Playing Botticelli: A Novel

by Liza Nelson

  Her father’s face in the palm of her hand. Though she’s never seen him before, she knows. He stares up at her, and she stares back. She reads a list of vital statistics: Middle name Howard. Height, 6’1”. Weight, 180 pounds. Born 1945, Shaker Heights, Ohio. His face on a wanted poster torn at the top where it has been ripped from a ring binder. Her father wanted by the federal government. “Conspiracy to bomb.” Where or how not mentioned. Or if he succeeded. Only his aliases. Henry Fireman, H. Firely, Frank Heeny, Firefly. And his face. Long black hair. Mole above lip. Expressionless eyes she is sure she has seen somewhere before.

  It does not occur to her to keep the picture. Nothing occurs to her. She breathes through a cloud, her arms weighed down by the thin sheet of paper, overcome by the same combination of terror and relief she feels whenever she wakes from her recurring nightmare of being chased across a rope bridge by unseen assailants.

  With excruciating care she folds the poster back the way she found it and places it in the envelope with Mrs. Culpepper’s I Ching. The pennies have scattered across Godiva’s handwoven rug. It takes a few minutes to find where several have rolled under a chair, but Dylan keeps count until she finds them all. She is putting the notebook back on the shelf when she hears Miranda sputter on the gravel where Godiva always swerves in to park. Godiva honks the horn and calls Dylan’s name.

  “I know, I know. I am so goddamn sorry,” Godiva says as Dylan stuffs the sleeping bag into the backseat. “But I’ll get you there yet.

  The clock on the dash says 6:20. Godiva is flushed and more disheveled than usual. She inhales her cigarette and blows smoke out one corner of her mouth.

  “I was visiting David at the hospital and got caught in traffic.”

  Lacing her fingers in her lap, Dylan does not open her mouth. She does not ask the questions she knows Godiva expects. Godiva answers anyway.

  “He seems to be doing better. The physical therapy has started.”

  Dylan wills herself not to listen. The storm she sensed in the air earlier has spread into an approaching darkness over the water. Along the side of the coast road, the weeds and sea oats lean against the wind.

  Just get me there in time, Dylan prays into her hands. Just get me there in time.

  Three

  Eight

  I AM ON MY WAY. You know, don’t you, that this is the happiest day of my life, so far. I keep pretending to read my magazine, but I can’t keep from smiling at the two old ladies sitting across from me. You should see them. They have a big box of popcorn they must have bought at the station before they got on the bus, and they keep offering me some, like we’re at the movies or something. Every time they look over and nod, I have to bite my tongue to keep from standing up in the aisle and declaring to everyone, “I’m on my way to my dad, and you can’t stop me.”

  It was so easy to leave. Godiva did not suspect a thing. Usually, she is so nervous about cars—the only thing she’s overprotective about—but she agreed just like that when I suggested that Cass and I drive to Gram’s in Cass’s new car. Probably she didn’t want to offend Cass’s mom, her new best friend. Anyway, who cares why she said okay. She did, and here I am. “Thank you, Jesus,” as Mrs. Brasleton would say.

  Traveling by bus is a snap. SEE AMERICA FIRST; that’s what the coupon says. I have it tucked in the zippered pouch in my purse so I don’t lose it. Twenty-eight days of unlimited travel for the price of one cashed-in savings bond from Gram. “Thank you, Gram” is more like it. According to the schedule the ticket agent in Atlanta gave me, I can be in Eden, Delaware, by late tomorrow if I push it. So there is a good chance I’ll see you sooner than I even imagined.

  Only I can’t tell if this bus is on time or not because my watch stopped. When I got off at the Thomasville depot to buy some chips and an orange soda, Minnie Mouse pointed to 9:30, and when we turned off the exit for Atlanta, Minnie’s thumb had only moved to 10:15 even though I knew we’d been on the road for hours. The second hand had stopped twitching forward altogether. Minnie had breathed her last, so I wrapped her in a Reese’s Cup paper and buried her in a trash can in the Atlanta bus station.

  It’s not like I’m on a set schedule. If you’re not at the farm outside Eden, there’s bound to be somebody there who can tell me where you are. Because I am going to find you. I am not going back. I mean it. I am going to find you. I am.

  The sun is tilting up left of the bus. Is that east or west, I never can remember. Without my watch or a coastline to define beginnings and endings, it’s hard to keep track. I have no idea where I am or when I am. All I am sure is that I am heading north and it’s one day since yesterday.

  Godiva would explain that time doesn’t follow clock minutes and hours anyway. She told me once that at important intersections in her life, time speeded up and slowed down at the same time. For instance, the six months she shared an apartment with that friend Evangeline she named me after—Evangeline Dylan Blue—who was killed, or the first three months after I was born, or whenever she was working full throttle on a new enclosure. I thought she was just spouting another of her crazy ideas, and you may remember she has plenty, but I have to admit I understand now what she meant. Since the lock-in, there have been more hours in the day, more minutes in every hour, especially more seconds in each minute, and yet everything has happened so fast. Not at Esmeralda speed, that’s for sure. In Esmeralda the days just dragged out and I had to look for ways to fill them. If I were there now, I’d probably be asleep. I’d be asleep and Godiva would already have taken her dawn walk and gone out to the studio hours ago. That’s where she is right now I would bet. You wouldn’t believe how much energy she has; five hours of sleep is all she needs most nights. Now I’m doing the same thing. Wouldn’t she be surprised.

  I don’t know what I expected exactly. I’m right out there on the edge it feels like. If Godiva lives this intensely all the time, no wonder she’s so difficult to live with, not that she ever looks for an excuse. I mean, she manufactures her intensity on purpose; for me the intensity is situational. It has to do with being keyed up looking for you and at the same time penned up on the bus. But Godiva Blue, she’s keyed up on ordinary life.

  Godiva, Godiva, Godiva. Godiva Blue, does the name ring some bells? How about Judy Blitch? I’m not sure when her name changed. You have no idea what she’s like now. She couldn’t have been like that when you knew her, or you wouldn’t have felt the way you must have. I don’t know why I am wasting so much energy thinking about her myself except, maybe, that if all goes well (no, no matter what, even if I gave up searching for you tomorrow, which I won’t) my life with her is never going back to the way it was. I do not fit inside any of her boxes anymore.

  Godiva and her boxes. I broke one about three months ago B.D. Before Discovery. That’s how I divide life now, before I discovered your picture and after. This is a secret I could share only with you. The details are probably not that interesting to anyone else. But to me, you can imagine.

  Cass had dragged me to The Pink Heron. She has this sick fascination with Godiva. I told her I hated going in there because Cleo makes such a big deal. The Pink Duchess is a little weird. She wears pink muumuus all the time and uses some kind of pink rinse on her hair. Not punk pink, believe me. She likes me to call her Aunt, but don’t worry, I don’t.

  Cass thinks she’s a kick. And it’s hard to say no to Cass, believe me. Or it was, when I was still an innocent and Cass was the Queen of Punk.

  Anyway, Cleo fussed around us for a few minutes, then disappeared back to her office. I suspect she was finishing her afternoon round of sherry. She is a tippler according to Gram. Gram hates Cleo. Not that they’ve ever met. Gram hates the idea of Cleo.

  Cass wandered around the gallery, almost shy for the first time since I’ve known her. I explained the stuff to her, like the ­papier-mâché tube hung like a telescope inside fake alligator jaws. It is one of Godiva’s cooler pieces. The way Godiva set it up, you would think the telescope cuts right through the ce
iling and roof toward a sky full of stars and purple clouds. Cass stopped in front of a miniature coffin in which Godiva had placed a necklace and matching earrings of glass beads and stone and wood. Cleo had suggested that jewelry sells, so Godiva was experimenting. “It’s not art, but it would sure beat janitoring,” she told me.

  I swear it was like magic, the transformation in Cass when she put on the earrings and necklace. She became a sort of priestess. Looking at her sudden, unexpected glamour, how the necklace hugged the bones of her throat, I was a little stung. Jealous, I guess. I wondered what it would take to transform me. (Remember, this was B.D. Finding your picture did the trick, didn’t it?)

  “This is really boring,” I said to Cass, but she didn’t answer.

  She was completely absorbed by her new image framed in the mirror, touching with one finger her lips, her cheek, the soft skin beneath each eye, lost in the wonder of who she might be.

  For lack of anything else to do, I rummaged carelessly among the other boxes on the shelves and on the small table in the center of the room, where Cleo put work she was rotating to and from her window displays. I picked up pieces and put them down without really looking. I had seen them all before.

  When I heard the sharp, metallic crack, I didn’t move. I thought it was a gunshot, although I have never heard a gun fired in my life. Then Cass was standing in front of me, the glittery dangle of earrings swinging. I half-expected to see blood.

  “Shit, shit, shit.” She was whispering under her breath as my hands floated up in front of my chest, the palms up to prove their innocence.

  “Shit, you’ve really broken it,” Cass said loud and clear this time. I closed my eyes so I would not have to see. My cheeks burned, and I knew my face must be puffing up like a jellyfish’s. But finally I had to look.

  I had knocked one of the boxes onto the floor. The domed lid was shattered, or at least broken into many, many pieces. The oblong ceramic body of the box was cracked in half down the middle, like an egg. But instead of spilled yolk, small silver oblongs, half the length of matchsticks, lay scattered between the blood-red halves. They looked like small miniatures of the box itself, but I knew what they were. I’d seen Godiva spray paint them. Perfect silver babies, and I had just helped them hatch prematurely. I picked up one and handed it to Cass so I could register the shock on her face. Instead, she giggled.

  “How cool. It’s a plastic baby just like the ones Aunt Lureen stuck in the cupcakes at Marcie’s baby shower.”

  There were dozens of them. The trick for Godiva had been to fit them inside one at a time through a small hole at the end. I’d sat watching her for two hours one Saturday morning, and even then she was not half finished. “Art is long,” she liked to tell me.

  “It was one of her favorites,” I accused Cass as if she were the one who’d broken it. “She was asking over two hundred dollars.”

  By then Cleo was clicking across the room in her pink mules. Before I could say a thing, Cass turned and said, “It’s all my fault. I’ll pay for it.”

  I didn’t contradict. But I begged Cleo not to tell Godiva.

  Cleo’s eyes scrunched up so that hundreds of papery wrinkles popped out at the corners.

  “Don’t you think she would rather be told,” she said, her voice slathered in layers of pink gauze. Cass again offered to pay for it, and Cleo said they would work something out. I could tell Cleo liked the idea of not telling, of keeping someone’s secret. I didn’t listen to the details. Cass never suggested visiting The Pink Heron again, that’s for sure.

  Cleo never did tell Godiva. I’d know if she had. And I don’t think she ever made Cass pay because Cass never asked me to pay her back. The whole incident evaporated into dreamlike memory. Meanwhile, I’d set those babies free.

  AND NOW I am free. Godiva was always warning me about getting boxed in by other people’s expectations, meaning mostly Reverend and Mrs. Brasleton’s. Well, the joke’s on Godiva because her boxes are the ones I won’t fit inside anymore. That’s the one thing I am sure of. Maybe the only thing. Last night I was so certain of everything, but now it’s hard to think straight. The bus is so hot and stuffy it’s making me sick. I have to keep pressing my face against the window to cool my cheeks, and so no one on the way to the toilet can see the tears slithering down my nose.

  What if this whole plan was a terrible mistake. What if I never find you. No, I am going to find you. I am. But so much depends on I don’t know what, like, what if Godiva had not been late the night of the lock-in?

  Every ten minutes this old guy, at least fifty, goes past me on his way to the toilet. He’s got a chin full of stubble, stringy hair weaseling out from under his ball cap, and definitely crazy eyes, the kind that swivel around to the sides. Every time he goes by he gives me this creepy smile and nods. I’d be scared if he weren’t so pathetic.

  I don’t know what I expected exactly. That everything in the world would be a little shinier, touched by the magic wand of my quest. Well, it’s not. All I’ve seen, I swear, since I crossed the Florida state line into Georgia, has been pure dreariness. The sky is gray brown, the fields are dead, the ponds scummy. There don’t seem to be any towns, just exit ramps leading to gas stations, eight-dollar-a-night motels and fast-food neon signs. I swear, if I do end up back in Esmeralda, I don’t care what Cass says, I’ll never step foot in that Dairy Queen again. (Why did I even think about going back? I cannot believe I am homesick. I am not going back.) For sure, I’ll never eat french fries again.

  The worst are the houses. Either broken down shacks or else these surreal settlements plopped down on crisscrosses of blacktop that don’t lead anywhere, definitely not to a town. Like they’re imitations of houses, all so new, all basically identical, whether they’re fake brick or fake wood. Treeless backyards smack against the highway. Plastic Big Wheel tricycles lying on their sides under spokes of flapping laundry. I’d worry about the kids getting run over except I can’t believe anyone real lives there.

  What if you live in a place like that? On purpose, incognito, invisible the way those houses must make a person? What if I find you in one of those houses, sitting in a vinyl easy chair, drinking beer and watching I Love Lucy reruns? Godiva used to joke that I Love Lucy was the beginning of the dissolution of Western civilization.

  But what does she know anyway? I am not going to let myself start thinking this way. I can’t. You would never let yourself go that far. You would never give up your soul.

  It’s just this bus that’s depressing me. I mean it smells depressing, disinfectant and old people’s sweat. Did you know that most people who ride buses are old? Except there’s a baby toward the front who’s been squawking on and off for, like, an hour. No watch anymore, remember, so maybe it only seems that long. Despite myself, I keep thinking of that long ride with Godiva from Connecticut to Esmeralda. The same landscape but completely different. North to south then, south to north now.

  Washington was the only city we went through. We must have stopped to sleep but I don’t remember. It seemed to me then as if we drove forever. When I was a little kid, time and space seemed bigger and wider than they do now. And thrilling, or Godiva’s running commentary made it thrilling. The way the thick green trees of Connecticut suburbs gave way to the rolling pastures of Delaware and Virginia, the scrub pines of Georgia, the orange juice souvenir stands of north Florida.

  Godiva had no idea herself where we were heading, at least not in specific geographic terms. It didn’t matter to me one bit. Actually, what I remember most clearly is her pack of Pall Malls open on the seat between us, her eyes on the road ahead, as she passed the hours explaining what she planned to accomplish moving us to a place where no one knew her, where our lives, hers and mine, were a blank slate.

  “Total integration, Noodle.” She flicked ashes out the window and let the wind carry them off into the Virginia hills. “Total integration. All that passion I’ve pissed away on men and the bullshit talk they pass off as their idealism. All
that passion is going into what’s important. I’ll think for myself from now on, I’ll raise you, I’ll perfect my art.” She gave me one of her warm-the-earth smiles. “We are all each other has in the world, and I promise we’ll be each other’s best friend for the rest of our lives.

  “We are on our way to Paradise,” she sang. Too young to know better, I sang along with her.

  But then everything about Esmeralda turned out wrong, a big fat disappointment as far as I was concerned, although I’d have died before admitting it at the time. The ocean was there all right, the town smack against the Gulf of Mexico, but the coast turned out to have a marsh and rock shoreline. The nearest beach was over an hour away. There were none of the orange trees Godiva promised either, only dusty palms. And no sun, just a flat, dirty blanket of cloud hanging over the car wherever we drove. Worst of all, the whole town smelled, and smelled bad.

  “Don’t worry, Noodle,” Godiva kept saying that first week, every time we caught another whiff. “We’ll find a place to live upwind of the mill, out of its range altogether.”

  Meanwhile we stayed in a boardinghouse on Magnolia run by a Mrs. Mims. “Call me Aunt Glad.” She squinted at me with an angry smile. Short and red-faced, Mrs. Mims (I refused to call her anything else) made huge breakfasts of pancakes and biscuits and sausage and grits and became silently broody if her paying guests did not eat every bit. She also had a dog she doted on, a big black dog that used to snarl whenever he saw me. “Darling is not used to kiddies,” Mrs. Mims would say every time.

  Darling slept on the bathroom-floor rug. If I had to pee in the middle of the night, I lay in the bed next to Godiva with my legs pressed tight, holding off getting up as long as I could, wavering between the temptation to wake Godiva so she would walk me in there and my determination that I would manage myself. Finally, almost doubled over with pain and effort, I would make my way down the unlit hallway. I’d graze my fingertips along the cracked plaster on the wall until I came to the wooden door frame. The light switch was just inside. I could reach around and in. My breath plugged up in my throat as I prayed that Darling would assume from the light that I was not an intruder. Ever so slowly, I’d step around the door and over his mangy back into the room. I always wore leather shoes out of fear that naked feet would be too tantalizing so long after his supper.