Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (6 page)

But as Beth begins to fill Tim in on the medical status of a driver who hurt his back, I find myself growing a bit skeptical that Tim is as content as he seems. He bailed out of college for this: a dozen daily circuits in this grungy, lumbering vessel? How could there possibly be enough here to sustain him?

Somewhere not far from downtown, though, as we're drawing up to a curb, an elderly woman on the front-facing seat to my left lets out a sigh. I turn. She's short, with white curls that she holds in place with a polka-dot hair band. I already know her name is Norma, because she'd greeted Tim and Beth by name upon her arrival, as they had greeted her by name, too. "Know what today is, Tim?" she asks.

"Wednesday," Beth answers authoritatively.

"It ain't only that," Norma corrects. "It's my anniversary."

"For your
wedding?
"

Tim, discharging passengers, says, "Isn't it the anniversary of when you met your first husband? You mentioned it last year, didn't you? That would make it sixty-one years now, I think."

"Yeah, long ago, may he rest in peace. God, that war ... But when I think about it, it was a day like this: cold and sunny."

Then, as Tim tacks back onto the road, Beth lets Norma take the floor. "It was in one of them great dance halls," she says. "I'll tell you, those were some times. We'd ride the trolley down from where we lived—only seven cents, that's what it cost then—"

"Right, I remember," says a white-bearded man a row behind her, nodding. "Had a newspaper they sold on board."

"The streets, they was all lined with shops. Imagine it. My daddy used to say you could start naked at one end of Main Street and by the time you got to the far end you'd be dressed like a king. He worked in a knitting factory, and on weekends he'd give us money for the pictures. Well, the
theaters,
all gone now ... I remember one with a domed roof that looked like the sky—"

"The Palace," adds a woman who wears a kerchief over her gray curls. "I had my first date at the Taj Mahal."

"The Taj was something," the bearded man says. "Not like them megaplexes now."

"And at the end of the trolley line," continues Norma, "was a grand park with a lake so wide I bet not even your finest athlete could swim it. There was a Ferris wheel, a carousel. Not that they ran at this time of year, and, anyway, the dance hall was all we cared about. The Silver Pavilion." Her listeners murmur in agreement. "You'd wear your smartest skirt and blouse, probably the same one you wore to church—we didn't have the means for lots of clothes—and you'd walk in the doors. It was so enormous, you could fit the whole town inside. But only young people came. There'd be a stage at the far end with a big band playing the hits: Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, all the orchestras you still hear about now.

"And that day I went with my sister. I was shy, so she brought me with her date. When we got inside the Pavilion, he saw his cousin. His hair was black, he was as handsome as Errol Flynn, and the very next song he asked me to dance."

As Tim drives, she goes on. Not everyone is listening—Beth has already floated off course, entranced by Tim's back—and most other riders are sorting through handbags or gazing out the windows. But for the few around this woman who grew up when she did, she is playing a newsreel of their youth. For a moment I too find it easy to see back sixty years, and I envision this woman, young and slender, and a boy taking her into his arms. Though the city might have declined since then, and though the war broke her heart, and, though, as Beth tells me, Norma later went through two more husbands, both of them louts, she chooses this moment to remember now: when the band struck up "In the Mood" and her hand first touched his.

Then I sense eyes on me, and look across the aisle. An attractive man about my age, wearing a chestnut-colored bomber jacket, nods at me. "Looks like you like to dance," he says.

I am startled. Strangers mix with strangers all the time on these buses, but this stranger's eyes are flirtatious, though I tell myself I must be imagining it. "Well, I ... I haven't really ... danced for ... for quite some time..."

"It comes back fast," he says with assurance. "You just get out there and go for it."

"I guess so."

"You ever get out to Club 86? The Lion's Den?"

"Uh, no"

"So you're new to the area?"

"I'm ... just visiting..."

He glances out the window, then back at me. "So where are you going?"

You'll never reach the Big Life by dancing,
a dark voice deep inside me says.
And, besides, this journey's not about you. He wants to know where you're going? You know what to tell him: Nowhere.

I square my shoulders and say, "Actually, I'm going wherever she's going," and gesture to Beth. "She's my sister." He laughs politely. Soon afterward he gets off, nodding a quick goodbye.

Norma is now talking about her wedding to the boy, but I can no longer bring myself to listen.

Later, virtually all the passengers except Beth and me pour off at a glossy, platinum-colored mall. I know, because Tim thanks Norma as she exits, that I missed hearing all about the reception and how everyone loved her mother's wet-bottom shoofly pie. I know other exchanges escaped my attention as well, when a woman in a nurse's uniform brings up the rear, and Tim says to her, "It might seem hard now, Annie, but you have to have bad days to know how to appreciate the good ones."

Finally, when we're once again a threesome, waiting at the curb for new riders to emerge from the mall, Tim angles toward us in his seat and says, as if in response to my earlier inner criticism of him, "See, it's not the driving. I spend my day meeting people who lived important parts of their lives before I was born. Shakespeare says all the world's a stage and everybody's an actor, and that's very true in the microcosm of the world that's a bus. And a lot of the riders on this run are playing, like Robert Frost says, in the winter of their lives, and they're like an open history book. Actually, it's better, because you don't get feelings in a history book. Every day right here in this seat, I have history riding with me.

"And that's what I like about it. There's so much richness on a bus—really, so much richness everywhere—if you just develop the ability to look at life with a different eye, and appreciate the opportunities offered to you. It's like what Marcel Proust said—he's a famous writer, Beth." Beth had lost interest in the conversation, but now she turns back to us. "He said that we need to look at every second, past and present, to truly see the whole oatmeal cookie of life, as it manifests itself all around us."

"No way did he say
that
,"I say.

"Maybe not," Tim says. "But he might have if he'd driven a bus. Right, Beth? Don't drivers have all the answers?"

"No," she says, waving her hand at his question, and I laugh. "Only about
some
things. Not
all
things. Nobody does."

Still wearing his smile, he throws up his arms in surrender, then turns back to the wheel. "So much for my MacArthur genius award," he says.

Beth has already mailed her thank-you note to me before I've merged my car onto the highway home. It arrives at my apartment the next day:

to sis.

thanKs. So very very much. For. hanging out with me. and TakinG Me. out and take carE. of me. too you are s☺ great. who l DO Love a whole whole lot. And forever too.

Love
Cool Beth

A second letter arrives as well.

to Rachel. Hi.

Happy TiMMy said. he saw Jesse riding his bike beHinD us. Jesse says. he Wanted to do a surprise. On his New bike. that. was Great. to hear. Happy Timmy said its just like What he said. now.

Love
Your Coolest sister of all

I stick the second letter to my refrigerator with a magnet, and, at first, every time I glance at it over the next few weeks, I imagine Jesse sitting on his bicycle at an intersection, catching a glimpse of us through the bus window, then swerving away from his route and pedaling along swiftly behind us, unseen by anyone except Tim. But after a little while, when I look at this letter, I think instead of Tim, who keeps as aware of what's behind as of what lies ahead. I wonder how he developed a different eye, and in what kind of schoolhouse he learned.

"
Get ready for some Halloween pictures," Daddy says, grabbing his Polaroid, which means it's time to pull on our costumes. Laura is six, I am five, Beth is four, Max two. Mommy has spent weeks sewing our outfits, in between her classes at library school. Now Laura jumps into her princess dress, I get into my clown suit. Max is too little for a costume this year, so he and his Captain Kangaroo juice cup watch everything from my bed. Then there's Beth. Mommy still has to help her with sleeves and collars, so she takes the witch's costume she made for Beth, a pretty black dress with a hood for the hat, and starts to put it over Beth's head.

But Beth will not wear dresses. How can she know it's not just a big shirt, we wonder, as Beth starts shrieking and Mommy begins wrestling the cloth down to Beth's shoulders, saying "Stay still!" as Beth flings her arms around like she's a genie that won't go back in her bottle.

We watch in amazement. Beth sure can put up a fight. Even though she still wears diapers, and never crawled but just pulled herself along on her front arms till finally she stood up. Even though she talks funny—
"Be quiet"
is
"Dee-DIE-ak"
—her voice like a song and a quack at the same time. That doesn't stop her from kicking and howling as Mommy hauls the collar over her head. She doesn't want dresses in any color or for any holiday, and when Beth doesn't want something she doesn't give in. Not till—like now—the zipper is tugged all the way to the top.

Mommy stands breathless, letting Beth go. "You look so cute," Laura and I say, but Beth doesn't glance at the mirror. The best she'll do now is go along. Not smiling the way we do when Daddy sits the three of us on the lawn and snaps our pictures. But at least that fight is done for today.

***

She's fun to play with. She'll do the things that Laura's too big to do, and Max too little. After all, we're only eleven months apart, which means one month every year we're twins.

She'll suck on wet washcloths with me after a bath. She'll ride her big sturdy tricycle, which our parents had specially built for her, alongside me and my Schwinn. She'll go "Oooh" when I show her my booklet of spelling tests because my teacher puts stickers on each page where you get 100 and I'm going to save that book forever because there's a sticker on every page. And sometimes in the afternoons, she'll crawl with me into that quiet place under the house where Daddy piles the cut grass, and it smells all fresh and green. We'll lie on the soft blades, and look up into the sunlight coming through the lattice between us and the outside, and one of us will surely spot it: the beautiful strands of the huge spider web in the corner, shining like diamonds in the sunbeams. As we watch it sparkle, and point to how each thread runs magically right into each other thread, she'll hold her arm out for me to tickle. I'll skim my fingers along her skin, and she'll say, "Oh, dee-lee-shus." Then we'll reach beside us and toss the grass cuttings into the air. They sprinkle down, from light to shadow to light, our own private fireworks in the shade.

This is the second most scary time I remember.

Before Mommy goes to librarian school, she does paint-by-number landscapes with trees and streams. She props her canvases on an easel near the living room fireplace and paints when all four of us kids are just a few feet away in the sun parlor, singing to
Meet The Beatles!
This makes it easy for us when the needle gets to the end of the record, because we can just run up to her, and Laura can ask, "Will you turn it over, please?" Mommy sighs every time, and puts the brush down in that slow way she does when she's sad, and she's sad a lot. She's sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There's no reason, it's just the way it is. She goes to the hi-fi, slow and not smiling, and flips the record to the other side.

One night when Daddy's working late, Mommy leaves a partway finished painting in the living room when she goes to make dinner. Laura and I are at Linda's house down the street, playing Colorforms and cootie catchers, but Beth and Max stay home. When we come in
from Linda's, there's Mrs. Stein, looking serious. She says Beth went to the easel when Mommy wasn't looking and drank up the tubs of oil paint like they were punch at a picnic, and now they're at the hospital. Laura and Max and I sit waiting in the living room, staring at the half-empty landscape. We don't sing now. We don't even talk.

Then we get the call: "She's all right." The easel disappears, and Beth comes home, and Mommy starts her library studies, and her eyes grow even sadder.

This is the first most scary time I remember.

One morning, Mommy is in the kitchen, holding baby Beth in her arms. There's no Max yet, and Laura and I are playing dress-up through the archway in the dining room. When the phone rings, we know it must be ten-thirty, because every day Daddy calls us on his ten-thirty break from his classes, and Mommy really looks forward to it. She's lonely, and wears a drawn face, and asks Grandma over coffee how other people ever feel okay with themselves. Once she got so low she took us out for ice cream and had to call Daddy to find out if she should buy vanilla or chocolate. Daddy says she should take up a hobby like folk guitar or painting, or go back to school to get a job, they could use the money, and then she wouldn't feel so lost. You can tell she feels lost because she naps so long every afternoon that I get bored lying beside her, and if she ever laughs it's only a tiny "ha" next to Daddy's great big "Ha-Ha-Ha!" And sometimes after the laundry and shopping and dishes, she sits us on her lap and in that gorgeous Judy Garland voice she sings songs that make you want to cry, like "Cockles and Mussels" and "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," and then says softly, "You know, I could have had a career as a singer." Daddy doesn't sing like that. He wakes us every morning by putting on bouncy records like "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee" from
Pinocchio
and "Hello, Dolly" by Louis Armstrong and "Where's My Pajamas" by Pete Seeger, and then comes upstairs clapping his hands and singing and he throws back our covers and pulls us to our feet and gets us dancing so we start the day all giggly. Mommy says, "I wish you wouldn't get them so worked up," and goes off to scramble the eggs.