Playing Botticelli: A Novel

by Liza Nelson

  Dylan knows she has to wait. Meanwhile, she studies him constantly. She has to be sure. Absolutely one-hundred-percent sure. She looks at herself in the mirror and then at him and then at herself again. Feature by feature. He definitely has the eyes. No question. And the walk. In Cincinnati, Martha saw the walk immediately.

  And Dylan is convinced he is sending her signals. Especially when they’re together in the kitchen. She loves helping out in the kitchen. She loves the good smells, the easy joking that occurs between Margie and Manuel, and David himself when Iris isn’t butting in, but most of all she loves that she can feel him watching her. He might work to cover it up, but she can tell he is genuinely interested in finding out more about her, as much as she is about him.

  He asks her questions, what her high school was like, what subjects she liked, what she did for fun. The kind of questions adults always ask. When she tells him, in vague terms, about the Youth Fellowship, he starts teasing her about leaving behind some boy with a broken heart as he pinches off bits of dough to form balls to fill with a cheese and apple mixture.

  “So you’re Baptists, you and your mother. Hey, Margie, aren’t you a Baptist?” He wipes his high round forehead with a towel; the kitchen gets very hot with all the burners going. Dylan wonders when he first started going bald. That photograph must be pretty old. He still has hair but it’s definitely getting thin.

  “No way,” Margie cackles. “They won’t let me past the front door anymore.”

  Dylan laughs along with the others, but actually she could care less if Margie were a Baptist or a Zen Buddhist like Coyote Sikes. If Dylan gets a chance to show him the poster, he’ll realize she knows about him being an atheistic communist.

  “My mother hates that religion stuff.” Dylan tries to mention Godiva every chance she gets, looking for a reaction. “I only joined for my friends. I’m sure you’ve heard about peer group pressure in adolescence.”

  He nods, but the way he twists his mustache after he puts the apple-and-feta cheese pastries in the oven makes Dylan nervous. She thinks he is wonderful, of course; he is her father even if he does seem a little stuck on himself. She keeps looking for the right thing to say to please him and charm him into growing so attached he could not bear to part with her.

  As long as he lets her stay, that’s a hopeful sign. But she still cannot figure out what he is thinking from moment to moment, cannot second-guess him the way she could Godiva. Dylan could always make her laugh.

  “Godiva is very spiritual, actually, you know, in her own way. And I’ve been more or less rethinking my religious beliefs.” It’s crazy, but Dylan finds herself missing Godiva a little. Or not her exactly, but lying in bed at night and hearing the waves hit the rocks, then looking out to see the light on in the studio. Or sitting on the back stoop with her, the easy silence. Most of all, though she cannot put it into words, she misses being the center of someone’s life.

  “What religion are you?” She watches him slyly.

  “Foodist. The preparation of wonderful food is my religion.” He reaches for a clean bowl to mix up cactus and cilantro chutney, then wanders into the other room to wash his hands, or look for Iris.

  Meanwhile, Dylan stays put on her stool, peeling carrots and adjusting her plans. If he really cares about this restaurant, he is never going to want to leave, that’s obvious, but it also occurs to her that his reverent attitude toward food and Godiva’s toward her boxes might be compatible. She is beginning to see how they might have been attracted once, and how they might connect again under the right circumstances. Once he accepts how much he wants to keep Dylan with him for good, her and Crescent both, maybe she’ll suggest bringing Godiva out here, at least to visit. Dylan is not particularly in love with Velasquez as a place to live. Almost everyone is Mexican or Indian or something and the town is even smaller, not counting the tourists, than Esmeralda. The sky is too big. But if the restaurant means that much to him, she’s willing to adjust. Godiva might be willing, too, once she and David Balboa/Henry Fierstein rediscover their old passion.

  “Dylan!” Margie’s shriek breaks the reverie. Dylan looks up and then down at her hand. The scraper has slipped and dark red blood is dripping onto the clean shredded carrots from the ball of her thumb.

  MORNING NUMBER three, or is it four? The days have been running together for Dylan in her concentration on this battle to win her father. She wakes up to television noises and walks into the apartment’s living room to find the three of them, David, Iris and Crescent, squeezed together in the big leather chair, rawhide he calls it, watching Sesame Street. In Spanish at that hour. Dylan has been left the sling chair, but the others don’t seem to notice. They’re too busy singing along with Big Bird and Maria. Crescent has on a diaper although yesterday Iris was the one making a big deal about toilet training.

  “She’s got to be close to three, and she needs to be trained so she’s not ostracized,” Iris told Dylan when she took them shopping for what she called a few necessities.

  “Ostracized?” Dylan asked.

  “By other kids.”

  “Like in an orphanage, you mean?” Dylan sneered.

  “No, not an orphanage. A school. Three-year-olds go to school, preschool anyhow.”

  Dylan bristled. “I know all about educating little kids, a lot more than you probably. My mom works in a school.”

  They were coming out of a clothing store down the block from Los Combientes. Iris had just purchased Dylan a pair of stretchy black pants. They had already been to a shoe store and were on their way to a children’s shop for Crescent, who was holding hands with both of them so they could swing her up between them every other step. The black pants would definitely have looked better on Iris but she refused to buy herself a pair.

  “This is your shopping spree,” she kept saying.

  If Iris wanted to spend money on Dylan and Crescent, let her. But that does not give Iris the right to take over Crescent. Crescent is Dylan’s responsibility. Maybe David Balboa’s, too, if he wants, but not Iris’s.

  “There you are, Dyl. Are you hungry?” Iris gets up from the rawhide chair as soon as she notices Dylan in the doorway.

  Dylan shakes her head, holding on to yesterday’s anger. She was mistaken ever to think she could like Iris. She is not about to let herself be taken in again, no matter how sucky sweet Iris acts. Iris is the moat keeping Dylan from David Balboa. Would any man leave an Iris, with her quiet, delicate elegance, for a big lumpy Godiva Blue? Not likely.

  Dylan sits down in the sling chair. A bigger problem is David Balboa himself. She’s still trying to figure him out. He is not like any father she met in Esmeralda, that’s for sure. The pierced ear and his mustache could go. Gross. On the other hand, everyone around here likes him which is a good sign. Yesterday, in the shoe store, Dylan flushed with pride when another customer spent about twenty minutes raving to Iris about the restaurant and David.

  “David has a certain magnetism,” Iris boasted afterward. “He always seems to have the answer to a question no one else thought to ask.”

  Magnetism is good, but Dylan finds herself picking at a new worry: With a mother like Godiva and a father like David, how will she turn out? She used to worry, long months ago, about being considered ordinary. Back then all she wanted was to be ordinary. Now there is no hope of ordinary. In Esmeralda she will ­forevermore be the one who ran away.

  “I’ve got to get to the bank,” David says standing up, “and then I was going to stop by Hernandez Brothers to check out that new oven of theirs.”

  “Why don’t you take some company?”

  Dylan catches the meaningful bend of Iris’s head in her direction and blushes in resentment at Iris’s patronizing meddling. At the same time, she hopes against hope he will invite her along. Instead, he gathers up Crescent, who has been perfectly content playing with a set of tin measuring cups and spoons, and zips her into her parka without a word to Dylan. Not even see you later. “What you need, girl, is a manicur
e.” Iris turns to Dylan as soon as David Balboa leaves, Crescent riding on his shoulders. “You know I worked in a beauty parlor for a while in high school. I’m known for my manicures.”

  Dylan shrugs. Less than enthusiastic, she sits cross-legged on the floor as Iris sets up a little folding tray between them.

  “I was always good at manicures, but God, how I hated working at Hollywood Hair. The chemical odors that invaded my pores were bad enough, and all that constant gossipy chatter. But what got to me most of all was how ugly the women looked in their stripped, naked faces.”

  “I’ll bet.” Dylan has never been to a beauty parlor. Not exactly Godiva’s kind of place. Godiva always cut Dylan’s hair for her, at least until last summer when Cass gave her the punk cut. Modified punk, really, because Dylan was not sure how far she was ready to take the punk thing. The cut is practically grown out now. Her hair hangs loose and slightly ragged, but pleasantly heavy against her neck.

  “The truth is we have a lot in common.” Iris lifts Dylan’s limp hand and turns it over to check the Band-Aid on her thumb.

  “Yeah, sure,” Dylan mutters, but Iris rattles on as if she hasn’t caught the sarcasm.

  “When I was nearly your age, a little younger, I took a bus to see my father, too.” Dylan’s hand stiffens slightly.

  “You didn’t live with him?”

  Iris shakes her head.

  “But you knew him. It’s not the same thing at all. You knew where he was whenever you wanted him.”

  “I knew all right. In the VA hospital in Albuquerque.” Iris begins pushing back Dylan’s cuticles.

  “My dad went to Vietnam in 1965.1 was barely three years old. I don’t even know if he was drafted or enlisted. Did they draft married men with children?” She opens a small bottle of moisture cream. “When he came back he was what they called ‘dysfunctional.’

  “ ‘A walking basket case except he can’t walk so well, either,’ my mom would tell her girlfriends. The same tired, sick joke over and over. I cringed every time because the joke meant Mom was getting mean drunk again. When she got bad enough, she’d storm out and not come back for days, even weeks.” Iris switches to Dylan’s other hand and begins massaging it, rubbing in lotion one finger at a time. “She finally went away for good a month before I turned nine.

  “She left a ten-dollar bill under a spoon along with a strip of snapshots she’d taken of herself at the five-and-dime in her favorite white off-the-shoulder blouse.” Iris lifts Dylan’s hand and turns it over, then pauses almost as if she’s forgotten for a split second why she’s holding it.

  “I lost the photographs years ago, but I can see them as clearly as if I had them in my hand right now. Five shots. In the first one, my mother is smiling. In the second, she stares deadpan straight ahead. In the third, she is chewing a finger and flirting up through her eyelashes. The fourth is in profile as if she were praying, and in the fifth, she has her eyes closed.”

  Dylan considers asking if Iris is telling this story to make her feel bad, but she holds her tongue. She wants to hear more. She wonders if David Balboa knows Iris was abandoned by at least one of her parents, and if that knowledge might affect his attitude toward Dylan.

  “My trip to visit my father was not as long as yours, I guess. I figured I could get there and back to my grandfather’s house on Front Street in a day, so I ditched school to see him for his birthday. At the hospital my father was sitting in a garden in his wheelchair. It was late afternoon by the time I got there. Almost sunset. The last bus back here was at nine. I had worked out the timing all wrong, not taking into account an extra hour for the walk from the bus station to the hospital.” Iris rubs more lotion into the skin on Dylan’s fingers. “Have you ever walked on a dusty road in socks that are too thin and keep slipping down into the heel of your shoe? Boy, did I get blisters.”

  Iris laughs but Dylan has an unpleasant flash of sensory empathy, for the skinny girl with a long braid down her back trudging along the side of the highway, choking exhaust from the trucks that threaten to brush her from the road as they roared past, while trying to ignore catcalls from the drivers.

  “The colors that evening were incredibly beautiful, the sky streaked yellowy and gray, like marble. So when I finally got there I said to him, ‘We’ll watch the sunset together. It will be nice, special.’” Iris begins carefully painting the nails on Dylan’s left hand a deepish, pinky beige.

  “We were sitting there, not talking or anything, but it was pleasant enough, what I thought a father and daughter together should be like. Then a plane flew over us. No big deal, right, except that Daddy went nuts. Started shouting obscenities, real ugly ones, and there I was with everyone watching and listening.”

  ‘You were embarrassed, huh?”

  “I could live with it. I knew he was sick and so forth. But then he started grabbing me, pulling and twisting my arm.”

  Iris wipes excess polish off the brush and takes Dylan’s other hand.

  “He dislocated my shoulder. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but the pain was excruciating. I was afraid to let on, thinking he’d get in trouble for hurting me, which he might have. I hitched a ride back to the station with one of the nurses and then rode the bus back to Velasquez, hours and hours it seemed, holding my arm so no one would notice. I had planned to slip home as if I’d never been gone, but I hurt too much. I called my grandfather as soon as I got off the bus. When he picked me up at the station, he said my face was like a death mask. He took me to the doctor, but he did not ask and I did not offer to tell what had happened.”

  Dylan holds up her newly painted pink nails and breathes in their varnishy shine. Does Iris’s shoulder still hurt sometimes? She wonders what that kind of pain must feel like. How did Iris manage, riding the bus home?

  Physical pain is not something Dylan has thought a lot about. It has not been part of her personal realm of experience. The closest she’s ever come to witnessing pain was David Franklin, the kid in the bicycle accident, and he was so connected in her mind to Godiva, that she never let herself wonder about him much. She paid very little attention to Godiva’s description of the actual accident, and when Godiva began to visit him all the time, Dylan was less jealous than annoyed that her mother was off on one of her tangents. The day of the lock-in, when Godiva was late coming back from the hospital, Dylan burned with indignation at first, until she found the picture. Then she was actually grateful that he’d kept Godiva away long enough. After that night, Dylan was caught up in her research and dreams for her future; she barely thought of David Franklin again.

  Now she remembers an afternoon before the lock-in, when Godiva dragged her along to the hospital on one of her visits. Dylan wanted to leave as soon as she arrived. She found the hospital creepy, the way nobody looked straight at anyone else passing in the hall, afraid of what they’d catch, some whiff of death.

  David Franklin was in a room with another kid. “Temporarily,” his mother whispered. There was a screen between the beds. Dylan never saw the other boy, but his low constant whimper made her skin crawl.

  David himself did not look particularly glad to see visitors. He lay wrapped in his white cast like a Martian mummy, staring ahead while Godiva read him a book she’d brought along, one of Dylan’s illustrated classics. At the time, Dylan assumed he was uncomfortable with Godiva, a stranger acting as if she were someone important in his life. It would be like Godiva to exaggerate the relationship.

  But studying the nails Iris has shaped and painted so precisely, Dylan realizes David Franklin had ignored her because he’d been unhappy that Dylan was there. He’d wanted Godiva all to himself. He resented Dylan, maybe envied her. And he was in real pain. What a baby she’d been.

  She glances at Iris, with genuine curiosity.

  “Did you ever see your father again?”

  “Many times. Not that it made any difference.”

  “But you loved him?” Dylan is embarrassed by her own question.

  “I still
do.” Iris screws the brush back into the shiny pink bottle, like a genie back into a magic lamp.

  Twenty-Two

  DYLAN HEARS DAVID Balboa’s car pull into his reserved space. When he doesn’t come to the kitchen, she decides he must have taken the private stairs to the apartment. She finishes folding the pile of napkins in front of her and slips away upstairs.

  David Balboa is lying on the rug, stomach-down singing softly to Crescent. Dylan recognizes the song from one of Godiva’s old records… . I get the urge for going, when the meadow grass is turning… . Crescent is riding his back, giggling, but as soon as she sees Dylan, she stands up and waves around her new book of nursery rhymes.

  “We read the big-girl book.” She plops back down on David Balboa, who groans and laughs at the same time.

  Dylan ambles over to the rawhide chair but does not sit down. David Balboa begins to read in a gentle, playful voice Dylan has not heard from him before, even kidding around in the kitchen. What would it have been like if he’d been there to read to her when she was Crescent’s age? Dylan’s stomach turns to ice. They are as close to alone, she and David Balboa, as they have ever been so far. It is now or never. She watches as he carefully, gently sets Crescent in the chair with her book. She has known him for less than a week, but time is already running out. She is scared to death.

  While she is gathering her thoughts, he clears his throat.

  “We need to talk,” he says and faces her directly. She knows how important it is to stay calm, now that they’re about to talk adult to adult, but how can she? This is the moment she has been waiting so long for.