Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey Page 13

  I don't tell Beth that it's much easier to remain in my apartment with my books than to greet a date at my door. I don't tell her that I am afraid to care about someone who might back away and move on. Or whom I might never be able to let myself love.

  So I write Beth that I appreciate that she cares. But no, I'm fine the way I am.

  Okay, she scrawls back the next day. I won't try to make that happen.

  "She's a writer," she mentions to one driver who likes to read fat library books.

  "She's a vegetarian," she informs another who is inclined toward health food.

  "Oh, yeah, she's single," she tells them all.

  Absent from these particular exchanges, I do not know this is happening. I do not know I have a yenta for a sister.

  I am on the phone with Rick, a driver about whom Beth has spoken highly, and often. An expert at pool, he runs a billiard school on the side, and, in the half year he has been with the bus company, has taken to inviting her out for milk shakes. I'm contemplating doing something more with the journal notes I've been keeping about Beth, maybe assembling an article about our bus adventures. So I've called him, along with other drivers, to conduct a brief interview. The sun has long since set, but I haven't bothered to lower the blinds. Leaf shadows shaped like small guitars flutter about my desk, dancing in the moonlight.

  I begin, "Do you mind if I ask a few—"

  "No, not at all"

  I ease into it with small talk. He's cheerful and unassuming; when he tells me his full name, Rick Whitman Gulliver, he acknowledges with good-natured humility that it is absurdly literary. "But for years," he adds, "I've been saying, 'Ma, why couldn't it have been Minnesota Fats Gulliver?'" His gentle laughter pours across the miles. I can't help laughing back.

  Then I steer us to the obligatory questions: How long have you been driving buses? Do you remember the first time Beth boarded your run? I check them off one by one until I say, "That's it." As I'm expressing my gratitude for his help, advancing toward the goodbye, he says:

  "So maybe sometime when you're back in town, we can go to dinner."

  A pause of several beats. He sounds charming and kind. Yet the receiver suddenly feels like a vise.

  "Well," I say, "thanks, but I'm just so busy. Maybe someday I'll see you on the bus."

  Three weeks later, I get a letter from Rick:

  Dear Rachel,

  Beth gave me your address. When she rode the bus on Wednesday your name came up and I told her I didn't know what to say (in a letter). She said she would write some stuff down for me to use. I think I should find my own material, though hers might have been better.

  Last night I enjoyed my monthly fine-dining experience. During the meal it occurred to me that this maybe a way to lure Rachel into a date with me. The place is the Kansas City Steakhouse. Aside from the food being great, everything they do is uplifting. I know you would enjoy it, and do hope you take me up on it. If you are interested, just say the word anytime.

  Sincerely,

  Rick

  I ponder what to say for a few days. Then I write him back. Thanks, I say, but I can't, and imply that I have some romantic drama in the wings.

  The next time I phone Beth, she says, "I didn't know you had a boyfriend. I won't ask who he is, but maybe you'll tell me. But I won't ask. At all. I won't be nosy like that. I won't. Thaz not what I do. I could but I won't."

  "Good," I say.

  "I thought I could have Rick as a brother-in-law, but I don't think thaz gonna happen."

  "Thanks for trying," I say.

  There is a silence, and then she says, "Okay. I won't try anymore. I'll lay off. I'll let things go on for you just the way you want."

  "I appreciate that."

  I can't see her sly smile, but I have a feeling it's there.

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  We four kids sit in a diner with Dad. He's flipping titles in the jukebox at our booth.

  Laura, lining up the salt and sugar holders, votes, "Three Dog Night's 'Eli's Coming.'"

  "'Brown Sugar,'" I say, reading about New Jersey inventors on my placemat.

  Max blows paper off his straw. "Ray Stevens's 'Gitarzan.'"

  Beth draws a smile in the condensation on her water glass. "Partridge Family"

  Dad runs his hand over his face. "Don't you guys ever agree?"

  "No," we say together. Laura's eighteen, I'm sixteen, Beth's fifteen, Max is thirteen. We don't hang out together anymore; we hang out in our own rooms now, finding our own paths. Actually, Beth hangs out with Mom and Ringo in the kitchen, but Mom's so busy with her job and dating, and we're so determined to keep to ourselves, that we haven't had real family meals for years. Mom's crying has stopped. The long drives together have stopped. All she does is work late, date late, cook late, and lie in bed late reading spy novels and books on UFOs.

  Dad fishes out a dime and drops it in. "Then I'll pick something you all like," he says, and presses the buttons for the crowd-pleasing "American Pie."

  Every few months, Dad takes us to a restaurant and we order dessert while he asks how school is going. Today it's Christmas break, but he asks about school anyway while someone else's jukebox pick comes on—Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle"—and we wait for our song's turn.

  Laura says, "Finals are harder at community college than at high school."

  I say, "We read The Odyssey. I liked the story, but my English teacher's an ass."

  Max says, "School? Aren't we all in the school of hard knocks?"

  Beth says, "I got new bankbook today."

  Dad closes his eyes.

  Our sundaes arrive. There's so much I want to ask Dad. I want to ask how to stop feeling so different from everyone in the world. I want to ask if Ringo still loves us because now when you pet him, he snaps. I want to ask why Mom always seems so bummed out. Dad still laughs his big laugh, though he and the lady professor have split up, and he doesn't laugh as much. But when I opened my holiday present from him, and it was an electric Smith Corona typewriter, I screamed with joy, and he laughed. Even when Mom vacations with a new boyfriend, or has coffee with Grandma, or helps patrons at the library research the history of horses, or wakes up to see the sun rise over the lake across the street, she's dragging.

  But I don't ask. I'm afraid of not looking in control like Laura, or of getting hit with one of Max's sarcastic spitballs, or of boring Beth. Anyway, Max is talking about Patty Hearst, who got brainwashed by kidnappers and was just arrested as a criminal. I join in, my mouth moving right along, but I'm really thinking about last night.

  It was late, and I'd raised my shades and peered down from my room. There was Mom, saying good night to a new man in front of the house—someone she hadn't endorsed too highly when she was getting dressed for her date a few hours before. Yet she'd pressed on as she had for eight years of dating now, just in case this was the one who might make her happy.

  He leaned in for a kiss, and she complied. But when she turned toward the house, I saw the look on her face. It was the same one I'd seen after so many of her dates, or whenever she pulled into the driveway from work, or even just last week, when she came across a half-finished paint-by-number landscape and threw it into the garbage. Failure, it read to me, and terror.

  I feel sorry for her, but I can't let her know. That would be like feeling sorry for Patty Hearst, which you're not supposed to do. "She made her own bed," my German teacher said and shrugged the day they caught Patty.

  We're scraping the bottom of our sundaes when finally our song comes on the jukebox. "A long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile."

  We all know the words, but we're too old to sing in a restaurant, so we make faces at one another while Dad goes to pay the check.

  Happiness, I have grasped, is a destination, like Strawberry Fields. Once you find the way in, there you are, and you'll never feel low again.

  I study the ways people try to get in. Flashy cars. Important jobs. Huge houses. Athl
etic trophies. Religion. Drugs. Beer.

  Or the big one: romantic, head-over-heels love.

  Many people believe in this. Just check out the Top Ten, or Love, American Style. Just look at how people make eyes at each other at school.

  I believe it, too. Last year, I fell in love with a blond boy in my English class. We spent every afternoon together, and stayed out late together every night. When I woke up in the morning, I saw his face in my mind before I opened my eyes. When I talked to friends, all my stories were about him.

  Yet I was always afraid that he would suddenly stop caring. This happens in the Top Ten. And it happens on back roads in Pennsylvania, where you stand at the door and stare at a truck hauling away your husband's clothing and a cot and a rug and there are your kids waving goodbye, and you go sit in your room for days. I lived for those moments when the blond boy called and visited as he'd promised, and I would know that it hadn't happened to me.

  Then he did break up with me, as unexpectedly as I'd feared. He had his bellhop job to tend to, and his buddies to party with. Suddenly, when I glanced at the mirror, I saw a face that looked like Mom, wearing the same despair she wore all the time. Now, at New Year's six months later, I don't peek at mirrors anymore, and I don't look at her either. I don't want her to see that I haven't yet found the way. I don't want her to see herself in me.

  "I met a new man last night," Mom tells me the day after New Year's. Beth is playing Chutes and Ladders with her at the kitchen table. Ringo is curled up on the next chair over.

  I wonder why she's mentioning it. She never has before. I pour myself some orange juice.

  Mom continues. "He doesn't seem to be much of a catch. He says he drinks two hundred dollars' worth of bourbon a week and smokes five packs of cigarettes a day."

  I turn around but keep a glaze over my eyes.

  "And," she goes on, flicking the Chutes and Ladders spinner, "he says he's an ex-con."

  "Are you serious?" I muster.

  "He's asked me out again." She sighs, moving down a chute on the board. "I don't think I'll go."

  Three days later, I hang out at David's house after school. We stand on his bed with a lamp and a broom for microphones, and belt out songs from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Pooped and laughing, I go home long after dinner and walk into a wall of cigarette smoke.

  I follow its source to the kitchen. A scowly guy sits at the table between Mom and Beth, holding a filterless Camel. He looks like a scuzzy version of Moe from The Three Stooges. There's a glass of amber liquid at his elbow.

  Mom says, "This is the man I was telling you about. He's living here now."

  My chest feels like something just hit it. She has never moved someone in before. And she has a glass in her hand, too, even though she hates to drink. We all hate to drink, and we all hate cigarettes. Beth is holding a jack-in-the-box, her face down and hidden by her hair.

  "Uh, I already had dinner at David's," I say, backing off. But that isn't true. I just want to get out of this kitchen.

  "Can't you say hello?" she says.

  "Hell. Low."

  Then I charge up to my attic room, where I turn on my typewriter and drop the needle on Close to the Edge and furiously pound out a letter to a friend.

  So I don't see Beth's confused face as she peers into the smoke at Mom and this man, trying to put all this together. I don't see the jack-in-the-box getting ready to erupt, in the room right underneath my feet.

  June

  The Earth Mother

  11:45 A.M. "So is this your sister?" asks Estella. Her voice, issuing forth from within a tumble of thick, ginger-ale blond hair, is low and reedy, reminding me of the woody tone of a medieval recorder.

  Panting, Beth and I throw ourselves into our customary seats. We've just descended from one bus as it angled around a corner, and then, spotting Estella drawing near, charged down the street to catch hers, Beth's sandals flapping, my gauzy print skirt snapping in the breeze.

  I place my hand on my chest to still myself. Five miles a day on my treadmill at home, and here I am, winded. Estella swivels back to smile a benevolent greeting at me from behind her wire glasses. As I pat a sudden sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, I take in her snow white complexion, unwrinkled despite her forty-odd years, her generous hourglass figure, halfway between maidenly and matronly, and her eyes—kindly, yet world-weary. I find her instantly likable.

  "I've forgotten what Beth told me," Estella says. "Where're you from?"

  "Philadelphia," I say, but there is something about Estella that makes me feel as if I've spotted the lights of an inn during a storm. So I add, "Actually, I'm from the state of confusion."

  "No you're not" Beth says.

  "Something getting to you?" Estella says at the next stop.

  Before I decide how to answer, a gaunt woman with mousy, disheveled hair shuffles to the exit. Estella nods to her, "Tell your husband hello, Josie."

  "Oh, Estella," Josie says, "he's feeling even worse than the last time I saw you."

  "I thought the fever was gone."

  Josie, having descended the steps, speaks from the curb. "The doctor prescribed some pills, and he took them and now he's in the hospital. Can you believe it? A prescription pill?"

  "That driver Keith who was mean to me is talking to me nice now," Beth says, as she has said to every driver we've seen today.

  "That's good, Beth," Estella says, still fixing on the woman.

  "There you are—" says the woman.

  "But I don't trust him—" Beth interrupts again.

  "...doing what the doctor says you're supposed to do—"

  "...and some drivers say to give him a chance and others say to watch out—"

  "...and you get hit with something ridiculous like a prescription pill—"

  "...and I don't know why he's so hot and cold, he's wee-ard, I don't know what to do—"

  Put a lid on it, Beth, the dark voice inside me wants to say—the same voice that's been piping up since this year began, and especially in my past few trips to see her. You've said precisely the same thing to every driver today, regardless of how the last one responded. Can't you get back to a sweeter mood? Would it be such a hardship to listen to someone else for a minute?

  Estella, hands on the steering wheel, focuses on Josie. "How is he now? Any better?"

  "Well, you know what's happened because he's in the hospital?" Josie recites a chain of woes as Beth sits at her seat's edge, waiting eagle-eyed for Estella to turn back.

  At length Josie's litany is exhausted. "It's some rough stuff, sweetheart," Estella says in a patient, compassionate tone, and adds, in a phrase that I later learn is derived from the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, "Please tell him I asked about."

  She draws the door closed, and, as Beth holds her tongue for just one more moment, Estella sighs and says to us, "Sometimes I want to move on from this job. There's a lot of stress. But I guess I'm where I'm supposed to be, at least for now. The people who go through big things, they're the ones that can help other people, and I think that's why I'm now here."

  No sooner has she re-entered traffic than Beth leaps right back in with her broodings about Keith. "I think I should tell him off, I should tell him not to mess with me, I should tell him he's being fake and I don't trust him, Jill thinks so too, and Sal, and Perry, not Jacob, he don't ever say do that, but what do you think? Iz a free country, I should tell him like it is, right?"

  Estella says, "Maybe he misjudged you, and you could give him another chance."

  Beth pauses. I can't discern if this message is getting through, but I can tell she's pleased that Estella is now spending time on her troubles, and perhaps that's all Beth actually desires, as it seems to soothe her quickly. Estella must be familiar with the calming effect her concern seems to have, because after she quietly consoles Beth, I see that she seems to offer everyone such a haven, listening with gentle nods and encouragement to her next half-dozen passengers. At a lull, when I remark o
n her nurturing ways, she says, "They're my customers, and that means something to me. I try to make them feel at home before they get home." A block later a stoop-shouldered man with fleecy gray hair climbs aboard, delivering a linen-covered dish on his upturned palm. Butler-style, he whisks away the napkin to reveal a platter of his wife's special roast chicken: "And this batch is as good as I've been telling you." Laughing, Estella thanks him for letting her sample the famed dish. As he then sets it in a bag for her, he says, "A gift to the great sounding board. God knows, some days I need you."

  On the last night of one of our visits in May, the pleasure I'd been deriving from our bus odyssey took a hit when I asked Beth for the first time if we could set out later the next morning. I needed to transport my sofa cushions and bedding home temporarily for a class I was conducting in my living room—a procedure that required some packing, several trips downstairs to my car, and the use of Beth's magnetic pass to fend off the glowering, self-appointed guards who would otherwise bar my way. I needed Beth's cooperation. "Could we try seven o'clock, instead of five-thirty?"

  "I leave early."

  "Then can you leave when you want but come back and help me at seven? Just this once?"

  "I leave early. There's nothing to do in here."

  "Okay. Can you lend me your front door pass, and I'll meet you later at the bus terminal?"

  She looked away. "I don't kno-oh."

  In the dark that night, drifting between wakefulness and sleep, not to mention between sisterly affection and sisterly annoyance, I heard Beth rise and run a bath. My watch read four-thirty. Wondering drowsily about her decision for the upcoming day, I fell into a sound sleep—and then suddenly I jolted awake. She was perched on her love seat, staring at me.

  "Beth, what are you doing!"