The Night Singers by Valerie Miner

the dinner tomorrow.”
    â€œYou have your studies.”
    â€œYou have your job. Besides, I wouldn’t have my studies if it weren’t for you.”
    â€œWell, this isn’t your Pacific dream. I always wonder if you’re happy in the desert.”
    â€œThey say it rains all the time in Seattle. OK if you’re a fish, but Willi would hate that. Besides, I’d have no friends there.”
    Jennifer smiled and turned back to the stove, unconsciously running her hands over her belly.
    â€œAnd to think,” Elsbeth said, “if we lived up there, how far Willi would be from his little sister Amelia.”
    Jennifer stirred the pasta sauce. “Amelia,” she whispered, talking through her love .

The Palace of Physical Culture
    I love to watch naked women. I would enjoy men, too, but they’re not allowed into the ladies’ locker-room. Watching is the best part of each day at the Y. Of course the glance must be discreet, you don’t want people thinking you have designs on them or the handbags they leave behind when they shower. Actually, most women are curious: comparing, contrasting, worrying, admiring. In this reunion of exiles, long separated by civilised attire, I decide that naked assembly promotes democracy because, after all, most of us have the same basic equipment. We stare at ourselves, at what we might become, at what we once were: big bottoms, little bottoms, pregnant bellies, surgical scars, buff thighs, silvery stretch marks, shaved legs, hairy armpits, tattoos, bunions, pink nipples, red nipples, brown nipples, pierced nipples.
    My dear brother gave me a summer pass to the Y this June when I turned forty. A complicated present. Yes, I’d been planning to exercise as soon as I found time. But, was he saying I looked fat? Did he notice the way my leg stiffened after sitting through a long movie? Was this a use-it-or-lose-it ultimatum? No, honestly, he insisted. He worked out himself and just thought I’d enjoy it. What a thoughtful gift. Maybe he wanted me to live longer.
    By July, whenever I enter the locker-room, I anticipate the familiar, curiously welcoming potpourri of disinfectant, sweat, moisturiser, deodorant and talcum powder. Today I spot Mrs Hanson slowly rolling support nylons over the amazingly irregular shape of her left knee. I hold my greeting until she has pulled the pantihose to her waist.
    â€œSo, how’s the new hip?” (A macabre question, I would have thought a month ago, but now it seems as natural as the frequently asked, “What’s your pulse rate?”)
    â€œGood, good,” the old woman nods with pleasure. “I got through all the kicking and treading.”
    I savour the smell of Mrs Hanson’s apple-mint soap.
    â€œAnd the waterjacks. All of it,” she beams.
    On first encounter, Mrs Hanson is an oddly diaphanous figure: wispy halo of curls atop white, bulky shoulders; thighs and hips so much loosely packed ricotta cheese; breasts sagging like the flesh of a plucked turkey. Who assigned me a locker across from this enormous old woman? She’s hardly what I consider a fitness muse. For a while, I am annoyed by the whole Senior Aqua Class who usurp bench space, noise space, shower space in mid-day, when joggers and weightlifters need to slip in and out over tight lunch breaks. Can’t the water birds reschedule for three in the afternoon? Or is that nap time, prime canasta hour, the perfect part of the day for a sloe gin fizz and a little virtual sex? In truth, I grow petulant.
    Then I study the naked Mrs Hanson. Dignity is the only word for her movement in the nobly earned flesh of those pale arms and legs. Her walk is light and graceful, despite a limp, which I soon understand is from her second hip replacement. I’ve learned a lot about Mrs Hanson this month, about how she still goes ice fishing on Lake Minnetonka in February, about how she lives alone, but likes to visit the “elderly