Pretending to Dance

  “Gracie lived with us the last month of her pregnancy,” the adoptive mother says. “Things were rough for her at home and we’d already come to love her, so it just made sense.”

  “I live with my boyfriend now, though,” Gracie says.

  “We still have dinner together a couple of Sunday nights during the month,” the adoptive father adds.

  “And we just hang out sometimes during the week,” Gracie says. The little girl taps the kitten on Gracie’s knee and Gracie lifts the child onto her lap. I wish I could steal a glance at Aidan.

  I am not the only person in the room who appears stunned by the relationship in front of us. Is this what we want? Is this what I want? To share my child to this degree? I decide right then that I can’t handle it. I’m afraid of it. I’m afraid of losing my child’s affections to his or her birth mother. There. I let the thought in. I feel weak for having it, but it’s the truth. I am not that generous person Aidan described. Secretly, I wonder if those old-fashioned closed adoptions still exist and, if so, can we find one.

  * * *

  “How about that family!” Aidan says as soon as we get in the car. “Was that fantastic or what?”

  “I thought it was a little much,” I say. “I mean, that couple didn’t just adopt a baby. For all intents and purposes, they adopted the baby’s mother as well.”

  “Well, that’s an exaggeration, but can you imagine how great it is for that little girl to have a relationship with her birth mom like that? It’s too bad the birth father couldn’t have been equally as involved.” The birth father, it had turned out, had been “unknown.”

  “Do you really want an adoption that’s that open?” I ask.

  He nods. “Absolutely,” he says, then he turns to frown at me. “I thought you did, too. You said there should be no deep dark secrets.”

  He doesn’t understand. I have never told him enough about myself to let him understand.

  “Well, like Zoe says,” I say, “there are different degrees of openness.” I press my hands together in my lap. “I don’t want deep dark secrets,” I say, “but I don’t want the birth mother to move in with us, either.”

  “She was only with them for a short time,” Aidan says. “You’re really blowing their situation out of proportion.”

  “You’re the father,” I say. “You can’t see it from my perspective.”

  “You mean … are you talking about competition? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes. That little girl knows who her mother is. But she loves them both, and more importantly, she’s loved by them both. You’ve said that yourself, babe. How great open adoption is because the child knows he or she is loved by so many people.”

  Had I really said that? These days, I seem to say one thing when I mean another. I’m a mess. I turn my face away from Aidan and look into the darkness outside the car window. I think of my father. If he were here right now, he would root out my true feelings in ten seconds flat. He’d know I’m afraid of losing the child I haven’t even met yet.

  14

  Morrison Ridge

  If someone was plunked down on Morrison Ridge and asked to pick which of the five houses had once been the slave quarters, they might pick Amalia’s last. Well, that wasn’t quite the truth. Nanny’s big brick house was clearly the main building, but Amalia’s small house was so modern and cool, no one would guess it had ever housed Morrison Ridge’s slaves. Amalia’s half acre was technically part of Nanny’s twenty-five. I don’t know how Daddy did it, but he’d talked Nanny into letting Amalia live there. I expected she would live there for all time.

  I heard music as soon as I turned my bike off the loop road and onto the narrow lane that led to her house, although I had to ride another ten yards or so before I could make out what it was: Phil Collins singing, “I Can Feel It Coming in the Air Tonight.” I loved dancing to that one, and I pedaled faster.

  Amalia’s house seemed to pop out of the woods. One minute it wasn’t there, and the next it was. Only one story, it seemed to hug the earth with wood and glass.

  I hopped off my bike and leaned it against one of the trees in her yard. Through the wall of windows, I could see that she was already dancing in the long living room. She was a shadowy figure blending in with the reflection of the trees in the glass. I ran inside, and when she spotted me, she smiled and held out her hand. I took it and we moved slowly across the wide wood plank floor to the final haunting refrain of the song. She had on a black spandex camisole and a loose lavender chiffon skirt that fell below her knees and was split up the middle to give her the freedom to kick her legs high. She had a bunch of those skirts in all different colors. The skirt floated in the air when she turned and her long hair swung around her shoulders. When Amalia spun in circles, everything spun with her.

  By contrast, I was in my cutoff denim shorts and pink tank top, my hair up in a ponytail. I kicked off my sandals so we were both barefoot.

  The room was perfect for dancing, the only furniture two huge round Papasan chairs at one end and a disorganized pile of floor pillows against the windows. The tops of the windows were filled with the abstract stained-glass designs she loved to make and the colors seemed to sway around us as we moved. I watched, mesmerized, as my arms turned blue, then gold, then red. I loved dancing so much. At school, my friends and I were into the Electric Slide and the Running Man, but I really liked the freedom of Amalia’s interpretive dance, moving however the music made me feel. How I felt today, though, was undeniably different than how I’d felt the last time I danced with her. I knew things about Amalia now that I hadn’t known then.

  The song ended and Amalia put on some Gregorian chants. We always warmed up to that quiet, eerie, echoey music, doing our slow stretches on her smooth wooden floor. She’d give instructions, although she called them “suggestions,” since she really wanted me to do what felt right to me rather than be precise or rigid in my steps. “Put your weight on your front leg,” she’d say. “Slide it to the side. Imagine a string attached to your breastbone, gently pulling you forward.” When I was younger, I was impatient through the stretches, anxious to get to the dancing. But then she taught me to pay attention to my breath and to how every little movement felt in my body and how I felt inside as I moved. She slowed me down. She centered me. Today, though, as I sat on the floor across from her, leaning forward, reaching for my toes, I couldn’t stop thinking about how different Amalia was from my mother. Everything Amalia did was slow and gentle and thoughtfully done. Everything my mother did was quick and precise and efficient. How had my father fallen in love with two such different women?

  Ever since my talk with Daddy on Sunday, I’d been consumed by the oddness of our living situation. Something that had seemed so perfectly normal to me all my life now seemed bizarre, and, in a way I couldn’t explain even to myself, dangerous. We have no secrets, Daddy had said about him and my mother. I wanted that to be the truth, and yet … would my mother truly have thought nothing of Amalia’s head resting on his shoulder? Why couldn’t I get that image out of my mind?

  I looked across the room to where Amalia was spread-eagled on the floor, her chiffon skirt hiked up high on her white thighs, her upper body stretching forward, arms nearly flat on the floor, and that long thick brown hair fanned out in front of her. I saw her in a new way, now. I pictured her teaching dancing at that “unorthodox” hospital. I imagined her falling in love with my father and the lovemaking that had created me. What must it have been like for Daddy when she suddenly disappeared? And what must it have been like for Mom when Amalia turned up on our doorstep with my father’s baby?

  Suddenly I had to speak.

  “Daddy told me about meeting you and everything,” I said.

  She lifted her head in surprise, then raised her upper body slowly from the floor. “So long ago,” she said dismissively. “Are you warmed up enough? Do you want to start fast or slow?”

  All right, I thought. I guess we’re not ta
lking about her and Daddy.

  “Slow,” I said.

  Colors from the stained glass passed over her body as she walked to the CD player. I stayed on the floor, waiting to hear what music she’d put on. The theme song from Chariots of Fire. I stood up and shut my eyes, swaying a little, waiting to see what feelings would come to me that I could express through dance, but nothing came. I started moving anyway, hoping the motion would inspire me, and although Amalia was dancing herself, I was aware of her eyes on me.

  “Molly,” she said after a while. “Are you thinking too much today, baby? Try feeling instead.”

  How did she know? I wondered. How could she tell simply by the way I was moving that I was caught up in my thoughts?

  “Here,” she said, taking a few steps to the cabinet beneath the CD player. She opened it and pulled out a plastic bag. I knew what was in it. Rolls of crepe paper. They would help.

  “Oh good,” I said. I held out my hand and she reached into the bag and pulled out a roll of red crepe paper, handing it to me. I tore off a strip and handed the roll back to her. She took a strip for herself and we continued dancing, letting the crepe paper streamers wind and unwind around us. Letting them float through the air.

  “Could I use some of that crepe paper to decorate Daddy’s wheelchair for the midsummer party?” I asked, when the music had stopped.

  “Oh sure.” She motioned toward the bag where it rested on the floor as she headed back to the CD player. “You can take the whole bag.”

  “Do you want to help me decorate it?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said as she sorted through the CDs on the bookshelf above the player. Then she suddenly stilled her hands and looked over at me. “You know I’m not going to the party, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I haven’t been invited, and that’s fine,” she said. “I understand.”

  “What do you mean, you haven’t been invited? Everyone’s invited. It’s automatic.”

  Amalia lowered her hands to her sides. “It’s your grandmother, Molly,” she said. “I really do understand where she’s coming from. The party is for the family, and—”

  “That’s not true!” I said. “Lots of people outside the family are coming. My friend Stacy, for starters. Nanny invited her herself. And I know Peter and Helen are coming, and Janet, and they just work with Daddy. They don’t have anything to do with the family. You’re my mother. You have a massive connection to my family! You are my family.”

  “Baby.” She smiled at me. “It’s really all right.”

  “It’s not like people got invitations in the mail or anything,” I said. “Everybody knows about it. You’re supposed to just show up.”

  Amalia bit her lip and I thought she was debating whether to tell me something or not. Finally she walked into her kitchen, and when she returned, she handed me a note. “This was on my door last week,” she said.

  Amalia, As you no doubt know, I’m throwing the midsummer soiree in a couple of weeks. I think it’s best if you sit it out this year, dear. Nora is generous with you and shares so much with you. Let her have her family to herself this once. Yours truly, Bess Morrison Arnette

  I knew anger at my grandmother was in my face when I looked up from the note.

  “I’m fine with it,” Amalia said quickly. “It’s one night out of my life and she’s right. Nora shares you with me every other day of the year.”

  “Well, I’m not fine with it.” I sat down on one of the Papasan chairs, sinking into its big round pale blue cushion, my arms folded across my chest in a huff. “I can’t believe she’d be such a bitch to you.” I knew Nanny didn’t like Amalia but she’d always hidden her feelings from me. Seeing her nastiness toward her in the note really galled me.

  “Okay, then!” Amalia folded her arms across her own chest, mimicking me. “Looks like we need some angry music for you!” She turned her attention back to the shelf of CDs and rooted through them while I seethed. My grandmother was so wrong to exclude her. Yours truly. So wrong and so mean.

  “How about this?” Amalia said as she inserted a disc into the player and in a moment Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” filled the room. I couldn’t help myself: I laughed. She reached for my hands, pulled me to my feet, and in a moment we were stomping and jumping and punching the air.

  I was out of breath by the time the song ended and Amalia put on the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto, which was my favorite music to dance to and a complete change from Twisted Sister. She sat down in one of the Papasan chairs and folded her legs beneath her long skirt.

  “Dance what you feel, Molly,” she said.

  I crouched down on the floor, unsure what I felt now. The anger was gone. I knew I could get it back in about two seconds, but I didn’t want it. Not with this beautiful music surrounding me. I thought of what Daddy had told me about Amalia showing up on our doorstep. How he’d been happy to learn I existed. How my mother had accepted me. How surrounded I felt by three people who loved me. I stood up slowly, unfurling like a flower. I let my arms fall open, encompassing the whole world, then brought them in close and I filled up with a kind of joy and peace. When I felt finished with my dance and looked at Amalia, she was smiling at me, her head tilted to the side, light from the windows flickering in her green eyes. She looked so beautiful. I smiled back at her.

  “That was lovely,” she said, getting to her feet. “I felt your sense of peace.”

  “You did?” I loved when I succeeded in expressing what I felt through the dance.

  “Absolutely crystal clear,” she said. “And I almost hate to ruin that mood with our finale, but really, it’s our ritual. And we don’t want to mess with a ritual, do we?”

  “No way,” I agreed, watching as she pressed a couple of buttons on the CD player. “Footloose” poured out of the speakers, bringing an instant smile to my lips. I couldn’t hold still when that song came on. Neither of us could. We danced around the house, swirling and swaying, feeling joyful, and I forgot every other emotion that had come before.

  But when I went out to my bike and began riding home, I thought about Nanny again. I would be with her tonight while that family meeting took place at my house. I would talk to her. I’d tell her I wanted both my mothers to come to the party. Nanny had never been any good at turning me down.

  15

  I was late getting out of the house that night because I was talking to Stacy on the phone.

  “Bryan has this friend, Chris Turner,” she said. “Bryan showed him your picture in the yearbook and Chris thinks you’re really cute and wants to meet you!”

  My picture in our middle-school yearbook was hideous. I’d taken my glasses off for the picture, but somehow I ended up looking cross-eyed and my smile was crooked, as though part of me thought I should wear an overjoyed expression but the rest of me wasn’t so sure. If this guy really thought I was cute, there must have been something wrong with him. Still, her words excited me.

  “My parents won’t let me go out with a seventeen-year-old, though,” I said.

  “They never have to know,” she said.

  I felt a shiver and had that feeling I always got when I spoke to Stacy. That strange, enticed, and a little bit jealous feeling. She lived in a different sort of world than I did. A freer world. I wanted some of that freedom.

  I started to speak again. “But how would we work it—”

  “Molly!” my mother called up the stairs. “It’s five of seven. Time to get going.”

  “I have to go,” I said to Stacy.

  “Where to?”

  “My grandmother’s. There’s a family meeting here and I’m escaping to Nanny’s instead.”

  “Well, I’ll be plotting a way to get you and Chris together, all right?”

  A thrill of excitement ran through me at the thought of actually meeting a boy who said I was cute.

  “Cool,” I said.

  * * *
br />   Russell was lifting my father from his wheelchair to the recliner when I walked into the living room, and I guessed that was where Daddy planned to sit for the meeting. The house smelled of my mother’s chocolate walnut fudge, and my mouth watered at the aroma.

  Russell tugged at the legs of my father’s jeans, which had ridden up above his socks during the move from chair to recliner. “Mom has the tape for you.” Daddy looked past Russell toward me. “It’s just the first part of the session, but you don’t want to bore Nanny out of her mind, so I’ll watch the rest of it with you some other time, all right?”

  “Okay,” I said. I knew he wanted me to watch an actual Pretend Therapy session before I went on his book tour with him. I didn’t think I needed to. After all, I’d been living with a pretend therapist my whole life.

  Mom poked her head into the room from the kitchen. “Get going, Molly,” she said. “Nanny’s expecting you at seven and it’s almost that now.”

  “Kiss before you go?” Daddy looked up at me where I stood next to the recliner.

  “It’s not like I’m going across the country,” I said, surprised by the request, but I leaned over and gave him a kiss on the cheek, my arms around his neck.

  “Love you, darling.” He smiled at me when I straightened up.

  “You, too,” I said.

  I heard voices in the kitchen and when I walked into the room to get the tape from my mother, Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim and Dani stood near the back door. Aunt Claudia and Uncle Jim were talking to Mom, while Dani leaned against the wall looking bored. I was surprised to see her there. I felt jealous that, at seventeen, she was considered adult enough to take part in a family meeting and, at fourteen, I was not. At the same time, I felt sorry for her that she’d have to somehow survive whatever sleep-inducing topics came up.