The Gift of Women (11 page)

People would be dipping into their
fasolada
soup when Lily's brown belly appeared right beside the pale brown beans. Doh-ray-me-fah-soh-lah-doh soup, Herbie called it because a while after you supped it, the stuff sang.

The next venue was the Achilles on Broadway. Here Lily had a centre to the floor, but it wasn't as good as the Candia for getting her belly into close quarters with the customers. However, the ambience of whitewashed walls, hinting at poverty and parched afternoons by the Aegean, turned the hunger and thirst on. Wine flowed between its larger selection of tables, and with those in the balcony upstairs, its numbers made the belly business there more lucrative than at the Candia.

While Lily danced, there was always a pause while the guys got over their embarrassment and pegged a bill to her belt. It happened as soon as they saw the women were more enthusiastic about Lily than they were. For Lily always danced to the women, demonstrating what women of her age had, what they could do with their own belly, if they had a mind to.

Herbie spent a lot of brain power explaining it to himself because he was both jealous and excited, no matter how hard he tried to keep business-like about it and just count their assets: his favourite, the kidney-shaped tub and Jacuzzi, added on the strength of her gyrations. Sometimes Lily would turn the jets off and agitate the water herself, for the exercise and to give Herbie a thrill. Lily, the one-woman whirlpool.

But her waters never broke in the way a woman's should. Maybe Herbie was too comfy with her at home, too sedentary, driving and delivering, waiting while his balls got grilled in the winter with the car heater on, waiting till she whipped through the back door and out into the alley in her trench coat.

So many stops at Greek Tavernas along Broadway and up 10th Avenue. Herbie wondered if there was enough feta cheese left in Greece for the Greeks to eat.

He watched them wheel the stuff in by the barrel along with the olives. If he ever did poke his nose in the back door to see her show, he caught the pails of Kalamata stench from the olives! Those times, the cooks would pass Herbie samples and before long his cholesterol was two times what it should be and he would sit in their kidney-shaped tub with his own testimonial to the belly sticking out.

Lily said she liked him fatter, and now that he was, she told him they could do some belly ballet, but Herbie wasn't so sure she wasn't screwing herself in the mirror of his belly.

As for Herbie not being able to make her a kid, it left him feeling condemned to be her bouncing babe in the bath.

One night there was a knock-knock at his car window in the lane behind Achilles.

“Business good?”

There was this new officer, fresh out of the Justice Institute on 4th Avenue. He pointed at a set of wooden steps going up to the flat-topped apartment over the store, next to the Achilles.

“Girls have been running in and out of there, pretty steady.”

“Those are the Chou girls,” said Herbie.

“Uh-huh, and who would the Chous be?”

“The girls you see downstairs in Chou's fruit and veg – Broadway Greens is what they call it.”

“Uh-huh,” the constable nodded. “I got a few girls myself. Makes you worry. What about you?”

“No girls, no boys. That's why Lily, the wife, took up belly dancing. Lily of the Belly is her trade name.”

“Nice and catchy.”

“We think so.”

“And you wait to see if she gets out safely?”

“I do.”

“Sensible of you, sir. Traffic down these back lanes isn't all blackberry pickers.”

“Uh-huh, here she comes.”

The constable straightened up to look over the top of the car at Lily. He blinked at the beauty spot and the stars she had sprinkled on her body to give it some flash when she danced.

“We were talking about the Chou girls and the officer's daughters,” Herbie informed her through the window.

Lily nodded to the constable and gave Herbie a look as she swung herself and the trench coat she had tightened around her into the car.

Herbie immediately started the car and looked at the policeman through the open window, taking a moment for a polite farewell, when the uniform introduced himself as Constable Cone.

“Some men,” Constable Cone explained, “have a little message in them that says: make women…” And before he had the chance, most likely to add, ‘It would be nice to have a boy,' Lily leaned across Herbie to ask him, “Which way do you mean make and how many have you made?”

“Three.”

So, if he didn't say it, Herbie said it for him.

“And you're after a boy now, to keep you company?”

“Not really. I like that I've made women.”

“You have…” Lily paused, “with a little bit of help from a wife, I hope.”

It was dark and the rain started. A drop or two bounced onto Herbie off the peak of the constable's cap. Lily had settled into her seat with the trench coat still wrapped tight, but her knees poked out as brown as Kalamata olives.

She kept up her colour at the Tanning Parlour on Dunbar, climbed into that coffin with those lights once a week. Part of the overhead, and white flesh frightened Lily.

In the dark of the car, the constable couldn't see what colour her knees were but with the proximity of the cop, Herbie could almost taste them in his mouth.

Home, and in the house, Lily laughed at him, “What are you licking at those for? You should have gone into the kitchen at Achilles. They would have looked after you.”

“I'm off Greek food,” said Herbie.

“You are,” and she looked down at his head between her knees. “Don't go skinny on me,” she warned him.

He lifted his head from Lily's round, deep brown thighs. In the mauve light cast by the lampshade above their bedside table, her skin turned the colour of eggplant, and it put Herbie in mind of a Chou girl, standing with one in her hand, badgering her father about a boy.

She wanted to bring this boy home. Every time she whispered the boy's name, she lifted the eggplant closer to her father's face.

“You always waan a son, doan you?”

Old Chou took the eggplant from her and walked over to the place for the eggplants, patted it and gently set it down.

“That belong to some guy who pay good money. Eggplan not your doll. You waan play house with this boy? You know he jus' waan come eat off us – he jus' a refugee from Mainland. He migh' be communis' spy, aan still think what udder people got is his.”

Herbie bought that eggplant. He brought it home and watched Lily cut it up and batter it for the pan. He kissed both Lily's knees after that lovely dinner, on the tops where they were sticking up out of the tub.

“You like eggplant?” Herbie asked, gazing at the deep brown, almost purple glaze on Lily's knees in the bath, a long while after that episode with the Chou girl and the eggplant. “You like it, don't you?”

“Herbie, are you all right?” Lily scoured Herbie's face for an answer.

Herbie realized Constable Cone kept up a casual surveillance on them. It broke up Herbie's Friday or Saturday night if he came by to talk.

At Achilles or the Candia, he'd stand beside Herbie's car out back, as they waited for Lily. Herbie joked Constable Cone about waiting there to arrest the berry-pickers in the back lane, if it was blackberry time. At other times he'd say to him, “Still here, trying to get a hold of those squatters…” – a family of skunks that had burrowed under a telegraph pole in the lane behind Achilles and arranged their lodgings underground in such a way that the pole began to tilt.

“Haven't I told you, Herbie, I'll leave the skunks to B.C. Hydro,” Constable Cone would answer on cue and chuckle.

Then, one time Herbie asked, “You're not hanging out here to see if the Achilles is seasoning the salad with hash instead of oregano?” – but got no answer.

“It wouldn't be right to evict them,” Constable Cone changed the subject.

Herbie wasn't sure if Cone was referring to the Chous because Cone was looking up at the railing on the Chous back deck above the storehouse.

“I saw them go in. There's three of them.”

“Three?”

Then, Herbie realized Cone wasn't referring to the Chou girls, but to the skunks. Herbie asked Constable Cone if he wondered why this skunk family never sprayed or caused a nuisance.

“Maybe because it's too near home and they don't want to draw attention to it.”

“Or they're out all night doing their rounds,” Herbie added his two bits.

In any case, neither Cone nor Herbie ever caught a whiff of that burnt-out rubber smell, as Herbie described it, or the underarm odour of a thousand-year-old armpit, as Lily once told him, being very body-conscious at the time, after a performance and getting into the car, lifting her elbow and wrinkling up her nose, like she inhaled an exact match.

Herbie was telling Cone about this and they were laughing, when suddenly the lights over the back door to Achilles died like a pair of eyes and Cone quick-marched for the door to go see inside what was up. Ten minutes later, the lights came back on and Cone appeared with his arm around Lily.

Somebody had thrown the main breaker inside, and somebody else plucked the money off Lily's belt while trying to feel her up, and poor Lily was still dancing as hard as she could on the spot, there, in the dark. She began to wallop anybody who came within range of her hands. Tramped the tiled floor and shook faster and faster in a tantrum, her belt and tiny clappers jangling, like a hundred little cymbal players in a mad Salvation Army Band – or a whole set of alarm bells.

One of those who got hit was Cone, approaching her to offer assistance. But that wasn't the worst. In the car, Lily told Herbie how Cone said it would be awful for anybody to maul her. Like somebody pawing over his mother.

“What did you say to that, Lily?”

“I told him. ‘What would you make of a mother, belly dancing, who never had a baby?'”

Cone was back inside to check if there was someone with Lily's scratches on their face, for they would be the robber. Basic detective work. Lily had told Cone she did get her claws into the bugger, but not deep enough. Then, in the dark – who knows? It may have been that the bastard was putting money in, not taking it out. She kept dancing on the spot, waiting for the candles to be lit. Damn odd they hadn't been, on every table, from early on.

Was Lily just a distraction, and Cone went into the Achilles, snooping after something – a kafuffle over something gone wrong? A knifing, under one of the tables. A few sharp knives had found their way into legs, other than legs of lamb, lately. Goons liked Greek food, too. And drug pushers.

After his mother remark that went wrong, Cone invited Herb and Lily to see his little girls. Lily made such a fuss over them, it was natural for them to treat her like a grandmother. But Herbie said nothing. The appeal of getting to be a grandmother without ever having had a kid of her own wouldn't last long for Lily. It was inevitable. She looked all mother, and now she was that touch older, a young grandmother.

The dancing took the edge off her years, a well-exercised belly ages well and doesn't let a woman down. Rolls of flesh can grow around a tummy like the rings of a tree, but given the right shake, jangle and roll…! Really and truly… Lily talked belly sometimes till she made Herbie sick. Her shtick about the belly had big words in the middle of it – omm, omphalos, ovum, centrum. When Lily got religious about it, you'd think the money was like what comes on the collection plate at church, a donation for life's oldest tabernacle.

If robbed her belly was in Achilles, for Lily it was sacrilege. Those godawful engineering students from UBC it had to be – the ones who stuck a poor girl on a horse every year and had her play Lady Godiva, buck-naked in February.

On the night, during their visit to his home, Cone told Lily and Herbie he had taken names and discovered this spot of what he called some other trouble.

Herbie went “Uh huh,” and Cone asked if he could take Lily down to the Achilles in the daytime early, and to the station afterward. Lily's report on that sequence of investigation. When they were talking to the manager, she said she could scarcely sit in Achilles, the questions were all about these people Cone had on a list in his notebook. Were they all possible belly robbers or what?

“Uh-huh,” said Herbie to Lily on that.

Herbie hadn't been privy to any of this. He had to take care of his day job in the body shop. Other than Nigel Cone's driving Lily to the Achilles and the Main Street Police Station in the daytime, Herbie didn't feel excluded or jealous. But come to think, Lily out there in the broad daylight, minus all her veils and bangles, was like seeing her naked. Herbie trusted Lily in a crowd of horny men, but alone with someone, without red lipstick, eyeliner and sparkle on her body – Lily's bare belly was public, her everyday face, not.

All this came to Herbie when she was reporting her investigations with Cone.

Then, Lily started reliving the fright for the fun of it, which relieved Herbie and made Cone none too happy.

She turned it into an excuse for being unpredictable and wild. If Herbie touched her unexpectedly, she would spin and slap at his hand.

Once, he accidentally nudged her with a plate of cheese and crackers from behind, when she was sitting watching television, and she swiped it across the room. She watched the soft inside of the Camembert stuck to the wall, while the creamy crust hung like a slice off of somebody's skin. Then, Lily ate it off the wallpaper, pressing her lips into the design as she did this.

As soon as she saw how startled Herbie was, she licked his face, like he was another piece of cheese she'd missed. Her tongue and the Camembert on the wall made him crawl, in a good and a bad way. Then, she turned the lights out at the switch.

“Did you like that new daytime driver of yours?” Herbie finally asked her his shy question.