Each day she spends cooped up with Lina exhausts her, even though Lina is a little different now, busier, less fragile. Lina sees no need to iron out her thoughts so they are intelligible to anyone else and so their days are peppered with lines from songs Lina’s mother once sang, with scraps of memories as they pass through Lina’s mind. Antonia makes them breakfast and Lina stands up in the middle of it and leaves her untouched plate, exclaiming that she cannot eat room-temperature toast, or else saying nothing, and walking away in inexplicable silence. Lina enters a room and begins to wax on about the things she could have done besides marry Carlo: She would have been a writer, she says. She would have been best friends with Zelda Fitzgerald. She would have been a shopgirl, one of those intimidatingly stylish young women who seem comfortable in every situation, though they stick out like well-dressed, long-boned beacons everywhere they go. Instead, this, Lina says, holding up her hands, which are covered in perennial cracks and thick white flats of dry skin from the industrial laundry where she whiles away her days washing linens for mid-range hotels. Instead, we lost your father. Antonia thinks of going to Sofia’s a thousand times a day but is stopped by some vague sense of pride and fear. There is a gulf between them. Sofia wears the mask of women they used to admire like it was made for her all along. She is powdered and perfect. Even imagining herself going to Sofia for comfort makes Antonia cringe. She has been making plans to go to Wellesley, to become a classics professor, to wrap herself in books and solitude like Emily Dickinson. Even to Antonia, there is something fantastical and flimsy about these layered fantasies. Out there, people are dying, and you are imagining a college degree you cannot afford. Seeing herself through Sofia’s eyes would make it worse.

So Antonia burrows into herself. Something’s coming, say the newspaper headlines, the radio broadcasts, the quibbling pigeons fighting over scraps on street corners. When Antonia shuts her eyes she is inundated with sensation. Malocchio, her mother says. The evil eye. Antonia is sixteen.

The world is unsteady.

—

Sofia and Antonia suddenly look like two different women, rather than two interchangeable girls. Sofia has grown tall and her lips and eyes and shoulders and calves have become round; she seems to hold within her body innumerable surprises, as though at any moment she might laugh or cry or stretch her arms above her head. Antonia’s hair has darkened and her fingers and toes have lengthened just enough that she carries with her an inimitable grace.