The Family(21)

In Antonia’s daydreams, she buys a house with a wraparound porch. She fills it with children and a husband and Lina comes for holidays and Sofia visits on weekends. No one goes to work. No one talks about the past.

Sofia can sense the sea change that must, must, must be on its way: she will end up on an unpredictable adventure. She will have a life that hasn’t been dreamed yet. She will throw off the constraints of womanhood she can already feel tightening around her future.

It isn’t lost on Sofia that, like Rosa, she is using those same constraints to her advantage, when she can. Sofia learns a lowered eyelid, an imperturbable stare. She lets Lucas Fellini take her out, but of course, the rumor about her unbuttoned blouse, his clammy hand, is untrue.

Sofia does learn, this year, to run her hands over her own body. She stands alone in front of her bedroom mirror and finds a softened place at the center of herself. This must be the thing Rosa tells her to protect. This must be the fragile heart, the thing that makes her breakable. This the cause of wars, the source of life.

It is almost enough.



* * *



—

Antonia and Sofia wave to one another when they pass in the hallways; they sit close together and say oh how are you with detached warmth at Sunday dinner. It is as if their friendship has been put on hold, frozen, and when they are together they both have to time travel to a place where they can speak the same language. They always have to leave something of their present selves behind. Antonia’s plain face reflects the ways Sofia is faking. With her new friends, Sofia never wonders if she needs the new sweater, the perfumed neck. Antonia, with her studiousness and her sensible shoes, makes Sofia feel like a fraud. And where once being with Sofia had made Antonia feel stronger, she now feels gawky and uncomfortable in the edges of Sofia’s light, even, if she is honest, faintly judgmental of Sofia’s new affect. How destabilizing, to question the motives of someone who has always been your compass. How isolating, to wonder if despite your family ties and the friendship promises and oaths of trust you swore, you are alone after all.

Late at night, when the hours seem not to have names anymore, and Antonia’s body is heavy with exhaustion but her mind spins a million miles a minute, she sometimes lays a palm flat against the brick wall that her bedroom and Sofia’s share. On the other side of the wall, Sofia sometimes rests the plane of her forehead against the brick. Each of them imagines that the other is there.





Antonia reads the news with a manic obsession. She watches Hitler’s men and boys trample through Czechoslovakia and imagines, as the summer burns a little less brightly, that they filter into Poland like a glass of water being poured. She feels evil seethe up through the cracks she’s beginning to notice in the world around her.

Each day she spends cooped up with Lina exhausts her, even though Lina is a little different now, busier, less fragile. Lina sees no need to iron out her thoughts so they are intelligible to anyone else and so their days are peppered with lines from songs Lina’s mother once sang, with scraps of memories as they pass through Lina’s mind. Antonia makes them breakfast and Lina stands up in the middle of it and leaves her untouched plate, exclaiming that she cannot eat room-temperature toast, or else saying nothing, and walking away in inexplicable silence. Lina enters a room and begins to wax on about the things she could have done besides marry Carlo: She would have been a writer, she says. She would have been best friends with Zelda Fitzgerald. She would have been a shopgirl, one of those intimidatingly stylish young women who seem comfortable in every situation, though they stick out like well-dressed, long-boned beacons everywhere they go. Instead, this, Lina says, holding up her hands, which are covered in perennial cracks and thick white flats of dry skin from the industrial laundry where she whiles away her days washing linens for mid-range hotels. Instead, we lost your father. Antonia thinks of going to Sofia’s a thousand times a day but is stopped by some vague sense of pride and fear. There is a gulf between them. Sofia wears the mask of women they used to admire like it was made for her all along. She is powdered and perfect. Even imagining herself going to Sofia for comfort makes Antonia cringe. She has been making plans to go to Wellesley, to become a classics professor, to wrap herself in books and solitude like Emily Dickinson. Even to Antonia, there is something fantastical and flimsy about these layered fantasies. Out there, people are dying, and you are imagining a college degree you cannot afford. Seeing herself through Sofia’s eyes would make it worse.

So Antonia burrows into herself. Something’s coming, say the newspaper headlines, the radio broadcasts, the quibbling pigeons fighting over scraps on street corners. When Antonia shuts her eyes she is inundated with sensation. Malocchio, her mother says. The evil eye. Antonia is sixteen.

The world is unsteady.



* * *



—

Sofia and Antonia suddenly look like two different women, rather than two interchangeable girls. Sofia has grown tall and her lips and eyes and shoulders and calves have become round; she seems to hold within her body innumerable surprises, as though at any moment she might laugh or cry or stretch her arms above her head. Antonia’s hair has darkened and her fingers and toes have lengthened just enough that she carries with her an inimitable grace.

Of course, when you are sixteen your body betrays things that will be true about you later, but which you cannot feel quite yet: Antonia only feels heavy and unkempt inside her graceful limbs and Sofia, more often than not, is bored to tears, desperate to move, waiting impatiently for something new.