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

  A sailor went to sea, chop, knee, ankle, toe

  To see what he could see, chop, knee, ankle, toe.

  But all that he could see, chop, knee, ankle, toe

  Was the bottom of the deep blue sea, chop, knee, ankle, toe.

  "Thaz good!" Beth says, as the girls zip flawlessly—hands, wrists, ankles, feet—through their routine. "Do it again! Louder!" She laughs, as complete a practitioner of the Golden Rule, at least when it comes to kids, as anyone could hope to be.

  Last night, Beth sat me beside her on her love seat and, as she often does, laid one of her scrapbooks across our laps. As we were paging through, admiring her cherished collection of every letter she's ever received, she looked away. "Sundays are the hardest days." She sighed. "The buses don't run and the mail don't come. Iz too quiet on Sundays for me."

  The brakes squeak; we are coming up to a railroad crossing just as the gates drop down. Jacob stops the bus, windshield facing the flashing red lights, and the first car of what turns out to be a freight train rumbles past us. I don't know that we will be at a standstill for something like fifteen minutes, though Beth and several passengers groan, the children's mother reaches into her bag for picture books, and, after a few moments, a fortyish man with a Rod Stewart haircut mutters, "Jeez, we'll all be dead and buried before that thing's done."

  "Jacob died," Beth says, turning to me.

  "What?" I say.

  "He says it was good for him."

  I give Jacob a look. He'd turned around at Beth's comment. "She's right, you know. I guess that's my story."

  "Iz a long story," Beth says.

  "Believe me," the Rod Stewart look-alike says to me, "you got time to hear anything. You got time to hear the whole damn War and Peace"

  "You can tell her," Beth says, waving her arm at Jacob. "I'm gonna sleep"

  Jacob looks questioningly at me. I nod. "Sure. Go ahead."

  "Well," Jacob says, pivoting in his seat to face us fully, "you could say my life before I died was a total drop to the bottom. I was a rebel in Catholic school. Then I went through hippie times and married young. My first wife, she'd be gone days at a time, and then come back and describe in detail to me who she'd been with.

  "I got deep into alcohol. I was a bus driver then, too, and I was almost fired from my job. My marriage fell apart. I couldn't have cared less if I lived or died.

  "Then I started feeling very sick. I was about thirty. They diagnosed it as hepatitis B. I could barely drive the bus. And one day"—he sighs—"I got so sick that I just came home and lay on the sofa and couldn't get up. A day passed, then a week. My wife and I had split, and my girlfriend called the hospital. They took me in, and I went into a coma. It ain't a bad way to die, believe me, you just slowly fade out.

  "I was in the coma for three weeks, and then for some reason they put me as number one on the transplant list for livers. They figured I had about seventy-two hours left. This is twelve years ago, when there weren't many donations, and it didn't look like it would happen. But somebody, and I still don't know the age or sex or race, said they wanted to be a donor before they died. It was a miracle for me. They helicoptered the liver here just in time, and they wheeled me in for surgery. It took a long time, and my girlfriend was really scared. They tell me my heart stopped while I was under. For a minute there, I died.

  "But here's where it all changed," he goes on. "I woke up in the hospital after the operation, and even though I could see and hear, I didn't know a single thing. My mother. The day. I didn't know the button on a shirt. I was totally erased."

  I'm thinking, Your mind was erased? Yet he's smiling serenely, and his eyes seem to take me in and at the same time to look at a place I cannot see. "Then," he says, "as my mind got functioning, everything was just beautiful. There was no right or wrong feeling, no social pressure. I believe that's what heaven's going to be like.

  "For six months after, I remained in that state. It was total purity. I'd admire everything I saw, like a baby. You don't worry about what you have to do or what you once did, you just look out there and admire God's creation.

  "Everything I asked for came to me in that state. If I had a thought about something and then couldn't remember it, I'd pick up a newspaper the next day and there it'd be. It went through my head one day that I wanted to see a turtle, and the next day I was driving the bus and a turtle was crossing the road. I got out of the bus and picked it up and brought it home.

  "I said to my girlfriend, We're going to have a little girl. That's what happened. We had our little girl within the year.

  "For a while, I struggled with going back to college or driving a bus. This is my second chance; am I chosen for something? Should I be the achiever I was supposed to be? But it didn't click. Driving a bus is where I belong.

  "But when I went back to work, things inside me started to slide back to the way they used to be. I didn't want that, not after I'd tasted the pureness of existence. It made me wonder what we're here for. So I started reading the Bible. I took a notebook on the bus every day, and wrote down everything I thought about—love, suffering, death—and the Scriptures made sense for the first time in my life.

  "The first part was all about getting close to God. The next step was understanding Jesus.

  "I said, 'Okay, now I'm being good, I'm close to God.' Wrong. Because once you look at Jesus, it tears you apart piece by piece. All your pride, your anger, your selfishness. That's where I'm at now, working on every part of myself.

  "And it's all because of my organ donor. Organ donors jump over all barriers of human selfishness. Let me ask you, Would you walk by someone dying without trying to help them?"

  "Of course not," I say.

  "Organ donation is the greatest thing you can do for another person. You don't need courage, muscles, or money. Just a commitment to do unto others. And then you can help someone who's died rise again."

  "Caboose!" the girls cry out. Beside me, Beth starts; I realize that she had indeed fallen asleep. As she yawns, Jacob says, "Good morning" with a laugh, and turns back to his business. The gate lifts up and his bus carries us over the tracks.

  I let Jacob's story ring in my ears as we trace along the ridge that separates the peak of the mountain from the valley. To our left sprawls a grid of streets, as bare of vegetation as a desert, and densely lined with row houses. To our right stretch three blocks, as tree-filled as vineyards, dotted with grand stone houses and Colonials. Maybe it's his words, maybe our vantage point on the mountainside, but for the first time in my journey, I see where one neighborhood, and class, borders another, and how, except for this ridge, they could easily blend into each other.

  "So here's how I feel," Jacob says at the next stop, "and I say this to Beth all the time, right, Beth?"

  "Huh?" says Beth, who is watching the kids across from us get off the bus, and as she waves goodbye to them, she says, "What do you say?"

  "If you think of yourself only," Jacob offers, "you get nowhere. Yeah, we all could be an eye for an eye. But I prefer the Golden Rule, at least for me. Because money ain't going to satisfy me, and women ain't going to satisfy me. The only thing that's going to satisfy me is to do good in this life."

  With that, he pulls away from the curb.

  "What do you think of this?" I say to Beth.

  "I don't kno-oh" she says. "Iz time to find a baffroom."

  I laugh at her timing. "That's all?"

  "Ah, you know it's right, Beth," Jacob says, already at the next stop.

  "Well, thaz what you always say" she says. "Evry day"

  "My battle's not won yet, huh?"

  "Thaz right"

  "Oh well," he says, as she tumbles down the steps. "Cool Beth keeps on rolling and Jacob keeps on driving. We're just rolling, rolling, rolling down the river. But hey, I'm not giving up yet. Have a good day today and a better one tomorrow. God bless you both."

  I jump onto the curb, wondering if, on the older buses, I would have been one of the passengers who g
ot off when he made that turn on the hill. And if I passed someone hurt on the road, would I really stop to help?

  I run after Beth up the street.

  Streetwise

  "What about the bathrooms in city hall?" I ask, as we're flying down Main Street.

  "I tried it once," Beth says, "and there was a lady in there who was naked. I think she was a drug addict. She jumped out of the toilet and started screaming at me, 'Get out of here! Get out!' Boy, did I run" She shudders. "I'm not going back there"

  Bathrooms are the greatest recurring difficulty in Beth's day. First there's the question of when, which is usually during the five galloping minutes between goodbye on one bus and hello on the next—the kind of breathless five-minute break on which we find ourselves now. Then there's where, which means knowing every public restroom in town, information she seems to have amassed through six years of foraging from establishment to establishment, and soliciting pointers from passengers and drivers, and then keeping her list updated, since not all public restrooms remain accessible to her.

  We charge past a popular fast food franchise. "What about here?" I ask between breaths.

  "They let me for a while, but one day the manager came up to me and she said, 'You can't come in here anymore.'"

  "But you told me that you sometimes buy the drivers coffee here. Did you tell her you buy things, so you should be able to use the bathroom?"

  "I told her, but she said I still couldn't come in. If they don't want me there, I don't want to go there."

  I try to wash the outrage from my face, as well as my surprise at her reaction. I think of the bookstore customers who'd call the president of the company if we dared say such a thing to them. I think of the libraries that homeless people have sued successfully so they could pass their days at a reading table. But lawyers, and the right to demand rights, are part of a world that Beth's aware of but doesn't seem to want to inhabit.

  "Where are we going?" I ask, my overstuffed coat pockets bouncing against my legs.

  "You'll see," she says, with a sly smile.

  She barrels on, in her flamboyant Big Bird yellow, her curly hair as wild as Little Richard's after an elbow-flapping performance. Today, her eyes are also bejeweled with the hippest one-dollar sunglasses available, her head crowned by a lavender baseball cap worn backward.

  I scamper behind, dodging smatterings of pedestrians in hooded sweatshirts and blue jeans or pullover sweaters and gingham house-dresses. The sidewalks are bordered by the kind of humble dwellings and mom-and-pop stores that can be found in countless other northeastern industrial cities past their glory days. At some point early in this city's decline, young people dreamed of emigrating to more sophisticated cities, but the passenger train toward the coast was discontinued decades ago, perhaps also diminishing that lure; many people born here are still, as they always were, buried in these hills. In addition, for reasons that seem more associated with family ties than career opportunities, populations drift in, not out. Not in a census-shattering way, though—if all the doors in this Zip Code opened at once and every inhabitant spilled onto the streets, they would fill only a good-sized football stadium to capacity. But the palette of complexions has changed; the almost homogeneous white of the past now accounts for only slightly over half of the population, the rest being shared by every pigment from biscuit golden to well-steeped tea.

  It seems that most people who are of Hispanic ancestry moved here within the last ten or twenty years, settled in the downtown area, and still retain the inflections and traditions of their native Puerto Rico, Mexico, or the Bronx. A few African-American residents have roots extending back many generations, though again, whether old-timer or newcomer, most seem to live closer to the city center, as do Asian immigrants. Only white people, who mostly have Italian, Polish, or German surnames, increase in number the farther one gets from the core of the city.

  But another influence, which is perhaps as important as race for some people, if not even more so, runs from the most urban corner to the most rural pasture: Pennsylvania Dutch, or Pennsylvania German. Their ancestors came to this area from Germany over two centuries ago, though few people from middle age on down here would now identify themselves as Pennsylvania Dutch. But the legacy of their culture remains evident in the homemade pretzel shop we're now passing, as well as hex signs on barns, chewy funnel cakes at state fairs, and dishes like dried snitz pie at diners. This history also seems to explain the occasional broken grammar and Germanic phrasing I've heard on the bus, which, I will later learn, are what remains of the original dialect.

  But I do not grasp all this at once. There are still the bus lines to figure out, and the layout of the city, and the protocol—on both the bus and the ground—and the social service system, and, most important of all, my sister. Besides, at the moment, I am racing down Main Street, just trying to keep up with my tour director.

  "See them?" Beth says. She points to men in red jumpsuits, pushing brooms on the sidewalks and emptying trash. "They're from jail," she whispers, and I observe a supervisor hovering nearby. "They work on the street. I don't talk to them.

  "Thaz the store that makes chocolate chip mint shakes." She is indicating a family restaurant. "But the stairs to the baffroom are scary. They're hard to go down—they're so deep!"

  "You mean they're steep?"

  "Yeah. Thaz what I mean. I can't go on them. A long time ago I tried, and they had to help me get up. I won't do that again. And see there?" She directs me toward a broken sidewalk. "Once I didn't see it and I tripped. I got all scraped up. But it's over with now, I'm all right now, I don't fall anymore."

  In this way I am introduced to Beth's city, as we hurtle past its ragtag assortment of the unpretentious: used furniture showrooms, beauty salons, pizzerias, apparel establishments, swivel-stooled lunch counters, wig stores, Spanish grocers, churches, Veterans of Foreign Wars clubs, a factory, a newspaper building, funeral parlors.

  "Does it ever get more crowded than this?" I ask, panting, noting that there are only a scattering of people out and about. "Is it safe?" My gaze is drawn to some police officers.

  "Iz getting worse. Thaz what the drivers say."

  At last, at the far end of Main Street, Beth scoots up to a renovated Victorian firehouse, which has been converted into a restaurant and offices, zips around the side, and swings open an unmarked glass door. "Down here," she says, shooting through an obscure corridor of small businesses and janitorial closets.

  "How did you ever find this?" I ask, trying to see as we pass out of the sunlight.

  "There were people in some office upstairs who helped Jesse out for a while, with money and stuff, and I'd just walk around when I went there with him, and I just found the baffrooms. But sometimes the doors're locked, so then I can't go. They don't always want us in here."

  "Us?" I ask. "Who do you mean?"

  She frowns, and opens a bathroom door. "Anybody who's not them," she says.

  We're on our way back up the street, only now we're walking. There's no need to rush; in the bathroom I removed a sweater beneath my coat, lingering for more than the three minutes Beth had allotted before our next bus. It was pulling away just as we stepped out of the firehouse.

  Annoyed, Beth storms on ahead of me. "You take too long," she says. "I'm fast, why'd you take so much time, iz too slow, now iz all messed up, now we have to wait."

  "Sorry," I say. "But I was getting warm."

  "You need to be fast to keep up with me, I'm not slow, I don't stop, I do what I want, I just keep going, and I can't keep going if you're so slow so you better get quick, you better, if you wanna ride with me, thaz how I do it, and thaz how you have to—"

  "All right!" I snap.

  Silence. Both of us steam. We're at an intersection, stuck waiting for the red to change. Ah—a distraction: I see a familiar form crossing up ahead, a woman with Native American jewelry and bouncing dark hair.

  "Isn't that Olivia?"

  "Who? Where?"

&n
bsp; "Right there." I point. I turn and notice that Beth is staring at her, but cannot gauge who it is. I grasp now that Beth's vision, damaged by the cornea problem I learned about in her Plan of Care meeting, is deteriorating. "Oh!" Beth says at last. "Hey! 'Livia!"

  Olivia whirls around and smiles. She's got a winsome, girl-next-door face, and since she has the walk sign, she U-turns back to us.

  "You're visiting?" Olivia asks me as she reaches the sidewalk.

  I say, "I'm touring the buses, and Beth is my guide."

  "Well, you'll learn fast," Olivia says. "Beth is really quick."

  "I sure am," Beth says. "I'm quick and she's slow. She was in the baffroom so long we missed Rodolpho and now we have to wait and I hate to wait and if she didn't take so long—"

  "You don't have to blab it to the world, Beth," I say, realizing that for the rest of the day, she will.

  Olivia says to Beth, "Does that mean you've got a minute for me?"

  Our light has just turned, and Beth has a let's go look on her face.

  "I just need to cover a few questions, honey," Olivia adds. "I'll only be a second."

  Beth stifles the look, and Olivia explains to me that as Beth's case manager, she has to check each month to see if everything's going well, and because Beth is out all day and has no answering machine on her phone, they usually have this exchange when she bumps into Beth on the street. "Are you getting the services you desire?" Olivia asks speedily. "Are you getting the help you need?"

  Off to the side of this exchange, I quickly put more of the system together: Olivia must work at the agency that monitors the services Beth receives, including those of the other agency, the one that employs Vera and Amber. That's why she was running the Plan of Care meeting, which was held where she works, and why she needs to know if Beth is satisfied with how she's being served. Once again, I'm a bit uncomfortable as I realize all I haven't known.