Sadie turned twenty a few weeks after Rose's wedding, and she felt as if she should be older. She should be twenty-three, at least. Gigi threw her a party, because she could never resist the opportunity to make people happy, and guests spilled in and out of the apartment for hours, eating and drinking and talking and dancing if there was room. The party started in the late afternoon, with drinks and light refreshments, moving on to real food around dinnertime. Addy and Marianna brought down a pot of spaghetti and meatballs in tomato sauce, like they had for Sadie's welcome-to-the-neighborhood party, Carroll appeared with his arms full of French baguettes and cheese, and Victor and his nice young man brought strawberries and chocolates and tiny pastries packed in a white baker's box. Frederika, to Sadie's great surprise, baked a cake, and Alistair brought a pineapple upside-down cake. Sadie took one look at it and almost fell over laughing, then threw her arms around him, kissed him on the mouth, and told him she loved him.

At seven, half the guests (and the hostess) vanished for the evening's performance at the Winter Theater, and after a while, almost everyone who was left followed to watch. Victor's nice young man had to bow out, and Marianna wanted to work, but everyone else trooped down the street in a cheerful crowd to the theater.

( Sadie had invited Leo for as much of the festivities as he wanted to attend )

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Two weeks later, Sadie boarded a train with her bridesmaid dress and her new bridesmaid shoes in a suitcase and her old winter coat with its new fur collar (an early birthday present from Gigi) around her shoulders, and she went back home for Rose's wedding.

The weather was cold and damp and windy, as if Mother Nature was threatening snow, and the trees along the train tracks were still bare. It seemed like a terrible, inhospitable month to get married, and Sadie wondered again if Rose and Mr Rockland - she'd have to start thinking of him as Adam now - needed to get married in a hurry, to do it now. They hadn't even known each other that long.

( But then, her parents had only known each other eight months before they got married )

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Alistair pulled his fingers away, wiped them on her thigh, and kissed her lightly. "I wasn't sure I could do that," he said quietly.

“You never have before,” she said. She'd talked to Gigi about sex, and that was one of the things she'd suggested, that Alistair use his fingers if he couldn't get her off any other way, but Sadie had been too embarrassed to mention it to him. She guessed that meant she wasn't quite as modern a woman as she'd thought.

But it turned out not to matter, since Alistair had taken matters into his own hands. Or fingers, as it were.

( I should have, shouldn't I. )

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The new year brought some pleasant surprises - Carroll got a gallery show and decided to hang some of his naked photos, including the one of Sadie. Victor met a nice boy ("A lapsed Protestant," he said, "bur we do have some things in common"). Roman decided he'd rather direct an all-female Hamlet than write one, and cast Gigi in the lead. Gigi took up a collection and used the money people gave her to pay off the balance of Sadie's sewing machine. Marianna's husband came home ("She's married?" Sadie demanded of Gigi, when she heard, and Gigi just shrugged and said "He's in the merchant marine") and Addy took to moping around because she couldn't use Marianna's studio to paint. Leo asked Sadie out to a movie, a Sunday matinee.

And Rose got engaged.

Sadie couldn't meet her and Ida for weekday lunches any more, now that she worked in Brooklyn, but she would meet them occasionally for dinner during the week, or lunch on Sundays. (More than once she'd shown up a little hungover and on very little sleep, but the twins had finally stopped commenting on her social life.) Rose dropped the news at dinner, and even though Sadie felt more and more removed from them, and they no doubt felt more and more removed from her, she was still excited for Rose, because this was what Rose wanted.

"Will you be in the wedding?" Rose asked. "I know we don't talk much any more, but I wouldn't have met Adam if I hadn't come to New York with you. All my sisters will be bridesmaids, of course - "

"And maid of honor," Ida interrupted.

"I'll ask Henny too. That's five bridesmaids. Adam has a sister, that's six. We're getting married back home," she told Sadie, "in March."

"March?" Sadie repeated. That was just a month and a half. She squinted at Rose, wondering if she and Mr Rockland were getting married in a hurry because they had to. They hadn't known each other that long. Although Sadie's Aunt Minnie told her once that her parents had only known each other five months when they got engaged, and they were married two months later. And Sadie knew they hadn't had to rush into it, because Henry didn't show up for almost a year.

"Adam wants to marry me as soon as possible." It was only because Sadie had known Rose since they were five that she could tell the smugness was unintentional.

Now Sadie wondered if Adam was in a hurry to marry so he could start sleeping with his girl sooner rather than later. But that was unfair - she didn't know him and it was just as possible that he was so smitten that he wanted to make Rose his wife almost immediately.

She was being ungenerous, and she was genuinely happy for Rose. But March? Could she make a bridesmaid's dress in time?

And she'd have to see her parents.

"You don't want to see them?" Alistair asked a couple of nights later. Sadie had baked a chicken for dinner, but when Gigi didn't come home to eat - she was rehearsing Hamlet - Sadie took some of the leftovers upstairs.

"I don't think they want to see me. They don't approve of anything I've done."

"And yet you still did it."

"I wanted to. I don't want to be like Rose - I want more for myself than just to get married and make a household for my husband." She sighed. "It's still hard. They're my parents. I want to think I have their support."

They were both silent. Sadie was sitting on the bed watching Alistair eat, and he'd cleared off a space on his desk so he could put the plate down. He didn't seem to care that she was watching him.

"Well," she finally said, "what's the worst thing that can happen? They'll tell me I'm breaking my grandmother's heart. My mother will remind me that she and my father want grandchildren. They'll tell me they worry about me. They'll try and give me guilt. But they can't make me stay."

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She was too stunned, the angle was too awkward - he had a good seven or eight inches on her - and they were both too drunk for it to be a good kiss, but when they separated, Sadie still laughing a little, this time in surprise, it hung between them. She found herself remembering the photo hanging inside Gigi's closet again.

And then Victor splashed into the fountain, accidentally elbowing Sadie out of the way, and the spell broke.

Soon they were all standing in the fountain, kicking and splashing and laughing and stumbling into each other. Sadie couldn't remember the last time she'd had so much fun, at least not since the night Carroll drove them out to the beach and they went swimming in their underwear. All her best nights revolved around water, didn't they. What were they going to do when winter finally arrived?

Go out into the snow, obviously.

( The sky was starting to lighten )

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In the middle of the next week, Sadie did something she had never done, either for school or work – she called in sick. And armed with Mr Roskoff's letter and her notebook of designs (both proposed and actually executed), she took the subway to Flatbush, in Brooklyn, to meet Mr Roskoff's cousin the seamstress.

The cousin's name was Irene Speigel. She was a middle-aged woman with a salt-and-pepper middle-aged woman's bob, and she wore a smock over her dress while she worked. She had a small shop that nevertheless managed to fit three assistants and several dressmaker's dummies, and she took Sadie into her tiny cramped office to offer tea and talk.

( Izzy told me about you, Irene said. )

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Carroll and Victor came over early and wrestled the dining room table out the back door and down the stairs to the yard, where Gigi covered it with a yellow tablecloth with a red and blue geometric print and then set out plates and silverware and glasses. Marianna and Addy showed up just before eight bearing a pot of spaghetti and red sauce.

"Marianna made it," Addy explained. "Be careful - it stains."

Gigi fetched a ladle and left the pot on the table with the lid on. Sadie imagined that she didn't want to wrestle it up into the kitchen and hoped the lid would keep the spaghetti hot. They'd already put out tiny rounds of bread along with olives and celery and cheese. Marianna took some cheese and a handful of olives, welcomed Sadie to the neighborhood, and went back to her own apartment.

The delivery man from the deli had arrived at seven-thirty, exactly on time, and Gigi had left the platter in the kitchen, to be served at nine like the invitations said. There were bottles of bathtub gin and bootleg whiskey hiding in her closet and bottles of Coca-Cola and orange juice in the icebox with the tiny pastries and dessert cheese. Sadie had been told in no uncertain terms to stop putting things out and sit down and let herself be the guest of honor, but she was too well conditioned to let someone else set up a party. Now she moved the flowers around on the table and ignored Victor when he laughed at her.

( Gigi fetched the drinks )

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"You're doing what?" Ida demanded, after Sadie got back to the residential hotel and told her about Gigi's apartment. "You can't do that!"

"You sound like Rose," Sadie said. "Why not? I have a job, I'm making my own money, I've seen the place, I met some of the neighbors, I like Gigi and she likes me, and I miss having my own kitchen. You and Rose aren't going to find an apartment with me."

"How do you know? You never asked."

( Do you want to find an apartment together? )

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So Sadie told her. Gigi leaned into the window of the cab and kissed Sadie on the cheek before stepping back and letting the cabbie drive away.

Sadie had been in her room just long enough to take off her hat and shoes and put on her slippers when there was a knock on the door. She opened it to reveal Rose and Ida, both in their dressing-gowns, looking annoyed. Their nightclothes were different, but their identical scowls made them look more like twins than anything else.

“Where did you go?” Ida demanded. “Why weren't you at dinner? We have news!”

( I met a friend, )

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Was she ready to live on her own? She didn't know. But she also didn't think it was a particularly pertinent question, since Gigi hadn't asked her to move in and so far she didn't have to. She mentioned it casually to Ida and Rose, and both of them were scandalized that she'd even think it.

"Men will get the wrong idea!" Rose insisted.

"You'll have to cook for yourself," Ida added. She had adjusted remarkably quickly to having someone else make all her meals, and after years of helping her mother and her sisters in the kitchen, she was more than happy to let someone else do it.

( But neither of those things really bothered Sadie. )

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note: the pepper pot was a real place. i found a menu from 1929.