Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

by Rachel Simon

  "I don't want to be here. I want to go." It was now five A.M.

  "Then go," I mumbled in a stupor. "Just come back for me."

  "Maybe," she said, jumping up and flying out her front door.

  At six-fifteen she did return, grumbling, with Jesse pressed into service. In silence, we packed my car, and when she resumed her rounds—at seven—I joined her, as we'd previously agreed I would. But on every bus, she tilted away from me, not addressing a word in my direction. Then, just before the appointed hour for my departure, she bolted off two stops earlier than we'd arranged, vanishing before I could even call out goodbye. My throat tightened, and I blinked back the impulse to cry.

  Did being a good sister mean having no needs of my own?

  As we rumble along in Estella's bus, the midday sun casts its abundant light up the aisles of the streets. On either side, flowers seem to burst open; trees attend our march from stop to stop, resplendently green. In front of Victorian houses topped with witch's-hat roofs, young men in tank tops tinker beneath the hoods of Fords. Mothers lift infants from strollers. Children in shorts race about the fairy-tale castle in the park, calling out from its weathered blue turrets.

  Some blocks later we find ourselves caught in a rare instance of gridlock. Everyone stays seated, except for a young, trimly dressed woman who has just angrily described being harassed by her boss on her early-morning shift, and wondered aloud how she can quit with two children to support. After she gets off, Estella, watching the woman let herself into her house down the street, says, "I hear hard things like that all the time. It's almost a given in this job. When people get a pink slip, or their wives throw them out, or the cops call to say that their son's in jail, I'm often the first person they see."

  I'd long since grasped that the qualifications for a bus driver can and often must extend well beyond operational skills. But I had not realized that drivers might also be called upon to assume the role, at a moment's notice, of emergency caregiver—or bereavement counselor, confidante, inspirational speaker, and all-around healer of life's slings and arrows. The responsibility is so comprehensive; how, I ask Estella, does a person who has applied her efforts to obtaining a commercial driver's license possibly, when faced with everything from mild dissatisfaction to crisis-level suffering, know what to do?

  "All my life," Estella says with a sigh, "I'd wanted things to be better for myself. When I was a kid, I had a stepfather who drank a lot. I got married at sixteen to escape that, but my husband wouldn't let me work. When my marriage fell apart, I just became involved with one man after another who was nothing but trouble. I had several kids by then, and I just thought I must deserve men like that because I wasn't a better person. But at least then I was working. I started as a call-taker for a tow truck company, and one particularly tough winter when they needed more drivers I asked to take the wheel. A few years later I started driving truck cross-country, the first woman in these parts to do that. I'd meet new people on the road and have adventures with sandstorms and twisters and you name it, all the way to the Texas Panhandle, but even that didn't show me that I could have a better life. I was with a very abusive man by then, and when you park your truck, no matter how far away you've traveled in this world, you still have to go home.

  "Well, right after my last child, my fourth, I got very depressed, and went for help. I thought therapy might cure me, but it's not the waving of the magic wand—it really comes down to you. So there I was, and it was a true life-to-God moment, there was no one for me to look to for answers but myself and God. And I realized that I'd been with those men because I'd chosen them, and that I had to start making better choices. So I got the guy I was with out of my life, which wasn't easy, believe me. And I started working really hard on myself, with counseling, reading, digging into my past. Then I began to explore my spiritual side, and it all came together. I realized I would never be perfect, but that I was still a good person. My sense of self-worth began to come back. It's been so much better ever since.

  "This is how I know to tell passengers what to do. I say that no matter what, there's nothing so terrible or that's gone on so long that you can't change it and look forward to a new tomorrow. I lost myself, but in the end that helped me find myself. You've just got to have faith and work at it."

  "With anything?" I ask.

  "Anything," she says, as a gap finally opens in the intersection. "As long as you accept the hardest thing of all: that you might have to lose to win."

  I wish I could accept this myself. After that last visit, I so wanted to talk with someone about the dark voice, someone who would listen without judgment and suggest what I might do when I hear it. For days I could not dislodge the image of Sam from my mind, with his high forehead and goofy pirate accents, his ease with Chinese culinary skills and my self-doubts, his loving green eyes. Maybe I could tell him, I thought, remembering my exchange with Jesse at our lunch. Maybe his eyes would still be loving. I had not seen him for so long now, and, though mutual acquaintances told me he was not involved with anyone else and still kept a photo of me on his mantel, I trembled as I finally dialed his number in the city where he'd relocated for a new job. He had hung plants on his front porch, I'd heard, and was taking lessons in classical guitar; he had indeed moved on with his life. On the third ring, he picked up. "Hello ... Hello?" I tried to speak back, but the words died in my throat. In silence, I hung up the phone.

  We circle through the city, encountering rider after rider who offer Estella a hearty hello, rocking in our seats like children in a cradle. I close my eyes, letting snatches of conversation wash over me, wash my frustrations with Beth out of me, fill the desolation I've become oppressively aware of in my apartment, especially over the last weeks. It works, for a little while.

  Then a woman with bobbed pumpkin-colored hair and a vinyl tote emblazoned with the words "Lucky Bingo Bag" asks as she climbs aboard, "My ex isn't here, is he?" Thirty years after their divorce, Beth fills me in, the woman's ex still sidles up to her on the bus to annoy her.

  Beth says, "Don't worry, he already rode today."

  "I tell you," Estella adds, "I could fix him up with someone and get him off your hands."

  "I couldn't do that," the redhead says. "Pass him on to another poor sucker? Never."

  A full-figured woman across from us makes a cynical quip about men, followed by Estella's gently humorous reassurance, "Come on, girls, you know they're not all that bad." But already her commentary is sparking others. I glance around, and realize with surprise that all the passengers happen to be female. Soon our chat in the front of the bus has rippled out to every unrequited teenager, too-young-to-vote mother, starry-eyed fiancée, common-law wife, football widow, three-time divorcée, golden-anniversary grandmother, and avowed single woman until the whole bus is talking together about men: the good, the bad, and their own choices.

  I listen in wonder, and I think, watching these women confide and cluck and slap one another's arms with laughter, Beth contributing in her own way, Estella mothering them all, that maybe this is what it used to be like once upon a time. Maybe, when women gathered for quilting bees, or when men played checkers outside the general store, or when everyone came together at village dances and July Fourth picnics, this ease helped people feel less alone in their worries. Maybe, too, this was the swiftness with which neighbors became friends, and the simplicity with which one person's tale became another person's teacher.

  I don't want to climb down to the ground and return to the emptiness that reclaims me at home. I want to stay up here, in this comforting place, harvesting the springtime light.

  "There's Bailey," says Beth, poking my arm. "Lez go!"

  She has already jumped to the top of the steps. I rise, and as I'm searching my fanny pack for my sunglasses, Estella draws Beth into a hug. Then, releasing my sister, she reaches out and hugs me.

  I'm warm and sleepy and lightheaded all at once and I clomp down the steps to our next destination. Turning back to wave go
odbye, dizzy from the scent of floral perfume in Estella's lush blond hair, I remember the call I couldn't complete, and think how nice it would be to have Estella's bus in my life, too.

  Disabilities

  "Where are we?" I ask.

  "We're at Tenff and Main," Beth says definitively.

  "We can't be. We're walking down a street, between two corners."

  "Tenff and Main."

  "But look: this is a street. The corner's up there. Maybe you mean that's Tenth and Main. If so, then we must now be on Tenth Street. Is that right?"

  "What diffrence does it make? I get where I need to go."

  "Because there's a difference between a street and a corner. You're smart. You can see that."

  "Yeah."

  "And we can't be at Tenth and Main until we reach the corner. Do you understand that?"

  "I guess.

  "So what street are we on?"

  Silence.

  "Do you know what street we're on?"

  "I don't know'"

  "Yes you do. What street are we on?"

  "Broad?"

  For six months I have, for the most part, consigned my older, more disgruntled feelings about Beth to some remote corner of my heart. But now they are squirming out, as Beth's mood seems to shift toward being more self-absorbed and contrarian—or perhaps as we become so well reacquainted that she reveals these hidden sides and I, in turn, rediscover my impatience. I want to blurt at her, "Stop being so dense!" I want to shake her and cry out, "Don't close your mind so fast to every new concept just because it's new, or because someone thinks you might benefit from it. Try to get it!" I want to chase away what I increasingly suspect is Beth's habitual defiance or laziness.

  I struggle to speak with kindness, but it's getting increasingly difficult. Why can she not learn the simplest things? Is it that she can't, or that she won't? Does the problem lie entirely in her disability?

  And—while I'm railing on—why doesn't she notice that anyone else has needs? Lately, she's entered a phase where she won't listen to other bus riders, not even her most adored drivers, when they talk about anything not bus-related. Me, too: I always arrive in town with my own food, knowing it has never occurred to her this entire time to stock even a single slice of bread for my visits. I ask for nothing except to be part of her life, accept her bawd expression if I dare mention anything about myself, and affirm and admire and truly like her. Yet she still resents giving me any help at all, even in carrying my bedding to the car.

  I don't get it. Especially because Beth is smart and acutely aware. She can also be outgoing and generous; she's started joining the retirees in her high-rise for Tuesday-night Bingo, and she routinely purchases and hand-delivers postage stamps to drivers with utility bills to pay. But every time she complains about the nasty drivers, sometimes even attempting to incite impartial drivers to war against their crustier colleagues, every time she pays no heed to a drowsy shift worker who has asked her to lower her voice, and every time she brags about how she barged into the drivers' room even though one of her enemies was there on his break, a feral feeling rears up within me, and it's all I can do to hold back my words.

  How much is Beth, and how much is Beth's brain?

  What is mental retardation, anyway?

  I call Olivia at her office. We have been doing this every month; she brings me up to date on Beth's medical developments, I acquaint her with events on the buses. Sometimes, we allow ourselves to slide off course. We talk about long-beached romances; we offer wisdom from books. She refers to the Bible and Edgar Cayce, I talk about Toni Morrison and Benjamin Franklin.

  This day, two beats before our goodbye, I try to sound casual: "Oh, by the way, what, uh, did you think mental retardation was before, you know, you studied it for your career?"

  She says, "People who couldn't do what I could do, because they were born that way."

  "When did you understand ... what did you learn when you entered the field?"

  "Well, one of my big moments came during my training, when I saw this movie about babies with a type of MR. Their brain wants to process information about learning to crawl, but it doesn't coincide with how their body responds. Eventually it happens, but it takes longer than with other babies. That was when I saw that what I'd need to deal with these people is patience, patience, and more patience."

  Good, I think. Perhaps she'll understand the return of my negative feelings and help me reach a calmer place. "Is that ... what you find most ... difficult about working with Beth?"

  She thinks for a minute. "The worst part of it is the way the people around Beth deal with her: talking about her like she's not there, looking down their noses at her. I deal with this every day in my job, and not when I'm hearing about strangers, but sometimes families, too. One person I know was visiting her family, and became talkative during dinner. When the family got fed up, instead of saying, 'Can you give someone else a chance to speak?' someone actually said, 'Maybe we should stick a pacifier in your mouth,' and everyone laughed. It's so demeaning! People treat their pets with more respect.

  "I don't have any trouble with Beth," she concludes. "I think she's a joy to work with."

  "Me, too," I say, half-truthfully, and change my mind about asking my question. I hang up in a swirl of relief and shame. I have lived with mental retardation for thirty-nine years, and I have never asked anyone what it really is. In the interest of raising four equal children, our parents almost never uttered the words except in private and never added books about mental retardation to our shelves. In fact, I'd read about this disability only in works of fiction—Flowers for Algernon, Of Mice and Men, and The Good Earth when I was younger; when I was older, The Sound and the Fury and the Flannery O'Connor short story "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." And none of them answered the questions that I hadn't thought to ask. But why should it have occurred to me to do so? Mental retardation had just always been my sister, and my sister had always been it.

  I am glad Olivia had to get off; I am not prepared for her to see my ignorance.

  Then, on my next visit, which falls right after Beth's birthday, when we are now officially "twins," I drag through a day that sits especially heavy in my heart. On seventeen buses, over twelve hours, Beth's talk brims with spite about the brutes she encounters in the drivers' room. Her babble is unceasing, booming, and unvarying from bus to bus. People glare. An elderly man with a cane, who evidently assumes I sat beside Beth without knowing what I was getting into, leans close to me and says, "She sure does run her mouth, that one." While we're waiting at the terminal for a bus, I'm accosted on the sidewalk by a mother and her teenage daughter. The mother, who grasps immediately that I'm Beth's sister, ignores Beth while shouting at me that I need to control her: she picks fights with them on the bus, I'm told, as she's jealous when they speak with the drivers, and plays her radio because she knows it irritates them. Beth shrugs. Late in our day, when I suggest that she at least speak more softly on the bus, she says to driver after driver, "Rachel thinks I'm talking too loud. The last driver didn't think I was talking too loud, he sez I should do what I want, and thaz right, I don't talk too loud, do you think I talk too loud, do you, do you?" I tell myself to let it roll off me, that it's none of my business if she's as loud as a foghorn. I don't want to intrude like her nosy coriders. Live and let live. Right?

  Then that evening, as we rest on her love seat watching Diff'rent Strokes, my head splitting despite my relief that I finally got to the end of this day, she gives me her slyest smile and says, "I'm gonna tell that fat girl off tomorrow. I'm gonna tell her like it is."

  I look at her. "Who are you talking about?"

  "Just somebody. She wants everyone to treat her special, she wants the bus to leave her at her house instead of the stop, and the drivers are sick of it, and now she wants my seat, and I told her she couldn't have it, and she yelled at me. So I'm gonna tell her off. Now you know."

  "What do you mean, tell her off?"

  She lau
ghs. "I'm gonna tell her that she stinks!"

  In a different mood I might laugh, too, then calmly discuss civility. But I'm already too worn out and perturbed to control myself, and my feelings suddenly break loose. "Beth, why don't you try being nicer to people?!"

  "I'm nice to people who are nice to me."

  "Telling people they stink isn't being nice."

  "It don't matter."

  "It does matter. You don't need to be nasty to anyone."

  "I don't care."

  I take a few deep breaths; I know it's just a petty conflict. But it's at least the tenth one today, and dammit, I'm not just another busybody passenger, I'm her sister, and the bus isn't a military theater, it's just a city bus and she's just another rider, and—and—and I just can't stand it anymore! "Why can't you ever notice when you upset people!" My voice is rising; I can hear my angry, righteous tone. I look away, pretending I don't want an answer, telling myself that everyone has feelings like Beth's sometimes. But, the dark voice retorts, most of us manage to keep them to ourselves. I peer back at Beth and force my words into an approximation of composure. "Beth. Really. You could just keep your mouth shut."

  "She'll get over it."

  "But think about what Jacob says: do unto others. You could just share your seat."

  "Iz not her seat."

  "It's not yours, either."

  "And she does stink. And I can say what I want. Iz a free country. Louie the driver sez so, and that new driver, Rita—"

  "Sure, you can say what you want. But you don't have to say things that hurt."

  "I don't have to be polite to her."

  "Look, I don't have to be nice to everybody, but I try, even when people act badly, because there's no need to make bad situations worse. And if I hurt people's feelings by accident, I apologize."

  "I'm not gonna apologize."