Oil and water.

With sweaty hands I stood at the small airport terminal under the broiling noonday sun awaiting the latest arrival. Vera had not told me a thing about this girl…just to be there to greet her with a big smile and show her around. I had been reminded to be on my best behavior as an official school ambassador. As the sweat dripped down my legs and arms under their respective coverings I could only hope I did a good job. I had no desire to fuck this one up, to do something wrong and ruin my chances for advancement among the ranks of students.

Her voice echoed in my head. “Don’t screw this up Cala…this is your first chance to prove your more than some wanna be porn star. Prove you have a brain upstairs and a desire to go places and doors will open for you. Screw this up and the basement will feel like a picnic, not that you can ever mention it to anyone but me. “ With the blood pounding in my temples I stood still as the concrete posts, unyielding in the light breeze that did no more than make my head scarf flutter and the hem of the long skirt bounce against my ankles. I vowed to be civil, proper, and not to cuss. The last one of course I could never be fucking certain of.

The door opened, the little stairway pushed into place as the next student soon stood and shielded her eyes to the hot glare of the sun. I smiled….remembering my own desire to be elsewhere when I arrived. The shaggy blond hair framed her face and as she strode closer I could see she was pretty, but that much was almost expected around here. The stride though, confident, a knowing bounce to her gait that said she could handle herself. This was no mouse. I smiled, happy to have the chance to met someone who was happy in their own skin.

As she came closer I waived, a simply movement of the hand. Her face was tight, like a barely controlled storm of anger road just under the surface. In that moment I had to wonder what I had looked like as I realized that this was not my destination of choice as well. I would be good…I would be good….

He dress was casual, the short cutoffs something I would rather have worn, but here in my official capacity I had no choice but to wear the uniform. With each ground eating stride the muscles rippled under the skin of her legs; a girl that had seen a gym or two I would bet. The tight baby tee topped her body and gold bounced between her breasts much as the rings bounced dangling from her ears reflecting back the sun in shimmering sparks of white.

Carefully I wiped my sweaty hands upon the sides of the skirt trying to be oh so discrete and probably failing miserably. While opening my mouth to speak my eyes caught the symbol between her breasts. A symbol my father hated…had taught me to hate. A symbol of destruction for Arab hopes and dreams under the Zionist boot. I who prided herself on being more of an American still could not help but react to that blatant display of this girls allegiance in a world gone mad with destruction.

Instead of hello…how are you my name is Cala…all that came out was….

“Shit” Vera had set me up…set me up good so that I might understand how things really stood…

“”Fuck…sorry…ahh….first time doing this, umm….my name is Cala Maysson Sumayyah and…I bid you welcome to the school so long as you don’t blow anything up.” Everyone knows the Star of David and what it stands for. How the Zionist pigs waged war on the innocent Palestinians and stole their land and homes and sent them into exile. Shit that did not come out right…fuck me…fuck Vera…I did not want to end up in that basement ever again.

“I hate you. I hate you both.”

Seven words, seven monosyllabic words. Those seven short words hung there, never far from the front of Tamar’s mind. She’d tried to forget about them, tried to push them out of her mind and replace them with something, anything, else. Nothing worked. Not gossip magazines, planning diary entries, deep breathing or staring at the seat back in front of her. No matter what she did or how enthusiastically she did it those words wormed their way back into the forefront of her consciousness and each time she felt guiltier than before.

Tamar sighed.

It was not the first time she’d told her parents she hated them, it was not even the most vitriolic of times but for some reason it seemed worse than the ones before. There was a sense of finality to it, a sense that the words would not be easily taken back. There’d be no tearful ‘I’m sorry’ moments after their utterance. Tamar crossed her legs and stared at the seat back in front of her.

The plane began to descend. There was no announcement, like there’d been no announcement about takeoff and Tamar was forced to scramble to find her seatbelt. It clicked into place and she felt her stomach tumble as the plane descended. She did not like flying and if she hadn’t slept the great majority of the flight Tamar thought she’d have probably gone insane. Thank God for small favors, she thought.

The wheels screeched when they touched down and goose bumps rose up and down Tamar’s legs. She shivered and ran her hand over her leg. Make sure you shave, she reminded herself. The plane slowed and then stopped with a sudden, definitive jerk that threw Tamar forward until the seatbelt around her waist snapped her back against her seat. She was here, where ever here was.

It took thirty seconds or so for Tamar to become convinced the plane had indeed stopped. Once so convinced she unbuckled her lap belt and stood up. She extended her arms high above her head, locked her knees, arched her back and stretched to work out the kinks of a long, long flight. The nap had thrown off her sense of how much time passed but it had to have been at least eight hours and eight hours was a long time to be cooped up in a plane, asleep or not. Tamar groaned as the stretch reached its apex and dropped her arms to her sides, satisfied and fulfilled.

Tamar grabbed her backpack and looked herself over and immediately decided “like hell” would have been a pretty appropriate way to describe herself at the moment. Her hair was a mess, her clothes were rumpled and her shorts were too short. Her shorts were always too short. The length, or lack thereof, of her shorts was a running issue between Tamar and her parents. She tugged them down and created a brief moment of modesty.

And like that, it was gone.

She shrugged. It wouldn’t be an issue for long, she assumed. The school had a dress code. A severe one she assumed given the glowing manner in which her dad talked about it. He seemed to think it would “do her good” but Tamar did not agree. As far as she was concerned there was nothing wrong with short, tight shorts. She had a nice ass and the reason for having a nice ass, as far as she could tell, was to flaunt it. Tamar grabbed her backpack, slung it on to both shoulders and headed up the aisle to the door that now hung open.

The sun was bright and Tamar was forced to squint as she stepped out of the plane and down the small staircase onto the tarmac. She held a hand to her forehead to shield her eyes from the sun but the relief was minimal. Heat reflected off the black asphalt in wavy lines and Tamar felt herself begin to sweat. She brushed her hair out of her face and forced it behind an ear. The solution was temporary but a temporary solution was better than no solution at all.

A figure stood a ways away and Tamar started towards it. Her strides were purposeful and deliberate and there just enough of a bounce in her step to convey self confidence. Rightly or wrongly, Tamar learned that projecting confidence was the key to feeling confident and confidence, real or imagined, was the best protection in a new situation. Her breasts bounced ever so slightly as she walked and the Star of David charm dangling from her gold necklace swayed in between them.

The girl waved, Tamar lifted a hand in response and acknowledgement and stopped a half dozen feet from her. The girl was dark skinned and her hair was long, black and curly. Tamar felt the girl’s brown eyes settle between her breasts on the Star of David. Persian, Arab maybe..., she thought, not that it matters she hates me already so who gives a fuck what she is.

“Shit,” the girl said. Tamar wanted to snap back. This wasn’t her ideal either, after all, but she held her tongue and counted to five. By five she’d decided she didn’t care who the girl was she was going to speak her mind but the girl had started talking again and Tamar was forced to bite her tongue.

“Fuck…sorry…ahh….first time doing this, umm….my name is Cala Maysson Sumayyah and…I bid you welcome to the school so long as you don’t blow anything up.”

Tamar’s ears turned red and she gnashed her teeth. As long as I don’t blow anything up!? she wanted to scream. As long as I... Hamas blows things up, Palestinians, Arabs, people like you. A part of her and not a small part wanted to hit the girl, to kick her, to bust her lip and make her bleed but she didn’t. She held back. “I’m Tamar Ben-David,” she said through gritted teeth, “from Israel.”

Now it was five words that hung in the air.

There was fire in those veins. The crimson heat of it touched her ears and flashed across her cheeks. A Zionist…had not my father told me so many times the way they had smooth tongues and ran the world. They were worse than Saddam Hussein in his book of grudges. Now I had met my first, a chance to learn firsthand if my father had been right.

His father had died in the Golan, leading an attack of Iraqi armor against the Zionist state in 1967 or so the story has been told. It had been a bloody affair and many a good Arab man had gone on to heaven to await his reward for dying in jihad. Of course the western part of me always wondered why the women never got 99 male virgins to play with. Maybe I was really not Arab afterall.

I was an American, for all intents and purpose. Still that did not make the nightly news images on Al’ Jeezera of Palestinian suffering go away. The bombs the Zionists dropped from their Western supplied airplanes, the bullets that they fired upon the rightful inhabitants of the land. It was land stolen by the Zionists through the softness of the UN and its western supporters. America was a good land, but it was not right in supporting the wrong side in this struggle against oppression…. Still there was the other side.

CNN nightly showed the death and destruction wrought by the suicide bombers. The weeping families of Jews laid low by a madman with a bomb strapped to their chest. And then 9-11 happened. Suddenly we were the killers, we brought death and destruction to the land I lived in and loved; The land that had given my father refugee. The dual cultures I lived within seemed to clash, to break against one another in our fragile household. Such conflicting images…the Palestinians jubilant in the streets in support of the terrorist and the Iranians…fellow Shites walking solemnly in their capital Tehran against the violence. Who would have thought? For an 11 year old girl it was all too confusing.

And so we stood eye to eye upon that hot sweltering tarmac, the soft breeze fluttering her hair and my head scarf. So far from the eye of the storm…and yet it was here. What we did with it rested on a razors edge. I had my doubts as to whether an Arab could befriend a Jew…But this was a strange place.

“American myself, though born in Iraq…so…which is right Al Jezzera or CNN….or neither….?” I looked at those eyes and the black swirl of emotion caught in them. I had to wonder if it was the beat of her heart I heard. I would probably hear about his later…I never should have baited her but then I had never met a Jew personally before. It was a lot of baggage to move.

A huge glob of sweat rolled down the back of Tamar’s neck and vanished into her tee shirt. It was hot. The sun felt like it was five feet above her head and her flip flops started to bubble and melt on the sizzling asphalt. Tamar ran her hand across the back of her neck and wiped away the lingering sweat. Their eyes locked and the two girls stared at each other without speaking.

Tamar suspected she knew what the other girl was thinking because she knew what she, herself, was thinking. Does she hate me because of what I am? Tamar was no stranger to being disliked and, largely, it didn’t bother her so long as she was disliked for her, not her religion or ethnicity. Tamar’s eyes never left the other girl, her face blank and (she hoped) unreadable.

She watched the other girl watched her as the wheels turned in her head. It was strange, she decided, to be both so far and so close to home at the same time. Tamar breathed through her nose, steady and slow. Finally the other girl spoke up and broke the long silence. “American myself, though born in Iraq…so…which is right Al Jezzera or CNN….or neither….?”

Which is right, Tamar wondered.

After a long moment Tamar shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said. “I know what I know from experience but I don’t know what they know.” Undoubtedly she’d play this conversation back in her mind a number of times over the next few days and pick out a dozen, or more, spots where things could have gone better. She exhaled between pursed lips, “I don’t have a lot of stuff with me, just a couple of bags.”

Did I bait her, she asked herself. Was I, after being cramped up in a plane, pissed off at my dad, looking for a fight? Maybe, she decided, a little bit. But the girl had called her a terrorist so some hostility was understandable and Tamar was fairly certain she stayed within the bounds of ‘fair play’. Of course, she knew, if the conversation devolved those bounds would not hold either of them.

Sweat trickled down my cloth covered legs. As we stared at one another I could see she was hot as well. Somehow the heat here was not so bad as New York in the summer. The cooling ocean breeze helped break the waves that radiated up from the tarmac. Well at least in my estimation. Still….the A/C was a nice and welcome convenience and one I could use a little of right then.

Maybe I could learn to be more civil, after all her story might be like mine, stuck her against her will. I needed to put the hate behind me which would take some time to un-teach what had been taught, but I suspected it was the first sign to know something had been taught to being able to do something about it.

With a deep breath, I set a smile upon my face, eager to show her what this place was about and needing to earn a few pats on the shoulder instead of demerits for fighting in a public place. I almost had to laugh inside…

“bags” I waved my arms in dismissal, smiling a little better now, “not to worry they will be in your room. Not that your cigarettes or alcohol or drugs or any such thing to include in my case the clothes my father so disapproved of, which was everything I owned will be in them when you get them. We can go there first if you are concerned or just start the tour and I will make a meaningful attempt to get to know you and be more civil. I find it is easy to condemn someone you do not know than the one you do. At any rate your choice…immediate tour…check your bags and room out?” Smiling, swaying….feeling a little more at peace now.

At least we felt the same about the conflict our cultures waged against one another. That no news seemed to have monopoly on the truth was a good start. Perhaps together we might discover a different truth and that was something I wanted very much. Live, learn and love. It did seem a much better way forward.