Riding the Bus With My Sister: A True Life Journey (23 page)

"Here we are, stuck," I say. "But you're relaxed about it."

"Thaz 'cause he knows we'll still get there," Beth says.

"Eventually," Bailey says. "Though we're falling behind schedule."

"But you'll still get us there,
some
time."

"Sure," he says. "I try not to worry about the schedule in a situation like this. I can't control it, and the more I get upset, the longer it'll seem to take."

When, I wonder, as he resumes his tales of teenage mishaps and we sit and sit, eventually not moving at all, will my sister stop being stalled in her life? Do I have the patience to work through the traffic with her? Do I even believe that we'll ever get there, sometime?

"How do you stay so upbeat and positive about everything?" I finally blurt out.

Bailey looks surprised. "You just try to see that there's always the opportunity for things to get better. If you look on the negative side, you don't see that the opportunity even exists."

"But sometimes," I say, "there doesn't even seem to be a positive side."

"Good thing we're just sitting here, then, because I've got a story for you. It'll tell you what it means to be optimistic, and then you'll know forever." He glances at me. "And whatever's going on inside you that's making you ask about this? See if you can turn it off while you listen.

"There are two sons," Bailey begins. "One an optimist, one a pessimist. And their father is trying to teach them to round themselves out, to see how others think. He takes the pessimist, and locks him in a room full of brand-new toys. He says, 'I want to teach you a lesson. These are all yours to play with. I'll be back in an hour and we're going to talk.' Then he takes the optimist, and locks him in a room full of horse poop. He says, 'Stay here for an hour, and then we'll talk. I want you to think about what you see in here.'

"An hour passes. He comes back and unlocks the door with all the toys. The pessimist is sitting in the middle of the room, crying his eyes out. The father says, 'What's wrong with you?' And the boy says, 'I just know if I touch one of these toys, it's going to break!'

"Then he goes to the optimist and opens the door. And the son's jumping up and down in horse poop, giggling and screaming. The father says, 'What's wrong with you? You're in a room full of horse poop! How can you be so happy?' And the boy says, 'Dad, I just know there's got a be a pony in here somewhere.'"

Beth laughs, and Bailey says to me, "I don't know what's getting at you. But take my advice: just look for the pony."

I smile politely, and moments later the traffic begins to surge forward. Bailey turns back to the road and accelerates with the flow, and as we move ahead, many of the passengers nodding off, Beth holding her radio close to her ear and turning it on softly to catch a snippet of a song, I think: Ponies. How simplistic. How inadequate a parable when faced with the enormity of a situation like my sister's. Still, wouldn't it be nice, even liberating, if I could begin to see beyond my cynicism and resistance and controlling impulses? As we roll over hills and down country roads that I'd glimpsed but not quite seen from a distance, and as, mile after mile, I think about how so many of these drivers, at crucial turning points, learned to view and inhabit their own lives in fresh ways, slowly it comes to me.

Beth is living by
her own choices,
unfettered by the whims of an institution or group home placement decision; she travels according to the starred dots on
her
map; she eats what
she
likes when
she's
hungry; she boldly dresses in a fireworks display of ensembles that declare, Look at me, I count in this world. She is, in many ways, the embodiment of self-determination.

A tension that I hadn't even realized I'd been feeling—a tension that has possessed my body throughout this day—for weeks, no, for
months
—begins to ease.

"These drivers," I muse to Beth as Bailey pulls over to close the sun hatch, "seem just too good to be true. How did you find so many nice, wise people, all working in one place?"

"It just
happened
" she says. "I rode, and I guess they were just
there,
and I saw them."

I look at her, her eyes milky from her corneal condition but also brimming with a response to life that I rarely perceive in the world or feel in myself, and I realize that nothing "just happens." Beth has sought out mentors in places where others might not look, and, moreover, taken the time, and endured the pain, to weed out those drivers who are decent and kind and reflective from those who are indifferent or hostile. The ones I'm meeting are, I realize as I quickly do the math, only about a sixth of the whole bus company. That took Beth a huge amount of trial and error—and, yes, determination. I shake my head, amazed at how much I'd somehow missed, and then, with a surge of optimism, wonder if one out of six people in
any
profession or community would also be exceptionally thoughtful. How could I really know? Have
I
ever spent this much time exploring the worldviews of my colleagues at school or the bookstore? Do I have a clue about whether my neighbors feel committed to the Golden Rule? I've never discussed anything with them besides trash pickup.

I look back at Beth. She's waving through the windshield to a driver passing in another bus, and it finally occurs to me that her invitation that I join her in her travels didn't "just happen," either. I realize, as the tightness yields in my shoulders and hips and feet, that Beth might well have wanted me to meet her drivers because I needed them, too.

I joined Beth on this odyssey so I could stop feeling like a bad sister. Perhaps on some level she is not aware of, some level that my own foggy vision has not allowed me to see, Beth invited me along because she wanted to stop feeling the same way about me.

Bailey positions himself once again before the wheel, and as softly as brooms sweeping the world clean, a summer rain begins to fall.

Among the fifteen or so letters I receive from Beth each week I find these:

To Rachel,

Hi. Rick got a new hairdew. He looks great. I am So glad thAt he likes you a lot.

Cool Beth

Dear Sis,

Rick will take you Were ever you want to go out Eat. I said that diner I like has Good food.

Cool Beth

Oh guess What

Now Rick thinks the same way I do about you. now. I love You a lot.

Cool Beth

Finally the day comes when she chaperones me onto his bus. I take my seat beside Beth—and am pleased to discover that Rick is attractive. In fact, he's burly and broad-chested, with a boyish, Warren Beatty face and laughing walnut eyes; beneath a full crown of richly brown hair, he sports a tan that, I learn, deepens on his days off, which he commits to the putting green during the warmer weather. He is, Beth informs me, about fifty, "only he don't
look
it." I have to agree.

But I have no intention of sliding into my sister's cunning little trap. I will simply be friendly but guarded, as I am with everyone I meet.

Yet, oddly, I find myself feeling a little giddy.

Rick tells me he's studied art history at a local college and that he is partial to Cézanne. He tells me he enjoys attending movies, especially films with real substance. He perks up when I mention that Beth lives down the street from a regional theater.

"And," he says at a stop sign, "I've gotten into crossword puzzles."

He produces one that he'd tucked beneath his side window "I do a few of these a day, between runs. This one's not finished."

"I'm really bad at these," I say, though, despite my affection for words, I've never tried.

He waggles it in my direction. Beth takes it from his hand and passes it to me.

"No, I really can't do these," I say, reluctant to look foolish should I come up short.

Rick says, "Oh, come on. See if you can help me with the blanks."

He drives on, and the puzzle is in my hand. I read, "Fifty-four down: a recluse." I pause. "I know what it is. A hermit."

"Is that it?" Rick asks as we stop for a long traffic light.

"It fits."

"I'd have gotten it."

I continue. "Fifty-six across: snuggle. It's six letters, and D is the third one."

"Hug."

"Six letters. Cuddle? Hey, what about thirty-four down: a baby shoe. Six letters."

Beth jumps in. "I told her you want to take her out."

"Beth, please," I say.

Rick says to me, "What's this about a little theater near where Beth lives?"

"I just noticed it," I say. "Passing by in these buses. You get to notice every building from here. It's like you're Huck Finn and you're seeing America from along the Mississippi, and you get to understand so many things you'd missed when you were just standing on the shore."

He says to Beth, "Good-looking
and
smart." And to me, "You like going to plays?"

"Well, yes. I do."

"I sometimes do that. I like plays. I like pool, too."

"You sure
do,
" Beth says.

"So, Rachel, you like pool?"

"Well, I've never even picked up a pool c—"

"Bootie," a passenger in a flannel shirt calls out. He rises to get off.

"What?" I say.

"Bootie," the man repeats, heading for the center door. And then he adds, "A baby shoe."

"Oh! Bootie!" Rick and I cry at the same time, and I scribble it in. "Thank you."

Rick winks at Beth as the man gets off. "Well, I think I've got some kind of chance now," he says, and pulls the bus onto the road.

In my first two weeks at boarding school, Beth and I write letters every day. Laura, who now rents a room near our mother's house, drives to see Beth every evening. She pulls into the driveway, and Beth runs outside. They sit in the car and listen to the radio, and after an hour or so, Beth goes back in.

Then right after Valentine's Day, I receive a letter from Beth. In it she says,
I think Mom and That Guy. got MArried.
I read it over and over, but it just keeps saying the same thing.

Laura tells Dad, who calls to tell me that it's true. Laura knows because when she stops by to see Beth, there is a babysitter who says, "They've left for their honeymoon.
"

But a week after the Valentine's Day wedding, when Laura stops by to see Beth, there is no babysitter. There are no lights on. In a panic, Laura scrambles around to the back door.

She finds Ringo, chained outside in the night. Shivering, he jumps up when he sees her, licking her hands. She glances down. His Alpo is frozen. He is alone in the cold, starving.

Dad calls Grandma. She tells him that she and Beth flew far away, to the place where our mother is spending her honeymoon. Then Grandma left Beth there and came home. We have no idea where that place is, and no matter how hard Dad yells, Grandma refuses to say.

Dad slams down the phone, and says, "Oh, Christ, where is she?
Where?"

I don't understand what's happening except for one thing: my sister has disappeared.

2:25
P.M.
"Just look at those children," a gap-toothed white woman mutters to her companion, who is probably, given their matching squints, her daughter.

"Disgusting," says the younger one, whose face is a shrine to aqua eye shadow.

We're standing a few feet from them at a bus shelter, peering up the street in anticipation of Jack's bus, but at this exchange Beth glances over. Monopolizing the bus bench, one in a faded denim jumper, the other in overstuffed capri pants, the women are sitting in judgment of a young family strolling down the opposite sidewalk in the blazing summer sun: white mother, black father, mixed-race children.

"It's a disgrace," Justice the Elder pronounces.

Justice the Younger opines, "Imagine a white mother raising her own babies to be nig—"

"You shouldn't talk like that," Beth says.

I hold my breath. The older one blinks. The younger one glares.

"They're just
peo
ple," Beth says.

"It's none of your business what we—"

"What you're saying iz
wrong.
Iz not
nice
"

"How dare you interrupt us!"

Beth says, "You can't tell me what to do. You shouldn't tell them what to do, either."

Then Jack rounds the corner and comes to a stop at our curb. Beth turns away from this streetside court of opinion and, with dignity, marches toward his opening door.

"Sit yourself down," Jack says in his gruff voice, gesturing toward Beth's customary spot. "Them there seats're just open and waiting for you."

Chunky and pug-nosed, Jack has the kind of lived-in, seen-it-all face that looks made for chewing a cigar and a tough, give-'em-hell air that he might have picked up from Hurry'S. Truman, the first president Jack remembers. Yet Jack describes himself as a happy-go-lucky guy; his round, ruddy cheeks frame an easy smile.