The Family(16)

At seven o’ clock, she reheats a casserole that Sofia’s mamma brought over on Thursday. The smell of tomato and cheese and the warmth of the oven lures her own mamma out from where she has been hiding in the deep folds of her favorite armchair. “It smells wonderful in here,” she says.

Antonia is piling bread slices in a bowl but she stops to turn around and kiss her mother on the cheek. “Sofia’s mamma brought it,” she says.

“She’s too good to us,” says Lina.

“She makes extra,” says Antonia. Here, honey, Rosa says, at least twice a week. Take this one to your mamma. Careful, it’s heavy. Her mother will not call Rosa to thank her. Antonia remembers when Rosa and Lina were close, closer than her and Sofia. The rainfall of their voices together in a different room. How warm the world used to feel. “It’ll be ready in two minutes.”

“Are you excited for school tomorrow?” asks her mother.

Antonia is surprised that her mother remembers she is starting school. “A little,” she says. And then, “I’m nervous, I think.”

“You’re going to do fine,” says her mother.

“You think so?” She is both desperate for her mother’s reassurance and not at all convinced by it. There is an exposed, pulsing vein in the body of their relationship that reminds Antonia you have to take care of her. She was made by her mother and she is also made, again and again, by herself.

“Don’t speak to anyone with slicked-back hair,” says Lina, before melting backward through the doorframe. Family men, she means. That telltale swoosh up and back away from the temples. Antonia leans over the open oven door to check on dinner. The heat hits her like a fist.



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The next day, Sofia and Antonia get a ride to their new school in one of Joey’s cars. Antonia does not tell Lina. They are silent on the five-minute ride and once they arrive, they both stand, staring, at the monolithic gray building in front of them. Students stream in and out of the brass double doors. Sofia and Antonia stand close enough that they could be holding hands. On their way up the steps they are jostled by someone they assume is an adult man—he’s bearded!—but who they realize is a student, like they are.

Sofia and Antonia are quickly separated by the crowds in the gymnasium where they register. “Russo” is a different line entirely than “Colicchio.” The big room echoes with the screeches of teenagers, the rumble of the pecking order, the shuffle of files on the folding tables where maudlin administrators hand out typewritten schedules to each of the students in turn.

Antonia scratches her thumbnail against the cuticle of her pointer finger until she feels skin begin to peel away from her fingertip. Her own breathing echoes in her head. The dress she chose feels too tight and too short and too childish. She watches the room move around her and tries not to look like she might panic.

Sofia is just as nervous, but takes out a lipstick her mamma disapproves of and applies it, using a sliver of mirror she keeps in her bag. In the mirror, she looks like she’s playing dress-up: a child’s face with a darkened adult mouth.

“That’s a sweet color,” says the girl standing behind Sofia. Sofia turns and smiles. She offers her lipstick. The line keeps moving and someone has to say, “It’s your turn,” to Sofia. “I’m Sofia Colicchio,” she says, as she steps forward to get her schedule. The woman who hands it to her looks bored and gray, like the building itself.

The girl Sofia shared her lipstick with is in her homeroom. Sofia learns her name is Peggy. Peggy has three friends named Alice, Margaret, and Donna. They eat lunch together, in a cafeteria that smells like old rubber and old grease, and Sofia cranes her neck for Antonia before they sit down, but does not see her.

At lunch, no one asks Sofia about her family. No one asks her about her religion. No one tells her she has responsibilities, or tells her how she is different from these girls. Instead, they ask which boys she thinks are cute. They ask which classes she likes. They eat their carrot sticks and throw their soggy chicken into the trash and no one tells them not to. They hitch their skirts up another half-inch and tighten their belts in the bathroom mirror and toss their hair.

But Sofia aches for Antonia until the final school bell.

In the car on the way home, Antonia tells Sofia, like she is bursting with it, that she found her way to each of her classes without being late for any of them. That she didn’t trip or rip her dress or drop her books in the hall; that she got her locker open on the first try. Antonia tells Sofia about the library, where there are thousands, “Thousands, Sof,” of books stacked high on metal shelves that anyone, “Anyone!” can read. The freedom of settling in to a chair and realizing no one is looking at her. On Antonia’s first day of high school, she was anonymous, and she was filled with hope that there was a place for her in the world after all.

Antonia does not tell Sofia that she spent her lunch in that library, skipping the cafeteria hubbub in exchange for a growling stomach and a stack of books, Austen and Whitman. That she started like a frightened deer every time anyone said her name.

And Sofia does not tell Antonia that she missed her. In her recounting of the day there is only dark lipstick and smooth stockings. The admiring glance of a senior boy. The bulletproof armor of a group of girls laughing.



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