Free There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister's Husband, and He Hanged Himself by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Page B

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Milgrom
    A girl is sewing herself a dress for the first time. She has bought three yards of cheap gingham (barely more than a ruble per yard), but it’s surprisingly pretty, black with bright circles, like a nighttime carnival.
    This girl is a penniless college student. She has broken out of her schoolgirl shell, literally so—she managed to make a new skirt out of her old school uniform. The skirt came out messy, crooked, and off-center, but that’s the end of the uniform, anyway.
    Nor did the skirt turn out to be fit for spring. It’s May, the hottest spring in memory, and still there’s nothing to wear.
    So the girl, following the “Sewing Ourselves” page from a women’s magazine spread out before her (chest measurements, front panels), tries to make the dress herself and fails utterly.
    The dress is lost, as are three rubles’ worth of fabric. Her monthly stipend at the college is only twenty-three rubles.
    Here the mom intervenes. Her whole life, Mom relied on a seamstress, but then difficult times befell her; her girl turned eighteen, and she stopped receiving child support.
    The seamstress is out, and Mom considers what to do, except here’s the problem: there’s no money.
    There’s no money, the girl is eighteen, it’s a hot May (the kind you feel maybe once every hundred years), and there are exams to take. But her daughter can’t go outside. She’s lying behind the wardrobe—that’s where her cot is—weeping and moaning like a puppy.
    So Mom calls her wise older friend, Regina, a Polish Jewess from the clan of the Moscow wives (that is to say, the new wives) of the Third International. In the thirties this whole communist contingent left the countries where it lived underground, came to the USSR via mountains and seas, remarried in Moscow, and then went up to heaven from their labor camps. Regina had served her time in Karaganda, was rehabilitated after the war, got back her old apartment on Gorky Street. The girl’s mother, who’d also seen some things in her time, latched onto her to learn about life. Regina was a good friend of the girl’s mother’s mother, who has also been serving her time and is expected to return this spring.
    Regina always dresses with Warsaw chic. She’s sixty now and still has suitors, and she listens with sympathy to the confused mother of the girl.
    Regina has a houseworker named Riva Milgrom. Regina is a European lady; she has soft white hands like an empress, and her house is always in order, as Milgrom makes sure.
    That’s what she’s called: Milgrom—her last name, according to the old Party habit. Milgrom has a Singer sewing machine. The girl walks with the bundle of material through the May heat in her brown wool skirt. We know where the skirt came from—the mother had a dress she wore down until the underarms had sweat stains in the form of half-moons, at which point the dress was bequeathed to the girl, who wore it to school but could never raise her hand in class, her elbows clinging to her sides like a soldier’s; it was hell. Finally the top with the sweat stains was cut off, and though the mother protested that it could still become a nice vest, the girl ran out of the apartment and threw it down the trash chute. Still the crooked skirt remained, and that’s the skirt she’s wearing as she walks clumsily through the heat ofMay.
    Over the skirt, to cover the tear, which was hemmed crookedly with the wrong thread—the hands sewing them were the wrong hands—the girl wears her mother’s blouse, which also has sweat stains at the pits, so, again, elbows at her sides like a soldier’s.
    The girl walks like a draftee, head down, watching her green winter shoes with their thick soles, her elbows at her sides. She passes by Patriarch Ponds; there’s a gentle May smell in the air; young men are marching by, observing proud young girls in their new summer dresses.
    Milgrom meets her little customer in her room, which is high up, right beneath