The street I grew up on was full of big houses, or they seemed big to me maybe. My house and the house next door were the only duplexes on the street. We lived in an apartment and so did our neighbors downstairs and the lesbians next door. Everyone else was rich. All the kids would ask why we have two doors and I'd say "we live in the apartment, upstairs" and they'd go "what's an apartment?"
I remember explaining to a friend once that we didn't own the house, it belonged to a "landlord" and we had to drop off an envelope of money at his "office" every month called "rent." They didn't get it. It's funny how the kids so rich they've never heard of anything other than living in a mcmansion can accidentally reverse engineer abolition of private property through sheer ignorance. "If you live there, and he doesn't, then how could it belong to him and not you? That sounds dumb."
Sometimes we'd walk to the T, or get driven to the T, and take it downtown. I'd say to my friends across the street "we took the T to the museum of science!" And they'd ask "you what? What does took the T mean. I don't understand. Did you not drive?" Being a Single Car Household meant sometimes it just made more sense to take the T. This didn't register to anyone except the lesbians next door. They were the only neighbors we were really close to even though they didn't have kids my age. They existed in the same world as us. There was one other kid we knew who lived in an apartment, but it wasn't on the street I grew up on.
Boston is a weird city, where the subway runs through rich and suburban yet shockingly walkable neighborhoods. Where, despite being connected by the country's first subway system, segregation can be so extreme that some kids don't even know the words rent, or apartment. I truly believed my family was poor, when we lived on the street I grew up on, but by nature of living on that street, we surely couldn't have been. We only seemed to be poor because my parents were spending an insane amount of money to live in the only place they could afford in this "good school district" so they we'd go to well funded schools. After we joined The Cult and got pulled out of school, it didn't make sense to live there anymore, and we moved a few years later.
