Rick Moody - The Diviners

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 inflamed. 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, coneflower. 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.”