“Convenient,” says Antonia, balancing Julia on her hip. “I was just sitting here hoping to feed a baby.” She kisses Julia’s palm. “A filthy baby! What, does your mamma not clean you? What is on these hands?”
Sofia is peeling off her hose, clips flapping against her thighs. She is hopping on one foot. “It’s just mashed carrots, you should have heard her scream when I came at her hands with a washcloth. She needs to eat every two hours these days.” She drops the hose to the floor, where they curl like snakeskins around her discarded shoes, and sighs. “It’s hot already. It seems like yesterday I was sweating and pregnant. Now I’m sweating and a monster.”
“You’re not a monster,” Antonia says automatically as she takes Julia to the kitchen sink to clean her hands. From the bedroom at the front of the house comes a wail, a siren call.
“I’ll get him,” says Sofia. While Antonia runs warm water in the sink and Julia leans in to splash it, Sofia walks the long hallway to the front room, where Robbie has woken up from his nap.
Robbie’s hands are clasped around the wooden slats of his crib and he is pressing his face between them, waiting to be collected. He sniffs and stops crying at the sight of Sofia, sneaking in barefoot, grinning. “Bibi,” she coos. “Has anyone ever not picked you up, when you needed it?” Robbie does not respond but he stretches his arms out to Sofia, throws his head back in warm release.
How easy it can feel, Sofia thinks. How simple it can be to slip into the role that is made for you. She and Antonia have the afternoon ahead of them. Paolo and Saul are out doing God-knows-what. And Antonia is healthy now, and Sofia is happy. Isn’t she?
Robbie, tired of Sofia standing still, reaches out and clasps a healthy handful of her hair in his hand and pulls it. Sofia looks at him and remembers where she is and hears Antonia talking to Julia in the kitchen, and feels the insistent warming air through the open window. “Let’s go find your mamma,” she says to Robbie. It’s what he has been hoping for the whole time.
Later that afternoon Robbie and Julia have been fed and bathed and they have been convinced to take another nap, curled together in Robbie’s crib. Sofia and Antonia have retreated into Antonia’s bed with a bottle of white wine and they have thrown the window open so they are breathing in the thick green smell of new leaves and grass; someone’s laundry; someone burning last year’s charred meat off the grill before dinner. The late afternoon sun is rich and runs like maple syrup, pouring down into the room, and there is something lazy and delicious swelling up in Sofia and Antonia, who rely on these afternoons, each in her own way, for reassurance. Sofia likes that with Antonia, always with Antonia, she is herself. And Antonia likes this: that Sofia thinks there is a way they could be the same people they once were. Antonia, who has spent the winter deep-sea diving into the darkest, most formidable parts of her own consciousness. Antonia relishes Sofia’s optimistic insistence that they can relax into selves that no longer exist.
The wine is a sloshing tablespoon in the bottom of the bottle and the room has darkened around Sofia and Antonia before they hear Paolo’s key in the lock, and then he is there with Saul, flicking the kitchen light on, standing in the quiet evening apartment with two babies who, now that they have napped so late, will never go to bed on time, and two women who are laughing, laughing at something they will not explain. Saul slips out wordlessly to get pizza from Stefano’s around the corner, where the service is abysmal and the hygiene a serious question but the pies are thin and crisp and dripping with cheese. Sofia and Antonia detangle themselves from the bed, from one another, from the dream of every late afternoon. Paolo is in the kitchen now, opening another bottle of wine, a red one an associate of Joey’s gave him, from a family vineyard in the old country, and it was supposed to be saved for a special occasion, but Antonia doesn’t remind him. She and Sofia will watch Paolo and Saul take off their coats and hats, greet their babies. They will accept scratchy kisses on the cheek.
Once in a while, Sofia and Antonia will catch one another’s eye and wink, or grin. For although they are married—married!—it also seems like at any moment Rosa might burst in and tell them to keep it down, to go to bed. Though they are mothers, it is easy, when they are together, for Sofia and Antonia to feel the childlike elasticity that bound them together, that bound them to the wide world. And more often than not, when Sofia and Antonia make eye contact around their husbands, over their children, they both find themselves stifling laughter.