Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (17 page)

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 with 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.

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 in 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.

I don't tell Beth that it's much easier to remain in my apartment with my books than to greet a date at my door. I don't tell her that I am afraid to care about someone who might back away and move on. Or whom I might never be able to let myself love.

So I write Beth that I appreciate that she cares. But no, I'm fine the way I am.

Okay,
she scrawls back the next day.
I won't try to make that happen.

"She's a writer," she mentions to one driver who likes to read fat library books.

"She's a vegetarian," she informs another who is inclined toward health food.

"Oh, yeah, she's single," she tells them all.

Absent from these particular exchanges, I do not know this is happening. I do not know I have a yenta for a sister.

I am on the phone with Rick, a driver about whom Beth has spoken highly, and often. An expert at pool, he runs a billiard school on the side, and, in the half year he has been with the bus company, has taken to inviting her out for milk shakes. I'm contemplating doing something more with the journal notes I've been keeping about Beth, maybe assembling an article about our bus adventures. So I've called him, along with other drivers, to conduct a brief interview. The sun has long since set, but I haven't bothered to lower the blinds. Leaf shadows shaped like small guitars flutter about my desk, dancing in the moonlight.

I begin, "Do you mind if I ask a few—"

"No, not at all"

I ease into it with small talk. He's cheerful and unassuming; when he tells me his full name, Rick Whitman Gulliver, he acknowledges with good-natured humility that it is absurdly literary. "But for years," he adds, "I've been saying, 'Ma, why couldn't it have been Minnesota Fats Gulliver?'" His gentle laughter pours across the miles. I can't help laughing back.

Then I steer us to the obligatory questions: How long have you been driving buses? Do you remember the first time Beth boarded your run? I check them off one by one until I say, "That's it." As I'm expressing my gratitude for his help, advancing toward the goodbye, he says:

"So maybe sometime when you're back in town, we can go to dinner."

A pause of several beats. He sounds charming and kind. Yet the receiver suddenly feels like a vise.