Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey Page 4

  As before, I sit immediately to her left. I could, though, choose from Tim's entire lecture hall, because, as Beth says, "I pick runs that aren't crowded, and when the seats get too full, I'm outta here."

  "If I might add an addendum to that," Tim notes, pulling the lever that closes the door. "It's because she likes to be the center of attention."

  "No I don't," says Beth with a giggle that belies her words. "I just like to talk"

  "She fills me in on what every driver's up to, their vacations, their ups and downs," he says to me. "She's the town crier." Then he steers the bus back onto the street, heading up an eastern cut in the mountain, directly toward the sun pushing into the morning sky.

  As he's driving, I follow Beth's gaze, which never wavers from him, and notice that beside his seat, he keeps a quart-sized plastic mug of coffee, a New York Times, and a glossy photography magazine.

  "Ah, look at that sunrise!" Tim says at the first stoplight, lifting his arms toward the windshield. "Four billion sunrises, over the dinosaurs, the pharaohs, and now ours today. And no one's ever the same. Isn't it just the most remarkable thing? Each day is fresh and unique, yet each is also a link to every dawn all the way back to the Precambrian."

  "Whuz that?" Beth asks.

  "A long, long time ago," he says. "Before there were even people."

  "You always use big words," Beth says with a touch of disapproval. "I wouldn't want to be around before there were people" She pauses. "Some people."

  Tim's smile now develops a knowing curl. He turns the bus toward a neighborhood of brick houses, and at the first stop sign, he glances at me and explains: a senior citizen recently flew into a rage because Beth was holding on to her seat—"Which the lady saw as the optimum place for her to sit as well," he clarifies. "I told the woman very nicely that all six of these sideways seats up here are for the elderly and handicapped; she could take any of them. She eventually did, but she sure made her feelings known. Whew! That was some day, wasn't it, Beth?"

  "Oh man, she went on," Beth mutters, and then declares, "It doesn't pay to be nice."

  "Certainly it does," he says. "That's why people admire Abraham Lincoln so much, and Eleanor Roosevelt. That's why the Gettysburg Address says, 'Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new kind of bus,'"—I laugh—"'conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that the nicer you are, the more they'll leave you alone.' Or, as Mahatma Gandhi said—you ever heard of Mahatma Gandhi?"

  "No," Beth says, rolling her eyes.

  "He was from India. Remember, we talked about where that is? And he once said, You can kill them with kindness."

  "He did not," I say.

  "Then he should have," Tim says.

  Smiling, I whisper to Beth, "What a great start to the day. He's so personable."

  She looks at me curiously, and I remember that, with her limited range of vocabulary and difficulty with abstract thought, our communication usually flows more smoothly if I use simple words and rephrase complex concepts so she can follow me more readily. But I wonder if, like Tim, I should just speak as I usually do, twenty-dollar words and all, and let Beth ask questions, and therefore learn.

  "Whuz that mean?" she asks.

  "Personable? It means he's nice, that he has a pleasing personality."

  "Yeah," she says with a quick nod. "He's cool"

  Ah, yes. Cool. As my speech might sometimes seem unintelligible to Beth, so can hers seem to me, because Beth has her own lingo. And in Beth-speak, as I have gathered from her letters, "cool" does not concern hip attire or trendy indifference. Instead, it is the term of highest approval, bestowed only upon those people Beth deems worthy of her attention and trust, and crucial if one is to be promoted into her personal Top Ten (though, in truth, hip-hop shades or chiseled Brad Pitt features—neither of which the Professor possesses—are apt to increase the likelihood of admission). "Yes," I say. "I guess I do mean he's cool."

  As Tim accelerates away from the crosswalk, Beth tells me that he's one of the drivers who truly loves his job, a quality without which, I realize, one cannot ever be deemed cool in her lexicon. Furthermore, she tells me, he smiles all the time, in glaring sun or fog, when the heater has broken, whether the riders have become deafening, or even if, as she sometimes observes from a bus shelter, he's gliding down the street alone. I'm impressed, especially after she mentions that he's been driving the buses for ten years. "What did you do before this?" I ask.

  "I took an evolutionary route," Tim replies, slowing to a stop at the edge of this suburban neighborhood.

  "Seven minutes," Beth says, reaching for her backpack. At first I'm confused, thinking she's referring to Tim's past, then realize that she's simply engaging in the kind of free-flowing talk that can characterize conversation on a bus. This time, she sees the question in my face, and clarifies, "Thaz how long he has to wait now."

  "It's a layover," he adds. "They're put right into the schedule: idle time where you just sit before departure. Good opportunity to stretch my legs and get some real discussion in."

  "Thaz what I mean," she says, as she pulls out a pad of paper and a set of Magic Markers and begins to draw.

  Tim reaches his arms for the ceiling, flexing his hands. Then he steps into the aisle, holding his mug, facing us. "So, to answer your question. I used to be what you might call searching, except I'm not sure how much I ever let myself see." He takes a sip of coffee. "Funny, when you consider that I've always enjoyed photography. In any event, I came from a college-educated family and dreamed of being an archaeologist, but I got so lost in my own head that I couldn't buckle down to a career or even school. I was working in a factory, which was actually nice because I saw I really liked being around the other people, but I knew there was more out there for me. Finally I realized that I needed to look at life with a different eye. It took a lot of effort, but eventually I went back to college at night.

  "I loved learning. Paleontology, history ... Looking back in time was very exciting to me. But looking forward is more challenging—nothing unfolds as you anticipate, and it's the small things, not the huge geologic shifts, that make or break you. There I was in college, and I went on my first dig, thrilled to know I would at last be excavating artifacts. But when I squatted down at the site, I saw that the earth was packed down hard, the work was backbreaking, and the sun was baking me head to toe. I said to myself, This is not my destiny. I came home and switched my major to photography."

  He pauses to finish off his morning coffee. "And life," he continues, "just kept happening; I began dating one of the teachers I met at college, and we ended up getting married. Then I heard that the bus company was hiring people. We wanted children, so I needed more income. That meant leaving college, but now we're looking forward to having our third kid.

  "It's a rewarding life. Not the driving of the bus so much, though that pays the rent. But there's much more to this than taking people for a ride. It's like William Blake said, how you can see the world in a grain of sand, in the smallest moments of life. I couldn't see that when I was younger.

  "This ties into my photography, too. I take pictures of all the things people don't normally look at." With his empty mug, he gestures at a jade plant inside a front window. "Like that little green guy over there. I pass him every day and watch him get bigger, and it makes me think about the way everything wants to grow, even if it's in a tiny pot."

  I look out the window. Above the single-sprinkler lawns, now fallow with frost, rises a neighborhood of rectangular, two-story houses, their brick exteriors as red as apple skins. In the yard beside the house with the jade plant, a branch tilts upward from a puddle of slush: the remnants of a snowman. In another yard stands a stocky man in a cap, clipping a flag to his own private flagpole. Then he hoists it up, arm over arm. Tim lifts his hand in a wave as the man cinches his rope to the pole; the man raises his gloved hand back.

  "You could say I left college behind," Tim says, getting back into
his seat. "But I think all I really did was find another major: the details—the ones that are so easy to overlook."

  I glance at Beth. She is shoving her markers back in her bag, with her finished work of art still on her lap. It is a variation on the many drawings she has sent me over the years: an intricate, mandala-like face, with a crown of many hues, a fan of dazzling hair, and what appear to be earrings and a necklace made up of small, smiling faces. Go-light green, merge-sign yellow, caution-cone orange, railroad-crossing red—each detail, I note for the first time, resplendent in its own color.

  The bus resumes its loop. Now, with the morning rush hour under way and with us headed back into the city, commuter after commuter gets on, each of whom Tim welcomes not as a mere fare, but as an individual who deserves a "Good morning, Louise" or a "Ricardo, how are you today?" Slowly we fill to capacity, though Beth, despite her stated preference for emptier buses, seems satisfied to remain on this line a while longer. So I settle in, too, and, keeping Tim's "lesson" in mind, I find myself taking in the individual faces around me: the jowls and curlers and nose rings, the bifocaled and puffy eyes, hair every color from snow to flamingo to ebony, all of it enveloped by a bouquet of perfume and after-shave. I become more attentive to the symphony of sounds, from the rrrr of the bus's transmission to the Ay, Dios mío! of heart-to-hearts to the frequency with which ain't and double negatives like he's not doing nothing pepper the meandering chitchat. I note the advertisements above the seats, for denture services, gas payment plans, funeral homes, Shriners hospitals. Beth points out passing buses, able to detect, from subtleties I don't yet see, the different varieties: "Conventional, like the one we're on," Tim elaborates when she can't find the words to articulate just what she means, "and then there are the new, low-rise variety, and then the ones wrapped in an advertisement like a birthday gift, called, you guessed it, 'wraps.'"

  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 diff
erent 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