Playing Botticelli: A Novel

by Liza Nelson

  “Beats me.” Louise’s smile was halfhearted at best. “But I’m sure they’re well supervised.”

  “I’m sure they are, Louise. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “No matter,” Louise said vaguely. I realized her attention was elsewhere.

  The elevator lurched, stopped, then started again. I looked at the wet spots on my sleeve and pictured Joe up in David’s room. How much longer would he stay?

  “She has two little boys, four and nine,” Louise said as the elevator reached the main floor.

  “Oh?” I said, trying to remember at what level of the garage I’d parked Miranda.

  “Our parents sat in the same row at First Baptist. I dated her brother’s best friend for a couple of months my senior year in high school. Then living in each other’s yards so to speak for the last ten years—her house is the brick with the carport you see out my kitchen window. There’s not a fence, not so much a line of rocks to mark where her yard ends and mine begins. We probably talked every day about something or other yet just now up in her room was probably the first time either of us ever spoke from the heart about something that truly mattered. And it had to be about dying, her dying.

  “She told me she is perfectly willing to die. She’s cheerful, almost lighthearted. She’s not merely resigned to it. It’s more than that. She’s almost eager. She says that she’s accepted God’s will. Can you imagine?”

  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to. Then I looked at Louise, really looked at her, concentrated on that homely, open face. She was upset to a degree I had not bothered to notice.

  “What troubles me most is how she is completely wrapped up in the lives of people on TV, you know, soap operas. I think she finds them more real now than her own friends and family that love her.”

  The woman lying up on the fourth floor watching soap operas was not real to me the way she was to Louise, but death was real enough. I hadn’t watched Daddy die without learning that much.

  “Louise, I am sorry. I wish I had more time.”

  “I know you do, Godiva honey,” she said, but the sorrow and puzzlement on Louise’s face as I reached out to hug her pulled me up short. She wouldn’t say so, but I had failed her as a friend. And what about Dylan waiting at home for me? She would be worried sick by now. I was never late like this. I was never so oblivious.

  I could blame Joe Rainey all I wanted, but I was angriest with myself, my foolish ridiculous self. Somewhere I’d lost control. “Get a lid on it, kid,” I told myself as I swung up to the house and honked for Dylan.

  Two

  Seven

  DYLAN BLUE LIES crosswise on her bed, ankles dangling over one side, arms and head over the other, a habit she knows Godiva hates. “Damn, if you don’t look like a carcass,” she’d say, standing in the doorway uninvited, the smoke from her Pall Mall spiraling up. “Like those sad-eyed deer your grandfather used to tie on his hood to show off to the neighborhood every time he went on one of his annual damn hunting forays.” Godiva is more or less a vegetarian of course, refusing all red meat; Dylan is not, not anymore, not for weeks. Besides she likes lying with her head weighted down and the blood pooling somewhere behind her eyes, the rest of her body floating above the bedspread momentarily lighter. Heavy. Light. Heavy. It relaxes her.

  “Lock-in.” When she closes her eyes the words swirl around in red blackness. She says it out loud and it sounds ominous, as if secrets are to be unveiled only to those willing to undergo dark rites of religious passage. What they would do exactly she has not quite figured out. Sing hymns and read scripture? Listen to Amy Grant tapes? Talk about God’s role in their lives?

  “You guys aren’t going to T-group with Jesus all night?” Godiva laughed through her smoke rings when Dylan first asked her to sign the permission slip.

  “What’s a T-group?”

  “Another lost phrase, Honeybunch. Another slice of my past disintegrating into dust. Sometimes I envision the sixties as a strange clay statue we all slapped together in a crazy artistic ecstasy. You know I’m all for artistic ecstasy, but no one had the follow-through to get the damn thing fired, and now it’s crumbling away bit by bit. It’s already lost its original shape, and eventually it will just be a pile of sweepings.” As Dylan knows, her mother tends to get carried away. Then she’ll remember and come back down to earth.

  “A T-group is when you sit in a circle and share your fears, desires and deep psychological problems. I don’t remember what the letter T stands for, therapy or togetherness or tell-all.”

  “I don’t think that’s what we’re doing,” Dylan answered quickly, unnerved at such a possibility, however remote.

  When she opens her eyes, she is slightly dizzy. She tries to focus on the knob of her bottom dresser drawer. It is chipped on one side. Of course. Everything in the house is beat up and secondhand, what Godiva calls collectibles but most people consider junk. Mrs. Brasleton has all new furniture from Sears in her house, with matching chairs and a dining room set sort of like Gram’s at Hilton Head. Dylan has been invited to dinner at the Brasletons’ twice: chicken spaghetti the first time, pork chops the second. As the pastor’s wife, Mrs. Brasleton will be chaperoning tonight. She has bent the rules so Dylan can attend as if she were already an official member of the congregation.

  Reverend and Mrs. Brasleton do not have children of their own even though they’re old, even older than Godiva. Dylan has been wondering lately what it would be like to have a mother like Mrs. Brasleton, who wore perfume and watched television and believed in God. Someone normal who would raise her to be normal without even trying. Normal people take being normal for granted, Dylan has noticed.

  She likes Reverend Brasleton, too, although there is something disconcerting about the bullet-headed erectness he never loosens, not even after supper when he’s supposed to be relaxing over Wheel of Fortune in his recliner. But maybe all men are like that. Dylan has been around so few. She does like his way of dressing, the way she can see the sleeves of his undershirt through his white dress shirt. Dylan is seriously considering being baptized.

  Godiva will go ballistic. Godiva has no interest in doing what normal people do. There is no way Dylan could hope to turn out like everybody else, the way Godiva has been raising her. It isn’t the single-mother routine; lots of kids Dylan knows have divorced parents. But no one else has a mother like Godiva Blue. For starters, the way she looks. Six feet tall, orangy hair flying in all directions except when she wears it in a long braid that reaches her waist. She buys her clothes from thrift stores. And she is almost forty years old. A forty-year-old woman in braids and high-tops. But the way she acts is worse. Those “outbursts of public conscience,” as Godiva likes to call them. Why must her letters to the editor of the Esmeralda Weekly Gazette always take the opposite view of everyone else about everything, from garbage pickup to President Reagan’s policy on Nicaragua?

  Then there is her art. Not that kids from the high school would ever be caught dead inside The Pink Heron, but Miss Cleo always sticks Godiva’s most outrageous pieces in the window for anyone walking by to see and comment about. Even Godiva’s job is weird. She couldn’t be a nurse or a secretary or a teacher like Cass’s mother. No, she has to be a janitor, “down and dirty where I like to be,” even though, as Gram tries to explain to Godiva all the time, it is a pure waste of brain and talent.

  Dylan puts her hands flat on the floor. The wooden planks are splintery and hard against her palms as she pushes herself up. The clock radio says 4:45. Godiva promised to be home by 4:30. Dylan wanders into the front room to look out the window. Nothing. She tells herself not to worry. Godiva should be home any minute. There is still plenty of time to get to the church. But she cannot relax. She keeps thinking how everyone is going to be there, even Cass, who always scoffs. Of course, Cass can afford to scoff. Everyone knows Cass Culpepper is the coolest girl at Esmeralda High.

  Hair dyed black and cut at a jagged angle everyone is copying, pole thin in acid-washed jeans, Cas
s Culpepper is totally punk. And she knows just how far to go with it. All the girls want to be like her, though none of them has the guts to cop the whole attitude. And practically every guy in the school has a crush on her. Dylan couldn’t believe her luck this summer at camp when she and Cass were assigned together to the five-and six-year-olds. Who would ever have predicted that they would actually become friends? But they did. Amazing as it seems, Cass seems genuinely to like Dylan, to seek her out, even since the most embarrassing, mortifying moment in Dylan’s life.

  Cass got her license in August and began driving Dylan home from camp. Cass kept saying she’d always wanted to see what a real artist’s studio looked like, but Dylan avoided going into the studio—it was hard to describe, but she respected that it was Godiva’s private place—but then one afternoon when she and Cass drove up, the doors were open wide, inviting them in it seemed, and Cass was practically begging. So in they walked.

  Cass saw, all right. Godiva stark naked practically, humming away, up to her elbows in clay. Cass was chill, pretending not to be shocked. For days afterward, Dylan kept waiting for Cass to make her the butt of some sarcastic joke. Instead, Cass became friendlier than ever. The only difference was that she began asking questions about Godiva a lot, about what it was like living with an artist.

  “Your mother is an iconoclast, that’s really cool,” she told Dylan one day after school started. It was an amazing word for her to use. Dylan had to look up the meaning in the dictionary that night even though she’s always had straight As in English. “Iconoclast” turned out to mean exactly what Dylan doesn’t want to be, what she lives in fear that people might think Godiva is. Now she has begun to recognize, with some bemusement, that having an eccentric for a mother, an “iconoclast,” somehow makes her more interesting to Cass. Which realization does not stop Dylan from jumping at the chance to tag along whenever Cass invites her, especially when Cass is heading to the Dairy Queen.

  If you are a girl between fifteen and twenty, there is nothing better to do of an evening in Esmeralda than to find yourself leaning on someone’s silver Camaro in the Dairy Queen parking lot, chewing the straw of a milkshake and giggling at some boy’s dumb jokes. Jimmy Cryder smiled at Dylan this morning when she walked past his locker after History. Cass, who always mysteriously knows these things, has been dropping clues all week that he is interested. And Jimmy will be at the lock-in tonight.

  Dylan grabs a cassette, the first her fingers touch, and shoves it in the tape deck. Randy Travis is singing “Too Gone Too Long.” Godiva has discovered country music lately. The refrain hammers in. Dylan hates it. She switches the music off. She tries not to look at her watch. Godiva promised 4:30.

  “No sweat,” she said yesterday, standing barefoot at her worktable, shaking silver paint from a thin brush in spatters across a square of stretched silk. Dylan hates a lot of Godiva’s stuff, but sometimes one is pretty wonderful.

  “I won’t even come in to embarrass you.” Godiva went on sprinkling silver raindrops. Although Dylan has been living in a state of perpetual secret embarrassment for the last two years, she was surprised Godiva had noticed.

  “But are you sure, absolutely certain, you want to spend all night in a church?”

  “Fellowship Hall.”

  “Whatever.”

  Surrounded by the kiln, the loom, the remnants of unfinished projects, Godiva could still cast quite a spell. Dylan watched her mother’s arm swing the brush, watched her shoulders hunch and stretch. For as long as she can remember, there has been Godiva’s back at work while she talked. In those moments when all that matters is to be loved, to be someone’s child, Dylan closes her eyes and sees its broad reassurance, smells the slightly acrid mix of sweat and paint and clay and cigarette, finds herself filled with longing for that simpler time when Godiva’s love was an impenetrable wall surrounding them from the rest of the world.

  “You know I don’t trust religion.” Godiva picked up a tray holding small pieces of wood and metal.

  “That’s because you don’t believe in God.”

  “Oh, Honeybunch, God is beside the point. Besides I don’t know if I believe in God any more or less than you do. Hell, I’m a regular browser in the supermarket of the spirit. You know me. I’ll try anything.”

  Dylan could not help smiling back. One thing about Godiva, she can poke fun at herself.

  “It’s the idea of you being sucked up inside a group mentality that scares the shit out of me. Like what happened to Coyote Sikes.”

  “Your roommate who ran off to the desert with a snake-swallowing guru and never came back, right?” Dylan has always thought Coyote Sikes was a dumb name to change to, even dumber than Godiva Blue. What kind of people changed their names all the time?

  “Other kids did that kind of thing, too, freaked out.” Godiva put down her brush. “But Coyote—Ellen—seemed so unlikely. So normal. I always admired her good sense as well as her intelligence. The same as I admire yours as a matter of fact, Honeybunch. So don’t you dare Coyote out on me.”

  Dylan cannot imagine turning out like Coyote Sikes for reasons Godiva would never understand. Being sucked into a group is what Godiva worries about. How to suck up to the group is exactly what Dylan still wants to figure out. Coyote Sikes really believed her guru’s line or else she fell in love with him, a matter of the heart. Coyote was vulnerable because she was secure in the first place. Not Dylan. Coyote could do something everyone thought was crazy because she’d taken everyone’s approval for granted for so long. She was probably a cheerleader in high school and a Girl Scout before that. Dylan remembers second grade, the little girls wearing their Brownie uniforms to school every Tuesday. Godiva would not have stopped Dylan from joining, but Dylan knew she couldn’t be a Brownie. Being a Brownie was the antithesis of all Godiva stood for. How could Godiva Blue’s daughter want to participate in such a regimented organization? As if being a daughter should have to stand for anything. It is not that she loves Godiva less now, but that she recognizes Godiva is, as Mrs. Brasleton would say, a heavy cross to bear.

  Dylan sits by the front window and stares at her hands. 5:37 by her watch. The clock in the kitchen says 5:40. If Dylan is going to the lock-in at all, she has to be there by 6:30. Everybody will be there by 6:30. Most of the girls are getting there by six. It is a long twenty-minute drive from the Point to First Baptist. If Godiva is not home in another fifteen minutes, Dylan might as well forget the lock-in.

  She strains to hear a car as it rounds the last bend in the shore road, but there is no car. There is nothing at all. The air is dangerously still. Even the gulls have stopped their usual afternoon swooping to disappear into the gray horizon. Dylan thinks she will suffocate in the thick stillness. She walks slowly, counting the steps, back into her room. Her clock radio says 5:43. She knows for a certainty then that Godiva is not coming, knows but does not, cannot believe.

  In the bathroom she stares at herself in the mirror over the sink. She can call Gulfside, but why would Godiva be working this late? A new pimple has erupted on her chin since she checked the mirror half an hour ago. She worries it with her pinky, then pinches to squeeze the pus to the surface. The school secretary would be long gone by now anyway. Her chin is turning blotchy red under her prodding. Could Godiva have gone to visit that stupid Franklin kid all the way over in Perry? If so, and if she is still there, the situation is hopeless. Dylan might as well forget the lock-in. But it isn’t possible Godiva would do this to her.

  At the front door, listening to the emptiness, Dylan aches to get to the lock-in. She pictures Jimmy scanning the room for her before some other girl snatches away his interest. She pictures Mrs. Brasleton at choral practice next Monday nodding understandingly when Dylan makes excuses for Godiva. She is so tired of feeling she has to explain Godiva. But this is different. Usually Godiva is all-too present, unavoidable in her diligence. She has never before failed to be where she said she’d be. But Mrs. Brasleton won’t know this; she’ll assume Godi
va is irresponsible on top of everything else.

  Godiva’s old sleeping bag lies bunched on its side where she left it by the door this morning. A faint odor of mildew and incense clings to the flannel underbelly as Dylan uncurls and re-rolls it. She sets the tight, neat cylinder next to her overnight case, the white Bible from Mrs. Brasleton poking out from an unzipped corner.

  Dylan cannot sit still. She wanders over to what Godiva self-mockingly refers to as her sacred corner. For someone who does not trust organized religion, Godiva is a sucker for her I Ching and tarot cards. On the second row of shelves above Godiva’s inlaid table sits the purple satin box where Godiva keeps her polished throwing pennies. Indian heads. Dylan wants them for herself suddenly. She doesn’t know where the urge comes from, whether she is about to roll the pennies to read her fortune or about to toss them into the Gulf. She only knows she has to have them.

  The shelf is higher than she expected. She has to stretch on tiptoe for the box. Even then she cannot quite grasp it. She is reaching beyond some awkwardly placed incense sticks when her wrist knocks a heavy book that falls forward off the shelf, bringing with it the penny box and a silk-covered notebook. An unmarked, unsealed envelope comes loose from inside the notebook flap as it drops.

  The notebook is all blank pages. Dylan opens the envelope and removes two folded sheets. At the top of the first LOUISE CULPEPPER is printed in block letters, followed by rows of long and short vowel markings and what look like Chinese symbols. The combination has a rhythmic, even musical quality. Dylan is amazed. Mrs. Culpepper. Why would Godiva throw the I Ching about her? Dylan runs her finger across the writing. It is spooky, voodooish. Dylan wonders if Mrs. Culpepper knows Godiva has thrown in her name.

  The other sheet, some kind of flyer, has been folded over and over, down to a small thick bundle. Impatient as she’s been for the last hour, Dylan takes her time. Crease by crease, she unfolds the fragile paper speckled with water and grease stains. Not until she has smoothed the page against her thigh and shaken it gently does she let herself look at what she is holding.