Playing Botticelli: A Novel

by Liza Nelson

  I drove on to the old municipal park. No one went there anymore, especially not during the week, so we had it entirely to ourselves. We opened two more cans, then lugged what was left of the twelve-pack to the old splintered picnic table.

  Near the picnic table was an old swing set with two swings left from the original five, the kind that when you let go, bits of rust and cold metal smell stick to your hands. I sat in one, looping my arm around the chain so I wouldn’t have to put down my beer. Louise sat on the splintery bench. She was ashen-faced, and I couldn’t blame her. Two beers in less than half an hour, yet here she was, hanging in there for me. I could have hugged her.

  “There’s going to be rain by evening,” Louise said licking a finger and holding it up to test the air. As soon as she spoke, I knew she was right. The sky was clouding up, while the wind had died down to the spooky soft calm that so often anticipates a storm along the coast.

  It kept running through my brain like a bad song, Hank was a wanted criminal. I began to swing. Why not? The skirt I’d changed into on a whim after school dragged along the ground when the swing went up, then billowed behind when I came back down.

  The skirt was one of these gauzy peasant deals, printed with multicolored flowers, and I felt as if petals were falling in my wake. A lovely sensation. I thought of the shrimper back at the restaurant. He was more or less the same age as Hank when those pictures were taken, except the pictures were fifteen years old. Men change a lot in fifteen years.

  I stopped swinging. “What’s the worst secret you’ve ever had?” I asked Louise.

  “Me?” Louise yelped. Then she looked down and we both realized she was still clutching the wanted poster. She folded it neatly by quarters into a small square and handed it back to me. “This is.”

  “No, I mean before now. Of your own.”

  She concentrated earnestly. “Well, once in a while I have these fears. I’ll get home after being out somewhere by myself and stand on the grass by the carport, and Darryl’s old broken motorcycle will be lying on its side, or there will be a soccer ball with all the air kicked out of it in the azaleas, or the screen on the porch by the kitchen will be torn again. And I’ll have this overwhelming knowledge that everyone inside is dead. Part of me is gripped in horror, but—and this is what is hard to admit—part of me is relieved. I have to force myself to walk up to the door, to turn my key in the latch. Sometimes I’ll actually turn back to the car before I can force myself forward.”

  “Wow!” I must have shifted my weight because the swing tipped back suddenly, so far that the ends of my hair grazed the ground. “That was beautiful, really.” I resettled myself on the seat. “But is there anything more concrete?”

  A thin red line creased Louise’s forehead between her eyes. She had just poured her heart out, against all better judgment, and here I was telling her it wasn’t enough.

  “I can’t imagine any secret deeper or darker.”

  “Oh, Lou.” I hurried reassurance like the condescending ass I admit I can be. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your candor, but I wasn’t thinking of anything quite that profound. I was hoping for something that might bring you down in the dirt with me. Just a run-of-the-mill dirty little secret was all I meant.”

  Louise swigged her beer, and I swigged mine.

  “I do pick my nose. In the car driving and under the covers at night, ever since I was a little girl.”

  “I love it.” I pushed the swing away from the ground on the balls of my feet. “Now we’re even.”

  “Well, nose-picking doesn’t compare to this,” Louise said, giggling despite herself. She was definitely getting a little tipsy, maybe more than a little. So was I. Everything was coming to me as if I were coated in Jell-O armor.

  “I’ve always been perfectly straight with Dylan about her father.”

  Taking another swig from her can, Louise’s eyes widened with curiosity, and her lips twitched with unease.

  “I mean, she knows I was not married.”

  “Goodness.”

  “Is that better or worse than a bomber-terrorist’s ex-wife?”

  She began to giggle again, but I was serious.

  “I’ve told Dylan the basic story of her father and me. Our time together, what little there was, was as genuine and romantic in its way as most stories parents tell their children about how they came to be born.” I doubted Esmeraldans ever told children anything about their births. “Also, I thought she deserved the truth.”

  “Which was?” The question evidently jumped out of her mouth before Louise could stop it.

  “Kent State. Student demonstrators against the war in Vietnam were shot by the National Guard.” I squinted at Louise. “I don’t know if you remember.”

  “Yes, of course I do. It was the spring of 1970.1 was one year out of college and teaching kindergarten. Also in the middle of getting engaged to Darryl. Most evenings, before we left my parents’ house for wherever we were going, Darryl made a point of sitting with Daddy in the living room for half an hour to catch Walter Cronkite. I remember how impatient I’d get, wanting to be alone with Darryl.”

  I thought of asking whether they were sleeping together already, but I didn’t dare. Her secrets were hers to tell me herself, and that wasn’t one she’d offered.

  “The picture of that young girl looking up from her dead friend on the cover of all those magazines gave me goose bumps all over,” Louise said.

  “It was May,” I said, remembering the slightly humid scent of freshly mowed grass on the quad. The semester had finished, but I was hanging around for an extra spring semester to make up some of the credits I’d lost while blowing glass in Seattle the previous fall.

  “A demonstration was called in D.C. I’m not sure why I decided to go. Probably because I was bored; my roommate had gone home to Little Rock for the week before classes started again. Or maybe because I’d already missed one big march that November. Anyway, it was organized the same as they all were. A score of rented buses left from the Union at seven in the evening to get there by the morning. Seats were assigned first come, first serve. Once the buses were filled, they rented cars. A former communist owned the local budget rental agency and didn’t mind being taken advantage of.

  “We thought of him as so old,” I sighed, “and he was probably younger than I am now.

  “I was smack in the middle of a big project that spring, a giant mural I was creating with kids from the Ann Arbor Free School. I couldn’t decide if I should leave it, and by the time I decided for sure, I was too late for the bus. I ended up in a gray Chevrolet. Remember ‘See the USA in a Chevrolet’? Somehow, I don’t think they meant six strangers heading to D.C. with no plans to tour the White House. Twelve hours it took us, maybe thirteen. We sang. We ate candy bars. We played Botticelli.”

  “The painter?”

  “The game. It’s a variation on Twenty Questions, more intricate and insinuating. The person who’s ‘it’ comes up with a name but tells only the initials. Then, to get him to answer a question you have to stump him by offering a clue and initials to a name of your own—you know, I can’t remember if the initials have to be the same for both names or not; I haven’t played for so long. It can take hours, believe me, circling in, slowly, on the identity. God, it was fun that night.”

  “You played word games?”

  I nodded, hoping I was giving her the right mental picture. The intimacy, the intensity of the six of us singing at the top of our lungs in a car with the windows rolled up.

  “You probably never thought the kind of people I’m talking about allowed themselves to have fun. They never looked as if they were having fun in those news reports, did they?”

  “No, Godiva honey, they really did not.”

  “Well, we were upset. And we did everything in extremes in those days, didn’t we?” As if Louise had been there, too. “Rage against injustice one moment, sing the rock-and-roll pleasure of being shit-kicking alive the next. God, it was intense bein
g young, wasn’t it?”

  I unfolded the square of paper with extreme care and ran one blunt fingertip along the creases.

  “Hank was assigned to my car. He didn’t play the Botticelli game, but he could sing, a voice like choppy water, and he knew all the lyrics. Blues, folk, you name it. His eyes, you can’t tell from this crappy snapshot, but they were amazing. Light, light blue, like a dream of blueness.”

  “Like Dylan’s?” Louise asked.

  I pushed the swing back and forth a few times, jerky but not hard enough to lift my feet off the ground. Without knowing it, she’d hit a nerve.

  “You’re absolutely right. Like Dylan’s.” A connection I’d never consciously made before by myself. Incredible.

  Louise smiled. We were obviously on some kind of new wave­length. She came over and sat in the swing next to mine.

  “Anyway, we didn’t pull out of the Union parking lot until almost midnight so a lot of the driving was at night. Every so often we’d stop at a Howard Johnson’s—ah, the innocent days of black raspberry ice cream and saltwater taffy—but no more than we had to. We drove and we drove and we drove.”

  I was swinging more regularly now. I let my voice follow the rhythm of the chains scraping back and forth, the story building and ebbing as the memories surfaced. God, how long ago it had been.

  “When we finally made it to Washington, the actual demonstration was a downer. There hadn’t been enough time to organize properly. People gathered as usual at the Justice Department to get tear-gassed, but no one was much in the mood for marches or chants. By late afternoon there was nothing to do.

  “Somehow Hank and I got separated from the rest of our trav­eling cadre.” Boy, that was a word I hadn’t used in years. “We had agreed that, whatever happened, we would meet at the car at eight that night to find the church where we’d been assigned to sleep.

  “Away from the others, Hank was much more boyish and playful. I think he decided to take a vacation from his politics for a little while. He took out his harmonica and serenaded me as we walked. He bought us hot roasted peanuts and soft ice cream from the truck vendors that catered to D.C. tourists. We began to pretend we were tourists. We window-shopped in some ritzy neighborhood full of what you’d call yuppies now, then strolled into a fairly grand hotel where we had drinks and cocktail sandwiches in the lobby.”

  “They let you in?”

  “You mean despite our wild radical good looks?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “We didn’t look that outrageous. Remember, most young people in 1970 were a little scruffy around the edges. I’ll bet even you had a pair of patched jeans and a peasant blouse or two. Besides, Hank told one of the managers we were trying to decide where to hold our wedding.”

  “And they believed him?”

  “He was pretty charming. They gave us the food. Anyway, we didn’t stay very long. We ended up on the mall. The cherry blossoms were out. Folks had taken off their shoes and were wading into the reflecting pools. But we all knew we were spending this lovely day together in the name of those dead students. It was definitely surreal. Like a scene right out of a Fellini movie, if you’ve ever seen one.”

  “All of them. Satyricon Fellini or La Dolce Vita Fellini?” Louise nodded to her beer. “That’s what brought Darryl and me together—movies. We both loved them. All kinds. Ones I imagine you would never expect.”

  “You guys as movie buffs. You’re right, I’d never expect.”

  “Well, Darryl had seen a lot of foreign films in Germany, and the one summer I worked in Orlando, all I had to do was go to movies. The first one we saw together was Easy Rider. I hated it. Darryl loved it.” Louise laughed. “We argued all the way home and I was sure that he would not be asking me out again. But he called the next week for a double bill over in Gainesville. The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven—Darryl said that if I didn’t like watching Easy Rider, I’d really hate them.”

  Louise smiled dreamily and pushed her swing in a kind of stationary circle. I didn’t have the heart to interrupt while she was taking a turn with her past.

  “For months I lived for going to the movies with him. Driving back to Esmeralda late at night, knowing I had to be at work at 8:30 the next morning, I felt nothing existed but Darryl and me in his Rambler. There were few lights along the road, not even stars most of the time. The radio would be on low, and that late at night there would be few commercials. Song after song, we’d pass a single cigarette back and forth, or a bottle of cheap wine Darryl picked up somewhere. Finally, when the soft unbroken dark around and between us became too much, Darryl would pull off the road. There was always that heartbeat as he turned off the ignition, the complete silence before he touched me.”

  “Fellini, cars late at night, we have more in common than I thought. Did you go to Bergman films, too?” I tried to picture Darryl Culpepper reading the subtitles.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, we did.”

  “I have to admit I am impressed.”

  “Thank you.” Louise grinned as I started to swing again.

  “It’s funny that I never painted it, though, the soft, tissuey cherry blossoms filling the background, the water spraying in pearly arcs over and onto hundreds of half naked bodies, the strong, beautiful bodies of youth. All of us middle-class kids splashing and laughing knew that four of our own had been killed on that campus in Ohio. Some protective bubble had been invaded. Responsibility for one’s beliefs was finally being demanded. It was almost a relief.

  “Hank was wearing a baseball cap with VENCEREMOS stitched across the bill. I remember I knocked it off his head, and he retaliated by pushing me into the reflecting pool.” I stopped swinging. “Does all this sound too bizarre to you? God, it was long ago.”

  “Don’t stop now.” Louise hiccupped, and reached for the bag of chips on the ground beside her. “You’re just getting to the good part,” she said and ripped open the bag with her teeth.

  I shook my head, and Louise flushed at her own indelicacy.

  “You had to be there, I guess, in that renta-Chevy and at the fountain,” I said carefully. Those few days probably could not be described in words after all. They existed only within the emotions and experience of the people there. I nibbled a chip.

  “I don’t know,” Louise said, almost pouting. “You’ve been doing a pretty good job of bringing the experience to life.”

  “There isn’t much more to tell. We met the others as planned, spent the night at a local church where there was some kind of organizational meeting, and drove back to Michigan. He wasn’t a student. He lived in Toledo or Detroit, I didn’t find out exactly where, working for the movement.”

  “Did he come back for you?”

  “For me? No way.” I left the swings with a push and a short leap. “I never saw him again.” A bank of clouds was moving in fast. “It could never have worked.” We had reached the end of what I was willing to share even now. There are feelings better left unstated, even to oneself. “He was too political for me. I stayed at the edge of things political because they distracted. He, on the other hand, was clearly at the center of the struggle.”

  “What struggle was that?” Louise hiccupped again despite her best efforts.

  I reached over and grabbed a handful of chips.

  “I don’t remember.”

  Then I began to laugh. So did Louise. We dropped into the weedy dirt. I think we were flat on our backs by then, holding our sides, spitting the word “struggle” back and forth along with bits of potato chip and saliva.

  “Let’s face it, marriage is not my style,” I said. “But I have always loved children.”

  “No kidding,” Louise sputtered, preening her new wittiness. “Kidding—get it?—kidding.”

  “I get it, I get it. I mean there I am in the post office, minding my own business, and there is Hank Firestone on the wall staring down at me.”

  “Fireman.” Louise corrected me through a spasm of giggles.

  “W
hatever.”

  Our last hoots of laughter subsided, floating away on woozy, newly discovered affection.

  “Wait until I show Dylan.”

  “Show her what?” Louise asked and something hard, a pebble or a stick end, pressed into the small of my back, forcing me to sit up.

  The wanted poster, crumpled and smudged, lay in the dirt by my straw hat and lighter, inches from Louise. I saw her fist clench and had a sudden horrible vision, no, not a vision but a deja vu in reverse of what I might be about to see, the lighter flicking open into flame, Hank’s face burning away. Quickly, with strained casual­ness, I picked up the sheet of paper and dusted it off.

  “I’ve always been straight with my daughter.”

  “I guess I’d handle things a little differently,” Louise said, sitting up and brushing the dirt off her stockings. There was no mistaking the splintery edge in her voice.

  “Would you really?” The beer had left an ugly taste in my mouth. I stood up. “Look how dark the sky has turned,” I said, pointing. “And so quickly.”

  Louise did look. What she saw brought her to her feet. She tossed the empty cans into a trash bin and ran with what was left to Miranda, squeezing inside just as the sky opened up. I waited, just a few seconds, to let the rain come.

  By the time I climbed in on the driver’s side and rolled up my window, my seat was already wet but it didn’t matter since I was soaking. My arms glistened as I reached for the key. But I managed to keep Hank’s picture dry.

  “Have you ever thrown the I Ching?” Sealed in the steamy hot car, I had to shout to be heard over the rain pounding from all sides.

  Louise shook her head.

  “I only use it for major questions myself. Do you have any major questions?”

  “Yes. Of course. Everyone has questions.”

  “Well, I’m game if you are.”

  Five

  THROWING THE I Ching may have been my biggest mistake, because here I sit banished from the garden of ignorant certainty. For the first time in my life, I’m not sure what to say to my own daughter. But that afternoon, how could I resist?