Pretending to Dance (14 page)

“Nanny,” I said when we'd set our glasses and the plate down on the coffee table in the den. There was another buck head in this room. It was smaller than the one in the living room and hung on the wall above the television. “How come you're not at the family meeting tonight?” I asked. “I think Uncle Trevor's going to try to get everyone on his side about developing the land. Maybe you should be there.”

Her cheeks suddenly flushed red. “I don't know how a son of mine can be so callous about his family land,” she said as she sat down on the sofa. “He was raised better than that. Can you picture our beautiful hillsides covered with paved streets of identical ticky-tacky houses, people right on top of one another? Strangers who know nothing about the Ridge and could care less?” She picked up a piece of fudge, then set it down again. “He's gotten so greedy!” She shook her head. “And his children! When Samantha and Cal picked up and moved to Colorado, it was a knife in my heart, Molly.” She stared at me and I nodded, wishing I hadn't brought the subject up. “And he just let them go. It's their generation that's supposed to carry on Morrison Ridge and its traditions.”

“I know,” I said, more to soothe her than to agree with her.

“Danielle has a foot out the door, you can see that, right?” Nanny said. “It's going to be up to you, I'm afraid. You need to have lots of children and keep Morrison Ridge alive.”

I laughed, unable to picture what I was going to do tomorrow, much less imagine myself getting married and having a bunch of kids. Her cheeks still had red coins of color on them and I wished I could roll back time to when we were in the kitchen. I wouldn't say a word about the meeting. I still didn't understand why she wasn't there. She should be talking about her feelings to everyone at the meeting, where it could do some good, instead of to me, who couldn't do a thing about it.

“Put on your tape,” she said suddenly. “I don't want to think about the ticky-tacky houses any longer.” She reached for a piece of fudge, then kicked off her sandals and rested her feet against the edge of the coffee table, getting comfortable.

I stood up to put Daddy's tape in the VCR. There was a tape already in the machine and I hit the eject button. “Were you watching a movie?” I asked.

“What?” She sounded confused. “Oh, not a movie.”

I pulled out the tape and looked at the handwritten label.
Graham and Nora, wedding dance
. “Oh my gosh.” I turned to her. “Is this from Mom and Daddy's wedding?”

“Just their first dance.” Nanny suddenly stood up and took the tape from my hand. She bent over to set it on the lower shelf of the TV stand. “Go ahead and put yours in,” she said.

I put Daddy's tape in the VCR and sat down at the other end of the couch from Nanny. I recognized Daddy's Asheville office on the screen. A girl sat in one of the three leather chairs, but I didn't get a good look at her because the camera swung around to face my father. The tape must have been from at least two years ago, because he was sitting in his desk chair like he used to and he was able to lift his right hand a bit as he spoke to the camera. He explained that he had the permission of his patient and her parents to allow others to view the tape, but that he would call the girl Dorianna, which was not her real name.

“He can still move his hand like that, can't he, Molly?” Nanny asked.

“Not really,” I said, which sounded better than “no way.” Nanny didn't say anything and I bit my lip. I should have said he could move it “a little.” White lies were not all that terrible to tell.

The camera filmed the session at an angle, so that we saw my father in profile but Dorianna from the front. I felt proud as I watched him talk to her. Proud and, to be honest, jealous. Dorianna—or whatever her name was—was a few years younger than me and I couldn't help but feel some envy at how he was talking to her. I was used to being the only important child in his life. I could tell he was making Dorianna feel important, too.

I quickly gathered that Dorianna's problem was a crippling shyness. I knew kids like her. They were invisible to most people, but Daddy had taught me to see them. To be nice to them.
They will surprise you with their value,
he'd said.

“Some of the most important and creative people in our history were shy,” Daddy said to the girl. “Abraham Lincoln, Elvis Presley, Albert Einstein, Johnny Depp.”

I laughed. “He added Johnny Depp for me,” I said. I hadn't realized I'd had a thing for Johnny Depp for that long.

“Who's that?” Nanny asked.

“Tell you later.”

Daddy also had lists of famous people who were dyslexic or had anger issues or were autistic like the Dustin Hoffman character in
Rain Man
. He had a list for anyone who walked in his office door.

Dorianna looked heartened by my father's list of names, but then she described how painful school was for her because of her shyness, and tears filled her eyes.

“Oh, now he made her cry,” Nanny said.

“Sometimes that's a good thing,” I said. “It means she's really into the session. She's engaged.”

“Where'd you learn so much?”

I shrugged. “He teaches me things.”

Nanny's smile was sad.
“Oh, Molly,”
she said.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said, then added, “It just breaks my heart, how he suffers.”

“He does okay,” I reassured her. I never heard my father complain.

We watched the rest of the tape. Daddy set up exercises with Dorianna to help her pretend away her shyness, but the screen went black before we could see the results.

“Oh no,” Nanny said. “Is that the end?”

“There's a part two,” I said, “and I'm sure it worked. He wouldn't have picked a case that didn't. That girl is probably homecoming queen by now.”

“He can change someone that quickly?”

I nibbled a piece of fudge, slouching on the sofa, my bare feet up on the coffee table, same as Nanny's. “He wouldn't say
he'
s changing them. He'd say they're changing themselves.” I took another bite of fudge. “You know Peter?” I asked.

“The other therapist he works with?”

“Right. He says Daddy's losing money because he works too fast. He says Daddy should treat the underlying cause of her shyness, which could take months or even years, but Daddy thinks the underlying cause usually doesn't matter and that most problems can be treated quickly.”

“Hm.” Nanny looked at the ceiling. “I've never understood his Pretend Therapy, really.”

“You should read the book he wrote for kids, Nanny. It's really simple.”

“Are you calling me simple?” She smiled at me and I was relieved to see that her odd mood seemed to have lifted.

“Never,” I said, getting to my feet. I hit the eject button on the VCR. “So what should we watch now?” I asked.

Nanny hesitated a moment, her gaze moving to the bottom shelf of the TV stand. “Put the dance one in, Molly,” she said. “The one from your parents' wedding. I want you to see it.”

I was surprised. A few minutes ago, she was practically hiding it from me. I picked it up from the bottom shelf.

“I had the old film made into a VHS tape,” Nanny said. “It's a little blurry and only three or four minutes long. Plus there's no sound. They didn't have sound back in those days. But it's good enough.”

I put it into the machine, then went back and sat on the sofa next to her. I'd seen pictures from their wedding, of course. There was a beautiful photograph on the sideboard in our dining room. My mother in her long white wedding dress. Daddy standing behind her, his arms around her waist. Both of them smiling and looking so much younger than they did today. But those photographs didn't prepare me for what I saw when the tape started to run. It didn't prepare me to see my father dance.

They moved to music I couldn't hear. Unbelievable. I felt strangely wooden, watching them. In shock. The tape was just blurry enough that I could imagine it was not my father at all. Who was that man with the long dark hair that brushed his shoulders as he twirled my mother around? As he pulled her body tightly against his, then spun her away?

I got up from the couch and sat down on the floor in front of the television to see them better. “What's the music?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't remember,” Nanny said. “A shame there's no sound.”

They looked as though they danced together every day of their lives, their steps fluid, their eyes locked on one another, their smiles so, so genuine. I'd been wrong to worry that Daddy might have loved Amalia more than my mother.

“Thank goodness he found Nora,” Nanny said as we watched. “So straight and steadfast. She grounded him, and if your daddy needed anything, it was grounding.” She chuckled. “He kept his strong family values when it came to choosing a wife.”

Was that a dig at Amalia? I didn't know. There was so much I didn't know.

The tape ended abruptly and I turned to look at Nanny. “It's crazy how fast he got sick,” I said.

“He was already sick then, when they got married,” Nanny said.

“I know,” I said. “He told me. But he looked so good. So healthy.”

“He had that one good dance in him at the reception,” she said. “I think he was so happy that day, his body forgot about being sick.” She stared at the TV screen as though the tape was still playing. “Nora knew, of course, but I don't think any of us thought it would move so quickly and get so terrible. I look at that tape and weep, Molly,” she said, turning her gaze to me. “His life is so hard now and he's so depressed.”

Depressed? I thought of how much my father loved his work and writing his books. I thought of how much he loved
me.
“I don't think he's depressed, Nanny,” I said.

“He's very good at hiding his misery,” she said.

“He's
not
miserable,” I argued. “Ask him. I bet he'd laugh if he could hear you talk like that.”

She waved a hand through the air as if dismissing the whole conversation. “Oh, I'm just talking like a mother, I suppose,” she said. “An old woman, worrying about her grown son.”

“He never complains or anything,” I said.

She gave me a long strange stare. “Molly, Molly, Molly,” she said finally, followed by a great sigh. “I think we should watch a movie, don't you? Better than listening to me ramble. You pick out a movie or else I'll do it and you know you'll end up with Kate Hepburn again. How about Hitchcock?”

As I stood up and walked over to the bookcase filled with her movies, I was suddenly filled with sadness myself. Was my father truly miserable? Was I so wrapped up in my own life that I didn't even notice his unhappiness?

 

18

 

At eleven, Russell came to the door to pick me up. To “carry me home,” as he would say. I sat up front with him in the van.

“What did you watch?” he asked when he turned onto the loop road in the darkness.

“Rear Window,”
I said. “Have you seen it?”

“Jimmy Stewart, right? Hitchcock?”

“Right.”
Rear Window
was one of my favorite movies, yet my concentration had been off tonight. I kept picturing my parents spinning around on the dance floor. What had it been like for my father to lose the use of his body, bit by bit? I was still upset by what Nanny said about him being depressed. I felt like a cold, unfeeling girl to not even notice that he was that unhappy.

The thin crescent moon was partially hidden behind thick clouds, and Russell put on his brights and drove slowly along the dirt loop road. I could see the turnoff to Amalia's coming up on our left.

“Russell,” I said, “does it bother you when we call Amalia's house ‘the slave quarters'?”

I could barely see his face in the dark interior of the van, but I thought I saw the white flash of his smile. “Since you ask,” he said, “yes it does. Your daddy never calls it that, you notice. Nor your mama. Nor Amalia herself.”

“Where'd I learn to call it that?” I asked, perplexed, because I thought he was right. Mom and Daddy never did use those words.

“Oh, I'm not one for naming names.” He chuckled.

Nanny, I thought. My aunts and uncles and cousins.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I won't call it that any longer.”

“Appreciate it.” He turned to face me and this time I was sure of his smile. He looked at the road again. “I came up in some so-called slave quarters,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Log cabin outside of Hendersonville.”

“That's where your family is.” I'd heard him mention Hendersonville before.

“Right. There weren't a lot of slaves in western North Carolina because there wasn't all that much farming,” he said, “but my great-great-great-granddaddy was one of six owned by a wealthy man in Hendersonville. They were mostly house and stable slaves, and he was the best treated.” He glanced at me. “Can you guess why?”

“'Cause he was the best at his job?”

Russell laughed. “I don't think that was it.” He chuckled to himself another few seconds before speaking again. “Story has it,” he said finally, “he was the son of the master.”

“Son of the…? Oh,” I said. “Wow.”

“They taught him to read and write, which was against the law, actually, but was fortunate for those of us who came along after him, since we all understood the importance of getting an education. When my great-great-great-grandaddy was freed, the master turned the slave quarters and thirty acres over to him. So we have a home place there, just like you have here, only smaller. My mama and sisters and aunties and one uncle are all there. I came up in one of the cabins.” He glanced at me again. “We never called it the ‘slave quarters' though,” he said. “We called it home.”