excerpt
Holy Rosary School was militantly Italian, as you might have guessed. The Polacks had their own Catholic school across the street. We used to communicate from time to time by throwing rocks at each other. Sometimes we’d ride on our bikes in the night and break windows. Then both schools put up heavy metal screens. They gave our classroom the aura of a concentration camp or a crazy house. But Rita made my incarceration sweet. She was different. With a musical walk that suggested a world of romantic events that unfolded in warm light, somewhere beyond the hurricane fence that kept us penned in the schoolyard during recess and kept us from coming back to play box ball after three. Her thick auburn hair which swirled around her head and shoulders like a breaking wave gave off the intoxicating scent, as I have only recently discovered, of rosemary oil. And she had a light that surrounded her. Not intense or powerful, more like a quiet mist around her body. (I could see things like that in those days. Sister Rose in second grade had a grey fog swaddling her egg shaped head, and Sister Assunta’s cloud was tabasco orange.)
Anyway, Rita’s light was forsythia, a bright yellow that smelled like flowers after a spring rain. I wanted to walk inside it, though I thought it might alter me in some unpredictable way and I felt deliciously fearful.
Every Friday afternoon, between the Italian lesson and religious instruction by Father Brackendorf, we got a put-your-head-on-the-desk time. We could sleep, or dream or think about things, but we couldn’t raise up our heads, or talk, or ask any questions.
I pretended to sleep, but really I was watching Rita’s forsythia light. Slowly, it began to shake and go brown at the edges. So I wasn’t surprised when she broke the taboo and raised her hand. Blackie would raise hell about that.
“It’s not wake up yet, Rita. Put your head back on your desk,” she said, picking up the yardstick and rapping it against her meaty palm.
“But Sister, I have to tinkle,” Rita said, and a ripple of giggles ran through the playdead corpses, though none of them actually opened their eyes.
“This is not kindergarten, Rita. We must learn to control ourselves.”
Slap, slap, went the yardstick.
Rita put her head back on the desk, but her body was not trained in the rigorous protocols of Holy Rosary School, and before too long, it began …
Libros Libertad 