Sofia nods. “I know,” she says. She hadn’t thought about the ripple effects of Saul’s promotion, the way it would bloom out away from their small family. Saul works longer hours, now, and Julia spends more evenings with Rosa or Antonia. Sofia keeps a gun in the drawer of her nightstand, now. Saul handed it to her in a nondescript paper bag and Sofia accepted it as her birthright. It was easy, to take on power that had until recently been inconceivable. When she feels small or overwhelmed she opens the drawer to look at it: the muscle of its trigger, the flesh of its handle. Knowing it is there makes Sofia feel powerful, a warmth washing up her thighs and down her spine. She realizes, sitting across from Antonia, that maybe the power she has is power that was taken away from other people.
Antonia stares past Sofia’s shoulder. “I don’t know what to do, Sof. I’m worried I was so surprised someone loved me that I missed out on—on—on everything!” Antonia tastes acid at the back of her mouth; her vision swims. Antonia is not a shouter; she is not a blurter-out of strange sad things. She is a thinker, a muser, a thoughtful deliberator. She is shaking with disappointment; with a fear that what she has just shouted in the deli is true.
And now something different rises in Sofia, something she tries to push away before it has a name, but which is insistent, and strengthens quickly. How often has she shrunk herself in front of Antonia, because she has some sixth sense that Antonia disapproves of what she is doing? How frequently does she pretend not to love her work as much as she does, or subtly not mention it in front of Antonia? At what point did the tact Sofia tries to employ to keep her relationship with Antonia peaceful become its own kind of box she does not fit into? Sofia raises her face away from her drink, brow in a knot, elbows on the table. “Tonia,” she begins. And then she stops, to make sure she wants to say what she is about to say, and then she takes a breath and says, “No one is stopping you from doing any of these things but yourself.”
There is silence at their table. And then Antonia says, “You might be right,” and this makes Sofia feel cruel and harsh: she had expected icy eyes, a you don’t understand. “But it doesn’t feel that way.”
“Do you love Paolo?” asks Sofia. And the way she asks it makes Antonia feel like she could answer yes or no and either would be okay. Sofia asks as if do you love your husband is a question like any other.
“I love him,” says Antonia. She pushes her thumb into the seedy center of half a dill pickle, making a mushy fingerprint. “But our house is quiet, Sof. I love him, but he’s not happy. I never thought I’d end up in an unhappy house, but I feel like I’ve been in one my whole life, now.” The sadness of hearing this out loud rounds Antonia’s shoulders; her face fills up; her eyes brim over. “I should have married out of the Family,” she says. “I should have listened to my mamma.”
Sofia reaches across the table to hold Antonia’s hands. “Sometimes,” she says, “I think about what it would have been like if I had never become a mother.” Antonia looks up at her. If I can see you, I must be here. “But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be one, Tonia. It doesn’t mean I can’t do other things.” If you can see me, I must be here.
“I should have gone to Egypt,” says Antonia. “I should have lived on top of a mountain somewhere. Do you remember Mr. Monaghan? That game we used to play, spinning the globe?”
Sofia nods.
“I play it in my head,” says Antonia. “When I feel lost, or restless. I spin a globe and think about where I might go.”
* * *
—
No one has asked Sofia when her second baby is coming in a long time, and for this, she is grateful. They are scared of her, or they don’t think she’s a good parent, or both. She’s ascended into a strange in-between world: she’s stayed well within the bounds of the Family, but has moved out of the realm of women, so people don’t know how to interact with her. The girls she went to school with have turned into stiff-nosed women. Sofia passes them on the street, in the market. They are all on their second or fifth baby. The wives of the men who come to Sunday dinner are always pregnant.
Sometimes Sofia remembers how she felt the morning Julia was born, before she left for the hospital. The way she knew—she knew—she could ride the waves of her labor all the way to the top of the world. The power of that, and the simultaneous powerlessness of motherhood, the way she can love Julia and have no control over Julia’s happiness, the way she is reduced to a voiceless decoration once people know she is a parent, even though she contains everything needed to build a world from nothing. There are days she’s sure of herself, sure of her choices, confident that she can point herself in any direction. But in the car back to Brooklyn, Antonia silent in the backseat next to her, Sofia is overcome by a sudden rush of despair.