You Are Always Safe With Me

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “Now I’m wondering if we should ask Marianne to join us. Even Whirling Dervishes don’t go on this long.” They could all see the white blur of Marianne, still spinning, on the foredeck. The soft brushing of her feet whispered on the floorboards as she listed first to one side, then another.

  “I think she’s just converted to a new religion,” Lance suggested.

  “I think she’s gone nuts,” said Jack Cotton.

  “Maybe she’s angry at us,” his wife said. “Something’s definitely eating her. Maybe she just wants to give us the silent treatment.”

  “Isn’t that what they call being passive-aggressive?” Harrison asked. “She’s angry about something and doesn’t want to join us for dinner, but there’s no way we can confront her and work it out if she’s having an in-your-face religious conversion.”

  “Give her a break,” Fiona said. “She’s had some rotten times in her life.” She lowered her voice. “You all know that her daughter died five years ago, don’t you? A teenage girl. Got sick and died, very suddenly, just like that.”

  “I lost my husband three months ago,” Harriet said suddenly. “I would never force anyone to feel sorry for me or think I expect special consideration. It’s not an excuse for rude or ugly behavior.”

  “None of us would ever dream you could be rude, Harriet,” Lance said. “You’re just the opposite of Marianne. She says harsh things that make people feel bad and you do all you can to be nice to everyone.”

  “Thank you, my dear,” Harriet said. “You’re so very kind.”

  Lilly knew all too well that tone of her mother’s voice, her perky spirit, her stiff upper lip. In the years she was growing up, Lilly was endlessly irritated by her mother’s agreeableness, her willingness to make sure everyone was served and content, to make no waves about what she might prefer or what would please her. Coming of age in her mother’s shadow, Lilly had, by contrast, seen herself as selfish, greedy, unbearably needy. As a young woman she had reflected daily and bitterly that she was not smarter, prettier, born with a nicer personality or a kinder temperament. Why hadn’t she been born to royalty, like the princesses in fairy tales? Or simply rich, so she would have anything she wanted?

  If she ever confessed these concerns to her mother, Harriet would pat her cheek reassuringly and dismiss her fears. “You’re a perfectly nice-enough looking girl with a good brain, and a good upbringing. You have plenty of clothes and books. Why shouldn’t you be satisfied with what you have? Others are much worse off than you.”

  Lilly could never accept that argument. Why shouldn’t she aspire to be like those who were “better off”? Why should she be content to think about those unfortunates who were “worse off” and be satisfied with that?

  Her father, too, had been a model of kindness and rationality. Mild mannered, good-humored, good- natured, he never found her wanting, and could not, it seemed, discover a single way in which he wanted her changed. Like Lilly, he loved to read, and spent hours in bookstores the way some men frequent bars. He often surprised Lilly by bringing her home a bag of books from a clearance sale.

  She’d go through them and line them up beside her bed, putting the most interesting books at the bottom of the pile and the boring ones at the top. This would force her to read all of them, at least a little, always with the most attractive book to look forward to reading last. Now and then her father bought her a duplicate to a book she already had in her library. When she asked him to return it to the bookstore and get her another, he’d say, “Oh, give the double to one of your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends I like well enough to give a book to,” she wanted to say to him, but instead bit her tongue and hid the “double” in the back of her closet. She liked having two copies of the same book. It gave her a sense of plenty, of being rich. Someday, she imagined, she might meet a friend who by some miracle would be worthy of the other copy (though she doubted it.) Why she had been born with such a petty, ungenerous soul she did not know.

  Here she was on this cruise, given freely away to her and her mother and all the rest of the guests by Fiona; here she was drinking good Turkish wine by the grace of Fiona’s generosity, Fiona, who, each time she went into one village or another, brought back little trinkets for all of them—woven baskets, or handkerchiefs printed with images of the cliff tombs of Myra, or tiny bags of saffron spice, or replicas of the blue glass eye. In fact, Lilly now wore one of the blue eyes around her neck on a piece of red wool (Turkish carpet wool!), one of the jewels of Turkey that Fiona had given all her guests.

  These amulets had been distributed by Fiona, one by one, around each person’s neck. “This will protect us from the evil eye, from getting searched by the Coast Guard again, from being raided by pirates, or being crunched in a major earthquake. Also from food poisoning.”

  “Pirates!” Lance laughed. “I haven’t yet seen a Turkish gulet flying the skull and crossbones.”

  “Don’t be so sure there are no pirates,” Harrison said. “Things do happen in these waters.”

  “What kind of things happen?” said Lance.

  “Some of these fancy boats are worth a couple of millions dollars. Their equipment is very desirable. And boats are sometimes left unguarded. Things disappear. Tourists have money, they have jewels, always good things to steal.”

  Fiona was pouring the wine. “Nothing will happen on our boat,” she said. “We have our brave captain, Izak.” She slid the glasses across the table to the various guests. “Shall I pour one for Marianne, do you think?”

  “Moslems don’t drink,” Harrison said. “Don’t bother.”

  *

  Dinner was once again outstanding. Morat had cooked crepes of spinach and goat cheese, a lamb stew with tomatoes and spices, a salad of melon slices of three colors and tastes, and a mousse that was dotted with shavings of chocolate.

  By the time it was dark and the dishes cleared away by the crew, Lilly became aware that the sounds of spinning on the foredeck had stopped. When she walked toward the mid-point of the boat, she could see up front the shape of Marianne, lying prone on one of the foam deck pads. She was motionless, she seemed to have collapsed and fallen asleep.

  Just as Lilly was about to turn around and go down to her cabin, she saw the a glint in the darkness beyond Marianne’s body. In the pale glow of the rising Turkish moon, Izak’s head, in outline, was visible as he sat on the floor near the anchor well, his legs crossed in Lotus position. His face was turned to the sea. Lilly studied his shaven head, straight nose, his beautifully lips. There was so regal a bearing to the angle of his head, the curve of his neck, the straightness of his back, a physical beauty so pure, that it made her breath catch in her throat and caused her heart to stop momentarily. When she could breathe again, she went down the steps to get the baby bunting for Gerta’s baby shower.

  *

  Lilly had been to enough baby showers to know how much they bored her. There was always the very-pregnant mother-to-be, the adorably beribboned packages with bunnies and teddy bears and butterflies and pacifiers on the wrapping paper, and the endless opening of presents, the oohs and aahs over the receiving blankets, the musical mobiles that would spin over the baby’s crib, the teething rings and rattles and fluffy toys and quacking ducks. When she had been in her early thirties, several female professors in her department took leaves of absence the same year. Because each woman had been granted tenure she felt she could finally take the time to have a baby: six months at home with the child, then placement of the baby in an excellent day-care program. The sleepless nights would be shared with the progressive, supportive father who had “no problem” with changing diapers and giving midnight feedings.

  To Lilly, it seemed nothing to envy—a course so “charted,” so lacking in passion: parenthood by the book. But when her colleagues brought the babies to school after a few months and showed them off to the other professors and the secretaries and the janitorial staff, and beamed even as drool was running down the fro
nt of their stylish jackets, and milk was oozing from their breasts into the fabric of their tailored blouses, Lilly saw that it was all passion. Flesh and blood and drool and pink cheeks, and wide, staring, magnificent baby-eyes. Tiny grasping fingers, with infinitesimal finger nails, perfectly formed shell-like ears, eyelashes moving like beautiful little fans, heart-shaped baby lips with tiny tongue protruding.

  All this had taken life from a spark occurring in the dark recesses of a woman’s body, had happened out of sight of the lovers so intent on their experience they could not know when the miracle happened.

  Miracle. A word that did not often enter Lilly’s mind, but what else could babies be, those perfect, elegant, miniature persons coming into being in the dark, coming brand new to replace those that were wearing out. Like Lilly.

  She saw the signs of her own aging and did not make much of them. Still, women in their forties were having babies every day—actresses, professors, lawyers, women who had let their lives get in the way till they realized it was now or never at all.

  Tonight, however, they were celebrating a miracle that began in a Petri dish, not between the slender hips of Gerta, not inside her perfect, gorgeous young body, but in a medical office, under controlled conditions, with an egg removed from Gerta’s ovary and with sperm delivered by Harrison into a plastic cup. This child was taking form in the womb of a hired hand, a woman who for a large consideration was happy to risk the stretch marks, the weight gain, the engorged breasts which might never return to their pristine state.

  Lilly stroked the gift—the baby bunting—she had bought for Gerta and pressed her face once, deeply, into the soft powdery-scented flannel. A baby had inhabited it. The garment seemed sacred as an altar.

  *

  At least this was not going to be one of those precious-gift baby showers. No one who had shopped this afternoon in the small Turkish village had unearthed a single Winnie The Poo blanket or Mickey Mouse bib or footed pajamas with footballs all over them. Jack and Jane Cotton presented the expectant mother with a miniature chess set made of finely sanded marble. “Your baby can be a chess genius by the time she’s six!”

  Fiona’s present for the baby was a hand-crocheted lace tablecloth. “She can make this into a wedding veil when she gets married. And remember to invite me to the wedding!”

  Harriet and Lance had chipped in together and bought a set of Turkish towels in the softest pink color.

  “Someday when your baby is older you can dry her after her bath and tell her these towels were first unwrapped under a Turkish moon.”

  Harriet looked to the sky and they all followed her glance. Above them were swirls of feathery clouds wafting through the heavens. Riding mysteriously under and over their filmy threads was the full Turkish moon.

  Words came to Lilly’s mind from some childhood poem she’d read: “Riding like a galleon o’er the silver sea…”

  For indeed the sea reflecting the moon was rippling with light, spreading pathways of moonlight over the gentle waves from the far horizon directly to where they rocked in the sea on the Ozymandias.

  All of them seemed frozen in a tableaux, caught in this moment of fragrant air blowing off the cliffs, embraced by this aura of silver moonlight.

  “My present to you,” Lilly said quietly to the expectant mother, “is a Turkish baby bunting. It belonged to a Turkish baby who isn’t a baby any longer. An infant has been kept warm in this, Gerta, I hope you don’t mind that it isn’t brand new. But her mother was happy to sell it, and I thought it was beautiful.”

  “Oh, I adore it. It will always remind me of this trip and of all of you. I adore these gifts you’ve given Harrison and me. I only wish…I mean, I really wish that right this minute that I was hugely pregnant!”

  *

  They drank more of Fiona’s wine, they toasted the baby to be, her coming life, her beauty, her success, they wished her every happiness, every triumph, every bit of the health and love and luck that a human being might enjoy.

  The hour grew late, but no one seemed willing to leave the enchanted circle to do the ordinary things one had to do to get ready for bed. On the foredeck, Marianne still slept in a sleep of such apparent exhaustion that no one thought to wake her. Harriet, however, went forward and covered her with a blanket.

  As Lilly began to feel the night dampness settle on her bare arms, she glimpsed a flash of light in the water beside the boat. Looking over the side, she saw below her the figure of Izak, swimming with rubber fins diving mask and snorkel toward the cliffs, holding in one hand an underwater flashlight and in the other a spear. In an instant, she saw two other figures enter the water behind him, both moving their frog-like legs and both armed with underwater lights and spears. The two crewmen, like Neptune’s attendants, followed their captain through the silvery waves on some nocturnal hunt. They disappeared from sight. Some time later, after the guests had drunk several more glasses of wine, all three men clambered up the ladder, holding high their spears victoriously. On the point of each weapon was a blue-black creature with many tentacles.

  “Dinner!” Morat called happily. The killed sea-creatures were dripping, their skins shining. The three men were laughing and displaying proudly the spoils of their hunt.

  “Calimari!” Harrison called out. “Good for you!”

  Izak’s catch was the largest. He displayed its tentacles almost tenderly.

  “Oh, take it away,” cried Gerta. “Don’t you know that if a woman is going to have a baby and she looks at something hideous, her baby will be deformed?”

  “Only if you’re pregnant,” Fiona said soothingly. “Don’t worry, darling. Your baby will be perfect. Don’t worry your pretty head one teeny bit.”

  PIRATES

  Sometime before dawn, Lilly, sleeping on deck, heard a strange noise: whispering, a thudding sound. There was also an odd physical sensation—as if she were dreaming of being in bumper cars and she had been bumped hard, from the side.

  She lifted her head and saw, across the dining table, the other deck-dreamers still asleep: her mother on one narrow bench, and Izak on his bench beside the helm. Both had burrowed under their blankets. Their heads were invisible.

  Above there was a gray sheen in the sky, the kind of pale light that foreshadows sunrise. Sea birds were flying and crying with sharp caws over the water. They circled and dove, circled and dove.

  Lilly breathed deeply. The canvas of the deck pad was dotted with dewy pearls of condensation which soon would be dried by the hot sun. But now it was cool, peaceful. How strange to be here, silently observing the forms of her mother and Izak, the two people on earth to whom she was so deeply attached.

  Again she felt a thud, a knock against the side of the boat. A fear rose in her and she suddenly saw why: the head of a man appeared over the side of the boat from the opening where the boat’s ladder hung into the sea.

  “Izak!” she cried out, but he had heard something too and had bolted to his feet. Harriet sat upright, also—her white hair disheveled, her hand to her mouth in astonishment.

  The man had boarded the boat, and now another man came behind him, speaking gruffly to Izak in Turkish. Lilly saw a gun in his hand. She felt her throat contract. The one with the gun seemed vaguely familiar to Lilly, but so many Turkish men had the dark hair, black eyes, black mustache. The man gestured to Izak, pointing below toward the cabins.

  “What do you want?” Harriet said from her bench. “What do they want, Izak?”

  “Mother, be quiet!” Lilly hissed.

  “They want money,” Izak said. “Jewelry.”

  “Well—send them right over here,” Harriet offered. “I have these gold earrings they can have right now.” She smiled and made a motion to unfasten her earring from one ear. “And my rings, of course.” She waved her hand, with her engagement and wedding rings on it.

  Lilly saw the impossibility of the moment—two women and an unarmed captain, and these…pirates. Both their faces were dark and ugly with intent.

>   Harriet beckoned them toward her. “Come over here, please, I have some money right in my pocket to give you, too.” She reached into the pocket of the sweater she wore over her pajamas and held some Turkish bills toward them.

  What was her mother thinking, waving those few million lire in the air? Harriet laid the money in her lap and as she was removing the earrings from her ears, one at a time, she said, sweetly, “You know, I remember you boys from that party you had next to our boat one night. That was a terribly hot night, wasn’t it?” As she chattered on, she graciously held the earrings and the money toward them while they stared at her in bafflement. She was smiling up at them, the dumbest, most innocent of smiles. “Oh wait, let me give you these rings, too.”

  As the man with the gun came toward her to take the jewels and money, as he peered at the rings that she was tugging off her finger, Izak leaped across the deck and flung himself on top of the man, knocking him to the floor. The gun went flying along the floorboards toward Lilly—she jumped forward and grabbed it, her ankle turning under her as she leapt. She cried out in pain, but managed not to fall. She’d seen enough bad movies to know what to do—she held the gun in two hands pointed it at the other man who was still on his feet. A burning pain shot through her right ankle.

  What should she do now? Where was the trigger? She had never even held a gun before. The man, seeing her hesitate, fled to the railing while Izak was subduing the fallen man and leaped over it into the water. Lilly heard a splash below.

  Izak was now dragging the other man to his feet and pushing him into a deck chair.

  “Give me the gun, Lilly,” he said, not taking his eyes off the man.