Authors: Naomi Ragen
She couldn’t let herself think about any of that, not yet! Not when she’d just tunneled out from under the avalanche of heartbreak and betrayal that had crushed and buried her over the last few months, using her own bare hands, having finally realized that the rescue dogs weren’t coming; her parents and fiancé weren’t coming. She was almost there, already seeing the light at the end
of the tunnel. But the sides and roof, she realized, were fragile and thin. Just thinking the wrong thoughts could bring them crashing down. She just couldn’t risk it.
She waited on line at passport control, filled with dread at being recognized. But when her turn came, the pretty Sabra with long dark hair just stamped her passport. “Have a good stay!” she said in heavily accented English. See, Kayla told herself, exulting. My name and face mean nothing to her!
She walked out into a wall of greeters anxious to gather some beloved wanderer into their arms, holding flowers and helium balloons in the shapes of Dora the Explorer and Dumbo. They looked her over; then they looked away. No one was waiting for her.
“Taxi, young lady?”
“No thanks.”
But he wouldn’t budge. “I have nice car. Big, American Buick. Where the young lady go? Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem?”
She shook her head, moving on. She had managed to avoid thinking about the answer to that question the entire eleven-hour plane ride. In any case, she couldn’t afford taxis.
She’d cashed a check drawn on her college tuition account, viewing it as a personal loan she fully intended to repay. Someday. Depending on whether or not a law-school dropout could ever find employment. When that ran out, she’d be on her own.
“Jerusalem,
motek
? We have five. We need six. You come?” the driver of a shuttle service accosted her. The other passengers eyed her hungrily. They, at least, were happy to see her, she told herself climbing in. A black-clad Chassidic man began arguing with the driver about where she would sit, piously adamant that it would not be next to him. Finally, a husband and wife agreed to separate, allowing her to sit down without controversy.
“Where you are going?” the driver asked her, slamming the door shut.
He started the engine.
“Hotel,” she answered, shouting over the noise. “Maybe you know someplace central, and very cheap?”
“Try the little hotel off Ben Yehuda Street,” the wife offered. “My American nieces always stay there.”
“Uff.” The husband shook his head. “Such a hole.”
“She wanted cheap.” The wife shrugged.
“The place. You go?” the driver asked Kayla again, insistently.
“Okay, okay. Ben Yehuda Street.” Her head swirled. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz,
a whirlwind had picked her up, hurtling her through time and space. She didn’t think, as any sensible person would far from home, in a strange country where she knew no one: What am I going to do? No, she didn’t think at all. Closing her eyes, she happily gave in to fatigue.
“
Geveret!
Your stop!”
Were they here already? She opened her sleepy eyes, peering out the dusty window. The white-stone walls of Jerusalem stared back at her. A shiver went up her spine. Excitement? Fear? Dread? She didn’t know.
Jerusalem.
Exhausted, barely conscious of her surroundings, she found the hotel, checked in, and without even undressing fell into a deep sleep.
She awoke feeling like a desert nomad, her hunger and thirst fierce and unfamiliar, her throat a bed of gravel clogged with mud. She coughed, spitting up and half choking on phlegm. She rushed to the bathroom, washing out her mouth and bringing cupped fistfuls of water to her lips to drink. She washed her face, cleaning the pus from the corners of her eyes, drying herself. The towel had seen better days, but at least it was clean.
She pulled back the frayed drapes, opening the dusty shutters. Bright morning light streamed through. She was in the middle of a city street, with lively outdoor cafes and shoe stores and clothing shops. Even two flights up, she could smell the pizza. She was starving, she realized. And filthy.
She stood beneath the burning-hot water, imagining solar water-heating panels baking in the Middle Eastern sun. She diluted it with as much cold as possible, to no avail, finally closing the hot-water tap altogether and making do with cold. Scrubbing off the accumulated grime of the last few days, she watched with pleasure as her skin turned pink and raw. But when she was done, a heap of sweaty clothes confronted her. The idea of putting them back on was disgusting. Rummaging through her backpack, she found one clean pair of underwear, a less sweaty bra, and her dress-for-success interview suit, wrinkled beyond recognition. Even if the room had an iron, which she highly
doubted, pressing it would take at least an hour, at which time she’d be dead of hunger. Taking pleasure in the underwear—an unexpected treasure—she reluctantly pulled on the dark blue skirt, slipping her arms into the white blouse, then the blue jacket. She looked at herself in the mirror, appalled. Although she knew she would suffocate, she pulled on her coat, hoping at least to keep the outfit hidden and thus salvage some self-respect, surprised she still had any left.
The hotel was far seedier than she remembered, she thought as she walked downstairs, taking in the dirty carpeting, the plastic lawn chairs stacked up on the dusty veranda, the lobby crowded with (very) used furniture, looking like a Goodwill warehouse. Even the clerk behind the front desk looked unclean, as well as sullen and a bit dangerous.
She changed some money. “What time is checkout?”
“Twelve. Something not good with room?” he accused.
“No, no. I’m… just… traveling… up north…” she improvised, realizing she now had no choice but to flee.
She followed her nose to the pizza place. Ordering four slices and two regular Cokes, she carried her tray to a sunny spot outdoors. She soon ditched the coat.
Chewing slowly, she closed her eyes, relishing the deliciousness of all that bubbling cheese and tomato sauce. The people at the next table were Russians, she saw, a pretty blond girl, a young man with close-cropped, wheat-colored hair, and a dark-haired older woman. She studied them idly, trying to unravel their relationship. Then the young man put his arm around the older woman, calling her “Mama.” But that could just be a courtesy, couldn’t it? If it really was his mother, why had he brought her along on a date? To the apparent delight of all, the older woman took a big bottle of something with Russian lettering out of a bag, setting it down. There was much laughter, the girl smiling at the woman and speaking in rapid Russian as they all took big slices from a large pizza and poured generous doses from the bottle.
Kayla tried to imagine herself with Seth and his mother in such a situation. There would be no easy laughter, no offering of beverages from plastic bags. It would all be terribly, terribly formal, an inspection and a judgment badly camouflaged in the thin wrappings of an outing involving people who cared about
each other. With her own mother, it would have been different, but equally strained, everyone working hard to be friendly and warm.
She felt suddenly sad.
Her mother tried; she really did. She’d been a bedside storyteller, a breakfast partner. A dinner companion. A play and soccer-game audience who sat in silent approval, good performance or bad. If anything, her mother had always been
way
too interested in what she did and thought. In fact, locating dark, secret corners where her life could unfold, unthreatened by the withering, relentless sun of her mother’s undivided attention, had become something of an obsession. As a child, she’d often felt like an African violet, desperately needing shade before she dared risk unfurling the delicate, velvety petals of her secret flowering self. She hated being pored over and examined, or even exclaimed over in joy. Truthfully, she hadn’t feared criticism more than praise. Both were equally intrusive, a banging down of doors—an uninvited entry into the only space she could call her own.
Both her parents had worked hard at family intimacy. Her mother made those elaborate, delicious sit-down dinners. Her father paid restaurant and hotel bills, taking them all on vacation. They’d provided generous amounts for their children’s educations and houses and birthdays and anniversaries. She and her siblings were grateful. They said thank you. But it was a cautious relationship—changeable, sensitive, resistant. Nothing like these Russians or those flamboyant Italian or Greek families you saw in movies.
But her mother did not expect or require her children’s unconditional adoration to fill up her life. She had her own life.
Kayla both admired and resented that: Every child wants to believe she is the epicenter of a parent’s existence. Yet, when she thought of her sister, who had given up everything to play perfect mom in Greenwich, Connecticut, she felt pity and contempt for such a compromised existence.
She had always envisioned a life filled with passion—for work, for love, for life. She wanted to live with intensity, to do nothing halfway, giving no quarter to life’s complexities, which most people used as sad excuses for failing to live up to their own expectations.
When she was very young, she thought she wanted to be a poet. She would drift off during math classes, filling notebooks with overwrought and passionate
prose:
Life stands in the distance like a great ship anchored in the harbor, calling “all aboard” for those with courage enough to face the great journey.
When she grew bored with prose, she tried her hand at poetry, often completely blocking out lessons in the Torah portion of the week as she concentrated on getting the meter and cadence of her lines right:
From golden skies I heard the cry of my enchanted rainbow friends. Their grief had seeped into my heart. I prayed and weeped, and soon fell into troubled sleep…
When her closest friend pointed out that “weeped” wasn’t a word, and suggested “wept,” Kayla had thought long and hard about the restrictions placed on art by the world, grammar, and spelling rules.
Writing made her feel special, even when her report cards came back with dismal statistics. She would hug her crammed poetry notebooks to her chest as she curled up next to her parents on the down-filled cushions of their living-room sofa, her eyes glistening with moisture as she read lines out loud:
If it darkens and bright images frequent less my widening vista
Passions will soon dry, leaving yearnings and flooding joys to but
murmur with ghostly faintness.
It is then I will sow the worldly seeds of the mundane and too soon will a tired harvest be mine to reap.
Will I even wonder at my indifference to the crimson sunset?
Will doubts gnaw at the absence of diamonds in the snow?
God! Would that I would see the world always through the eyes of my thirteenth year!
Her parents, of course, thought she was a genius. They tried to explain this to her teachers and were unsatisfied with their unfeeling response, but agreed to humor them by adopting their solution: a private tutor for math and science. The first two didn’t last very long. But the third—a tall, blond Brandeis sophomore named Jeff—was a different story.
Jeff. She smiled to herself, remembering her girlhood passion not for the subject matter but for the man. Snobbish and sure of himself, he exuded the pheromones of worldly success. Soon, she put away her poetry notebooks,
trying to learn what he was intent on teaching her, which went way beyond the subject matter.
He was very directed, regaling her with his strategy on how to get into an Ivy League law school, and how to prepare for the LSATs. He told her he already had his list. Although Yale was supposed to be the top school and the hardest to get into, he had still opted for Harvard because his uncle was an alumnus and he figured that would give him a leg up. Besides, you couldn’t compare the campuses: New Haven to Cambridge. New Haven was practically a slum, he’d told her, even a bit dangerous. Because of him, she learned about the monetary value of grade-point averages and extracurricular activities. “You should really get a job,” he told her. “Earning your own money is so empowering and maturing. Otherwise, you’ll be a spoiled princess who is under her parents’ thumbs forever.”
Until then, she had never been aware of being spoiled or even of living a life of rare privilege. She took her custom-made designer bedroom for granted, thinking every Bat Mitzvah girl sat with fabric swatches and carpet samples. But then, she began to look at herself through his eyes. By the age of ten, she’d already been snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef and Maui. By the age of twelve, she’d become so used to the wonders of transatlantic flights and eye-popping hotels, she didn’t even bother asking her parents where they were taking her anymore, confident it would be one more stop in paradise.
But the summer of Jeff, she told her parents that she didn’t want to drag along with them to rain forests, or the top of Machu Picchu; she wanted to earn some money. Like her friends, she found a job working as a junior counselor at a very expensive Jewish summer camp in the Catskills.
The experience was transformative.
She was assigned to a group of eight-year-olds. Two of them refused to drink anything but bottled water, which arrived by the caseload from doting parents in California. Another resolutely resisted putting on a life vest during boating exercises and swimming lessons, thereby exiling herself from water sports the entire summer. Only toward the end of the summer did the little brat finally explain why: “Orange,” she said, “is so not my color.”
They were self-centered, spoiled, blasé, pushy, ungrateful know-it-alls. Kayla envisioned the years stretching ahead of them—one long whine as everyone in
their lives scurried around trying to squeeze a smile or a word of affection out of them. They were bored by the world, left with nothing to wish for that wouldn’t be handed to them—sooner or later—tied up with a red gift bow expertly tied by a professional gift wrapper in a major department store. And in them she glimpsed—with horror—herself.