Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (31 page)

Finally I feel sick and glance away. When I peer back, she's still staring at me. I'm so far away we can't speak to each other, though our faces are twisted with hurt.

Once, when Beth and I went out to dinner with Jesse, he tried to explain her to me. "You got to understand," he said. "Her mind is set like a clock. And no one can reset that clock. That's just the way she is."

How right he was, I think at the end of our run; needless to say, Beth has planned our ride so that we have the driver all to ourselves. Jesse's words return to me now as Beth asks Cliff if he would mind her getting off up ahead, "just for a
min
it," to use the bathroom, and elaborates on which pizzeria in this block has the clean rest-room and just how long the owner's daughter—the one who accommodates Beth's restroom requests—stays on shift.

Cliff says okay, if she'll meet us within seven minutes at the top of the hill where he begins the next run. "I
will,
I always
do.
" When we pull into a narrow city street, she jumps out.

As Cliff then chugs up a series of steep hills, I make my way toward the front of the empty bus. He pulls over at a corner, sits back to wait, and extracts a copy of a magazine,
Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords,
from his bag. For a moment, as I stand halfway up the aisle in the now still bus, embarrassment courses through me. I realize how I keep turning to these drivers to help me steer my own life. But it has come to feel like a different world up here, with different rules, and, besides, I think, I am too desperate to remind myself that I should keep my mouth shut. I wait until I've calmed down, then slip into Beth's seat. I face him, as she always does, until he feels my eyes on him. He peers over at me.

I say, "Tell me, have you ever wanted something you couldn't have?"

He thinks for a minute. "I always wanted to be involved in sports when I was in school, and I couldn't because they found out I had scoliosis, which is a bad alignment of your spine. I was really disappointed. I couldn't accept it for a long time."

"What did you do?"

"I felt pretty bad, but eventually I thought, Maybe there's something else I can do, and I started bowling. The disappointment didn't disappear completely, but I was good at bowling, so it didn't weigh on me anymore."

Outside, a mom opens her front door and five little costumed kids dash down the steps to the street. "Or," he goes on, "let's say I want something for my car, and I know that I can't afford it. I look for something else that will be almost as good."

The kids tumble by us, a Teletubby, a princess, Batman, a firefighter, a hobo. The hobo drags a bit behind the others, not quite seeming to fit in.

Cliff says, "You just look at other ways to get the same results. Or other ways for
other
results. Like forget about football, which at some point a friend said to me, 'Get over it, look for something else.' That's the way you do it," he says. "Sometimes, you just have to change your goal."

"But how? How do you change?"

"When I was in shipping and receiving," he says, "I was always looking for something better financially. Plus there were times when I thought, I can't take this abuse on my body, lugging this stuff around. I had to change. It was hard for me, since I'd been in shipping awhile, and I liked it. But I just got to the point where I said to myself, You know what? I'm going to try something different. That's what I had to do to change,
really
change: be both at the end of the line with one thing, and willing to take a risk with something else. The two things together."

From the window I see a lime green streak in the street. It's Beth, flying along like the Road Runner. She blows past the hobo without a look and zips around the rest of the kids.

"I made it," she says, leaping onto the bus.

"Just in time, too," Cliff says, leaning in to look through his side mirror. "I was scared you weren't going to pull it off."

"Oh, you know I'd be back, you
know.
"

I move aside, well aware that this is
her
seat. "Thanks," she says, and settles right in.

Then Cliff accelerates, and we head down the hill. A block in front of us, the street is swarming with kids: ten, twenty, all dressed up for a Halloween party, running down to a house that's decorated to appear scary. But the bats are made out of paper, the mummies are plastic. Fake tombstones sport bad jokes.

Beth is ignoring the parade of costumes in the street and gazing adoringly at Cliff—and with a jolt, I know what scares me.

It's not just the same old crush with a new face, or the same old song with the same wrong words. It's not just the pattern she doesn't see, or care about, and therefore cannot or will not change.

It's that Beth seems to need a cataclysmic event for her to change in any way—an event like our mother's complete abdication of her responsibility to protect her own child, Juanita's rejection, or Rodolpho's abandonment. This seems true whether she's being called upon to develop resourcefulness, assertiveness, or just basic self-restraint. I look at her and feel a clutch in my throat. What will it take now?

Is this all there will ever be to her life?

I stare outside, to the open row house door that is spilling light into the street, and to the kids crowding the doorway: the werewolves and ballerinas and pirates and the hobo. To all the sights I would be missing if I were at my desk, wrapped in my own pattern.

I suddenly realize that Jesse's metaphor applies to me, too. Whoa, I think, I don't want to be a clock that nobody can reset—not anymore, I don't. Especially if that nobody is me.

"Here we are," Rick says, as he glides his car into the golf course parking lot. "Chip and putt."

In the chilly mist of an autumn evening, the golf green fans out to the left of his compact sedan, flags planted along its gentle hills. Before today, I had played only miniature golf with Beth. Now Rick is going to teach me the real game. "Sure," I'd told him when I called to say yes, I'd go out with him. But all day this Sunday, as a cold rain drizzled down and I loafed about with Beth in her apartment, I wondered if the weather would permit us to tee off. Now, though the rain has ceased, the leaves drip silver threads of water, and the fairway has become a sponge.

"So," he says, turning to me, "you ready to learn?"

"I ... I don't think anyone's here," I say, peering through the windshield.

He glances up to the main building and then around at the grounds. Not a soul in sight.

"Oh no," he says. "I thought they'd stay open in the rain, but..." He sighs. Then he says, "But that doesn't mean we can't go in."

He smiles. Although tiny crinkles frame his eyes, his baby-smooth cheeks give him the air of a schoolboy, which is underscored by the kind of attentiveness and warm, ready laugh that I see on the faces of smitten youths strolling beside their sweethearts in mall corridors. This is not to say that Rick is shy. While it is true that he is adept in what he calls a lost art—the simple act of listening—he also talks easily, rolling out sketches from his life without egotism, reflecting knowledgeably on local lore. I am soothed, and stirred, to see that we have a natural rhythm to our conversation.

He hops out of the driver's seat, strides around to the passenger side, and opens the door with a slight bow. I climb out and look around. The golf course—smaller than a regular course, that's what a chip and putt is, he's explained—is but one feature of this sprawling, private park. There's also a baseball field, swing set, picnic area, and, in the distance, a stream with a footbridge.

We turned in here after a long country drive away from Beth's apartment, during which Rick told me that he used to be an over-the-road driver, as intercity, or Greyhound-type, bus drivers are called. The buses were far more luxurious, with restrooms in the back and upholstered seats, the works, but he couldn't form relationships in that job, with passengers keeping so much to themselves, the long hours, and overnights in distant hotels. He was still struggling with the disappointment of two divorces, and with pangs of loss and failure. He needed more interaction than four silent hours with a windshield.

He holds out his arm, and I rest my hand upon it. We walk down the sloping wet pavement, fallen leaves matted to the ground in the wake of the storm. A light breeze nips at his windbreaker, and at my raincoat and floral dress, which Beth convinced me to wear, saying, "You should look more
bright
" Above Rick and me, the sky is still marbled with gray, but the late-day sun has begun to peek out, glowing gold and crimson along the horizon.

"Oh no, the gate's down," I observe sadly at the bottom of the hill, noting a waist-high metal barrier crossing the path in front of us. He simply climbs over it and offers me his hand in the misty fall evening. With his help, I step over the gate, too.

"You know," Rick says, as we walk along the path toward the ball field, "you have a lot in common with Beth."

I laugh. "Oh, yeah?"

"No, really. She's sweet, and sometimes very giving, and she has a kind of innocence to her. You do, too."

I am flattered, though I don't see myself this way, nor Beth, for that matter. "I think she's really streetwise."

"Sure she is. But there's also something else. You know, the way you're both shocked at the intolerance in the world. The way you both board these buses with such open hearts toward the drivers. It's a kind of innocence, seeing the good in humanity, and wishing for even more. That's too rare in this world."

I mull this compliment over. "But it can get us hurt when the bad stuff happens."

"Well, maybe that's okay," he says. "Maybe it's the price you pay to be more human."

We walk along, our backs to the rest of the world. In front of us lie picnic areas and patches of woods and, around the bend, the surging stream and the pretty wooden bridge.

We stop on the bridge. The water tumbles beneath our feet, and all around us grass sparkles from the recent rain. Everything smells fresh, and there are no voices but our own.

Lingering above the stream, we talk about love. The rocky love of fading romances and friendships. The distant affection of his grown son, who sometimes doesn't return his calls. The fondness I feel for my college students. The recently contentious love of his sister. The always complex love of my sister. The never-ending, hard work of love.

He is thoughtful and kind, and when I admit to my frustrations with Beth, he listens. "I understand," he says. "I can't make them go away, but I totally understand."

On the bridge, gazing down at the clear, flowing water, we trade anecdotes and advice, and ask ourselves how, and how much, to give to others. How, and how much, to ask from them.

The mist frizzes my hair, and the chill makes him button his windbreaker. But neither of us seems in a hurry. We may not be at the ocean, but I feel I've gone into the deep, as our clothes grow damp in the cool, humid air.

After the sun sets, we drive and talk. Then we eat and talk. We have Indian food, which this meat-and-potatoes guy tries because it's what I like, and he finds he likes it, too. He smiles all through the meal, and, with no hesitation, I smile back. Then we drive some more: "Here's a town I once lived in," he says. "And there's a garden I started years ago. Look how it's doing!" He points out the country bus stop where he used to pick up an elderly man who called himself a gypsy, and wore tattered clothes and lived in an unheated apartment, and rode the bus all winter long just to keep warm. "I'd talk with him. It's not hard to do that. If you don't want to, why drive a bus? You might as well be a truck driver." He nods toward a swinging lantern on the far side of a field, then slows down long enough for me to make out the farmer walking along toward his house. "That's probably an Amish family living at the end of some dirt road out there. Everyone calls them the plain folk. I think of them as dignified." I bring up the deceptively simple idea of self-determination, and we contemplate its intricacies. We then explore the intricacies of his own family, as he gestures toward the cemetery where he'll be buried beside his mother, who lives in a trailer near town. "Did you know bus drivers are deeply respected in Japan?" he says, steering us over the hills. He tells me how they dress in sharp uniforms, with white gloves, and are seen as true professionals, playing a role that's vital to the smooth workings of the community. "Isn't that something?" We talk about Thoreau, whom he's just begun to read. He makes little jokes now and then, and I laugh.

Then, heedful of the time when he has to get up the next morning—when the fleet rolls out of the terminal before dawn, there are no allowances made for late risers—he drives me back toward the city, and before I know it, he pulls up to Beth's apartment. Standing beside his car, I reach into my raincoat pocket and discover that I can't find her magnetic door pass, which I thought I'd taken with me, and since it's already eleven o'clock, she's sure to be asleep.

"I'll have to call her from my cell phone," I say, as her front buzzer is perpetually broken.

He walks me into Beth's vestibule, and I dial. She picks up in a stupor.

"I'm locked out," I say. "Can you come down and let me in?"

She agrees, half-asleep, and when I turn around to tell Rick, he is no longer beside me. I look through the glass vestibule doors, and he's leaning against his car, waving good night, saving us both from the awkwardness of having to figure out whether to kiss.