The Brandons were having a party.

The music drifted through the alleyways, the laughter from the kitchen shook the foundation, and the iridescent light trickling through the first floor windows hung the small, one story house aloft—like an ecclesiastical peg on an utterly incomprehensible nighttime board. 

Every Tuesday night, it seemed, the small, yellow-paned house on the corner of Abbot and Levine would come alive with a spirit foreign to the deadened throes of suburbia to which it was held to comparison. No one could say why Tuesdays had been christened as a day of celebration for this young couple no one seemed to know. All they could say was that, every Tuesday, the light from the gas lamps and the flickering shadows of laughing, dancing silhouettes would extend an invitation to the loud, the young, and the reckless.

Because, every Tuesday, the Brandons were having a have a party.

Although their madness went unquestioned, it did not go unjudged. The houses flanking the Brandon’s comparatively impoverished estate stood erect, austere, and ever judging. Their lights remained off, their curtains drawn. For them—those to whom and invitation was never extended—time passed in an orderly, condescendingly didactic fashion, and weeknight “parties” were simply out of the question.

Their neighbors, the Brandons felt, simply didn’t understand the need.

‘It is Tuesday, after all,’ Mr. Anderson, a blunt, portly man from the left house noted before pulling up his sheets for the night.

‘They shouldn’t be up so late, those kids,’ he mumbled to his wife, Margaret, before reaching over her to turn out the light.

‘They’re newlyweds. They’ll get over it in time.’ Margaret growled, as she turned away from him in a ritualistic fashion.

But they never seemed to learn.

Every Tuesday night, the sun would fall, the music would rise, and the house would come alive with the raucous din of laughter and the chatter of heeled feet scuttling across the floor. No one ever entered this place, and no one ever left. Somehow, this mysterious young couple managed to smuggle their guests in under the cover of twilight, and keep them held happily against the promise of conversation, dance, and drink until the early morning where, with an equal amount of stealth, they were able to escape without detection.

‘I don’t know what they’re trying to pull,’ Mrs. Povitz used to say as she spread jam across her husband’s toast on Wednesday morning. ‘They think they live in Uptown. They don’t understand that, here, Tuesday nights are work nights. You stay in, you sleep, and you go to work the next morning. Tuesday nights are for adults. Children get Saturdays.’

The Brandons knew the talk.

They had been hearing it since they first met.

‘The music is too loud,’ their former neighbor, Mr. Albertson used to say.

‘My kids have school in the morning,’ a rabbity mother down the street liked to whine.

‘Tuesday nights are no nights for dancing,’ the night watchman criticized. ‘You’d do better to get your sleep.’

The Brandons didn’t care.

In truth, the Brandons didn’t care much about anything.

Mr. Brandon worked six nights a week.

Mrs. Brandon worked six days a week.

Mr. Brandon didn’t attend church on pretense of science.

Mrs. Brandon didn’t attend church on pretense of guilt.

Mr. Brandon had little tolerance for living in hypotheticals.

Mrs. Brandon had little tolerance for the time her husband was away.

In truth, the Brandons didn’t care much about anything.

Except the one night a week,

Where Mrs. Brandon could put on her favorite dress,

And Mr. Brandon could turn up the gramophone,

And where, if only for a night, the judgment and the anxiety of world around them would dissolve into the rhythmic enchantment of the only piece of furniture they owned. The night would drag on into early morning; Mrs. Brandon’s blush would steadily begin to crease at the corners of her mouth as she smiled through dusk, and Mr. Brandon would slowly lose himself as deadly combination of whiskey and lust threatened to take him down for the count.

The Brandons were having a party.

The rest of the world could only hope to be so lucky.

Sydney Charvat is a junior at Boston University actively (potentially haplessly) pursuing a degree in Film and Television with a minor in English Literature. In addition to her love of prose, she is a lover of rainstorms, tweed coats, cold Chinese food, and Woody Allen films. You can follow her at explainingstalecrackers.blogspot.com. (Updated October 2015)