate that no one had entered her office that morning. 

She was ready to snap. She wanted to snap. She wanted her resentment to be released from her body in the form of a short, loud and witty reply to another human being. She needed to release it. 

She did not care about the customers. She had enough customers. And they were part of the problem. Every customer through the door, every phone call, every invoice took time away from her conceiving and planning her other life.  But, they just kept coming. Day after day, year after year. Procession after procession. She heard a thousand eulogies, passed out a thousand tissues. She had seen thousands of black suits and veils. They just kept coming. Even if the flowers were wilted. Even if the orientation was insufficient. Even if the price was too high. They kept coming and kept paying. And no one ever haggled or asked for a discount. It just wasn’t done.  Some people said, “Wow” or scrunched their brows in shock as to what a funeral would cost. But they always paid. They always paid.  Her family had done the job for thousands of people over the last forty years and competition was scarce. 

         On this afternoon, Lily did not care about the customers or the respects they needed to pay to the corpse, the deaf, blind, and mute shell of some Earth-wanderer. And she did not want that smelly kid to keep asking questions about the hearse, or the bathroom, or the stale candy in the dish. She always had empathy for her customers, but, upon her father’s prudent instructions, she refused any sympathy. They were just bodies, not people. The things with heartbeats and breath and tears were the people. Her father also told her, before moving on himself, to always maintain a prudent decorum.

        But today, she, as the funeral director, was about to completely ruin the final social event, the celebratory funeral of Gerald Russell Orion Peabody, and there was not a singular thing anybody, living or dead, could do about it. 

For more info on one of my favorite writers, go to The Modern Word.