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.