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

  "Yeah, evrything's all right"

  Olivia nods, listening hard. Then, "And how are your eyes doing?"

  I'm fine.

  "When's the doctor appointment? I ask.

  "I just had one, Beth says. "He wants to have me come in again this summer.

  "To see if it's getting any worse, Olivia adds.

  "We done? Beth says.

  "All done. I'll see you in a month, Olivia says, but as she steps off the curb she turns to me. "I really like Beth. She's so cool. At this observation, Beth grins. Then Olivia hurries across the street.

  We're sallying up the slope of Main Street, toward the you'll see of our next stop, when I realize, though Beth doesn't say it, that as far as she's concerned I am not cool. Having apparently forgotten her annoyance with me, she is chattering about the different stores along the way when we see a scraggly, bowlegged man walking toward us. His pants cuffs are unraveling, and his beard is a waiting nest for birds. I avert my eyes, figuring, as always, that it's better to ignore homeless people than to get a request for a handout.

  As we pass him, Beth says, "Hi, John." He looks directly at her and nods back.

  A moment beyond, I ask, "You know him?"

  "Yeah. He lives on the street. He's nice."

  I turn around and watch him walk away.

  After a few more blocks, I realize that she knows all the misfits. Every time I notice one—the mustached guy with the loping belly and duffel bag, the frog-faced woman whose scarlet shoes match her hair, anyone who seems homeless or "different"—I, preset to tune them out, turn away. Immediately, as if reading my dismissiveness in the swing of my head, Beth will say, "He lives in a shelter. He uses Tide in the Laundromat." Or "She works at the drugstore. We talk about Whitney Houston." I walk on, my footing less sure than only minutes earlier.

  But Beth's goodwill toward other outsiders doesn't extend to everyone.

  A sallow man wearing a toupee, who's driving a rusty station wagon, screeches over to the curb. "Hey, Beth," he calls out, but she just treks forward, saying nothing.

  I say, "He's calling you."

  "I know," she says, without breaking stride.

  "Beth," he says. "I got something for you." He thrusts an arm out of the passenger window. Dangling from his fingers is a photo album with Tweety Bird on the cover.

  She swerves over, snatches it from his hands, and resumes her march.

  "Aren't you going to thank him?" I say.

  "I'm gonna throw it away."

  "Why?"

  "Because he likes to give me things. I don't like that. He shouldn't do that. Iz creepy"

  "How do you know who's safe?" I ask.

  "He's not," she says, pointing to a man in a wheelchair sitting in front of a fast food restaurant.

  "How do you know?"

  "He asks people for money. The drivers and Vera told me he's bad news."

  "That's how you know? You listen to what people say?"

  "Yeah, but I also see if they're nice. I give them two chances. If they're nasty twice, then they're not my friends."

  "For good?"

  "Unless they change. Really change. Like, you can't fake being nice. If you have to fake being nice, thaz not who you really are" She sees a trash can, and, without elaborating on who this man is or how he knows her, she flings in the offering.

  She's got her own streetwise code of behavior, I see, as she finally stops at a corner. It's a code born of circumstances she has not shared with me, and that have taught her a level of discernment I do not possess. Indeed, throughout this break from the bus, I've felt far more naive than the street urchin chugging along in front of me.

  "So is this where we're waiting for Rodolpho?" I say.

  "Yeah." She sets her radio on a bus bench.

  It's Fifth and Main. I realize that, even though it is a fairly nondescript intersection, with a bank, luncheonette, bankrupt department store, and McDonald's on the four corners, it is where the two most important downtown streets cross. Not surprisingly, many buses stop here; each corner has one or more shelters.

  "A while ago," she then says, "I was waiting for a bus here, and a homeless girl on that corner"—she points across the street—"started giving me crap. She called me names, and I tried to ignore her, but then she came over here and jumped on my feet. I'd heard that her boyfriend sometimes hit her, so I said, 'Why go after me? Did your boyfriend hit you again? Why not go after him?' Then she put her hands around my neck, and said, 'I'm gonna kill you.'"

  "Beth, this sounds awful." But I notice that she doesn't sound troubled. Actually, her voice is gleeful, and each sentence is taking her higher.

  "I pushed her hands and broke away and ran to Jesse's. I told him what happened, and he rushed back there on his bicycle, and I ran back, too. When we got there, we saw that she'd brought her boyfriend, too. He whacked Jesse, and Jesse let him have it! Then the cops broke it up," Beth crescendos in triumph, "and the boyfriend went to jail!"

  I pause, aghast at how rapidly this incident went from ugly to life-threatening, and I'm terrified for Beth's safety. "Maybe you could have just walked away. Jesse and you could both have gotten hurt."

  "And now the guy's out of jail." She giggles. "And I hear he has a knife!"

  "Beth, please watch what you do out here," I say. "This isn't something to laugh about. This could be dangerous."

  "Iz okay. Jesse will take care of me."

  "And who will take care of Jesse?"

  "Nothing's gonna happen"

  "But it could, Beth."

  "It won't."

  "What if it does?"

  It won't.

  Now I grow irritated. I glare at her, remembering how I used to get fed up with her stubbornness, and how much that made me disappointed in myself—and in a flash, anger spews through me, at her bullheadedness, at my inability to get through to her, at my years of excuses for not being a good sister. And there it is again, that deep voice grumbling on inside me: How can she be so blithe about the possibility of trouble? You can't let her do that. She may be putting herself in real jeopardy!

  I take a deep breath. Despite her familiarity with this city, I'm not sure she fully understands, or accepts, how perilous the world can be. Yet if I get too "bossy, I know she'll dig in her heels all the harder. I also know it would be a great loss if I let some inner voice of criticism come between us. I'm enamored of her feistiness and her keen-witted street savvy. I feel privileged to be her sidekick. I want this year to go on.

  So maybe I should back off. Even if I don't think it's safe here. I think of her words: "Iz getting worse. Thaz what the drivers say. Oh, how I wish someone would tell me what to do.

  "I'm sorry, Beth, I say. "I don't mean to be bossy. I really don't.

  "Iz all right, she says.

  "I just don't want anything bad to happen to you or Jesse. "I know.

  "And I don't want us to grow apart again.

  "Iz okay. I like having you here.

  "Do you really? I ask.

  "There's Rodolpho!"

  "Do you really like having me here?" I ask again.

  "You worry too much," she says, turning toward the approaching bus. "I don't worry. You should try being more like me."

  "Oh, Beth, what am I going to do with you? I sigh, not caring that I may be uncool forever.

  Into Out There

  "My turn," Laura says from the back seat. "Alaska."

  "Oh, not an A word," I say from the front. "All the A place names end in A, which means you start the next with A, and it goes on forever."

  "If she wants an A word," Mommy says next to me, her eyes on the dark road, "she can do that."

  "It's a free country," Max calls out from the far back of our Dodge station wagon.

  "Yeah," Beth says, next to Laura.

  "Ruff," our puppy, Ringo, barks. He rides shotgun in front with me. "How about Name That Tune?" I say. "I'm tired of playing Geography anyway."

  "Fine," Mommy says. "Laura goes first."
/>   We're on our way home from visiting Grandma. It's winter, and Laura, Beth, Max, and I are ten, seven, five, and eight, and this ride lasts four hours. Home is this far now because we've moved to the mountains in Pennsylvania, the first time our family, including Mommy and Daddy, has lived outside New Jersey. It's cold every night in our split-level, especially downstairs, where Laura and I sleep, so we make up reasons to sleep in the warm upstairs with everyone else. Sometimes it works, and Mommy lets me sleep in Beth's room, Laura in Max's. Sometimes when we're up there and I can't sleep, I hear Mommy in her bedroom, crying.

  Last summer we moved to Pennsylvania for Daddy's new job as a college dean. In September I began third grade and Mommy became a librarian at Daddy's college and Daddy met a lady professor in the hall outside his office. Then the leaves fell off the trees and Daddy packed up the beige suitcase and Mommy stood next to him with runny eyes and he clicked the suitcase shut and he was gone.

  In our bedroom, Laura whispered to me, "Maybe he'll be back." And he did pull up in a truck a few days later, and we ran out to see him, all happy that he'd come home. But then he went inside and just carried out a cot and a rug and said he was sorry, he was so sorry, and we watched him lock the back of the truck and he hugged us and our faces got his shirt all wet, and then he climbed into the truck and drove down the road, and we were standing in the street waving bye and the wind felt cold on our cheeks and then the truck went over the hill and we couldn't hear it anymore. Mommy stayed in their room for a week. When she came out, her eyes were saggy and she burned all the dinners. Finally she said, "We're going to visit Grandma." We've been driving there every weekend since.

  We like pulling into the parking lot of Grandma's white brick apartment house. We like the ride to the sixth floor on the elevator with the porthole window, and we like the echo our voices make in the dark halls. We like bursting into the living room, which smells of Grandma's matzo ball soup, and kissing her hello and dumping over the toy box and throwing ourselves onto the couch next to her console color TV and turning it up loud, so we won't hear the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the Garden State Parkway out the back window, and so Mommy can cry to Grandma in the kitchen in peace. For the longest time, that highway kept me up at night. I'd get up and tiptoe past Laura on the sofa, and Beth and Max on cots, and peek into the bedroom, but Grandma would be in one bed, Mommy in the other, everyone asleep, and I'd go back to my own cot and try to read a Peanuts book in the dark. But one night Mommy got up just as I was making my way to the bedroom. She came out and whispered to me, "Just pretend it's the ocean. That's what I try to do," and when she sat on the carpet beside me and I lay down and closed my eyes it did sound like waves after all, and then I fell asleep.

  "All right," Laura says in the car. "Da da da DA dada da DA da."

  "'See You in September,'" I guess right away. "That's the opening. Now my turn. Doo doodoodoo doo DOO doo doo."

  "'I'm Henry the Eighth,'" Max guesses. We all know the same songs, so this game is easy. Then he says, "Dee dee deedee DEE DEE."

  "'Hey, hey, we're the Monkees !" Beth guesses.

  "Great!" we all say. "Your turn, Beth."

  Beth says, "DUH duh."

  "What else?" Laura says.

  "Thaz it," Beth says.

  "There has to be more," Max says.

  "DuH duh."

  "But songs have more than two notes," I say. "Do more."

  "Thaz all iz. DUH duh."

  We guess "Born Free." We guess "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." We guess so hard we get that messy feeling inside that you sometimes get with Beth, where she makes you laugh but you get steamed up at the same time.

  Finally we say, "All right, forget it. Just tell us."

  "'Hey Jude,'" she says.

  "Aw, that's not fair," Max says.

  "How can we get it from two notes?" Laura says.

  "It kind of makes sense to me," I say. "It makes sense and doesn't make sense. Both."

  Mommy says, "All right, we're putting on the radio."

  Ringo barks.

  Mommy got Ringo after Daddy left. Dogs scare Beth and me, and Mommy said that's why we need one. "You should look at what you're afraid of," she said, her voice all shaky.

  Ringo's the size of a cat and he's black except for the tan rings around his paws, which is why he was named Ringo by the family that owned his mom. This is handy, since for a longtime Ringo was our favorite Beatle. Ringo's readiness to play won us over the second we let him loose in our living room. We all like to hide him under the covers at bedtime and when Mommy comes to kiss us, we throw open the sheets and—surprise!—he licks her face instead.

  Now Ringo is barking along with the music. There are songs we like to sing to and songs we like to hate to sing to, and the one we like to hate the most has come on. It's Jack Jones, and it's called, "The Impossible Dream (The Quest)," and we think that title is stupid, but we know all the words.

  "Now, no one act up this time," Mommy warns.

  We sing along to all the words, behaving ourselves. But there's something about that song. It gets louder and louder as it goes, like a monster getting meaner and noisier as it gets closer in your nightmares, and the music starts pounding harder and harder, and we just can't help it. When we get to the end, we all hate it so much that Ringo is barking and our arms are out in the air like Las Vegas celebrities and Laura and Max and Beth and I are all belting out at the top of our lungs, "To reach the unreachable STARRRRSSSS."

  "That's enough!" Mommy says, whipping around to smack anyone she can reach.

  We're laughing, it's like the Fourth of July going off in the car, and Mommy says, "I can't take it anymore," as she snaps off the radio.

  Silence falls. We didn't want to upset her. We can hear the tires moving over the road at the Delaware Water Gap. We look out at the icicles.

  Then Beth says it. For the seventeenth time tonight she says it, twenty-ninth time this weekend, three hundredth time this winter. "Look!" she says, pointing out the back window. "Moon's following us!" We spin around as we always do, and there it is, high in the sky behind us, and we laugh when we see it, and even Mommy lets loose a little ha.

  "It's not following us," Mommy says, her voice tired but nicer. "The moon's just there."

  "Iz!" Beth insists. "Iz following us!"

  We know the moon's the big thing and we're just puny underneath, but in Beth's head we're the big thing and it's the moon that's small, and there it is again, her makes-sense-doesn't-make-sense thinking. But her funniness wins out over our steaming up this time, the way it always does with Beth's moon.

  "All right," Laura says. "Forget Alaska. How about Atlantic Ocean?"

  "Newark," I reply.

  "Kentucky," Max says.

  We drive on into the night, doing the geography of the world, the moon hitching a ride above our bumper.

  "Who wants to play Bingo?" Mommy asks.

  "We do," we all say.

  "Let's go down to your bedroom," she says to Laura and me, "so we can all sit on the beds together."

  "It's cold down there," I say. "It feels like a basement."

  "It is a basement," Mommy says. "But it's not good to have a whole part of the house that you never use." She picks up the dog, since he can't walk downstairs yet, and we traipse out of the kitchen after her.

  We like playing Bingo, which is good because Beth is in special ed classes in school now, and they're teaching her letters and numbers, and Mommy tries to help her by playing Bingo.

  At the landing, Mommy turns to us and says, "Let's let the puppy go pish," so she opens the door and he scoots into the snow outside. "This is why it's good to live in the country," she says, but her voice says she doesn't mean it. She misses New Jersey. With Daddy gone, we all do.

  We get to the bottom of the stairs and go down to the North Pole of our room. Laura and I clear the Creepy Crawler kit off our beds and push them together, so our room becomes a nice soft Bingo palace. All four of us kids and Mommy get on the be
ds and sit in a circle and throw the blankets over our laps. She deals out the Bingo cards. Mommy calls, "B3. N7." Beth marks the squares on her board. There are two kinds of special ed classes, we've learned. They have big names: Trainable and Educable. Trainable is for kids who have lots of difficulties, Mommy says, like kids who can't dress themselves. Educable is for kids who can read.

  Once, I found out that before Beth started school, a man at a big desk in a school office told Mommy that Beth should be put in Trainable classes. "According to her IQ score," he said. Mommy set her hand on the desk and said, "My daughter is going to read," and she put Beth into the Educable class instead.

  "O4," Mommy says. "I5. G7."

  "Bingo!" Beth cries out.

  There's a noise outside, and we look up. Ringo is scratching his paw at the window above our beds. "He thought we were calling him!" Mommy laughs, bigger than her ha laugh. She opens the window and Ringo leaps in all wiggly and jumps on the bed, spilling the cards to the floor.

  Mommy sits Max and Laura and me down in her room and closes the door. She tells us, "Beth needs a little extra help sometimes, and whenever you see that she does, help her. Don't you ever forget: it could have happened to any one of you."

  Daddy sits Max and Laura and me down in his office when we're visiting and Beth is out with his secretary. He says, "When you get older, you'll have to save money for her, so when we're gone you can take care of her."

  Mommy says, "People used to hide mentally retarded kids in back rooms. We will always have her as one of the family."

  Daddy says, "Some people send mentally retarded kids away to institutions, but we'll never do that. Ever, ever, ever. We'll always have room for her."

  Then when they get up and open the doors I think about how we just heard two words that they never say in front of Beth: "mentally retarded." We never ask why, we just go back to playing with her. But we know, too, not to say those words where she can hear them.