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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619844391 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Gatekeeper Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2016 |
| Pages: | 290 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d) |
Read an Excerpt
One
August 28, 1986
Well, this summer is over. Kaput. Finis. Down the tubes. Extinct. All gone. The end.
As far as I'm concerned, anyway.
It shut like a book this afternoon. One minute I was full of August, easing my way down Highway 12, windows down, music blasting, the hot wind whipping in thick ribbons against my neck. The next minute I was chilled to the bone.
To the bone.
I'd been at work. The teachers come back for pre-planning in a week, and I want no hassles from middle-aged women having nervous breakdowns because their chalkboards are dusty or their windows won't open. Life is too short and art is too long. Being a janitor-excuse me, custodian-is not exactly my life's work. I am an artist first, but I have to earn a living. If I were by myself it would be one thing, but with a daughter to feed, clothe, educate and all the rest, I've had to make my compromises, though fewer than most people, I'm glad to say. Bourgeois excuse, someone would have accused me in '68, back when the revolution was at hand. I'm kidding, sort of. Besides, I take pride in being a woman with Mechanical Skills, as Gulfside Elementary's esteemed principal Granger Morris would say.
It must have been around three o'clock when I finished painting the cafeteria ceiling an incredible azure blue, and I'd added the Pleiades and a few other constellations as my signature. There are ways to do a job, and then as Daddy used to say, there are ways to Do a job. Old Grange could always ask me to repaint it, but he never would. Certain teachers might complain among themselves, but not to me directly. A good janitor has clout, especially in a school with as few resources as Gulfside.
I gave the floor a good once-over with the mop, packed up and started home to Point Paradise. I was singing along with the oldies station out of Tallahassee, "Don't you want somebody to love? Don't you need somebody to love?" People have told me I look a little like a redheaded Grace Slick, or they used to when I lived where people had actually heard of her.
Then the news came on. Out in California, land of the seasonless season where all our dreams and nightmares bloom, a DC-9 and somebody's private jet had tried to thread the eye of the same needle.
"Eighty-one dead," according to the disembodied radio voice.
Just the idea. One minute you're looking out one of those little curved windows feeling godlike, casting your shadow across the earth; twenty seconds later you're bone chip and seared skin pierced with metal. Unless you're on the ground looking up, thinking what a pretty pattern those two planes make flying so close overhead, until the sky bursts wide open to surround and lift you up toward the deafening wreckage. Toward heaven, if only it existed.
Of course, people have been blowing up all summer, the innocent with the guilty. Not just in planes. In buses, in restaurants, in department stores. Wherever a bomb can be stowed. Frankly, I can handle the concept of terrorism. At least someone means death to happen. If I'm going to be blown away, I'd rather spend my last millisecond thinking I'm dying for a cause, even some idiot's insane idea of a cause that I find morally repugnant, than cursing the underpaid, undertrained air traffic controller, and probably a scab strike breaker at that, who has botched the job.
I'm willing to argue the point. I'm always willing to argue. As I've told Dylan over and over ever since she was a little girl, it's bad politics to accept the authority of an idea until you've examined both sides. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying terrorists aren't scary people doing evil things. But let's face it, terrorists usually exist in the first place because some government screwed up, maybe months ago, maybe generations, maybe centuries ago. Maybe it was on purpose or maybe it was just a misjudgment on the part of an individual in some government department who set in motion the series of reactions, first to last, that led to the creation of people so angry and hopeless they'd commit desperate mayhem.
Not that I want to get into heavy political second-guessing. When I settled here, I pretty much left politics behind. That was the point of moving us to the edge of nowhere in the first place.
I'm out of the loop as they say a lot these days in Washington. Me and Vice President Bush. I mean who in their right mind wants to be in the loop? We thought Vietnam and Tricky Dick were bad, but the sixties were nothing. Let's face it, we're stuck in the middle of a decade that is spiritually pure shit, and Ronnie Reagan, with all his crummy little wars that keep breaking out on our collective chin, is leading the way.
Shit. Shat. Shitty. Wash my mouth out with soap. Nice girls and ladies do not talk that way around here, not that anyone would include me on her list of Esmeralda's nice ladies exactly, and not that I care. In any case, I do love the word. "Shit" has to be the quintessential female expletive. "Fuck" and "damn" are basically masculine, don't you think? Hard and sharp. "Shit" has the same number of letters but it's slower to say, softer across the tongue. A nice, nasty contradiction. Plus there's the mud pie in your eye against all those nice-nellyisms, like "ca-ca" and "poo-poo," our mothers taught us to use to keep us proper.
I mean really, in my deepest heart of hearts, I'm still twelve years old, the vinegar sting of my mother's slap hot on my cheek, pickle juice pooling at my bare feet that are pink from the blood trickling down my ankle where a glass sliver has lodged.
"Oh shit," was all I said when the jar hit the linoleum.
"Judy, please!" There was a splatter of small dark stains down the front of my mother's cashmere sweater. "I can't stand it when well-brought-up girls say that word."
The s-word. I was barefoot for God's sake and there was glass everywhere and that was all she could think about. Of course, now that I'm a mother I'll give her the benefit of a doubt. She could have been overwrought about something unconnected to me: the bad perm she got at the beauty parlor; trouble she was having getting the household checkbook to balance; Daddy coming home late from his insurance office yet again without calling. No matter. The devil had me by then. I laughed in her face and said it twice more, louder. That's when she slapped me, hard. Another in a series of intimate moments between Mom and me.
Don't get me wrong. I do not hate my mother. We talk almost every month. When she closed up the house in Connecticut seven years ago, I flew up to help her pack. The last time I was on a plane by the way. Since then, once or twice a year I drive Dylan-although she's getting old enough to send alone-to Hilton Head, where Mother has a condo with Jack, whom she refers to discreetly as her special gentleman friend. A perfectly nice man, Jack.
No one would ever have dared to describe Daddy as a nice man. That's what I loved about him, even during those two and a half years we didn't speak because he had decided I could not be his daughter Judy Blitch if I was also an unwed mother living in a commune "with a bunch of long-haired, commie bastards" and calling myself Godiva Blue. "Jesus Christ, you sound like you've turned Negro. If you've got to change your name, why not call yourself Virgin so we could all laugh at the joke?" Daddy never did mince his words.
Mom minces, dices and arranges on a platter with parsley and radish hearts every time she opens her mouth. As I said, I do not hate her or resent her or even dislike her any more. As I said, we talk on the phone with a certain regularity. But let's face it, all the phone calls in the world will not change the fact that we simply do not connect. She hasn't the slightest inkling what I'm about, never has.
She loves Dylan of course. Not that she wanted me to give birth to her-as if I had an alternative at the time-but once Dylan was born, Mom couldn't have given her up any more than I could, I'll hand her that. She has more or less adjusted to the terms of my motherhood. Her great joy is sending along articles she's clipped from earnest women's magazines about single mothers and how they cope. Coping is one of her big themes. She does not believe I am coping well. Of course, she believes coping is a good thing: make do, stiff upper lip, stoic forbearance, the Puritan spirit at work. What in her life, aside from Daddy dying over all those pain-filled months, has required coping I am not sure, but I don't bother to quibble because basically she's right. I do not cope.
I am against coping on principle and I tell her so. Coping is an acceptance of less than you want. I expect more and don't mind doing what it takes to get more. That's why I hammered and forged and sculpted until I built the life I wanted. And when I decided I needed to earn a living and find a job, I did not simply cope. I made the job fit me, not the other way around. Of course, that choice of jobs remains beyond my mother's comprehension. Needless to say, she never tells anyone in Hilton Head how I earn my living, and she can't understand why, if I'm going to call myself an artist, I choose to live in Esmeralda, where she's never been, instead of some overdeveloped artist-slash-tourist colony like the Vineyard or Greenwich Village.
"There are such limited opportunities."
"You mean to meet men." Men I can live without, as I have shown my entire adult life. Men are generally what I don't want to meet, and if Esmeralda has few to tempt me, the better off I am here. But I bite my tongue. My unwritten rule of etiquette states that if she's paying for the call, I try to avoid out-and-out confrontation. "Try" is the operative word.
"Not only men. Educated people." That cute little hurt in her voice could not be louder and clearer if she were standing next to me in the room shouting through a bullhorn. "And what about Di?" She loves calling Dylan "Di," as if she were named for Princess Diana, although, of course, Dylan was born long before the royal wedding. "What kind of education can she get there? Do they even have advanced-placement classes at the high school?"
"Dylan is happy."
"So you say."
I bite my tongue again. Dylan not happy? We have an almost perfect life. Not almost. Perfect. We play together, we create together. Dylan has never been merely my daughter, the way I was my mother's daughter, a responsibility to give birthday parties for and drive to dancing classes. Dylan is a mind in formation, a spirit I am helping to shape. She goes to the local, admittedly mediocre school, but I have been her primary teacher. I don't say it hasn't become a challenge lately, now that the demons of adolescence have begun to circle. She can be moody and a little prickly at times, but not like other girls with their parents. Our relationship is different. Being Dylan's mother is as intrinsic to my wholeness as a woman and an artist as being my daughter is intrinsic to her wholeness. Dylan, as much as myself, is the beneficiary of my quest for perfected vision.
That is what life is all about, isn't it? Seeing true and clear to the core, so that you know the essence of a thing despite the detritus. When we happened into Esmeralda ten years ago I was just beginning my search, trying to piece together the elements of a life that would allow me to slough off all that garbagey stuff that clings to most people, women especially. Most have no vision so they are trapped in what they call their lives-narrow alleyways cluttered with all the petty trivia of television, office politics, bill paying, dating. Those dancing classes and birthday parties that kept cornering my mother and me in my childhood. The prosaic routine of domestic dependency. I wanted more. I wanted to inhabit my space in the world as I pleased.
So after Daddy died, I turned the twenty thousand dollars he left me into traveler's checks, over my mother and her lawyer's strenuous objections. Then I loaded all our worldly possessions into the back of Miranda, my VW bus, and took off, clutching a map of America's back roads. Dylan was barely five, but she was a fine traveling companion for those three weeks, enthusiastic most of the time and surprisingly patient through the inevitable long stretches. I had not planned to stop in northwest Florida, but I fell in love with that barely visible line in the distance where sky and sea meet, how the roots of the scrub oaks dig in and take hold in the sandy soil. The spiky leaves of the palmettos. All that gnarled resilience. When I saw the FOR SALE sign at Point Paradise I knew we were home. It was destiny. Walking the marshy shore and looking out across the cove to flat open water and empty sky, watching Dylan's delight in the geckos and in the pelicans nesting on abandoned pilings, I knew this particular geography had been ripening for years while it waited for me.
Not that people hadn't stood there before, but no one who counted. Only a typical Florida land developer with King Midas dreams. Back in the fifties, he had cleared half the Point and built pastel bungalows to sell to rich retirees from Miami looking for a retreat from the sweltering heat of south Florida. Point Paradise was his name for the place and he gave each house its own title burnt into the lintel above the front door. Pelican's Landing, Hibiscus Haven. I've always liked him for those names.
Then Hurricane Margaret-Ann hit, the same week his ad campaign was scheduled to run, the same week his workmen were under rush orders to finish installing the pink and aqua kitchens; the same week it so happens that my grandparents took me to Madison Square Garden in New York City to see a rodeo with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, my heroes I'm not ashamed to admit. Shaking hands with Roy and Dale counted as the peak experience of my six-year-old life. When we came outside afterward, the skies had darkened to an ashy charcoal gray the color of the sleeve of my grandfather's overcoat as he worked desperately to flag down a taxi cab. My first conscious sensory memory is the danger I could smell in the air, metallic and electric, smokey and moist.
My misguided get-rich-quick-now-bankrupt developer disappeared. I can see him, a small bald man who sweats through his linen suits, driving by his ruins one last time, his wife beside him, chipping off her nail polish and chewing her lip as they head north in a long-finned Cadillac whose back end sags under the weight of their hastily gathered possessions, the trunk's mouth roped down into a half open grin.
Eight of the ten cottages had been flattened by the storm and never touched since. I used most of what was left out of my traveler's checks-over half of my inheritance from Daddy-to pay cash for the twenty acres plus. God, it seems like so much land for so little money, but back then I was considered insanely fiscally brazen. Fiscally brazen, it sounds almost as bad as sexually promiscuous, which I was obviously considered by certain family members as well.
Rot and hibiscus overran the place. Even Paradise, the cottage most inland and least damaged, was falling in on itself by the time I moved into it with Dylan. I stripped the cottage down to its skeleton and rebuilt. The folks at Ace Hardware and Henry's Building Supplies were standoffish at first, as you can well imagine: Esmeralda, Florida, circa 1976: woman stranger who looks more than a little like a hippie coming around asking questions and buying supplies with traveler's checks written on a Hartford, Connecticut, bank while her little girl hangs on her leg and refuses to smile or take even one piece of Chicklets gum. The raised eyebrows I saw the first afternoon Dylan and I walked in stayed raised for months, but eventually the guys got used to me. And I even got used to them, overalls, chewing tobacco, ma'ams and all.
I did my own plumbing and pretty much all my own electrical. It was a learning experience, that's for sure. There is not one inch of surface, not a beam, not a nail hole, that I have not touched. Four rooms and a bath, that's all we needed- plus my studio in the old toolshed-filled with serenity and order amid the chaotic beauty of the land. Point Paradise. The embodiment of my, Dylan's and my, essential spirit.
And believe me, rebuilding Paradise was a spiritual act. I've been a studio potter, a weaver, a painter, even a glassblower. God, I had loved working the glory hole, but once I had Dylan I gave up my plans to go back. It was not a place to have a toddler crawling around. And I can't say I ever had what I could call a sense of purpose until I worked on my house. Fishing wires through the walls, framing doors, smoothing Sheetrock plaster, I discovered the energy of space and time within the set boundaries of a ten-by-twelve-foot room. The quality of space. How life can expand within an imposed, purely spatial structure. It all goes back to vision.
That's how I discovered my art. My boxes of wood-or clay or papier-mâché or whatever materials feel right-that I fill with my own constructions. My medium has become life enclosures. Not shrines. Not reliquaries. Though I like the spiritual nature of reliquaries, they're still about what is past and dead. My boxes are worlds unto themselves, filled with the shapes and colors and textures of my visions. Vision. Your vision forms your life. The seeing beyond takes you into the within and vice versa. As in waking dreams. As in visionary. My college roommate and ultimate mentor, Evangeline Pinkston, talked a lot about making her own inspiration, but Evie was a genius, a real genius. All I have is a strongly developed attentive unconscious. And thank the gods I have that.
I have always possessed the gift. My ability to lose myself, will myself lost within a given environment, has grown over the last ten years, but it has always been there inside, waiting for my recognition. I can do it anywhere, but out there on the Point is the best, at the tip of the peninsula, past the crumbling remains of the other bungalows. It takes some scrambling to get out there past the marsh, through the beach nettles, but once I make it to the thumbnail of limestone that sits like a turtle's back in the shallows, I'm home free. None of the noise of civilization to interfere with my inward hearing. Only the shushing of the tide, the shriek of the gulls, my own ragged breath. I become nebulae, like meditation without the mantra.
Even in this heat. Maybe the heat helps. Last Thursday was one of the hottest, muggiest days I can remember around here, and that's saying a lot. My toes squished deliciously deep into the wet muck of sand and dirt on what's left of the old road. The sand would have burned my soles but for the mud. My jeans and T-shirt stuck to my skin, so once I reached the Point I stripped them off, lay back, and opened my pores to melt into the natural sauna of salt spray, gray rock, and sky. I was transformed into leaf, cloud, foam, air. Bodiless, coming and going with the tides. My mother used to accuse me of daydreaming, but she had no idea.
So there I was peering into my own unconscious. A contradiction in terms, you might argue, but that is what happens. Like adjusting to the dark. Suddenly you see where everything fits despite, or even enhanced by, the blackness. Thursday, lying in that cocoon of heat, I traveled into a black room, windowless, doorless. I did not feel trapped. I felt the expansiveness of empty space. After a while, scissors cut slits in the walls and the walls curled like paper. Through the slits I saw blue sky filled with bleeding moons. Black to blue to red. Slices to circles to sharp moon points, silverfish bodies slithering, lines of unborn dead. And, strange or morbid as it may sound, a sense of profound peace.
I stayed there, inside wherever I was, for maybe an hour, maybe ten minutes, maybe only a few seconds. No matter. And then gradually it all faded back into the shimmer of sea and sky, the physical world I inhabit with everyone else. I could feel the physical reality of my body and the rock and the heat. I slipped off the turtle's back exhilarated by awareness that being alive was, is, the thing. Gray-green slime came off all over my arms and legs. Wet leaves and sand clung to my shoulder. Strings of seaweed wrapped around my ankle. They were life, life, life.
It is true that I am an unusually enthusiastic person.
I don't remember how I got back to the studio or sitting down to work. I was in a creative euphoria. But I do remember velvety browns and slippery blues and singing reds, a spiny silver. And the light. God, the light. Thick with heat. Tingly, stretching through the open double doors and along the walls, carrying me forward like a wave of energy as I sketched and cut and pieced.
Then the briefest shadow. I looked up. Dylan stood at the doorway beside a taller, dark-haired girl. Louise Culpepper's daughter, Cassie. For a fraction of a second, I thought they were another vision before I delineated the particulars of their presence. Identical black T-shirts and thigh-hugging skirts. Only, despite the multiple earrings and the painted eyebrows, Dylan, my Dylan, still chubby with baby fat, had not quite pulled off the look. She paled beside the other girl's theatrical, almost haggard disdain. Dylan's mouth and eyes formed small o's, the geometry of her horror quite wonderful from an artist's view.
But artist and mother are separate sensibilities sharing side-by-side space inside my brain. The mother side saw only disaster. Maternal awareness moved in slow motion from Dylan's eyes to my knees, still covered with slime. Then I heard an intake of breath, hers and mine in discordant harmony.
"Shit."
I was stark naked. I grabbed an old shirt off the stool and buttoned it around me, not knowing whether to giggle or to sob. Even now the memory makes me smile and blush together. The absurdity. Those two painstakingly punked-out kids shocked by my less-than-youthful, far less-than-perfect body.
Needless to say, the mood was broken. I could not find my way back to any inner wisdom that day.
+ + +
Driving along Highway 12 this afternoon, though, watching the clouds stretch over the Gulf as the radio cut from the news to a commercial for strawberry wine coolers, I decided my dream vision out on the Point had been some kind of real premonition: a sealed black room, a sky the color of the cafeteria ceiling, which is pretty spooky itself when you think about it, blood and death. My God, what had I seen coming? Someone who believes as strongly as I do in trusting my unconscious should have paid closer attention. Let no sign slip away, remain on constant guard, I began berating myself.
Then I saw the bicycle. Just barely noticed it, the way you half see a thing on the side of the road as you drive by. If I had not lifted my foot halfway off the gas and shifted my glance as I leaned across the seat for my cigarettes, the bike probably would not have registered at all, but in my state of heightened attentiveness it did register. As all wrong.
There were two bikes actually. One lay on its side. The other stood upended, halfway through a decrepit guard rail, the pedals revolving furiously in the breeze. I forced myself to get out of Miranda and walked toward the blue two-wheeler, an old-fashioned boy's Schwinn. Not Dylan's, was my first thought, as if Dylan has been near her bike in a year. Then I heard the cries and began to run.
A young boy, no more than seven or eight, lay several feet down the embankment. The bushy overgrowth had cut his fall, possibly saved him. Let him be breathing, I begged the powers that be, before I saw his face. He was awfully still, but his eyes stared up full of terrified life.
"There's blood. There's blood. Is he going to die? Is he going to die?" A second boy, the one whose screams I'd heard from the road, rushed at me as soon as I scrambled down to them. Tears were streaking sandy stains down his cheeks. He grabbed my arm and wouldn't let go.
He started sobbing, "We snuck off. I knew we shouldn't. I knew we shouldn't. Oh, is he going to die?"
"No, of course not." I needed to calm him down but had no idea how. "What's your name?"
"Philip."
"And his?"
"David."
"Well, Philip, let me take a look at David."
I let Philip keep hold of my shirtsleeve while I bent over the injured child. There was blood, red and oozy, a cut above his forehead, but it did not look terribly deep.
"Do you hurt real bad anywhere, David?" Dumb question but at least I kept my voice calm and used his name. I'd read somewhere that in a medical emergency you should use the victim's name whenever possible. The boy barely moved his lips.
"I hurt okay." Whatever way I wanted to interpret that one, pain or terror.
"You're going to be fine. We're going to take good care of you." The gears had kicked in I guess, emergency automatic. By some act of fortune I had thrown a bathing suit and towel in the backseat this morning. I stanched the cut with the suit, and used the towel as a blanket. Whether he had broken bones or internal injuries I could not tell, but I was not about to move him. I flagged down a car of teenagers and sent them off to phone 911.
Inside the cramped ambulance when it finally came, reality shifted somehow. David grew smaller strapped down on the stretcher, already attached to an IV-drip. Not small like a baby. More than anything else, he resembled at that moment a little old man, fear and pain stripping all the childhood out of his face. When the driver asked Philip if he wanted to sit up front, Philip shook his head and reached for my free hand. David already had my other. In a matter of an hour we had developed the visceral, physical intimacy of family.
Almost. As involved in the boys as I was, I also found myself thanking God, even if I didn't believe in him, that Dylan was safe. When she'd told me she was invited to dinner with the Reverend and Mrs. Brasleton after choir practice, I was not thrilled. This phase Dylan was going through, this flirtation with the Baptists, was annoying. But at least at this moment I knew where she was.
"What about my bike?"
I turned to Philip, but it was David speaking, worried even now about his bike.
"It's safe. I put the lock on," Philip answered before I could. Kids can be so amazing.
"David, you hang in there." I gave both boys' hands a quick squeeze. "You're being very brave, the two of you. Aren't they?" I turned to the medic sitting on the other side of David, a young guy with acne who had tried to describe the equipment to Philip earlier although the boy was too frightened to pay attention.
"Oh, yes, ma'am." He rubbed his palms along his knees as if to follow a musical beat the rest of us couldn't hear. "You have a very brave little boy here." Gradually, David's grip lightened, exhaustion or painkiller. Philip stared straight ahead, holding on tight as ever.
What if I had not happened by? How long would the boys have waited before someone else stopped, and who, what kind of person? How would life be different, for them or that other passerby, now reaching another destination untouched? And what if I had not glanced over when I did, had kept driving, what other road would my thoughts be traveling now? Those planes colliding, finding these boys. What is life but the friction of one coincidence against another?
Thousands of miles away, victims and survivors were going through their private, enormous anguish. I tried to see them, but my imagination closed down. All I knew were these children's hands in mine, small and dry, dirt etched deep in the lines of the knuckles. I knew David, his dilated eyes, the matted damp hair above the bandages on his forehead, the blood drying to a muddy rust at the edges. And I knew Philip, his almond eyes the color of tree bark, the two pinpricks of nervous energy high on his otherwise drained cheeks, his narrow lips set in stubborn stoicism. For now at least, the ambulance had become the donut of my life. These boys had me completely claimed.
—From Play Botticelli, Liza Nelson. (c) December 1999, Liza Nelson used by permission.
What People are Saying About This
A tough, tender, and unabashed meditation on the joys and dangers of motherhood and the longings of a daughter for her father. Elegant, moving, and true.
"The fabulously named Godiva Blue is a vividly drawn reclamation project from my generation. But her daughter, Dylan, steals the book.... Playing Botticelli is one of those wonderful novels that treats the mother-daughter relationship for what it is -- part mine field, part love nest."
"These are wonderful characters."
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
Playing Botticelli
"Playing Botticelli is one of those wonderful novels that treats the mother-daughter relationship for what it is—part minefield, part love nest." —Pat Conroy
Liza Nelson's debut novel tells the story of Godiva Blue, an artist, single mother, and self-proclaimed visionary, who believes she has found a haven for herself and her daughter, Dylan, in the backwaters of northwest Florida in the mid-eighties. A refugee of the late sixties, Godiva revels in a self-reliant existence that allows her free reign of her eccentricities.
But Godiva, who has buried pieces of her past, discovers that she cannot handpick the parts of her life that she would prefer to box away. On a casual trip to the post office, she glances at the FBI most wanted poster and recognizes the face of the man with whom she conceived Dylan while attending an antiwar rally sixteen years earlier. Meanwhile, a combination of pride and chance keep Godiva from recognizing that fifteen-year-old Dylan is chafing under her mother's overwhelming personality. When Dylan discovers the poster, which Godiva has taken and hidden in a rare moment of self-doubt, she begins to build a fantasy centered on reuniting with a father she has never met, setting her—and Godiva's—course.
Beginning with Godiva's point of view, then alternating throughout the novel with Dylan's perspective, Playing Botticelli offers the frank and funny juxtaposition of a mother's vision of the world with her daughter's reality. Through their individual voices, Nelson movingly explores motherhood and daughterhood, the ties that bind as well as those that must bend and even break.
ABOUT LIZA NELSON
Liza Nelson graduated from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1972. She eventually settled in Atlanta, where she was editor of The Great Speckled Bird and The Atlanta Gazette, alternative weeklies, and was literary manager for The Alliance Theater. More recently, she has been a biweekly columnist, writing on life beyond the suburbs, for The Atlanta-Journal Constitution. Nelson has written essays for The New York Times, Glamour, and McCall's, and her poetry has appeared in Ploughshares and other journals. She lives on a working farm in Newnan, Georgia, with her husband and two children.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- In many mother-daughter stories, the reader's sympathy, as well as the author's, is weighted ultimately toward one or the other. As the reader, did you find Godiva and Dylan equally sympathetic? Does the author seem to favor one or another?
- In discussing her first novel, Liza Nelson has said, "Whether we love them or hate them, obey them or rebel against them, we are, like Dylan Blue, in a permanent state of reaction to our parents." What clues does Godiva share about her relationship with her own mother? How does Godiva's mothering change, and remain the same, when her own daughter begins to rebel against her?
- While Dylan and Godava are both fully developed protagonists, they see each other in limited ways. How do the roles of "mother" and "daughter" limit these characters perception of each other and of themselves?
- By the standards of the "nice ladies" of Esmeralda, Godiva's language, particularly in the first twenty pages, might be considered "coarse." How does her voice affect a reader? What about the story's more lyrical passages?
- Does Dylan sound her age, or do you ever notice her voice sounding older or younger than her years? At certain points throughout the novel, she catches herself sounding like Godiva. Is this a sign of her growing maturity or does it reveal something else?
- How do men fit into the lives of the novel's female characters? What is it about Joe Rainey that so attracts Godiva? Would she have been as drawn to David Balboa if they were to meet as adults? Are the men (and boys) in the novel believable?
- Dylan's encounter with Randall "Spider" Gervais parallels Godiva's brief affair with Hank seventeen years earlier. What do their experiences reveal about the way sexual adventures and romantic relationships have changed or remained constant over time?
- How does Dylan's fantasy of being adopted by Reverend and Mrs. Braselton connect with her desire to meet the father she's never known?
- David Balboa never owns up to being Dylan's father. As the reader, do you think he was? Why does or doesn't his physical paternity actually matter?
- Why does Godiva feel such a need to be in control at the beginning of the novel? Is it connected to her being a single parent, or more basic to her character?
- This novel explores many forms of friendship. What attracts one character to another? What are the similarities and differences between Godiva's friendship with Louise Culpepper and Dylan's friendship with Cass? What different bonds does Godiva form while visiting the hospital, and Dylan while on the road?
- What will life be like for Godiva and Dylan once Dylan returns home?
PRAISE
"Playing Botticelli is a tough, tender, and unabashed meditation on the joys and dangers of motherhood and the longings of a daughter for her father. Elegant, moving, and true." —Pam Durban, author of The Laughing Place
"The fabulously named Godiva Blue is a vividly drawn reclamation project from my generation. But her daughter, Dylan, steals the book." —Pat Conroy, author of Beach Music
"Liza Nelson is a terrific writer, and these are wonderful characters." —Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird