1

Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, in insubstantial light, entrails in
flames. Rosa Elisabetta of the hammertoe, Rosa Elisabetta of the
corns. Rosa Elisabetta of the afflictions. She has hinted about the
nature of her sufferings to certain persons up the block, certain
persons on Eleventh Street, Brooklyn. Emilia, whose son sells the
raviolis, for example. She has whispered to Emilia about the
colitis. She has indicated problems relating to her gallbladder.
Stones. Also headaches. These headaches begin with visitations,
with rainbows, celestial light, an inability to remember numbers.
Rosa Elisabetta might smell the overpowering perfume of cocktail
onions, after which there is Technicolor. Two or three days sick in
bed, lower than a dog is low. If she's enumerating the complaints
for Emilia, there is the colitis, there are the corns, there is the
pancreas, there are the headaches. At least four things. Gas,
though it's not proper to talk about it. On nights when the garlic
has not been properly saut?ed according to the cuisine of her
ancestral homeland,Tuscany, then there is also the gas. Perhaps it
is correct to include this in the list of complaints, assembled at
6:13AM, as she burrows down further into bedcovers, into the folds
of her four-poster. She doesn't know how much longer she can resist
the cramps, the pressurized evacuation of her last meal and
everything else eaten in the past twenty-four hours, everything, at
least, that has not already been evacuated. Best to be pleasant
about it; this is what Emilia said when Rosa Elisabetta Meandro was
telling her about the scabs. There are these scabs that don't heal;
when she gets a cut, saws into herself accidentally in the kitchen,
dicing vegetables, there is the mineralization of the cut. The cut
doesn't heal, not as it should. What's that all about? She was also
going to tell Emilia about the halitosis, that day, which she can
smell by cupping her hands and attempting to exhale and inhale
quickly, while lying in the four-poster. It is no longer the smell
of the garlic saut?ed, nor is it the smell of the cocktail onions,
nor is it the smell of port wine, nor is it stewed peppers. It's
some new smell, and this is what Rosa was trying to tell Emilia the
other day, no doubt about it. The look in the eyes of Emilia was a
look of pity, which is a look that makes Rosa Elisabetta Meandro
irritable, though she tries to be pleasant, and this righteous
anger, even in the dawn light ebbing into the garden apartment
through the windows facing the street, is a refreshing sentiment, a
motivator, as she breathes out cupping her hands.

Consider the formidable Rosa Elisabetta of the past. Consider the
archaeology of her phases. Kingmaker in the civic politics of the
Fourth Ward, parader with infant ghouls and vampires on Halloween,
soup kitchen volunteer; Rosa Elisabetta, institution. Dignified
mother of the block, guardian of the parking spaces of longtime
residents of the neighborhood, protector of the community, of local
parishes, registrar of voters. Once she was all these things. A
lover of families. As she enumerates them, however, Rosa Elisabetta
can feel the sweat pooling in the folds of her abdomen; she can
feel cramps beckoning from south of her equator.What was it that
Emilia surely wanted to say about her bad breath? Maybe nothing.
Her father had bad breath. Foul breath. It was his guts. She was
there with the priest, such a nice priest, and the breath of her
father smelled like a gizzard. She won't talk to Emilia anymore.
How can anyone think such a thing? The cupping-hands experiment
does not bear out results. Nothing at all like the smell of
death.

She held the little children in the day care center while their
mothers worked in Manhattan. She sang songs to these children,
songs by important American singers from the age of big bands. Not
one of these little children said to her: Your breath smells
like something died in your mouth. She liked to present the
boys with chocolates; she liked to warn them about the dangers of
amorous contact. She told the little boys and girls: Avoid becoming
in- flamed. Never be alone in a room with a man who is too thin.
Never walk near an idling automobile if it has tinted windows. Next
she would speak of the constellations, how the constellations were
catalogued during the Roman Empire. She knows about the Roman
Empire from her father and his father, and she knows about it from
the priests in the schoolyard of Dyker Heights, where she lived as
a girl. She also once watched a miniseries on the subject of the
Roman Empire. The emperors poisoned one another.The emperors knew a
lot about poisons. She lifted and carried children, kissed them on
their dirty necks. It is not right that Emilia from the ravioli
store should even consider saying anything about the colitis, the
gas, the headaches, the corns, the scabs, the breath, or the hair
that is falling out. Or the blindness, or the incipient deafness,
or the fact that Rosa is too skinny. Her dresses hang off her, like
sheets draped over furniture in shuttered houses.

The cat is disturbed by a migrating foot from his spot in a spiral
of bedclothes at the end of the bed. The cat resembles the
black-and-whites of civic policing, but she does not like the name
her daughter has given him and will not utter it.The animal hops
gamely to the floor, waits. Will Rosa feed him? Now Rosa Elisabetta
smooths her threadbare nightgown over her legs, pulls an old pink
sweater from a squeaky dresser drawer just opposing, and wraps it
around herself.Winches herself up on swollen knees and hips. This
is her submission to the order of aging and infirmity. She knows
what is to come now, how long it will take. She passes across the
hardwood floor with its inlays of cherry and mahogany, into the
sitting room, careful to avoid stacks of reading material beside
the chair, some large stacks, in front of the French doors leading
out to the garden. She flips on the television on the way past,
6:21AM. A twenty-four-inch monitor that she bought used from a
newspaper advertisement. The static of the picture assembling. She
doesn't have time to look because all at once she is doubled over,
indelicately emitting pollutants, she's awake and will be awake,
clutching at her insides. She can hear the device, the old
television set, from the bathroom. The volume is calibrated to
allow this pleasure. Its music is generous from the agony of the
bathroom. She bolts the door, leaving the cat on the other side.
She begins to weep as the tremors begin. She weeps for the
indignity. She hopes she will not bleed. She worries that it will
not stop. She could live with it for a while, the colitis, if only
she didn't bleed. She reaches for a magazine on the tank.The
wallpaper in the bathroom, floral print, is peeling, and there is
paint flaking from the ceiling. She tries to pretend that the
concerns of the magazine are her concerns. Allegations about the
outgoing president and his wife. His wife's lesbian secret. A
powerful weight-loss program has enabled certain celebrities to
shed up to seventy pounds. One chubby actress had her stomach
stapled, live on the Internet.Will Rosa Elisabetta faint?
Perspiration courses down her brow. She has fainted in the past. An
awful embarrassment, the fainting, because then her daughter or the
Polish woman who comes to clean will find her on the floor. Another
actress, this one too thin, needs to put some weight back on,
drinks milk shakes that weight lifters drink. Just the ticket. She
thinks she can hear them talking about it on the television. Weight
loss. Rosa throws the magazine into the claw-footed bathtub. Her
face is slick.The cat is mewling outside the door, beckoning. There
is a moment of pain, but then she attends instead to the soothing
television voices. In the morning she likes to have on the perky
one, the perky one, because the perky one keeps at bay the fear of
death, but it doesn't sound as though she remembered to turn on the
perky one, it sounds as though she got the one with the speech
impediment. She likes the one with the speech impediment because he
might explain things properly. But she prefers the perky one. She
is comforted by all overheard voices, especially on mornings like
this. And these voices are mixed with discussions from the past, in
her head, enmity between her grandfather and her father, for
example; she has been known to have a conversation with her
estranged husband while shitting her brains out.

She will need someone from the neighborhood to keep an eye on her
parking space. She has no car, but still. People are moving in,
young people, they don't even know.Your car is secure for a total
of six days through the kindness of neighbors. The young people
don't understand until they have lived here as long as she has
lived here, forty-six years. If she catches one of these young
people trying to take her parking space, no matter about the
colitis, she will give him or her a talking-to. From time to time,
she has put on her robe and pulled open the door and called up the
steps in the darkness. "Take your car back to Omaha! Don't you come
around here again!" Imagine taking people's spaces when these
people have lived here since before your parents were born. They
move into the neighborhood, these young people, and the girl
doesn't even have a ring on her finger. Honestly. That first
September her daughter was in college, she put an advertisement in
the paper, apartment to let, like in the old days, when the floozy
from the bar performed an incantation on Rosa's husband. Just like
then, renting the room. Except this couple calls to see the
apartment. No wedding rings. They are different colors; one is a
black man and one is an Italian girl. She shows them around, the
original balustrade, cast iron, painted black, finials. She makes
remarks about southerly light; she makes remarks about original
moldings and plastering; she speaks of the Romanesque and
Italianate uses of brownstone, things she has been told to say by a
Realtor on Seventh Avenue whose services Rosa did not retain. She
doesn't say anything to this couple that she wouldn't say to anyone
at all, treats them as she would treat anyone, makes pleasantries,
even when the black man is offering his know-it-all comments about
wiring in the building, asking if the wiring has been rewired since
the building went up. When exactly. She says, "You ought to see the
garden, honey," ushers the girl back onto the patio, through her
own apartment. She has the tomato vines, some basil and parsley,
painted daisies, cone- flower.Warm, everything flowers later into
the season. Rosa takes the girl by the shoulder, in the dappled
sunlight of the patio, where she used to hang the laundry, and she
says to her, "I figure out who your mama is, I'll call her, and
I'll tell her you were here with that man, and I will help her give
you a talking-to. So now you get your black boyfriend and you get
out of here same way you came in; don't let me see you on this
street again, do you hear me? And you better hope none of the boys
on this block saw you with that boyfriend, not if you want to make
it to the subway in one piece."

There are couples like this on the block now, all sorts of couples,
and the boys on the block, who used to have a sense of honor, they
don't do a thing about it. Maybe the neighbors all treat these
couples to a look of chastisement on the way past, but that's the
end of it. A disgrace. Rosa Elisabetta herself is no longer the
kind of person who lives on this block. Rosa is a specter, a
revenant of a Brooklyn past, someone buried under layers of
sediment, which is why she has the smell of death on her.

The pancreas, the problem with the pancreas, and the corns, and
other complaints. She thinks, I will no longer drink the vin
ordinaire, I will only drink the white wine and the Communion
wine.Voices in the next room, gathering to speak of such
terminologies as grave uncertainty, political instability,
intervention of the courts, none of it particularly clear to
Rosa. She pays the most attention to the school board and the city
council, the social clubs, and she only pays attention to these
because in the old days she paid attention to them when her father
and her father's friends had an interest in politics.They knew how
to look after what was theirs. She would give out leaflets over by
the subway. Now she's not even sure who is running for the school
board, if there is even a school board candidate.

Like trying to evacuate pieces of glass, like glass or maybe pieces
of your brain coming out of your posterior, bits of your insides,
bits of your organs, like your pancreas, for example, or the
gallbladder. Black bile, green bile, stones. All the humors. Such a
stink. She moans, while the voices debate about concession and
recount, and so Rosa resolves not to give in herself and reaches
into the cabinet underneath the sink, if she can just reach from
where she is, where she keeps a special something. At the exertion,
another molten river floods from her. Usually after an hour or so
she feels better.When it is clearing itself up, she doesn't really
need the bottle, the quart bottle purchased from the criminals at
the bodega. Doesn't like to patronize them, because they do not ask
after her family. She's sure that they are selling illegal drugs to
schoolchildren, but nonetheless, there's the fact of convenience.
The mildew smell is nauseating, too. When the Polish lady comes,
she will have to tell her about the smell. Rosa Elisabetta doesn't
know if she'll be able to keep down the malt liquor. Sometimes she
spits it up. Sometimes she has to spit up some of the malt liquor
in order to calm her stomach. Into the sink, sometimes into the
tub. It's like in the miniseries about the Roman emperors. One
fellow, he had the sour stomach, and then his grandmother fed him.
Rosa unscrews the cap on the malt liquor, a feverish chill
overtaking her; she can hear the chatter from the next room,
beautiful and serene now that she's unscrewing the cap of the malt
liquor. The voices sound like birds. The flocks of Prospect Park in
spring, like that rooster that was crowing in the park last summer,
someone left a rooster in the park, and it was doing its job in the
mornings. She decides to risk the malt liquor. Everything is
nauseating on a morning like this, the old tile floor in the
bathroom of the brownstone, the mildew, the stink, the interracial
couples of the neighborhood, the diaspora of her contemporaries to
Long Island and to Westchester, to the state of Florida. She drinks
deep, gags, drinks more, gags. Drinks more. Rosa Elisabetta, the
last person in this neighborhood to have officiated in stickball
and to have carried lasagna next door when people moved in, the
last person to have drunk red wine out of jugs at the block party,
where the priest came by and made jokes about baseball.They all
drank wine, her family drank wine, even as a girl she drank wine,
her friends had wine on Sundays at church, and no one worried about
whether the priest was molesting anyone.

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
clawfooted 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' kids, 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 bon- fire,
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 greatgrandfather 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.