—
In spring of 1943, Joey signs the papers on a solid, four-story brownstone with a spacious front yard in Carroll Gardens. The war has made him, if not a rich man, a very comfortably situated one. Sofia and Saul and Julia move in to the first floor one frigid day, when the sky dumps snow in wet, sticky clumps which cling to coat collars and congeal in bootlaces and the folds of trousers.
Rosa wastes no time in her new kitchen. Sunday dinner had been too big for her Red Hook apartment for years. She invests in a long, sturdy table that runs like a canyon from one end of her dining room to the other. Even so, dinner has grown so much that folding chairs still have to be squeezed into tight places. Preparation regularly spills into Sofia’s kitchen, where there are always pans of ravioli on the table, waiting to be boiled. Where the fridge is stuffed with twine-sealed bakery boxes and bottles of wine line the baseboard. A fog of tomato and meat floats out the windows of both Rosa’s and Sofia’s apartments. It fills the hallways of their building. It makes its way in fragrant tendrils down the street.
* * *
—
Even after Antonia seems to have recovered, Sofia goes to Antonia’s every day all summer. She is relieved the way the family member of anyone who has almost died is relieved: in no small part, what would I have been without you, a selfish and insistent wondering that has not lessened as Sofia observes herself in the mirror and in shop windows. She is stuck inside a disintegrating container. Her face is puffy and tired; her hair comes out in small slithering bunches when she runs her hands through it. She has stuffed herself back into her pre-baby girdles and hose, but her body resents being told how to breathe now. The fear that choked her when she was pregnant has changed; Sofia has developed a certain confidence in her own ability to care for Julia. She sleeps thinking of Julia, and wakes with the slightest hiccup in Julia’s breath. Sofia knows where Julia is the way she knows she has arms; it’s easy. Sofia loves Julia with her belly, with her hands; a hot love like a flame. But Sofia feels herself sinking into invisibility. She wants desperately to pull herself onto an alternate path. She is not the same as she was, and she is not the same as other mothers, and she mourns that, and she wakes hoping to see Antonia’s face each morning. Antonia is a rudder, a root system, a time machine.
And so as the quietly rotting carpet of cherry blossoms below their feet is replaced above by waving rafts of lime-green leaves; as New Yorkers throw open their windows and let the life out of their stale winter apartments and begin to drape their courtyards in crisscrossing lines of laundry and the smell of their food and the timbre of their conversations bursts out into the air in waves; as the city begins, again, to feel full, Sofia Colicchio dresses her daughter, whose strong fat thighs and wildly waving arms threaten to burst the seams of any outfit, and together they walk the three blocks to Antonia’s apartment.
A neighborhood can change drastically in just three blocks; so it is that Sofia and Julia walk from the carefully cultivated front gardens and brownstone smiles of historic Carroll Gardens to its shabbier tenement-style outskirts in mere minutes. Antonia and Paolo and Robbie live in an eight-unit redbrick building on Nelson Street. They have one bedroom in the front, the kitchen faces the rear, and there is a narrow second bedroom and a sitting room laid along the inside of the building like roe along the inside of a fish.
Sofia is breathless when she knocks, and sweating from carrying Julia.
“Tonia,” she says, “I brought you a hungry child to feed.” Antonia takes Julia and coos; moves aside to let Sofia in.
“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.