First that sweatshop for a month, and then another one, this time with dresses, and another, jacket linings again, America was the land of a million jackets and they all had linings, and Pauline and Esther always stayed together at the pig market to find work for two, and they got work this way for the first year.

It was so exciting to be in America they didn’t mind the long hours and tedious work for such small money. They did mind being cheated all the time by the contractors, but they learned their way and tried to find good bosses and sweatshops with a little bit of light and a little bit of air to make the work easier. They shared a rented room on Essex Street, a nicer room than the first one from the cousin who wasn’t really a cousin, in a tenement building filled with girls like them, some other sisters were sharing too, from all over Russia and Poland and the Ukraine and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so they could talk Yiddish and feel at home.

But they both learned English very quickly, which you had to do if you wanted to get ahead and not stay a greenhorn. The Italian girls also had to learn English fast. Sometimes in one of the little sweatshops on Orchard Street they would be working next to Italian girls who didn’t know any English yet and they had no language in common, but still, they understood each other.

After that first year, they had a step up when they found better jobs in a garment factory making shirtwaists, and they could make a little more money to send home to their papa for the boys. There were hundreds of girls all together at tables in these factories but it was a better way to work, at the machines all lined up in open spaces with high ceilings, than all squashed together in somebody’s dark parlor with a screaming baby sick with a fever half the time and dirty clothes and laundry and cooking and people all working on top of one another. And by then the Auerbach sisters had become skilled sleeve setters, a valuable ability, because this was a job not everyone could do quickly without too many mistakes, and they found even better jobs in a better garment factory, the biggest waist company in New York. The biggest waist company in America. The biggest waist company in the world.

“How are we doing?” George asked softly from the doorway.

“Okay. Well, not so okay,” Rebecca whispered, gesturing for him to come over by the bed where Esther lay breathing shallowly. She hadn’t opened her eyes for a long while. “I really think this is it,” Rebecca whispered. George’s shirt of yellow and red taxicabs was incongruously festive in the dim room. The little television on the table in the corner flickered soundlessly, showing images of ugly rotating zircon jewelry. Earlier it had been knives, and before that, coins. Who bought these things? Rebecca had repeatedly offered Esther a bigger television set than this one, but Esther had said what did she need that for, she didn’t watch so much anyway, there was nothing worth watching so much that she needed to see it big. Rebecca ordinarily hated home-shopping mindlessness, and she had no knowledge that Esther watched it either. Probably one of the nursing aides had kept Esther company in the night and had turned it on.