Early every Sunday Morning I would toe it past the pesky noisesome creaks which weather and age had secreted in our stairs to open the front door and snatch the Sunday paper through the one cautious crack I allowed myself—narrow because I was naked. Half-light shadowed the rug like lace. I was always silent as a snake since I thought if I woke my parents at such an hour they would surely decide there was time enough for all of us to go to church, or worse, that there was time enough for me to be hauled off to Sunday school—the ultimate humiliation—where I would sit in a gently rounded row of little folding chairs set up in a damp and badly painted, cutesy-pie basement cubicle, and promise a moist-eyed, pin-haired lady to be as good as gold and as God, my Father, wished, or sullenly let myself be cajoled into saying a prayer for the poor, or singing something icky about baby Jesus, or guessing the significance of the sappy smile which tradition had fixed to the overchromed features of the Virgin, where she lay faceup in a penny leaflet we were routinely, on arriving, handed. Staring between our knees we said the Lord’s Prayer. The bulb-lit floor seemed ready to go out. My knees grew as we murmured together, and by the time we reached temptation they seemed swollen the size of softballs. Alice in her tunnel could not have improved on the phenomenon. We colored Daniel grinning smugly in his lions’ den (red for the great open mouths of the beasts, orange for the pelts, yellow for their teeth), and we learned the meaning, with Joseph, of all those dreams. My father gave me a dime for the collection, a nickel of which I spent on candy at a nearby drugstore, and a nickel of which I placed, the buffalo grazing, in the middle of a plate I pretended was a prairie. At the front of my candy store various city papers would be piled in satisfying stacks, each wrapped with brightly colored funnies or in the deep sepias of the rotogravure.

So I suffered a little anxiety, Sunday Mornings, until I could be certain that the old man and my mother were going to sleep through Jesus and Jerry, and then I somersaulted into the bright arc of midday, full of relief and happy anticipation of an open and endless afternoon. Yet the day’s decorum was like dusk in the morning, and half of the world was closed. One’s friends were with relatives or in the country. The sick beckoned with a trembling finger. The lavender ink was got out, and notes of condolence were composed. The radio played “Ave Maria” or went on about politics. My aunt fell asleep at her jigsaw puzzle; my mother mended my pants; father continued through the paper like one on safari. “Look what’s happened to Phelps-Dodge. Down another dollar.” In the kitchen, plates scraped clean of yellow gravy, chicken bones and puckered skin, lay in the sink. And my homework had been put off. Again.