Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey Read online

  On why we're here: "We're here to learn, sooner or later, to surrender our pride and do unto others as you would have others do unto you. But most people don't want to hear this until they hit bottom."

  On prayer: "It means so much more than what people think. It ain't just sitting there, mumbling things. My prayer has graduated from asking for things to downright praise and gratitude. And instead of wondering whether I'll get something I want, I pray for others. It's how I keep myself at peace."

  Then Beth joins us and, without preamble, says, "I'm afraid to have my eye operation. But I have to, I know."

  We talk about hospitals and healing. Jacob lifts his T-shirt to show us the scar from his liver transplant. Beth has told me he gets sick more often than most drivers. "Are you okay?" I ask, concerned. "Oh, yeah. It's under control." He smiles reassuringly.

  The voices of children playing nearby rise and fall. Grace and Carol sit a few yards away, building a castle. Beth gets up and shoots a water pistol at me, giggling.

  Later, along the boardwalk, we stop in shops with beaded curtains and seashell jewelry, watch hermit crabs crawl in wire crates and see the Ferris wheel rock to a stop, meander through an old-fashioned candy store, and ogle machines that make saltwater taffy. Banners zip through the air tied to light airplanes. We wave at a hot-air balloon.

  Jacob takes pictures. We admire a miniature golf course with cartoon themes. Then Grace takes pictures. In a shop, Carol tries on a blue bathing suit that makes her look as fetching as a mermaid. Then she takes pictures: Jacob with his arms around Beth, Grace, and me. "Now you have three daughters," Beth says to Jacob as the shutter clicks.

  I have not yet gone into the water. I don't care for being in over my head, or tempting the tides, or chancing across a rabid jellyfish swimming too close to the shore.

  After lunch, we wind our way back through the sunbathers to our chairs. Jacob and Grace say, "Let's go in!" But I remain on the dry sand, with Carol and Beth.

  "This is the beach!" Jacob says when he returns, dripping wet. He scoops up the ball. "Come on, you'll be fine."

  "I'm fine here in my chair with my book," I say as he runs back in.

  I watch him and Grace jumping about in the waves, tossing the ball. He returns one more time to say, "You drove all the way here and you're not going in?" Without waiting for an answer, he scurries back to the water.

  Carol shrugs. "You're on your own."

  Beth says, "I'll go if you go."

  I pause. "Okay. I'll try."

  I set down my book and remove my skirt and sweater and shirt and hat and sunglasses and wristwatch. An ocean breeze whistles past, pricking up goose bumps on my arms and legs. I feel as if I'm in my underwear, except that I can't lower the blinds.

  Then Beth and I head past the many beach towels to the water's edge.

  Jacob and Grace, happily tossing the ball in the deep, catch sight of us. "Hey!" Jacob calls above the breaking waves. "You're here!"

  Beth and I put our toes into the foam. "It's cold!" we say.

  Jacob reaches his arm over the water toward us, his fingers beckoning.

  Beth and I linger on the shore, giggling, holding each other. He keeps on, finally throwing me the ball. I step out to catch it—up to my ankles. He throws it again, aiming deeper into the water. I move toward it—up to my knees.

  "Come in!" he calls.

  Beth, I see, has retreated to the beach. I throw the ball back. I am alone.

  "You throw well!" Jacob says.

  Grace joins in. "Come on out here!"

  I let myself go partway in. Jacob is making his "come here" gesture.

  The water is up over my knees. Over my thighs.

  But then: "I'm cold!" I say.

  "Just get in! C'mon!"

  "I can't!"

  "You'll warm up as soon as you get used to it!"

  "No, no. The water seems warm, but the air is cold!"

  He calls, "You know what that is? That's writer's crock!"

  I'm suddenly shivering so hard I can't try any longer. I turn and run back up the beach.

  Inside the Tears

  Three months after Beth disappears, I am in class on a dewy spring morning when a student who works in the office comes to the classroom door. "Rachel has an emergency phone call," she says. I know, I just know, it has to do with Beth.

  I tear across campus. It is a friend of Dad's, telling me that Mom's husband had called that morning and said he was about to put Beth on a plane in Albuquerque. Dad was told to get to La Guardia to meet her. Immediately.

  Why so suddenly? Why didn't mom call?

  It is mysterious and frightening. When I step outside the office, I faint for the first time in my life.

  I stay out of classes all day, waiting for Dad. He is supposed to swing by my school after he and Max have picked up Beth. I lie on my dormitory bed in silence, listening, telling myself my worst fears could not be founded.

  Then I hear that cadenced, quacky voice.

  I whip into the corridor. She is down the hall with my brother, grinning. She has the same heavy, awkward walk, the same body, the same laugh—though some of her hair has fallen out, her hands and face are grimy, and her all-yellow outfit is filthy beyond words.

  I barrel down the hall and throw myself into her embrace.

  Minutes later, we get into Dad's car, feigning normalcy. "So, Beth," I say, as Dad steers us down the country roads toward his apartment, "did you like the plane ride?"

  "I liked Las Vegas"

  "I thought you were in Albuquerque"

  "Las Vegas"

  Dad says, "Albuquerque was a lie. They obviously don't want us to know where they are."

  "She has almost no clothes," Max says. Dad adds, "And what she has hasn't been washed." Hiding my dread, I ask, "What happened, Beth? Where have you been?"

  She pours it out. Our mother and this guy—"He was mean and he yelled. He was nuts!"—have been running from what he said was the KGB and the CIA. They have been living in hotels under aliases, running from skipped bills, shoplifting. He beat Mom and once held a knife to her throat. He slept all day and drank all night. He wouldn't let them make calls except to Grandma, and they couldn't tell her where they were, and eventually they couldn't call at all. He wouldn't let them go out alone, or speak to anyone, even waiters or taxi drivers. Over and over, they left their luggage behind when they ran away from hotels in the middle of the night, except that he always kept his Samsonite, which was filled with guns and knives, and running away meant really running, doing it on foot, because they sold Mom's station wagon two months ago and she kept the money in her support hose because he didn't like banks and ever since then they'd traveled around Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico spending whole days on buses—

  "Buses?" I say.

  "Yeah. Long, long bus rides. They'd sit together in one seat, and I'd sit in my own seat and look around to see if anyone could help."

  On a bus. Independent, yes, but not the way I'd envisioned it. She was on her own on a bus.

  And all along, Beth kept planning to get away and call us to come rescue her. Everywhere she went, she looked for a pay phone. Yesterday she'd made her break. While he and Mom were in a casino, Beth sneaked out of her hotel room. She asked strangers in the lobby for their loose change and then she walked outside to find a phone. Showing a resourcefulness that had been incubating for three months, a resourcefulness she'd never shown before, she did find a phone. She figured out how to call the operator. She remembered Laura's phone number.

  But Laura's landlady answered and said that Laura was away at class.

  Moments later, when the man found her, he'd thrown himself, punching and raging, at Beth, saying he wanted to kill her. "Thaz when the crap started." He sent Beth to her hotel room, wouldn't let Mom come in, and held my sister at gunpoint all night, as she sat on her bed, staring at him in terror. This morning, at the airport, Mom kissed her over and over, and told her, crying, "I have to send you back, if you're going t
o stay alive"

  Then Beth, in the car with us, begins to sob, and Dad does too. And then Max breaks down, and then me. In a cascade of tears we cruise down the road, not noticing the budding trees or the young corn in the fields.

  So Beth also moves in with Dad, joining Max and Ringo, and, when she finishes the semester at college, Laura. In June, my summer vacation arrives, and I move into Dad's place, too.

  We cannot begin to understand our mother, who seems to have gone off the deep end. We piece together that her new husband is a lawless alcoholic, for whom life careens between boredom and paranoia. But Mom went along with it all, to the point of talking her own mother into helping her. To the point of almost letting her daughter get killed.

  Maybe, we think, our mother liked it. She must have. She must be a monster inside. Why else would she do that?

  The sleet from that February afternoon has settled deep into my chest. I feel nothing for my mother. I lose myself in my homework and writing.

  Laura and Max feel the same as I do about her. We dogleg around her name in conversations. We see only holes where she stood in our dreams. We try to forget with black humor, sundaes, new friendships, and scorn for phrases like "maternal instinct." Only rarely does anyone bring up what happened.

  But sometimes in the afternoon we find ourselves in the living room while Dad is grading papers in his study and an old movie is on TV and feelings I don't understand poke out of the ice inside me. I'll be sitting on the wing-backed chair, writing to a friend in New Jersey, my pen going on about Richard Brautigan or the new Grateful Dead album, and then suddenly it'll veer off into a bold-letter marquee:

  THE STORY OF THE DECLINE OF THE SIMON EMPIRE

  WRITTEN, DIRECTED, AND STARRING

  THE INCOMPARABLE RACHEL SIMON

  (WITH ASSISTANCE FROM BLOOD RELATIVES)

  Max and Laura don't know I'm spilling our tale to distant friends. It doesn't occur to them; they're hunkered down over the dining room table, each involved in a game of Solitaire. All the while, with their eyes on their cards, they talk. Laura says, "We just need to move on, forget it, begin a new life." Max says, "Life is a bowl of sour grapes. If I can beat myself at this game, that's enough for me."

  But Beth sits on the sofa, staring at the TV. When the movie ends, she stares at the wall. I finish my letter and take a new sheet from the stationery box beside me to start another. Laura and Max start a game of Gin. Then, as dusk rolls in, Beth pulls herself to her feet and slowly climbs the stairs to the room she shares with me. I pause with my pen, Laura suspends her card shuffling, and we all look up to the ceiling. There're the feet, padding across the floor, one-two, one-two, one. There's the oomph of the bed. We keep looking up, hoping. Maybe this time she won't stay in that bed for twelve hours. Maybe her hair won't keep falling out every day.

  "I wonder if she'll ever feel better," I say.

  "I wonder if the Yankees are winning," Max says, but he's not wearing his joker face. "Just deal a new hand," he adds quietly.

  September

  The Jester

  3:35 P.M. "Anybody have a birthday?" Bert bellows down the aisle in his New York accent as he positions himself like a comedian, the fare box area his stage.

  We are stopped for a "time point" at a downtown corner. As distinct from a layover, which is actually written into the schedule, a time point means we've happened to reach a stop several minutes before our bus is due to depart. So, to prevent us from arriving at subsequent stops prematurely, he must take a recess here until it is time for us to move on. Towering, beefy, white-haired, red-cheeked, clownish, and in his late fifties, Bert is whiling away these extra minutes as he often does: "Getting folks going. Getting them to ease up a little."

  Everyone looks toward the front of the bus: Little League boys, girls sucking Tootsie Pops, dreadlocked dads, one-kid-per-hip moms, leisure-suited retirees, the dozing, the listless, the fidgety, the gum-cracking, hand-holding lovebirds, sad-faced shoe-gazers. Beth and I perch on our front seats. Like the kids in the bus, she's laughing already, because she knows what's happening. Someone's bending the rules, someone so solid that he blocks the windshield and doesn't mind if he makes a monkey of himself if that's what it takes to get people relaxed and smiling.

  "Anybody have a birthday or anniversary coming? Sir, you." He points to a young father halfway down the bus, a seemingly shy fellow who has hesitantly raised his hand.

  Egged on by his daughter, who is leaning bright-eyed over the seat behind him, the man nods. His wife sits beside him, her lips curved in amusement.

  "What's your first name?" Bert says.

  "Domingo."

  "Domingo. Domingo!" Then, as thirty passengers cohere into an audience, and kids slip away from their parents and gather around his feet, Bert lets loose with his song, breaking each note in two or three places, so his lyrics come out as a booming croak:

  Happpppy birthday tooo yoouuuu,

  Happpppy birthday tooo yoouuuu,

  Happpppy BIRTHday, Dominnnngggggoooo,

  HAPPPPPy BIRTHday TOOO YOOOUUUU.

  The bus, laughing, bursts into applause. "You sing terrible." Beth razzes him as she claps. "You need a tune-up." Domingo and his family are grinning, every child beams with delight, and Bert takes the applause like a pro, brushing away the praise.

  "You do what you got to do," Bert says to me as the applause dies down. "You realize they need to smile, you go to work. You just get creative. There're no problems. There are only solutions." Mindful of his remaining spare minutes, he takes a breath and begins his next skit.

  "Tell her about New York," Beth says to Bert earlier that day.

  We're doing our stop-start bus dance down the city streets, which are, mercifully, no longer scorched by summer. Green leaves still flutter beside and above us, though the lawns have been singed to a lackluster brown, and in gardens sunflowers huddle over their shriveled brethren.

  Before he retired, I learn, Bert had been a New York City bus driver for thirty years. He declares this history with a veteran's pride, then adds that when he relocated to this area, where the lower cost of living would allow him to spend his twilight years in more comfortable circumstances, he grew restless, searching for excitement. So now he drives part-time "just for fun." It's easier than in New York, since there are fewer pedestrians blocking crosswalks as his bus maneuvers through the streets, and only a handful of passengers, rather than a throng, flagging him down at every stop.

  "But you know what I don't like about folks around here?" he says. "They're rude and crude."

  "You said it," Beth chimes in.

  "Like, people will get on Beth's case on the bus. I think it's so hilarious. Because she knows about four times as much as these people do. That's the truth, too.

  "In the Big Apple, you get people like Beth on every bus, and nobody would say a word. You get races mixing, and it's no big deal. Old people, young people, everyone keeps their mouth shut. There's just more tolerance there."

  "It's here, too," Beth adds. "For people that know how to behave"

  "Not that New York was a piece of cake, believe me," Bert says. "And I'm not even talking prejudice or whatever. I'm talking the whole shebang, the whole grab bag of human actions. Because in New York, everything you can think of happens.

  "Like when I started. Staten Island was more rural, more wild. And this kind of thing happened every day. I'm driving along at two in the morning, along swamps. Here comes this girl out of the woods with nothing on but shower slippers. Naked. Mud up to her knees. I'm all by myself. I pull over the bus—rrraahh! She gets on and says she and her boyfriend had a fight, they were parked in the woods there, and she left. She has no money, so what am I going to do? I let her on. She needs a ride! Rules don't mean anything in times like these. I mean, if someone gets on here with a dollar nine—"

  "A dolla ten," Beth corrects him.

  "Right. That's right. But if you only got a dollar nine, some drivers won't let you ride! But I'm not going to say
no. I mean, what's she going to do? Naked, the middle of the night? Is it really that important to collect that fare? I think as a public service you're obligated to take the person if they have no money."

  "Naked or not?" Beth asks.

  "Any which way. Hell, I've given people money for breakfast because they just got kicked out of their apartment with no cash."

  Beth says, "Tell her another naked story."

  "Sure. Another time the only thing the girl had on was a bandanna—on her head. So I call up on the radio and tell my boss and he says, 'Tell her to take the bandanna and put it like a pair of underwear.'"

  He cracks up. Beth follows his lead.

  "It teaches you to be ready for anything. And to know that whatever the problem, you'll figure it out. As long as you're not too rigid. There's always a solution."

  I glance at Beth and am startled to remember something about her—no, about her and me and what we used to do together, in the days when we lay behind the lattice under the house, half mesmerized by the silvery threads of the spider's web. It rewarded us for exploring in the diamond-shaped shadows, for surviving all those silly adult lessons on shoe tying and table manners; it threaded us together, too. I am saddened that I've forgotten it until now.

  "What?" she says.

  "Nothing," I reply. "Only, when we get home tonight, there's something I want to do."

  "Okay, everybody," Bert says, standing in what I'm coming to think of as the Time Point Club. "Who's got a dime? I'll give you the time."

  A boy in a Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt pitches a coin high in the air.

  "Thanks for the dime. Four-fifteen's the time."

  "Hey," says the boy. "You rhyme."