The Family(4)
When they were pregnant is when Rosa and Lina took to whispered late-night conversations in one another’s apartments. There, by low light, they laid themselves open. They talked about the future, which always means talking about the past: about Rosa’s father and mother, their buzzing, bustling house, and about how Rosa wanted a bustling house of her own. But no needles, Rosa always said, no thread. No raw-pricked fingers. Her children would want for nothing. Lina, whose future had always felt like a vise tightening, was just relieved to love the baby growing inside of her more often than she was afraid of it. She thought of her own childhood, where there was no room for want in the face of the fight for survival. No have-to’s, she told Rosa. No musts. Her children would have a full world of choice. She would teach them to read.
It looks like a boy, the other Family ladies told Rosa at the butcher, at the park. It looks like twins, they told Lina, who was big, big, big, and could no longer fit in her usual shoes, and could not see her feet anyway, and who thought, of course, I will not be good at this either. The ladies reached out their hands to pinch Rosa’s and Lina’s faces and pat the domes of their stomachs. Rosa and Lina interlocked elbows and hobbled down the street. They realized that their babies would not have a blank slate: that they would be born into a world that expects them to be the right size, shape. If it’s a boy, they prayed, let him be good with his hands. If it’s a girl, let her be careful with her heart.
Lina, with her clammy hands and her pinched low back, added, let this child fear nothing.
In the fall of 1928, Sofia and Antonia start school together, and the world gets exponentially bigger with each passing day. They race there each morning, tripping over each other’s feet and legs. They are fierce and small, and arrive breathless and early. They learn numbers, and letters, and geography.
They learn on the first day that half the kids in their class are Italian, and half are Irish. They learn that Ireland is a small island far away from Italy, but not as far away as America, where we all are, says Mr. Monaghan. Sofia and Antonia make friends with Maria Panzini and Clara O’Malley. They are all wearing blue ribbons in their hair. They decide they will also do this tomorrow. They eat lunch together and they hold hands on the way out to their waiting mammas. Mamma, mamma, the four of them are ready to call out, but the mammas have dark shades drawn over their faces. The next day Maria Panzini eats lunch with another table of girls, and Clara eats all the way across the courtyard. The Irish kids eat over there, Antonia realizes. Just stick with Antonia, Sofia’s mamma says later. Our families are a little different, Rosa and Lina tell their daughters, and Sofia and Antonia don’t know whether that means they are better or worse, but soon they spend lunch alone.
They still love school, because of Mr. Monaghan, who fought in the Great War and has a limp, and who lives by himself in the basement apartment of a run-down brownstone a stone’s throw from the ship forge. Mr. Monaghan has a twinkle in his eye. He is long and lanky and lively. He looks at them when they speak.
Every morning they spin a globe and pick a part of the world to learn about. This is how they have come to know about the pyramids, and the Taj Mahal, and Antarctica. No matter where Mr. Monaghan’s finger lands, he knows stories about the place, and he has pictures, and he tells them great, animated, nearly too-tall tales that hold twenty children rapt, still as stones in their seats. And today Marco DeLuca has stolen Sofia’s turn to spin the globe.
He did it without knowing, which means when Sofia looks at him with a furrow in her brow and a boiling fury in her chest, he returns her gaze with his own soft, impassive stare, and does not know why she is glaring, and that makes it worse. Inside Sofia’s body a heat builds, flushing her face and shaking her fingertips and turning the breath in her body to bile. Later in her life, friends and family will come to recognize the telltale tightening at the mouth and narrowing of the eyes as Sofia sinks into anger. She, too, will come to appreciate the hot, swollen, all-consuming fire of an imminent fight.
Today Sofia does not participate as her classmates look at pictures of sea creatures in old copies of National Geographic and Mr. Monaghan’s special Encyclop?dia Britannica. She does not ooh and whoa with them as Mr. Monaghan draws a to-scale stick figure of a human being on the chalkboard, and next to it a to-scale giant squid, and next to that a blue whale. She stares at Marco, and she waits in vain for Mr. Monaghan to remember that it should have been her turn. She feels the great unfairness of life rippling through every fiber of her being.
Antonia knows something is wrong with Sofia with the sixth sense of someone who does not understand, yet, that human beings think of themselves as separate containers. She participates in the sea creatures lesson, though rumbling around in the crush of children without Sofia makes her nervous. She cranes her neck with everyone else to see the picture of sharks lined up by size, and gasps on cue at the diagram of a shark’s many rows of sinister, red-rimmed teeth, but she sits quietly as Mr. Monaghan calls on her classmates to name the seven seas, and doesn’t raise her hand even when the rest of the class is stumped on “Indian.” She looks down at her shoes, which are very black against the pale of her stockinged legs. For a moment, she imagines being one inch tall. She could live inside her desk then—weave blankets out of torn-up paper, the way the mice she found in her closet had done with tissues; eat crumbs and bits of rice from leftover arancini and the occasional shaving of milk chocolate. She does not notice Sofia narrow her eyes as Marco makes his way back up the row of desks.