The Family(17)
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On Sunday after her first week of high school it occurs to Sofia that she should not have to go to church if she does not want to, and like a flashbulb has blinded her she cannot see anything else. When she tells her parents this over breakfast, her mother crosses herself and Sofia says, “You’re just being dramatic, Mamma,” and Frankie opens her mouth in a sharp little oh. Her father does not even respond until Sofia says, “Did you hear me, Papa, I said I am not going,” and then he raises one eyebrow and looks at her, his gaze inscrutable, and says, “Eat your breakfast.”
Sofia does not know it, but when her father is working and wants to remind someone a debt is owed, he calls and asks to take them out to lunch and does not mention the debt even once. Joey, like his daughter, has a little murky blood running through his veins—he relishes the nervous squirm of his indebted lunch dates. The terrified other man—a restaurateur, the owner of a downtown cinema, the manager at a bar—usually vacillates between a tentative, airy calm and an almost palpable panic. I swear, it’s coming, they say. Please, I just need a little more time. Joey finishes his food. He asks about the other man’s wife and children. He mentions their names. He smiles. He walks his lunch companion home, and says, I’ll see you soon.
When confronted with the steely, stubborn, wall of will that has been built around the skin and bones of his daughter, Joey tries to channel the version of himself who, without speaking a single word, can leave a grown man straining not to wet himself. He searches for his cache of calm facial muscles, subtle hand gestures, implacable and aloof expressions.
Joey Colicchio can load a revolver in six seconds. His wife will still go down on him after sixteen years of marriage. He is the most powerful man in his jagged section of Brooklyn.
But his fourteen-year-old daughter finds him irrelevant and unimpressive. “You can’t make me,” she says casually, as he gestures furiously toward the front door, where the rest of the family waits. Joey, more than most fathers, is torn between acquiescing to the fierce small woman in front of him and a grand show of machismo—I’ll show you what I can and can’t make you do, he imagines saying. But he tries not to bring his work home with him.
Frankie is small and solemn as they leave, six years old and lost without Sofia. I want to stay too, she declares, eyes wide. Sofia feels a small tug at the string between her heart and her gut, asking if she should just go, sit in the pew, kneel with everyone else, spend five minutes running her tongue over the roof of her mouth to clear the doughy remains of the host. It wouldn’t be so bad, and Frankie doesn’t understand why Sofia is refusing to do this easy thing, this thing she does every week. The reflection of herself in Frankie’s eyes makes Sofia feel petty and silly, stubborn and strange. Incapable of doing the regular things everyone else does. But Sofia sets her jaw, refuses to leave, watches Frankie trudge down the hall, notices her papa paint a slow line across her mamma’s back with his hand as the three of them walk away. She is alone; she is elated; there is an unfamiliar empty air in the apartment.
That day for the first time Sofia sits at home as Sunday morning ripens. She watches passersby through the living room window and wonders how many people have so much time on Sunday, which in her family has always been marked by rushing: to church, home for dinner, into bed before it’s too late to get a good night’s rest before Monday. Her apartment feels huge. She wanders into the kitchen, carelessly sliding her hands along countertops and over the backs of chairs. She opens the fridge; dips her finger into the ragu waiting in a bowl for Sunday supper; opens a white paper bakery box and chips a corner off a jam-filled cookie. The sugar blooms against her tongue; it makes her eyes water.
Sofia looks at the apartment where she’s lived all her life with new eyes: high school eyes, eyes that have spent the past week in a world inaccessible to her family. Sofia is realizing how very alone she has been for most of her life. Aside from Antonia, Sofia has not been immersed in schoolyard dynamics; she has never been the center of a buzzing crowd of children. Sofia feels like she has come up for air, emerged into sunlight, washed a layer of dirt away. She has unearthed, at the center of her person, a little sprouting seed of something that feels like anger, like jealousy. It is looking at her father, at his job, at the structure within which Sofia has been raised, with new suspicion. What will I do?
Who, Sofia Colicchio wonders, alone in her apartment, will I be?
Sofia cannot picture herself as an adult. She knows she will get married and have children. She cannot remember learning that information, but she knows it is true. Marriage is like clothing one must pull on before leaving the house; to be without it is to walk naked through the streets.
Down the block there is a woman who lives alone. She came from Sicily many years ago to escape a horror, some vague thing no one will say, but everyone’s parents understand, yes, us too, and it always has something to do with hunger, with being forgotten. She came with one ragged leather suitcase full of herbs, cards that tell the future, and a wooden box, locked shut. It is rumored that women having babies can call her and she will help them burn the cord and dim the lights and make poultices of herbs and flowers and show the mothers how to angle their nipples to feed. It is rumored that if she makes eye contact with you no one will ever fall in love with you. It is known that she can curse you with a word or two, and just like that, your future will be altered, shadowed, darkened. Sofia knows she is a witch, and she and Antonia walk the long way around the unassuming building where the shades are always drawn across the face of the attic apartment. They do this out of habit—because it is what they have done since they were six, walking home from school—but even teenage Sofia is filled with a cold fear, a heart-fluttering kind of panic, when she imagines the witch woman, who is only ever spotted on her way to the grocers, wild hair escaping her hat, gnarled fingers curled around her shopping bags like pea tendrils, reaching until they find something to squeeze. No one looks at her, and the idea of this terrifies Sofia. How empty, to walk through the world under no one’s gaze. How impossible, to never be seen. How could anything grow like that.