Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (30 page)

For a long time, though, she doesn't talk about the bewildering turn of events that occurs a year after she comes to live with us. We keep wondering if she will, despite our not talking about it, either. We cannot bring ourselves to discuss it. Indeed, we cannot cope with it at all.

It begins one Sunday, right around the time Dad has started bringing Beth to work. He is reading the local paper that morning, and by some fluke he glances at a section he has never paid attention to before: the bankruptcy notices. To his shock, he sees a notice for someone with our mother's first name and the bad man's last name. Neither is common, but it can't be her; she never lived in this part of Pennsylvania.

He tries to call, but the operator says the number is unlisted. So he drives to the address in the notice, thirty minutes away, just to see
.

Mom opens the door.

In the living room squabble that follows, Dad learns that the bad man is gone. He also learns that Mom is a librarian in a nearby college, that in fact it was the job that brought her here, but that she has not tried to reach us.

He leaves, livid and speechless.

When he tells us, we all feel a fury too huge and confusing to face. Laura and Max vow never to think of her again—she is dead to them. As for me, I just bury my fury inside a layer of ice. I tell myself that I
will get such good grades that I won't see my anger or pain, and I do get good grades, and most of the time I don't see it. I just feel bereft and numb, and I continually fall for guys who won't return my affections. I also make a lot of friends and sit in their dorm rooms laughing about our difficulties with calculus and relationships. But at night the fury unleashes itself inside me, pounding and yelling. I wake up every few hours and cannot shut it up. When I go home for holidays I watch Beth sleeping and wish I could forget things the way she seems to.

For a few weeks after this new development with Mom, Beth looks overwhelmingly perplexed. Then that stops, and for one year, two years, three years, as we say nothing about it, she says nothing as well. Or almost nothing.

One evening, she is driving home with Dad when a terrific thunderstorm hits. It washes out their usual route, and they get detoured onto back country roads. Driving on through the darkness and the downpour, swerving around fallen trees, and finally so far behind other traffic that they have no taillights to follow back to the highway, Dad realizes they are lost.

"
I don't know where we are," he admits, squinting through the blackness.

"
Will we get home?" Beth asks.

"
Somehow. I'll get us there somehow.
"

She's quiet for a minute, then she looks at him. "At least we have each other," she says.

4:50
P.M.
"Cliff races
cars
" Beth almost squeals. "He has a Mustang named Sally and he takes it to the track on Saturdays and drives it real fast and I like him a lot, a lot, I mean
a lot
!"

We're stationed at a bus shelter, a week before Halloween. In her lime green Tweety Bird T-shirt and purple jacket, she's hopping about at the curb, craning her neck to look down the street. The surgery has not improved her sight, but at least with the lashes retrained, her vision is not deteriorating further. I'm collapsed on the bench, adjusting my cream-colored shawl over my black coat to stay warm, hoping to revive; her aerodynamic pace is once again exhausting me.

A recent rookie at the bus company, Cliff entered right at the top of Beth's Top Ten chart, with Rodolpho bumped to Number Two. "He looks like Rodolpho," she goes on, as we wait for the light down the street to turn green, "'cause they both shave their heads."

"Why's Cliff your new favorite?"

"Because he has that car. Because he's a decent person. Because he's fine-looking."

I sit back as she goes on about him and, as spooky recorded sounds waft from the five-and-ten behind us, I think about the crushes she's had. The pop stars. The printer in the back building, the salesman in Queens. Jesse. Lorenzo, a weight-lifting driver of her early bus days, who was generous with her until he tired of her obsession with the buses and with him. They had a falling-out and, though they'll kid around if they cross paths, she does not ride his bus anymore.

Then there was Rodolpho. Now Cliff.

I know just what will happen. For the next month or year, the Cliff saga will duplicate all those that came before: she'll chatter endlessly about him while he drives on, unaware of the enormous responsibility that she has thrust upon him.

For instance, in September, Bailey decided that his children didn't need a babysitter anymore. Since then, many of the drivers have begun to feel that it would be beneficial for Beth to spend less time on the buses, and, at least now and then, to pass her time more productively. The most outspoken of all was Claude, the main driver in my
Philadelphia Inquirer
article. He has driven Beth for almost seven years, and his patience with her bus routine had begun to run thin. One day when she took her seat, he declared that she was capable of holding a job, and, moreover, that it was time for her to get one. For the next several weeks, he bargained, he bribed, he appealed to her sense of equality—"Almost everyone works." He tried to simplify the circuitous connection between his taxes and her'S.S.I. payments, he grumbled about fairness. Finally, he said, "If you don't even try, you can't ride with me anymore." Although at the time Beth had been Cliff's copilot for a scant two months, she sought his counsel, and, despite a less than full understanding of the particulars, and undoubtedly not realizing that her questions were a setup, he casually replied with precisely what she wanted to hear. "Cliff sez he wouldn't work if
he
didn't have to," she reported back to Claude. "He sez I should do what I
want,
so
thaz
what I'm
doing.
" With that, Beth's partnership with Claude came to a close, and these days, when they end up in the drivers' room at the same time, each steps silently, with eyes averted, around the other.

Now, as Beth prattles on and on about Cliff, the loudspeaker switches from ghostly sounds to "The Monster Mash," an inane song I have heard almost every Halloween I've been alive. Beth starts singing along, getting wrong the same words she has always gotten wrong, and something about the song scares me for the first time.

Then Beth calls out, and I see Cliff rolling his bus toward the curb. "Come on!" she says, pulling a Mountain Dew out of her knapsack. "Iz his favorite drink, so I bought a case and now I give him one
ev
ry day and here he iz so come
on!
"

"The Monster Mash" ends as the bus door opens, and suddenly I see why I'm scared: the present looks just like the past and exactly the same as the future.

"It's a grudge-type race," Cliff says at a stop. "That's what I do on Saturdays." Cliff, a good-looking, lantern-jawed, George Clooney look-alike, has slightly more hair than Rodolpho—maybe a plush quarter-inch rather than a spare eighth—and, though he's past his mid-thirties, the hair on his head, and the five o'clock shadow on his face, are the same shade of bronze as his eyes. He also differs from Rodolpho in being taller and more muscular, and he seems considerably more inclined to chat.

I'm sure I haven't heard him correctly. "Grunge?"

"
Grudge.
If you want to race your buddy, or someone in your neighborhood—hey, my car's faster than yours—then instead of racing in the street, you go down to the track. It's a kind of drag race, a quarter of a mile, straight. Whoever has the quickest time wins."

Beth says, "You gotta see that
car,
iz great, you gotta see that. Iz a green Mustang. Iz really neat. I wanna
ride
in your car."

"I used to think you were harmless," he says, "till you started flirting with me."

She says, "I don't
flirt.
I have Jesse. I just like you. I don't do that."

"Ahhh, I know better than that, Beth."

"I'm not a flirt. I'm
not.
I want to fix you up with 'Livia."

She launches into a description of Olivia's beauty and kindness. Cliff, who is rolling away from the intersection, doesn't seem in the mood for dating, but persistence seems essential to Beth's matchmaking strategy. After all, she's still trying to fix me up with Rick. Just last week, she sent me a letter that said,
I gave Rick a pHOto of you. Now he can Freak out ©ver it. now. Just kidding.

"Look, there's the store that sells your favorite soda," Beth is saying to Cliff. "And thaz the house where that nasty driver Albert lives, he's a jerk, do you think he's a jerk? He put a sign on the ladies' room door in the drivers' room that said 'Only people who work here can use this.' I don't
care,
I'm going in anyway, as long as he's not there I'm going in 'cause iz just a
baff
room and I'm not hurting anybody, do you think iz okay for me to go in there, do you think Albert's a jerk, do you think iz right what he does..."

Damn it, Beth, shut up!
my dark voice erupts.
Look at you—same expression, same seat, same stupefying conversation.

"My mom," Cliff is saying to me as we pause at a light and as I try to still the voice, "used to race stock cars in powder-puff derbies before I was born. I must have driving in my blood. Even my grandpa was a mechanic. I still work in the same garage he did. It's attached to my house."

"Izn't he cool?" Beth says. "See?"

"So," I say, trying to will the discussion away from the fiftieth lap around the same old track, "you started driving because it's the family business?"

"Actually," he says, "I started out in shipping and receiving. Then I drove a school bus."

"Why did you change?"

"I'd always liked being behind the wheel. My parents took me to the races when I was eight or nine. I knew then that this is what I'd—"

"The people here are mean," Beth says.

"Beth," I say, trying to control my tone, "Cliff's talking about something else."

"They
are,
" she says, "and so are some of the
drivers,
Cliff knows, you can ask him about how—" And then as he drives on in silence, she goes off on yet another story of how a passenger told her to quiet down and Driver X stood up for her, she told them off, they told her to stay at home where she belongs...

Passengers look at her severely, but she fixes her gaze on Cliff, avoiding their glares.

She goes on and on, and now the dark voice, which I thought I'd laid to rest last month, roars within me again. I squeeze my hands together. When I started riding the buses, I remember, I thought of the people who didn't like Beth as insensitive and narrow-minded. Now I find myself more sympathetic to their point of view. Yes, some of them are coarse and offensively vocal. But she
is
so loud. And she talks
all the time.
About
nothing.
I know many of us babble on about nothing, too, but she does it over and over and over—and over and over and
over
—and it's really eroding the limits of my endurance. Dad used to tell us he came to dread their car rides to work for precisely the same reasons. That was
twenty years ago.

"Beth," Cliff says calmly. "Chill." Because he says it, she is quiet. But only for a minute, and then she starts up again.

I stare at my feet.
She's driving me up a wall! When the hell will she ever change?

For the first time in our odyssey, I stand up, and, without even planning to, retreat from her to the back of the bus, gritting my teeth with shame for having these foul feelings all over again. But I'm afraid if I don't pull myself away, I'll snap at her. No, I'll start screaming.

We pass scarecrows on porches and black cats taped to doors. I press my cheek to my window in the back of the bus. I can feel the bus hum and the road rumble up through my bones. I close my eyes and let it drown out the sound of her voice, far up the aisle from me.

And I think: I wish I were a saint.

I wish I were a magnanimous sister who could feel compassion for the way that Beth is re-creating a dysfunctional family environment on the buses.

I wish I had the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

I wish I could learn the language of Maybe It's Good Enough. Maybe it's good enough that she can memorize seventy drivers' schedules and stand up to racists and read. I wish I could be a realist who could accept Beth's level of development and not long for more.

I wish I were like acquaintances who think that people with mental retardation are "God's true angels." I don't want to think, "I wish she'd behave a
little
more appropriately today."

I wish I could
change.

Instead I peer toward the front of the bus. Beth must feel me looking, because she turns and squints through her scratched corneas, rooting out her sister from these strangers, until finally our eyes meet.

I'm sure I seem steamingly upset, and her expression registers her concern. We hold this gaze for a long time, as Cliff cruises down the potholed highway. The bus bangs with each imperfection, almost shaking us out of our seats, but neither of us breaks the look. It's a grudge race all our own; whoever holds on the longest will win.