The Family(34)

The radio is on in the kitchen and Rosa is sifting powdered sugar over tarts and hazelnut cookies and there is the big pot, full of boiling water on the stove. Sofia is rolling out dough on the counter, breathing out each time she pushes the rolling pin away from herself, and Frankie is next to her, mincing onions and rolling stacks of basil leaves into thin tubes to slice them into ribbons. Sofia’s hair has escaped into a dusty, floured cloud around her head, and there are stinging onion tears dripping from the corners of her eyes when she hears a voice ask, “Are you sure there’s nothing I can do to help in here?”

Sofia shoves so hard with the rolling pin that her stretch of dough breaks in half and slips flatly off the counter and comes to rest at the feet of Saul, who has just walked in, who has just offered to help cook, if Sofia’s ears are working properly. He picks the dough up and hands it to her, and it is covered in bits of onion skin and herb stem that have slipped onto the floor. Rosa snatches the dough from Sofia’s hands and says something like never get all this out in time, and begins to tweeze the bread crumbs and chili flakes off of the once-velvety pasta dough. “Sorry, Mamma,” mutters Sofia. And then she looks at Saul and before she can stop herself says, “I think you’ve helped enough,” and Saul looks stricken, and retreats into the living room. Sofia’s stomach lurches. What’s wrong with you? she berates herself. Why are you like this?

“That one’s a little odd, don’t you think?” asks Rosa. “Offering to cook?”

“Sofia likes him,” says Frankie. “Look how red her face is.”

“I do not!” Sofia nearly shouts. Frankie is still shorter than Sofia, but she meets Sofia’s angry face with a fearless, almost undetectable wink. Sofia wants to throttle her.

“I think he’s Jewish,” says Rosa, as though that settled that. Rosa knows he is Jewish, but this is her way: to present facts as questions. And, Sofia thinks, rolling out the un-ruined half of the ravioli dough, to present herself as a question. Rosa knows more than everyone in any room combined, but you’d never know it from the way she speaks. Offering to cook? There is something simpering about Rosa’s tone, something that makes Sofia want to take a wrecking ball to her family home. I think he’s Jewish—as if everyone else in the room will also adhere to whatever invisible, unbreakable rule Rosa invokes. Sofia spends the rest of the afternoon fuming, trying not to meet Frankie’s probing eyes.

Later, when Sofia has washed her face and hands and changed out of her apron and smoothed down her hair, she slips into the living room to find Frankie squeezing herself into the empty chair beside Rosa. “There’s one over there,” Frankie says, nodding toward the chair across from Saul, who is sipping wine and wearing a brown vest and round glasses and whose hair is curling into his face so that Sofia wants desperately to run her fingers across his forehead and brush it away.

“Frankie, please,” says Sofia to Frankie, who turns placidly away as if she does not hear Sofia.

So Sofia finds herself sliding down into the chair at the end of the table, across from Saul, who looks up and says, “Hello again.”

“Hi,” says Sofia, and then looks down at her plate. Try talking to him, this time, says the Antonia in her head, but Sofia finds that every last thought she’s ever had has vanished, that the inside of her brain echoes like an empty marble corridor.

“I’m sorry about before,” says Saul. Someone passes him a basket of hot garlic bread. Sofia’s stomach growls so loudly she’s sure Saul heard it. Steam fogs up his glasses.

“No,” she says. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so—” Sofia loses the words in her mouth; fills it with bread instead.

“I don’t know how things work here, yet,” says Saul. His accent is faint but trips over his tongue just slightly enough that Sofia cannot help but hang on to his every word. “I like to cook, but I think that’s not my place.”

Sofia laughs. “It’s definitely not,” she says. “I don’t love to cook, but I’m stuck with it.”

“Too bad we can’t trade,” Saul says. He passes her a dish of meatballs.

Sofia smiles, and something melts in the air between them. “Where did you learn to cook?” she asks.

“My mother,” says Saul. “It was just us, so I helped her.”

“Your mother—she’s still in—Germany?”

“Berlin,” says Saul. “I think.” He is suddenly very focused on spearing a green bean.

“You don’t know?”

“It’s impossible to know. The Nazis. It’s very bad there.” But there is a shortness to his voice Sofia hadn’t noticed before, and she feels like she is intruding.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Saul meets her eyes, and suddenly the two of them have accessed something much bigger than the politics of Sunday dinner. There is a real world out there, with real consequences, she thinks. A world where people don’t know where their mothers are. A world where everyone’s biggest concern isn’t whether a man offered to cook.

And then Bugs or Vito calls for Saul, and he turns away from Sofia, and she wonders if she imagined the whole conversation. “Sofia,” calls Rosa, “will you pass that dish, please,” and Sofia stands and brings the dish of garlic bread to the other end of the table, where Rosa sits across from Joey and Pop, who reaches into the dish and fishes out the best piece of bread without even looking at it, or Sofia. Suddenly Sofia feels very much tethered to the world she already knows. She glances down the table and Saul appears to be deep in conversation. Vito chucks him on the arm and the two of them laugh. Frankie is talking to Rosa, and Nonna, and to a woman Sofia thinks is Bugs’s wife. The four of them appear completely engrossed. Sofia is alone again.