Antonia grimaces, but there is a little thread of fear running through her. Would Sofia consider that?
Sofia smirks, and pats the bed next to her, and Antonia sits down. “He took me to dinner and he couldn’t think of anything to say. And I felt sorry for him, at first, because you know, he has his shirt tucked in too tightly and you can just tell his mother did his hair for him and his father gave him a lecture about behaving like a gentleman, but he didn’t ask me one question and he ordered plain noodles with butter and we just sat there in silence for half the meal!” Antonia is grinning now, picturing luminous Sofia trying to fit into a wooden bench on a trattoria patio, ordering Coca-Cola with a straw. Sofia and Lucas Fellini: the most boring boy in school. Sofia covers Antonia’s hand with her own. She leans forward conspiratorially. “And then after? It was like he thought it had gone really well—or something—and he walked me the long way back—you know, past the park outside school”—and here Antonia gasps, because the park outside the high school is notorious for being a spot where couples meet, and because at least two girls had ended up pregnant after trysts there last year—“I know,” continues Sofia, “and he sort of looked at me like alright, here we go, and I could only look back and think here you go by yourself, maybe”—at which Antonia says, “Sofia, honestly,” and Sofia waves a hand—“I know, but tell me you don’t think he did when he got home! Anyway, he couldn’t even bring himself to lean toward me or ask for a kiss and finally he just turned and walked me home!” Sofia stops to catch her breath. “Oh, Tonia, you should have seen him. Standing there looking at me like a kicked dog. As if that would get me going!” The two of them look at each other for a second and a half of held breath and then collapse laughing on the bed. “He was so boring!” wailed Sofia. “I thought it might be contagious!”
“Imagine catching Fellini’s dullness!” cries Antonia. Tears leak from the corners of her eyes and her stomach hurts. “D’you think you could get it just from kissing him or would you have to . . . ?”
“I didn’t even want to breathe the air near him, much less kiss him!” gasps Sofia. “Much less . . . ugh! And I’m sure he’s told all his friends we did that and more, and God I almost don’t care as long as I don’t have to talk to him anymore!” Sofia almost tells Antonia there was a moment where she looked at him and thought, what if I just did it? What if I undid my buttons and just did it, just like that, what would happen then? and that she was stopped not by a sense that it was wrong, or that she had to protect herself, but by a powerful surge of sadness, the idea that Lucas Fellini would be the one to divide her life into before and after, the idea that if she was changed he would be a part of it. Instead, she had turned to him and told him to walk her home, and she had gone to bed still shaking with the thinness of the boundary between saying yes and saying no. But she would feel naked if she told Antonia, who she is sure never has to wrestle with breaking rules the way Sofia does.
Antonia’s stomach hurts from laughing—with relief, with love, with horror at the things Sofia is tempted to do. Sofia rests her head on her stretched-out arm so she can look sideways at Antonia.
“I’m sorry, you know?” says Sofia.
Antonia is tempted to ask about what but she knows it would be one of those choices that makes her smaller, that Sofia would roll her eyes and say you know, and Antonia does know. So she says, “Me too,” and they lie together and listen to the adults in the living room. Occasional coughing; a man’s laughter.
“Do you ever think about this?” asks Sofia. She gesticulates toward the closed bedroom door.
“How do you mean?” asks Antonia.
“I mean, do you ever think about what they’re doing in there? Do you think about what our—what my father does?”
“I try not to,” says Antonia. But of course she thinks about it: every doffed cap an homage to her papa. Every slick suit a reminder of what was taken from her. She almost tells Sofia that she has been building a house with a wraparound porch, in her mind. She has been entertaining fantasies of college, of independence and escape. Sofia would understand this, she thinks. But Sofia would feel abandoned, too. And Sofia would know Antonia was faking something.
Sofia is silent, and then she says, “I do.”
“You do what?”
“I think about it.” She doesn’t often. But she can’t get the image of small Antonia, life permanently scarred by the machinations of men with power and secrets to spare, out of her head. And lately, surrounded by friends who don’t call on the weekend or ask how she’s doing but who will stand next to her, an army of pleated skirts against all that’s unknown, Sofia is sometimes suddenly breathless, caught in a memory of grade-school friendlessness, the throat-ache of walking the halls under pinched, judgmental eyes. And Sofia realizes she harbors no curiosity about what it is her father does to run Brooklyn, but rather, is filled with anger. Anger at all of it.
“What do you think, then?”
“I think it’s wrong.” As Sofia says this she thinks she believes it. As she says it she is buoyed by a pure, sovereign opinion. She realizes this is Joey’s worst fear: that she will see what he does, and that she will hate it. “I think it’s wrong, and I think they really hurt people.”
“I think it is more complicated than that,” says Antonia. Antonia, who never has the privilege of single-mindedness. Who knows viscerally how the Family has destroyed her life, but also how they have maintained it. She feels surprised to think this. A hole punctured in the side of her imaginary future life, the air all draining out. You’ll never abandon your family, she realizes. She’s no better than Lina, who cannot escape Family ties either.
“How?” asks Sofia. She feels that she is right. She feels it catch flame inside of her. “How can you”—it is coming out, there’s no stopping it—“you, of all people, think it’s complicated?”
“Excuse me?” Antonia stands, and suddenly there they are: on the brink of something unspoken. They are giddy and close to tears, still fragile together. They do not want to break apart again, but it would be easy.
The fire consumes Sofia’s belly and chest and it comes for her throat. “After what they did to your papa. How can you. How can you think it’s complicated.”
“They pay my rent, Sof. And yours, in case you forgot.” Antonia glares. “Isn’t it a little hypocritical to criticize them?”
Sofia is suddenly both sorry and even more angry. Tears form behind her eyes. She feels herself grow hot and knows her face is bright red. Her voice is stuck in the back of her mouth. “I’m sorry,” she says. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“It’s okay,” says Antonia, and it is: the relief of having something to fight about somehow better than having nothing to say to one another at all.
Sofia looks at Antonia and opens her mouth to ask a thousand questions. “Aren’t you angry?” is what she says. “At them? At us?”
Antonia looks at Sofia. She is standing by the doorway of Sofia’s bedroom, backlit by the lamp on Sofia’s desk. She has the same face she had when she was five, and nine, and thirteen. “Every moment,” is what she says. “But what alternative do I have?”
* * *
—
After Antonia leaves, Sofia turns over her newfound anger in her mind. It’s hot as molten metal. She cocks her head toward the rumble of end-of-dinner conversation from the sitting room, but she can’t quite hear it. So Sofia slips through her bedroom door in stocking feet. As she gets closer to the living room, the rumble sorts itself out into her papa, talking with her uncle and her grandfather.