Sex makes Antonia feel like a wildcat, like a river. She finds herself kneeling on the edges of furniture, straining toward Paolo as he brushes his teeth, as he hammers a nail into the wall, as he opens the fridge and then meets her eyes across the room. She finds that she is spacious, that she is resilient, that she is flexible. Antonia is hungry as she runs a bar of soap over herself in the bathtub, as the water drips from the ends of her hair. She is surprised by the voracity of her own want; this tremulous, physical thing that comes from her body, that cannot be overthought.
She is pregnant almost immediately, and with each passing day feels less like an imposter in an adult world. She interlaces her fingers at night and squeezes the blood out of them in prayer. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
* * *
—
Sofia bakes and swells in the springtime sun.
Saul takes First Communion on a brilliantly blue May morning, body of Christ gluey on his tongue and the sour taste of wine lingering in the folds between his gums and his cheeks. Afterward, he holds the door of the church open for his pregnant fiancée and hopes his squinted, twisted face can be blamed on the bright sunlight outside. Because Sofia is who she is, she will not thank him for adopting her language and her holidays and her family’s name. Because Saul is who he is, he will not ask her to.
They are married by a priest who comes to the Colicchio apartment on a Friday evening and leaves with a thick envelope of cash and less guilt than he would have expected. For a wedding present, Sofia’s parents find them an apartment on Verona Street, situated carefully in the still-Italian area of Red Hook. Suspended on one side several blocks from Hamilton Ave, where the Irish kids who call themselves Creekies still throw punches, rocks, and sometimes knife blades at Italians who get too close, and on the other side, the old docks, where there are too many hollow-eyed desperate families who, Joey understands, would do anything to survive, the apartment is most importantly as far away as Joey can manage from the Red Hook Houses, where every day, it seems, new longshoremen and their families are pouring into the neighborhood like ants. Joey has his sights set on a townhouse in Carroll Gardens: one of the modern ones, with brick walls and new plumbing and a front yard filled with flowers. He imagines Rosa presiding over one end of a long wooden dining table. He can picture Sofia and his grandchildren living on one floor, the sounds of small feet pounding the wood floors and laughter coming up through the radiator pipes. But in the meantime, he finds, for his daughter, a railroad apartment with two bedrooms and a kitchen and a sitting room all in a line.
Saul and Sofia move their things in before they are married so they can sleep there on their first night. Rosa packs them boxes of second-best dishes, the old stockpot with the small dent in it, and when they arrive and the door shuts behind them there is an awkward silence in the apartment until Saul says, wait here, and goes into the kitchen, and comes back with a drinking glass wrapped in a dishtowel. He puts it on the floor before Sofia and tells her to stomp on it. Sofia does not ask questions, but lifts her foot and slams it down, and as the glass crunches it is like a film is peeled back from her eyes. She is giddy. She wants to take the glasses down from the shelves and smash them all.
Sofia wakes sweating in the night and opens the bedroom window to let the sludgy air move around her like porridge. She turns to watch Saul sleep, the outlines of his face just visible in the gray city night. His brow furrows; words form and fade around the edges of his mouth. And it is now, while she is alone in the way one always is while watching someone else sleep, that something occurs to Sofia, something she has always known, but has never had the words for, or the courage to speak: it is possible she doesn’t want to be a mother.
She considers the unshakable physicality of her baby, turning now, suspended above the bowl of her hips. Her doubt feels also like a tangible thing, twisting its way through the air and blooming around her like nightshade.
She cannot fall back asleep. Her eyes dry out and ache. In the morning, the doubt is still there. It has coiled around her nightstand and she can feel its scratchy leaves in the folds of her clothing.
“Don’t,” she says to Saul, as he snakes an arm around her belly. “Don’t do that.”
“Do you feel okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine.” Her voice is a locked door.
“How about tonight I bring home Chinese?” Saul suggests. “You shouldn’t have to cook.”
“I said I’m fine,” says Sofia, and walks to the bathroom.
After she closes the door, she stares at herself in the mirror. Her face is always bright lately, shiny with new blood and warm air. Her features look ordinary. Are you bad? she wonders. Are you broken?