The Family(39)

Sofia, in bed, claps a hand over her mouth to keep from weeping. All her life, she had been told this would change her. How disappointing to break the biggest rule she could and be left inside the same skin.



* * *



—

She leaves Saul’s room with a vague sense of dis-ease, with a disappointment bordering on disgust. Not at Saul—Sofia smiles at him as she leaves his room; he asks if she is okay; she lies—who is always kind, and in whose eyes Sofia has ruined nothing, has given away nothing, has betrayed no confidence. Sofia is disgusted by the lies she has been told about her own body. She trusts no one. She holds her arms slightly away from her body in the cab on the way home. She gets out at the corner and peers up into the curtained windows of the houses on her block, which all look like they are watching her. I was just at Antonia’s, she says, to her furious and terrified mother, to her curious and shrewd sister. I just fell asleep. I’m sorry. I know, Mamma. I’m sorry. In the bathroom, Sofia undresses and turns the water on full-blast and stands in the shower until her skin shines with heat.

She forces herself to look in the mirror once the steam clears. She looks the same. She doesn’t feel broken, or damaged. She doesn’t feel hurt. Rosa hadn’t taken one look at her and asked, what have you done?

Every rule you’ve ever learned, Sofia realizes, is a lie.

And then the tears that have been building since she stood on the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal with Saul finally spill down Sofia’s cheeks. And as she hugs a towel over her body in the bathroom and weeps, it seems to Sofia that the world has finally turned completely inside out.

But Rosa is of course wondering what has come over Sofia, who has spent all summer and fall sneaking away, avoiding her family. She knows, the way you can know something you don’t want to know, that Sofia didn’t fall asleep at Antonia’s, because she knows, of course she knows, that Sofia and Antonia aren’t as close now as they have sometimes been, that they are both preoccupied with the business of being almost adults, of figuring out what that will look like. Antonia has a fiancé, that beautiful boy from Manhattan, and Rosa is as happy for Antonia as she can be while desperately wishing Sofia would meet someone, too, that Sofia would take her ferocious energy and focus it toward a recognizable life. And Rosa doesn’t know where Sofia was the night before, but she knows Sofia is lying.



* * *



—

Sofia doesn’t see Saul until the next Sunday dinner, where he hardly meets her eyes out of nervousness that Joey Colicchio will take one look at him and know what he has done. This suits Sofia, who spent the week moping in her room, and who isn’t sure what she would say to Saul, even if she were given the chance. The magnitude of what they have done is like a concrete wall between them. The next week is Christmas, and then there is New Year’s, and then the first weeks of 1942 are unusually busy for Joey and his team, and Saul keeps strange hours and Sofia goes on walks around the perimeter of her neighborhood, bundled in furs, wind whipping tears down her face as she turns every corner. So they don’t run into one another, and neither of them picks up the phone. What’s gotten into you? asks Rosa. You seem stranger than usual, says Frankie.

Sofia is stranger than usual. She doesn’t recognize herself. And so Sofia finds herself sitting on her bed, willing herself to call Antonia. It is the middle of February. Antonia is planning her wedding, and it is all she can talk about. Sofia doesn’t want to call her. But there is no one else who can help, so she is staring at the phone. She is commanding herself to pick it up. Dial the number.

Sofia knows there is nothing to be done, but she is sure Antonia will know what to do. Or rather: Sofia is sure that in Antonia’s eyes, she will feel like herself again.

She picks up the phone. She says, “I need to come over.”





Are you sure?”

Sofia nods, hands in her lap. She is sitting on Antonia’s bed, in Antonia’s musty apartment, familiar as an old coat. Her knees are touching Antonia’s knees. “I’m sure. I mean, I’m as sure as . . . it’s been two and a half months, Antonia. I spent every morning in January kneeling on the bathroom floor.” She shrugs. “I’m sure.”

“But . . .” Antonia sits now, quietly next to Sofia, in reverence of the crisis at hand. “How?”

Sofia raises her eyebrows.

“I mean, I know how. I guess . . . when? No, I know when.” Antonia is silent for a moment, and then asks, “Where?”

“In his room, in December.”

“Wow. Sofia, wow!”

“I know,” says Sofia.

“You’re not married,” says Antonia.

“I know,” says Sofia.

“Oh, Sofia, he’s Jewish!”

“I know.” Sofia turns to look at Antonia, and her features are small and scared inside her big, white face. “My parents don’t even know that he and I—that we—my father works with him every day. Antonia, I think he’ll kill him.”

“I’m sure he won’t,” says Antonia, and puts her arm around Sofia’s waist. She is not at all sure, but she knows that the immediacy, the permanence, and the incontrovertible existence of the third life in the room with them means that everything has to be okay. It has to work out. Sofia and Antonia, playing make-believe, had always assumed there was nothing they couldn’t tackle together.