The Neighbor, Antonia Angress

by Antonia Angress '12

I grew up in a little white house between amidst a field of banana trees whose fruit never ripened and a wide expanse of guarias moradas, purple orchids that bloomed only in April. My next door neighbors—who were also the landlords—were severe, hard-working, and devout Catholics. The husband was a taciturn dairy farmer and the wife was a cook at a nearby private school. They were the kind of Catholics that got up at six on Sundays, week after week, and walked three miles to mass. The kind that held prayer circles when a church member was sick, that said "que Dios te bendiga" when they passed me on my way to school. And I, bleary-eyed, heavy-footed, starched navy uniform stretched tightly over my flat chest and buttoned up to my chin, dutifully replied "gracias senor, gracias senora, que Dios los bendiga tambien." Although after so many years, the words began to run together like the ink in a Bible that has been smudged a thousand times by a thousand people. Diotebengidasenora, Diosbengidasenor, Diosbengida, quetebendigasenora.

We moved to the little white house when my brother and I were too tiny to walk. My father, the eldest son of haggard German-Jewish immigrants, brought his young wife to a country where they did not speak the language. Why? I don't know. Perhaps to spite his parents. Perhaps to emulate them. My father arrived at the neighbors' doorstep holding a Spanish-English dictionary in one hand and a map of the town in the other. My mother, pale-lipped and jet-lagged, grasped his arm a little too tightly, casting frightened eyes around the unfamiliar land. The neighbors did not know what to make of us, but we stayed anyway.

My neighbors had a daughter, a pleasantly roundfaced girl named Karla. She often babysat my brother and me when we were young. I was always jealous then because my little brother David was the one she cooed and fussed over, the blond one with the dimpled limbs and the shadows of freckles on his wide-open face. I was the black-eyed one, the dirty, tantrum-prone muchacha terrible with unruly everuncombed hair. A devil-child. When I misbehaved, Karla pinched me. My hands were forever dotted with little red spots. Out of sheer childish malice, I pinched David when she wasn't looking. His face scrunched up and he wailed pathetically, and though I always felt guilty afterwards, I could not bring myself to stop.

When I was in the third grade, all my classmates were preparing for their first communion. For a while I was too embarrassed to ask what that was, exactly. My father finally explained that it was something like a bar mitzvah, although that was nearly even more mysterious because my parents had given up on Hebrew school after I had thrown a tantrum in the lobby of Templo de Jerusalen. I was scared of God. I secretly believed I was a sinner, and my classmates, noticing my absence in catechism, were quick to confirm this fear.

Karla helped me braid my hair in the mornings before school sometimes. The dark dawn ritual: the comb running through my curls, snagging snarls on its journey down.

You're hurting me, you're hurting me. "Are you going to catechism today?" Karla asked me, and yanked the comb, and yanked it, and again, and again. "Yes, yes" I lied. "Ay Karla, me duele."

She put the comb aside and embraced me from behind and met my eyes in the mirror. Olive skin brushing olive skin, dark hair fading into dark hair. The doughy roundness of her belly pressed up against my jutting spine. She was not much older than me, but there stretched between us a gaping chasm of unimaginable depth and blackness. She stood on one side and I stood on the other, and we thought we could see each other clearly, but it was really just a trick of the light. Sometimes I felt as though she was trying to coax me across, and although it looked inviting where she stood, my legs were frozen, and I could not jump.

That day I came home from school on the early