Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (5 page)

Out in the living room, she pops open a diet Pepsi
(diet,
she'll stress, and only in cans). "Boy, you're a
slow
poke," she says, as I sit down to put on my sneakers.

"Mmph. I'm not used to this hour. It's still dark out, you know."

"I do this
ev
ry day. You're missing too much. Thiz what I
do
."On the love seat, she devours a bagel and cream cheese before I've finished tying my laces.

Downstairs, she sashays into a bitter gust, hatless, gloveless, jacket unzipped. "Brrrr!" she says. "Iz
cold
out
here
"

I skitter after her, buttoned up against the cold. She calls back over her shoulder, "Hurry! Come on!" A cradle-shaped moon still rests above the buildings, and only a couple of the row houses have lights on. But the hourglass of our day has already started running, and Beth is not going to be late.

6:00
A.M.
We shiver on a stoop at Tenth and Main, peering up the steeply rising street for the first driver of our day's wanderings. Beth looks carefully into the windshield of each passing bus. "Thaz K.T. driving," she says. "Sharon." "Thaz Eric." Some she waves to, some—the ones with whom she feels no solidarity—she pretends not to see. She tells me about them all, as she shifts her weight back and forth, playing her radio, cupping hands in her sleeves. She makes clear that each bus is distinct, noting their four-digit identification numbers, as unique as fingerprints. "Hope you're staying
warm
" she says to a newspaper delivery girl, the only other pedestrian in sight.

Then our bus sweeps around the corner. With glee Beth looks through the window to Tim, who is so cheerfully outgoing that Beth has nicknamed him "Happy Timmy," though some of his colleagues call him the "Professor." Right away, I see the reason for both names, as I scale the steps to meet a man who reminds me of the kind of amiable bookworm who might amble down the corridors of my college: lanky, long-faced, intelligent-looking, and fortyish, with parchment-colored hair, mirthful brown eyes, and a trim goatee. I half expect him to be wearing the rumpled khakis and tweed jacket my jocular calculus professor wore twenty years ago, but there the resemblance stops, as he's clad in the uniform of this company, a bland blue tone somewhere between Union and Confederate. Though above the collar, he sports a wisecracker's grin.

"Good morning!" Tim says heartily, extending his hand for—not my token, as I erroneously assume, but a greeting. "Welcome to the world's most edifying one-room schoolhouse," he adds, pumping my hand. Only then does he nod toward the fare box.

As I slip the token in its slot, I give Beth a look:
This is a bus driver?
Smiling, she settles into what I already think of not just as her seat, but her throne, which, I realize, is in the most secure—indeed, the only—nook on the bus, tucked against the panel that separates the seats from the entry steps. Thus, in addition to being, quite literally, the driver's right-hand man ("but I'm
not
a man," she corrects me when I tease her later), she can take in the entire length of the bus at a single glance. Perhaps even better, she can peek over the handrail atop the partition, ensuring that she knows who's boarding before anyone but the driver can see.

As before, I sit immediately to her left. I could, though, choose from Tim's entire lecture hall, because, as Beth says, "I pick runs that aren't
crowded,
and when the seats get too full, I'm
outta
here."

"If I might add an addendum to that," Tim notes, pulling the lever that closes the door. "It's because she likes to be the center of attention."

"No I
don't,
" says Beth with a giggle that belies her words. "I just like to
talk
"

"She fills me in on what every driver's up to, their vacations, their ups and downs," he says to me. "She's the town crier." Then he steers the bus back onto the street, heading up an eastern cut in the mountain, directly toward the sun pushing into the morning sky.

As he's driving, I follow Beth's gaze, which never wavers from him, and notice that beside his seat, he keeps a quart-sized plastic mug of coffee, a
New York Times,
and a glossy photography magazine.

"Ah, look at that sunrise!" Tim says at the first stoplight, lifting his arms toward the windshield. "Four billion sunrises, over the dinosaurs, the pharaohs, and now ours today. And no one's ever the same. Isn't it just the most remarkable thing? Each day is fresh and unique, yet each is also a link to every dawn all the way back to the Precambrian."

"Whuz that?" Beth asks.

"A long, long time ago," he says. "Before there were even people."

"You always use big
words,
" Beth says with a touch of disapproval. "I wouldn't want to be
around
before there were
people
" She pauses. "
Some
people."

Tim's smile now develops a knowing curl. He turns the bus toward a neighborhood of brick houses, and at the first stop sign, he glances at me and explains: a senior citizen recently flew into a rage because Beth was holding on to her seat—"Which the lady saw as the optimum place for her to sit as well," he clarifies. "I told the woman very nicely that all six of these sideways seats up here are for the elderly and handicapped; she could take any of them. She eventually did, but she sure made her feelings known. Whew! That was some day, wasn't it, Beth?"

"Oh
man,
she went
on,
" Beth mutters, and then declares, "It doesn't pay to be nice."

"Certainly it does," he says. "That's why people admire Abraham Lincoln so much, and Eleanor Roosevelt. That's why the Gettysburg Address says, 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new kind of bus,'"—I laugh—"'conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that the nicer you are, the more they'll leave you alone.' Or, as Mahatma Gandhi said—you ever heard of Mahatma Gandhi?"

"No," Beth says, rolling her eyes.

"He was from India. Remember, we talked about where that is? And he once said, You can kill them with kindness."

"He did not," I say.

"Then he should have," Tim says.

Smiling, I whisper to Beth, "What a great start to the day. He's so personable."

She looks at me curiously, and I remember that, with her limited range of vocabulary and difficulty with abstract thought, our communication usually flows more smoothly if I use simple words and rephrase complex concepts so she can follow me more readily. But I wonder if, like Tim, I should just speak as I usually do, twenty-dollar words and all, and let Beth ask questions, and therefore learn.

"Whuz that mean?" she asks.

"Personable? It means he's nice, that he has a pleasing personality."

"Yeah," she says with a quick nod. "He's
cool
"

Ah, yes. Cool. As my speech might sometimes seem unintelligible to Beth, so can hers seem to me, because Beth has her own lingo. And in Beth-speak, as I have gathered from her letters, "cool" does not concern hip attire or trendy indifference. Instead, it is the term of highest approval, bestowed only upon those people Beth deems worthy of her attention and trust, and crucial if one is to be promoted into her personal Top Ten (though, in truth, hip-hop shades or chiseled Brad Pitt features—neither of which the Professor possesses—are apt to increase the likelihood of admission). "Yes," I say. "I guess I do mean he's cool."

As Tim accelerates away from the crosswalk, Beth tells me that he's one of the drivers who truly loves his job, a quality without which, I realize, one cannot ever be deemed cool in her lexicon. Furthermore, she tells me, he smiles all the time, in glaring sun or fog, when the heater has broken, whether the riders have become deafening, or even if, as she sometimes observes from a bus shelter, he's gliding down the street alone. I'm impressed, especially after she mentions that he's been driving the buses for ten years. "What did you do before this?" I ask.

"I took an evolutionary route," Tim replies, slowing to a stop at the edge of this suburban neighborhood.

"Seven minutes," Beth says, reaching for her backpack. At first I'm confused, thinking she's referring to Tim's past, then realize that she's simply engaging in the kind of free-flowing talk that can characterize conversation on a bus. This time, she sees the question in
my
face, and clarifies, "Thaz how long he has to wait now."

"It's a layover," he adds. "They're put right into the schedule: idle time where you just sit before departure. Good opportunity to stretch my legs and get some real discussion in."

"Thaz what I
mean,
" she says, as she pulls out a pad of paper and a set of Magic Markers and begins to draw.

Tim reaches his arms for the ceiling, flexing his hands. Then he steps into the aisle, holding his mug, facing us. "So, to answer your question. I used to be what you might call searching, except I'm not sure how much I ever let myself see." He takes a sip of coffee. "Funny, when you consider that I've always enjoyed photography. In any event, I came from a college-educated family and dreamed of being an archaeologist, but I got so lost in my own head that I couldn't buckle down to a career or even school. I was working in a factory, which was actually nice because I saw I really liked being around the other people, but I knew there was more out there for me. Finally I realized that I needed to look at life with a different eye. It took a lot of effort, but eventually I went back to college at night.

"I loved learning. Paleontology, history ... Looking back in time was very exciting to me. But looking forward is more challenging—nothing unfolds as you anticipate, and it's the small things, not the huge geologic shifts, that make or break you. There I was in college, and I went on my first dig, thrilled to know I would at last be excavating artifacts. But when I squatted down at the site, I saw that the earth was packed down hard, the work was backbreaking, and the sun was baking me head to toe. I said to myself, This is
not
my destiny. I came home and switched my major to photography."

He pauses to finish off his morning coffee. "And life," he continues, "just kept happening; I began dating one of the teachers I met at college, and we ended up getting married. Then I heard that the bus company was hiring people. We wanted children, so I needed more income. That meant leaving college, but now we're looking forward to having our third kid.

"It's a rewarding life. Not the driving of the bus so much, though that pays the rent. But there's much more to this than taking people for a ride. It's like William Blake said, how you can see the world in a grain of sand, in the smallest moments of life. I couldn't see that when I was younger.

"This ties into my photography, too. I take pictures of all the things people don't normally look at." With his empty mug, he gestures at a jade plant inside a front window. "Like that little green guy over there. I pass him every day and watch him get bigger, and it makes me think about the way everything wants to grow, even if it's in a tiny pot."

I look out the window. Above the single-sprinkler lawns, now fallow with frost, rises a neighborhood of rectangular, two-story houses, their brick exteriors as red as apple skins. In the yard beside the house with the jade plant, a branch tilts upward from a puddle of slush: the remnants of a snowman. In another yard stands a stocky man in a cap, clipping a flag to his own private flagpole. Then he hoists it up, arm over arm. Tim lifts his hand in a wave as the man cinches his rope to the pole; the man raises his gloved hand back.

"You could say I left college behind," Tim says, getting back into his seat. "But I think all I really did was find another major: the details—the ones that are so easy to overlook."

I glance at Beth. She is shoving her markers back in her bag, with her finished work of art still on her lap. It is a variation on the many drawings she has sent me over the years: an intricate, mandala-like face, with a crown of many hues, a fan of dazzling hair, and what appear to be earrings and a necklace made up of small, smiling faces. Go-light green, merge-sign yellow, caution-cone orange, railroad-crossing red—each detail, I note for the first time, resplendent in its own color.

The bus resumes its loop. Now, with the morning rush hour under way and with us headed back into the city, commuter after commuter gets on, each of whom Tim welcomes not as a mere fare, but as an individual who deserves a "Good morning, Louise" or a "Ricardo, how are you today?" Slowly we fill to capacity, though Beth, despite her stated preference for emptier buses, seems satisfied to remain on this line a while longer. So I settle in, too, and, keeping Tim's "lesson" in mind, I find myself taking in the individual faces around me: the jowls and curlers and nose rings, the bifocaled and puffy eyes, hair every color from snow to flamingo to ebony, all of it enveloped by a bouquet of perfume and after-shave. I become more attentive to the symphony of sounds, from the
rrrr
of the bus's transmission to the
Ay, Dios mío!
of heart-to-hearts to the frequency with which
ain't
and double negatives like
he's not doing nothing
pepper the meandering chitchat. I note the advertisements above the seats, for denture services, gas payment plans, funeral homes, Shriners hospitals. Beth points out passing buses, able to detect, from subtleties I don't yet see, the different varieties: "Conventional, like the one we're on," Tim elaborates when she can't find the words to articulate just what she means, "and then there are the new, low-rise variety, and then the ones wrapped in an advertisement like a birthday gift, called, you guessed it, 'wraps.'"