The women laughed. A good time, the young women sighed. America was a balloon filling with the sighs of immigrant women. Here the world was open to us, we could go without chaperones, earn our own way, pay to stand in the Yiddish theater even if we sometimes nodded off on our feet. We could discuss politics with socialists, literature with published poets in cafés, and whether God was really dead with anyone who’d listen. If we didn’t fall asleep. If we could find an hour, if there were more hours in a day.
I closed my eyes and listened. The steam seeped under my lids and gave me a dizzy image of women floating, laying their heads on each other’s bellies, entwining their arms, rolling their breasts along each other’s sides in a cascade of flesh. Could it really be only me and Rose who had this feeling for each other?
I blinked open in the heat. Everywhere, pairs and circles of friends. In the corner were the two women from our English class who ran the grocery on Houston, who said they were sisters. Grown women, maybe thirty or forty, one was rubbing the other’s shoulders. No one paid them any attention. But usually when women rubbed each other, the rubbing one was distracted, concentrating on her job but looking somewhere else, at a spot on the wall. Between these two there was only a smiling that went back and forth. Were they really sisters? Did they hunger for each other? But of course they were old already, and they had their own shop. If they wanted each other, there they were.
“I see you’re still biting your fingernails,” Rose said.
“What?”
“Your hands look better, but you should file the nails, not bite them.”
“Why?”
“So your touch is smoother,” she whispered.
B
Y THE TIME
they got home it was almost eleven. That was the trouble with going to the baths on Mondays, Rose thought. It made Tuesday a plague. Every week we vow we’ll simply get clean and leave, but instead Chava gets asked to be in a poker game, or I end up commiserating with a girl down the block about a terrible love affair, or plead to stop for an eggcream on the corner until Chava gives in—actually, getting back before eleven was early. But it didn’t keep her from complaining.
“I’m tired of these sweatshops, Chava, I’m plain tired. I still like sewing, but I can’t keep working like this. We didn’t work this way at home, not even the poorest people worked like this.”
“How do you know how the poorest people worked?” Chava rubbed her face. Rose could see how the flicker of the gas jet bothered her. Chava wasn’t the only one who wished the landlord would put the electricity in already—as if that miser would have wasted money on improvements.
“I never saw girls of sixteen work like we do,” Rose said.
“I’m seventeen.”
“All right, it’s the same, isn’t it? It wears us both out. Shlep, yes, we shleped—look, I had to make meals every day for all my brothers and mend their clothes. But we never worked on Shabbes, and no one would make us work in conditions like these.”
“Conditions? Look at you, all clean and relaxed from the steam. So, we’ll be sleepy at work. Tomorrow you be extra careful not to put the needle through your finger.” Chava made a motion to kiss Rose’s fingers but she pulled them away.
“I’m serious, Chava. Now that you’re a bookbinder you get at least an extra hour a day than me, and you forget how important an hour is. We never grabbed at hours this way back home.”
“Then we were lucky—and young. You forget all those beggars who lived underneath Odessa, in the catacombs. Some of them were girls like us. I know there were factories in Russia where whole families worked all day and then slept under their work tables in mud at night. My brother told me. What do you think the revolution is about? Why do you think we join unions? Everywhere around the world it’s horrible what they do to us.”
“That’s all I was trying to say, Chava. It’s horrible what they do to us. You don’t have to get up on your soap box and give me another lecture.” Rose let her hair down, all crinkled from the steam in the baths. It took a long time to brush out on Monday nights.
“Maybe I do have to get on my soap box once in awhile. Is that so bad?” Chava took the hairbrush from Rose, standing behind her with one hand on Rose’s shoulder, brushing slow, stopping to press the bristles gently into the middle of her back. Rose inhaled sharply, lifting her shoulders up.
“I used to think the revolutionaries were as much show-offs as anything,” Chava continued. Rose wondered how she could concentrate on politics when her fingers felt so delicious pressing into her skin. “But now, if everybody feels this way, how can the bosses stop it? Wouldn’t it be great if there was a revolution all over the world at once?”
Rose sighed. How come they could talk freely about revolution but not about how getting her hair brushed excited her, how she would rather have grabbed Chava’s wrist and pulled her close? Rose answered in the language Chava was speaking, the language her family expected to hear coming from their room, if they happened to be listening.
“I don’t know—it’s not so long since the revolution in Russia was crushed, don’t forget,” Rose said. “And if it started up again, all over the world, it might be very frightening, more than you realize.”
“It would be a great opportunity, an amazing time. Think how lucky we would be to be there when everything changed!”
“Ow! Be careful with that brush.”
“I’m sorry.” Chava bent close to Rose’s ear and whispered, “Sweetheart.”
By then Rose was annoyed. “So what would happen in your great revolution? The old bosses get thrown out and then there would be new bosses.”
“Just because your papa says that every time I talk about socialism, doesn’t mean it’s true. Suppose the workers ran things? Suppose you and I got to run a committee?”
“At seventeen they’re going to make you a big American committee lady? Who have you been talking to? Emma Goldman invites you over for dinner?”
“You don’t understand. I heard at the league Pauline Newman’s going to run for office with the Socialist Party.”
“That’s ridiculous. What man would vote for a woman? Give me that hairbrush.”
“You don’t understand.” Chava sat hard on the corner of the bed.
“Don’t keep telling me I don’t understand. Just because you always have big ideas and talk strike with Lena Reznikoff and Rose Schneiderman, doesn’t mean you know everything.” Rose could tell Chava was feeling sorry for herself from the way she stuck out her lip while looking at the floor, but whether it was because Rose didn’t have the same passion for revolution or had taken away the hairbrush was hard to determine. Seeing Chava pout made Rose soften a little. Chava was so earnest, so dedicated.
“Well, I know more than you.”
“That’s not fair.” Rose unsoftened, banged the hairbrush on the bureau and started to braid her hair up again.
“Rose, I’m just teasing you.”
“Well, I’m tired of you teasing, and I’m tired of talking about revolutions that aren’t going to happen and I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Come, don’t be upset with me.” Chava used her softest pleading voice. “Tell me what would cheer you up.”
Rose stopped and considered Chava for a minute, finishing the second braid. All these difficult nights, where they had to sew their love for each other into hidden pockets in their flesh, as if they were still greenhorns in danger of being robbed on the way. On the way to where?
“Poetry,” she was surprised to hear herself say. “Poetry would cheer me up.”
“Poetry? Like Pushkin, you want poetry?”
“Well, you know everything, you have all kinds of words, you could have a little poetry for me.” Rose sat beside Chava, taking her hand.
“Poetry!” Chava cleared her throat and thumped her free fist against her chest. “All right then, Russian poetry.”
The eagles fly over foreign cities
that were our homes.
Little poppies on the steppes are in bloom.
My heart is the mother country,
and your eyes are the stories of my people.
Come close and look upon me,
that I may read my own history.
Chava stopped, startled with herself. And then threw her head back. Seventeen and proud. “That wasn’t so bad!”
“If you do say so yourself. But go ahead, write it down.” Rose gave her a little push.
“See, you liked it.” Chava looked over at the closed door. “But really, you know I feel that way about you,” she whispered.
“Sha,” Rose said, then raised her voice, focusing somewhere over Chava’s head. “I have to get ready for bed.”
“But Rose—,” Chava began to whine. Rose could see that she was puzzling her. I puzzle myself sometimes, she thought. When I’m not too tired, when no one is in the house, it’s easier to respond. But on nights like this it’s hard to admit we kiss, stifle cries while our fingers go to each other’s nipples under our sleeping gowns. I know I hurt Chava when I turned away. I didn’t want to hurt her but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Chava put her head in her hands as Rose went out the door to the toilet. When she got back, she found Chava at the kitchen tap, letting the rusty water overflow their washstand pitcher, watching the swirl go down the drain. Chava jumped when she felt Rose’s hand on her back.
“Come read to me a little in bed, poet,” Rose tried to speak calmly and quietly, as if this was the normal way cousins spoke to each other. Chava sensed the way Rose was relaxing towards her, and smiled. Leon coughed in his sleep or his awareness, while Aaron continued to snore.
Chava took the pitcher into their bedroom and Rose closed the door carefully. Then Chava found something very old fashioned to read and Rose lay on her stomach, smoothing the wrinkles in Chava’s nightgown.
T
HOSE GIRLS
, “ Isadore said, a few nights later.
“What is it, Isadore?” Bina was stitching, sitting by the air shaft, trying to extract breathable air from four stories of decomposing garbage. It was early still, 8:30 on a July night. The last bit of light made shadow patterns down the shaft. Sometimes she pretended it wasn’t piecework, but just a little something she did when she felt like it, for treat money, to help out Ephraim. He insisted it was still hard going, getting his shop to operate at a profit. She knew he underpaid the greenhorns he found at the ferry docks. She sighed. What had Isadore asked her? “What about the girls?”
“They’re getting too close.”
“Too close!” She looked at the dust filtering through the air shaft and shook her head. “Maybe you’d like to buy us all an apartment building?”
“That’s not what I mean. Don’t you notice how they are together? How Rose sighs when Chava reports about Emma Goldman’s speeches? How Chava spoils Rose, gives her the best food from her plate? One night I think I heard them kissing.”
“Kissing? Iz, really.”
“Please, it’s enough they call me Iz uptown. You don’t have to use that silly nickname too.”
“Excuse me, Isadore.”
“All right,” he cleared his throat, folding his newspaper carefully. “So, you were going to say?”
“Say? Oh, the girls. You know, in the bathhouses of Russia girls kissed each other all the time. Better they should try it out first on each other than some dance hall Casanova. It’s their energetic time of life, and we should be grateful they have any energy left at the end of their day.”
“All right, all right, you’re the mama. What do I know about girls? Just what I read in this new Bintel Brief advice section Mr. Cahan started in the
Forward
.” He put the paper on the table and tapped it for emphasis. “Sometimes I think I don’t know anything about boys either, the way Saul and Ephraim turned out.”
“They’re not so bad. We just have to keep praying for Saul, that he should be careful. But since he went to organize over in Austria, I think he’ll be all right. And Ephraim—now he’s an American boy, your Harry. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“A bum is a bum. I don’t like the way he smart talks everyone. I want us to do well here, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like his get-rich-quick schemes.”
“You didn’t have a few schemes once? Listen to you, Mr. Always-Upright. He’ll be okay. By me, it’s Aaron you should worry about.”
“Just because he studies to take the policeman’s exam? What a country, that a Jewish boy could join the police.”
“You think the Irish of New York are better than the Russians in Odessa?” She stared at him. The easygoing, liberal watchmaker she married had disappeared—or been covered over, like a tenement wall with layer after layer of wallpaper. This new pattern was very plain, picked out by someone trying to piece together many different people’s tastes, not following their own heart. She inhaled and took up her needle.
“That’s the trouble with you, Bina, your nose is so much in that sewing. I wanted something else for him too, but I have to accept his decision. There are no pogroms in America. To be a policeman is honest, steady work. A living, even.”
“But there are strikes. It could happen that he would have to shoot at his friends—or worse, God forbid, his own sister.”
“Strikes! You’re all the time shushing anyone who talks about the workers or revolution at your table, now you’re going to let Rose go out on strike? You wouldn’t let my baby walk a picket line?” He went over to her and lifted her chin from the sewing, trying to joke.
She exhaled, attempting to cover her amusement. “Rose isn’t going out on any strike. Not now, but we won’t always be able to forbid her. I’m just saying, what if?”
“What if? What if we got some sleep tonight, what if that, huh, missus?”
“It’s early, Iz. I need to finish this.”
“Again with the Iz?”
“All right, all right. But don’t you let your drinking friends call you Iz?”
“It’s not the same. In my house I want to be treated like a person, with respect.”