Spin Cycle by Sue Margolis Page A

looked at her watch. “Look, I hate to walk out just as you’ve had such fantastic news, but I really should be getting back to Sam. Why don’t you come up later after he’s in bed?”
    “No, I can’t. I really must wax my bush tonight. It’s so overgrown that if I leave it any longer I’ll have to take a hedge trimmer to it.”
    Rachel snickered. “You know,” she said, “my mother’s suddenly started waxing her bikini line.”
    “So?”
    “Well, don’t you find it a bit odd that she’s started waxing now? At her age?”
    “What makes you think she’s only just started? She’s probably always done it. She’s just never discussed it with you, that’s all. I mean, for women of our mothers’ generation, depilation is a very intimate, private affair.”
    “Not for my mother,” Rachel said, as she headed toward the door. “Words like
intimate
and
private
have never figured in her vocabulary. Believe me, a woman who has always been perfectly at ease discussing optimum turd texture over the breakfast table cannot possibly have a fear of pubic speaking. Doesn’t make sense. No, there’s something going on. I just know it.”
    “Maybe she’s going on holiday and she’s treated herself to a skimpy bikini.”
    “No, she’d have said something if she were going away.”
    “OK. OK. I’ve got it,” Shelley said, starting to laugh. “Perhaps she’s found herself a boy toy.”
    “As if,” Rachel said with a chuckle.
    * * * * *
    Even from the bottom of the stairs, Rachel could hear Sam’s execrable singing. The atonal racket could curdle milk, she thought, grimacing. She opened the front door, came in and dropped her keys into her bag, which was on the hall table. Then she walked toward Sam’s bedroom and peeked through a crack in the door. He was sitting on the floor in his blue school sweatshirt and gray trousers surrounded by tapes and CDs. The headphones he was wearing were plugged into the ghetto blaster Rachel had bought him for his birthday and he was singing along to the music with all the gusto of a well-oiled Japanese salaryman in a karaoke club. She shook her head. Like most of his mates, Sam had just started getting into music. But whereas his friends were all wearing their parents down by playing the latest chart-topping crap at full volume from the moment they got home from school, Sam was wearing Rachel down by playing Barbra Streisand.
    He knew all her songs by heart. He spent all his pocket money on Barbra CDs, old records and videos of her concerts. He could imitate her gestures and facial expressions, and did his excruciating utmost to reach for those top notes and hold them just like Barbra did. His room was plastered with Barbra posters. Until a few weeks ago, Rachel had thought his mania was nothing more than an irritating, but amusing—if slightly eccentric—stage her son was going through. It was Faye who had arrived to baby-sit, walked into Rachel’s kitchen, come to the end of her usual “This place is so filthy it should come with a tetanus jab” speech and then segued straight into how in her opinion Joe and Greg were turning Sam gay.
    “Mum,” Rachel had laughed, “Joe rented him a video of
Hello, Dolly!
one afternoon, that’s all, and Sam fell in love with Streisand’s voice. Joe thinks the whole thing’s as funny as I do.”
    “Really,” Faye sniffed. “And what about Adam? Does he think it’s funny too?”
    Rachel said nothing as she remembered the faintly concerned Rachel-this-just-isn’t-normal looks Adam gave her whenever Sam disappeared to play his Barbra CDs.
    “He’s fine with it,” Rachel said a tad defensively. “Just like me.”
    Faye merely arched her eyebrows.
    “Look,” Rachel said, “Joe may have his faults, but he would never try to brainwash his own son. For a start, Joe’s been a West Ham supporter all his life, and yet Sam’s turned out to be fanatical about Tottenham. And anyway you can’t
turn
a person gay. They’re born that