She turns her attention to Saul, who has soft curls and could use a haircut. She watches for the rest of the meal. She sees how he holds a napkin, a glass of water, another man’s hand in greeting, so delicately the things he touches seem holy. Sofia wants to be held like that. Like a glass of water. Like a library book. Like a pair of folded socks.
Next to Sofia, Antonia argues with herself in silent agony. Say it, Antonia tells herself. Spit it out. But the desert stretching itself along her tongue and down her throat is too dry.
After Antonia goes home, Sofia sits on her bed and tells herself, you are not allowed to do this. It has never worked for her before. She lists forbidden things that she has done: skipping class to sit swinging her legs on a park bench in the sun. Winking at the construction workers who tip their helmets to her and purse their lips. Once, telling her parents that she would watch Frankie, but spending the whole time in her room, and letting Frankie get into the bathtub alone. Buying the brassiere her mama wouldn’t be caught dead buying for my daughter, with the scalloped lace edges and the modern cut. Walking alone from Canal to Fourteenth, shoulders thrust back, head high.
Down the hall, Saul Grossman has lingered to speak with her father. The doors to the parlor echo as they shut; the evening air thickens. Sofia Colicchio, skin all abuzz, ecstatic with curiosity in her bedroom.
* * *
—
Antonia stalks home, carrying a plate of leftovers for Lina. Her anger is a red-hot coal, a condensed and burning thing. She slams the front door of the apartment harder than she means to, and not being a dish-thrower or an insult-hurler, decides to make tea. The water boils and Antonia pours it into a pot; the leaves soften and spread. And as the tea runs golden through the strainer into her mamma’s cup, Antonia gets angrier and angrier.
She is angry with Paolo for giving her this awful ultimatum. She is angry with Sofia, for falling into infatuation over eggplant and sausage, for living so fully in her own affections. For saying, I shouldn’t have asked you, so casually, as though there were no depths to Antonia that Sofia could not reach in and scoop up and comb her fingers through. She is angry with her mother, for giving her life to regret and sadness. Mostly, Antonia is angry with herself. For being unable to summon the courage to be her whole self in front of the people who love her most, and for refusing to show a man who has been nothing but kind and warm and giving that she loves him back. For looking happiness in the eye and telling it, I’m not ready.
Antonia puts her mamma’s teacup on a tray. She drops a lump of sugar in and stirs it. “Mamma,” she calls. “I made you some tea.” She turns the oven on its lowest setting and puts Lina’s plate in to warm up.
Lina shuffles in, wearing a robe and slippers. Her hair is wispy and tangled from resting against the back of the couch. She grips the back of her chair with long fingers. Her nails are cracked and the skin around them bleached. “You got home later than usual,” Lina says.
“Mamma, I’m in love,” Antonia says, and then claps her hand over her mouth, and then takes the hand away because more words are coming, quickly, in a small flood, “with a man. A Family man. His name is Paolo.”
Lina looks at her daughter like she would study a painting, or a faraway vista. Antonia stands with her feet apart on the floor as though she is steadying herself for a fistfight, but her hands tremble and her face is empty of blood and her hair swirls in chaos around her head. Antonia has been taller than her mother for years, but she seems to shrink and cower now.
Lina is not bad. She is maybe weak, or lost. And as she looks at her daughter—her beautiful, intelligent, suddenly grown-up daughter—she remembers the morning Antonia was born. It was in this corner, where the table is—she and Antonia are staring at one another over the spot where, almost eighteen years ago, she found herself locked inside a pain much bigger than herself. She knelt under the weight of it, knocked to all fours, and when she looked at her daughter for the first time, and Antonia opened her wet brown eyes and looked back—there it was. I’ve got you, she promised her tiny daughter. And also, thank you.
Lina is suspended, suddenly, barely balancing along the thread of her own life. Where, this memory asks Lina, did that warrior woman go? And Lina does not want to hear this question, for she has long ago decided that helplessness and a slow shrinking-away are the only solutions to the deluge of pain life has delivered her. I do not want to fight, she has decided. And she has not. She has let herself be swallowed: her body is small, her inhales consume less oxygen. She makes as few decisions as possible. She tries her best not to leave any traces of herself—no footprints in the mud of anyone’s memory. But the memory of her baby girl looking at her—in trust, in love, in mystery—swirls in the air around them and tells Lina, it’s time. Here is your daughter. She is all grown up, and she is scared to tell you that she has fallen in love, because you have not mothered her in ten years. All you ever wanted was for her to live a life absent of fear, and you have failed. You have forced her to take care of you, to mourn for you, to live for you. You have asked her to propagate your prejudices. You are the weight dragging her away from happiness.