We Are Not Ourselves Read Online Free PDF

neighborhood, all of it, every inch, once belonged to a single family that traces its roots back to the very beginnings of this country.”
    A garbage truck in front of the school emitted a few loud coughs, and Sister paused to let it pass. The rolled-up map above the blackboard swayed slightly, and Eileen imagined it unfurling and hitting Sister in the head.
    “The grandson of one of the early Puritan founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a farmhouse near this spot, on a massive plot of land he’d bought.” Sister started walking around the room with a book held open to a page that contained pictures of the house. “His heirs converted that farmhouse into a manor house. This manor house ”—Sister practically spat the words—“had a wide hall leading to a large front parlor. It had a back parlor with a huge fireplace, a grand kitchen, a brass knocker on the door. It had an orchard to one side.” The insistent way Sister counted off the house’s virtues made it sound as if she was building a case against it in court. “After a few generations, they sold the estate to a Manhattan-based merchant from South Carolina to use as a weekend retreat. Then, in the latter half of the last century, when the train lines expanded, a real estate developer saw an opportunity. He cleared the estate’s trees, drained its swamps, laid out the streets you walk on today, and carved it into nearly a thousand lots that he distributed by random drawing. He opened the door to the middle class, letting them pay in installments of ten dollars a month. Houses were built. The last vestige of the estate, the manor house, was razed in 1895 to make room for the church, and, eventually, the school you’re sitting in right now.”
    Eileen was watching the frowning white face of the clock at the front of the room when Sister came up to her with the book. Her gaze drifted lazily to the pictures, but once she saw them she couldn’t take her eyes off them, and when Sister moved down the row, Eileen asked her to come back for a second.
    “The Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and then the LIRR East River tunnel the following year, and they began laying out the IRT Flushing line—the seven train to you—station by station, starting in 1915. The Irish—your grandparents, maybe your parents—began coming across the river in droves, seeking relief from the tenement slums of Manhattan. They wound up in Woodside. Imagine ten people to an apartment, twenty. Then, in 1924—providence. The City Housing Corporation began building houses and apartments to alleviate the density problem.” Sister hadmade it back to the front of the room. The faint outline of a smile of triumph crept onto her lips as she addressed her final arguments to the jury. “This is the way the Lord works. To those who have little, he gives. Isn’t it nice to think of all of you here instead of it just one privileged family in a mansion in the woods? Wouldn’t you agree, Miss Tumulty?”
    Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion she’d just seen the picture of. Sister’s question snapped her to attention. “Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
    But all she could think was what a shame it was they’d knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it—that wasn’t a bad thing at all.
    “And think of this,” Sister Mary Alice said in closing. “Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldn’t exist.”
    Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?
    She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why