Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (16 page)

Then Beth plops down onto the sofa, and, hoisting the red glass for a series of staccato sips, she asks him, "So, you gonna
practice
before we leave?"

"Practice what?" I say.

"Tae kwon do," Jesse says.

"He does this
some
times. You wanted to see what we
do. Thiz
what we do at
lunch. Some
times." She adds, "See his black
belt
?"

"When did you get that, Jesse?" I ask, knowing the drivers have been skeptical about the black belt since Beth first mentioned his skills.

"Oh, I got my black belt long ago," he says. He pauses, and I wait, having discerned that silence kindles his desire to speak. Then: "Well, first there was my brother's library books, and my cousin took karate classes, too. He tole me did I want to start karate, and he paid my way till I got my black belt. I could have went farther, I could have gotten the first degree, second degree, but that's with swords and knives. I just want the basic hand-to-hand stuff. It give me more confidence. I didn't used to have none of that."

I hear some rustling and turn to Beth. She's talking to herself, as, I'm realizing, she often does when she's alone or the conversation has strayed beyond bus topics. She catches my glance and smiles guiltily—it's clear that she was paying him no attention—and her lips stop moving. Except for her blush, it looks as if she's been interrupted while praying. I wonder if she was. She does pray, she's told me, when she wants things. "What were you saying?" I ask her.

"I don't
kno-oh.
"

I glance at Jesse, but he's fussing with his black belt. Either he doesn't know or doesn't care that she has stopped listening. I think of how hard it is to understand her, with her roadblocks of
I don't knows,
how hard it is to understand both of them—and how much I wish I could.

I say, "So show us your stuff, Jesse. And then let us know if you want to go out for lunch."

His gaze tucks inward. As I relax into his sofa, and Beth's lips continue their soundless movements, Jesse reverently bows to the room, then to us. He kneels and seems to still himself inside. Then he rises, spreads his legs as if he's on horseback, and, crossing his left arm over his chest, he draws his right arm back, hands balled into fists. In a flash he turns his torso and punches straight in front of him.

And he's in it. Lunging into the downward punches of lower blocks, the skyward punches of upper blocks, inside, outside. He arcs his leg high in front of him—front kick, side kick—and, as I watch what I later learn is called the Way of the Flying Fist and Kicking Foot, I find myself feeling more alive in my seat, in awe at his agility.

Later Jesse tells me that for years he practiced so long and was so submerged in concentration that he saw visions when he got into bed at night: people in his bedroom doing karate motions. Sometimes he saw right through the walls to the snow or rain outside, and when he sat up to peek out his window, he found the weather exactly as he'd just seen it. And one time, when he'd just climbed beneath the covers, a wind blew in his ear, and it seemed that one of these visions must be trying to speak to him. He glanced out the window and saw God standing beneath the autumn trees. God was a white man with a brown mustache, curly hair, and dark eyes, and he just stared and stared at Jesse, as dying leaves drifted down around him. Jesse pulled himself together, and when he looked again, God had vanished.

The visions gave Jesse a momentary feeling of safety. But although his mother told him she saw visions, too, they made him feel that he had to get a grip—"They're just not real, you know"—so he was relieved when they trailed off a few years ago. Instead, he's shifted his concerns of late to his dreams. Over and over, he'll dream that he's back in school, running as hard as he can; that somebody he can't see keeps chasing him. When he wakes up he'll remember where he is and laugh at himself. Nothing to be afraid of, he'll tell himself. I got my black belt, and I'm all growed up.

Now, in his compact living room, Jesse is flying. He's a blur of thigh and elbow. He's the Jet Li of his high-rise, twirling so fast he whips up a wind.

Then he is standing before us, breathless and bowing.

"That was great," I say, and Beth applauds.

"It's not hard," he says. "It's just a putting together of the mind, body, and spirit to give praise to martial arts. You don't think about nothing else while you do it. It's like saying a prayer."

I look to Beth, who has at last ceased moving her lips. "Lez eat," she says to Jesse. "It'll be all right. Iz early, no one'll be there, no one'll look."

He gazes down at his bare feet. "I don't know," he says.

"Don't worry," I say. "I'll be there. I'll make sure no one messes with you."

The skylit lobby of the sunny restaurant is empty; we have entered the front door an hour before the lunchtime crunch. Beth crosses the polished wooden floor toward the hostess, who stands before the room of pine tables, each already set for customers and adorned with a vase bearing a single carnation. Jesse, still wearing the tunic that I now know is called a dobok, ambles behind. The hostess glances up from her podium with a welcoming smile, then sees Beth approaching and her face falls. On carefully timed layovers between the Downtown Local and the Mall Express, Beth has asked to use the lavatory here, and they always issue a refusal—customers only—a policy I suspect that, were I on an identical quest in professional attire, they would not insist on. Now, from behind my sister, I say, "Table for three," and the hostess takes up three laminated menus and leads us to a table by the window. Beth struts into the deserted room, head held high in triumph.

We settle in. Beth opens her menu and, because Jesse never mastered reading, tells him what's listed for lunch.

We order drinks first. The hostess, who is also the waitress, has shed all traces of her earlier inhospitality, and she doesn't ignore Beth and Jesse, as some waitresses would do, waiting for me to act as the interpreter. Instead, she asks them what they want. It must be taxing for her, I think, as she pockets her pad and walks off; it's perplexing enough for me. And how
can
she assess the proper way to behave, when my conversations with friends have made plain to me how little even the most enlightened of them knows about people like my sister? After all, until Beth's generation, many people with mental retardation were shut away in institutions and attics, and, except for roles in a handful of movies and TV shows, which presented the trite image of the noble, naive hero, they have been almost entirely separated from the rest of us. This is why, I've come to think, some of my acquaintances feel sufficiently informed to declare about an entire population, "I think retarded people are God's true angels." Conversely, I also think this is why such a surprisingly large number of the elderly riders on Beth's buses simply can't tolerate her existence; if the Beths of this world were kept quietly out of sight for so long, why should they now be allowed to chatter all day on that most public of places: a bus?

As the waitress disappears into the kitchen, I notice that a bald white man has taken a seat at a corner table. He's holding up a newspaper, but it appears to be no more than a prop. He's glaring at Beth, then Jesse, then Beth, then me. With each second, his face clenches more tightly in abhorrence. It's the look of someone who wants his reality perfectly sorted, his whites washed only with other whites.

Beth and Jesse are preoccupied with pawing through our basket of rolls. I whip a scalding look at the bald man. He snaps his paper higher, obscuring his face.

Beth wipes a bread crumb from Jesse's small mustache. I bite into a roll, so frazzled that my hand is trembling. Now I understand that it's not just Jesse's blind eye or mental disability that discourages him from accepting my offers to join us in restaurants. There's so much separateness in this almost empty room that I can't breathe.

"Don't pay him no mind," Jesse says quietly, having observed more than I'd realized. "People is gonna look all day, and they might say that they don't think it's right, but it's not really for them to judge. As long as you be nice to a person, looks don't matter. You in this world, and you gotta accept it."

"
Yeah,
" Beth says. "Sometimes people give us looks, but I don't
think
about it."

The bread feels thick in my mouth. Jesse blinks sloe-eyed at me as I swallow. He says, "You know, when I was younger, in Georgia, people always wanted to pick with me. I be out jogging, practicing karate on my front lawn, in special ed class, whatever, I got it from all sides. Black, white, it don't matter, they just see me and they say, You can't do this, you can't do that, and they treat me ugly. They don't care who you are, they just want to start with you.

"It just turned me to meanness. I was all anger. I broke a man's jaw once when he challenged me to karate. All I liked was being by myself. While everybody was out playing, I was in the living room. I had bought some toy army mens, and I just showed my meanness on them. My mom tole me you got to get that violence out of you. Then when I was getting up in age, twenty-four, twenty-five, she got me into classes for violence. It's like a round table, everybody talk about meanness, and a lady tell you the opposite, that people care about one another, and what to do when you have that real mean feeling. I saw I didn't want to live that kind of life.

"Now, I feel good every day when I get up. I feel good that I got into biking, and knowing Beth be all right. I feel good to be alive.

"That man over there, he just want to start something. He just don't know what's right and what's wrong. He just don't got nothing to do."

Our table is quiet for a minute. Then I say, "Does anyone want me to butter a roll?" They both say yes, and as I'm breaking the bread, I glance out the window to a granite building across the street. In one of the office windows, a spherical vase teems with a motley assembly of blue pansies and lavender irises and pink peonies and white poppies. I hand Beth and Jesse the bread, and we admire the flouncy blossoms and the pinstripe stamens basking in the sunlight.

Later, as Beth scurries off to the bathroom and the waitress hands me the check, I remember the conversation about love that Beth and I had begun earlier in the day. I glance at Jesse, who is sipping the last of his orange soda, and decide to extend my earlier line of inquiry to him. "What do you think it means," I say, "to be able to love?"

"You want to know 'bout love?" he says, lowering his glass. Then he sits up straight and says slowly, "Love is when you care for somebody, and you be willing to go out of your way and do anything for that person, and to take care of that person, and if they have problems, that you can help them out any way you know how. If they sick, that you can bring 'em medicine, or give 'em a helping hand. That's what love is."

I pause. "Beth was right," I say. "You do know."

I open my wallet to pay the check. "What do you love about Beth?" I ask.

"You got me stumped." He laughs, and then, as Beth blasts out of the restroom, he says, "Well, she's real funny. When I see her on the street, sometimes I wish I could stay talking to her forever. And sometime when I look at her or when she talk on the phone, I can just tell she feels happy or she feels hurt. I can just about feel it myself. I tell her, Why don't you be happy, because I can tell in your voice. And I try to make her happy."

He hesitates as we notice Beth rocking back and forth at the exit, gesturing to us to get going. "I guess I love her," he says, "just to be Beth."

I plunk down the tip, my hand shaking. He is so right, and for a second I think about Sam, and the way he used to say similar things to me, the sweetest look in his eyes, and for a long, terrible moment, I realize all over again how much I miss him. I inhale sharply.

"Now I got
you
stumped." Jesse laughs.

I try to laugh back, and I look to Beth, who's mouthing, Come on! Finally the laugh comes, and we make our way to the door.

A few days after the tae kwon do demonstration and the lunch, I receive a letter from Beth.

to sis

Hi. What I like about Jesse

is He is SExey and has Sexey legs and he can ride all over on his bike and he is Smart. and a great kisser. and he is Fun. to look at. too. all the time OK now you do have it. now

Cool Beth

It has been a decade since I have initiated Conversation Number Three. Back then, I needed to talk about it, to question what was right and what was wrong, to receive a promise of forgiveness should I be influencing my sister wrongly. That winter is long behind us, but it is not the remoteness of the event that deters me from bringing up Conversation Number Three with new friends. It is that sometimes talking cannot provide the answer, nor can forgiveness always silence lingering doubts.

Conversation Number Three begins on an overcast afternoon the November that Beth is twenty-eight. She and Jesse have just begun keeping company, and our family is thrilled for her. At last she has met someone who will hold her hand while she watches TV, and enjoy her jigsaw puzzle masterpieces. This is how we see it at first.

It is a week into their courtship, and I am on one of my visits to see her. Jesse is out riding his bike, so I have not met him by the time she concludes that there are no television options for the next hour and walks me away from her roommates toward her bedroom. At the threshold she announces she wants to show me the latest Polaroids in her lifelong collection. I settle on her quilt, and Beth deposits her photo album on my lap with a grin and opens to the Halloween party the group homes threw the week before. I compliment wigs and capes and jack-o'-lanterns as we flip through, until she turns cheerfully to the final page. "Look at
this
one, what'dya think of
this
one?" she says. The planted evidence comes into focus: a man who is obviously Jesse, perched on the edge of her bed, beaming a snaggle-toothed smile. Not wearing a costume. Not wearing anything.