I live by the bells
of St. Dominic's, the towering Catholic church
that lies Up a block and over two—a chess-piece
move—from my small raised house in the old New
Orleans neighborhood known as Lake View. The
church ladies cluster in the coffee house on my
corner, across the street from where Peter, the
Greek, teases their thinning hair beside a display
case filled with crucifixes, under posters of the
Grecian isles. On Sundays, as the church bells
peal, my neighbors hurry by my door, their baby
girl all flounces. Their toddler in his sailor
suit They nod to me, an anomaly reading my paper
on the porch. Unimpelled by bells, I think,
musically. "en mass to Mass," I think, save me.
Inside, my daughter sleeps the deep morning sleep
of teens, and doesn't hear the bells or feel their
tyranny, as do I, musing on the double sense of
living by the bells. It's nine o'clock on Sundays,
and on Saturdays it's eight. I rise against my
will, the deep, soundless sleep of adolescence
past. In the afternoon at four, as I call my
sister, once again they intervene? "What's that?"
she asks. "It's the bells " I say. "But they're so
loud," she answers. "Yes." (What more can I say?)
That's just the way it is here. Divinity so much
the rule that each routine of mine becomes
enmeshed with theirs, churchgoing intersecting
paper-reading, Southern Bell meeting Church Bell
on an unwitting party line. Walking my dog, I pass
their statues, Mary with her head bowed, Jesus
sprouting from a lawn as casually as a birdbath or
an oak. Driving carpool, I pass the marquee that
displays their word-play, "Get your Christmas
Presence Here," and then by more statuary flanking
their schools, "Holy Name of Jesus." "Mater
Dolorosa," "Our Lady of Prompt Succor," strange
words, even after twenty years here
foreign-sounding, in the same way egrets, as
common as sparrows, still look exotic to me.
People here see Mary in cloud banks, burn their
retinas and come home happy, like Cajun versions
of Woolf's Lily Briscoe, "I have had my vision."
They say "Hail Marys" in their huddles before
soccer games and, when you tell them your sad
stories, offer feelingly, "I'll pray for you."
They just don't get it. And it's all drowned out
by the bells, anyway.
It wasn't always this way, back in the West where
I grew up, or, now that I think about it, maybe it
was. It's just that here everything stands out in
high relief literalized, like the word made flesh.
Elsewhere, the bells ring on a lower frequency,
with only the most sensitive of us bristling: In
fact, it's possible to live a whole life immune to
others' sacred ways, especially in the West where,
with saguaros rising majestic out of desert lawns
and sunsets flaming, God is a redundancy. And yet
it never really goes away, the subtle tyranny that
compels us heathen few to live by someone else's
bells. Especially in childhood, painful memories
abound.
It's Spring. I'm in fifth grade, and the teacher
tells us to draw ourselves on Easter day, an easy
assignment for the girls, who plunge into pastels
and paint their Easter dresses. But I'm in agony.
Do I fake an Easter dress, even though I've never
owned one, suggest a church on some strip corner
where I've never been? Or do I tell the truth dip
into the blues and paint my cutoffs, the long
stretch of an empty beach where I will rise from
my cold hollow in the sand on Easter morning, when
I hear the crackling of the fire And why should
this picture make me feel ashamed?
It's the first day of fourth grade and I, the new
girl, fill out the teacher's form. It's standard
fare: name, address, phone number, previous
school, age. . . and then, there it is, as if in
bold, or neon: church. Those six letters sink my
ship. Now I'm in trouble. A coward, I leave it
blank and pass my paper forward, hoping she won't
notice. But I'm out of luck. "Sally, what church
do you go to?"' "Well, we're new in town, so we
don't have a church yet." (That ought to do it.)
But she persists. "What church did you go to in
Louisville?" Now I'm hooked and flopping on the
sand. "Well... we didn't really go to church...
very much." Now they all know: the new girl
doesn't go to church and you can bet they know
what to do with this information.
It's October 1993. My mother has died, a sad,
pointless cancer death, and we need to mark the
spot, to fill a room for her and tell a story,
read a poem, belt out a cowboy song. We choose the
church on the corner. It's Unitarian, after all a
philosophical as well as geographic fit, we hope,
although none of us has ever gone there, except my
father with his black light after dark to pick the
scorpions off its stucco walls, or my brother,
squeezing through the fence to see the city's most
colossal anthill in its parking lot. We tell the
minister 'Please, no Jesus, no God, no prayers. We
are unbelievers. We want to celebrate her life.'
And things are going swimmingly. Tom sings, Jeff
recalls her on a mountain top, Davy reads a poem
she wrote, Chris builds a metaphor with wings. And
then it's time to close; he can't resist, "Amen,"
he intones, just when we thought we'd pulled it
off.
Back in New Orleans, a sign screams at me from the
expressway, square blue letters ten feet high,
'Thou Shalt Not Kill,' with the 'not' underlined
as if we clueless ones, skeptics and atheists, had
somehow got it wrong, thought all these years we
were to kill and now, via billboard, had got that
straightened out. The school girls wear their
faith out loud, in the colors of their uniforms.
On Ash Wednesday, the cashiers in my grocery are a
lineup of smudges. And maybe it's better this way,
at least more honest-- no cheap shots, no sneaking
it past you-- but the statues showing it, and the
athletes chanting it, and the bells blaring it
home After all, we know where we stand here, and
always have Well within earshot, just a few blocks
down.