The Family(71)

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Later that day, Antonia is on her knees at the edge of the bathtub, trying to scrub out a dark ring while Robbie makes a mess in the kitchen, when she hears a door slam and then Paolo shout, “He’s being groomed, Tonia.” His angry footsteps cross the short expanse of their home. Paolo swings open the bathroom door and Antonia looks up at him with one eye. “Did you hear me?”

“I heard you,” she says. She had just that morning read about Famine, whose thinness and pallor and utter vacancy nonetheless inspired in others an insatiable hunger. There is something Paolo hungers for, uncontrollably; some bit of Antonia’s attention she cannot find within herself to give him. Her belly, no more an indication of where a belly might be found.

“Saul just called me at the office to tell me that Joey is making him his right-hand man. He’s being groomed to take over.” Paolo sits on the edge of the toilet and puts his face in his hands. “I thought it might be me. I thought my life was headed toward something more.”

“Paolo.” Antonia wants to say more than this. She can tell Paolo is waiting for something reassuring, that he is expecting her to make him bigger by giving him a small piece of herself. But she cannot give him any more, because she is feeling a wave of powerful disappointment. Their home, which is small and more chaotic than either of them had wanted, seems to shrink in on Paolo and Antonia in their bathroom. Escape seems impossible. Antonia has no more words to give Paolo. No more of her self. Just as the sea receives from round the world its rivers, and is never satisfied . . . all his eating only left him empty.

“I wanted more than this,” Paolo says, gesturing at the bathroom, its peeling paint, its thumping pipes. “I wanted to give you more than this.”

“I’m happy,” says Antonia. This is automatic, but it will quell the questions Paolo and Antonia do not want to ask one another. Questions like, how did we get here? And more importantly, how do we get out? And, terrifyingly, can we do it together? There is a crash from the kitchen. “Look, can you go check on Robbie? Can we do this later?” Paolo stands and walks out of the bathroom. Antonia wrings the rag between her fingers until they chafe.





A week later Antonia wakes with her skin aching against her nightgown. She knows she’s pregnant even before she stumbles to the bathroom. She kneels on the tile floor with the side of her face against the porcelain of her bathtub and counts days. She had been careful—as careful as she could be—since Robbie was born. What would be so bad about another baby? Paolo has asked her as she turns away from him, saying, not this week.

What would be so bad about another baby? Antonia asks herself now. From the other end of the apartment she can hear Robbie stirring. Paolo has already left for the office—he goes earlier and earlier, as if he can escape his desk duties by overachieving.

When she has controlled herself Antonia stands and walks into the kitchen to make Robbie breakfast. He pads down the hall after her, black hair pressed into an architectural post-sleep sculpture. He wraps a proprietary arm around the low point of her hip bone, leans his head against her. “Mamma,” he says. “Hi, baby,” Antonia replies.

Five years ago she lay holding him—the same person, somehow, but nine pounds and wailing, reaching, a small packaged parcel of unending, absolute need. Antonia remembers settling Robbie to her breast and shutting her eyes, trying to be somewhere else. Trying to be someone else. Sure she couldn’t feed Robbie when she was just an aching cavern of need herself.

Antonia puts a hand to her belly and feels fear like ice water trickling down her spine.

The idea of a raw egg makes her queasy and she slathers jam on toast for Robbie, who settles into his chair at the kitchen table with a comic book. “School starts soon,” Antonia says to Robbie. He nods. He swings his feet against the floor, scuffing it like Sofia used to do. While he eats, Antonia calls Sofia.



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Sofia and Antonia carve the afternoon out of their regular lives to spend together, just the two of them.

They don’t do this often anymore, so there is a moment it is strained: the conversation dragging behind them, each of them flicking her eyes up to the clock behind the deli counter. They are eating pastrami sandwiches downtown.

“How did you find this place, again?” Antonia asks.

“Saul used to work here,” replies Sofia. “He took me here once before we got married. He says they make the best pastrami in the city.”

Antonia’s mouth is full. She nods. There is something fluttering in her heart; she has not told Sofia the reason for their lunch. She feels rebellious, like drinking martinis all day, like being late to pick up Robbie from school, like shucking off her responsibilities, one by one like corn husks, until her glistening insides are exposed to the sun. She suggested downtown; she is wearing slacks, which bunch uncomfortably in her lap and which, she realizes, as the pastrami fills her up like a water balloon held over the mouth of a fire hydrant, might not have been practical for this particular lunch spot.

“Can you imagine?” Sofia says, looking around. “If Papa hadn’t given him a job, Saul could still be working here.”

Antonia swallows; she has been preoccupied by this exact thought experiment lately: what if, could have been. She looks back and sees her life as a series of branching paths; she is obsessed with wondering what would have happened if she had taken another. If she had saved up and gone to university. If she had gotten pregnant before she was married. If she had never found her way back to her mamma. If her papa had never been killed. If she had never married Paolo. If she hadn’t messed up her days last month. Inside her belly she imagines something growing. She imagines herself disintegrating. Stupid, she tells herself.