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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