You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  This program hid nothing (although the camera angle was mostly modest and shielded the woman’s genitals from view.) The baby’s head was shown emerging, the woman’s face, screwed up to push the baby out, was displayed in its extreme contortions, and her grunts and screams (“Get it out, get the baby out!”) were recorded without flinching from the truth. The baby, finally ejected in a rush of bloody fluid, was laid by a nurse on the mother’s breast, and the woman’s face was transformed instantly into an expression of calm, madonna-like ecstasy as she touched the wrinkled forehead of her newborn. Tears flowed down her cheeks, her husband kissed her with tears in his eyes. The baby’s rosebud lips moved, its eyes opened to take in the world. Then it cried, a piercing desperate comment on its new state of life.

  On that day, Lilly had shut off the television and fallen on the couch, sobbing violently, without constraint, making as much noise as the woman in labor, not caring whom she might offend or how she might frighten herself into seeing how deep was the cauldron of loss and pain in which she swam.

  *

  For most of the day, the Ozymandias—after its ocean sailing—was moored in another of the sparkling coves that dotted the southern coast of Turkey. After the morning’s rough trip, the guests were happy enough to sunbathe, swim, sit around the table and talk. There was an underwater ruin called “Cleopatra’s Baths” to which some of the guests swam. The guidebook suggested that when Cleopatra visited the Anatolian coast, her friends built her these baths as a present. The locals liked to claim that her great beauty was due to the minerals found in their water. “At the bottom of the sea, where the ruins are, before the winds pick up, you can see the sand moving which means hot springs are still coming up today.”

  Marianne wanted to swim in the baths, and even Lilly’s mother was willing to go, accompanied by Lance who gallantly swam beside her all the way. On her return she reported that there was almost no effort required for her to stand still in the water and rest; no treading, no paddling. Just being a buoyant human being was flotation enough. Lance remarked that Harriet was “twice as beautiful” now that she had swum in Cleopatra’s Baths.

  Lilly didn’t swim, though. She sat with Gerta at the long wooden table on the deck and looked through the box of scarves Gerta had bought from the last group of children who had clambered aboard the boat, selling their family’s wares.

  “This one is for my mother, this one is for my aunt. And this one,” she said, holding up a pink and gauzy cloth, “is for the woman having my baby.”

  “You must be very excited,” Lilly said. “To know your baby’s birth is so soon.”

  Gerta bowed her head and blinked her long lashes. “I don’t know,” she whispered, looking around for Harrison.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “If I’m excited. It doesn’t feel as if it’s really going to be my baby.”

  “But it will be. Of course it will be. Isn’t it your egg and Harrison’s sperm? That’s what he told us all.”

  “Yes, its our egg and sperm, I guess. We had to go through all this medical process. But I’ll never feel my baby kicking inside me, or be able to nurse her. I wish so badly I were having her myself.”

  “But why aren’t you then?”

  Gerta said, “Because Harrison won’t let me. He wants me to stay looking like…this.” She indicated her body as if it were separate from her, an entity sitting on the green foam pad wearing a yellow bikini. A perfect body, perfectly smooth, perfectly shaped.

  “Did you tell him you wanted to have your own baby?”

  “Lilly,” she said. “I was a waitress in a Dairy Queen in Minnesota when he came in to buy an ice cream. He married me and gave me my perfect life. Now I’m a highly paid model. I don’t have to work if I don’t want to. We have a gorgeous house, we have maids. I have so many clothes I don’t know which ones to wear every day. And if how I look is so important to him—well, then let him keep me this way. Eventually, I’ll get old like everyone else. But he doesn’t believe it.”

  Lilly looked down at her own sturdy thighs in the simple blue bathing suit she wore (its bottom was cut like boy’s shorts.) She appreciated her legs, their strengths, their ability to carry her about. Her breasts were full and heavy, not perky, like Gerta’s. She had an impulse to put her hand over Gerta’s and comfort her. But she refrained. Gerta had made her choice, for whatever reasons, and it was not Lilly’s place to pity her or advise her to engage in war with her husband.

  “I’m sure the baby will be beautiful and wonderful,” she said to Gerta. “And in no time you’ll forget that you didn’t bear her yourself.”

  “But he won’t even want me to take care of her. We’ll have a nanny—we already have hired her—and I may not even be with the baby that much. Harrison likes to take me on business trips. He loves to show me off.”

  “Maybe he’ll feel differently when the baby arrives. He’ll probably want to have another!”

  “Oh, he does,” Gerta said. “He’s already looking for another surrogate, a woman who will agree to have our next child. Harrison wants a boy, of course. I don’t know if they can guarantee him that.”

  Lilly almost asked Gerta if she could be hired as their next surrogate, but she stopped herself in time. Why not, though, make that her new career? Why not be a mother-for-hire?

  GUNS

  At sunset, Izak reached a small port. Harrison, playing backgammon with Lance on the aft deck apologized to everyone that he knew it wasn’t ideal to spend the night docked among dozens of other boats, but they needed to be here in the morning to have a few repairs to the lighting system made by an electrician. “There’s good thing about docking in slip,” Izak said. “No balance-tricks to get into Zodiac. Just walk down gangplank and you be in town tonight.”

  As Izak maneuvered the boat toward the docking area, Morat and Barish threw large white fenders over the sides of the Ozymandias to buffer and protect them from hitting the boats on either side of their space. Lilly noticed there was only one slot vacant. Lines of boats were already docked in port and it was into this last one remaining that Izak eased the Ozymandias.

  They all heard an angry yell coming from the dock. A man was making fierce pushing-away gestures with his hands and yelling in Turkish. Izak called back an answer.

  “What is he saying?” Harrison asked him.

  “Saving place for friend,” Izak answered. “Forbidden to do this.”

  “He looks furious,” Gerta said, alarm in her voice.

  “Not worry,” Izak said. “We stay here.”

  *

  After the motors had stopped, Izak and the man continued having an angry conversation with one another. The man had boarded the boat just beside theirs, and Lilly could see four other men on the aft deck watching a television set whose volume was turned up to an extremely high level. They had ugly expressions on their faces as they watched Izak and the shouting man exchange harsh words. At intervals they tilted bottles of beer into their mouths. Lilly’s mother came to stand at her side. “I don’t like the look of this,” she whispered. “Those aren’t nice people over there.”

  The angry man stopped shouting and abruptly went below deck.

  “I think you shouldn’t worry,” Lilly said. “Izak will take care of it. Maybe the whole discussion is over now.”

  Marianne pushed her head between theirs. “Look into their salon window, right over there,” she said, indicating with a nod of her head the direction she wanted them to look. The man who had done the shouting could be seen in the cabin now, laying a shotgun on the table.

  “A gun!” Marianne said. “Izak,” she called to him. “Look over here.” Izak saw the gun at once. It was clear the man wanted him to see it. He had displayed it openly in the window of the cabin. The two boats were not three feet apart.

  “They’re threatening us,” Marianne said. “What are you going to do?”

  Izak planted his feet apart. “No problem,” he said. “I Ottoman.”

  * />
  Though Lilly tried to sleep on deck that night, sleep was impossible. Music from the cafes near the pier came loudly through the air. The sailors in the next boat turned up their TV to the highest possible volume. The lights from the dock glared brightly over the deck. It was a hot and humid night and in Lilly’s mind was the image of the gun on the table in the other boat. Her mother had decided to sleep below in the cabin, which meant there was no room for Lilly. If they both tried to sleep on the tiny bunk, they would suffocate one another.

  Izak apparently did not expect to sleep at all. He sat up beside the wheel facing the boat from which the noise erupted in a constant roar, calmly watching the situation. The other guests had all retired below.

  Lilly tossed and turned on the foam pad, finally throwing off her blanket in the heat. Izak did not speak to her as she lay a dozen feet from where he sat. Twice she had passed him, first going down to the cabin to get her earplugs, then to use the bathroom, but he did not acknowledge her even though she moved past him only inches away.

  Just when she was certain that something was alive between them, he’d behave as if she were merely another guest on the boat. She didn’t understand his code of behavior, she didn’t understand his language. Often he spoke on a cell phone that lay on a shelf near the helm, giving orders, sounding gruff, almost savage, to whomever he was speaking. It had to do, she knew, with business: arranging repairs or ordering food or making sure the bus would be there on time for the next expedition. The mystery of who he was (half man? half Ottoman warrior?) cut him off from her. She was too restless and nervous to settle into sleep on the foam pad. The activity on the other boat unsettled her. She knew the men were drunk. She knew they were angry.

  On the other side of the Ozymandias was a large white cruising ship, elegant in its fittings, curtains at its windows. She had a sense of people sleeping within, in spacious, cool staterooms. On their upper deck she could see the table set for morning with fine glassware and china, even flowers arranged in silver bowls.

  She pulled the blanket over her head, but couldn’t breathe in the closeness. She got up and paced the deck, walking forward, walking aft. Izak kept his gaze on the other boat, completely alert. He made a point not to acknowledge her.

  After a long time, Lilly went downstairs where her mother slept below. It was stifling in the room, but she sat on the edge of the lower bunk and said, “Mother, move over please.” In her sleep, Harriet moved and Lilly found a sliver of space in which to lay her body. Somewhere in time, long after she stopped counting down from fifty, long after she stopped imagining a quiet country scene, she must have fallen asleep.

  *

  The stinking fumes of exhaust filled the cabin. Lilly sat up choking. A roar came from the next boat, its diesel engines chugging into high gear. A stench from the motor entered the cabin from the porthole above their bunk and from another open porthole in the bathroom.

  “Mother, wake up, we have to get out of here.” Harriet stirred, opened her eyes. “What is that smell?” she cried. “My God! It’s hard to breathe.”

  They staggered up to the deck where the noise from the next boat was even louder than it had been earlier. A party was obviously in progress there, girls had arrived from somewhere and were laughing rowdily with the men, teasing and kissing them on the deck pads and drinking with them. In the salon window below, the gun was still in view on the table.

  Izak was at the railing of the Ozymandias, calling loudly for Morat and Barish to come up from below. They arrived and flanked him, one on each side. Lilly feared they might all be shot. The other guests, smoked out of their cabins, were now coming up from below, Fiona in a flowered caftan, Jack and Jane Cotton dressed in crumpled shorts and shirts, Gerta in a silk kimono, Harrison in his jockey shorts. Lance came up last, baffled, carrying his telescope. They all seemed confused and exhausted.

  Izak was speaking in Turkish to his crew, then calling out to the men on the other boat. He was shouting and pointing to the clouds of motor exhaust, filling the Ozymandias with stinking foul air.

  One man called something back to him. Lilly saw Izak’s face darken. She could not stop herself, she went to his side and touched his arm. “Please,” she said. “They could kill you.”

  The man continued shouting. “What does he want?” Lilly asked.

  “He says generator was turned on so to make more ice for their drinks.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she begged him. “Don’t fight with them. It’s almost morning. Soon the sun will rise. The party has to end sometime.”

  She could tell by the set of his Ottoman jaw that he was not about to back down. She stood on tiptoe and whispered something into his ear. She knew the risk she took, that she would be heard by the others, but she said to him, “Izak, I want you alive. I need you.” Her hand was on his arm, she could feel his hairs under her fingertips.

  He looked at his charges standing like a rag-tag army on deck.

  “I decide that everyone go below,” he said, finally. “Shut all your windows. I turn on boat generator and we have high air-condition now. Then everyone try to sleep.”

  *

  By dawn, it was quiet everywhere. The cafes were silent, the lights on the dock were out, the sailors on the other boat were sprawled on the deck asleep, the women were gone. Lilly ventured up the steps from her cabin for fresh air and found Izak still awake, still sitting on the bench, staring out at the sea. The moisture of the night had condensed on the tabletop and the foam pad, it was almost cold. She found her blanket, still on deck, and brought it over to where he sat. She sat beside him, and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and her own.

  “You are so tired,” she told him. “Go down now and rest.”

  “Soon,” he said. “When I am sure.”

  “They’re all sleeping,” she said. “They won’t make trouble now.”

  “I sit here with you,” he said very simply. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He reached for Lilly’s hand and clasped it in his. She sat there with him till the sun rose fully, till the birds flew off the cliffs and dipped into the sea for food, till the big white pleasure boat on one side of them chugged softly out of its berth and set out on its journey. She held Izak’s large hand, felt the pulse of his blood beneath his skin. She wanted this moment never to end. The only significance in the world was his hand in her hand, and no other history, fact, or direction of her life mattered in the least.

  *

  One by one the boats left their docking areas for the day, pleasure boats departed to go further on their journeys, rental-day boats took out their groups of tourists, fishing boats sailed away to fish. The drunken sailors in the next berth woke, staggered about, and several times Lilly noticed one of them glaring at her and Izak. His face was ugly, and he seemed to be muttering to himself.

  Finally their boat withdrew from the port and there was only the Ozymandias, floating quietly on the water, its crew coming to life from below, ready to perform the day’s duties.

  The guests, exhausted by the night’s disturbances, slept late. No one spoke of the trouble when they met on deck. They all seemed subdued, spoke very little as Barish set out the bread and jam, the olives and tomatoes, the cheese and cucumbers. Izak brought out the plates, the silverware, the plastic glasses for juice, the cups for coffee and tea.

  Harriet had carried up her water colors from below and was painting the Ozymandias on a post-card size bit of cardboard. Jane Cotton was writing in a notebook. Marianne twisted round and round a bead bracelet on her wrist that she had bought from one of the village children.

  In the galley Morat was making cheese crepes while Gerta and Harrison leaned over the counter watching him, sampling bits of crepe as he offered them up.

  Lance made a point of dragging his telescope here and there over the deck, peering into it, adjusting its lens, when suddenly he said, “Uh -oh, Coast Guard.” A large boat was pulling into the berth next to theirs, it’s guns clearly visible, covered with
canvas, but mounted and ominous-looking.

  A white-uniformed officer appeared at the railing of his boat and said: “Who is captain?”

  Izak came forward. There was a curt exchange in Turkish, and then the man disappeared. “Everyone get passports, please,” Izak said, “you must go down below now and get them for Coast Guard.” The man in white was coming up their gangplank with two other officers behind him. It seemed to Lilly everyone was holding his breath. Who among them was guilty of some crime? She felt that perhaps she was, some crime of the heart, of conscience, some breach of sanity. But it didn’t seem the kind of crime for which the Coast Guard would seek her out.

  They all hurried below for their passports which they in turn handed to Izak to passed them to one of the officers. The other officers were looking at papers that Izak spread before them on the big table.

  “They want to see that we’re licensed,” Harrison whispered to the group, which had congregated near the helm. “They have to be sure our ownership papers are in order, that certain fees and licenses have been paid. I think we’re all right on that.”

  “But why our passports?” Lance asked. His gray-blue eyes were filled with alarm. His thinning white hair blew over his pale forehead.

  “They’re looking for you,” Marianne informed him, her eyes narrowed. “They want to be sure you’re not dealing drugs.”

  “But I’m not!” he said, in a tone of outrage.

  “Only kidding,” Jack Cotton said. “She’s only kidding, Lance. Can’t you tell?”

  “This has been a really bad night,” Lance said. He looked shaky, as if the night without sleep had unnerved him.

  “Take it in stride,” Harriet said. “It’s all part of the adventure of travel.”