It is July 4th, 2011. I am picking my sister up in Boston’s South End at her apartment. We are going to visit our mother at her friend's house on the cape.
My mother’s friends have always been eclectic, but this is the group that we have known all our lives, that feels almost like family in the absence of us ever having had a family.
These people were roommates of my mother’s when she escaped her mother’s Dorchester home and tried to begin her own life.
As she told it, she packed all her things in trash bags and just kept walking the clothing out of her mother’s house and into her friend's convertible.
All the while, my grandmother yelled out the door to her that she would never make it on her own.
These are the people that became, in a sense, my mother’s people. We were raised with their children in passing. Christmas parties, pool parties, Bat Mitzvahs, apple picking, summer cookouts.
Growing up, we saw them only a few times a year, yet they seemed like our world. They seemed family to me as a child.
They held a myth to us.
Two were named Ellen, and my sister and I played dolls or cocktail party and would be taken with toasting each other, saying ‘chin, chin, Ellen.’ Both of us calling ourselves Ellen.
