ten

Later that week Sadie learned that Gigi paid someone once a week to come and clean the apartment, to sweep and dust and scrub the toilet and wipe down the stove and the icebox and polish the silver. Sadie thought that was a waste of money and said that she was more than happy to do it, but Gigi merely shrugged and said she could afford it and it freed up her and Sadie's time and helped someone else make a living, so why shouldn't she hire a cleaner? Sadie opted not to mention it to her parents when she wrote home.

She'd been writing regularly, to her parents and her sister and brother and both her grandmothers, and occasionally to her Aunt Molly and Uncle Samuel, her father's older brother and his wife, or to her cousins. She didn't necessarily expect her cousins to write her back every time - they were busy people with their own lives - nor did she expect to hear a lot back from her aunts and uncles or her grandmothers. (She loved her bubbes but her father's mother especially didn't write in English, and her handwriting was difficult to decipher and she couldn't always get someone to be her secretary.) But ever since telling her parents that she was moving out of the residential hotel and into an apartment with another girl - a stranger they didn't know, and a shiksa at that - she hadn't heard from them at all. She sent them Gigi's telephone number, they had her new address, and... nothing. She'd heard from her sister Edith, a short letter asking what it was like having her own apartment and running her own life, but other than that, no one had bothered.

( Sadie decided that was her parents' way of showing their disapproval )

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