The Family(3)

Antonia has no idea that her father’s absence two or three nights a week is unusual compared with other fathers in her neighborhood, or that her mother once broke down crying in the butcher, overcome with a deep, existential exhaustion from planning meals “for two or three,” or that deep in the belly of the night when her father comes home, he tiptoes into Antonia’s room and cups her forehead in his palm and shuts his eyes in prayer. Antonia doesn’t know what he does, only that it is work with Uncle Billy or Uncle Tommy. He has meetings, Sofia once told her. Meetings about helping people. But something about that seems insubstantial and incomplete to Antonia. Here is what she knows: she knows that while he is gone her mother is never the right size and shape—either larger than life, trailing a cloud of matter and chaos around as she obsessively cleans, arranges, fixes, fusses; or small, skeletal, a shadow of her usual self. And Antonia, five years old, depends upon her mother the way the ocean depends on the moon: she grows and shrinks accordingly.

She imagines her father sitting in a small room. Uncle Billy smokes cigars and swivels back and forth in his chair and gesticulates fiercely and shouts into a telephone. Uncle Tommy stands in a corner and watches over them; he is the boss. Her father sits quietly, with pen and paper. Antonia puts him at a desk and gives him an expression of deep concentration. He stares out the window, and occasionally drops his gaze to scribble something on his paper. He stays out of the fray.

Antonia thinks she can make the world up if she shuts her eyes.

At night, when her mother has put her to bed, Antonia can feel the apartment straining up away from its foundation. The weight of herself and her mother is not enough to keep it attached to the earth, and so it bucks and floats and Antonia shuts her eyes and builds foundation brick by brick until she drifts into sleep.

In the next room, her mother reads, or, more than once, slips on shoes and goes next door to drink three fingers of wine with Sofia’s mother, Rosa. The two women are subdued, weighted down by the knowledge that their husbands are out doing God-knows-what, God-knows-where. They are both twenty-seven; by day, each of them can conjure the blinding glow of youth, but by lamplight, maps of concern crease each of their faces; some pockets of skin darken with exhaustion while others thin over the bone. They, like so many women before them, are made older by worry, and stretched taut by the ticking seconds, which they swear pass slower at night than during the light of day.

Antonia’s mamma, Lina, has a nervous constitution. As a child Lina stayed in to read when the other children played rough outside. She looked back and forth five or six times before crossing streets. She startled easily. Lina’s mother often looked at her sternly, shook her head, sighed. Lina will always be able to picture this. Look; shake; sigh. Marrying Carlo Russo did not make her less nervous.

Every time Antonia’s papa, Carlo, leaves the house, fear whittles away at Lina’s person until he is home again. And when Tommy Fianzo decides he needs Carlo to spend nights picking up and transporting crates of Canadian liquor, fear grips Lina around the throat and will not let her sleep at all.

So Lina develops a system: she doesn’t worry until the sun comes up. When she is awakened by the pulled-taffy air stretched between herself and Carlo, by the knowledge that he is elsewhere and has taken the most vulnerable part of her with him, Lina slips out of bed and alights on the floor lightly, like a bird. She pads down the steps of her building and up into the Colicchio apartment next door. She uses her spare key, and she sits on the couch with Rosa until she can bear the silence of her own apartment.

Just before dawn, Lina knows a key will turn in the front door. Carlo will move quietly into the apartment. And it, and she, will settle back down into the earth where they belong.



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Sofia’s mamma, Rosa, remembers her own father working nights. Rosa stayed at home with her mother, who spent her days finishing the buttonholes of men’s shirts, making small stitches and worrying about Rosa’s father, spinning yarns for her children about her childhood before the boat ride to America, shouting at them to finish their homework, for God’s sake, to study, to sit up straight, to be careful, to make something of themselves, her babies. Rosa’s mother, with her raw fingertips from sewing, slicing onions for dinner and never wincing, but shutting her mouth, quiet for once, which is how Rosa and her siblings knew she was in pain. This all made sense to Rosa: the building of community and home no matter how, no matter where, no matter what the cost.

So when she met tall and striking Joey Colicchio, who had accepted a job from her father’s associate Tommy Fianzo Sr., Rosa knew what it would take to build her own house.



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Antonia and Sofia do not always go to sleep when their mammas tell them to. They pass many hours pressing messages to one another through the wall between their bedrooms. They doze fitfully. Sleep is not as finite for them as it is for adults: there is no reason they cannot continue their conversation in a dream. They tell each other, your mamma is here tonight, because of course they know. And the mammas sit pressed together in one kitchen or another, sipping their wine and laughing, sometimes, and crying, others, and of course, they know when their daughters fall asleep, because they can still feel the shapes of those daughters turning against the insides of their bellies.

They remember being pregnant at the same time: tender to the touch, humming with potential. That, more than their husbands’ shared work, is what bonded them.