The Family(31)

Antonia looks. “I haven’t seen him before,” she says. I can ask Paolo, she almost says. It would slip out so easily. She turns her attention back to her plate.

“I heard my parents talking,” Sofia says. “My father hired a Jew, from Germany. Does he look like a Jew to you?”

“I don’t know, Sofia,” says Antonia. Impatience hardens the ends of her words. Sofia will fall into infatuation now, like she always does. She will be in love by next week.

“I think he does,” says Sofia. Saul is quiet across the table, observant. He listens with both eyes and both hands as Joey talks to him about business, as Rosa offers him third helpings of everything. “I never imagined falling for someone who works for my papa.”

Antonia does not roll her eyes and tell Sofia that falling for anyone she has only seen for ten seconds from across a dinner table would be silly.

Paolo, like all of Joey’s men, is invited to dinner every week. He stays in Manhattan with his own family because Antonia doesn’t think she could pretend not to know him for three hours. There’s an easy solution to that, Tonia, Paolo says. Antonia presses her lips together. Paolo wants her to tell her mother about them. He wants her to say she will marry him. They argued over coffee, and Paolo left his to cool sadly on the table. He looked disappointed, and angry, and outside he threw up his hands and said, I don’t know if I can do this anymore, and walked away, and Antonia stood aching on the sidewalk alone. She has pictured him all week, nestled in the loud, fragrant recesses of his apartment, surrounded by his family. In her own bed she threatens to float up away from the mattress and dissolve into the night air.

“Antonia?”

“Sorry,” says Antonia. This is a perfect moment, she tells herself. Tell her. What do you think will happen? But she says, “I don’t know, I guess you just meet who you meet.”

“I guess,” says Sofia. And then, “I shouldn’t have asked you, should I,” which even Sofia knows is mean, but which she cannot help, because she feels mean, now: out of control, curdled. Inside herself she feels something small wither, something that had wanted to grow toward Antonia. Whatever it was disintegrates. People change, she tells herself.

She turns her attention to Saul, who has soft curls and could use a haircut. She watches for the rest of the meal. She sees how he holds a napkin, a glass of water, another man’s hand in greeting, so delicately the things he touches seem holy. Sofia wants to be held like that. Like a glass of water. Like a library book. Like a pair of folded socks.

Next to Sofia, Antonia argues with herself in silent agony. Say it, Antonia tells herself. Spit it out. But the desert stretching itself along her tongue and down her throat is too dry.

After Antonia goes home, Sofia sits on her bed and tells herself, you are not allowed to do this. It has never worked for her before. She lists forbidden things that she has done: skipping class to sit swinging her legs on a park bench in the sun. Winking at the construction workers who tip their helmets to her and purse their lips. Once, telling her parents that she would watch Frankie, but spending the whole time in her room, and letting Frankie get into the bathtub alone. Buying the brassiere her mama wouldn’t be caught dead buying for my daughter, with the scalloped lace edges and the modern cut. Walking alone from Canal to Fourteenth, shoulders thrust back, head high.

Down the hall, Saul Grossman has lingered to speak with her father. The doors to the parlor echo as they shut; the evening air thickens. Sofia Colicchio, skin all abuzz, ecstatic with curiosity in her bedroom.



* * *



—

Antonia stalks home, carrying a plate of leftovers for Lina. Her anger is a red-hot coal, a condensed and burning thing. She slams the front door of the apartment harder than she means to, and not being a dish-thrower or an insult-hurler, decides to make tea. The water boils and Antonia pours it into a pot; the leaves soften and spread. And as the tea runs golden through the strainer into her mamma’s cup, Antonia gets angrier and angrier.

She is angry with Paolo for giving her this awful ultimatum. She is angry with Sofia, for falling into infatuation over eggplant and sausage, for living so fully in her own affections. For saying, I shouldn’t have asked you, so casually, as though there were no depths to Antonia that Sofia could not reach in and scoop up and comb her fingers through. She is angry with her mother, for giving her life to regret and sadness. Mostly, Antonia is angry with herself. For being unable to summon the courage to be her whole self in front of the people who love her most, and for refusing to show a man who has been nothing but kind and warm and giving that she loves him back. For looking happiness in the eye and telling it, I’m not ready.

Antonia puts her mamma’s teacup on a tray. She drops a lump of sugar in and stirs it. “Mamma,” she calls. “I made you some tea.” She turns the oven on its lowest setting and puts Lina’s plate in to warm up.

Lina shuffles in, wearing a robe and slippers. Her hair is wispy and tangled from resting against the back of the couch. She grips the back of her chair with long fingers. Her nails are cracked and the skin around them bleached. “You got home later than usual,” Lina says.

“Mamma, I’m in love,” Antonia says, and then claps her hand over her mouth, and then takes the hand away because more words are coming, quickly, in a small flood, “with a man. A Family man. His name is Paolo.”