Pretending to Dance

by Diane Chamberlain

  “Let’s see how he’s feeling,” Russell said. “He might be too worn out by then.” He shook his head with a grin. “We might all be too worn out by then.”

  * * *

  We showed up at the bookstore a few hours later to find it packed with people. I could practically hear our collective sigh of relief at the sight of a crowd. A bunch of chairs had been set up in the middle of the giant store, and they were full of mothers—and some fathers—and lots of squirmy children. The staff was setting up more chairs for the people who were standing.

  “We don’t usually get this big a turnout,” the store manager, a dark-haired man with wire-rimmed glasses, said to us as he reached out to shake my father’s hand. He awkwardly put his hand behind his back when he realized Daddy could not lift his own. “It was your radio interview,” the manager said. “We started getting phone calls to reserve your book as soon as the interview was over.”

  I stood there talking to the manager, feeling somewhere between cute and cool in my short pink skirt and my purple Doc Martens. I’d taken a couple of Daddy’s Advils for the cramps and I felt really good. I wished Chris was there to see me right then.

  Daddy wore tan pants and the blue shirt Russell had been ironing, along with a smile nothing would ever be able to erase from his face as he took his place in front of the audience. This is exactly what he needs, I thought.

  The manager introduced him as “pretend therapist Dr. Graham Arnette,” and everybody applauded. Russell and I sat in the front row and neither of us seemed able to stop grinning as Daddy spoke. He briefly explained why he was in the wheelchair, because it was obvious that the people who’d heard him on the radio had had no idea. Then he launched into a description of Pretend Therapy, saying that while it could work for anyone, children were particularly receptive to the techniques he talked about in his book.

  “Pretend Therapy means having control over your life,” Daddy said. “The tools you need to ‘fix’ yourself already exist inside you. Pretend Therapy simply helps you track down those tools to make them work for you.” I’d heard him say those few sentences a hundred times before, but I heard them differently on this night, when the parents sitting around me seemed to hang on his words with interest and hope.

  “There’s someone here tonight who’s been my guinea pig over the years as I’ve developed Pretend Therapy techniques,” Daddy said after he’d talked for a while and was ready to take questions from the audience. He smiled at me and my heart started pounding, surprising me. I suddenly wished I hadn’t left my palm stone in my backpack at the hotel. “I’d like her to join me up here,” Daddy said. “This is my daughter, Molly.”

  I got to my feet and everyone clapped as I sat down next to him in a chair. There were so many people in front of us! I smiled, pretending I did this sort of thing all the time, and I felt my heartbeat begin to steady itself.

  People began asking Daddy specific questions about their children, and he offered suggestions. The hands flew up faster and faster, and he answered question after question, often brilliantly suggesting they could find more answers in his book. He was a natural at this.

  Finally there was a question for me.

  “What’s it like, growing up with a father who has such a fascination with pretending?” a man asked from the back row. The little girl he held on his lap was nearly asleep, her head on his shoulder.

  “It’s normal, I guess,” I said with a shrug. “I mean, for me it’s normal, anyway. I don’t know anything different. Doesn’t every father tell his kids to pretend to love doing their homework or washing the dishes or eating broccoli?”

  The audience laughed, and I glanced at my father. There was pride in his eyes. We answered a few more questions together, and I felt as though we were a team. I realized, with a sense of joy and wonder, we always had been.

  * * *

  Daddy was happy but exhausted by the time we returned to the hotel. I took a bath while Russell got him into bed, and then I sat and stared at the phone for a while, wishing I could call Chris. I suddenly remembered Russell saying he was going to make a phone call from the lobby earlier that day. There had to be a pay phone down there.

  I pulled my wallet from my backpack and counted out my change. A dollar fifty-five in quarters, dimes, and nickels. Would that be enough?

  I changed into my shorts and stuck Chris’s number, my room key, and the change into my pocket. Leaving my room, I shut the door as quietly as I could in case Daddy and Russell could hear it in their room. I rode the elevator to the lobby, growing excited over the thought of hearing Chris’s voice. I’d tell him about my Doc Martens and how cool the bookstore event had been tonight. As I searched the lobby for the phone booth, I tried to think of questions I could ask him about his day.

  I had to ask someone at the front desk where the phone was. There were three booths tucked into an alcove near the bank of elevators, but only one of them was free. I tried to make the call, but the operator asked for more money than I had. I’d have to get more change tomorrow. I sat staring unhappily at the phone for a moment, and that’s when I became aware of the voice coming from the booth behind me. It was muffled, the words hard to make out, but it was definitely Russell’s voice, and I was relieved then that I hadn’t been able to reach Chris. If I could recognize Russell’s voice, he would have been able to recognize mine. If I left now, I’d have to walk right past him, so I burrowed deeper inside my booth to wait out his call. I tried to listen in, feeling nosy, wondering who he might be talking to.

  I heard him laugh. Maybe he was talking to someone in his family to say we might come to the pig pickin’? That was probably it. I couldn’t make out more than a couple of words, but I didn’t care. All I wanted was for him to get off the phone and go back upstairs so I could get out of this booth. Finally, he said, “love you, too,” clear as day. I heard the door to his booth open and burrowed my head between the phone and the wall, hoping he wouldn’t see me as he left. I heard him walk away from the bank of phone booths and breathed a sigh of relief, but then I thought of those words love you, too. They made my heart freeze. Would he say them to someone in his family? Or did he have a girlfriend we knew nothing about? And if he had a girlfriend, would he leave us someday to be with her? That thought was unbearable—we’d be so lost without him—and I suddenly felt the burden of needing to keep not only my father happy, but Russell as well.

  32

  By the time we piled into the van three days later for our trip back home, Russell and I were pretty well worn out, though Daddy seemed almost perky. His publicist had called our hotel that morning to say how thrilled—that was the word she used—the publisher was with the response to the tour. She’d spoken with the six bookstores we visited and they were happy with their sales, even though a couple of stores had only a few people in the audience. In those stores, I’d done my best to fill the seats, walking through the aisles in my Doc Martens, encouraging people to come listen to my dad talk about the “importance of pretending.” I thought that sounded better than “pretend therapy.” Still, while I got a few people to come listen to him, I discovered I couldn’t make people do what they didn’t want to do. I couldn’t make them buy his book. But the publisher was happy and he was happy. That was all that mattered.

  Charlotte and Raleigh—the two towns where he’d had radio interviews—had the best turnouts by far.

  “So, we have to remember that for the next time,” I’d said the night before, as we drove to the hotel from the book signing in Raleigh. “More radio interviews!” Neither of them responded, and I figured they were tired out and ready to crash at our latest in a string of hotels.

  In general, though, the four days on the road seemed to have energized my father rather than tired him. Every time I spoke to my mother, she sounded worried and I had to constantly reassure her he was fine. In our phone call that morning, I told her he had more energy than me. That wasn’t quite true, of course, but something was definitely going on with my
father. There was a lightness in him that was new. He wanted to go to Russell’s family’s pig pickin’ on the way home, too. “We have to eat somewhere,” he’d said the night before as we planned our itinerary. He’d nodded toward Russell. “I’d rather eat with your family than at another McDonald’s any day.” Although I was anxious to get home so I could talk to Chris and Stacy, if the pig pickin’ would make Daddy and Russell happy, I was all for it.

  “How about some music?” Daddy said to me now, as we pulled out of the parking lot of our Raleigh hotel.

  I groaned. I was really tired of his music collection and the thought of four more hours of it was almost too much for me.

  “Maybe we could just listen to the radio for a while,” I suggested.

  “Nah,” Russell said, “I personally haven’t gotten my fill of Willie Nelson yet.”

  I laughed. Russell really had issues with some of Daddy’s taste in music and I knew he’d gotten his fill of “On the Road Again” a long time ago.

  “Oh well,” Daddy said from his chair behind Russell. “If she doesn’t want to hear the new music we bought her, it’s her loss.”

  I turned to look at him. “When did you have a chance to buy some new music?” I asked, lifting the case onto my lap, curious. I’d complained that he had no New Kids on the Block tapes and wondered if he’d sent Russell out to find one for me for this long trip home.

  I unzipped the lid, and there, on top of the cassettes, were two tickets to the August 8 New Kids on the Block Magic Summer Tour concert in Atlanta. I grabbed the tickets and held them close to my face in disbelief.

  “Omigod omigod omigod!” I shouted. “Are these real?”

  Daddy laughed. “They’d better be, for what they cost,” he said. “I’ve had them a while, but I wasn’t sure how we’d get you there. Now that I see how I’ve managed on this trip, I think Russell and I will have no problem carting you down to Atlanta for a couple of days.”

  “Oh my God, I can’t believe it!” I was still staring at the tickets, reading every word on them. “There’s only two tickets, though.”

  “Well, Russell and I will pass, thank you.”

  “Thank you, Jesus,” Russell said, and I punched his arm. I knew he thought the New Kids on the Block were pretty bad.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and jumped between the bucket seats to hug my father. He laughed. “Get back in your seat,” he said. “You’re scaring me.”

  “So, I can bring a friend?” I asked him as I buckled up again.

  “Whoever you’d like.”

  I thought momentarily of Chris, but knew that was impossible for about a hundred reasons. Besides, Chris’s opinion of the New Kids was only slightly higher than Russell’s.

  “Can I bring Stacy?” I glanced at Russell, knowing how he felt about her. His face was impassive. If he still thought Stacy was “trouble,” though, he didn’t say a word about it.

  “Of course,” Daddy said.

  I couldn’t wait to get home to call her.

  * * *

  We were getting close to the turnoff for Hendersonville, and I had a sudden terrible thought. What if the woman Russell had told he loved on the phone was at his family’s get-together? In my imagination, she had quickly become a seductress who could pull him away from my family and I didn’t like her.

  When we stopped for gas and Russell got out of the van, I turned to my father.

  “I think we should fix Russell up with Janet,” I said.

  Daddy looked surprised. Then he laughed. “The only two black adults you know, so you think they belong together?” he asked.

  “Don’t you think they’d like each other?” I asked.

  “I think Russell has his personal life all figured out,” Daddy said.

  I thought of telling him I’d overheard Russell on the phone, but then he’d know I’d been in a phone booth myself. “I was just worried he’d find a girlfriend who lived far away from us and leave us,” I said.

  “Since when did you get to be such a worrier?” Daddy asked. “Trust me, darling,” he said. “You don’t need to worry about Russell.”

  * * *

  A short time later, Russell switched off the Beatles tape we’d been listening to for the last half hour. Then he turned onto a winding country road for a few miles, and then onto a hilly gravel lane that reminded me a little of Morrison Ridge, the way it was cradled by acres of thick green trees on either side. The silence in the van felt good after hours of music, and it gave the road an almost sacred feeling. I remembered Russell telling me about his great-great-great-grandfather getting this land from his master. I looked at Russell and thought I’d never seen his face so peaceful. This was his home place. His Morrison Ridge.

  “That’s your sister’s house back there on the left, isn’t it?” Daddy asked Russell.

  “Right,” Russell said. “Wanda’s place.”

  I looked into the woods to our left and could make out the corner of a house behind the trees.

  “You’ve been here before, Daddy?” I asked, surprised, as the lane twisted and turned through the woods and the gravel crunched beneath the van’s tires.

  “A couple of times, right, Russell?” Daddy asked. “Last year for your niece’s baptism and…”

  “The year before for my birthday,” Russell said.

  The road curved sharply through the trees and I thought I could already smell the barbecue through the closed windows of the van.

  “Only seventy-five degrees out today, Graham,” Russell said into his rearview mirror. “But if it gets too hot for you, there’s an air conditioner in Mama’s bedroom and I know she’d let you take a break in there.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” Daddy said.

  Russell drove into a huge clearing and the woods gave way to a different scene entirely. A large log house sat in the middle of the clearing. The brown logs and white mortar formed thick irregularly shaped bands, and the house looked ancient but solid. A half-dozen picnic tables covered with white paper tablecloths had been set up near the side of the house. Cars and trucks dotted the lawn, and I could see the pig cooker attached to the rear of one of the trucks, smoke and shimmery heat rising off it.

  “The house has been added onto about half a dozen times,” Russell said to me as he parked the van next to a small red car and pressed the button to lower the ramp. He pointed toward the house. “That was my room, up in that corner,” he said. His voice was nostalgic. I heard tenderness in it, and pride, the same sort of pride I heard in Nanny’s voice when she talked about Morrison Ridge. “That part of the house is the original,” he said.

  A few men surrounded the cooker, bottles of beer in their hands, and one of them raised his bottle in our direction as Russell and I got out of the van. A bunch of little kids ran around like a swarm of bees, and music—Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing”—poured from a boom box on the top of one of the cars. Russell climbed the ramp into the van, unlocked Daddy’s chair, and wheeled it to the ground.

  “That’s my favorite sister, Wanda.” Russell pointed toward a woman who set a big blue bowl on one of the tables, then started walking toward us.

  “Rusty!” she called. “You made it!”

  Russell took a few steps toward her, wrapping her in a hug.

  “Smell that ’cue.” Daddy looked up at me. “We’re going to eat well today, Molly.”

  Wanda leaned over to buss my father’s cheek. “Good to see you again, Graham,” she said. She was light-skinned, much lighter than Russell, and her eyes were a mesmerizing greenish-gold shade I’d never seen before. She looked at me. “Is this Molly?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She held my hand and looked at Russell. “Amalia’s girl?” she asked, and Russell nodded.

  I was shocked. Not very many people knew I was Amalia’s daughter. “You know Amalia?” I asked.

  “Wanda met her one time when she came out to Morrison Ridge to visit Russell,” Daddy said. “Right, Wanda?”
>
  Wanda looked briefly confused, then seemed to remember the meeting. “Right!” she said. Then she suddenly tugged on my hand. “So, come on,” she said, heading across the lawn toward the pig cooker. “Let’s meet everybody.”

  We moved around the yard for a while, Russell introducing us to everyone. I met so many people that their names and faces quickly got tangled up in my head. Uncle So and So. A bunch of aunts, all of whom Russell called “auntie.” Loads of cousins, many of them men Russell’s age who were hanging around the pig cooker, stealing crispy bits of pork. Daddy and I were the only white people I could see, and I thought I was having a tiny taste of how the two black kids in my school must have felt every day.

  Wanda took me into the house, where the doorway into the kitchen was so low I had to duck to keep from hitting my head. “People were shorter back when this house was built,” she said. The kitchen was hot, filled with steam and women and the pungent, unmistakable smell of collard greens cooking. Wanda introduced me to her four sisters. “This is Carla. She’s a nurse. And Ree-Ree, she’s a teacher. And Tula, nurse. And Janice, nurse.” The names and faces ran together, but I counted three nurses and two teachers. “And this is Mama, who’s making her world-famous deviled eggs.” Wanda led me to the head of a long table, where Russell’s mother sat expertly squeezing the yolk mixture into the whites from a canvas pastry bag.

  “You sit here, sugar.” Russell’s mother pointed to the bench on one side of the table. “You can chop the pickles for the potato salad.”

  I was glad to have a task. I needed something to take my mind off how much I was dying to call Chris and Stacy. I still wasn’t sure which one I’d call first. I started chopping the pickles on a little wooden cutting board Wanda handed me, and I was instantly sweating, as though chopping was hard physical labor. The kitchen was full of people and chatter and steam and the sounds of chopping and mixing along with the muted sound of music coming from that boom box outside.