Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey Page 5

  I stick the second letter to my refrigerator with a magnet, and, at first, every time I glance at it over the next few weeks, I imagine Jesse sitting on his bicycle at an intersection, catching a glimpse of us through the bus window, then swerving away from his route and pedaling along swiftly behind us, unseen by anyone except Tim. But after a little while, when I look at this letter, I think instead of Tim, who keeps as aware of what's behind as of what lies ahead. I wonder how he developed a different eye, and in what kind of schoolhouse he learned.

  Fighting

  "Get ready for some Halloween pictures," Daddy says, grabbing his Polaroid, which means it's time to pull on our costumes. Laura is six, I am five, Beth is four, Max two. Mommy has spent weeks sewing our outfits, in between her classes at library school. Now Laura jumps into her princess dress, I get into my clown suit. Max is too little for a costume this year, so he and his Captain Kangaroo juice cup watch everything from my bed. Then there's Beth. Mommy still has to help her with sleeves and collars, so she takes the witch's costume she made for Beth, a pretty black dress with a hood for the hat, and starts to put it over Beth's head.

  But Beth will not wear dresses. How can she know it's not just a big shirt, we wonder, as Beth starts shrieking and Mommy begins wrestling the cloth down to Beth's shoulders, saying "Stay still!" as Beth flings her arms around like she's a genie that won't go back in her bottle.

  We watch in amazement. Beth sure can put up a fight. Even though she still wears diapers, and never crawled but just pulled herself along on her front arms till finally she stood up. Even though she talks funny— "Be quiet" is "Dee-DIE-ak" —her voice like a song and a quack at the same time. That doesn't stop her from kicking and howling as Mommy hauls the collar over her head. She doesn't want dresses in any color or for any holiday, and when Beth doesn't want something she doesn't give in. Not till—like now—the zipper is tugged all the way to the top.

  Mommy stands breathless, letting Beth go. "You look so cute," Laura and I say, but Beth doesn't glance at the mirror. The best she'll do now is go along. Not smiling the way we do when Daddy sits the three of us on the lawn and snaps our pictures. But at least that fight is done for today.

  ***

  She's fun to play with. She'll do the things that Laura's too big to do, and Max too little. After all, we're only eleven months apart, which means one month every year we're twins.

  She'll suck on wet washcloths with me after a bath. She'll ride her big sturdy tricycle, which our parents had specially built for her, alongside me and my Schwinn. She'll go "Oooh" when I show her my booklet of spelling tests because my teacher puts stickers on each page where you get 100 and I'm going to save that book forever because there's a sticker on every page. And sometimes in the afternoons, she'll crawl with me into that quiet place under the house where Daddy piles the cut grass, and it smells all fresh and green. We'll lie on the soft blades, and look up into the sunlight coming through the lattice between us and the outside, and one of us will surely spot it: the beautiful strands of the huge spider web in the corner, shining like diamonds in the sunbeams. As we watch it sparkle, and point to how each thread runs magically right into each other thread, she'll hold her arm out for me to tickle. I'll skim my fingers along her skin, and she'll say, "Oh, dee-lee-shus." Then we'll reach beside us and toss the grass cuttings into the air. They sprinkle down, from light to shadow to light, our own private fireworks in the shade.

  This is the second most scary time I remember.

  Before Mommy goes to librarian school, she does paint-by-number landscapes with trees and streams. She props her canvases on an easel near the living room fireplace and paints when all four of us kids are just a few feet away in the sun parlor, singing to Meet The Beatles! This makes it easy for us when the needle gets to the end of the record, because we can just run up to her, and Laura can ask, "Will you turn it over, please?" Mommy sighs every time, and puts the brush down in that slow way she does when she's sad, and she's sad a lot. She's sad in the way Laura wears glasses and Max has freckles and Beth is retarded. There's no reason, it's just the way it is. She goes to the hi-fi, slow and not smiling, and flips the record to the other side.

  One night when Daddy's working late, Mommy leaves a partway finished painting in the living room when she goes to make dinner. Laura and I are at Linda's house down the street, playing Colorforms and cootie catchers, but Beth and Max stay home. When we come in from Linda's, there's Mrs. Stein, looking serious. She says Beth went to the easel when Mommy wasn't looking and drank up the tubs of oil paint like they were punch at a picnic, and now they're at the hospital. Laura and Max and I sit waiting in the living room, staring at the half-empty landscape. We don't sing now. We don't even talk.

  Then we get the call: "She's all right." The easel disappears, and Beth comes home, and Mommy starts her library studies, and her eyes grow even sadder.

  This is the first most scary time I remember.

  One morning, Mommy is in the kitchen, holding baby Beth in her arms. There's no Max yet, and Laura and I are playing dress-up through the archway in the dining room. When the phone rings, we know it must be ten-thirty, because every day Daddy calls us on his ten-thirty break from his classes, and Mommy really looks forward to it. She's lonely, and wears a drawn face, and asks Grandma over coffee how other people ever feel okay with themselves. Once she got so low she took us out for ice cream and had to call Daddy to find out if she should buy vanilla or chocolate. Daddy says she should take up a hobby like folk guitar or painting, or go back to school to get a job, they could use the money, and then she wouldn't feel so lost. You can tell she feels lost because she naps so long every afternoon that I get bored lying beside her, and if she ever laughs it's only a tiny "ha" next to Daddy's great big "Ha-Ha-Ha!" And sometimes after the laundry and shopping and dishes, she sits us on her lap and in that gorgeous Judy Garland voice she sings songs that make you want to cry, like "Cockles and Mussels" and "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," and then says softly, "You know, I could have had a career as a singer." Daddy doesn't sing like that. He wakes us every morning by putting on bouncy records like "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee" from Pinocchio and "Hello, Dolly" by Louis Armstrong and "Where's My Pajamas" by Pete Seeger, and then comes upstairs clapping his hands and singing and he throws back our covers and pulls us to our feet and gets us dancing so we start the day all giggly. Mommy says, "I wish you wouldn't get them so worked up," and goes off to scramble the eggs.

  Now, Mommy's talking to Daddy on the phone. Laura and I are hooking slips over our heads for long, princess hair, and suddenly Laura grabs me and points: there, in Mommy's arms, Beth's neck is going back, and her eyes are rolling up into her head. She isn't gurgling. She isn't breathing.

  "Oh, God!" Mommy blurts out to Daddy. "What'll I do? Oh, God!

  What?"

  Daddy tells her something so loud, we can hear him say, "Now. NOW!" over the phone.

  She hangs up, looking with this sick face at Beth, and then she's dialing the phone with her finger so shaky she messes up and has to start again. Then she's talking high into the phone, and when she says, "Help me, Mort!" Laura whispers, "That's Linda's dad. He's a doctor."

  We hold each other as Mommy says, "Okay, I'll try, I'll try," and throws down the phone and races with Beth to the sink, limp as a towel in her arms. She rips through the clean dishes, seizes a spoon, and sticks the handle in Beth's mouth, pushing on Beth's tongue. But Beth just lies there. "I can't do it, I can't!" Mommy's saying, her mouth all crumbly, eyebrows sucking together. She tries again, moving the spoon around like she's trying to dig something off the bottom of a pan. "Oh, God!" she wails, and then she drops her arm. It's like she's giving up. "Oh, no." The spoon clinks onto the floor.

  That's when Laura steps into the kitchen. I follow, and with the slips still on our heads we walk up to Mommy. She's facing out the sink window, holding Beth against her chest, her body shaking.

  "What's the matter, Mommy?" Laura asks.
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  Mommy turns. Her eyes are red, and she looks down at us. And we stand there, just like that, staring up at her, until the scare in her face suddenly turns into something else.

  She spins around and scoops up a new spoon and then it's into Beth's mouth and she's got it shoving against the tongue like a stick pushing a stuck rock. "Uh!" she says, and then we hear a gasp from Beth. Mommy keeps pushing, and then Beth breathes.

  Later that morning, Mommy calls Daddy, and cries when she tells him the story. "I did it because they were there with me," she says. "I just couldn't let them see me not knowing what to do. They saved their sister's life today."

  March

  The Pilgrim

  8:10 A.M. "You know how you can tell the selfish from the unselfish people?" Jacob says to us. "On this bus, it ain't hard to do." An ivory-skinned man of average height and average girth, he grins hugely. His single distinct feature, especially striking for a man in his fifth decade whose Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors all went bald, is a tumble of dark hair. He has paused his bus at a stop sign at the bottom of a steep road. "When we had the older buses years ago," he says, as we peer up the almost vertical block to where this street will T-intersect at the forested mountain, "they lacked the power to climb this hill, so we would get to about halfway and then be stranded. I would then ask people, 'Is anyone willing to get out and walk the rest of the way up the hill and meet me around the turn?' You could tell the unselfish people because"—and he quiets for the ascent, then leans in for a hard left, arm crossed over arm, banking us onto a long ridge and over to the first shelter—"they would be the ones to volunteer to brave the demanding hike in sometimes harsh rain and snow. And then they'd get back on the bus with a good feeling."

  It is about ten days after my first round of rides, and I have returned to spend another couple of days on the buses, a schedule I will try to stick with through the year. I came to this conclusion last night, as I cut my Toyota's engine in the bus company's visitor parking area. Beth, worried that the city's two-hour parking signs would keep me from being able to join her for whole days, had asked some dispatchers what to do, and they suggested that I leave my car here. She's making it so easy, I thought, as she hailed me to a shelter to catch the last bus home; I'll be able to handle this.

  The seasons are already cycling, I see. The sun slants higher in the east, melting frost from parked windshields, and opening crocuses in window boxes. Jacob stops and starts the bus, block by block, so rhythmically that I almost don't notice when we're stationary and when mobile. In fact, we pause and go so predictably that Jacob—and all the drivers, I eventually see—time their talking for when the bus is not in motion, and do so with such skill that the exchanges appear to flow smoothly.

  As we continue our pulsing course along the ridge, Beth tells Jacob about a driver she'd never ride with. "That Gus, he keeps saying I shouldn't go into the drivers' room. He's a jerk."

  "He might just be in a bad mood," Jacob tells her.

  "He's obnoxious."

  "You can try to understand him," he advises. "When you listen to somebody's story, and you see the troubles they have, you get a better sense of why they act a certain way. It might not excuse lousy behavior, and not everyone who has a difficult life acts badly. But going deeper, and really listening to someone, can help you see that they don't mean nothing against you, they're just hurting."

  "I don't care."

  "Remember that driver who died?"

  "Yeah."

  "He was a difficult driver," Jacob explains to me. "Gave Beth a hard time. Didn't like her talking and talking in the front seat. I kept digging at her to send him a card when he got sick. She finally did. It made him feel so good."

  "But he wasn't nice to people. He was nasty," Beth says.

  Jacob asks, "How do you feel about making him feel good?"

  "I don't kno-oh"

  "Ah, yes you do. You're blushing."

  "No I'm not"

  "You're really a good person."

  "I'm tough," she says.

  "You're tough and good, too."

  "Thaz right"

  "You like people too much not to be good."

  "Some people."

  "Don't I always hear you say," he teases her, "that you love all mankind?"

  "What? I don't say that. I never say that. You're making that up. I love people that are nice to me. I don't love evryone."

  "I'll be patient," he says. "I'll wait a year. I'll wait ten years. Because everyone's got it in them to treat others as they wish to be treated themselves, and I know you do, too."

  "No I don't," she says.

  "Ah, you're blushing again," Jacob says.

  "You just passed into Zone 1," a woman bursts out, accusingly. "And she doesn't have a Zone 1 pass."

  I turn. A squat, seventyish woman diagonally across from us who'd been watching this exchange is now pointing at Beth, who has not even glanced over.

  "All she has is an inner-city pass. You should put her off. Unless she pays you the extra, and she never does."

  I look to Jacob; the mood in the bus has suddenly plummeted. He drives on, saying nothing.

  "Can't you hear me? You're letting her get away with this! She's just cheating the system. She should be out on that road, right now."

  I feel tense in every muscle, and glance at Beth. She acknowledges me with a slight tilt in my direction, and a rolling of her eyes. The woman, lips puckered, rattles on and on. What business is this of hers?

  Finally, after maybe a mile of her demands, Jacob reaches a stop. I pull on my gloves, expecting Jacob to turn to us and tell us, sorry, we have to leave now. "Hey, Beth," he says, and I am puzzled to note the same pleasant tone as he had before. "Lift up your pass, Beth."

  Beth turns to the woman, and hoists her pass as if raising her fist in a Yes! "Zone 1," it says quite clearly. Then Beth lowers it to her lap, wearing the aaah-hah grin that I know so well.

  The woman clamps her lips shut, and stares out the window, fuming in defeat.

  "Nothing bothers Beth," Jacob says, after the woman departs, hissing at Beth on her way to the door. She might as well have been invisible; Beth shows no response. As the door closes, Beth steps forward to hand Jacob a box of raisins, a treat she offers the drivers once a week.

  "Some of the old people, they don't like me," she tells me, as she sits back down.

  "Why? You have a pass; your riding has nothing to do with her."

  "Thaz just what they're like," she says with a sigh. "Some of them."

  "And know how much she'd have to pay if she hadn't had the Zone 1?" Jacob adds. "A big twenty cents."

  "Iz just to be mean," Beth says. "But I don't care."

  "I'll tell you," Jacob says, "you could get the Marine Corps in here, and they wouldn't take Beth down. Oh well is her attitude. Whatever happens happens, she's going to get through it, and good things are going to happen after that. That's all there is to it."

  He thanks her for the raisins as a family gets on, and the two little girls, in matching yellow coats, give Jacob high-fives. They and their mother take the seats across from us, and Beth is instantly captivated by them. With her seated posture resembling a macaroni noodle, she's at kid level. As they begin playing clapping games, singing, A sailor went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see, Beth acts as she often does with children: chuckling along, answering questions. Their mother acknowledges her with a cordial smile.

  I've seen this before. The mother views Beth as another of the impromptu aunties whom they might encounter in public places, like waitresses who say Hon. Her kids, though, probably sense that this heavyset auntie doesn't seem like the usual authority figures who constitute the adult world, and welcome her as an ally. Some people—those who don't know better—might think that Beth gets along so well with children because she is simply a large child. But kids see that, unlike other grown-ups they know, she treats them as she wants to be treated: with no restrictions, no judgments, no authority.

/>   I envy her connection with kids. When I felt myself backing away from Sam, it drained away any thoughts of having children. Now, sharing my bed with books, I have no room in my life for a man, much less a future family.

  "She knows the good ones out there," Jacob says, nodding toward Beth as the kids grow louder and more giggly, and she seems increasingly spellbound. "She can pick out who to trust better than I can.

  "But she and I have little debates," he goes on. "She feels, An eye for an eye. I argue, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That's the biggest debate in life for all of us. I see her struggle with this, and it's a tough one for everybody. Like I just wrestled with myself back there about how to handle that lady. An eye for an eye would have meant getting angry, shooting my mouth off, or, like Beth puts it, 'telling it like it is.' It's a lot easier to do that. You get that immediate rush of power, that excitement, and some of the other drivers, that's how they advise her. But do unto others—living by the Golden Rule—that means you stay calm and don't get revengeful. Then truth will come out. It's harder, and it ain't instantly satisfying. But it's the right choice.

  "She asks what I think, and I tell her. Of course, then she tells me back. Some drivers get impatient, especially if it looks like her mind's made up, which it probably is"—he laughs—"but I don't get bothered. It's good for me that she tests my patience. If I see myself growing irritated by Beth, I know I have a problem. I know Jesus wouldn't act like that. It's how unselfish can I be, because when I'm not, that's my problem."

  I feel a twinge of those old bad-sister feelings, wondering if I have it in me to be as openhearted as Jacob. I glance at Beth to see her response. Her eyes are not on us, but on the children's hands, though her canny smile reveals she's been following every word. Then a commotion startles me back to the goings-on across the aisle. The girls' game has leapt to new heights, their voices bellowing, their whole bodies engaged: