By three o’clock, the usually spacious-seeming Fianzo apartment is stuffed to the brim with the buzzing and spitting of adults, the smell of wine and garlic. In the winter, the windows steam and the house fills with the singed, snowy smell of gloves and scarves drying on radiators; in the summer there is the sharp stench of sweat, and melting buckets of ice for lemonade and white wine on every surface. Antonia and Sofia are quickly forgotten in the maelstrom and fend for themselves with the other Family children, who they see once a week but who they do not know well, because their families are the only ones who live in Red Hook.
Tommy Fianzo has a son, Tommy Jr., who is bigger than Sofia and Antonia and mean, given to vicious pinches and obscene gestures when no adults are looking. Tommy’s brother Billy comes, who Sofia and Antonia like even less than Tommy’s son. He doesn’t have a wife, or children, and he seems to skulk at the edges of rooms like a barnacle on a rock. His eyes are narrow and black, and his teeth crowd into his mouth like commuters on a train platform. He rarely speaks to them, but he watches them with his beady eyes, and Sofia and Antonia avoid him.
At six, Tommy Fianzo and his wife carry the platters of food into the room. Bellissima, the guests cheer. They welcome the bowl of pasta, the falling apart lamb, the cold plates of beans and sliced squid drenched in olive oil, the slippery roasted red peppers. The guests kiss their fingers. They beam. Moltissime grazie, they moan. I have never been so full. I have never seen food so beautiful.
For the most part, Sofia and Antonia are ignored: left to their own devices, they play precarious games of tag, racing around the table and between the legs and gesturing elbows of adults. The house fills with pipe tobacco and ladies’ perfume; the chaos is friendly, familiar, the burbling high point of a wave. Eventually, their parents fill their plates.
On the way home, Sofia and Antonia are half-asleep, eyes lowered, limbs heavy. Manhattan sparkles through the car windows as they flash over the Brooklyn Bridge. And if they are lucky, Antonia’s papa will put a hand to each of their backs and sing to them, low and soft songs that he remembers from his own mamma, from the island where he grew up. He tells them about the red-hot dirt, the whitewashed ancient church, the fragrant shade of gnarled lemon trees, the old woman with long and tangled hair who lived in a hut overlooking the sea.
When they get home, the Colicchios and the Russos unfurl from the car and the grown-ups kiss one another before they go into their respective apartments. Carlo carries Antonia upstairs and Joey takes Sofia by the hand and Rosa and Lina share a lingering look at one another, at their husbands, at their girls.
Papa, Antonia says, before she drifts into solid sleep, you would rather be here all the time instead of going to work, wouldn’t you. It is not a question. Cara mia, Carlo whispers. Of course.
In the other room, Lina Russo always knows when Carlo gives this answer. She knows when Carlo eases their daughter into sleep. Cara mia, and Lina is weighted down at last, balanced and calm. Of course.
On Sundays after Sofia is asleep Rosa stands still in her living room and surveys her territory. Cara mia, she thinks. Her sleeping daughter, who wants for nothing. Her husband with his raised eyebrows, waiting for her to decide the room can be abandoned for morning. Of course.
* * *
—
The next morning Sofia will wake in her bed, and Antonia will wake in hers. The garbage carts come on Monday morning and if the trashmen look up, they sometimes see, in adjoining buildings on a small side street in Red Hook, two little girls in nightgowns, both staring out of their windows as a new week begins.
The summer when Sofia and Antonia are seven, their parents decide they have had enough of the punishing heat, and plan a beach trip.
At the beginning of August, they set out: Antonia’s mamma crammed into the tiny backseat with Sofia, Antonia, and the luggage, the other grown-ups in front. They join the throngs of New Yorkers crowding the Long Island Motor Parkway and proceed to inch along, a couple of miles per hour, for the whole afternoon.
The sun beats down on top of the car and inside they sweat into their clothes and seats and try their best not to touch each other. The traffic moves like a full and languid snake across Long Island.
Sofia quickly grows tired of watching the occupants of other cars and falls to counting the spots on her new skirt, but Antonia leans forward around Sofia and watches as a man in a suit picks his nose; as a woman with a white blouse taps her manicured finger idly on the windowsill; as two children push each other in a backseat that looks roomy and clean compared to the one Antonia is stuffed into like an oiled sardine.