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Mommie came to visit often during those first months I lived in Atlantic City. But she had as much trouble as I did accepting some of the customs in Peggy and Paul's house.

One time we gathered at the gray linoleum dinner table to say grace. Mommie sat across from me, Paul and Peggy across from each other. I sat, head bowed, eyes closed, the way they had taught me.

Paul started grace. Maybe because Mommie was there, he did a longer version, the one that called on the Virgin Mary to bless the food we were about to eat by the grace of Our Lord.

I cocked my head and opened my right eye to peek up at Mommie.

Her head was cocked too, left eye open, peeking down at me. Her expression said, You and I both know this is a bunch of poppycock.

In spite of ourselves, we started to giggle. Paul droned on, barely pausing. When he finished, he stared down into his plate and remained silent.

Struck by how Mommie's presence had altered the dinner-table dynamics, and still snickering, I glanced at him, then Peggy, who seemed flustered.

'Er, I don't like that," Peggy said, after a pause, refereeing to our disrespect of the grace ritual.

Mommie and I just giggled some more.

I liked to compare my life in New York with my life in Atlantic City. Sometimes I kept lists.

Peggy was fifty years old. Mommie was 36. I was four and a half.

New York had big skyscrapers made out of cement. Atlantic City had little houses made out of wood. In New York it took two and a half strides to get from one crack to the next sidewalk. In Atlantic City I could do it in one stride.

New York had playgrounds with swings and monkey bars where children could go and play. In Atlantic City, you played in the dirt.

There were two kinds of dirt in Atlantic City: the dark earth that Peggy's flowers grew in, and the beige sand at the beach. If I dug deep into Peggy's flower bed, which I wasn't supposed to do, dark dirt yielded to the beige sand, as if the earth had tanned.

The sand at the beach was fine, like sugar. In New York the sand in the playground sandbox was course, like the batter of Peggy's fried chicken before she dipped it.

In New York you lived in an apartment high above the streets, where you could look out and see over the world.

In Atlantic City you lived in a house and could only see down the block, but everyone at the store knew your name.

I had a hard time figuring out all the different Gods. Peggy's was called Episcopalian. She shared him with her best friend, Aunt Hugh. Paul's was Catholic. He shared his with Italians.

Paul's God had a Mommie called Virgin Mary. If you wanted something, you prayed to Virgin Mary, he said, ands he talked to God.

Paul's priest talked to god, too, but he did it in a language only he, the Italians, and God could understand-or so Aunt Peggy said.

Mommie didn't trust organized religion. He friend and my godmother, Mikki in New York, had a God who was Christian Scientist. She was trying to make him be Mommie's God. Mikki told me that her God lived all around me, and on the nights I wanted my dreams to take me back home, I prayed to him. I figured that Paul's God's mommie would be too busy listening to everyone else's prayers, While Peggy's God seemed to live far, far away; too far, it seemed to even hear the prayers of a child.

St bedtime in Atlantic City, I would put on my pajamas and kneel on the oval green shag rug next to the twin bed against the wall. Aunt Peggy would kneel beside me.

First we did the prayer that my Godmother Mikki had taught me:

Father-Mother God,
Loving me-
Guard me when I sleep
Guide my little feet
Up to Thee

Then we worked on a longer Prayer Peggy was teaching me. She called it the Lord's Prayer. Peggy had shown me a picture of her Lord God in the Bible. He had white hair and a long white beard, this God, who had his name hallowed out in a log somewhere, and you had to beg his forgiveness for stepping on it.

Peggy said all these Gods were the same, and I shouldn't try so hard to distinguish them from one another. Sometimes, when I recited my lists of comparisons to her, she would pucker her brows and lips simultaneously, and tell me that I should accept things as they were and stop making differences.

So after a while, I just kept lists in my head.

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