Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (10 page)

Last summer we moved to Pennsylvania for Daddy's new job as a college dean. In September I began third grade and Mommy became a librarian at Daddy's college and Daddy met a lady professor in the hall outside his office. Then the leaves fell off the trees and Daddy packed up the beige suitcase and Mommy stood next to him with runny eyes and he clicked the suitcase shut and he was gone.

In our bedroom, Laura whispered to me, "Maybe he'll be back.
"
And he did pull up in a truck a few days later, and we ran out to see him, all happy that he'd come home. But then he went inside and just carried out a cot and a rug and said he was sorry, he was so sorry, and we watched him lock the back of the truck and he hugged us and our faces got his shirt all wet, and then he climbed into the truck and drove down the road, and we were standing in the street waving bye and the wind felt cold on our cheeks and then the truck went over the hill and we couldn't hear it anymore. Mommy stayed in their room for a week. When she came out, her eyes were saggy and she burned all the dinners. Finally she said, "We're going to visit Grandma." We've been driving there every weekend since.

We like pulling into the parking lot of Grandma's white brick apartment house. We like the ride to the sixth floor on the elevator with the porthole window, and we like the echo our voices make in the dark halls. We like bursting into the living room, which smells of Grandma's matzo ball soup, and kissing her hello and dumping over the toy box and throwing ourselves onto the couch next to her console color TV and turning it up loud, so we won't hear the
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
of the Garden State Parkway out the back window, and so Mommy can cry to Grandma in the kitchen in peace. For the longest time, that highway kept me up at night. I'd get up and tiptoe past Laura on the sofa, and Beth and Max on cots, and peek into the bedroom, but Grandma would be in one bed, Mommy in the other, everyone asleep, and I'd go back to my own cot and try to read a Peanuts book in the dark. But one night Mommy got up just as I was making my way to the bedroom. She came out and whispered to me, "Just pretend it's the ocean. That's what I try to do," and when she sat on the carpet beside me and I lay down and closed my eyes it did sound like waves after all, and then I fell asleep.

"
All right," Laura says in the car. "Da da da DA dada da DA da.
"

"
'See You in September,'" I guess right away. "That's the opening. Now my turn. Doo doodoodoo doo DOO doo doo.
"

"
'I'm Henry the Eighth,'" Max guesses. We all know the same songs, so this game is easy. Then he says, "Dee dee deedee DEE DEE.
"

"
'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees !" Beth guesses.

"
Great!" we all say. "Your turn, Beth.
"

Beth says, "DUH duh.
"

"
What else?" Laura says.

"
Thaz it," Beth says.

"
There has to be more," Max says.

"
DuH duh.
"

"
But songs have more than two notes," I say. "Do more
."

"
Thaz all iz. DUH duh.
"

We guess "Born Free." We guess "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." We guess so hard we get that messy feeling inside that you sometimes get with Beth, where she makes you laugh but you get steamed up at the same time.

Finally we say, "All right, forget it. Just tell us.
"

"
'Hey Jude,'" she says.

"
Aw, that's not fair," Max says.

"
How can we get it from two notes?" Laura says.

"
It kind of makes sense to me," I say. "It makes sense and doesn't make sense. Both.
"

Mommy says, "All right, we're putting on the radio.
"

Ringo barks.

Mommy got Ringo after Daddy left. Dogs scare Beth and me, and Mommy said that's why we need one. "You should look at what you're afraid of," she said, her voice all shaky.

Ringo's the size of a cat and he's black except for the tan rings around his paws, which is why he was named Ringo by the family that owned his mom. This is handy, since for a longtime Ringo was our favorite Beatle. Ringo's readiness to play won us over the second we let him loose in our living room. We all like to hide him under the covers at bedtime and when Mommy comes to kiss us, we throw open the sheets and—surprise!—he licks her face instead.

Now Ringo is barking along with the music. There are songs we like to sing to and songs we like to hate to sing to, and the one we like to hate the most has come on. It's Jack Jones, and it's called, "The Impossible Dream (The Quest)," and we think that title is stupid, but we know all the words.

"
Now, no one act up this time," Mommy warns.

We sing along to all the words, behaving ourselves. But there's something about that song. It gets louder and louder as it goes, like a monster getting meaner and noisier as it gets closer in your nightmares,
and the music starts pounding harder and harder, and we just can't help it. When we get to the end, we all hate it so much that Ringo is barking and our arms are out in the air like Las Vegas celebrities and Laura and Max and Beth and I are all belting out at the top of our lungs, "To reach the unreachable STARRRRSSSS.
"

"
That's enough!" Mommy says, whipping around to smack anyone she can reach.

We're laughing, it's like the Fourth of July going off in the car, and Mommy says, "I can't take it anymore," as she snaps off the radio.

Silence falls. We didn't want to upset her. We can hear the tires moving over the road at the Delaware Water Gap. We look out at the icicles.

Then Beth says it. For the seventeenth time tonight she says it, twenty-ninth time this weekend, three hundredth time this winter. "Look!" she says, pointing out the back window. "Moon's following us!" We spin around as we always do, and there it is, high in the sky behind us, and we laugh when we see it, and even Mommy lets loose a little ha.

"
It's not following us," Mommy says, her voice tired but nicer. "The moon's just there.
"

"
Iz!" Beth insists. "Iz following us!
"

We know the moon's the big thing and we're just puny underneath, but in Beth's head we're the big thing and it's the moon that's small, and there it is again, her makes-sense-doesn't-make-sense thinking. But her funniness wins out over our steaming up this time, the way it always does with Beth's moon.

"
All right," Laura says. "Forget Alaska. How about Atlantic Ocean?
"

"
Newark," I reply.

"
Kentucky," Max says.

We drive on into the night, doing the geography of the world, the moon hitching a ride above our bumper.

"
Who wants to play Bingo?" Mommy asks.

"We do," we all say.

"
Let's go down to your bedroom," she says to Laura and me, "so we can all sit on the beds together.
"

"
It's cold down there," I say. "It feels like a basement
."

"
It
is
a basement," Mommy says. "But it's not good to have a whole part of the house that you never use." She picks up the dog, since he can't walk downstairs yet, and we traipse out of the kitchen after her.

We like playing Bingo, which is good because Beth is in special ed classes in school now, and they're teaching her letters and numbers, and Mommy tries to help her by playing Bingo.

At the landing, Mommy turns to us and says, "Let's let the puppy go pish," so she opens the door and he scoots into the snow outside. "This is why it's good to live in the country," she says, but her voice says she doesn't mean it. She misses New Jersey. With Daddy gone, we all do.

We get to the bottom of the stairs and go down to the North Pole of our room. Laura and I clear the Creepy Crawler kit off our beds and push them together, so our room becomes a nice soft Bingo palace. All four of us kids and Mommy get on the beds and sit in a circle and throw the blankets over our laps. She deals out the Bingo cards. Mommy calls, "B3. N7." Beth marks the squares on her board. There are two kinds of special ed classes, we've learned. They have big names: Trainable and Educable. Trainable is for kids who have lots of difficulties, Mommy says, like kids who can't dress themselves. Educable is for kids who can read.

Once, I found out that before Beth started school, a man at a big desk in a school office told Mommy that Beth should be put in Trainable classes. "According to her IQ score," he said. Mommy set her hand on the desk and said, "My daughter is going to read," and she put Beth into the Educable class instead
.

"O4," Mommy says. "I5. G7."

"Bingo!" Beth cries out.

There's a noise outside, and we look up. Ringo is scratching his paw at the window above our beds. "He thought we were calling him!" Mommy laughs, bigger than her ha laugh. She opens the window and Ringo leaps in all wiggly and jumps on the bed, spilling the cards to the floor.

Mommy sits Max and Laura and me down in her room and closes the door. She tells us, "Beth needs a little extra help sometimes, and whenever you see that she does, help her. Don't you ever forget: it could have happened to any one of you.
"

Daddy sits Max and Laura and me down in his office when we're visiting and Beth is out with his secretary. He says, "When you get older, you'll have to save money for her, so when we're gone you can take care of her.
"

Mommy says, "People used to hide mentally retarded kids in back rooms. We will always have her as one of the family.
"

Daddy says, "Some people send mentally retarded kids away to institutions, but we'll never do that. Ever, ever, ever. We'll always have room for her.
"

Then when they get up and open the doors I think about how we just heard two words that they never say in front of Beth: "mentally retarded." We never ask why, we just go back to playing with her. But we know, too, not to say those words where she can hear them.

Mommy is away at her library job. The babysitter who has too much of a tan and a different hair color every time she's here is in the kitchen, copying the words to "I Am the Walrus" off our album. Ringo has been following Beth and me around all night, and today we're afraid of him all over again. First, because he's a dog with all those teeth. Second, because we've been teasing him with a sock and jumping around and now he's too excited and he's after us.

Since we know he can run up stairs and not down, we dart down the steps to the landing by the front door. Ringo flops to a halt at the top of the stairs and hangs his head down at us.

Beth and I hold onto each other, giggling with fear. "He gonna get us!" she says.

"
No he won't," I say, but I'm worried he will.

We stare up at him, and he stares down at us, and we're squealing with fear till the babysitter comes out. "What's this?" she says.

"
We're
scared,"
Beth says.

"
He's just a puppy," she says, pulling him back from the edge of the stairs. "I've got him. Come back upstairs.
"

"
She's right," I tell Beth, even though I'm still nervous.

We're grabbing onto each other when we go up the stairs—one.
step. at. a. time. Ringo wags his tail as we come closer, and we relax. By the time we get to the top I realize two things: that Beth knows she's safe holding on to me, and that I kind of like that feeling.

Dear Mr. Simon,

You don't know me, but I know what's best for you. I understand you have 4 great children. Your wife loves you, too. You could say it is not my bizness but I know that you will be happier if you go back to them all now.

I sit at Mommy's sewing table in her bedroom, trying to bang out this letter. She put her Underwood typewriter on the same table where she keeps her Singer sewing machine because we've just moved to a city apartment with no room for a desk. I'm nine, and we came back to New Jersey so Mommy could live closer to Grandma, because Grandma's her best friend. We live one block from the border with Newark, where Mommy and Dad grew up. Dad runs a mail correspondence school there now, but he lives in Greenwich Village with the lady professor, who wants to buy a farmhouse in upstate New York so she can turn it into a commune.

If you go back you will make everyone happy again. The dog, Ringo, will like you too.

Mommy taught me how to press down on the keys. Every day I write letters and stories: a girl stows away on Columbus's ship, a girl obtains the knowledge that could stop Booth from killing Lincoln. I write fake newspapers. Beth still can't read more than the alphabet, so I write plays too, and then Laura and I put on a show for everyone, wearing costumes and using accents.

Now I'm working on this letter, which I am planning to sign "A friend.
"