The Family(18)

Sofia also knows that if she needed help, the witch would help her. But she would take something in return. Sofia scans her person and finds nothing she would be willing to part with. But she feels invincible and cannot think of anything that could go wrong. She is on the raging pinnacle of fourteen; she knows nothing about sacrifice.

Sky, earth, someday you will be a mother: these are the constants. Sofia is interested in boys as purveyors of attention. She is interested in them as adventures. There is a tickling, an urgency in her rib cage and tongue when she thinks of kissing one. She can picture exhaling into an open mouth, creating some new breath that lives only between bodies. But she cannot imagine dragging two children across the street, groceries falling off of one shoulder. She cannot imagine being her own mother, whose hair always seems to stay in place, who has mastered the behind-the-scenes coordination necessary for keeping two children and a husband fed and clothed and clean, but who sometimes grips the sink and hunches her shoulders and takes a staggering breath in and out, exhaustion seething in the kitchen air. Her papa looks at her mamma, but is he the only one? Sofia wants to belong to the world.

It is easier for Sofia to imagine being Joey. Her papa strides through the world chest-first. If her mamma is behind the scenes, her papa is the star of the show. He is watched, listened to, talked about. But I wouldn’t do what he does, Sofia tells herself. She knows what he does. There is something about Joey that makes Sofia angry, prone to gnashing her teeth. He is the reason other families cross the street when they see the Colicchios walking. He is the reason no one was allowed to be friends with her at school. It’s best not to ask questions, Rosa has told her. Sofia has a feeling she will have to get smaller as she gets older. Fit herself into tighter spaces.

Sofia is just starting to realize that the freedom of this Sunday morning will shrivel into boredom when she sees Antonia, clad in a red dress with smart black buttons and capped sleeves, walk down the street. Sofia presses both of her palms and her nose to the glass and holds her breath so it will not fog and watches Antonia cross at the corner.

Antonia would have told her if she was going to the hair salon, or the grocery store, or the post office—somewhere routine. And Antonia would have invited her to the cinema, and would have asked for advice if she was going somewhere forbidden and scandalous (midday on a Sunday?) like Central Park, where they are absolutely not allowed to be alone, or Coney Island, where the air is brackish and foreign, and they can watch men shuffling sheepishly in and out of the freak show.

When her family arrives home, Sofia sits patiently as her father, still in his Sunday best, lectures her on the need to participate in the family and follow direction. She nods as her mamma, fighting back tears, says, sometimes, Sofia, you just have to do things you don’t want to do. Sofia weighs this. Do I?

But Sofia is distracted by a deep, manic curiosity for the rest of the day. It trembles her fingers and causes her to kick her right foot against her left heel until she has a bruise. It drags her to the telephone four times and it makes her dial the number for Antonia’s building twice before she hangs up. It chews the pointer fingernail on her left hand to the quick.

Antonia arrives for dinner at five and Sofia manages not to ask her where she has been. Two years ago, Sofia would have asked. She would have pulled Antonia into a closet, sweet-breathed and sticky, and whispered, what, what was it. She would have reached her arms out and tickled Antonia between the ribs until Antonia gave up the secret, until it was splayed out on the floor for both of them to examine. But tonight, Sofia is sure that admitting Antonia has a secret would make it worse. Asking her about it would be like collecting all the power in the room into a small glowing golden orb and placing it into Antonia’s waiting hands, Sofia left to beg at her feet. Sofia spends supper pushing small pieces of eggplant into a circle orbiting her plate. She stays quiet.



* * *



—

In an act of defiance that feels like a rebellion and a homecoming all at once, Antonia has, for the last several months, snuck away on Sunday mornings. She leaves Lina, with her thin cigarettes and her delicate crossed ankles in their browning house shoes, with her stack of books and her trail of things she has forgotten: comb, cooling cup of tea, light sweater, pile of mail, all left to molder where they sit. She leaves Sofia, who is loud and confident and who gives Antonia energy to go on but who also exhausts her. She leaves all of this, and she goes to Sunday morning Mass, eleven o’clock at the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

She tells herself she goes for the smell. It is a combination of old books and incense and vacant air that has been trapped in the cavernous rafters and is doled out to the parishioners breath by sweet breath. It is sharp and toothy pine in the winter and cool metallic stone in the summer and all year long, the distinctly floral scent of relief.

But of course, it is more than the smell. It is the deeply ingrained order, the clearly defined rules. The familiar rise and fall of the kyrie, the round and regular textures of Latin words brushing against her skin, the ritual of kneeling, the rhythmic flicker of small candles at the altar, the whisper of incense. It is the ability, for an hour each week, to trust that someone else is in control.

Antonia settles onto her knees. She crosses herself and her future seems to hover in the rafters of the church. Hi, Papa, she prays. I miss you.

Here, missing is a clear thing. She misses the light in their home, the shuffling of her parents’ feet as they danced together in the living room. She misses looking up and always finding Carlo looking down, the open window of love in his face, the certainty of that. Her papa’s hand on her back as she floats toward sleep.