As the table is set around her, Sofia chews on a pencil eraser. School starts in a week. Her mamma puts bowls on the table with no tablecloth. Her papa pours deep glasses of wine from a jug at the back of the pantry. Antonia and her mamma come over from next door and the five of them crowd around the table. Lina Russo is always small but tonight she is almost translucent in her chair. She sits the still, calm vigil of someone to whom the worst thing has happened. Her soup steams, untouched in front of her.
At their corner of the table, Sofia and Antonia eat quickly, messily. Sofia is filled with a restless discomfort, and wants simultaneously to break the tension at the table and to sink down and flatten under its weight. Antonia watches her mamma out of the corner of her eye. Lina is not eating. Antonia feels like she has woken up on another planet. She wants to be anywhere else. So when Sofia speaks, she feels relief pour down through her body and she shakes with adrenaline, with dread, with the shock of her old body being thrust so viciously forward through passing time.
“I have new dress-up clothes,” Sofia says.
Antonia looks up from her soup. Thank you. “What are they?”
“Tonia,” says Sofia, who wants to fill the room with anything, even the sound of her own voice, “YOU HAVE TO SEE!” This comes out too loud. She knows immediately.
All three adults look up from their steaming silent bowls and her mother glares and says, “That’s way too loud,” and her father says, “Why don’t you girls go play in your room,” and so Sofia and Antonia get up meekly and grit their teeth against the scraping of wooden chair on wooden floor and run down the hall together. The air gets lighter as they go, as if their parents’ moods can only dampen a certain radius. Both girls are breathless with escape. How often have they done this, running like wildfire through a meadow, so eager to make something new together.
“We can play adventure,” says Sofia, digging through her toy chest for a pair of leather-rimmed goggles.
Antonia ties a scarf around her neck. She is free. She is free. She is going somewhere else. “We’re arctic explorers!”
Sofia looks at her disdainfully. “You are wearing a royal gown, not an explorer’s uniform. You should tie that around your head,” but Antonia looks at her with a quiet, wild venom and Sofia acquiesces. “Maybe you are a royal explorer.”
“We’re arctic explorers,” says Antonia, climbing onto Sofia’s bed and holding her hand to her brow to shade her eyes as she surveys the terrain, “and we have run out of food.”
Sofia jumps up next to Antonia. “We’re weak with hunger!”
“We are hunting a polar bear!”
“But it won’t come out of its cave!”
“We have written letters to our families to tell them we love them.” Antonia is solemn, just barely on the wrong side of the make-believe reckoning with mortality. “They will find our bodies in the springtime.” Her voice trembles.
“Maybe we should play something else,” says Sofia. She sits on the edge of the bed.
Antonia acts as if she does not hear. “Our souls will be in Heaven,” she says quietly.
“Antonia, I think we should play something else,” says Sofia. She twists a corner of the blanket in her fingers.
Antonia turns around, eyes on fire, arms raised. “I am an arctic explorer,” she says loudly, towering over Sofia.
“Antonia, this isn’t fun,” says Sofia.
“I am alone in the wilderness. Everyone has left me. I voted to stay alone because I am a women’s sufferer and I can vote. I stayed here and I wanted to be alone.”
Sofia says nothing. Antonia is unrecognizable. Her voice is coming from somewhere outside of her body. Suddenly Antonia’s calm face cracks down the middle. She melts onto the bed next to Sofia. “I don’t want to play anymore,” she says.
“Okay,” says Sofia. She is uncomfortable and suddenly wishes Antonia would leave.
“I don’t want to play!” says Antonia.
“I heard you,” says Sofia.
Antonia bursts into tears. Sofia stares, silent, desperately wishing her parents would come in.
Antonia wails. She shudders. She sits limp on the edge of Sofia’s bed and howls.
Rosa bursts into the room.
Sofia is so relieved she starts crying too.
Rosa is pregnant, and she has not told her husband. She sits between two wailing girls and hugs them both close and wishes for her own mother. She stares out the window and knows she cannot fall apart.
* * *
—
They have a funeral for Carlo, though there is no body. They bury a silk-lined, dark-brown box in St. John’s. For the rest of her life, Antonia will be able to picture the funeral in little pieces, as though a broken film is playing in her head. The day is too warm and she sweats in her black stockings and new dress. There are the bent elbows of men clasping one another around the triceps; the rustling of women stepping through long grass in heeled shoes; the nasal drone of the priest, who keeps having to adjust his eyeglasses and off of whose naked pate the sunshine glints as the afternoon wears on. Again and again, the faces of bent-over adults loom toward her like flesh-colored balloons. There is the queasy discomfort of being kissed and hugged and having to say thank you, thank you, thank you over and over again, and as the afternoon grows old the adults’ breath becomes worse and worse, soured with dark wine and fat-lined slices of lonza shipped from Rome. Antonia can feel her self separating from this day, retreating. Further and further away so by the time Aunt Rosa kisses her and holds her close at the end of the afternoon Antonia can hear her voice echoing, like there is water between them.
Lina is inconsolable for most of the funeral, reddened and teary and leaking. Carlo’s well-wishers are sympathetic, but seem wary of getting too close to such a volatile fountain of animal grief. A wife, everyone knows, should have a wan but clear face at a funeral. She should be holding herself together, in honor of the memory of her husband. So the guests at Carlo’s funeral give Lina sympathetic glances from afar, ask each other how does she seem without asking her themselves; whisper such a shame when they think they are out of Antonia’s hearing.
Lina had given everything to the conventions she was told would protect her. Get a husband, her mother used to say, and you will be taken care of. Along with get a husband went fix your hair when you go out, be polite, and don’t sob like a broken beast at your husband’s funeral. Lina has been betrayed. She sees no need to continue abiding by anyone’s rules.
Near the end of the interminable afternoon, Antonia is sitting on the couch, staring in mute exhaustion, when the crowd in her living room seems to part like a zipper being undone as three tall, gray-suit-clad, slick-haired men with clean faces and very shiny shoes walk in. One of them is her uncle Joey, and the other two look familiar: hard-shouldered, bold-eyed, faces gleaming under close new shaves, looking warily around the room. She recognizes them from Sunday dinners, from the circle of men who hunch together in the living room until the food is served.
They remove their hats in unison.
The crowd in the living room is thick with silence. Suddenly, Lina emerges from where she has been cowering under the weight of her own sorrow and fear in the bedroom. “Get out,” she says.
“Lina,” says Uncle Joey. “No one is sorrier than I am.”
“Get out. Get out of my house,” says Lina, whose own voice is strong and clear for the first time in days. “How dare you bring them here. How dare you bring this into my home.” Antonia can feel herself swimming toward the surface of this moment. There is something about it that sings with significance.
“Lina, I understand why you’re angry,” says Joey. “He was my best friend.”
“You bastard. You get them out of here right now.” Lina gestures at the men flanking Uncle Joey. Antonia cannot place them. She does not understand why her mamma is growling so ferociously at Uncle Joey, who has just come to say he is sorry, like all the other adults in the room. But she is grateful and relieved to see the light of Lina’s life shining for the first time in days, like there is still a person under there.
“Lina, please—”