The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [21]
“Isn’t it freezing?”
“You can try for just one minute?”
Manny comes running with a mischief-eyed smile, saltwater splashing out of his red bucket—he squeals as he drenches us both with the cold.
“Hey!” I scramble to my feet, go running for him.
“Mama! Help me!”
Now Barbaro’s rushing back for the water. “Come on!” He’s a silhouette against the sun.
My fellow travelers. “Famiglia from scratch,” Barbaro calls us. Think of that. Famiglia.
Chapter 7
ALL SAINTS
In school they called me “Lonely Only” because apparently no other Catholic girl ever lacked for siblings.
They called me “Freaky Frances” because toward the end of first grade someone decided that my eyes were set too far apart. Who comes up with these decrees?
“Her apartment’s creepy!” the few kids I’d had over would bristle, but the apartment itself couldn’t have given anyone the heebie-jeebies. My Nana, on the other hand, well, if you didn’t know her, I guess my Nana could have been classified as creepy. Old even for a grandmother, she’d had my father late in life, believed his birth to be something of a miracle. Black clad and rosary mumbling, my Nana had only one beef with the Catholic Church: the Vatican II reforms of the late 1960s. “Exchange the peace before communion?” she’d mutter. “Liberal balderdash.” Worse, the priests had all but forgotten their Latin. It’s not like my grandmother ever really understood the Latin, but maybe that’s why she’d liked it so much—mysterious and unknowable. Now they’d started saying mass in English. “English!” What were we, Protestants? Oh, how my grandmother grieved her beloved dead language.
Other kids went to All Saints K–8 because their neighborhood public schools sucked, because the Catholics gave out scholarships like communion wafers. They went because their mothers had something to prove to their fathers’ mothers or because they’d gotten busted with a joint at DeAvila Elementary. They were Catholics, for the most part, but their religion seemed a lighter thing than ours, something they wore like an accessory pinned to their uniforms, something they could call themselves even if their parents were, quite frankly, more taken with the Dalai Lama than with any tired old cult of the male savior.
I imagined that in New York or Puerto Rico—Chicago, even—other girls had old-school, pope-fearing guardians like mine. I’d seen them in movies. But in California, my grandmother was a freak.
I longed for normal parents you could call by their first names. Second-generation Mexican immigrants or cool professionals who worked at religious nonprofits and thought Vatican II was “a step in the right direction.” They’d show up at school in jeans or business suits, roll their eyes when the nuns weren’t looking. Their apartments smelled of Nag Chaampa incense. Beads hung in their doorways. Potted plants dangled from ceiling hooks. Old Angela Davis posters in the kitchens, U2 records on the turntables. Or they lived in actual houses in the Sunset district, ate off Williams-Sonoma dishes. Better yet, a single mom with a job—an empty apartment where all the fly-children could gather after school, sneak sips of Bacardi and practice French-kissing each other’s hands. I’d been invited to homes like those, mostly for birthday parties to which everyone but Ezekiel Goldstein got a pink-enveloped invitation. The kids didn’t ostracize me the way they did Ezekiel Goldstein, that much I had to be thankful for. Poor little mop-haired kid, how he ever ended up at All Saints K–8 remained a mystery. Rumor had it his parents were in prison for organizing some mad political protest at Concord Naval Weapons Station. Foster care. The kids taunted him. “Jew boy!”
Here was something worse than just being white.
“Jew boy!”
Maybe if he’d made a joke out of it, shrugged it off, or bribed them with Cheetos, they could have accepted him, eventually, but Ezekiel Goldstein stood defiant under the monkey bars in his pressed blue slacks, yelling,