* Author : Rebecca Fraimow

* Narrator : Barbara Krasnoff

* Host : Jen R. Albert

* Audio Producer : Peter Wood

*

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PodCastle 448: Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

This story is the sequel to “Further Arguments in Support of Yudah Cohen’s Proposal to Bluma Zilberman,” which originally ran at Diabolical Plots and also ran on PodCastle.

Shaina Rubin Keeps Her Head Under Circumstances Nobody Could Have Expected

by Rebecca Fraimow

People in our neighborhood are always saying what a pity it is that two such fine-looking people as my cousin Bluma and her husband have no children yet. I don’t see that they’re so fine-looking as all that. Still, I’ve often thought that if Bluma had a little bit more business of her own to worry about, she might have less time to waste getting into mine.

It wasn’t even my idea to sneak out to the Yiddish theater, that unlucky night I’m telling you about. It was my friend Gittel who really wanted to go. She’s always saying she’s going to do something wild like run away with an actor, so in fact it was a mitzvah for me to say I would go with her and make sure she didn’t do anything foolish—but you just try explaining good sense like that to anyone in my house, especially my cousin Bluma.

Most of the time my father’s too busy disapproving of my brothers to mind what I do and don’t do, but Bluma’s another story. She’s only three years older than me, but she’s more full of advice than a kugel’s full of noodles. Personally, I think people ought to mind their own affairs. Do I ask where Bluma’s mother disappears to at nights, when most women of her age are snoring in their beds? I certainly don’t, and I don’t want to know the answer, either. When Bluma spent a whole summer going back and forth about who she should marry, and if she should marry, and when and why and where—well, did I say a thing about it? The whole neighborhood had an opinion on that, but you didn’t catch me gossiping one way or the other.

All right, perhaps I expressed one or two opinions to personal friends. But a person is allowed to have personal friends, and certainly a person is allowed to have opinions on a subject like whether or not her cousin is going to marry a rich man and finally move out of the house!

But my cousin Bluma, who thinks she’s so much more sensible than anybody, never does take the really sensible course. One day she turns down two proposals flat, and the next day she swears she’ll never marry anyone. Finally, after taking some time to think it over, she decides that she still won’t have the rich one, but the penniless man is just the one for her.

Now we’ve got the both of them in our house, Bluma and her husband, and they’re always either quarreling or making up to each other. For the person who has to live in the next room, the one is just about as bad as the other. I share a room with Bluma’s mother, and you should see the way her face goes red as she’s pretending she can’t hear. Then you’ve got my father and brothers—they all quarrel with each other even more than Bluma and Yudah. And even that’s discounting Bluma’s mother, my Tante Leah, who’s still so grateful to my father for taking her and Bluma into our household that she’s spent seven straigh...