Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (12 page)

So Beth fixes on Rodolpho, lost to me, and maybe to herself, in the labyrinth of her own mind.

I sit back and follow my own thoughts. So far, it hasn't been so difficult to attend to the good-sister obligation on these visits, simply putting off other obligations till tomorrow.
But you must admit,
the dark voice says,
it
is
wasted time, just spacing out here on a bus.
I snap back, But since meeting Tim, I have taken note of countless tiny details I'd missed before: the shadows of branches that lie like lace across the windshield, the wing-shaped triangle of Rodolpho's pale blue shirt where he would otherwise be wearing his tie. And since meeting Jacob, I have measured my actions against a new standard, asking myself which impulses are generous or selfish. No, this time hasn't been wasted at all.
Oh yeah?
the voice hisses back.

"Are you cold? Beth asks.

"What? I say.

"You're shaking like you're cold. I'm not cold. I'm
warm.

"I'm fine," I say, hugging my shoulders.

Out the window I notice seagulls circling, and then I realize we're crossing a river. I peer down. Waves flicker like silvery pennants in the midmorning sun, as if hailing our arrival. Signs point toward an airport, and as my shoulders warm up, Rodolpho noses our bus onto that road.

"So how did you first meet Beth?" I say when we brake for an intersection, eager to re-immerse myself in my—in
Beth's
—journey.

Rodolpho glances at Beth with a should-I-tell? look. I detect a slight apprehension in her face, then a hey-the-truth-won't-hurt response in his.

"We met six years ago, on the Niteline," he says, as we sit at the red light. "That's the only bus that runs after seven
P.M.
, and it makes all the major stops in the city. She didn't usually ride it—"

"And I don't now, either," she interjects.

"But then there she was, day after day, and she started talking to me. Always, the passenger starts talking to me. When I'm driving, I'm a stone-cold person. I take my job seriously, because I have a lot of lives in my hands, so I don't start anything up. That's why I didn't say much back, but I heard it all: stuff about Jesse, your family, her everyday life. Then I just let her ride my bus all the time. It just evolved that way."

He is quiet as he accelerates through the crosswalk, and I can tell, as the houses begin to grow sparse outside our windows, that six years ago Rodolpho hadn't realized what a crush Beth had on him, nor how minutely she had learned to read his emotions in the sliver of profile she could observe from her seat, in the smallest shifts in the nape of his neck. He certainly hadn't understood that in her letters to us, he was the only subject she wrote about, and, indeed, the only reason she was on the Niteline at all, and that his advice, which he offered casually at stop signs and which sometimes contradicted ours, might as well have been hand-delivered by a god.

Instead, as I learn at the next intersection, "She just kept riding and riding. And
riding.
So I put her on a schedule. And she stuck by those limits."

"Really?" I say, glancing at her with admiration.

"Well..."she says.

"But she found another way to test my limits," he says dryly. "She would talk about her love life with Jesse. Explicitly."

"And
loud,
" Beth admits, no longer hiding this story from me.

"Too loud. I said, 'Beth, what you do with Jesse is your business. You shouldn't be telling people that. You got to pipe down.' I gave her warnings. Then I said, 'Next time you do that, you're off.' She did it again, and I said, 'That's it.' I stopped the bus and put her off."

He hits the gas. Miles with only pastures and stands of trees roll by; I note that the sprinkling of passengers with whom we'd begun has thinned to three solitary window gazers, perhaps wandering amid their own fantasies, perhaps trying not to hear a story they might have witnessed. I glance back at Beth. I feel for her; her hormones had flared so giddily out of control that she couldn't restrain herself, broadcasting soft-core porn on a bus.

"How long were you banished?" I ask Beth.

Without taking her sight off him, she says, "A long time. It was terrible." I try to reconstruct her life in that grim period: day after day, Rodolpho gliding along the streets, Beth perched on the curb as he sails by, longing for all the indulgences she'd raved about in her letters. I know that she pined for the way that he would keep the heat off in the winter until she boarded, and then, only for her, blast it on. I know that she missed his spontaneous quizzes: practical arithmetic problems, hard spelling words like "Mississippi." But her greatest hunger, I'm sure, was for those times when he would uncap a pen at a traffic light and compose poetry on the back of a transfer. His marriage had disintegrated, and he needed to write it down, and sometimes, when it was just he and Beth on the bus, he'd fish out a transfer, and read her his rhymes. She would glow the rest of the day, feeling deliciously privileged.

We crest a hill, and the sky opens wide. "Then one day," he continues at the next curb, "I saw Beth up ahead at one of my stops, and instead of passing by, I braked and opened the door. She was standing all alone at the foot of the steps. 'I told you you're off the bus,' I said. In a tiny voice, she said, 'I've learned my lesson.' I said, 'Once and for all?' 'Once and for all.'"

Beth's smile resumes, her eyes remembering.

"I wanted our little spat to be over, too," Rodolpho says. "'All right,' I told her. "'Come on.' She's been riding with me ever since."

"Not
ev
ry day," Beth quickly corrects him.

"She sticks to my limits: three days a week, with only one trip each day."

This diet seems too meager for her tastes, but, she tells me later, she can tolerate it, "'cause I get Saturday afternoon." That's when Rodolpho parks on a side street, unwraps the turkey sandwich he's brought for lunch, and allows her to sit in the empty bus, singing along to the Top Ten countdown on her radio while he eats. Then, when he's finished, he'll unfold a slip of poetry from his wallet, and she'll shut off her radio, and in the narrow luncheonette that's all their own, he'll read to his audience of one.

We park beneath the airport canopy as a Cessna zooms down the runway and lifts off. Rodolpho lets the last passengers out, but looks through the windshield, watching the aircraft rise.

"I got a surprise for you," Beth says to him.

He glances at her, then out the window behind her shoulders, where, I see, he spies a planter bursting with hyacinths. "Bet I know what it is," he says.

"Oh, you know, I know you do, you
know
me. Iz spring and you know what I want to do in the spring, 'cause thiz when you all take your
ties
off, yeah, thiz the
good
time, you know it."

She rummages in her Pooh backpack. A single-engine Bonanza bellies up to the airstrip.

"I wanted to be a pilot," Rodolpho says, his voice a murmur as he peers out to the plane. "I wanted to be out there, up free in the air, able to see everything."

"Why don't you
try?
" Beth says, her face in her bag.

"I did," he says. "I took lessons here. I even soloed a few times."

"So what happened?" I say.

He breaks the hypnotic pull that the plane seems to exert on him. "You know, I had a lot of plans. I was going to make money, and have everything that money could buy my wife and me: the nice home, the nice cars, the credit card. That was my idea of success. I worked three, four jobs, making myself rich. I bought a house. I had another house built for us. I got a Dodge Ram. I took flying lessons. I thought this was it, that I was going to get everything I want.

"But there was one problem. I worked so hard for all this that I was never home. My wife'd get upset, but I wouldn't give an inch. It was my way or the highway—it was just no balance at all. Finally, it all came crashing down around me, and when the divorce came, I ran out of money to pay for flying lessons."

"I'm so sorry," I say.

"Oh, it's all right," he says. "Because I met a woman after all this, and now I look at success a different way. It used to be just stepping out every morning and seeing my Dodge Ram sitting there, all shiny. Now it's making Sabrina smile. That's my idea of success now: not thinking of what I can get, but thinking of what I can give."

"Did you ... did you ever try to fly again?" I say, my voice suddenly raspy.

"No, but I'm not sure I need to anymore." I nod, a gesture so politely forced that I briefly feel a crick in my neck. "I really don't need anything," he adds, "except to be able to come home, share my day, cry on somebody's shoulder, have someone I want to do things with. I still want to fly, but it's better to keep my feet on the ground if I have to pay that kind of price." I stretch my face into a smile but can't help wondering if I could discipline myself to reach this point in my own life.

"Do you think you'll marry Sabrina?" I ask Rodolpho.

"I hope so," he says. "But if things don't work out, at least I found somebody new. Somebody new within myself, that is."

"Got it!" Beth says, and extracts a Polaroid camera from her backpack.

"I knew it." Rodolpho laughs.

"Knew what?" I say.

Beth says, "Iz warm enough for
pic
tures."

Then Beth bounds down the steps to the curb, camera in hand. I expect Rodolpho to rise and pose beside his headlights, but he remains in his seat, cooperatively unbuttoning his driver's shirt, just enough to show a little chest hair.

"Thaz it," she says, pointing her lens up the steps toward him. "A little more."

"You got three buttons already," he says. "Last year I just did two."

"
Four
this year." She laughs, and he obliges.

She snaps a shot, then climbs back on the bus. As Rodolpho gives the engine gas and spins his wheels back toward the road, Beth holds the photo in her palm, watching the image emerge. Rodolpho's slim torso appears, then his arched, hollow cheekbones, and finally his solemn face.

"So many of you drivers," I say to him, as he slows to a stop, "seem to be philosophers, anthropologists, spiritual guides, commentators on what it means to be human, and how to be human a little better. It surprises me."

Rodolpho brakes, then turns back, and I see I've earned his pint-sized smile. "What do you do when you're a bus driver? You spend time with people and you sit and you think. I've thought all kinds of things in this seat. I think a lot in here about life."

I glance at Beth, who is not listening to us, but is gazing down at the image of her living deity, a person who not only imposes limits on her, but on himself, too. Both of them have learned the hard way. The bus suddenly seems chilly to me. I lean close as she presses a ballpoint to the Polaroid frame, her crooked scrawl coming out smaller than usual, and hence tidier, without spilling onto the photo. Her body warms me, as, slowly, the letters add up.
Number One DRiver,
they say.

"Watch out," Jacob says. "It can be a soap opera in here."

Rodolpho has just deposited us at the bus terminal and pulled away, but as luck would have it—or as Beth has cleverly planned it—we happened to run into Jacob, who was just exiting his own bus for a break. Beth is again in search of a bathroom, so we are walking with him toward a glass door off an employee parking lot. "Thiz the drivers' room," Beth says, going in.

We pass from the windy spring morning into a coffee- and muffin-scented room of surprising serenity. Enclosed by the four corners of the bus terminal—garage, parking lot, dispatcher's office, and the bosses' offices—the drivers' room is, I've gathered, the inner sanctum. It's where the seventy or so drivers in this company secure their belongings, exchange tips and hard-luck stories, eat, read, lay down their heads, and have a laugh.

As a result, members of the public are viewed here as trespassers and immediately shown the door. Beth, however, perceives herself as more worthy than the rank of common folk, and the bosses, who have cast a kind eye upon her, agree. So when there are no curmudgeons who might ignore the bosses' wishes, Beth finds a bathroom here. Today there are no curmudgeons.

As my vision adjusts from sunlight to fluorescent tubes, I make out a rectangular space, with two walls of blue lockers—one of which incorporates an interior window to the dispatcher's office—another wall of vending machines, and one plate-glass window from which to scout out incoming buses. The four metal tables, each ringed by metal chairs, are almost militarily austere. Drivers cluster about, sipping from mugs, playing cards.

Beth emerges from the bathroom and glides up to me. "Thaz Perry, and Melanie, and Marco, and Rod, and Karl. And thaz Betty," she adds, pointing toward the dispatcher's office.

Nods and waves follow. Then Beth produces a birthday card from her pocket. It's for a driver whose big day is still months off, but why wait for the last minute? I am amused until I remember that, when I was a student, I handed in papers months early to avoid the suffocating feeling of deadlines, and as a college teacher, I write my syllabi half a year in advance. Now Beth carries the card to the dispatcher's window, passing it through for Betty's signature.