High Kicks, Hot Chocolate, and Homicides

by Mary McHugh

  Finally, there’s Gini Miller, a fierce redhead with a temper to match. She’s a prize-winning documentary filmmaker, small and pretty. She’s divorced. “We just wanted different things,” she says of her ex-husband. “He was happy sitting on a couch with a beer watching football.” She wanted to see the world. She filmed an oral history of the people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She made a documentary about an orphanage in India, where she fell in love with a little girl she hopes to adopt when regulations ease in that country.

  We call ourselves the Happy Hoofers—that’s with an f.

  I love these women. The easy intimacy that the five of us enjoy has certainly helped to prepare us for life after fifty. We’ve been through everything together—miscarriages, sick children, husbands’ affairs, cancer, widowhood, teenagers, divorce. None of us could have done it without the other four cheering us on, lending a shoulder to cry on, saying just the right words to make everything better.

  We are all different, all great-looking, and fierce friends forever.

  Tina’s Travel Tip: Talk to as many people as you can on a cruise—some of them might actually be interesting.

  Chapter 2

  Cruising and Schmoozing

  I knew this wasn’t going to be one of your Love Boat cruises the minute I opened the door to our cabin.

  “Mary Louise, look at the size of this room! How can we change into our costumes in here?”

  “Wait until you see the bathroom,” she said. “There’s no bath and I’d hardly call it a room. If we hadn’t dieted ourselves into near nonexistence, we wouldn’t be able to wash during the whole trip.”

  I looked over her shoulder and groaned. There was a basin, a toilet, and enough floor space for a very small three-year-old to take a shower.

  “Where’s the shower?” Mary Louise asked.

  “I think you take the faucet off the basin and hang it on that hook up there, pull this curtain around you, and very carefully take a shower without breaking any of your movable parts.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she said. “There’s only two feet of floor space between the beds to change our clothes in. We’ll have to dress in shifts.”

  “Too bad—I forgot to pack mine,” I said, and we fell on the narrow beds laughing hysterically.

  “Remind me again why we decided to take a Russian river cruise,” she said.

  “Because somebody actually hired us to tap dance on a ship sailing from Moscow to St. Petersburg,” I said.

  “What were they thinking!” she said.

  “What were we thinking?” I said, and that set us off again. We couldn’t help giggling at the absurdity of this whole situation. We’ve been friends for such a long time, we can read each other’s thoughts. Ever since we met at Redbook magazine, where we both worked as editors before we were married, we’ve been good friends.

  We’ve helped each other through babies—three for her and two for me—marital fights, and musicals at the community theater where she and I danced and sang our way to local stardom and total disdain from our teenagers. And the death of my husband a year ago. I could never have made it without her.

  Now, at the age of fifty-two (Mary Louise) and fifty-three (me), we are on another adventure with our friends Gini, Janice, and Pat.

  “Remember that time we drove across the country with Gini and Pat in that old Pontiac?” Mary Louise said. “Some of the places we stayed had smaller bathrooms than this.”

  “Can you believe we were still friends after four weeks crammed into that ten-year-old car, with a water hose that leaked—”

  “And we patched it with bubble gum! You always had to sleep on the rollaway because you were the smallest, Tina. You must have weighed ninety pounds in those days. What do you weigh now?”

  “None of your business. Why do you think I took up tap dancing? Let’s see if we can unpack our stuff.”

  “Wait,” said Mary Louise, pulling an aerosol can out of her tote bag. “Let me spray the drawers with Lysol first. You never know what might have been in there.”

  “OK, Ms. Germ Freak,” I said. We often tease Mary Louise about her fastidious habits. She’s the only person I know who actually sings the entire “Happy Birthday” song while washing her hands.

  After unpacking in our crowded little stateroom, somehow finding room to put everything, we collected our friends and headed out to get some breakfast.

  * * *

  The Smirnov’s dining room was a bright and cheerful space, with windows all around. The tables were set with linen tablecloths, blue and white china, crystal glasses, and sparkling silverware. Comfortable yellow wicker chairs complemented red roses, freshly cut and fragrant in a vase in the middle of each table. We sat at a round table for five and waited for a waitress to come and take our order.

  Gradually the other tables filled up, but there was still no one to take our order. A little jet-lagged and really hungry, I waved to a large dark-haired woman wearing some kind of naval uniform, who seemed to be in charge.

  She strode over to our table and said in a deep voice, “Ja?” Her highly polished shoes seemed oversized as they reflected the light.

  Hmm, I thought. A German wearing a uniform on a Russian ship? Oh well, just play along.

  “Hello,” I said. “We were wondering if we could get some breakfast.”

  “May I see your room keys?” she said, not smiling, looking at us as if we somehow turned up on this ship illegally.

  We handed her the little cards that opened our doors and she nodded.

  “Ahhh. You are the entertainment,” she said. “You dance, ja?”

  I almost saluted but stopped myself in time.

  “Yes, we are the Happy Hoofers and we’re really looking forward to this cruise.” I hesitated and then timidly asked, “Could I ask who you are?”

  She looked annoyed, as if we should certainly know who she was, and said, “I am Heidi Gorsuch, the ship’s director of activities. You vill dance tonight after dinner, yes?”

  “We’re looking forward to it,” I said, dredging up my best party hostess smile. “We’re so glad to have the chance to perform on your lovely ship. Is there anything else you would like us to do before our performance?”

  “Like vat?”

  “We could do lap dances for all the men on board,” Janice said, and I could see she was just getting warmed up.

  I faked a laugh and glared at Janice. “Oh, Ms. Gorsuch, she’s just joking. We thought we’d mingle with the other passengers and get to know them. Sort of goodwill tap dancers.”

  “Is gut,” she said, and I could swear she clicked her heels together before moving to the next table.

  “Good going, Tina,” Gini said. “We’re stuck on a Russian ship with a cruise director who talks like a drill instructor, a cabin the size of a broom closet, and no food in sight.”

  Gini always says exactly what she thinks about everything.

  “Relax, Gini,” Pat, our peacemaker, said. “We just got here. Things will get better. Don’t make such a big deal about it.”

  “Listen, happy face, I’m tired and hungry and in no mood to—”

  “You want food,” a sullen, blond waitress said, appearing from nowhere. Her name tag identified her as Olga.

  “Do you have a menu?” Janice asked, smiling as only Janice can.

  “No menu,” the waitress said, and was about to leave.

  “Please,” I said. “How do we get something to eat?”

  She pointed to a long table on one side of the room that was now covered with food and platters, baskets and samovars.

  “You go get what you want,” she said. “You want drink?”

  “I’d like some orange juice,” I said, and my friends ordered the same.

  “Could you put a little vodka in mine?” Pat asked.

  Olga looked at her as if she had ordered a hit of heroin, then walked off.

  We got in line at the buffet table, which was loaded with croissants, mu
ffins and breads, scrambled eggs kept warm in a metal container, jams and butter and bacon, sausage, and waffles. A man stood behind the table ready to whip up any kind of omelet you wanted.

  I was behind a woman wearing a pale pink sweater over a rather plain beige dress. Because I have this habit of talking to people wherever I go—it used to drive my husband Bill crazy—I said to her, “Looks really good, doesn’t it?”

  She didn’t turn around, but said with a very pronounced British accent, “I’mnotveddygood-inthemorning.”

  “Excuse me?” I said, leaning forward to hear her better.

  She exhaled a long-suffering sigh, and said more slowly, “I’m not veddy good in the morning. Pahdon me.” She picked up her plate of toast and a boiled egg and walked to her table.

  I felt boorish, crass, like an ugly American.

  “I see you’re making friends in your usual effective way,” Mary Louise said, laughing.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said, recovering my dignity and asking the man behind the table for a salmon omelet.

  We were just digging into the first food we had eaten in twelve hours when a loud whistle startled us and made us turn. Heidi, lips still pursed from her ear-splitting signal, stood at the front of the room.

  “Gut morning,” she said, clapping her hands together like the principal in a boarding school and arranging her face in what I’m sure she hoped was a smile.

  “Velcome, velcome,” she said in a loud voice to the startled passengers. “I am Heidi, your cruise director. Ve haf many fun things planned for you on this cruise and you vill enjoy them. Please ask me if you have questions. Our Russian crew will do their best to help you, but they sometimes have trouble with the English. Some of them are just learning their jobs. I’m sure you will be patient with them.” From the look in her eye, I was sure she was giving us orders, not asking for our cooperation.

  “I vant first to introduce our captain. Captain Kurt Von Schnappel.”

  A tall, grim-faced man with gray hair in a dark blue naval uniform stepped forward and surveyed the crowd in front of him. I couldn’t help feeling that he disapproved of us and that saying hello was a distasteful part of his job.

  “Guten morgen,” he said. “Enjoy your voyage.” He gave a slight bow and left the dining room. That was it. No friendly welcome. No “glad to see you.” I assumed we wouldn’t be getting an invitation to sit at the captain’s table anytime soon.

  Heidi watched him go, then motioned to the white-suited crew members. They stepped forward, their hands folded, looking down at the floor.

  “Oh dear,” Gini said under her breath. “What have we done?”

  “Now I vould like to introduce the crew to you. First is Sasha, who is in charge of the dining room.”

  Sasha stepped forward, his eyes darting wildly from side to side, desperately searching for a way to escape. His uniform jacket was buttoned crookedly, leaving one side longer than the other, and his shirt tail was untucked in the back. His hair stuck out all over his head as if it were trying to escape. Surely no older than twenty-five, he looked as if he couldn’t be in charge of a falafel stand on a street corner in New York City, let alone a dining room on a cruise ship.

  “Next ve haf our chef, Kenneth Allgood from England, who comes to us highly recommended. He vill prepare many delicious Russian meals for you—but with a British accent—and you vill enjoy them.”

  “A British chef on a Russian ship,” a man in back of us muttered. “What’s his specialty—Spotted Chicken Kiev?”

  I turned around and saw a handsome man about my age, with dark hair graying at the temples, at a table near us. He looked like a golfer in his seersucker slacks and short-brimmed cap. I smiled at him and he smiled back.

  The chef stepped forward unsteadily, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, wearing filthy whites with a toque perched on top of his greasy hair. He looked about twenty-eight years old. He glared at the passengers.

  “Geeez,” Gini said in a low voice. “His mother must have been Typhoid Mary.”

  I tried to give her a stern glance, but I was also trying to keep from laughing. If I looked at Mary Louise, we would both lose it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her stifling a giggle.

  Heidi introduced the waitresses, the desk clerks, and the kitchen crew, and then she said, “Ve haf a special treat for you on this trip. Ve are very lucky to have with us the Happy Hoofers from America, who vill tap dance for us tonight and every night of the cruise. Please stand up, Hoofers.”

  We stood up and smiled at the other passengers, who clapped rather halfheartedly. Who could blame them? This cruise was not turning out to be the polished, interesting, professionally run trip they had been hoping for. And, of course, they had never heard of us.

  “Happy Hookers?” an old man at the table next to us snarled. “What kind of a cruise is this? I don’t want to see a bunch of hookers.”

  His wife tried to shush him. “They’re hoofers, dear, not hookers. You know, dancers.” But he kept on grumping and snarling until she pulled him out on the deck. As she dragged him away, she said over her shoulder, “He’s been this way since Hillary ran for president.”

  We had another cup of good strong coffee and looked out the window at the clear, sunny day brightening the clean, white deck outside. I was glad we were making this trip in June when the temperature would be in the sixties and seventies.

  We walked out to the deck and leaned on the rail as the ship glided by little towns, with brilliantly colored red and blue and green church domes peeking over the treetops, people picnicking along the riverbanks, and fishermen who waved to us holding rods.

  “If that’s their idea of breakfast, I can’t wait to see lunch and dinner. What a crew of misfits. Why do I have the impression I’m on the Russian equivalent of the Titanic?” Gini said.

  “Let’s throw Debbie Downer overboard right now,” Janice said, grabbing Gini by the arm.

  “Look on the bright side, Gini,” Pat said. “How else could we get to see Moscow and St. Petersburg and the Hermitage Museum?”

  “We’ll be lucky if this crew can get us to the next town without running into another ship,” Gini said. “At least we can look forward to seeing the White Nights at this time of year. I’ll be able to take pictures twenty-four hours a day if I want.”

  “Think of this trip as a great setting for a documentary,” I said.

  “Riiiight. Look on the bright side,” Gini said. “You’re always such an optimist, Tina. You remind me of that Monty Python movie, Life of Brian. Brian is nailed to a cross, and he says, ‘Peter, I can see your house from up here!’ Then he sings, ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.’ ”

  That’s all we needed to hear. We linked arms and sang the rest of the song, dancing and twirling on deck.

  Passengers gathered around us, clapping and laughing as we did some time steps and high kicks.

  Even Gini was in a good mood after our impromptu practice session.

  Two teenaged girls bounced up to us. “Are you the Happy Hoofers?” asked the one with dark hair with pink streaks on the side, who looked about seventeen years old.

  “We are,” I said. “Do you like tap dancing?”

  “Oh yes,” she said, “It’s cool. We saw a musical on Broadway with Savion Glover. I love that kind of dancing. He has so much energy.”

  “We want to be your groupies,” the younger one, around fourteen with curly blonde hair, said. “We saw you on YouTube, and half our class is taking tap dancing now. We could help you with scenery, or costumes, or anything you need. I’m Andrea and this is Stacy.”

  “We don’t really have scenery and we already have costumes, but you’re welcome to watch us rehearse,” I said. “We’ll teach you some steps. What are you doing on a cruise ship in Russia anyway?”

  “Our grandmother brought us. She’s celebrating her eightieth birthday and she thought it would be more fun if she took us with her.”

  “And I was right,” an older woman
said, coming up to join us. She had a face she had earned after eighty years of a good life—beautiful, lined, serene, ready for anything that came along. “Hello there, Hoofers,” she said, and did a little time step and a ball change. “I’m Caroline. These are my two spoiled-rotten granddaughters, who are the joy of my life. Can’t wait to see you dance tonight. I do a little tap dancing myself.”

  “Nana was one of the dancing Kennard sisters in the fifties,” Stacy said. “She was really good, and she still is. She used to take us to Macy’s Tap-a-thon every year in New York—that’s why we love tap dancing.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “Mary Louise and I went every year for a while.”

  Her mention of the Tap-a-thons brought back all those hot August mornings when Mary Louise and I would drive into New York and put on some kind of cartoon T shirt—Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop, Garfield, whatever they thought up that year—and join people of all ages, colors, and states of mental health, to dance on Broadway in front of Macy’s.

  “Hi, Caroline,” Mary Louise said. “We had so much fun at those Tap-a-thons. The best part was, after we danced, Tina and I would go to the fanciest restaurant we could find, still in our sweaty T shirts and tap shoes, and eat up all the calories we had just danced off. The last time we went, there were six thousand other people out there in Betty Boop T shirts and lace garters dancing on Thirty-fourth Street.”

  “We were part of the six thousand,” Caroline said. “We were probably right in back of you.”

  “You would have pretended you didn’t know us if you were anywhere nearby,” I said. “We kept forgetting the routine and asking the trainer to do it over again. Then we figured if we made a mistake, who would notice? We had a great time. I don’t know why they stopped doing them.”