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reserved for piles of clothes, clean but never folded. We slept side by side, with some lying across the bottoms of the mattresses; usually Kevin preferred this spot. He could fit there best, being the skinny runt we all called him. I always thought it strange at friends’ houses to see a high bed, perfectly made, with layers of sheets and blankets for different purposes: one sheet to hug the mattress, another to put over you, a light blanket coming out over the top of a matching quilt. It all seemed like such a big deal to make out of sleeping. I decided my mattress on the floor, covered with a tangled pile of blankets, was better than all that fuss. I felt bad for my mother, though, who had to sleep on the couch and was lucky if she got a blanket at all. Usually she’d cover herself in our winter coats. She said she liked them better than blankets. Even after some religious people came around with loads of army blankets for us, she’d still call out from her bed, asking me to get her a couple of coats to put over her. “Those blankets are scratchy old things I wouldn’t give to a dog,” she’d complain. The couches Ma slept on were also close to the floor, with their legs ripped off the bottoms. Once one leg broke, the rest of them had to go. In later years, we started to take the legs off our couches immediately after buying them from the Salvation Army. Why wait for the day when one of the wooden legs would crack and throw the couch lopsided while everyone was squeezed together watching Saturday morning cartoons or “Soul Train”?
    Neighborhood kids were thrilled at the amount of freedom in our home. Most of them had couches covered in plastic, and had to eat at the dinner table and answer their parents’ questions about school and play. We could walk on top of mattresses and couches with our shoes on. Even jump up and down on them, and have pillow fights. We could take curtain rods down from the windows and have sword fights and scream “on guard.” We could eat food whenever we wanted and wherever we wanted. We never once sat down at a fixed time at the dinner table. There was no dinner table. Besides, there were just too many of us. Ma would make a big pot of something—usually an invention, mixing the last three days of leftovers into one big mush—and you’d slop some in a bowl, and find a corner of the house where no one would bother you.
    Most of the families on Jamaica Street were Irish American, and some parents were actually from Ireland. My mother and her sisters spent a good part of their childhood years on this street, so we were familiar with many families who had been there for a couple of generations. The Sullivans and the Walshes lived across the street, the Rowans next door, Dick and Bridy Burns down the road, and Mrs. Carrol to the left of us. They were all part of a tight-knit Irish community that spanned Boston. The Irish in Boston all feared each other’s gossip, and Ma always said that certain news of her would be “all over Ireland.” As a kid I imagined that she meant this literally, and couldn’t believe that a whole country would care about things like the length of Ma’s miniskirts, which seemed to be a preoccupation of my grandparents and the other God-fearing Irish parents in the neighborhood.
    My mother continued to play the Irish accordion for money at the local barrooms. The welfare office of course didn’t know this, and if they ever found out we’d be in worse shape than we’d ever been in before. We’d be out on the streets. But the welfare check certainly couldn’t support all of us, and so Ma made some money for the kids doing what she loved to do: entertaining people. She’d get about thirty dollars for groceries at the end of a night. We’d go to McBride’s down past the projects at the bottom of our hill, or else to the Galway House on Centre Street. Kevin would show he