The Tenth Song

by Ragen, Naomi

  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 r
esolutely 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.

  When she came home, Jeff was gone. He never made it into Harvard, her parents told her. He was in some little college in the Midwest.

  She refused her parents’ offer of another tutor, promising to keep up with her grades. But in a sense, every boy she’d been interested in from then on had been a Jeff.

  She began to spend more time at the library, reading everything: romance novels, travel books, the poetry of Emily Dickinson. She chattered less, played less, asked for less. And her grades zoomed up. Her teachers gushed over her like doting older relatives giving Bat Mitzvah speeches. Her principal, cold, undemonstrative Mr. Arens, once even put his arm around her mother and asked: “Mrs. Samuels, what is your secret? I’ve never seen such a transformation in a student.”

  Far from being delighted, her mother had been completely unnerved. Had they solved a problem or created one? Had they come down on Kayla too hard and “broken her spirit”? Or had they assured her future?

  Kayla found all the parental hand-wringing hysterically funny. “Ambition. Almost as bad as being on drugs,” she’d mocked.

  She looked down at her Brooks Brothers blouse where the pizza sauce had stained it an oily red. So much for ambition, so much for hard work; she sighed, trying and failing to clean it off with a thin napkin.

  What had it all come to?

  She got up, leaving the fourth slice of pizza untouched, and walked slowly down the street without purpose or direction. Crossing over busy Jaffa Road, she suddenly found herself in the middle of an outdoor market. The air was scented by piles of cookies fresh from the oven, newly roasted nuts, and the exotic perfume of paprika, coriander, and cumin.

  Her eyes feasted on the piles of red strawberries, the passion fruit, and oranges. The exuberance of the produce was matched only by the joie de vivre of the vendors who sang out in praise of their wares: “Come buy strawberries, sweeter than wine, and cheaper than you deserve,” warbled one. “Oranges, bright like the sun, filled with vitamins. Take some for your sons.”

  She had always thought of America as rich, and all other countries as poor. But as she looked at the amazingly cheap prices of fresh local produce, she realized that even the poorest Israeli could feast every day on strawberries and oranges—even in the dead of winter—something most people in Brookline could never afford.

  A one-legged beggar in a wheelchair held out his cup, sobbing dramatically. She dug into her pocket, taking out a few coins. As soon as she dropped them into the can, his sobs stopped, his face wreathed in a smile of cynical self-mockery and congratulation. He had gotten his coin and kept his self-respect.

  She looked at him in admiration. He couldn’t care less what anybody thought of him. Her entire life, on the other hand, had been one long search for an affirmation of her worth: degrees to prove her intelligence; the trophy boyfriend to prove her beauty and desirability. So far, her life had been one big report card signed by the universe, all A’s. But what kind of person are you, really? she asked herself. Do you have any quality or achievement worth admiring?

  She thought of her grandmother, Esther Cantor. They had been so close, she had always told herself, remembering all those visits she had made when she was a little girl. But she wondered now if that was ever true. She would come to her, laying her accomplishments—drawings, poems, report cards, certificates of merit—on her kitchen table like offerings. And her grandmother would accept them, making her feel—as no one else ever had—that it all meant something. She told herself she was making the old woman happy. But really, she received more than she gave. She was royalty when she arrived unexpectedly, fussed over and fed and admired. But each passing year, the intervals between visits had grown, reducing their meetings to a handful or less, until the old woman had had a stroke and could no longer speak.

  In the beginning, Kayla had hurried to the nursing home to hold her hand and whisper kind words. But then she’d gotten tired and bored. The week her grandmother passed away, Kayla couldn’t remember the last time she’d been to see her.

  And now, she had left her father, too, just when he really needed her.

  Why have I come here? she asked herself. What is the real reason? Or is it just another flight from responsibility? Another ugly, unforgivable act of selfishness?

  A group of klezmer musicians began to play. A Chassidic woman pushing a crying baby in a carriage, two smaller children trailing after her, all talking at once, passed her by. From a number of different command posts, the noise of walkie-talkies from security guards blared. The rumble of traffic merged with the songs of the merchants hawking their wares.

  I have to get out of here, out of the city. I need to think, to work it out. I need some peace and quiet.

  Her eyes brimming, she hurried down the street back to her hotel.

  And then she saw it.

  She stopped, leaning against the building: a square bronze plaque dated August 9, 2001, for the victims of a Hamas homicide bomber who had blown up a Sbarro pizza parlor in the heart of Jerusalem.

  She held her breath as she read the names. A sixty-year-old from Brazil. A thirty-one-year-old American tourist. Two sixteen-year-old girlfriends from Jerusalem. A Dutch mother and father in their early forties, along with their fourteen-year-old, four-year-old, and two-year-old. A young mother and her eight-year-old daughter . . .

  Her heart began to beat erratically, feeling as if it might burst.

  She closed her eyes, trembling, leaning against the building, imagining what it must have been like. The summer crowd filling the restaurant. The laughter. The baby carriages pushed close to the wall. The smell of melting cheese. And then the explosion. The noise and black smoke. The scattered limbs and bits of cloth. A child’s screams. A baby bottle and someone’s broken glasses lying in the blood. A bomb purchased by money given to terrorist organizations. A terrorist’s family and his accomplices rewarded with thousands of dollars from terrorist organizations. They couldn’t, wouldn’t, do these things if they had no money. The money made it possible.

  What . . . ? she thought, unbearably. What . . . if . . . ? What if her father was guilty? No, not in the sense of having deliberately transferred the money to terrorists for a profit. She would never believe that of him! Never! But something else. Like running over a small child who runs right in front of your car with absolutely no warning, no chance to brake in time. You’d be blameless. Blameless! And yet, without wanting to, without any intention, you’d killed a child.

  Her father had admitted transferring the money—so much money!—and that money had gone to terrorists. Her wonderful, kind, honest father. It had gone to facilitate the worst crimes imaginable. People were dead because of that money. And, like the blameless driver who kills the toddler, her father had been part of it. And because she was his daughter, she too was now part of it.

  She sat down in the triangle known as Zion Square, now the front yard of a bank high-rise. It was filled with Peruvian flute players, beggars, political activists, and homeless young people who had adopted it as their own. In the center was an ambulance from Magen David Adom, which was collecting blood donations.

  She said nothing as she walked in off the street, accepting their smiles and thanks as she lay down on the table. She welcomed the pain of the needle through her skin, turnin
g her head to watch as her blood dripped out, filling a bag.

  Her stomach contracted, her throat caught, and large, silent tears streamed down her face.

  “Are you feeling all right?” the nurse asked in concern.

  “Yes, I’m fine, really,” she insisted unconvincingly. She saw the nurse exchange glances with the orderly. She detached the tube and the bag, bandaging her arm.

  “Sit up slowly. I’ll bring you some juice.”

  She felt dizzy and strange as she sipped the sweet orange-flavored drink.

  “We don’t get many tourists these days. Except the German kids. The kind who had Nazis in the family. For them, coming to Israel is a kind of atonement. They also give blood,” the nurse said.

  She suddenly felt faint.

  Like a German kid. The kind who had Nazis in the family.

  She let herself be led to a chair, where she was given more juice. She sat there, dazed, until the dizziness passed, her mind clouded and blank. She took out her cell phone and dialed.

  “Seth. Did I wake you?”