All around Sofia and Antonia, the economy rages and sputters like a dying animal. They walk to school via a different route in 1931 and 1932, to avoid the shantytowns that have sprung up in vacant lots, where anything could happen, Rosa says, bouncing Frankie on her hip, handing Sofia a sandwich to take to school. Mamma, nothing will happen, Sofia says, defiant at nine years old, and fearless, and cocooned in certainty that her family will always take care of her, that she will always take care of herself. Antonia at nine years old has a home that echoes when she speaks. The graveyard of their living room, the empty third chair. Anything could happen, Sof, she says, tugging on Sofia’s hand. Come on.
Sofia and Antonia learn new words. Stock market, breadline. Unemployment. Sofia’s father is busier than ever. He has new men working for him. He has less time to tell Sofia about his day, but he sneaks into her bedroom when he gets home with a caramel or a lemon drop and whispers, don’t tell your mamma. Sofia’s mother makes Sunday dinners big enough to feed whole countries and sends everyone home with packages of leftovers. Sofia and Antonia sit and watch as Rosa and Joey make their rounds, talking to the men Joey has hired and their wives, to Rosa’s parents when they come, to Rosa’s brothers and sisters. There are no more Fianzos at dinner. No more Uncle Tommy, no more Uncle Billy. Thankfully, no more Fianzo children, whose thick, pinching fingers had always been the bane of Sunday. Sofia and Antonia balance Frankie between them on two chairs squeezed next to one another and feed her green beans and torn chunks of bread. They make faces when no one is looking. They play tic-tac-toe on napkins.
Sometimes, especially as they turn ten, and eleven, Sofia leaves Frankie with Antonia and ventures into the clumps of adults strewn about the rooms of her home. She reads the newspaper over men’s shoulders and imitates their disdainful sighs about the economy, and listens to their worries that Roosevelt will be no better than Hoover, and their jokes that a new Prohibition would make the Family rich again. They say, Big Joe, this your girl? You’ll have your hands full with this one. She wends her way into conspiratorial hives of women, who talk about hair salons and grocers as a flimsy shield for what they really want to know about one another. The women whisper their future families into being. Sofia breathes in their perfume. They think she is precocious, fearless, a little uncouth. Soon she is shooed back to Antonia, where she will whisper, that one’s pregnant, over Frankie’s head. Those want to move to the country, but they need savings. One week, she comes back with the gleaned details of sex itself, her face alight with shock and excitement. Antonia is horrified to learn about her body’s permeability. Adulthood, she worries, will make her feel no more solid than she does now. Antonia is happier with Frankie, where anything can be made up and believed and the stakes are not so high. Where she doesn’t have to see how many other adults are moving through the world with so much more force and presence than her own mamma.
Mostly, Sofia and Antonia are still too absorbed in the workings of their own lives to spend much time thinking about the world outside of their homes, outside of their own internal architecture. But the older they get, the more different they realize they are from their classmates. Because of their families, Sofia and Antonia are not included in playground games; they are not welcomed into tight circles of gossiping girls. The Family, they learn at school, are petty criminals. They are bullies. They are giving the rest of us a bad reputation. Sofia and Antonia, as a result of being Family children, are not to be trusted.
Sofia and Antonia, by way of listening at doors, by being out of bed and underfoot, know that Carlo’s disappearance had to do with escaping the Family, but the idea of this is like escaping air, or sunlight. Impossible, and incomprehensible. They are too young to think about the Family as bullies and themselves as separate. They are still connected at the root. So Sofia and Antonia turn over the possibility that they are criminals; that they are untrustworthy at their core. This doesn’t feel true either.
Sofia develops a thicker skin. She cannot think of herself as the villain, nor can she imagine herself as the victim. So pre-teen Sofia convinces herself she chose to be alone. This is what I wanted. She is filled with the warm certainty that Joey is helping people, that it is an honor to come from a Family family, that if she is ostracized it is by those who do not understand. When Carlo’s disappearance rises inside her mind, she shoves it down.
Antonia retreats into her own skin, into her own mind. She carries a book with her everywhere she goes. She reads under the desk in school when she ought to be solving for x.