Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

by Rachel Simon

  As the waitress disappears into the kitchen, I notice that a bald white man has taken a seat at a corner table. He's holding up a newspaper, but it appears to be no more than a prop. He's glaring at Beth, then Jesse, then Beth, then me. With each second, his face clenches more tightly in abhorrence. It's the look of someone who wants his reality perfectly sorted, his whites washed only with other whites.

  Beth and Jesse are preoccupied with pawing through our basket of rolls. I whip a scalding look at the bald man. He snaps his paper higher, obscuring his face.

  Beth wipes a bread crumb from Jesse's small mustache. I bite into a roll, so frazzled that my hand is trembling. Now I understand that it's not just Jesse's blind eye or mental disability that discourages him from accepting my offers to join us in restaurants. There's so much separateness in this almost empty room that I can't breathe.

  "Don't pay him no mind," Jesse says quietly, having observed more than I'd realized. "People is gonna look all day, and they might say that they don't think it's right, but it's not really for them to judge. As long as you be nice to a person, looks don't matter. You in this world, and you gotta accept it."

  "Yeah," Beth says. "Sometimes people give us looks, but I don't think about it."

  The bread feels thick in my mouth. Jesse blinks sloe-eyed at me as I swallow. He says, "You know, when I was younger, in Georgia, people always wanted to pick with me. I be out jogging, practicing karate on my front lawn, in special ed class, whatever, I got it from all sides. Black, white, it don't matter, they just see me and they say, You can't do this, you can't do that, and they treat me ugly. They don't care who you are, they just want to start with you.

  "It just turned me to meanness. I was all anger. I broke a man's jaw once when he challenged me to karate. All I liked was being by myself. While everybody was out playing, I was in the living room. I had bought some toy army mens, and I just showed my meanness on them. My mom tole me you got to get that violence out of you. Then when I was getting up in age, twenty-four, twenty-five, she got me into classes for violence. It's like a round table, everybody talk about meanness, and a lady tell you the opposite, that people care about one another, and what to do when you have that real mean feeling. I saw I didn't want to live that kind of life.

  "Now, I feel good every day when I get up. I feel good that I got into biking, and knowing Beth be all right. I feel good to be alive.

  "That man over there, he just want to start something. He just don't know what's right and what's wrong. He just don't got nothing to do."

  Our table is quiet for a minute. Then I say, "Does anyone want me to butter a roll?" They both say yes, and as I'm breaking the bread, I glance out the window to a granite building across the street. In one of the office windows, a spherical vase teems with a motley assembly of blue pansies and lavender irises and pink peonies and white poppies. I hand Beth and Jesse the bread, and we admire the flouncy blossoms and the pinstripe stamens basking in the sunlight.

  Later, as Beth scurries off to the bathroom and the waitress hands me the check, I remember the conversation about love that Beth and I had begun earlier in the day. I glance at Jesse, who is sipping the last of his orange soda, and decide to extend my earlier line of inquiry to him. "What do you think it means," I say, "to be able to love?"

  "You want to know 'bout love?" he says, lowering his glass. Then he sits up straight and says slowly, "Love is when you care for somebody, and you be willing to go out of your way and do anything for that person, and to take care of that person, and if they have problems, that you can help them out any way you know how. If they sick, that you can bring 'em medicine, or give 'em a helping hand. That's what love is."

  I pause. "Beth was right," I say. "You do know."

  I open my wallet to pay the check. "What do you love about Beth?" I ask.

  "You got me stumped." He laughs, and then, as Beth blasts out of the restroom, he says, "Well, she's real funny. When I see her on the street, sometimes I wish I could stay talking to her forever. And sometime when I look at her or when she talk on the phone, I can just tell she feels happy or she feels hurt. I can just about feel it myself. I tell her, Why don't you be happy, because I can tell in your voice. And I try to make her happy."

  He hesitates as we notice Beth rocking back and forth at the exit, gesturing to us to get going. "I guess I love her," he says, "just to be Beth."

  I plunk down the tip, my hand shaking. He is so right, and for a second I think about Sam, and the way he used to say similar things to me, the sweetest look in his eyes, and for a long, terrible moment, I realize all over again how much I miss him. I inhale sharply.

  "Now I got you stumped." Jesse laughs.

  I try to laugh back, and I look to Beth, who's mouthing, Come on! Finally the laugh comes, and we make our way to the door.

  A few days after the tae kwon do demonstration and the lunch, I receive a letter from Beth.

  to sis

  Hi. What I like about Jesse

  is He is SExey and has Sexey legs and he can ride all over on his bike and he is Smart. and a great kisser. and he is Fun. to look at. too. all the time OK now you do have it. now

  Cool Beth

  It has been a decade since I have initiated Conversation Number Three. Back then, I needed to talk about it, to question what was right and what was wrong, to receive a promise of forgiveness should I be influencing my sister wrongly. That winter is long behind us, but it is not the remoteness of the event that deters me from bringing up Conversation Number Three with new friends. It is that sometimes talking cannot provide the answer, nor can forgiveness always silence lingering doubts.

  Conversation Number Three begins on an overcast afternoon the November that Beth is twenty-eight. She and Jesse have just begun keeping company, and our family is thrilled for her. At last she has met someone who will hold her hand while she watches TV, and enjoy her jigsaw puzzle masterpieces. This is how we see it at first.

  It is a week into their courtship, and I am on one of my visits to see her. Jesse is out riding his bike, so I have not met him by the time she concludes that there are no television options for the next hour and walks me away from her roommates toward her bedroom. At the threshold she announces she wants to show me the latest Polaroids in her lifelong collection. I settle on her quilt, and Beth deposits her photo album on my lap with a grin and opens to the Halloween party the group homes threw the week before. I compliment wigs and capes and jack-o'-lanterns as we flip through, until she turns cheerfully to the final page. "Look at this one, what'dya think of this one?" she says. The planted evidence comes into focus: a man who is obviously Jesse, perched on the edge of her bed, beaming a snaggle-toothed smile. Not wearing a costume. Not wearing anything.

  I don't know what to say. Beth giggles at my silence.

  A day later, Beth phones Max. "Guess what I did last night" she says.

  Max swallows. "How much did you do?"

  "Evrythiiiing" she says.

  A chain of phone calls follows, the family passing the news along like buckets in a small-town fire. Here it is, the moment we've dreaded since an eleven-year-old Beth first poked her head out of the bathroom and called Mom to come in to help. The moment bobbed into sight then, as Laura and I turned to each other on the sofa and said, "Some day she'll want to..."It receded for a while, only to pitch back up some years later when Beth would get goo-goo-eyed over David Soul in Starsky and Hutch, and then as soon as she left for the kitchen during a commercial, Laura would stop reading her mystery and whisper, "What's going to happen when she acts on this? She might remember birthday cards, but we all know the poor job she does brushing her teeth. I can't see her being conscientious with pills or foam or a diaphragm."

  I would look up from my Kurt Vonnegut and say, "Well, it's not going to be an IUD, either. Remember how messed up my friend got from using one?"

  Max would glance up from his San Francisco earthquake and Titanic books and say, "You want to trust that she won't be a klutz w
ith a condom?"

  Laura would say, "Maybe she won't become active."

  I'd say, "She's human, you know."

  Laura would say, "Maybe there'll be a perfect form of contraception by then."

  Max would say, "Maybe there'll be peace in our time."

  But now we feel an urgency; evrythiiiing had apparently not included anything for contraception. And the thought of Beth undergoing an abortion seems unbearable—not that she would anyway, as she is the one family member who objects to abortions. Yet now a man has entered the picture, and even if this romance fizzles in a month, Beth has learned how intoxicating it feels to have a person she loves in her bed.

  In the single month in which I engage in—no, obsess about—Conversation Number Three, I explain to my friends that it's not sex itself that concerns us. Everyone's entitled to passion. And goodness knows it's not that her sweetheart is of another race; we do not even comment on this to one another. It's that Beth never passes an infant in the supermarket without veering close and gushing, "Aw, cute baby!" She has even speculated aloud about how much fun it would be to have a baby. But Beth needed over five years to take an interest in, and consistently perform, the steps necessary to deal with menstruation. She drops groceries; she can't hook her own bras; around her, things break. How long would it take her to learn bottles and diapers? Not to mention colic and teething and potty training and fevers and electrical outlets and terrible twos and lunchroom insults and orthodontia and facts-of-life talks and adolescent irony. We can see her loving a child—being delighted every minute by a child. We've read stories of people with mental retardation who've become responsible parents. But rightly or wrongly, each of us feels that parenthood will take a lot more than Beth can, or reliably will, give. Then what might happen?

  Max calls Laura and says, "More government assistance is what would happen."

  I call Mom and say, "Government or not, what'll probably happen is the family will have to step in to help. Maybe every week. Maybe every day."

  "And it's not at all fair to a child," Dad says.

  We hate to admit it, but we agree.

  The day after evrythiiiing, our mother calls Beth. "So you really like Jesse?" she asks.

  "Yup," Beth replies.

  Mom grips the phone cord in her fist. "Can we talk about babies?" she says.

  Then she renders pregnancy and infancy in detail, progressing from first trimester through bassinet. "Of course," she says, "it can be fun, but it's a lot of work. Babies are not like dolls. They get sick, and they grow."

  Over the next week everyone else rings up Beth to contribute to her baby education, italicizing the unrelenting needs of a child through the toddler years, the grammar school years, and on and on. If she chooses to become a mother, she must accept that she'll have to be responsible all the time. All the time; none of us will be able to take on the daily needs of her baby. Then we address birth control. "Will you remember to take a pill every day?" "I don't know." "Would you put a diaphragm in?" "I might." "An IUD could make you bleed more, is that okay?" "No." "But you have to do something, unless you want to risk having a baby. Do you want a baby?" "Maybe," she says during the first call. "No way" she says in the last.

  Finally our mother phones again, steeling herself to bring it up, the one form of birth control that none of us has mentioned. "It's called sterilization," she forces out. "It's an operation, and you have it once, and after that, you can do whatever you want. Forever. Without having to worry about it."

  Beth listens hard. In a few days—one month from the moment I found Jesse's photograph—Mom calls back. "What do you think?" she asks.

  "Okay," Beth says.

  That winter ten years ago, with Beth having settled on a course of action, I abandon Conversation Number Three. I cannot translate it for friends. I can barely even speak it to myself.

  Instead, I volunteer to be the one to accompany Beth through the process. Everyone is relieved to have someone else play the ambiguous role of parent and sibling, to balance the contradictions of right and wrong, so I call Beth's service provider and physician to set things in motion. Then I drive Beth to the preliminary appointments, hold her clamping fist when the gynecologist drapes the sheet on her legs for the exam, sit at her side in a darkened room during the hospital's required tubal ligation video. I get acquainted with Jesse after the doctor visits, as I chauffeur them around the valley. I hear about his sisters and brothers, his bicycle outings to a faraway amusement park, the janitorial job he keeps sleeping through. When I stop for take-out snacks, I learn his preference for orange soda. When I dawdle over goodbyes in their parking lot, I cheer at how well he can pop a wheelie.

  Then, after I pull away, waving with a big, sunny smile, when I am too far down the road to glimpse them in my rearview, I weep. It is a terrible act to eliminate the possibility of children, to terminate a long march of futures.

  I think, as I try to keep my blurry gaze on the road, that I still do not know when I might want a baby myself. So far, Max is the only one of us to have become a parent. It seems that I have not had the depth of longing for motherhood that many women possess. Perhaps my feelings about having a child resulted from my having observed my parents' efforts to rear children while striving to keep their own heads together. Perhaps it is a consequence of having parented Beth for much of my life—and fearing that I might give birth to a child with her disability. But my heart is still divided, and with relief I remember that I'm young; I don't have to make the decision yet. Beth, though, will have no more yets. At twenty-eight, her decision has been made.

  The morning of the surgery, I pick up Beth and Jesse and steer us toward the hospital. It is a bitter January day, with a single ash white cloud staked to all four corners of the sky. Outside the car, the row houses seem swaddled in dimness. Inside the car, Beth stares out her window, nose and lips against the glass. She remains quiet except for fretting about the "knockout shot." When I make weak jokes, she manages a laugh, but it's as soft as a door hissing shut.

  Assuring her that it will all be okay, I help her check in, and, when they call us, take her to the prep room. The doctor explains the surgery again, as Jesse sits nearby and listens. Then the doctor presents a consent form, and, without hesitation, Beth signs. She changes into her gown, and squeezes my hand during the shot. Jesse and I watch as they wheel her away.

  We sit in the waiting room, and see through the window that a light snow has begun to fall. I stare at the crystals winnowing downward, melting at the touch of the earth. In the room, a family of five huddles in one corner, the genes of each rippling through the faces of the others. I look down at my hands, and find my fingers clenched tightly together.

  Jesse wants to watch Scooby-Doo. I fiddle with the waiting room TV to find the program, though it's a rerun, and soon he is asleep. I try to read, but cannot concentrate; I have not eaten this morning, and my stomach has started to churn.

  A few hours later, the doctor appears and motions for me to come speak with him in a corner. Beth has done fine, he says in a low voice. She'll need a week to recover fully, but soon you won't even see the scar. His voice is as hushed as the snow falling outside. I glance out the window and see the white tumbling down, and wonder what the hell we have just done.

  The scarred flesh does heal, and Beth and Jesse grow into an unmarried couple. One with the same ups and downs as the rest of us. One that strangers gape at in restaurants.

  Every January, Beth will mention the anniversary of her tubal ligation in a letter. Its TEn years, she wrote in the latest, since I cant Have a baBy. Then she'll switch to one of her typical topics, and I will muddle about for days, uncertain if I should mention it when I finally write back. In ten years, I never have.

  Matchmaker

  And now, Beth wants to fix me up with a husband. Not just any husband. Beth is drawing back her bow for specific targets, as I learn from her in a letter:

  Dear R,

  I wAnt to HavE a driver as a BrothEr i
n law.

  Cool Beth

  I start my response. Thanks but no, I say. I'm just not interested in marrying anyone right now.

  Though the truth is, I'm unnerved by the proposition. Last week when I made my usual ten-thirty P.M. foray into the produce section of my grocery store—no crowds, no lines, and, hurray, sixteen solid hours of work stacked up behind me before my usual late-night dinner—and was reaching for the kale, the overhead music cranked up louder. Or maybe I just thought it did, because suddenly I was listening to the same plaintive Nick Drake tune that Sam often put on when he came home from work, and thumbed open his tie, and he and our tabby and I would all collapse on the bed and I'd hear the chronicle of his day in the dusky light, or his soothing reassurances if I happened to be blue, or one of his silly accents when he wanted to make me laugh. In the refrigerated chill of the aisle I stiffened, clutching the leafy vegetable. What peculiar music for a supermarket, I thought, and then my mind sprang backward to all I had not said and all I had not done and the icy feeling in my veins when he drew too close, and then the produce sprayer was wetting my hand and I jerked it away, fearing I might never know what Beth and Jesse—and Sam—already know about love. I shoved my cart forward, so cold I shivered inside my cardigan.