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different, all brick row houses, but right on the sidewalks, no
flights of steps going up to the door, just one level block. There
were more gardens. Kids didn’t stay outside playing that I could
see. Or maybe there weren’t any, I don’t know. Joe had grease
on his hair and it was combed very straight and sticky sort of,
and he wore checkered shirts, and he talked different but I
don’t know why or how: he didn’t seem to be used to talking.
He was a teenager. I would walk down the street and he would
sort of come out and I wouldn’t know what to say, except one
day I smiled and he said hello, and then after that I would
decide if I was going to walk down the Catholic block or not
and if I was chasing boys and what was wrong with him that I
wasn’t supposed to talk with him and I couldn’t talk with him
too long or someone would notice that I hadn’t come home
with my friends on my block. And I used to come home other
ways too, where I had no one to talk to. I would walk home
by the convent and try to hear things inside it, and sometimes I
would walk home on the black blocks, all alone. This was my
secret life.
*
There was an alley next to a church on the way to school and
we would always try to get lost in it. It was only a tiny alley,
very narrow but long, dark and dusty, with stray cats and
discarded bottles and strange trash and urine and so even
children knew its every creak and crevice very soon. But we
would close our eyes and spin each other around and do
everything we could not to know how to get out. We would
spend hours pretending to be lost. We would try to get into
the church but it was always closed. We would play adventures
in which someone was captured and lost in the alley and
someone else had to get her out. But mostly we would flail
around being lost, the worst thing being that we would know
exactly where we were and there were no adventures and we
couldn’t go in the church. Then sometimes suddenly we would
really be lost and we would try to find our way out and not be
able to no matter how hard we tried and it would start getting
dark and we would get scared and somehow when we got
scared enough we would remember how to get out of the alley
and how to get home.
*
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We had to walk a long way to and from school, four times a
day: to school, home for lunch, back to school, home at the
end of school; or sometimes we had to go to the Hebrew School
