Sofia and Antonia do not realize that their friendship is undisturbed by other children.
Sofia and Antonia close their eyes and make the world. Together, they go on safari, narrowly escaping bloody death in the teeth of a lion. They travel in airplanes, to Sicilia, where their families are from, and to Japan, and to Panama. They survive in the wilderness with only two sticks and a tin of Christmas cookies to sustain them; they escape quicksand and locusts. They marry princes, who ride down bedraggled Red Hook avenues on horseback. Sofia and Antonia straddle their own horses. They lean forward and whisper into their horses’ ears. They shout, fly like the wind! and are hushed by their mammas. Go play somewhere else, the mammas say. Sofia and Antonia play on the moon.
Antonia feels free next to Sofia, who is lit by an internal flame that Antonia can warm her hands and face next to. Antonia catches herself just watching Sofia sometimes; staring at the place her dress tugs between her shoulders as she hunches over a table, or forgetting to rinse her hands as they wash up side by side in the bathroom before dinner. If I can see you, I must be here. Antonia feels that without Sofia she might float away, disintegrate into the night air. And Sofia, comfortable in the spotlight of her friend’s undivided attention, feels herself growing brighter as it shines. If you can see me, I must be here.
* * *
—
Antonia and Sofia live, mostly, with their mothers, and with each other. Their fathers are often gone, though Sofia’s father comes home for supper often enough that she can feel his presence like bookends to her days: filling the house with the smell of brilliantine and espresso in the morning; rumbling around the kitchen just before she goes to bed at night. Sometimes, the click of the front door and his retreating footsteps just as she falls into sleep: leaving again.
Antonia has no idea that her father’s absence two or three nights a week is unusual compared with other fathers in her neighborhood, or that her mother once broke down crying in the butcher, overcome with a deep, existential exhaustion from planning meals “for two or three,” or that deep in the belly of the night when her father comes home, he tiptoes into Antonia’s room and cups her forehead in his palm and shuts his eyes in prayer. Antonia doesn’t know what he does, only that it is work with Uncle Billy or Uncle Tommy. He has meetings, Sofia once told her. Meetings about helping people. But something about that seems insubstantial and incomplete to Antonia. Here is what she knows: she knows that while he is gone her mother is never the right size and shape—either larger than life, trailing a cloud of matter and chaos around as she obsessively cleans, arranges, fixes, fusses; or small, skeletal, a shadow of her usual self. And Antonia, five years old, depends upon her mother the way the ocean depends on the moon: she grows and shrinks accordingly.
She imagines her father sitting in a small room. Uncle Billy smokes cigars and swivels back and forth in his chair and gesticulates fiercely and shouts into a telephone. Uncle Tommy stands in a corner and watches over them; he is the boss. Her father sits quietly, with pen and paper. Antonia puts him at a desk and gives him an expression of deep concentration. He stares out the window, and occasionally drops his gaze to scribble something on his paper. He stays out of the fray.
Antonia thinks she can make the world up if she shuts her eyes.
At night, when her mother has put her to bed, Antonia can feel the apartment straining up away from its foundation. The weight of herself and her mother is not enough to keep it attached to the earth, and so it bucks and floats and Antonia shuts her eyes and builds foundation brick by brick until she drifts into sleep.
In the next room, her mother reads, or, more than once, slips on shoes and goes next door to drink three fingers of wine with Sofia’s mother, Rosa. The two women are subdued, weighted down by the knowledge that their husbands are out doing God-knows-what, God-knows-where. They are both twenty-seven; by day, each of them can conjure the blinding glow of youth, but by lamplight, maps of concern crease each of their faces; some pockets of skin darken with exhaustion while others thin over the bone. They, like so many women before them, are made older by worry, and stretched taut by the ticking seconds, which they swear pass slower at night than during the light of day.
Antonia’s mamma, Lina, has a nervous constitution. As a child Lina stayed in to read when the other children played rough outside. She looked back and forth five or six times before crossing streets. She startled easily. Lina’s mother often looked at her sternly, shook her head, sighed. Lina will always be able to picture this. Look; shake; sigh. Marrying Carlo Russo did not make her less nervous.