The Fledglings by David Homel

Author:David Homel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cormorant Books
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

NINE

Good Rubber After Bad

SOMETHING STRIKINGLY NEW TOOK PLACE at the end of the summer: Rachel and Bluma had a full-fledged conversation. Bluma thought of her mother as a fixture, an inert piece of furniture like the kitchen chair, the way any child feels about her parent. But behind the outward paralysis, the woman had a strong will to spread her unhappiness.

“Sit.”

Her mother pointed to a chair at the kitchen table.

“Your brother is gone and your father can’t work. How do you think I’m going to keep this house together?”

“You could get a job,” Bluma told her mother.

Rachel laughed.

“You used to work. That’s what you told me. You worked in Shukyan.”

“That was in another country. Back then I could do anything. I could work from sunup to sundown.”

“Now you can’t get out of the chair.”

“Now I don’t want to,” her mother corrected her.

“I decided I’m going to secretary school. I’m going to Washburne.”

“Why do you need school to learn secretary when you can have a job right now? Sadow is hiring.”

“How would you know? You never go out.”

“People come to me,” Rachel said, full of self-important mystery. “I hear things.”

“Sadow? Tires? I’d rather be a taxi-dancer.” Bluma burst into song. She was a member of The Fledglings again, but a more vulgar version:

Everyone works but Papa, he sits around all day

Staring into the fireplace and smoking his pipe of clay

Mother takes in laundry, Sister is a whore

Everyone works but Papa, I can’t take it anymore!

Her mother cut her off with a shriek.

“My own flesh and blood, a kurva! Men pushing their bodies against you so you feel their things. And you liking it!”

“A taxi-dancer isn’t a kurva. She’s a dancer. She dances with guys. She makes them feel better about themselves. I heard about a girl who works at the Lonely Fellows’ Club. She makes plenty of money, she has nice things and she doesn’t have relations if she doesn’t want to.”

“A kurva!”

“Stop saying that.”

They sat in silence a moment as Rachel regrouped. Bluma waited for the next assault, and her mother didn’t let her down.

“Take the job, at least for a while. We need money. We have to pay for the whisky your father ordered. It’s just sitting there, and he won’t open his business and sell it. You know what happens to people who don’t pay what they owe.”

“You want him to open the speakeasy again, and have a house full of drunks next door?”

“It’s easy for you to criticize. It’s a job, a living. And now it’s gone.”

“Why don’t you go see what’s wrong with him?”

Rachel smiled wanly. “I’m too tired. You can’t imagine.”

“Make an effort.”

“I have made efforts,” her mother defended herself.

She and Bluma sat for a while more. Bluma felt inertia coming over her. It was contagious. She was catching it from her mother. “All right. But it’s only temporary.”

“Of course.”

The following week, Bluma started at Sadow’s Vulcanizing. The job was her class-dunce destiny, and her first outrage against the sacred oath she’d sworn with Bella. The two girls were breaking up, and they didn’t need a man to do it.

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