The Family(36)

Other nights, his longing for his mother feels like a beast walking beside him down the gaslit avenues.



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After high school ends, Sofia spends a week sitting aimlessly in her room, caught in a breathless sort of freedom that feels empty and insubstantial and overwhelming. The rest of her life—which until June had been no more than a surreal abstraction—asks her to think in lengths of time she had never conceived of. It paints every little decision she thinks of making in lurid shades of permanence. “You could consider university, you know,” said Frankie, peering in around the door to Sofia’s bedroom to find Sofia flipping through the same magazine for the third time, or staring aimlessly out the window. “You’ll meet someone soon,” said her mother. Sofia doesn’t want to go to university, where she would spend years more being told what was right and wrong. And she doesn’t want to meet someone. Someone other than Saul, that is, and he will never satisfy her family’s requirements for “meeting someone.” They will never get married. They will never have children. Saul’s name will never come first on cards addressed to both of them; they will not be bound together by church or culture or anything but their own web of secrets and lies and love. This makes their time together irresistible. It makes it possible for Sofia, who has always felt a vague dread at the thought of marriage and children, to fall madly into obsession with Saul, who is safe, who doesn’t threaten Sofia’s independence. Sofia is beginning to understand contradiction: how it is possible to want something more than anything and not want it at the same time, how sometimes the impossibility of a dream is what makes it attractive.

Sofia is borne along by her new secret. She and Saul cross paths in the hallway; there is something magnetic about them, something molten. They clasp hands in doorways; they walk together around the block, quickly; they speak directly into one another’s mouths, pouring sentences out like liquid, cresting a wave that is all animal addiction, all exhale.

Sofia and Saul pass notes when he comes to her house. They arrange meetings in other neighborhoods. They duck into small restaurants and try foods from places they have only ever seen on maps: Morocco, Greece, Malaya. Saul doesn’t know which are the bad neighborhoods and he doesn’t treat Sofia like she’s fragile. They walk as far west as they can without stepping into the Hudson, and as the sun sets they watch the lights come on in New Jersey and Times Square and they find themselves on an island, an impenetrably dark patch of industrial wasteland at the edge of the world.

With Saul, Sofia feels there is room for her. Saul asks Sofia who she is, who she wants to be, and there is never the threat of disappointment, of Sofia not fitting into a preordained space. I think I want to be powerful, like my father, she says to Saul, but I will never do it the way he does it. She does not know what she will do but she understands that it will be something. As the summer passes, Saul is on her mind more and more often, despite her resolve that they are only having fun, only breaking rules.

Saul, who is in love with Sofia despite it being unbearable to fall in love when you have lost your country and your family, understands contradictions. He understands standing in the presence of something impossible. And Saul begins to feel like he is coming out of a long hibernation, a lifetime of winter, the soft thump of his heartbeat speeding up as Sofia grows warmer and warmer in front of him, bathing him in heat. He begins to understand the value of sensation, the burning necessity of the present. Where once he had lived in memories, in speculation, in profound worry, Saul begins to claw his way toward his life as it unfolds in each moment.



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In the fall, Sofia and Antonia do not start school again, for the first time in their memory. September yawns open and they fall in headfirst. They feel themselves borne along in the river of their lives. They are rushing toward what feels like a cliff, staring down a waterfall over which there is only marriage and children, sensible dresses, the business of running a home. They wage separate, silent battles with themselves: what they want; what will happen regardless of what they want. Love, they realize, is something that might happen regardless of whether they want it. They cannot tell whether it is the river itself or a life raft. They have to readjust how they thought it would be.





Joey Colicchio has been working too hard. He has been overextending himself, stretching himself taut between the world where he is a parent to two girls with long legs and discerning eyes, and the world where he is violence personified, the terror in the room, the reason men wake sweating in the night. In both worlds, his very best is demanded, taken from him, drawn out. In both worlds, he is the center. The beating heart.

Joey had imagined that the wartime smuggling operation he had spearheaded would relieve him of some of the guilt that sits like a rock in his intestines. He had imagined that enabling other families to feed off of the sizzling, decadent, fat-bellied American dream would help him to justify the relative opulence of his own lifestyle, compared to so many of the families he knows. Joey wants to believe he pays his men as much as he can. He wants to believe he uses violence as sparingly as possible.

But some part of Joey knows this is untrue. You chose this life, he remembers. There would have been less violence in the bricklayers’ union, if he had kept quiet and paid his dues. He would have perpetrated less fear if he had stayed in his parents’ house until he was married, brought ten or twelve grandchildren into a tenement hovel. He would have disintegrated into mud next to his father in the graveyard. Dust to dust. Joey finds himself wondering whether he is a good man.