The Family(37)

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Rosa stopped looking to Lina for comfort years ago, but recently—Sofia disappearing all day, secretive and defensive about her plans, Frankie bursting into flames at the smallest provocation, Joey rarely home and restless when he is there—she has found herself picturing, in the quiet hours of the night, padding next door in slippers and her robe and sinking into the familiar old rhythm.

She knows this is impossible. Lina has turned into a spectacle, a cautionary tale. Aside from her brothers, from the wives that show up each Sunday, Rosa is left to muddle through her weeks alone. And just like she always does, Rosa understands this. She knows why it is so. She understands the structures that make it necessary.

Still, Rosa stays up nights and pictures what it would be like. To shut the creaking door of her apartment and tiptoe through the halls and out onto the street and to find her way up the dark staircase of Lina and Antonia’s building, where Lina might hug her and say, I was hoping you might come. And where, if they were lucky, they would know once again where their daughters were, and if the daughters were asleep yet.



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On December 7, Pearl Harbor is bombed. Nothing is spared. The war, which had been someone else’s problem, a faraway tragedy, something unapproachable, enters the houses of Americans. It fastens its hands around their throats. It forces them to look it in the face.

Sofia escapes her house, where her parents are mired in adult worry, a kind of depression that makes her feel like the ground underneath her feet is quicksand. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what will happen. She takes a taxi to Manhattan. She watches the metal cables of the Brooklyn Bridge zip by and remembers being four, on her way to Sunday dinner. Nestled in the lap of her father, the bosom of certainty. How can she focus herself? How can she decide to do anything in a world that is crumbling from the foundation up?

Sofia meets Saul under cover of a dark downtown cinema. The picture has already started when she shuffles in next to him, so she greets him by way of a hand on his shoulder and presses her body toward his in the dark. He offers her a half-empty box of popcorn and she is suddenly ravenous. She scoops up handfuls at a time and lets the salt collect under her fingernails and the grease soak into her skin. Sofia snakes an arm around Saul’s elbow and leans her head against his shoulder. She can feel the bones of his arm, the long lanky way he extends out from his heart. He is solid and sure and breathing. Something in Sofia settles. Something opens.

After the film, Saul and Sofia wander through the tree-lined paths of Washington Square Park, trying their best not to look like good targets for pickpockets. They stop in a dingy artists’ bar on MacDougal and Saul buys them half pints of dark beer, which they drink standing, leaning together at a tall corner table. Sofia likes the light and foolhardy feeling it gives her and drinks another while Saul nurses a cigarette. She makes conversation about the movie; she makes up stories about the other patrons (a mistress, the woman with the too-tight dress and the carefully arranged curls; a journalist, notebooks in tow, twisting a wedding band around his finger, who doesn’t want to go home yet; an artist, who moved out of her parents’ home in New Jersey and has only milk crates for furniture). She fills the empty space in their conversation, all the while thinking about the bones of Saul’s arms, the jut of his knuckles against the skin, his dancing dreaming eyelashes. Inside of Sofia, the thing that has yawned open paces back and forth. It is hungry. Saul is quiet; his eyes look through her.

“What are you thinking about?” she asks, and Saul opens his eyes wider and focuses on her, as though he has forgotten where he is. He makes a twisted face; an inside joke, one he throws over the shoulders of men he is talking to when Sofia is standing just outside the room, watching. I’m right here, is what that face is supposed to say. But I would rather be just over there, with you.

“Nothing,” he says, which is what he says when he is thinking about his family, and Germany, and the layers of unspeakable mystery surrounding his life in Europe.

Sofia reaches for Saul’s hand, and he takes it, but his gaze stays neutral, focused somewhere above her shoulder. She doesn’t know where he goes, but she wishes he would come back.

“You’re somewhere else,” she says.

“I’m right here,” he says. He isn’t, though. And Sofia, who often falls back into her own thoughts when her conversations with Saul reach this impasse, sets her mouth and puts her hand on Saul’s chest. “Tell me,” she says.

“You haven’t seen the news?” asks Saul.

“Of course I have,” she says.

“Well, I’m—” Saul stops. He shrugs. “I suppose I’m thinking about that, then.”

“I suppose I’m trying not to,” says Sofia. She is thinking about Saul’s hands, about bubbles rising to the top of a glass of beer.

“I suppose,” says Saul, “I can’t help it.”

“Fine,” says Sofia. She wants to be enough for Saul. She wants her presence to draw him up and out. She wants to see herself do this, and feel like maybe she is good, after all; like there is not empty space ahead of her where a path should be. “Maybe I should go,” she says. It would comfort her to comfort him.

“Sofia,” says Saul, and there is an urgency Sofia does not recognize in his voice, “do you even care that the world is falling apart? They think thousands of people died yesterday. And it’s war, so the result of people dying will be more people dying. And each of those people is part of something. They have mothers, they have sons—” Saul breaks off abruptly. A pink flush has risen in his cheeks and his eyes are bright and animated.