The Family(2)

Sofia pays only a glancing attention to other adults. She notices when they enter her father’s gravitational field, and when the warmth of his attention skips from one to another. She notices that her father always seems to be the tallest in the room. She accepts the offerings of jellied candies and biscotti handed down by men who, even Sofia can tell, are more concerned with currying her father’s favor.

After his meetings Sofia’s papa takes her for gelato; they sit at the counter on Smith Street and he sips thick black espresso while she tries not to drip stracciatella down the front of her shirt. Sofia’s papa smokes long thin cigarettes and tells her about his meetings. We’re in the business of helping people, he tells Sofia. For that, they pay us a little bit, here and there. So Sofia learns: you can help people, even if they are afraid of you.

She is his girl, she knows that. His favorite. He sees himself in her. Sofia can smell the danger on her father like a dog smells a storm coming: an earthy quickening in his wake. A taste like rust. She knows that means he would do anything for her.

Sofia can feel the pulse of the universe thrumming through her at every moment. She is so alive she cannot separate herself from anything around her. She is a ball of fire and at any moment she might consume her apartment, the street outside, the park where she goes with Antonia, the church and the streets her papa drives on for work, and the tall Manhattan buildings across the water. It is all tinder.

Instead of burning the whole world Sofia contents herself with asking why, Papa, why, what is that.



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Antonia Russo lives in an apartment with two bedrooms, one that is hers and one that is her parents’. Her mamma and papa leave the door to their room open and Antonia sleeps best when she can hear the cresting waves of her papa snoring. Her kitchen has no window and a small round wooden table instead of the square dining table Sofia’s family has. Her mamma scrubs and scrubs the floor and then sighs and says, there is nothing to be done about this. In the living room there are pictures on all the walls, the grayish-brown old-fashioned kind where everyone looks upset. The pictures are of Antonia’s grandparents, before they left theoldcountry. Sometimes her mamma looks at them and kisses the necklace around her neck and shuts her eyes tightly, just for a moment.

Antonia finds that though she is expected to stay inside her own body, she often feels like she is in Sofia’s body, or her mamma’s body, or the body of the princess in a story. It is easy for her to slip away, spread out, and exist in the whole universe instead of within the confines of her own skin.

In the mornings, Antonia lines up her stuffed animals and names them. She makes her bed without being asked.



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Sofia often appears in the doorway of Antonia’s home with unbrushed hair and dirt under her fingernails; she possesses the effortless light of the sun, sure she will rise, confident that she can wake everyone up. Antonia is both attracted and repelled: fascinated in the way a child will circle a dead bird, admire a lone feather, build a shrine to it. She is scrupulous about her own appearance. She wants to drink Sofia, to fill herself with her friend’s addictive magic.

Sofia and Antonia spend all of their time together, because they are young, and they live next door to one another, and their parents encourage their friendship. It is convenient for parents when your child can always be found with someone else’s.

The texture of Sofia’s walk is as familiar to Antonia as the heft and rhythm of her own; her reflection in Sofia’s brown eyes is more grounding than the reflection of a mirror. Sofia, for her part, recognizes Antonia by way of a smell of powder and lilies, left in her room long after her friend has gone home for dinner; by the perfectly stacked tower of blocks on her shelf; in the wave of her favorite doll’s neatly brushed hair.

Sofia and Antonia do not realize that their friendship is undisturbed by other children.

Sofia and Antonia close their eyes and make the world. Together, they go on safari, narrowly escaping bloody death in the teeth of a lion. They travel in airplanes, to Sicilia, where their families are from, and to Japan, and to Panama. They survive in the wilderness with only two sticks and a tin of Christmas cookies to sustain them; they escape quicksand and locusts. They marry princes, who ride down bedraggled Red Hook avenues on horseback. Sofia and Antonia straddle their own horses. They lean forward and whisper into their horses’ ears. They shout, fly like the wind! and are hushed by their mammas. Go play somewhere else, the mammas say. Sofia and Antonia play on the moon.

Antonia feels free next to Sofia, who is lit by an internal flame that Antonia can warm her hands and face next to. Antonia catches herself just watching Sofia sometimes; staring at the place her dress tugs between her shoulders as she hunches over a table, or forgetting to rinse her hands as they wash up side by side in the bathroom before dinner. If I can see you, I must be here. Antonia feels that without Sofia she might float away, disintegrate into the night air. And Sofia, comfortable in the spotlight of her friend’s undivided attention, feels herself growing brighter as it shines. If you can see me, I must be here.



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—

Antonia and Sofia live, mostly, with their mothers, and with each other. Their fathers are often gone, though Sofia’s father comes home for supper often enough that she can feel his presence like bookends to her days: filling the house with the smell of brilliantine and espresso in the morning; rumbling around the kitchen just before she goes to bed at night. Sometimes, the click of the front door and his retreating footsteps just as she falls into sleep: leaving again.