The Family(38)

“Of course I care,” says Sofia. “But I came here to escape my family, to see you, and you are acting just like them, and there is nothing I can do to reach you, like there is nothing I can do to reach anyone, to do anything. I can’t just feel so helpless, Saul. And I could go home, but my mamma would hand me a—a—a sock to knit, and I don’t think knitting a sock is helpful!”

“Okay,” says Saul. “Okay.” Patrons at other tables are watching them out of the corners of their eyes. Saul nods toward the door and he and Sofia sidle out of the bar and onto the icy street. “I think you’re right,” says Saul.

“What?” Sofia has steeled herself for a fight.

“This worrying—it doesn’t help. I just feel guilty.”

Sofia has pent-up energy now, angry anxious breath, adrenaline pumping. But she has not been offered a fight, and she does not know how to resolve it without letting it out, without screaming into the weak and wavering winter sun, without destroying everything in her path. “There’s nothing for you to feel guilty about,” she snaps, harsher than she meant.

“What kind of son wouldn’t feel guilty for abandoning his mother?”

“You didn’t abandon her,” Sofia says.

“But I did,” says Saul. The simplicity of that threatens to pull tears from Sofia’s throat. The two of them are hobbling down MacDougal to Bleecker. They are leaning in toward one another for warmth. Fingers of December air tunnel into their coats. The agony of being helpless rises in Sofia again, rakes her throat with its claws.

When Saul tries to turn right, toward Sixth Ave, where Sofia will hail a cab to Brooklyn, she stops him.

“I have an idea,” she says, but her words get lost in the layers of her scarf and Saul has to lean close and ask her to repeat herself. “Take me home with you,” she says into his ear. Her breath is hot and then freezes on his earlobe.

For the rest of his life, Saul will recall the moment he nodded and said okay and pushed his face into Sofia’s scarf and hair to kiss her and put his arm around her shoulders. He will be able to taste the metallic freeze in the air, and to feel, as though it is right there, the urgency of Sofia’s body leaning toward his. He will be able to imagine his life as it seemed to him in this moment: stretching out before him and filled with infinite pleasures. Sofia was always the only one who could reach down into the depths of his preoccupation with things he could not control and bring him back up to the surface. Take me home with you, she said, and the ice on his earlobe reminded him he was alive, and standing on his own two feet with a girl he loved in New York City.

“Okay,” he says, and they begin to walk east, shivering with cold and anticipation and both of them quiet, shuffling along in the tide of commuters going home.



* * *



—

Later that night, Sofia lies in the unfamiliarity of Saul’s narrow boardinghouse bed. Saul is asleep. She feels anonymous and powerful: a timeless woman, part of a ritual much bigger than herself. Moonlight shines in through the window and makes lurid shadows on the wall. There is a tree that grows and shrinks, distorted in the wind, and the unnaturally stretched-out bodies and small heads of pedestrians pass across the ceiling in a surreal parade.

Sofia believes in God the way a child believes its parents will know if it breaks a rule. She is curious, and a bit resentful, but God, like all big structures against which Sofia finds meaning in asserting her independence, is omnipresent in her world. God consists of the ritual Masses she stopped going to as a teenager, just to see if it would make a difference; of insalata di mare and baccala on Christmas Eve; of crossing herself as naturally as she breathes when she passes a cathedral. God is in the smells of her mamma’s cooking. God, in the waistband of her skirt, the one that feels like it asks too-personal questions of her hip bones but lifts her up and smooths her out and makes her the focal point of every man she passes on the street. It occurs to Sofia, just before she falls asleep, to wonder if God knows she is naked and unmarried in a Jewish man’s bed.

She wakes up in the gray predawn, and considers the shift of her bare body against Saul’s sheets. What have I done? For all her posturing, Sofia has never crossed a line as thick as this one.

She stands up and wraps a shirt around herself and carefully eases open the door of Saul’s room. The bathroom is a fifteen-foot walk down a creaky hall she is absolutely not allowed to be in, and she tiptoes along the wall, hoping for mercy from the ancient floorboards. She locks the door and peers at her face in the spotted mirror, wondering if anyone will be able to tell. She looks the same, but a bit pale from sleeping too little. She splashes icy water over her face and lowers herself to the toilet, which is cold enough to stop her breath in her throat.

In Saul’s room, thighs still stinging and heart pounding, Sofia climbs back into bed and stares at the ceiling. She cannot decide if she feels more or less whole. She isn’t sure whether she has been successful in drawing Saul into the present. The fear that she has not been enough chokes her. That she has not really changed anything—really, everything is the same—blinds her. She struggles for air, for light.

Next to her, Saul stirs. Sofia turns her head to look at him. She has never seen the features of his face so slack. His exhales whistle softly and Sofia finds she is uncomfortable to know this; it feels too personal. She feels frozen now. She wants to spring from the bed, to sprint down the icy Lower East Side street as dawn surges, to pound and thrash against something bigger than herself as light cracks the morning city open like an egg.