Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (33 page)

"And Backstreet Boys."

"Which one?"

"All of them."

"Definitely. They are hot. Hotter than summer."

"Hotter than a
stove
" Beth laughs. "I want them to drive the bus."

I feel as if we're in a carnival fun house, partially because the inside of the bus is lit with blue lights. "To cut down on the night glare through the windshield," Melanie explains. At thirty-seven, she's tall, has an ample figure and auburn hair, a creamy complexion and a bouncy personality, and as she gestures to the window I marvel at how changing just one thing inside—adding blue lights—can make such a difference when you look out at the world.

But mostly our blue bus feels like a fun house because Melanie and Beth are cracking up. This is what they do privately, and what they're doing today, since, on this rarely used run, it's just them and me and a goofy stuffed turkey whose tummy plays "Over the River and Through the Woods" when you squeeze him. Melanie set him down on the dashboard as her hood ornament for the evening. When she grabs him at red lights, Beth breaks up all over again.

Melanie may be settled and married, with almost grown sons and a job that requires a level head. But when she's with Beth, they become teenage girlfriends.

"Oh, oh, I have another one," Melanie says. "Will Smith."

Beth squeals so hard she can barely get it out: "Oh, I'd like to have him here, all right, right here, and you know what I'd do, you
know.
"

"How about that song?" Melanie asks.

"'Iz Raining Men,'" Beth roars.

They laugh so hard at the thought of men falling from the sky that they almost tip out of their seats.

I watch them as we pull onto a long, flat highway with almost no stops, mostly a straight forty-five minutes out to the remote country towns and back. They are having so much fun, and, sitting halfway back in the bus, at the far edge of their party—too distant to laugh along, yet close enough to wish I could—I remember how much I used to savor that feeling. It's a feeling I had almost forgotten until the night I went out with Rick.

But now a longing wells up within me, and I remember the days when I felt it, too: when a friend practiced cartwheels with me in our yard, or cheered when I tossed my spinning baton as high as the roof and caught it, or lay on her stomach next to me on a dormitory bed to analyze pop lyrics, or wiggled into overpriced gowns with me in department stores, pretending to have money and somewhere to go, collapsing on the fitting room floor in giggles.

Now, witnessing Beth and Melanie take such joy in making each other sparkle, mourning my own defection from such ready, easy pleasures, I appreciate anew how much having friends helped. Yes, work is a crucial part of life, but work alone cannot generate easy laughter, closeness, meandering conversation—and, best of all, the certainty that you belong right here, right now, because someone is special to you. I so took this feeling for granted, I never thought to name it. But now I think I would call it happiness.

"Cliff doesn't know why thaz so funny to us," Beth says at a brief stop, wiping her eyes.

"That's 'cause he doesn't know you wish
he'd
be raining from the skies!"

"He knows. I make sure he knows. That I want him and Jesse. Ten of them. Raining down right in front of me. Yum
mee
."

"Onto the roof of the bus"

"All over the road."

"All over the city!"

"Cliff's so fine-looking," Beth muses.

"Bet you think he's hotter than a heat wave."

"You got that right. Hotter than a stove!"

Envious, I turn toward the low-glare glass as we pull back onto the highway. I expect to see the nothingness of fallow fields in the night, but instead make out my reflection far too well, hauntingly blue and close. I cringe at the expression on my face.

Failure, it reads, and terror. The way my mother used to look when she trudged into the house after one of her dates. The way I used to feel when love withdrew. Though, no, I realize it is more than that, studying my face as if it were a student paper I'd been grading over and over all semester and suddenly understood. It's not only failure and terror I observed in Mom, and now see in myself. There is self-pity, too.

That old darkness rises within me.
Don't think about this,
it says.
Keep telling the world, No, I can't, I'm sorry. Keep shutting the door.

But I do think about it. Beth is in stitches along with her friend right in front of me, and I realize with a jolt that for all her failures and terrors, I have never seen self-pity on her face. Not even a trace. Not once.

Maybe I can begin to get rid of my own self-pity, I think. In the weeks to come, I tell myself, I will try.

Rodolpho admits that he'd like to explore new career options in his spare time. But he can't afford more pilot lessons and is casting about without direction, unsure what to do now.

"You're good-looking, you could be a model," I tell him. "Or an actor."

"Yeah, sure," he says. Then his eyes soften. "Well, okay. How?"

I think for a moment. "There's that community theater down the street from where Beth lives. Maybe you can audition for a play, to see how you like it."

"I've never done that before."

Without a moment of resistance, I volunteer to extend this visit a day longer and reschedule my student meetings. I say, "I'll help you."

We accompany him when he picks up the script for
Bye Bye Birdie.
Then we hole up in a pizzeria booth, and, as Beth sips her soda beside us, Rodolpho and I practice the lines. One minute he's Conrad Birdie, and I'm the what's-the-matter-with-kids-today father, and the next, we've reversed roles. We talk about stage fright. We talk about life fright.

We see him to the theater door. He gives us a high-five before he walks in.

Jacob has become fond of a particular rider: a young mother in an advanced stage of cancer. He tells me that she has a wisdom that life is to be lived to its fullest every moment, and a great love for her family. He says, "She makes me care more about people than I ever did."

He brings her homemade corn pie, her favorite. He speaks to other riders about her courage and he prays for her.

One day he informs me that she's back in the hospital because her liver has failed. I speak before I can stop myself. "I'll visit her with you," I say.

When we arrive, we see that the cancer treatment has stolen her hair and her energy. Her family is gathered around her. Within days, I realize, she will be dead.

We don't say much, just listen to them all, and to her. Her voice is so quiet that I can barely hear a word. When we leave the room, Jacob is weeping. I take his arm as we make our way down the hall.

In the blue bus, Melanie tells us that many years ago, she lost a close friend in a car accident. One minute he was on the phone with her, and half an hour later he was gone. She says, "You don't know what lies ahead of you the next ten minutes. I don't know what's going to happen when I turn this corner here. So why not be a friend? Why not give while you can?"

Soon it's as if word has spread.

In the drivers' room, James talks to me about his woefully unraveling marriage and his guilt over sending his son, who has autism, to a group home. "Can I talk to you?" he asks me.

Roberto asks my advice. Should he continue coaching his inner-city basketball league, or work up the courage to run for mayor? "Jacob says you have a good head on your shoulders," he says. "What do you think?"

Joan says she wants to return to school to get her G.E.D., but she feels insecure. "I know you're a teacher," she says. "Can you give me any tips on what to do?"

"Yes," I say, over and over. "Yes."

"You know what a friend is?" Melanie asks. "Someone you can tell anything and not worry that they're going to repeat it. Someone you can trust. Someone who's on your side."

Rick listens to me, and I to him, as we dawdle over dinner, as he demonstrates how to angle a pool cue, as we throw scarves around our necks to walk beside a pond filled with geese.

If I've gotten fed up with Beth, he lets me rant, and when I'm thrilled with her, he shares my excitement. When we're strolling on the grounds of the local art museum, we share jokes and worries. When we finish having coffee at a café and are walking back to his car, he sings old folk ballads to me.

But, despite all the time that has passed, there are days when I still long for Sam. So I tell Rick, "I really enjoy spending time with you, but I don't know that I'm ready for more."

He replies, "I like your company, and you can handle this any way you please. I just want you to feel safe with me."

Maybe this is how it goes, I think, watching Beth and Melanie, remembering the people I have loved, and the ones I wish I hadn't lost. Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or letting them hop aboard ours. For a while we ride together. A few minutes, a few miles. Companions on the road, sharing our air and our view, our feet swaying to the same beat. Then you get off at your stop, or I get off at mine. Unless we decide to stay on longer together.

The bus is still blue, I think, looking back at my reflection, but beyond the window, the world doesn't seem quite so dark.

We are all in our twenties. I am trying to write a book of short stories, Laura is progressing in her career as an advertising sales executive, and Max is devoted to his classes at law school.

Beth sits in Dad's basement, watching soap operas every day.

"
What are we going to do?" Laura says to me over the phone.

"
She can't just stay there," I say to Max.

"
We've got to think of something," Max says.

In a round robin of worries and complaints, we fret over her life. She is twenty-seven already; she shouldn't spend her life on the sofa. We dial one another late at night and mutter our fears into the telephone. In their bedrooms, with their new spouses, our parents agonize, too.

Dad turns to our stepmother. "I want to do the right thing for her," he says. "But, oh God, what'll be good for us, too?" Our stepmother is a cultured and poised college professor—not the lady professor at the time of the divorce, but one he met a few years ago. She explains Faulkner and Plato to me on holidays, teaches us backgammon, and brings home a film projector from her school to show us
Casablanca
and
Citizen Kane.
She whips up gourmet dishes for dinner, while graciously making macaroni and cheese for Beth. At night, in the silence and the starlight, our stepmother and Dad go over it again. To be closer to her job, they've moved to a house off the beaten path in central Pennsylvania, even farther from Dad's job. It's a big house that they love, though too far from a downtown or even a store for Beth to take a stroll and enjoy a little distraction. A bus that stops a block away could carry her downtown, but she has never ridden buses alone before. Think of all that could go wrong on a bus—and that doesn't even begin to address what might happen on the other end. For a while Dad continued to drive Beth to his office, and they stayed overnight a few times a week in a hotel. But with the longer commute and the nights upon nights at the Holiday Inn, he became so frazzled by Beth's talk and talk and talk, so vexed by her constant dismissal of his Beethoven or
Upstairs, Downstairs
in favor of Madonna and
Three's Company,
so maddened by the way any office task dissolved into "Oops," so infuriated by her boomeranging any conversation back to the topics of the printer and the salesman again and again and again, that every time he came home he'd say to our stepmother, "I'm ready to blow my brains out." Besides, taking Beth to his office won't work anymore anyway; the business closed, and he's started a new career in real estate. He shakes his head at the thought of a group home, as she made few friends in her special education classes years ago and has seldom been drawn to people with mental retardation. He expects she'd be miserable. "I don't have any idea what to do with her." He sighs.

Our mother, for her part, gets up long before dawn and, in the dappled shadows of her bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed. "Beth again?" asks her new husband. He's a gentle, industrious factory worker, nothing like her maniacal second husband, whom she never saw again and divorced by printing notices in newspapers around the country—which her lawyer recommended and the court agreed to. Not surprisingly, the notices were never answered, thus permitting the divorce to go through. She met this new man a few years ago, and he knows our names and knows how to garden and hugs us when we come to visit. "I don't know what to
do
with her," Mom says. Though her worries are different from Dad's. After their reconciliation, Beth visited often with Mom. They both looked forward to these get-togethers, when they'd shop and eat out and go to amusement parks and zoos. But soda by soda, and hamburger by hamburger, Mom grew distressed watching Beth's poor diet and surging weight. "Here, try this broccoli," she'd say at the table. "Don't tell me what to do," Beth would reply. "Beth, I'm just worried about your health." "You're being bossy." Then our stepfather got laid off from the factory, and Mom from the library, and new work took
them to North Carolina. More letters, fewer visits. In the predawn light, our mother glances at the phone. She and Beth speak once a week. Or, really, they quarrel once a week. "I don't have any ideas." She sighs.