You Are Always Safe With Me Read Online Free

make calls.
    “The must be desperate to know if their families are safe,” Harriet said. “What a pity they don’t build safer buildings here.”
    All traffic had stopped, people on the street were poised as if frozen in time. But, after a moment, the world began to move again. No caverns opened under the street cars, no fires spit from the center of the earth.
    “It’s really lucky,” Harriet said, “that at home we only have hurricanes.”

HOUSE OF TURKISH DELIGHT
    Lilly and her mother heard their names called by the driver of a large van who hurried them inside and then tore along the city streets from their hotel to another, where two people got on and to another, where a single person boarded. They were delivered to the “House of Turkish Delight” which promised an “extravaganza that promises you a peek into the heart of Turkey with folk music and authentic belly dance.” Lilly, who had studied belly dance for two years in a course at the local Y, looked forward to seeing the real thing. She had loved both the music and the movement of the dance and felt it had expressed some hidden aspect of her nature that had no outlet otherwise. She and the other women in the class, two of them grandmothers, had found themselves friends as well as classmates. All of them had been pleased to find an art form that appreciated their rounded bellies, and helped them express the gentle sensuousness that the music invited.
    “The House of Turkish Delight”—once they got inside—looked to Lilly like a Las Vegas showroom, with narrow tables lined in vertical rows to meet the stage floor. She and her mother were asked their nationality by a waiter who placed in front of them a small American flag on a stand. A speedily dispatched dinner was also set before them short cycles, wine, appetizers, some sort of broiled meat, sauces Lilly could not identify, vegetables she had never seen before, breads and spreads to put on them. This dinner event was costing them seventy dollars each, which was why Harriet was sure the food would be safe to eat. However, once she had her fork in hand, she looked doubtful. “Do you think they leave the meat standing out for hours?” she whispered to Lilly. “Do you think they all wash their hands back there in the kitchen?”
    In between courses, on the stage, a folk troupe dressed in Turkish costume played extremely loud music, tromped around the stage and banged on drums. When coffee and a sweet pastry dessert was served, the belly dancer came leaping into view…her enormous breasts nearly falling out of her spangled bra, her tassels shaking, her coins jangling, her beads ringing.
    Lilly recoiled in the blast of noise and movement, and shuddered further when the woman stepped onto their table, between the flags of many nations, the coffee cups and the dessert dishes. She spun above them, a tornado of noise and color and thunderously shaking breasts.
    The others at their long table, two couples from Japan, a couple from Australia, others from England, were laughing and yelling; (while Lilly and her mother were still each nursing her glass of wine, the others had apparently consumed several bottles.) The belly dancer continued her gyrations, using more of the movements, Lilly thought, of a stripper than a belly dancer. Then she leaped to the floor, and began to tease one of the men in the group, flinging her veil over his head, jiggling her breasts inches from his eyes and then stopping to pose, provocatively, while the nightclub’s hired photographer took a picture. Then she moved on to another man, posed for another picture.
    “Oh my,” Harriet said. “I don’t want my picture taken.”
    “Don’t worry, Mother, she isn’t going to pose with us. She’s already figured out who will buy the photos.”
    At this point, a large jovial MC wearing a silly hat began giving belly dance “lessons” on the stage, exaggeratedly wiggling his hips and saying how simple it was, that “anyone can