The Family(20)

It is the first time in her life Lina has done something because she wanted to, and not because someone told her she should. It is the first time she is choosing something and does not care what anyone thinks. If La Vecchia is a street to be crossed, Lina is striding forward without looking left or right.

And without even realizing, like she did when she was a child, Antonia begins to take heed of Lina’s mood, and take up space in their home accordingly. In their apartment a silence descends: the witch and the Catholic girl, eating lasagna.



* * *



—

During their first year in high school Antonia and Sofia spend more time apart than together. It happens slowly and simply, and so by the time they do not walk to school together each morning it feels almost natural.

Antonia takes on hours of studying with the enthusiasm of a thirsty man who finds a clear stream. She is never totally comfortable in the hallway rush, but learns to take solace in the library, in the pages of her textbooks. Antonia studies French and Latin. She reads voraciously. She graphs parabolas and puzzles through the dates of famous battles for American independence. On her way home each day, Antonia quizzes herself. She whispers the quadratic equation. She recites the opening of the Inferno.

In the afternoons she washes Lina’s dishes, the old teacups with the amber stains and the plates with desiccated toast crusts dangling off the edges. She boils pasta or reheats leftovers or brings home containers of soup from the deli and tries to get Lina to sit at the table, to eat something, to ask Antonia how her day was. She leaves each dinner table for her books, and imagines being Antigone, buried with her principles and her god and her unimaginable loss. Or she feels like she is living on the earth, and scooping shovelfuls of black soil down on top of Lina in her tomb. Antonia is Penelope, abandoned by more courageous adventurers. She is Circe, with only the ghosts of things she has missed out on for company. In this way, Antonia manages to inhabit every bitter and angry and passionate thing she has denied herself in her real life, where she is too busy trying to survive to think about how it feels.

At night, when she is close to sleep, Antonia shuts her books, closes her eyes, and misses Carlo. She does this carefully, for a few minutes at a time. Good night, Papa, she whispers.

Sofia finds a group of red-lipped, coiffed-haired older girls who slip notes to one another when the teacher turns around and linger leaning against their lockers between classes. If they know who her family is, they say nothing. It is possible that they do not care. From her new friends, Sofia learns the power of a jutted hip, a manicured nail. She begins to take a different sort of care when she dresses. She dares show up at the dinner table with her proud straight spine and her lips lined and glossy. She begins to notice the eyes of other students at school following her as she walks down the hall, and most of these encounters make her feel taller, more full of red blood and moxie.

And Sofia, armed in bulletproof popularity, moves again, and again, into every new friendship and obsession she can find. And while it is true that people find Sofia Colicchio a little unpredictable (this from her layered and coiffed hallway best friends; this from boys she deigned to go out with, from teachers in whose classes she didn’t live up to her potential), it is also true that she possesses the same addictive magic her father does, so that people cannot help but want to be around her. And while she is not exactly conscious of the fact, it is true that her rotating cast of friends becomes the stuff of clockwork and legend—a regular shuffling, a rhythmic cycle of heartbreak and infatuation. She picks up and falls in love with girl after girl, and drops each of them down just as suddenly. And they line up to be friends with her anyway, because to spend two weeks, or four, or nine, as the object of Sofia’s attention is worth it: to exchange sideways smiles with her, to bask in the laser focus of her sharp dark eyes. Despite the pervasive rumors about her family. Despite the danger that snaps like static in the air around her. Despite the cruelty of Sofia’s wandering affections, the quick way she moves on, the sunlight of her attention slipping under the horizon. To be friends with her is worth it. Oh, it’s worth it.

Of course, it’s worth considering whether it is love or love and the truth is that this has never occurred to Sofia: that for some particularly consuming friendships between teenage girls the line is blurred anyway. And it is fair to say that Sofia in particular falls in and out of love and love with these girls, but she does not name it.

And so Sofia moves again and again, and each time she leaves someone behind she feels a little more like herself. I’m not like that, I’m not like that, I’m not that either. I am made of something else. Always possessed of an inimitable electricity, Sofia begins to wield her power. To test its limits.

Eventually, Antonia mentions to Sofia that she is going to Mass every week, alone. She mentions this offhand, and it is clear she does not care what Sofia thinks the way she used to. Sofia does not ask her why she goes. Antonia hears a rumor that Sofia has let Lucas Fellini, the most boring boy in school, put a hand under her blouse, but dares not confirm it with her, dares not ask her what it was like. Was his hand cold? she wonders. Were you wearing the one with the buttons that stick?

Sofia and Antonia begin to fill the space between themselves with stories about the future. Antonia decides during her first year of high school that she will go to college. She has realized that reading, which has always been an escape from her immediate surroundings, could be an escape from her entire life. She will leave Brooklyn, she will leave the Family forever—not the way her mother did, by retreating into her own skin, but by bursting forth, by achieving something altogether new. And then, Antonia decides, she will meet someone who has never heard of the Family. Her children will never know about it. They will never feel isolated at school; their father will never disappear one day, never to be seen again. Antonia the arctic explorer, the knight on horseback, the safari adventurer, will rescue herself and her future family from the untamed landscape she has been marooned in since Carlo died.