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

  "Cliff doesn't know why thaz so funny to us," Beth says at a brief stop, wiping her eyes.

  "That's 'cause he doesn't know you wish he'd be raining from the skies!"

  "He knows. I make sure he knows. That I want him and Jesse. Ten of them. Raining down right in front of me. Yummee."

  "Onto the roof of the bus"

  "All over the road."

  "All over the city!"

  "Cliff's so fine-looking," Beth muses.

  "Bet you think he's hotter than a heat wave."

  "You got that right. Hotter than a stove!"

  Envious, I turn toward the low-glare glass as we pull back onto the highway. I expect to see the nothingness of fallow fields in the night, but instead make out my reflection far too well, hauntingly blue and close. I cringe at the expression on my face.

  Failure, it reads, and terror. The way my mother used to look when she trudged into the house after one of her dates. The way I used to feel when love withdrew. Though, no, I realize it is more than that, studying my face as if it were a student paper I'd been grading over and over all semester and suddenly understood. It's not only failure and terror I observed in Mom, and now see in myself. There is self-pity, too.

  That old darkness rises within me. Don't think about this, it says. Keep telling the world, No, I can't, I'm sorry. Keep shutting the door.

  But I do think about it. Beth is in stitches along with her friend right in front of me, and I realize with a jolt that for all her failures and terrors, I have never seen self-pity on her face. Not even a trace. Not once.

  Maybe I can begin to get rid of my own self-pity, I think. In the weeks to come, I tell myself, I will try.

  Rodolpho admits that he'd like to explore new career options in his spare time. But he can't afford more pilot lessons and is casting about without direction, unsure what to do now.

  "You're good-looking, you could be a model," I tell him. "Or an actor."

  "Yeah, sure," he says. Then his eyes soften. "Well, okay. How?"

  I think for a moment. "There's that community theater down the street from where Beth lives. Maybe you can audition for a play, to see how you like it."

  "I've never done that before."

  Without a moment of resistance, I volunteer to extend this visit a day longer and reschedule my student meetings. I say, "I'll help you."

  We accompany him when he picks up the script for Bye Bye Birdie. Then we hole up in a pizzeria booth, and, as Beth sips her soda beside us, Rodolpho and I practice the lines. One minute he's Conrad Birdie, and I'm the what's-the-matter-with-kids-today father, and the next, we've reversed roles. We talk about stage fright. We talk about life fright.

  We see him to the theater door. He gives us a high-five before he walks in.

  Jacob has become fond of a particular rider: a young mother in an advanced stage of cancer. He tells me that she has a wisdom that life is to be lived to its fullest every moment, and a great love for her family. He says, "She makes me care more about people than I ever did."

  He brings her homemade corn pie, her favorite. He speaks to other riders about her courage and he prays for her.

  One day he informs me that she's back in the hospital because her liver has failed. I speak before I can stop myself. "I'll visit her with you," I say.

  When we arrive, we see that the cancer treatment has stolen her hair and her energy. Her family is gathered around her. Within days, I realize, she will be dead.

  We don't say much, just listen to them all, and to her. Her voice is so quiet that I can barely hear a word. When we leave the room, Jacob is weeping. I take his arm as we make our way down the hall.

  In the blue bus, Melanie tells us that many years ago, she lost a close friend in a car accident. One minute he was on the phone with her, and half an hour later he was gone. She says, "You don't know what lies ahead of you the next ten minutes. I don't know what's going to happen when I turn this corner here. So why not be a friend? Why not give while you can?"

  Soon it's as if word has spread.

  In the drivers' room, James talks to me about his woefully unraveling marriage and his guilt over sending his son, who has autism, to a group home. "Can I talk to you?" he asks me.

  Roberto asks my advice. Should he continue coaching his inner-city basketball league, or work up the courage to run for mayor? "Jacob says you have a good head on your shoulders," he says. "What do you think?"

  Joan says she wants to return to school to get her G.E.D., but she feels insecure. "I know you're a teacher," she says. "Can you give me any tips on what to do?"

  "Yes," I say, over and over. "Yes."

  "You know what a friend is?" Melanie asks. "Someone you can tell anything and not worry that they're going to repeat it. Someone you can trust. Someone who's on your side."

  Rick listens to me, and I to him, as we dawdle over dinner, as he demonstrates how to angle a pool cue, as we throw scarves around our necks to walk beside a pond filled with geese.

  If I've gotten fed up with Beth, he lets me rant, and when I'm thrilled with her, he shares my excitement. When we're strolling on the grounds of the local art museum, we share jokes and worries. When we finish having coffee at a café and are walking back to his car, he sings old folk ballads to me.

  But, despite all the time that has passed, there are days when I still long for Sam. So I tell Rick, "I really enjoy spending time with you, but I don't know that I'm ready for more."

  He replies, "I like your company, and you can handle this any way you please. I just want you to feel safe with me."

  Maybe this is how it goes, I think, watching Beth and Melanie, remembering the people I have loved, and the ones I wish I hadn't lost. Maybe we are all Beths, boarding other people's life journeys, or letting them hop aboard ours. For a while we ride together. A few minutes, a few miles. Companions on the road, sharing our air and our view, our feet swaying to the same beat. Then you get off at your stop, or I get off at mine. Unless we decide to stay on longer together.

  The bus is still blue, I think, looking back at my reflection, but beyond the window, the world doesn't seem quite so dark.

  The Eighteenth Hole

  We are all in our twenties. I am trying to write a book of short stories, Laura is progressing in her career as an advertising sales executive, and Max is devoted to his classes at law school.

  Beth sits in Dad's basement, watching soap operas every day.

  "What are we going to do?" Laura says to me over the phone.

  "She can't just stay there," I say to Max.

  "We've got to think of something," Max says.

  In a round robin of worries and complaints, we fret over her life. She is twenty-seven already; she shouldn't spend her life on the sofa. We dial one another late at night and mutter our fears into the telephone. In their bedrooms, with their new spouses, our parents agonize, too.

  Dad turns to our stepmother. "I want to do the right thing for her," he says. "But, oh God, what'll be good for us, too?" Our stepmother is a cultured and poised college professor—not the lady professor at the time of the divorce, but one he met a few years ago. She explains Faulkner and Plato to me on holidays, teaches us backgammon, and brings home a film projector from her school to show us Casablanca and Citizen Kane. She whips up gourmet dishes for dinner, while graciously making macaroni and cheese for Beth. At night, in the silence and the starlight, our stepmother and Dad go over it again. To be closer to her job, they've moved to a house off the beaten path in central Pennsylvania, even farther from Dad's job. It's a big house that they love, though too far from a downtown or even a store for Beth to take a stroll and enjoy a little distraction. A bus that stops a block away could carry her downtown, but she has never ridden buses alone before. Think of all that could go wrong on a bus—and that doesn't even begin to address what might happen on the other end. For a while Dad continued to drive Beth to his office, and they stayed overnight a few times a week in a hotel. But with the longer commute and the nights
upon nights at the Holiday Inn, he became so frazzled by Beth's talk and talk and talk, so vexed by her constant dismissal of his Beethoven or Upstairs, Downstairs in favor of Madonna and Three's Company, so maddened by the way any office task dissolved into "Oops," so infuriated by her boomeranging any conversation back to the topics of the printer and the salesman again and again and again, that every time he came home he'd say to our stepmother, "I'm ready to blow my brains out." Besides, taking Beth to his office won't work anymore anyway; the business closed, and he's started a new career in real estate. He shakes his head at the thought of a group home, as she made few friends in her special education classes years ago and has seldom been drawn to people with mental retardation. He expects she'd be miserable. "I don't have any idea what to do with her." He sighs.

  Our mother, for her part, gets up long before dawn and, in the dappled shadows of her bedroom, sits on the edge of the bed. "Beth again?" asks her new husband. He's a gentle, industrious factory worker, nothing like her maniacal second husband, whom she never saw again and divorced by printing notices in newspapers around the country—which her lawyer recommended and the court agreed to. Not surprisingly, the notices were never answered, thus permitting the divorce to go through. She met this new man a few years ago, and he knows our names and knows how to garden and hugs us when we come to visit. "I don't know what to do with her," Mom says. Though her worries are different from Dad's. After their reconciliation, Beth visited often with Mom. They both looked forward to these get-togethers, when they'd shop and eat out and go to amusement parks and zoos. But soda by soda, and hamburger by hamburger, Mom grew distressed watching Beth's poor diet and surging weight. "Here, try this broccoli," she'd say at the table. "Don't tell me what to do," Beth would reply. "Beth, I'm just worried about your health." "You're being bossy." Then our stepfather got laid off from the factory, and Mom from the library, and new work took them to North Carolina. More letters, fewer visits. In the predawn light, our mother glances at the phone. She and Beth speak once a week. Or, really, they quarrel once a week. "I don't have any ideas." She sighs.

  For a while, it seems that Dad has it figured out. He discovers something called a sheltered workshop, run by a local social service agency.

  "There's more to life than soap operas," he tells her. "I want you to try this."

  Every day, he drives her there, and though she is shy at first, she soon gets the hang of it. When she brings home her first check, she calls us all in delight.

  "Maybe," I suggest to Laura and Max, "we're out of the woods at last."

  But the feelings of glory fizzle as status reports come in from our father.

  After a brief respite when she begins her job, she starts lying more and more. She routinely tells Dad that she did not lose the remote control, eat the cake, break the toilet—someone else did, though no one else but Dad and our stepmother live in the house. She pretends to be doing her chores, but really messes things up and hides the evidence, until eventually our father says, Please, don't bother again. She helps herself to cash from our stepmother's wallet. Okay, who took it, Beth? "I don't kno-oh," she says.

  At work she meets Ron, who uses a wheelchair and lives a few miles away. She sneaks out to see him, walking along curved, shoulderless roads, then lies to Dad about where she's been.

  She treats other people's things as worthless. Dropping the dry cleaning you asked her to hold, dropping the camera you gave her minutes ago as a present, leaving her radio in plain view in your parked car as she says, "If they steal it, they'll only break a window."

  The sheltered workshop calls Dad. Beth is a discipline problem, they tell him. She keeps trying to get away with little stunts and doesn't listen to supervisors. She tries to incite others to insubordination.

  "It's one thing after another" Dad tells us. "Each one adding to the feeling of water dripping on your head—constant, constant, constant—and it isn't going to end"

  Increasingly, too, a smirk accompanies her misbehavior. As if she thinks it's charming to be bad, and she's certain we think her too incompetent to hold her responsible for her actions.

  Or, I think to myself, it's as if she knew many holidays ago that we knocked on doors to collect for "charity" and decided at last that she'd exploit her disability, too.

  "I feel so guilty," Laura says to Max.

  "I feel so trapped," Max says to me.

  "She's a dead weight," I say, shocking us all.

  Although it is true that we care about our sister's well-being, secretly, slowly, our words show us that we care a lot more about our own. We know that if nothing changes, someday she will end up living with one of us. We are just getting established financially and professionally and hoping to find romances that will last. Adulthood is hard enough as it is.

  "Did I say that?" I gasp in a fever of shame over the phone. I have become, it is clear, a bad sister.

  One winter afternoon Dad drives the several hours to see me. Never before has he come without our stepmother or even Beth. Coat still on, he sits down on a chair, sighing deeply. Then he pulls out a piece of paper. It is a list of every weekend for the next year.

  Quietly, he says, "I came to ask you to share in caring for Beth. I am asking you to bring her to your place here for one weekend a month. If you do this, and Laura, and Max, then we'll have her the rest of the time, and I'll feel a little more sane."

  I take the paper from his hand and stare at it.

  "Please," he says. "I'm begging you."

  I sit there in silence. It is very little, compared to his burden: one weekend a month. I glance up at him. He is looking at me with desperation. I open my mouth to say the right thing, but instead I burst into tears. "I can't," I say. "I'm sorry. I just can't."

  In a daze of disappointment, he says, "Max and Laura said no, too. And Beth refuses to live with your mother." Then he stands, unfolding himself as if every joint is painful. And as I watch him I know I will always be haunted by this moment, when I let my father—and my sister—down so completely. I sit in a sweat of self-hatred as I watch him shuffle toward the door.

  Finally, feeling utterly crushed, he calls a social service agency.

  "The waiting list for group homes is long" the first person he speaks with says. "Several years at least."

  "I can't wait several years" he says.

  The second person he tries tells him the same thing, and adds, "You don't have any choice."

  "This is my daughter I'm talking about!" he shouts.

  At his wit's end, he writes a letter to the governor.

  Within days, he gets a call. There's a space open in a group home. Would Beth like to move in?

  Far across town from Dad's house, I sit with Beth on her new bed in her new group home. It's in a low-rise apartment complex across a river, far enough from downtown that you can barely see the skyline, but close enough that shops and pedestrians still freckle the streets.

  We're in that twin month, both of us twenty-eight. She slouches, forlorn.

  "You'll get used to it" I say. "Look. There's a nice view from the window."

  "Iz not nice. Iz a parking lot"

  "Well. Still. It's ... a window."

  I feel bad for her, even though I know it was her rotten behavior that caused this turn of events. I feel heartsick that Dad tried so hard with so little success, finally moving her here a month ago and driving home without her. And though I control my expression so my feelings don't show, I'm profoundly relieved to know that she won't be a burden to me.

  But still, who would want to move from a house where you have your own bedroom, bathroom, and TV, to an apartment with three women you don't know, a shared bedroom, bathroom, and TV, scheduled household chores, and your beloved stuffed animal collection confined to a dresser top?

  This is the fourth week she has been here, and so far I have come every Saturday.

  "You've seen me more this month than you ever do," she says.

  I say, "That's because I know how hard it is to
live on your own all of a sudden" Besides, I think, I have a little atoning to do.

  A roommate walks in, and Beth lowers her eyes and goes quiet. Her housemates have mental retardation, too, and some of the people in the nearby units, also run by this agency, have additional disabilities as well. I've met a lot of them in the last month. Some say "Thank you" when you hold the door for them, others barge past you with a scowl. Some go outside every morning to thread a long string into the air and lift a kite into the sky, while others lounge about the front steps, grumbling about people with different skin color and smoking Kools. Some settle into the group sofa for an evening of The Sound of Music on video, others snatch the remote control as soon as the credits finish to click over to MTV. Some get into bed beneath posters of Miss Piggy, while others fall asleep beneath Dallas Cowboy calendars.

  Beth isn't fond of any of them, or even comfortable in their presence. I watch her roommate retrieve something from a drawer while Beth keeps her gaze in her lap, her mouth tight. After the woman leaves the room, Beth says, "She doesn't want me here."

  I have no idea what to do until my tongue suddenly finds the words that Dad used to utter when he'd come to visit us. "Then let's go out for ice cream," I say.

  "All right," she says with no enthusiasm.

  We head out, and as we pass through the dining room, I notice that another housemate is vacuuming the carpet, clearly in an arctic mood. As Beth nears the door, the woman detours over with the machine and runs it "accidentally" over Beth's heels.

  "God!" Beth says, running outside.

  "Oh, God," I echo, running out of optimism.

  We pick up the ice cream; Beth has abandoned the chocolate of her childhood for chocolate chip mint. As we lick our cones and get back in the car, I try to find a reason not to take her back right away. I pull over to a miniature golf course. "Hey, let's play a round," I say, trying to think Be cheerful and She'll adjust... though never being able to eat when you want, or sleep in a room alone, or avoid people who vacuum your feet seems a kind of purgatory.