The Midnight Boat to Palermo and Other Stories

by Rosemary Aubert

  The first few minutes of the first class were spent on the ten participants introducing themselves to each other. They were, for the most part, oldish women. A couple of them looked like they’d signed a life contract with the purveyor of white-haired puffed up hairdos that could last a week without shampooing. And a couple others looked like old hippies who’d never quite made the leap into the present. And the rest looked like me. Nondescript. Decent but nothing to write home about as they had all been used to saying in their youth.

  And then there was the “professional”.

  Now of course I had checked the brochure to see what kind of professional this woman was supposed to be. It said that she had been in the entertainment field for a number of years and that she was now devoting her time to helping the “mature” woman come to a happy “partnership” with her “changing” body.

  Sounded okay to me. And she looked okay. At first. Her hair was a little brassy and a whole lot more abundant than that of her students, rising, then falling in a cascade of wild auburn curls. And she was clearly a fan of Avon and its competitors—lots of eye makeup and those red lips that looked like they’d been painted on by one of the students in the “Capturing the human face in art” classes.

  She was wearing a sort of trench coat. Nothing odd about that. It was, after all, the spring semester, which put us at the top end of the new season.

  But when she took the coat off, I realized that there are a lot of branches of the entertainment industry and that I was about to become familiar with one that I had never fully—or even sketchily—investigated before.

  She was wearing shorts. I mean really short shorts. I would put her at around forty, but judging from everything that was visible below her waist, her changing body didn’t need much in the way of partnership. She looked terrific with long, strong legs and, sorry to have to say it, a butt that you could bounce a coin off of.

  And that was only half of it. The upper half was also available for view. She wore a tight black top that matched the shorts in more ways than one. For example, you could see as much of her top as you could see of her bottom.

  As I was getting used to this outfit and wondering what it had to do with coming to grips with my own body, she took a laptop computer out of big leather bag she was carrying, set it on the desk and pressed a few keys.

  I wasn’t expecting the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. After all, this wasn’t “Music for mental growth,” this was “Taking off…” The music was a pounding relentless beat that instantly called to mind a whole slew of clichés, none of them reminiscent of hymns.

  I realized at once the stupid mistake I’d made. My husband was a retired insurance salesman. He was always telling me how much trouble people could get into by not making sure of the exact meaning of a word or a phrase.

  There was only one thing to do. I stood up, retrieved my jacket from the back of my chair, picked up the notebook I was now embarrassed to have opened with naïve eagerness and headed for the door.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” the teacher said.

  I froze in my tracks. What was I supposed to say? That I’d never seen a stripper in person before? That I’d been so eager to do what my husband wanted me to do that I’d made a fool of myself? How about that I was such a prude that the idea of learning anything from an “exotic dancer” wasn’t something I’d ever sully myself by doing?

  I glanced at the other students. They were all staring at me as though I were deserting a sinking ship and leaving all of them to fend for themselves.

  “I—I… I have to put money in the parking meter.”

  Great. Now I was not only a student of strip tease, I was also becoming a liar.

  “Hurry back, honey,” the teacher said sweetly. “You don’t want to miss anything. We’re going to get going on the moves in a few minutes.”

  One of the other students winked at me. I thought she had a hell of a nerve. The gesture, tiny as it was, changed my mind about the rest of the day’s lesson. I wasn’t a wimp. I wasn’t a chicken. If all these other old ladies could do the moves, why couldn’t I?

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I had to hide in the washroom on another floor until enough time had passed to make it look like I’d actually gone down to the street. Then I summoned my courage and went back to class.

  Well, the moves were pretty entertaining. Imagine fifteen sixty-five-year olds gyrating. I had no choice but to gyrate, too.

  I guess we kept it up for forty-five minutes or so, before the teacher, who told us her name was Fancy, called a break, followed by a power point presentation on the history of exotic dancing. I was ready to sit down. I fell asleep for a few seconds, but on the whole, I learned more than I ever imagined there was to learn about what Fancy called, “a real art”.

  “That’s it for today, ladies,” she said. Did I mention that it was only women attending the class? In this day and age, it was considered completely incorrect to make any assumptions about gender. So had I known what I was in for, I wouldn’t have assumed that there would be no men present. Nonetheless, I was saved at least that little embarrassment.

  “Good work, girls,” Fancy said. “I’ll see you next week. Oh, and be sure to wear a top that buttons down the front.”

  When I got home, my husband was sitting in the living room reading, deeply absorbed in whatever was on the screen of his tablet. It took him a couple of minutes to finish, to look up and ask me, “Well, how did it go? Did you discover any secrets about yourself today?”

  He smiled sweetly, stood, gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Whatever you discovered,” he said, “I’m sure it’ll be something nice.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Want some supper?”

  The next week, we practiced taking off our tops. We were all pretty pathetic at first, but between the helpful music and the enthusiastic coaching of Fancy, we were what she called amateur professionals after about an hour or so. I learned how to tease a button. I learned how to slither a sleeve. I learned how to move back to front, front to back, each time lowering my blouse a tiny bit until, by the end of the recording, it fell smoothly to the floor, leaving me in my fortified bra and my polyester slacks.

  “Be sure to wear slacks that zip up the front—or jeans, or you can change into shorts,” were Fancy’s parting words for the week.

  Which is where my nun-school underpants came into play.

  To make a long story short, I got through the whole course—all four classes—without missing a beat—so to speak. In fact, by the end of the third class, I was actually having fun. The only thing missing was a male audience. The other old ladies in the class joked a lot and we had a good time, but underlying everything was the fact that our only audience was Fancy and ourselves.

  “What you have to do soon as you can,” Fancy advised, “is practice at home right away. If you don’t dance for somebody soon, you’re going to forget and you’re going to lose all the work we did.”

  I thought about that. My husband wasn’t home when I got there, which gave me time to get ready. I couldn’t do anything about the fashionless underwear I’d worn all my life, but I could and did put the disc I’d bought from Fancy in the last moments of our time together on the stereo, ready to play the minute he came in the door.

  Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long. Within minutes, I was sliding and gesturing and slithering and piling my clothes in a sweet little heap on the floor until there was nothing left to take off.

  With what I thought was a flirtatious look, I glanced up at my husband.

  He was standing stock still, a look of complete shock on his face. He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t frowning. In fact, he wasn’t breathing.

  Neither was I.

  Finally, he drew in a shaky gasp.

  “What time,” he asked “is supper?”

  That night we made love as we always did on Tuesday. It wasn’t any different than any other time. I soon began to think that I was supposed to forget the whole nig
ht school thing and go back to my usual pre-adult education hobbies. I was about equally relieved and disappointed.

  I guess it was three days later that my husband came home with a present for me. It was a box wrapped in flowered paper and when I opened it, I found a nice new pair of gardening gloves and then a gluten-free recipe cookbook. I thought that was all, but then I noticed a slim little package at the bottom of the box, wrapped in pink tissue paper.

  As I opened it, my fingers shook a little. I pulled aside the tissue and I found a black lace bra. I smiled with delight. Never in all our years together had my husband given me any such thing.

  But that wasn’t all.

  There was one more item.

  Underpants.

  Bikini underpants.

  THE CANADIAN CAPER

  At it again!

  Mrs. DiRosa manoeuvred her walker so that it was flush against the sill of the hallway window on the sixth floor of The Towers—called Wobble Towers by her smarty-pants grandchildren. It was the only way she could free both hands in order to adjust her binoculars. Damn cheap things. If they made them here, instead of some foreign country, they’d work better.

  She fiddled with them until she could see the Canadian flag clear as a bell on the other side of the river. That was one of the things her daughter said was so great about The Towers. That you could get such a good view of the bridge from Niagara Falls, New York to Niagara Falls, Canada.

  “Could be the only place in the world where you can look out a window and see another country,” her helpful son-in-law had suggested when they’d signed her in.

  Big deal!

  She trained the binoculars on a vehicle stopped at the Canadian toll booth and gave the focus knob one more little shove. Good thing I don’t have arthritis! She tracked the long truck full of logs as it slowly made its way through the narrow entrance and onto the bridge.

  “You still looking at them trucks?”

  At the squeaky-voiced question coming from behind, Mrs. DiRosa jumped a mile. She let the binoculars fall back around her neck by their cord and grabbed her walker, turning to face the only person she could stand in The Towers, her friend Meenie—or Teenie Meenie as Mrs. DiRosa’s grandchildren called their grandmother’s seventy-five-pound friend. Her real name was Minette, and a long time ago she’d left her home in Canada to live with her children before she, too, had been sent to The Towers. She still spoke with a French Canadian accent.

  “What do you have to sneak up on me like that for?” Mrs. DiRosa said irritably. “Scared the dickens out of me and messed up my focus, too.”

  “You still watchin’ them truckloads of frogs?”

  “Logs, you silly old thing. Not frogs, logs.”

  “So why you watchin’ them now?” Meenie asked.

  “Look,” Mrs. DiRosa said, forgetting her disgruntlement and eager to share her remarkable discovery. “See that truck coming through now?”

  She handed the binoculars to Meenie who, being ten years younger, was more agile in every way and had no need of a walker to help her get close to the window. She held the binoculars to her eyes.

  “Yeah, I see it,” she said, “It just got to the American side. One of them nice-looking young men in the uniform is talking to the driver. So what?”

  “Get a load of the very top log. See anything funny about it?”

  Meenie was quiet for a few seconds. Studying. “I see a mark on the top log,” she finally said. “A funny mark. Maybe like a hax hit it wrong.”

  “Axe,” Mrs. DiRosa said. She had been correcting Meenie’s English now for eighteen and a half years without any noticeable effect. “Yes, that’s it.”

  “What’s funny about a hax mark on a big log?”

  “Nothing,” Mrs. DiRosa said. “Except that I’ve seen that mark on that log six times since I started counting.”

  “What?”

  “Meenie, that truck comes through here once every two weeks. And every single time, the same log is on top.”

  Meenie leaned closer to the window. “Comes down from Canada with the same log on top? I don’t get it.”

  Mrs. DiRosa took the binoculars from her friend’s hand. She trained them on the handsome young American customs official. She watched as he took a bunch of papers from the driver of the truck, glanced at them, nodded and waved the man on.

  “They don’t keep them long enough with nine-eleven and all,” Mrs. DiRosa said. “No wonder there’s so many smugglers.”

  Meenie laughed. “You read too many of them books. You got too much of imagination. There aren’t smugglers now. That’s stuff out of stories.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Mrs. DiRosa said, suddenly remembering bits and pieces of a conversation. “Somebody was talking about smuggling just last week.”

  Damn memory. Isn’t worth a thing. Should have eaten more carrots or something.

  Meenie thought about it for just a minute. “I know,” she said. “It was at the Trans-border Social last Tuesday. You know, when those old ladies come over from Canada for lunch at The Towers.”

  “Yes, Meenie. You’re right. That’s it! They were talking about smuggling people out of foreign countries through Canada into the United States!”

  “You don’t think that truck of logs has people hid in it?”

  Mrs. DiRosa took another look out the window. The log truck was just pulling onto the Parkway, headed for points south. “The logs could be hollow or something like that. I wouldn’t be surprised. Foreigners are tricky. And getting into America is the thing they want most.”

  “But it’s a big crime!” Meenie protested.

  “Sure is,” Mrs. DiRosa said. She caught one last glimpse of the truck as it disappeared down the highway. “A whole load of criminals headed right into the heart of America.”

  ***

  It wasn’t until the next day that Mrs. DiRosa finally figured out what they had to do. “Meenie, you’ve got to talk to that nice young customs man.”

  Meenie laughed. “What I going to tell him—that my friend think people are coming in empty logs to America?”

  “Don’t be a smarty-pants. I’d do it myself only I can’t walk. You can.”

  “But I can’t talk that good. He won’t listen. He’ll just think I’m some old crazy person like Mr. Winters.”

  Mr. Winters no longer lived at The Towers because he’d wandered onto the bridge in his underwear on a February morning, swearing he was Canadian and wanted to die at home.

  Meenie’s got a point.

  “OK,” Mrs. DiRosa said, “I’ve got it. I’ll write everything in a letter. How I’ve been watching the bridge for weeks now and have seen the same truck with the same logs go over time after time. I’ll put in the letter about how I can see that top log from above, which is how I can tell it’s the same log, when the customs men can’t. Then they won’t feel insulted or anything.”

  “Don’t want to insult them, no,” Meenie agreed.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “To keep criminals out of America? OK.”

  It didn’t take long to write the letter. Meenie was right about Mrs. DiRosa reading a lot of books. One thing it did for you was make it easy to write. She signed the letter, “An American Citizen.” That sounded good.

  Even though it would take Meenie a while to go all the way downstairs, then to the back door, then across the parking lot, then across the street, then onto the bridge and into the customs booth, Mrs. DiRosa got right up against the window the minute Meenie left her apartment.

  It seemed to take forever before she finally caught sight of her. Luckily it wasn’t a busy day on the bridge. Even without the binoculars, Mrs. DiRosa could see the customs man take the envelope from Meenie. She watched him tear it open and read the letter. Then she saw him step into the booth and pick up the telephone. She lifted the binoculars. Now she could see that the man was smiling and nodding. Was he talking to his boss? Were they going to check things out?

  She waited for what seemed like
a long time. Finally the man put down the phone. He stepped out of the booth. He had something in his hand, which he gave to Meenie. He was talking to her. Mrs. DiRosa couldn’t see Meenie’s face too clearly. But she did see that Meenie’s shoulders were more slumped than usual. It didn’t seem like a good sign. It wasn’t a good sign either when the handsome young customs man patted Meenie on the head just like she was a dog.

  ***

  “All he did was give me this,” Meenie said, holding up a small, bright American flag.

  “What did he say?” Mrs. DiRosa demanded. They’d already been through this several times, but she wanted to make sure.

  “I told you,” Meenie said, twirling the flag in her fingers until Mrs. DiRosa reached out and made her stop. “He say old ladies don’t always see too good and not to worry because he’s protecting America for us.”

  Mrs. DiRosa thought about it for one minute longer. Then she made up her mind. “That log truck has something wrong about it and I’m not going to give up until we find out what it is.”

  “How come you always say ‘we’?” Meenie asked, beginning to twirl the flag again.

  “There’s only one thing we can do now,” Mrs. DiRosa announced.

  “Oh, no. What?”

  “We have to go to Canada.”

  “But you can’t even walk!”

  “We will find a way.”

  “Stop saying we,” Meenie said again, but of course, Mrs. DiRosa wasn’t listening. She was thinking again.

  ***

  The first thing they had to do was borrow a wheelchair from the office. It wasn’t easy because for several years now, Mrs. DiRosa had told the The Towers’ social worker that the only place she was going to be wheeled was to her grave.

  “Where you be goin’ then, sweetie?” the social worker asked. She was a nice young girl with a master’s degree in social work from some university in Georgia.