We ran through the dark, Mrs. Peterson and I, so that we wouldn’t be late for 6:30 Mass.
Mrs. Peterson slipped out of her child-filled house for the peace of the dark and the voice of silence and private thoughts, broken by bells and Latin murmurings.
I crawled from my warm bed into the sharp bite of cold air and duty. This was my Lenten sacrifice, to give up that last hour of sleep to run five blocks with Mrs. Peterson to the church and sit in the cold and wait for the Introit, the Kyrie, the Confiteor, the Gloria, the reading, the sermon (it was almost always less than two minutes) the Creed, the offertory, the lavabo, the consecration, communion and dismissal. Tick tick tick, now it’s over and I can run back home, and turn around a half hour later run to school.
If I do this, I will resemble a good Catholic, and hope of hopes, maybe I will be like Mrs. Peterson -- tall and beautiful, calm, not like my frantic mother, but loved by a dominant man who’d been a World War II fighter pilot, and the mother of my sister’s best friend. Maybe I could belong to a beautiful and secure group, maybe I wouldn’t be ditched.
“Did you have to bring her too?” Pat, the younger sister, sneered, as I tagged behind my sister, tall and painfully skinny in the tight skirt she had to have.
My sister looked at me with the hatred she knew she wasn’t supposed to feel, yet her friendship with these older girls was never secure she was never assured that her friendship was solid.
“You’re so im-ma-ture,” she dragged out the epithet as she spoke to me, then turned to her friends, “My mom made me.”
They looked at her, and then suddenly Pat yelled, “Ditch!” and the three older girls, including my sister, ran for the nearest back yard and the alley, ran and ran to get away from me, to lose me.
I ran until I was out of breath, and then roamed the alley looking into every back yard to find my sister and her friends.
