Late at night, when the hours seem not to have names anymore, and Antonia’s body is heavy with exhaustion but her mind spins a million miles a minute, she sometimes lays a palm flat against the brick wall that her bedroom and Sofia’s share. On the other side of the wall, Sofia sometimes rests the plane of her forehead against the brick. Each of them imagines that the other is there.
Antonia reads the news with a manic obsession. She watches Hitler’s men and boys trample through Czechoslovakia and imagines, as the summer burns a little less brightly, that they filter into Poland like a glass of water being poured. She feels evil seethe up through the cracks she’s beginning to notice in the world around her.
Each day she spends cooped up with Lina exhausts her, even though Lina is a little different now, busier, less fragile. Lina sees no need to iron out her thoughts so they are intelligible to anyone else and so their days are peppered with lines from songs Lina’s mother once sang, with scraps of memories as they pass through Lina’s mind. Antonia makes them breakfast and Lina stands up in the middle of it and leaves her untouched plate, exclaiming that she cannot eat room-temperature toast, or else saying nothing, and walking away in inexplicable silence. Lina enters a room and begins to wax on about the things she could have done besides marry Carlo: She would have been a writer, she says. She would have been best friends with Zelda Fitzgerald. She would have been a shopgirl, one of those intimidatingly stylish young women who seem comfortable in every situation, though they stick out like well-dressed, long-boned beacons everywhere they go. Instead, this, Lina says, holding up her hands, which are covered in perennial cracks and thick white flats of dry skin from the industrial laundry where she whiles away her days washing linens for mid-range hotels. Instead, we lost your father. Antonia thinks of going to Sofia’s a thousand times a day but is stopped by some vague sense of pride and fear. There is a gulf between them. Sofia wears the mask of women they used to admire like it was made for her all along. She is powdered and perfect. Even imagining herself going to Sofia for comfort makes Antonia cringe. She has been making plans to go to Wellesley, to become a classics professor, to wrap herself in books and solitude like Emily Dickinson. Even to Antonia, there is something fantastical and flimsy about these layered fantasies. Out there, people are dying, and you are imagining a college degree you cannot afford. Seeing herself through Sofia’s eyes would make it worse.
So Antonia burrows into herself. Something’s coming, say the newspaper headlines, the radio broadcasts, the quibbling pigeons fighting over scraps on street corners. When Antonia shuts her eyes she is inundated with sensation. Malocchio, her mother says. The evil eye. Antonia is sixteen.
The world is unsteady.
* * *
—
Sofia and Antonia suddenly look like two different women, rather than two interchangeable girls. Sofia has grown tall and her lips and eyes and shoulders and calves have become round; she seems to hold within her body innumerable surprises, as though at any moment she might laugh or cry or stretch her arms above her head. Antonia’s hair has darkened and her fingers and toes have lengthened just enough that she carries with her an inimitable grace.
Of course, when you are sixteen your body betrays things that will be true about you later, but which you cannot feel quite yet: Antonia only feels heavy and unkempt inside her graceful limbs and Sofia, more often than not, is bored to tears, desperate to move, waiting impatiently for something new.
* * *
—
Frankie is eight now, precocious, and as eagle-eyed as Rosa. Why don’t you come over as much, she asked Antonia last Sunday, and Antonia felt her stomach flip, like she had been caught doing something forbidden, and then she returned to helping Rosa set up. The two card tables folded and stashed behind the sofa are dusted and arranged end to end so that everyone can fit; there is a long brown leaf that, installed in the dining room table, allows it to seat ten squashed, rather than six spread out.
Each week Sofia and Antonia have small conversations about comfortable things while they set the table, chop the onions, wipe the dust out of the wineglasses. They feel close enough to breathe each other in; it is enough time that they do not have to feel guilty about letting their friendship erode away outside. And, each of them notices, she seems happy. She seems happy without me.
Sofia and Antonia stumble out of their junior year of high school as June of 1940 begins to swelter in earnest. The next week, the radio announces that Italy has joined Germany, and Antonia and Sofia find themselves crushed into Sofia’s apartment with countless familiar bodies, all of them restless in the early summer heat. Wine is poured, and the room fills with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke. A pile of hats and sweaters and pocketbooks buries Sofia’s desk.