Tonight Antonia and Paolo will go to a hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, the Grand Palace, where they will have a view over the East River. Tomorrow they will move into their own apartment. Paolo has been saving for rent and furniture all year. Antonia has picked out dishes, towels, bedside lamps. So I didn’t do it the way you wanted, she says defiantly, imagining herself at fifteen, awestricken in the high school library. I got us out, didn’t I? Last night was the final one she will ever spend in her childhood apartment.
They eat marinated red peppers and spinach ravioli with scalloped edges and trout with shriveled eyes and flesh of seaweed and lemon and river water. They all dance wildly; the sadnesses that always come to a family function are relegated to dark corners, to the bathroom line, to the side of the bar where they wait for their drinks. All night Antonia’s face is hot with food and wine and she watches Paolo, the boldness of his brows and lips and the half plum of his tongue; the jaunty tilted Homburg set just to shade one eye and then the other as he dances in the lowered light. After the reception, in the back of a powder-blue Cadillac, Antonia feels emboldened by four glasses of prosecco to run her fingers through the thick dark hair that escapes from under his hat brim, and he catches her fingers and pries open her fist so he can kiss the place where her middle finger meets her palm.
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?
* * *
—
In the kitchen, Saul has made a pot of tea. He has sliced bread for toast. He has set two eggs next to one another on the counter. “Boiled?” he asks Sofia as she comes out of the bathroom. Sofia wants to refuse herself food. She wants to feel the empty throb of her stomach until she figures out what is wrong with her. But hunger has taken on a new ferocity over the course of her pregnancy and Sofia finds herself unable to resist her primal needs: to pee, to sleep, to eat.
“Boiled,” she responds, and sits at the table. It is still strange for her to sit in a kitchen that belongs to her, that smells like the food she and Saul eat, that is not presided over by her own mamma. It is strange to run out of olive oil, soap, bleach. Strange to wake up next to Saul every day. It makes her giddy; it makes her nervous. It feels like she is a child, playing house with Antonia. She has whiplash from the speed at which her life morphed into this adult shape. As her body stretches against the confines of her child’s skin, Sofia wants, again and again, to be angry. Or else, she is joyous and bursting with energy, peppering kisses over the surface of Saul’s chest and shoulders, making him late for work.
But Saul is unrelentingly kind. He makes room for her anger. He stays grounded when Sofia threatens to explode.
There is nothing tangible for Sofia to fight against.
And so she finds herself thinking about her words, swallowing down snappy comebacks and dissatisfactions that jar like rocks against one another in her throat. She finds herself choosing a gentleness she has never known before, conserving her energy.
At night, she curls into Saul’s side like an animal making a nest.
It doesn’t feel permanent. Sofia can no more see the rest of her life now than she could when she was fifteen. She considered a moment of panic at until death us do part but her death is impossible to imagine.