Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

by Rachel Simon

  Now, as Beth prattles on and on about Cliff, the loudspeaker switches from ghostly sounds to "The Monster Mash," an inane song I have heard almost every Halloween I've been alive. Beth starts singing along, getting wrong the same words she has always gotten wrong, and something about the song scares me for the first time.

  Then Beth calls out, and I see Cliff rolling his bus toward the curb. "Come on!" she says, pulling a Mountain Dew out of her knapsack. "Iz his favorite drink, so I bought a case and now I give him one evry day and here he iz so come on!"

  "The Monster Mash" ends as the bus door opens, and suddenly I see why I'm scared: the present looks just like the past and exactly the same as the future.

  "It's a grudge-type race," Cliff says at a stop. "That's what I do on Saturdays." Cliff, a good-looking, lantern-jawed, George Clooney look-alike, has slightly more hair than Rodolpho—maybe a plush quarter-inch rather than a spare eighth—and, though he's past his mid-thirties, the hair on his head, and the five o'clock shadow on his face, are the same shade of bronze as his eyes. He also differs from Rodolpho in being taller and more muscular, and he seems considerably more inclined to chat.

  I'm sure I haven't heard him correctly. "Grunge?"

  "Grudge. If you want to race your buddy, or someone in your neighborhood—hey, my car's faster than yours—then instead of racing in the street, you go down to the track. It's a kind of drag race, a quarter of a mile, straight. Whoever has the quickest time wins."

  Beth says, "You gotta see that car, iz great, you gotta see that. Iz a green Mustang. Iz really neat. I wanna ride in your car."

  "I used to think you were harmless," he says, "till you started flirting with me."

  She says, "I don't flirt. I have Jesse. I just like you. I don't do that."

  "Ahhh, I know better than that, Beth."

  "I'm not a flirt. I'm not. I want to fix you up with 'Livia."

  She launches into a description of Olivia's beauty and kindness. Cliff, who is rolling away from the intersection, doesn't seem in the mood for dating, but persistence seems essential to Beth's matchmaking strategy. After all, she's still trying to fix me up with Rick. Just last week, she sent me a letter that said, I gave Rick a pHOto of you. Now he can Freak out ©ver it. now. Just kidding.

  "Look, there's the store that sells your favorite soda," Beth is saying to Cliff. "And thaz the house where that nasty driver Albert lives, he's a jerk, do you think he's a jerk? He put a sign on the ladies' room door in the drivers' room that said 'Only people who work here can use this.' I don't care, I'm going in anyway, as long as he's not there I'm going in 'cause iz just a baffroom and I'm not hurting anybody, do you think iz okay for me to go in there, do you think Albert's a jerk, do you think iz right what he does..."

  Damn it, Beth, shut up! my dark voice erupts. Look at you—same expression, same seat, same stupefying conversation.

  "My mom," Cliff is saying to me as we pause at a light and as I try to still the voice, "used to race stock cars in powder-puff derbies before I was born. I must have driving in my blood. Even my grandpa was a mechanic. I still work in the same garage he did. It's attached to my house."

  "Izn't he cool?" Beth says. "See?"

  "So," I say, trying to will the discussion away from the fiftieth lap around the same old track, "you started driving because it's the family business?"

  "Actually," he says, "I started out in shipping and receiving. Then I drove a school bus."

  "Why did you change?"

  "I'd always liked being behind the wheel. My parents took me to the races when I was eight or nine. I knew then that this is what I'd—"

  "The people here are mean," Beth says.

  "Beth," I say, trying to control my tone, "Cliff's talking about something else."

  "They are," she says, "and so are some of the drivers, Cliff knows, you can ask him about how—" And then as he drives on in silence, she goes off on yet another story of how a passenger told her to quiet down and Driver X stood up for her, she told them off, they told her to stay at home where she belongs...

  Passengers look at her severely, but she fixes her gaze on Cliff, avoiding their glares.

  She goes on and on, and now the dark voice, which I thought I'd laid to rest last month, roars within me again. I squeeze my hands together. When I started riding the buses, I remember, I thought of the people who didn't like Beth as insensitive and narrow-minded. Now I find myself more sympathetic to their point of view. Yes, some of them are coarse and offensively vocal. But she is so loud. And she talks all the time. About nothing. I know many of us babble on about nothing, too, but she does it over and over and over—and over and over and over—and it's really eroding the limits of my endurance. Dad used to tell us he came to dread their car rides to work for precisely the same reasons. That was twenty years ago.

  "Beth," Cliff says calmly. "Chill." Because he says it, she is quiet. But only for a minute, and then she starts up again.

  I stare at my feet. She's driving me up a wall! When the hell will she ever change?

  For the first time in our odyssey, I stand up, and, without even planning to, retreat from her to the back of the bus, gritting my teeth with shame for having these foul feelings all over again. But I'm afraid if I don't pull myself away, I'll snap at her. No, I'll start screaming.

  We pass scarecrows on porches and black cats taped to doors. I press my cheek to my window in the back of the bus. I can feel the bus hum and the road rumble up through my bones. I close my eyes and let it drown out the sound of her voice, far up the aisle from me.

  And I think: I wish I were a saint.

  I wish I were a magnanimous sister who could feel compassion for the way that Beth is re-creating a dysfunctional family environment on the buses.

  I wish I had the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.

  I wish I could learn the language of Maybe It's Good Enough. Maybe it's good enough that she can memorize seventy drivers' schedules and stand up to racists and read. I wish I could be a realist who could accept Beth's level of development and not long for more.

  I wish I were like acquaintances who think that people with mental retardation are "God's true angels." I don't want to think, "I wish she'd behave a little more appropriately today."

  I wish I could change.

  Instead I peer toward the front of the bus. Beth must feel me looking, because she turns and squints through her scratched corneas, rooting out her sister from these strangers, until finally our eyes meet.

  I'm sure I seem steamingly upset, and her expression registers her concern. We hold this gaze for a long time, as Cliff cruises down the potholed highway. The bus bangs with each imperfection, almost shaking us out of our seats, but neither of us breaks the look. It's a grudge race all our own; whoever holds on the longest will win.

  Finally I feel sick and glance away. When I peer back, she's still staring at me. I'm so far away we can't speak to each other, though our faces are twisted with hurt.

  Once, when Beth and I went out to dinner with Jesse, he tried to explain her to me. "You got to understand," he said. "Her mind is set like a clock. And no one can reset that clock. That's just the way she is."

  How right he was, I think at the end of our run; needless to say, Beth has planned our ride so that we have the driver all to ourselves. Jesse's words return to me now as Beth asks Cliff if he would mind her getting off up ahead, "just for a minit," to use the bathroom, and elaborates on which pizzeria in this block has the clean rest-room and just how long the owner's daughter—the one who accommodates Beth's restroom requests—stays on shift.

  Cliff says okay, if she'll meet us within seven minutes at the top of the hill where he begins the next run. "I will, I alwaysdo." When we pull into a narrow city street, she jumps out.

  As Cliff then chugs up a series of steep hills, I make my way toward the front of the empty bus. He pulls over at a corner, sits back to wait, and extra
cts a copy of a magazine, Muscle Mustangs & Fast Fords, from his bag. For a moment, as I stand halfway up the aisle in the now still bus, embarrassment courses through me. I realize how I keep turning to these drivers to help me steer my own life. But it has come to feel like a different world up here, with different rules, and, besides, I think, I am too desperate to remind myself that I should keep my mouth shut. I wait until I've calmed down, then slip into Beth's seat. I face him, as she always does, until he feels my eyes on him. He peers over at me.

  I say, "Tell me, have you ever wanted something you couldn't have?"

  He thinks for a minute. "I always wanted to be involved in sports when I was in school, and I couldn't because they found out I had scoliosis, which is a bad alignment of your spine. I was really disappointed. I couldn't accept it for a long time."

  "What did you do?"

  "I felt pretty bad, but eventually I thought, Maybe there's something else I can do, and I started bowling. The disappointment didn't disappear completely, but I was good at bowling, so it didn't weigh on me anymore."

  Outside, a mom opens her front door and five little costumed kids dash down the steps to the street. "Or," he goes on, "let's say I want something for my car, and I know that I can't afford it. I look for something else that will be almost as good."

  The kids tumble by us, a Teletubby, a princess, Batman, a firefighter, a hobo. The hobo drags a bit behind the others, not quite seeming to fit in.

  Cliff says, "You just look at other ways to get the same results. Or other ways for other results. Like forget about football, which at some point a friend said to me, 'Get over it, look for something else.' That's the way you do it," he says. "Sometimes, you just have to change your goal."

  "But how? How do you change?"

  "When I was in shipping and receiving," he says, "I was always looking for something better financially. Plus there were times when I thought, I can't take this abuse on my body, lugging this stuff around. I had to change. It was hard for me, since I'd been in shipping awhile, and I liked it. But I just got to the point where I said to myself, You know what? I'm going to try something different. That's what I had to do to change, really change: be both at the end of the line with one thing, and willing to take a risk with something else. The two things together."

  From the window I see a lime green streak in the street. It's Beth, flying along like the Road Runner. She blows past the hobo without a look and zips around the rest of the kids.

  "I made it," she says, leaping onto the bus.

  "Just in time, too," Cliff says, leaning in to look through his side mirror. "I was scared you weren't going to pull it off."

  "Oh, you know I'd be back, you know."

  I move aside, well aware that this is her seat. "Thanks," she says, and settles right in.

  Then Cliff accelerates, and we head down the hill. A block in front of us, the street is swarming with kids: ten, twenty, all dressed up for a Halloween party, running down to a house that's decorated to appear scary. But the bats are made out of paper, the mummies are plastic. Fake tombstones sport bad jokes.

  Beth is ignoring the parade of costumes in the street and gazing adoringly at Cliff—and with a jolt, I know what scares me.

  It's not just the same old crush with a new face, or the same old song with the same wrong words. It's not just the pattern she doesn't see, or care about, and therefore cannot or will not change.

  It's that Beth seems to need a cataclysmic event for her to change in any way—an event like our mother's complete abdication of her responsibility to protect her own child, Juanita's rejection, or Rodolpho's abandonment. This seems true whether she's being called upon to develop resourcefulness, assertiveness, or just basic self-restraint. I look at her and feel a clutch in my throat. What will it take now?

  Is this all there will ever be to her life?

  I stare outside, to the open row house door that is spilling light into the street, and to the kids crowding the doorway: the werewolves and ballerinas and pirates and the hobo. To all the sights I would be missing if I were at my desk, wrapped in my own pattern.

  I suddenly realize that Jesse's metaphor applies to me, too. Whoa, I think, I don't want to be a clock that nobody can reset—not anymore, I don't. Especially if that nobody is me.

  The Price of Being Human

  "Here we are," Rick says, as he glides his car into the golf course parking lot. "Chip and putt."

  In the chilly mist of an autumn evening, the golf green fans out to the left of his compact sedan, flags planted along its gentle hills. Before today, I had played only miniature golf with Beth. Now Rick is going to teach me the real game. "Sure," I'd told him when I called to say yes, I'd go out with him. But all day this Sunday, as a cold rain drizzled down and I loafed about with Beth in her apartment, I wondered if the weather would permit us to tee off. Now, though the rain has ceased, the leaves drip silver threads of water, and the fairway has become a sponge.

  "So," he says, turning to me, "you ready to learn?"

  "I ... I don't think anyone's here," I say, peering through the windshield.

  He glances up to the main building and then around at the grounds. Not a soul in sight.

  "Oh no," he says. "I thought they'd stay open in the rain, but..." He sighs. Then he says, "But that doesn't mean we can't go in."

  He smiles. Although tiny crinkles frame his eyes, his baby-smooth cheeks give him the air of a schoolboy, which is underscored by the kind of attentiveness and warm, ready laugh that I see on the faces of smitten youths strolling beside their sweethearts in mall corridors. This is not to say that Rick is shy. While it is true that he is adept in what he calls a lost art—the simple act of listening—he also talks easily, rolling out sketches from his life without egotism, reflecting knowledgeably on local lore. I am soothed, and stirred, to see that we have a natural rhythm to our conversation.

  He hops out of the driver's seat, strides around to the passenger side, and opens the door with a slight bow. I climb out and look around. The golf course—smaller than a regular course, that's what a chip and putt is, he's explained—is but one feature of this sprawling, private park. There's also a baseball field, swing set, picnic area, and, in the distance, a stream with a footbridge.

  We turned in here after a long country drive away from Beth's apartment, during which Rick told me that he used to be an over-the-road driver, as intercity, or Greyhound-type, bus drivers are called. The buses were far more luxurious, with restrooms in the back and upholstered seats, the works, but he couldn't form relationships in that job, with passengers keeping so much to themselves, the long hours, and overnights in distant hotels. He was still struggling with the disappointment of two divorces, and with pangs of loss and failure. He needed more interaction than four silent hours with a windshield.

  He holds out his arm, and I rest my hand upon it. We walk down the sloping wet pavement, fallen leaves matted to the ground in the wake of the storm. A light breeze nips at his windbreaker, and at my raincoat and floral dress, which Beth convinced me to wear, saying, "You should look more bright" Above Rick and me, the sky is still marbled with gray, but the late-day sun has begun to peek out, glowing gold and crimson along the horizon.

  "Oh no, the gate's down," I observe sadly at the bottom of the hill, noting a waist-high metal barrier crossing the path in front of us. He simply climbs over it and offers me his hand in the misty fall evening. With his help, I step over the gate, too.

  "You know," Rick says, as we walk along the path toward the ball field, "you have a lot in common with Beth."

  I laugh. "Oh, yeah?"

  "No, really. She's sweet, and sometimes very giving, and she has a kind of innocence to her. You do, too."

  I am flattered, though I don't see myself this way, nor Beth, for that matter. "I think she's really streetwise."

  "Sure she is. But there's also something else. You know, the way you're both shocked at the intolerance in the world. The way you both board these buses wi
th such open hearts toward the drivers. It's a kind of innocence, seeing the good in humanity, and wishing for even more. That's too rare in this world."

  I mull this compliment over. "But it can get us hurt when the bad stuff happens."

  "Well, maybe that's okay," he says. "Maybe it's the price you pay to be more human."

  We walk along, our backs to the rest of the world. In front of us lie picnic areas and patches of woods and, around the bend, the surging stream and the pretty wooden bridge.

  We stop on the bridge. The water tumbles beneath our feet, and all around us grass sparkles from the recent rain. Everything smells fresh, and there are no voices but our own.

  Lingering above the stream, we talk about love. The rocky love of fading romances and friendships. The distant affection of his grown son, who sometimes doesn't return his calls. The fondness I feel for my college students. The recently contentious love of his sister. The always complex love of my sister. The never-ending, hard work of love.

  He is thoughtful and kind, and when I admit to my frustrations with Beth, he listens. "I understand," he says. "I can't make them go away, but I totally understand."

  On the bridge, gazing down at the clear, flowing water, we trade anecdotes and advice, and ask ourselves how, and how much, to give to others. How, and how much, to ask from them.