Every time Antonia’s papa, Carlo, leaves the house, fear whittles away at Lina’s person until he is home again. And when Tommy Fianzo decides he needs Carlo to spend nights picking up and transporting crates of Canadian liquor, fear grips Lina around the throat and will not let her sleep at all.
So Lina develops a system: she doesn’t worry until the sun comes up. When she is awakened by the pulled-taffy air stretched between herself and Carlo, by the knowledge that he is elsewhere and has taken the most vulnerable part of her with him, Lina slips out of bed and alights on the floor lightly, like a bird. She pads down the steps of her building and up into the Colicchio apartment next door. She uses her spare key, and she sits on the couch with Rosa until she can bear the silence of her own apartment.
Just before dawn, Lina knows a key will turn in the front door. Carlo will move quietly into the apartment. And it, and she, will settle back down into the earth where they belong.
* * *
—
Sofia’s mamma, Rosa, remembers her own father working nights. Rosa stayed at home with her mother, who spent her days finishing the buttonholes of men’s shirts, making small stitches and worrying about Rosa’s father, spinning yarns for her children about her childhood before the boat ride to America, shouting at them to finish their homework, for God’s sake, to study, to sit up straight, to be careful, to make something of themselves, her babies. Rosa’s mother, with her raw fingertips from sewing, slicing onions for dinner and never wincing, but shutting her mouth, quiet for once, which is how Rosa and her siblings knew she was in pain. This all made sense to Rosa: the building of community and home no matter how, no matter where, no matter what the cost.
So when she met tall and striking Joey Colicchio, who had accepted a job from her father’s associate Tommy Fianzo Sr., Rosa knew what it would take to build her own house.
* * *
—
Antonia and Sofia do not always go to sleep when their mammas tell them to. They pass many hours pressing messages to one another through the wall between their bedrooms. They doze fitfully. Sleep is not as finite for them as it is for adults: there is no reason they cannot continue their conversation in a dream. They tell each other, your mamma is here tonight, because of course they know. And the mammas sit pressed together in one kitchen or another, sipping their wine and laughing, sometimes, and crying, others, and of course, they know when their daughters fall asleep, because they can still feel the shapes of those daughters turning against the insides of their bellies.
They remember being pregnant at the same time: tender to the touch, humming with potential. That, more than their husbands’ shared work, is what bonded them.
When they were pregnant is when Rosa and Lina took to whispered late-night conversations in one another’s apartments. There, by low light, they laid themselves open. They talked about the future, which always means talking about the past: about Rosa’s father and mother, their buzzing, bustling house, and about how Rosa wanted a bustling house of her own. But no needles, Rosa always said, no thread. No raw-pricked fingers. Her children would want for nothing. Lina, whose future had always felt like a vise tightening, was just relieved to love the baby growing inside of her more often than she was afraid of it. She thought of her own childhood, where there was no room for want in the face of the fight for survival. No have-to’s, she told Rosa. No musts. Her children would have a full world of choice. She would teach them to read.
It looks like a boy, the other Family ladies told Rosa at the butcher, at the park. It looks like twins, they told Lina, who was big, big, big, and could no longer fit in her usual shoes, and could not see her feet anyway, and who thought, of course, I will not be good at this either. The ladies reached out their hands to pinch Rosa’s and Lina’s faces and pat the domes of their stomachs. Rosa and Lina interlocked elbows and hobbled down the street. They realized that their babies would not have a blank slate: that they would be born into a world that expects them to be the right size, shape. If it’s a boy, they prayed, let him be good with his hands. If it’s a girl, let her be careful with her heart.
Lina, with her clammy hands and her pinched low back, added, let this child fear nothing.
In the fall of 1928, Sofia and Antonia start school together, and the world gets exponentially bigger with each passing day. They race there each morning, tripping over each other’s feet and legs. They are fierce and small, and arrive breathless and early. They learn numbers, and letters, and geography.
They learn on the first day that half the kids in their class are Italian, and half are Irish. They learn that Ireland is a small island far away from Italy, but not as far away as America, where we all are, says Mr. Monaghan. Sofia and Antonia make friends with Maria Panzini and Clara O’Malley. They are all wearing blue ribbons in their hair. They decide they will also do this tomorrow. They eat lunch together and they hold hands on the way out to their waiting mammas. Mamma, mamma, the four of them are ready to call out, but the mammas have dark shades drawn over their faces. The next day Maria Panzini eats lunch with another table of girls, and Clara eats all the way across the courtyard. The Irish kids eat over there, Antonia realizes. Just stick with Antonia, Sofia’s mamma says later. Our families are a little different, Rosa and Lina tell their daughters, and Sofia and Antonia don’t know whether that means they are better or worse, but soon they spend lunch alone.