You’re always a pill, Sofia snaps back at her, and then storms into her bedroom and feels like a monstrous, awkward thing.
* * *
—
When Paolo invites Antonia to supper at his family’s house, she arrives five minutes early and climbs the creaking stairs slowly, listening to the percussion and melody of the families behind their peeling apartment doors. Paolo’s apartment has four rooms stretched out along a narrow hall. The graying walls give off a faint aroma of simmering tomatoes and dusty paint and the sweat of four sons. The wooden floors are scratched by gravel and work boots and thirty years’ worth of rearranging furniture and boys running back and forth down the lengths of boards. It is an apartment that would tell stories about its occupants, even if they weren’t there. It does its best to contain Paolo’s family—to soak up the smells of their cooking and the steam from their showers and the tears from their fights. Paolo shares a room with one brother, two older brothers sandwich into a second room, his parents sleep in a third, and the six of them cook, drink, eat, fight, laugh, cry, and breathe together in the final room. They seem to coexist in their small apartment by moving so quickly they are hard to keep track of. Antonia, sitting at the kitchen table folding napkins, feels like she is on a carousel: slightly dizzy, a little exhilarated, trying fruitlessly to keep track of the ever-changing view. His family is loud and affectionate. His mother: small, wide, exclamatory, kisses Antonia on both cheeks, holds her face and looks into her eyes and says, “So this is the beautiful girl keeping our Paolo on the other side of the river so often lately?” and Antonia tries to smile but because Paolo’s mother is still holding her cheeks, she ends up grimacing oddly. Paolo’s father is tall, with long limbs like an octopus and thick black spectacles, and cries, “Basta, Viviana, give the poor boy a chance!” and Paolo’s mother swats him with a dishtowel and turns back to the stove. Paolo’s brothers pay Antonia no mind, engaged as they are in a loud argument about whether to enlist in the army. “I’ll cut off your feet in your sleep before I see you go to war,” warns Viviana, gesticulating with her butcher knife, and the boys duck out of the way just in case she means to do it now.
Paolo wants Antonia to marry him. Antonia can feel her desire to say yes beating like a drum on the inside of her chest. She thinks, often, of Sofia: the relief it must be to do what you want, when you want.
But Antonia has told no one about Paolo, and she cannot marry him until she does. She worries that if she tells her mamma, or Sofia, her reasons for loving him will be revealed as flimsy. She is worried that he will be rendered smaller, or less important, in the act of telling her larger-than-life best friend. Sofia never means to belittle Antonia, and perhaps Antonia lets herself be made small too easily, but she still fears the quizzical rise of Sofia’s brow; her cherry lips rounding in shock and maybe laughter, a little derision sneaking into the really, you? and the well who is he? I’ve never heard of him. Antonia’s carefully constructed relationship will come crashing down. She knows her mamma will be furious and disappointed that she loves a man who works for the Family. Her mamma might collapse under the weight of Antonia’s inadvertent but encompassing betrayal. Don’t speak to anyone with slicked-back hair. Paolo’s is brown, but so dark it’s almost black, and it moves toward the back of his head on its own, in a cresting wave that frames his face.
And his job is a good one. Good, in that it is enough to rescue Antonia from her own graveyard home. Good, in that it will pay for their future children to be fed, and it will buy them clothes and books. Good, in that by marrying Paolo, Antonia will buy herself time, and space. No wraparound porch, but an apartment with multiple rooms. A safety net for her children. Antonia, a child of loss, can build with anything she is given. She can see her life unrolling before her like an infinite carpet. Antonia and Paolo, in perpetuity, construct a home from the ground up. They do not carry anything that holds them back.
She wants to tell her mother about him first. She wants to tell Sofia. The secret has started waking her in the night, twisting its fingers through her hair and holding her down. But the words are locked somewhere below her lungs and she cannot find the key.
* * *
—
New York City straddles the mid-Atlantic coast. It is part swamp in the summer; part empty northern wasteland in the winter. And the city creates weather, like a mountain range: in the summer, the pavement and the buildings trap and heat the air; in the winter, wind screams down the long avenues, nature itself whirling through the concrete jungle.