We Are Not Ourselves Read Online Free PDF Page A

was older she would live in a beautiful enough home that you wouldn’t even notice the clarinet. That was what Mr. Kehoe would have wanted. She would have to marry a man who would make it possible.
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    When she was thirteen, she started working at the Laundromat. The first time she got paid, after kneading the bills awhile between her thumb and forefinger, she spread them on the table before her and did some math. If she kept working and saved every dollar she could, she wouldn’t need anything at all from her parents once she was done with high school—maybe even before. The prospect excited her, though excitement gave way to sadness. She didn’t want to think of not needing anything from them. She would save her money for them.
    Her mother drank harder than her father ever had, as though she were trying to make up for lost time. Eileen started tending to her needs in a prophylactic rather than merely reactive way. She made coffee, kept a constant supply of aspirin waiting for her, and lay a blanket over her when she fell asleep on the couch.
    One night, Eileen came into the living room and saw that her mother’s head was bobbing in that way it did when she fought sleep to hold on to a last few moments of conscious drunkenness. Sitting with her was easiest then. She was too far gone to say something tart and withering but could still register Eileen’s presence with a tiny fluttering of the eyelid.
    Eileen took a seat next to her and felt wetness under her hand. At first she thought her mother had spilled her drink.
    She was terrified to change her mother’s clothes, because there was a chance her mother might realize what was going on, but she couldn’t just let her sit there in that sopping spot all night. She managed to remove her wet clothes and wrap her in a robe. Then she lay her back down on the dry part of the couch. Getting her to bed would be much harder.
    Eileen sat on her haunches next to the couch and guided her mother’s head and shoulders from her lap to the floor, then dragged the rest of her down. Once she had her there, she slid her along by hooking her arms up under her mother’s armpits. Her mother was making murmuring noises.When Eileen got her to the bed, though, she couldn’t lift her up into it. Her mother had stirred to more wakefulness and was trying to stay on the floor.
    “Let me get you up, Ma,” she said.
    “I’ll sleep right here.”
    “You can’t sleep on the floor.”
    “I will,” she said, the end of the word trilling off. Her brogue came back when she was drunk or angry.
    “It’s cold on the floor. Let me lift you up.”
    “Leave me be.”
    “I won’t do that.”
    Eileen tried for a while and then gave up and lay on her mother’s bed to rest. When she awoke it was to the sound of her father coming home from tending bar. She went to the kitchen and saw him sitting at the table with a glass of water.
    “Can you pick Ma up? She’s on the floor.”
    He stood without a word and followed her. It occurred to her that, except on Mr. Kehoe’s last night, she’d never seen her father enter that bedroom. In the light streaming in from the kitchen, her mother looked like a pile of dirty sheets on the floor.
    Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast asleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say “Bridgie” once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
    “Go to bed now yourself,” he said, and shut the door behind him.
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    “Imagine all of Woodside filled with trees,” Sister Mary Alice was telling her eighth-grade class. “Imagine a gorgeous, sprawling, untouched estate of well over a hundred acres. That is what was here, boys and girls. What is now your