Like flowers in the desert that somehow manage without water, religion flourished on Grand Avenue. A Bible-Baptist couple one block over provided theological instruction in their backyard. They paid in candy for those who brought other kids to them. They gave Bibles, stickers, and Tootsie Rolls to anyone able to memorize and recite the words to John 3:16:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
I went a few times, memorized and recited the passage to earn the Bible, the candy, their easy admiration. They were nice, though their good manners and concern for my eternal soul seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Still, I liked to read and eat sweets, and so attended their backyard lessons as often as I could, my fervor only dying as their candy supply dwindled.
A Pentecostal church three houses down held services in Spanish, which didn’t stop our mother from herding us there once a week. We’d been baptized Catholic, but it didn’t matter. The church on Grand Avenue could have spoken in tongues and handled snakes and she wouldn’t have cared. She was still commuting to her job near the refuge and stopping on break to see herons. She was high and light and prone to flights of fancy, and thought the church would be a good idea.
“It’s so pretty inside with all those windows,” she said, and added, “Maybe we’ll learn some Spanish.”
Everyone smiled and sang, and we made friends with the Padilla family, who lived next door to the church, whose father wore starched shirts and ties, and whose mother invited us girls to learn to embroider hand towels. With two parents, a house they actually owned, and a fence that circled their front and back yards, closing off their property to the rest of the street, the Padillas were the elite of our neighborhood. Because the Padilla kids were our age and because their parents thought we were somehow different from the other grubby kids on Grand, they allowed us to unlatch the front gate and join them.
On Sundays, after attending the church service we didn’t understand, we visited the Padillas, played kickball, and ate the greasy foods their mother served. Arroz con gandules. Bacalao. Platanos fritos. We loved playing in their deep green yard, instead of in the street, where we had to stop our game every few minutes to let cars pass. The oldest Padilla girl liked my brother Anthony. His long hair and her flirting with him in see-through pink cotton shirts somehow went unnoticed by Mr. Padilla, and our way of life became almost routine.
Until I fought with Itza.
Itza was my age, and must have said something mean about my being white or having mismatched clothes, so I said something back and we fought. Behind the church. The lawn was in need of mowing; we were alone in grass that went to our knees. Everyone else was in church, their thin singing leaking out the windows. Having always relied on Steph to do my fighting, I didn’t even know where to begin.
It was awkward for that first moment, the intimacy of standing face to face, the tension of the impending fight heavy in the air, my not knowing which hand or leg to push first into combat. Finally, when I realized I had to begin somehow or else stand fixed in starting pose forever, I grabbed hold of the gold hoop hanging from Itza’s right ear and yanked it down. Hard.
She held her ear and screamed. There was blood on her finger and she cried out so loudly I covered my ears until her crying beat out the singing, and people came running, looking at me with disdain.
Que mala esa blanca—what a bad white girl.
Mrs. Padilla wiped Itza’s ear with one of her embroidered washcloths while my mother swiped me in the head and apologized for my behavior.
“I understand,” Mrs. Padilla said. “Kids will be kids.”
But after our fight, the Padilla gates closed to us and we stopped attending the church where none of us ever knew what was being said anyway.