You Are Always Safe With Me by Merrill Joan Gerber

Then, in case he hadn’t heard her, she said, with more clarity in her voice, “Yes, I’d like to be next.”
    *
    Just then, they all became aware of the high cry of a child’s voice from the water at the side of the boat, something in Turkish, repeated two or three times.
    When Lilly looked over the railing, she saw that a small motorboat had pulled up beside the Ozymandias and in it was a Turkish woman, her head covered with a kerchief. She sat cross-legged on the boat’s bottom, with a round metal pan heating over some charcoal. The boy, perhaps her son, eleven or twelve years old, controlled the outboard motor, and called out the words again.
    Marianne—because now Izak was standing up and had indicated his massage was over—came over to the rails and exclaimed: “Oh, they’re making crepes. I’m absolutely starving. Does anyone have some money? I’ll pay it back, I promise.”
    Jack Cotton pulled some bills out of his pants pocket. “How much do you need?” he asked.
    “Four million,” the boy cried, smiling now that he had a potential customer.
    “What do you have?” Marianne called down to him.
    “Banana and honey, cheese and lemon, chocolate and sugar,” he recited in English, his lesson well-learned.
    “Izak,” Marianne said, “is lunch soon?”
    “Not so soon,” he said.
    “Good, then I’ll have banana and honey,” she told the boy. He relayed this information to his mother who slapped a piece of dough on a wooden board and rolled it flat with a rolling pin. When she laid it on the pan over the coals, it browned quickly. She flipped it over, laying slices of banana in its center and pouring honey from a bottle over the fruit. A moment later she folded the crepe expertly in quarters, wrapped it in a napkin, and handed it to the boy who climbed up the ladder, fast as a monkey, and delivered it to Marianne, who paid him the four one-million lire bills.
    “Oh,” Marianne said, biting into it. “This is heaven on earth.”
    “I’ll have cheese,” Jack Cotton called to the boy. “Make that two.”
    “And I’ll have chocolate and sugar,” said his wife.
    Lance and Lilly’s mother came to inquire at the crowd at the railing, and soon they, too, were ordering crepes. The boy was beaming as he collected money, his mother was busily rolling out the flat circles of dough, filling the crepes with ingredients from jars and cans kept on a small shelf on the side of the boat. The woman looked serene, legless under her wide shirt, satisfied with her child and his business skills.
    “You,” Izak said, touching Lilly on the shoulder. “You are getting crepes?”
    “No, not me,” Lilly said.
    “Then it’s your turn now for massage. They will eat. You will lie down.”

PRAYER
    Lilly lay face down on the green canvas covering of the lounge cushion, closed her eyes, and prayed. What she prayed for she did not know. She was not a praying person. It was more as if she were begging: let me not be made fun of, let me not show what I am feeling, let him not think of me as ugly or fat or, worst of all, as a paying customer. (Because perhaps there was a fee for this service, perhaps it would be on her bill at the end of the voyage. He was a working man. Perhaps he sent money home to his mother. She knew, from Morat, that he had no wife or child.)
    She felt him against her side, felt him move his body so that his knees were on either side of her thighs, felt him pour oil on the small of her back, just above the curve of her bathing suit.
    No one had ever touched her body in this way. Even her two long-ago lovers, if she could call them that, had never, either one, laid such a gentle hand on her skin. How could a woman allow herself to submit to this kind of intimacy, arrange to be touched this way by a stranger, by hire and for pay? She knew friends who often sought massages for purposes of relaxation, for the cure of pulled muscles, for the sake of health or as a gift to oneself, to be pampered and