The Family(14)

“Tonia, Tonia, you have to come,” she screeches before the door is even all the way open. Antonia is halfway out of her school uniform. Her apartment smells like unwashed hair, like ghosts.

In Sofia’s living room, Sofia and Antonia crowd around the baby, Frankie, and pet the down on her head, examine her fingers and toes. And it is not an exact trade, but both of the girls can feel the world shifting: someone taken from their life, and someone given.

“Mamma,” asks Sofia, “where did she come from?”

Rosa gestures toward her deflating belly. “She lived in here,” she says. “Remember? You could see her moving.”

Sofia and Antonia look at Rosa, and they look at Frankie. They look back and forth. “But, Mamma,” says Sofia, finally, “how did she get in there?”

“And how,” asks Antonia, “did she get out?”

Rosa sighs. “You’ll learn when you’re married,” she says. “And until then, you have to be careful.” Her answer is not enough for Sofia and Antonia, who make a speechless pact to get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.



* * *



—

It is hours before Rosa rises from the couch and puts sleeping Frankie into the small crib that lives in the spare bedroom in their apartment. Sofia peeks around the corner of the halfway shut door. She tries to imagine that Frankie will live with them forever.

Rosa ventures into the kitchen. It smells like her mamma—soap and rising yeast, rose from her perfume. She finds fresh loaves of bread and a full fridge. She presses a loaf of Nonna’s bread and a covered casserole dish into Antonia’s hands, and Antonia reluctantly pads down the stairs and back to her own apartment.

Later that night, so late that the deepest secrets can be revealed and the darkness will keep them, Rosa sits on the couch to feed Frankie and weeps. In gratitude, for the child in her arms. In exhaustion, for the work she has done to get the child there. And in a pure, clean sadness, for last time Rosa nursed a child on this couch, Lina was there to help her.



* * *



—

In the weeks that follow, Antonia spends every moment she can at the Colicchio apartment. She learns to bathe Frankie, to change and pin her diaper, to rock her. Sofia is more wary, a little cautious about this new creature who commands all the attention in the room. She is torn between protecting her and competing with her. But Sofia, too, falls for Frankie. She learns to make Frankie laugh.

Sometimes Antonia pretends the baby is hers, and she is older, and she lives in a clean glass-walled house next to the sea, and there is always a fire lit and there is music playing from somewhere. She and Sofia and the baby dance and sway and celebrate. They listen to the waves crashing. She thinks maybe she won’t miss her parents so much, when she is older, when she is a mamma herself. She thinks maybe having a baby will divide her life into before and after, will push her past this sad chapter. For while Sofia’s family treats her like one of their own, Antonia still feels a jagged tear in the fabric of herself, and she wants, fervently, to be mended.



* * *



—

Children are resilient, and so it is that Antonia appears to be okay relatively soon after her papa’s disappearance, when of course, she is not okay. But the world keeps turning, carrying her along.

All around Sofia and Antonia, the economy rages and sputters like a dying animal. They walk to school via a different route in 1931 and 1932, to avoid the shantytowns that have sprung up in vacant lots, where anything could happen, Rosa says, bouncing Frankie on her hip, handing Sofia a sandwich to take to school. Mamma, nothing will happen, Sofia says, defiant at nine years old, and fearless, and cocooned in certainty that her family will always take care of her, that she will always take care of herself. Antonia at nine years old has a home that echoes when she speaks. The graveyard of their living room, the empty third chair. Anything could happen, Sof, she says, tugging on Sofia’s hand. Come on.

Sofia and Antonia learn new words. Stock market, breadline. Unemployment. Sofia’s father is busier than ever. He has new men working for him. He has less time to tell Sofia about his day, but he sneaks into her bedroom when he gets home with a caramel or a lemon drop and whispers, don’t tell your mamma. Sofia’s mother makes Sunday dinners big enough to feed whole countries and sends everyone home with packages of leftovers. Sofia and Antonia sit and watch as Rosa and Joey make their rounds, talking to the men Joey has hired and their wives, to Rosa’s parents when they come, to Rosa’s brothers and sisters. There are no more Fianzos at dinner. No more Uncle Tommy, no more Uncle Billy. Thankfully, no more Fianzo children, whose thick, pinching fingers had always been the bane of Sunday. Sofia and Antonia balance Frankie between them on two chairs squeezed next to one another and feed her green beans and torn chunks of bread. They make faces when no one is looking. They play tic-tac-toe on napkins.

Sometimes, especially as they turn ten, and eleven, Sofia leaves Frankie with Antonia and ventures into the clumps of adults strewn about the rooms of her home. She reads the newspaper over men’s shoulders and imitates their disdainful sighs about the economy, and listens to their worries that Roosevelt will be no better than Hoover, and their jokes that a new Prohibition would make the Family rich again. They say, Big Joe, this your girl? You’ll have your hands full with this one. She wends her way into conspiratorial hives of women, who talk about hair salons and grocers as a flimsy shield for what they really want to know about one another. The women whisper their future families into being. Sofia breathes in their perfume. They think she is precocious, fearless, a little uncouth. Soon she is shooed back to Antonia, where she will whisper, that one’s pregnant, over Frankie’s head. Those want to move to the country, but they need savings. One week, she comes back with the gleaned details of sex itself, her face alight with shock and excitement. Antonia is horrified to learn about her body’s permeability. Adulthood, she worries, will make her feel no more solid than she does now. Antonia is happier with Frankie, where anything can be made up and believed and the stakes are not so high. Where she doesn’t have to see how many other adults are moving through the world with so much more force and presence than her own mamma.