The Family(32)

Lina looks at her daughter like she would study a painting, or a faraway vista. Antonia stands with her feet apart on the floor as though she is steadying herself for a fistfight, but her hands tremble and her face is empty of blood and her hair swirls in chaos around her head. Antonia has been taller than her mother for years, but she seems to shrink and cower now.

Lina is not bad. She is maybe weak, or lost. And as she looks at her daughter—her beautiful, intelligent, suddenly grown-up daughter—she remembers the morning Antonia was born. It was in this corner, where the table is—she and Antonia are staring at one another over the spot where, almost eighteen years ago, she found herself locked inside a pain much bigger than herself. She knelt under the weight of it, knocked to all fours, and when she looked at her daughter for the first time, and Antonia opened her wet brown eyes and looked back—there it was. I’ve got you, she promised her tiny daughter. And also, thank you.

Lina is suspended, suddenly, barely balancing along the thread of her own life. Where, this memory asks Lina, did that warrior woman go? And Lina does not want to hear this question, for she has long ago decided that helplessness and a slow shrinking-away are the only solutions to the deluge of pain life has delivered her. I do not want to fight, she has decided. And she has not. She has let herself be swallowed: her body is small, her inhales consume less oxygen. She makes as few decisions as possible. She tries her best not to leave any traces of herself—no footprints in the mud of anyone’s memory. But the memory of her baby girl looking at her—in trust, in love, in mystery—swirls in the air around them and tells Lina, it’s time. Here is your daughter. She is all grown up, and she is scared to tell you that she has fallen in love, because you have not mothered her in ten years. All you ever wanted was for her to live a life absent of fear, and you have failed. You have forced her to take care of you, to mourn for you, to live for you. You have asked her to propagate your prejudices. You are the weight dragging her away from happiness.

Antonia stands, scared and defiant and un-mothered.

And Lina realizes she has not succeeded in disappearing. Here in front of her is the tangible evidence of her failure.

She is unspeakably sorry. She is filled with remorse that threatens to burst her open. She will not run away this time. She will not ask her daughter to hold her hand.

“Tell me about him,” she says to Antonia. Let me be your mamma again.



* * *



    —

Antonia calls Sofia the night after she tells her mamma about Paolo because really, nothing scares her anymore, and Sofia listens as Antonia says I’m in love and Sofia notices a small rancid place weighing her heart down as she listens, but she says I’m so happy for you and hangs up the phone and is alone in her bedroom with her rotten heart and her flimsy fantasies.



* * *



—

Sofia develops a habit of lingering outside the parlor door, eavesdropping on Paolo and Saul as they work. It is this way she has learned that Saul is from Berlin, where he got the neatly articulated ends of his words and the quiet ja that sometimes slips out as he is listening to someone else speak. She has internalized his schedule by listening to him describe the rounds he makes of boardinghouses and hotels, unfathomably foreign neighborhoods like Borough Park and parts of the Lower East Side so low and so east they could be mistaken for water, for the crumbling edge of the island itself. She has seen Paolo checking off names on a long list, passing neatly wrapped packages that she has learned contain valuable forgeries for wealthy European Jews willing to pay for a new life. And she has seen her father, lurking in the room like a conscience, weighing stacks of bills with a practiced hand and kissing Paolo and Saul before they leave.

Sofia understands both the Family and Germany like a nightmare she can only partially remember—something sinister in both of them, her belly and throat are sure—but she chooses to feel comforted by the sound of Saul and Paolo and her papa, plotting in their baritones, working against a vague and unnameable evil. They cannot all three be on the wrong side.



* * *



—

The day Paolo comes to dinner at her apartment, Antonia spends the afternoon cleaning. There is not much that can be done about the shabbiness of the sofa, the sunken spot that belies Lina’s favorite place to sit, the browning throw rugs in the kitchen and living room. But Antonia shines the mirrors and countertops until they gleam. She makes dinner and the apartment fills with steam and fragrance, warm garlic and the fresh spice of lemons. She hounds Lina until Lina showers, dresses, pulls her hair away from her face. Lina looks almost normal, Antonia thinks. Almost like a real mother. Antonia shakes her head to rid it of that ugliness. Things between her and Lina have been good since their first tentative conversation about Paolo. Antonia believes Lina wants her to be happy. But Lina is strange, and getting stranger: women have begun sneaking in and out of the living room to visit with her when Lina thinks Antonia is asleep. Lina is charting her own course. Antonia might admire this, but there is a part of her that is still too angry. She doesn’t trust Lina to shower before company comes over, or to give advice about wedding details. She doesn’t trust Lina to stay in the real world for long enough to have dinner with her fiancé, and so Antonia spends the day cleaning and cooking, one suspicious eye trained on Lina, who wants to be trusted, but who cannot bear the inconvenience of making herself presentable for company, or eating at a pre-arranged time, rather than whenever she decides she is hungry.