Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (19 page)

"Well, you know what's happened because he's in the hospital?" Josie recites a chain of woes as Beth sits at her seat's edge, waiting eagle-eyed for Estella to turn back.

At length Josie's litany is exhausted. "It's some rough stuff, sweetheart," Estella says in a patient, compassionate tone, and adds, in a phrase that I later learn is derived from the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, "Please tell him I asked about."

She draws the door closed, and, as Beth holds her tongue for just one more moment, Estella sighs and says to us, "Sometimes I want to move on from this job. There's a lot of stress. But I guess I'm where I'm supposed to be, at least for now. The people who go through big things, they're the ones that can help other people, and I think that's why I'm now here."

No sooner has she re-entered traffic than Beth leaps right back in with her broodings about Keith. "I think I should tell him
off,
I should tell him not to
mess
with me, I should tell him he's being
fake
and I don't trust him, Jill thinks so too, and Sal, and Perry, not Jacob, he don't ever say do that, but what do you think? Iz a free country, I should tell him like it is, right?"

Estella says, "Maybe he misjudged you, and you could give him another chance."

Beth pauses. I can't discern if this message is getting through, but I can tell she's pleased that Estella is now spending time on her troubles, and perhaps that's all Beth actually desires, as it seems to soothe her quickly. Estella must be familiar with the calming effect her concern seems to have, because after she quietly consoles Beth, I see that she seems to offer everyone such a haven, listening with gentle nods and encouragement to her next half-dozen passengers. At a lull, when I remark on her nurturing ways, she says, "They're my customers, and that means something to me. I try to make them feel at home before they get home." A block later a stoop-shouldered man with fleecy gray hair climbs aboard, delivering a linen-covered dish on his upturned palm. Butler-style, he whisks away the napkin to reveal a platter of his wife's special roast chicken: "And this batch is as good as I've been telling you." Laughing, Estella thanks him for letting her sample the famed dish. As he then sets it in a bag for her, he says, "A gift to the great sounding board. God knows, some days I need you."

On the last night of one of our visits in May, the pleasure I'd been deriving from our bus odyssey took a hit when I asked Beth for the first time if we could set out later the next morning. I needed to transport my sofa cushions and bedding home temporarily for a class I was conducting in my living room—a procedure that required some packing, several trips downstairs to my car, and the use of Beth's magnetic pass to fend off the glowering, self-appointed guards who would otherwise bar my way. I needed Beth's cooperation. "Could we try seven o'clock, instead of five-thirty?"

"I leave
early.
"

"Then can you leave when you want but come back and help me at seven? Just this once?"

"I
leave early.
There's nothing to do in
here.
"

"Okay. Can you lend me your front door pass, and I'll meet you later at the bus terminal?"

She looked away. "I don't
kno-oh.
"

In the dark that night, drifting between wakefulness and sleep, not to mention between sisterly affection and sisterly annoyance, I heard Beth rise and run a bath. My watch read four-thirty. Wondering drowsily about her decision for the upcoming day, I fell into a sound sleep—and then suddenly I jolted awake. She was perched on her love seat, staring at me.

"Beth, what are you doing!"

"I don't want to be
here.
I want to go." It was now five
A.M.

"Then go," I mumbled in a stupor. "Just come back for me."

"Maybe," she said, jumping up and flying out her front door.

At six-fifteen she did return, grumbling, with Jesse pressed into service. In silence, we packed my car, and when she resumed her rounds—at seven—I joined her, as we'd previously agreed I would. But on every bus, she tilted away from me, not addressing a word in my direction. Then, just before the appointed hour for my departure, she bolted off two stops earlier than we'd arranged, vanishing before I could even call out goodbye. My throat tightened, and I blinked back the impulse to cry.

Did being a good sister mean having no needs of my own?

As we rumble along in Estella's bus, the midday sun casts its abundant light up the aisles of the streets. On either side, flowers seem to burst open; trees attend our march from stop to stop, resplendently green. In front of Victorian houses topped with witch's-hat roofs, young men in tank tops tinker beneath the hoods of Fords. Mothers lift infants from strollers. Children in shorts race about the fairy-tale castle in the park, calling out from its weathered blue turrets.

Some blocks later we find ourselves caught in a rare instance of gridlock. Everyone stays seated, except for a young, trimly dressed woman who has just angrily described being harassed by her boss on her early-morning shift, and wondered aloud how she can quit with two children to support. After she gets off, Estella, watching the woman let herself into her house down the street, says, "I hear hard things like that all the time. It's almost a given in this job. When people get a pink slip, or their wives throw them out, or the cops call to say that their son's in jail, I'm often the first person they see."

I'd long since grasped that the qualifications for a bus driver can and often must extend well beyond operational skills. But I had not realized that drivers might also be called upon to assume the role, at a moment's notice, of emergency caregiver—or bereavement counselor, confidante, inspirational speaker, and all-around healer of life's slings and arrows. The responsibility is so comprehensive; how, I ask Estella, does a person who has applied her efforts to obtaining a commercial driver's license possibly, when faced with everything from mild dissatisfaction to crisis-level suffering, know what to do?

"All my life," Estella says with a sigh, "I'd wanted things to be better for myself. When I was a kid, I had a stepfather who drank a lot. I got married at sixteen to escape that, but my husband wouldn't let me work. When my marriage fell apart, I just became involved with one man after another who was nothing but trouble. I had several kids by then, and I just thought I must deserve men like that because I wasn't a better person. But at least then I was working. I started as a call-taker for a tow truck company, and one particularly tough winter when they needed more drivers I asked to take the wheel. A few years later I started driving truck cross-country, the first woman in these parts to do that. I'd meet new people on the road and have adventures with sandstorms and twisters and you name it, all the way to the Texas Panhandle, but even that didn't show me that I could have a better life. I was with a very abusive man by then, and when you park your truck, no matter how far away you've traveled in this world, you still have to go home.

"Well, right after my last child, my fourth, I got very depressed, and went for help. I thought therapy might cure me, but it's not the waving of the magic wand—it really comes down to you. So there I was, and it was a true life-to-God moment, there was no one for me to look to for answers but myself and God. And I realized that I'd been with those men because I'd
chosen
them, and that I had to start making better choices. So I got the guy I was with out of my life, which wasn't easy, believe me. And I started working really hard on myself, with counseling, reading, digging into my past. Then I began to explore my spiritual side, and it all came together. I realized I would never be perfect, but that I was still a good person. My sense of self-worth began to come back. It's been so much better ever since.

"This is how I know to tell passengers what to do. I say that no matter what, there's nothing so terrible or that's gone on so long that you can't change it and look forward to a new tomorrow. I lost myself, but in the end that helped me find myself. You've just got to have faith and work at it."

"With anything?" I ask.

"Anything," she says, as a gap finally opens in the intersection. "As long as you accept the hardest thing of all: that you might have to lose to win."

I wish I could accept this myself. After that last visit, I so wanted to talk with someone about the dark voice, someone who would listen without judgment and suggest what I might do when I hear it. For days I could not dislodge the image of Sam from my mind, with his high forehead and goofy pirate accents, his ease with Chinese culinary skills and my self-doubts, his loving green eyes. Maybe I could tell him, I thought, remembering my exchange with Jesse at our lunch. Maybe his eyes would still be loving. I had not seen him for so long now, and, though mutual acquaintances told me he was not involved with anyone else and still kept a photo of me on his mantel, I trembled as I finally dialed his number in the city where he'd relocated for a new job. He had hung plants on his front porch, I'd heard, and was taking lessons in classical guitar; he had indeed moved on with his life. On the third ring, he picked up. "Hello ... Hello?" I tried to speak back, but the words died in my throat. In silence, I hung up the phone.

We circle through the city, encountering rider after rider who offer Estella a hearty hello, rocking in our seats like children in a cradle. I close my eyes, letting snatches of conversation wash over me, wash my frustrations with Beth out of me, fill the desolation I've become oppressively aware of in my apartment, especially over the last weeks. It works, for a little while.

Then a woman with bobbed pumpkin-colored hair and a vinyl tote emblazoned with the words "Lucky Bingo Bag" asks as she climbs aboard, "My ex isn't here, is he?" Thirty years after their divorce, Beth fills me in, the woman's ex still sidles up to her on the bus to annoy her.

Beth says, "Don't worry, he already
rode
today."

"I tell you," Estella adds, "I could fix him up with someone and get him off your hands."

"I couldn't do that," the redhead says. "Pass him on to another poor sucker? Never."

A full-figured woman across from us makes a cynical quip about men, followed by Estella's gently humorous reassurance, "Come on, girls, you know they're not all that bad." But already her commentary is sparking others. I glance around, and realize with surprise that all the passengers happen to be female. Soon our chat in the front of the bus has rippled out to every unrequited teenager, too-young-to-vote mother, starry-eyed fiancée, common-law wife, football widow, three-time divorcée, golden-anniversary grandmother, and avowed single woman until the whole bus is talking together about men: the good, the bad, and their own choices.

I listen in wonder, and I think, watching these women confide and cluck and slap one another's arms with laughter, Beth contributing in her own way, Estella mothering them all, that maybe this is what it used to be like once upon a time. Maybe, when women gathered for quilting bees, or when men played checkers outside the general store, or when everyone came together at village dances and July Fourth picnics, this ease helped people feel less alone in their worries. Maybe, too, this was the swiftness with which neighbors became friends, and the simplicity with which one person's tale became another person's teacher.

I don't want to climb down to the ground and return to the emptiness that reclaims me at home. I want to stay up here, in this comforting place, harvesting the springtime light.

"There's Bailey," says Beth, poking my arm. "Lez go!"

She has already jumped to the top of the steps. I rise, and as I'm searching my fanny pack for my sunglasses, Estella draws Beth into a hug. Then, releasing my sister, she reaches out and hugs me.

I'm warm and sleepy and lightheaded all at once and I clomp down the steps to our next destination. Turning back to wave goodbye, dizzy from the scent of floral perfume in Estella's lush blond hair, I remember the call I couldn't complete, and think how nice it would be to have Estella's bus in my life, too.

"Where are we?" I ask.

"We're at Tenff and Main," Beth says definitively.

"We can't be. We're walking down a street,
between
two corners."

"Tenff and Main."

"But look: this is a street. The corner's up there. Maybe you mean
that's
Tenth and Main. If so, then we must now be on Tenth Street. Is that right?"

"What
diffrence
does it make? I get where I need to go."

"Because there's a difference between a street and a corner. You're smart. You can see that."

"Yeah."

"And we can't be at Tenth and Main until we reach the corner. Do you understand that?"

"I
guess.

"So what street are we on?"

Silence.

"Do you know what street we're on?"

"I don't
know'
"

"Yes you do. What
street
are we on?"

"Broad?"

For six months I have, for the most part, consigned my older, more disgruntled feelings about Beth to some remote corner of my heart. But now they are squirming out, as Beth's mood seems to shift toward being more self-absorbed and contrarian—or perhaps as we become so well reacquainted that she reveals these hidden sides and I, in turn, rediscover my impatience. I want to blurt at her, "Stop being so dense!" I want to shake her and cry out, "Don't close your mind so fast to every new concept just because it's new, or because someone thinks you might benefit from it.
Try
to get it!" I want to chase away what I increasingly suspect is Beth's habitual defiance or laziness.