by Rick Moody
Rosa Elisabetta won’t allow herself to be pushed out of her own neighborhood, where she raised up a daughter by herself and grew old. The neighborhood where she learned the one thing she learned, that a daughter was what God had promised. The perfection of daughters, daughters running in the park, daughters playing on the swings, daughters at the zoo, daughters smelling hyacinth in the botanical garden, smelling lilies. She made a dress for her daughter out of gingham, put up her daughter’s hair in pigtails, took her over to the neighbors to ask if her daughter was not the prettiest girl on the block. She raised a daughter and worked in the principal’s office of the elementary school, and no one can take her parking space away from her.
Replenishment of fluids. Vital to her condition. She knows what a flat cola will do for an elementary school child in the throes of a stomach complaint. She knows how to stop a nosebleed and how to apply a tourniquet. She will stay here until she has replenished. The malt liquor is half empty, and she is feeling as though she might be up and around before noontime after all. She is starting to feel like a matriarch, like a God-fearing Catholic. So she reaches back and toggles the lever, to flush away the bits of her that she has ripped loose, and the toilet gurgles darkly after clearing only a portion of the evidence. “Oh, don’t tell me. Don’t you dare tell me.” Yet while this anxiety about plumbing—like anxiety about all home maintenance issues, and anxiety about medical issues, and anxiety about automotive issues, and anxiety about political issues—weighs heavily on Rosa Elisabetta, a fresh bout of muscular contractions overtakes her, and she can do nothing until its temblors have coursed through her. Then, coated with sweat and smelling like malt liquor, she reaches over, runs the tap, as if the sound of the tap will help, maybe the sound of the tap, instead of voices talking about the state of Florida, and she gets a handful of water, spills it across her face. It splatters the neckline of her nightgown and her sweater. She hates the color of her towels. She avails herself further of the malt liquor. She will finish the bottle.
Rosa is going to have to get herself well enough to search out the plunger in the kitchen, and then she is going to have to plunge the john, because she doesn’t want to make it anyone’s business, though she can barely make it up the block to the bodega on a good day. She only does it to purchase supplies when her daughter is at work, so no one will see. Otherwise, she has everything delivered. She won’t have the plumber in here because of the blood, because she knows there’s blood. She won’t have it. She heaves, nothing comes up, and then the last of the malt liquor goes down. The first sip tastes like ambrosia, the last like formaldehyde.
She drops the empty into the claw-footed bathtub. It rolls back and forth without shattering. The trash can that she purchased at the discount store on Atlantic is over by the door. She doesn’t like going there, Atlantic Center. It’s full of the wrong kind of people. She went that one time because there were bargains. She reaches for a second bottle under the sink, just to be sure of the existence of the second bottle, and she gets a finger around the top of it, but then the quart bottle topples and rolls back into the sink cabinet, upending a toilet brush and a can of cleanser. She takes the name of her Heavenly Father in vain. She must have lost five pounds now, maybe more, and the room stinks, and the toilet is all clogged, and all she asks for is a little bit of relief.
The voices clamoring about Palm Beach County are like the souls clamoring to get into purgatory, or like the bees making a nest in their honeycomb. In the countryside. In an Italian village. In Siena. Il mio caro paese. She can see it now, her father and her father’s father. Amateur magicians. In the old country. She knows all the stories. She can see the cypresses, farmers bent along rows of grapevines. Olive groves. She pushes up the lid of the toilet tank and plunges her hand into the tank, its rusty H2O, and the lid, which is so heavy, slips sideways, hits the lip of the claw-footed bathtub, crashes to the floor, where it actually breaks clean in two. Rosa Elisabetta castigates the toilet lid with a string of ornamental curses. Outside the door, the cat gets traction and skitters off to the farthest closet he can find. Upstairs, too, from the racket she’s causing she can hear that her daughter has waked, the planks of the hardwood giving with her daughter’s ungraceful footfalls. Where is that pint bottle? She knows she put the pint bottle in the toilet tank, because her daughter was haranguing her. Her daughter was in the closet, throwing things out, mementos, items that Rosa needed, and that was when someone must have taken away those other items in the closet and perhaps also the one in the toilet tank. Someone has thrown them out. Her daughter is always straightening. She comes and she straightens up. And her daughter hired the Polish woman who also comes, and they straighten up together, but Rosa Elisabetta knew what that was all about, she knew what was getting straightened up.
Voices call out about the weather. Chance of showers. Drizzle approaching.
The worst of all possible things, which is that she hears her daughter’s front door closing, hears steps in the stairwell. The lumbering tread. She’s in her pajamas and coming downstairs to look in on Rosa. How could the great-granddaughter of magicians be such a dinosaur! Her grandfather, her great-grandfather, they were revered men of the village. They turned the lands of the poor and the afflicted to good. Gypsies followed them wherever they went.
The Viscusis came to the barren parts of the land with special tools, divining rods. These tools had been blessed by a sympathetic priest. The Viscusis said some powerful magical phrases, and then when they dug in that spot, they found water. Clean water, pure water. All the wells in their town, those wells had been selected and dug by Viscusis, so the Viscusis stood for water, for things growing, for cultivation, for husbandry. The wine that you drank from that town, the town where she was from, where her father and her grandfather were from, that wine came from grapes that were nourished by the wells dug by Viscusis.
Rosa’s mistake was marrying Claudio Meandro, who was only good for one thing, and that was drinking up the product. Well, he was good for other things, too, for whoring and never bringing home a wage and abandoning his wife and daughter. She can hear her daughter wheezing, even with the television on. The rudeness of her daughter’s breathing, which is the husky breathing of a chubby woman, the breathing of someone who is undersea diving. And that was just her coming downstairs.
“Did you feed the cat?” her daughter yells from the stairwell.
“Don’t come in here!” Rosa calls from the bathroom.
“Why do you have to chain the door?”
Her chubby hand now on the other side of the doorknob.
“Why is this chained?”
“I’m in the bathroom!” Rosa calls, and the exertion prompts a fresh stream of her insides. “Don’t come in.”
“Are you okay?”
“If I needed you in here with me I’d call you.”
“I heard a crash.”
“You did not.”
The neighbors in the next building will be able to hear the shouting through the cement, through the brownstone, through the Sheetrock, through the plastering. She gets up off the john now and crouches; her legs and her bottom are covered with the mess of her condition, she’s a mess, and she tries to flush it away, again; she wants all of this gone, this indignity of the present, feminine-itch commercials, television programs about people on some island eating rats to stay alive so that their pictures might appear in magazines devoted to the subject of weight loss. She will brain that daughter if she comes in here. How did she give birth to a fat woman?
Her grandfather was summoned by the mayor of the village, a man with guns and power. The mayor said, I’m not getting a crop to grow here on my lands while you have many crops growing on the lands you oversee. You are harvesting all the crops, and I can’t bring my grapes to market, and what I want is for you to bring your magical spells to my land here. I want you to make my lands fertile. Or else I’m going to run you out of town, and that will be the end of your vineyard. And your kids and your kids’ ki
ds, they’ll be forgotten here, they will be outlaws, and the name of Viscusi will be forgotten here for all the rest of time. This was after the war, understand, and there was a lot of ill humor around. And there was also the matter of the well at Pienza, which owed its fame to Pius II. The mayor was outraged, completamente oltraggiato, that none could design a better well than the one at Pienza.
“I can’t stay here and be after you all morning, Mom.”
“Give someone some peace and quiet if they need it.”
Rosa tries to flush away the evidence one more time. A serious tactical error. Now the worst possible thing happens, which is that the merda begins to come up, the water swirls ominously, and soon what will not go down through the drains, out to the sewage treatment plant, it comes up, backs up, and she can hear herself crying out in dismay, but she hears it almost as if it is happening to someone else. She doesn’t know what’s in her, what worm or parasite causes her to suppurate like this, part of her pancreas, part of her bowel; there’s that moment of hesitation, that meniscoid pause in the process of boiling up, before it swells over the lip of the toilet —
“Are you listening about the election?”
— and begins to flood the floor. The insides of her twisting and burning. And that’s when the headache starts, she can feel it beginning to start, the headache is upon her now, too, the Technicolor. She is beginning to have the vision, the phantasms that precede the next onslaught of pain, and the vision is of her grandfather and her grandfather’s father, and they are desperate men, because they cannot find the water in the fields belonging to the mayor. They cannot find the water. After dusk, after church, they are wearing the clothes they wore to church, and there is the light of the old country, the light that inspired those old masters, the perfect light of the Tuscan country, and they go out into the fields, past a matrimonial procession winding up the streets toward the town square, and the wedding is making its tortuous way toward the well in town, a beautiful old well where the men and their wives will pour out long drafts of water, and they will drink wine and they will drink water, and they will revel and dance. Her father’s father and grandfather are not in the wedding party, they are working, and they have the polished sticks of their profession, diviner’s wood, this wood that for generations has made for good crops for the villagers of their town, and all they have to do is find one single well on this property. They have done it many times.
Rosa Elisabetta takes off her sweater and pulls the nightgown over her head. There are only glimpses of her in the mirror above the sink, a mirror veined with flaws, a translucent elbow, a swollen knob at the bottom of it, here are the gray tendrils of her curls around the severe lines of her chin and cheeks; the light moves over her and through her in her nakedness, the light is an affliction, she bears up under it, because she is a beauty even as an old woman, the men will clamor to lie with her, and she climbs into the bathtub and leans her striated face against the porcelain of the side of the tub; she knows the feel of the polished wood of the divining rod, it is the wood of the umbrella pine and it has been polished and tanned until it is like the hide of a cow; she knows that creation of this divining rod is controlled by emissaries from the heavens. A vision is upon her and this is its material.
Her grandfather had the women chasing after him all the way to his death. The women followed after him and his father, even that night, le amiche abandoning a wedding party and its black sedans, jumping out of moving cars, and they were following her grandfather and his father as they worked their way across the farm belonging to the mayor. A procession of diviners. The men were working their way across the fields, with the sticks of their trade, but they were finding nothing. They had begun to sweat. They had begun to worry. The ragazzi trailed the grandfather and the great-grandfather, across the fields, the ragazzi already drinking wine. No one knew where this drinking wine would lead, except that at the end of drinking wine, the men would find the water, because it was always so. And there would be a bonfire, and the hermit who lived in a shack by the railroad tracks would bring out his concertina and his pet rat. This was the one field between here and the city where there was no water. They’d never before faced the possibility of failure, the Viscusis, because they knew Gypsies. That’s how the story went, thought Rosa Elisabetta, in the bathtub, her soiled clothes on the floor.
The mayor would not take no for an answer.
There was nothing to do but fabricate a response from the divining rods. Nothing to do but fake it. It was her great-grandfather who suggested this. Her grandfather didn’t want to do it. Because he was a moral man and he felt that it would do no good for their reputation. Tuttavia, ha detto troppo una bugia assurda.
Here is what the divining rod felt like in the hands of the men. Smooth but burdensome. You carried it as if it might break apart at any moment, as if it were a ceramic relic from the sixteenth century, and then you carried the divining stick into the field, and when the water was there under the ground, the stick trembled, as if it were in the midst of a Bernini ecstasy. The way her grandmother trembled, her grandmother who almost became a nun, or the way her mother trembled, who was among those who followed the men around in the field that very night with the wine. They watched the wedding, they jumped out of the car, they followed the men into a field, waiting for the men to find the water so that they could have the bonfire. Soon they would dance to the music of the concertina. That night, the Viscusis had to work fast, because that night they added a new skill to their repertoire: lying.
The mayor and his lackeys, armed, emerged from a copse, and now they watched as the Viscusis came to the most distant hectare of the mayor’s lands. They stood off to one side, and Marco Viscusi, her grandfather, held the divining rod, and it trembled in his hands, a steady, unearthly trembling, if a playacted one, and Claudio said, “Father in heaven,” or muttered another oath that would make it seem as though this were the work of the angels who sat right at the lip of the proscenium of all the hosts.
“Dig here, dig here,” Marco told them. But the mayor threw down the shovels and said, “No, you dig. We’ll be back in an hour.”
“Okay, I’m coming in now, Mom. Okay? I’m going to go ahead and remove the chain.”
She smelled them, Rosa Elisabetta, flush against the past, the cocktail onions, the breath of her husband, Meandro, the foul collars of his work shirts. And then her daughter pounding on the door outside, shouting to be let in. She could hear the voices yammering in the other room: bladder-control problems, the recount. She could hear the unfed cat whining. But she was a century back, when the Viscusis were sprinting across the fields, gunfire crackling over their heads, gathering up their things, making for the coast, leaving even their umbrella pines behind, that the mayor might burn them that night in his fireplace, cursing the name of Viscusi. Let this be a lesson to others! Off to America, in the company of the easy women from the fields, one of them already with child. That would be her own mother, the tyrant of Dyker Heights.
2
Statuesque, plus-size, smoggy sunlight in her dirty-blond hair, in front of the hospital, concealed in dark glasses, as if she might want to spray bullets into the crowd. She flags down the car, though it needs no flagging down. The woman in the gray raincoat and black designer suit climbs in. Slams the door. It rattles on its hinges. Arranges herself on the plush seat of the Lincoln Town Car. The car service driver, of subcontinental extraction, is perplexed in the rearview, would she slam her own doors? But she pays no attention, since she is already embarked on instructions: “Rockefeller Center. Here’s how we’re doing it: We’re making a U-turn here and we’re going back to Ninth, where we’re going west until we get to Smith. At Smith, first available left, then we’re going all the way over to Hicks, and then across Atlantic, not onto the BQE, along Hicks, using the back entrance to the bridge.” As if he mustn’t understand because he’s an immigrant. He has a child at home, you know, a boy, an American boy, a boy raised in America. He, too, has shouted
the words Away from that socket! He has an education, which is better than an American education, which is shit. He does not eat every day at a restaurant with a plastic exterior. The woman knows nothing of these things. He nods, imperceptibly, and they are off, into the part of rush hour that is composed of employees who are late.
