Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

by Rachel Simon

To R.

  Hi. Henry told me agaiN. Henry is diffrnce. He will get Back to his own self. I hope soon.

  Cool Beth

  But whenever we were speaking and the topic of Henry came up, her normally blaring voice would get slight and wispy, as if she was coming to the heartbreaking realization that someone who had once cared about her no longer did. I'd heard this bleakness in my own voice when I'd suffered some rejection, and I tried to tell her what I'd learned in life: how, just as she spots birthdays far ahead, so too can she learn to spot trouble before it arrives.

  "Beth," I told her, "sometimes when we like someone a lot, we push harder than they can take, like you did with Rodolpho. Sometimes they try to tell us differently than Rodolpho did, but we just don't want to hear. This is why you might need to set limits for yourself with Henry."

  In her small voice she'd repeat her refrain, "Henry will tell me when he wants to." I pointed out that he had, tactfully. But she insisted he had not. His wishes hadn't been blunt enough for her to hear, or accept.

  I wanted to protect her. I wanted to take her by the hand and show her, as Merlin showed the young boy who would become King Arthur, that if you fly above the world like a hawk and look down, you will see that there are no boundaries between countries, and that might make you think that there are no boundaries between people. Yet there are boundaries between people, trust me, Beth: invisible lines that separate what you want from what they can give, borders you need to respect.

  I imagined emotional devastation, Beth needing my support for months. I did not realize that she had other people who could take her by the hand, and that one of them would ultimately get through.

  But that, I later learned, is what happened. Every night she discussed Henry with Jesse. In fact, for some time it was all she talked about during their nightly phone calls, and during the moments when they lay beside each other in bed. Jesse is an attentive listener, offering advice only when it's asked for. Whether this restraint results from his generally subdued personality, his slowness with speech, his southern gentility, or their trust in each other, I don't know, but for a decade Jesse has listened devotedly on the phone, and lain comfortingly beside Beth, as she has filled him in on the pinnacles and valleys of her life. There were a few occasions early on when her babbling and not-taking-no-for-an-answer manner got to him; he threw things around. Then his aides had long talks with him about controlling his temper, and ever since he has listened to and supported Beth, and when he's had his fill, he gets on his bike for another sixty-mile ride.

  "Leave Henry be," Jesse finally advised in his drawl, "till he decides to come around."

  So I received her final letter on the subject:

  Dear Sis,

  I give up. I don't know about Henry. Oh well. That's His lost. Not my.

  Cool Beth

  Now, as Jacob and Beth and I stand at the plate-glass window, facing the yellow forsythia down by the employee parking lot, Henry rolls up in his bus. He jumps out with the engine running, and jauntily makes his way toward the drivers' room.

  Beth regards him from our lookout. Then she pockets the birthday card and says, "I'm ready to go," her voice resonant once again.

  Well, I think, maybe she arrived here slowly, but here she is, having survived the pain of a friendship that went bad, not dwelling on the past as she sets out into the future. Perhaps she is dreamily adventurous, sometimes impractically so. But Beth is no mere knight's servant. She is directing her own adventure. She might seem at first like Sancho Panza, but she is really Don Quixote.

  We wave farewell to Jacob and the drivers, and she pushes open the door. Then we stride out, passing Henry, and mumble an indifferent goodbye.

  The End of Play

  Beth says, "Play it again."

  I say, "You've already heard it fifty times. What's so special about Donny Osmond?"

  "Play it."

  "Which side?"

  "One Bad Apple."

  "That's not a side, it's a song. This is a forty-five, so there's an A-side and a B-side."

  "Don't be mean. And do a puzzle with me, too."

  "I don't want to do puzzles. I don't like puzzles."

  "I like puzzles."

  "I know. You're the Jimi Hendrix of puzzles."

  "Who?"

  "A famous guitarist."

  "Donny. Play Donny."

  I sigh and reach over to the portable record player sitting on her bed with us and pick dust off the needle. I know how to do things like pick dust off a needle now because I'm in junior high. I know how to roast a chicken so it's ready when Mom comes in from work because she says we're too old for babysitters. I know how to do a spitfire twirl with my baton (but I can't catch it as well as Laura catches hers). I know how to ride my bike to the five-and-ten with Max. I know that Beth likes "Puppy Love" while I like "People Are Strange."

  "Look," I say, "you want to see how to put the needle on the record? It's not hard."

  I put the tone arm in her hand. She grabs it as if it were a banister railing.

  I say, "Lighter. Think of it like a tiny bird. You have to be gentle."

  Her fingers do a little ripple, but her grip stays the same.

  "Lighter," I say.

  "Iz lighter."

  I sigh, and steer her rock of a hand to the vinyl. It'll start spinning when I make the tone arm cross a certain spot, and here we go, the record's cranking up into its regular revolutions. "Now we're going to set the needle down," I say.

  Gradually, I lower our hands to the wheeling record. Beth's tongue is out in concentration.

  "Now, let it touch down soft."

  She jams the needle down like an ice pick, so hard the record stops spinning.

  "Beth," I say in that edgy tone I've had with her lately. She is too slow for me, that's what this little whisper in my head keeps saying. Though sometimes I wonder if it's just that my patience with her is getting too short.

  "I didn't mean to."

  "I hope you didn't break it," I say, pulling our hands off.

  But then a funny thing happens. As soon as the needle's free, the record starts moving again. The music comes on in that muddy way it does when the speed's wrong, but then it gets faster and faster until the record starts playing normally.

  "See?" Beth says. "Iz all right." Donny Osmond comes on and she leans back on the bed and starts singing along, "One bad apple don't spoil the whole lunch, girl."

  I like it when she sings. She knows the tunes just fine but gets the words all wrong, and that makes us laugh, and then it makes her laugh.

  I like helping her fix up her new room. We've moved again, to a two-story house on a lake in a farming part of New Jersey. Laura and I sleep in the attic bedrooms. Beth and Max and Mom sleep in the first-floor bedrooms. Beth's room is orange, thanks to me, because orange just became her favorite color, so I went to a store with Mom and got the most electric orange they had and painted Beth's walls for her. Then we pinned up posters of Donny Osmond—and David Cassidy, the Jackson 5, and Bobby Sherman. All her faves. She sees them in Tiger Beat. We got her a subscription for her birthday.

  I like that she can read now. She reads picture books and TV Guide. She writes, too, and keeps notebooks listing every card, record, and knickknack she receives, all of it in orange marker, all in chronological order.

  I like that Mom takes us to the library together. I pick up books like A Wrinkle in Time and The Hobbit and War of the Worlds. Beth gets Make Way for Ducklings. I sneak a look at hers when I've had enough of mine.

  But I don't like it all. I don't like when we go to the lake across the street and she stays in the kids' swimming area. I don't like when she goes through my bookcase and finds the spelling book I've been saving since second grade, with stickers for all my 100s on every page, and she uses it like a coloring book. I cry when I find it. Mom says Beth didn't know it was important, I should be understanding, but now my prized book is ruined forever and I throw it away.

  I don't like being bored b
y her puzzles. I don't like being bored by her music. I don't like telling her, No, I don't want to do that or that or that. I don't like that she doesn't get that I'm too old to play with her anymore.

  But most of all, I don't like the way I feel when I'm walking down the hall at school around lunchtime, sticking to the walk-to-the-right rule along with a thousand other kids in their blue jeans and flannel shirts streaming to their next class, and the hall reeks of Herbal Essence shampoo and Clearasil and dirty bell-bottoms and Marlboros and pea coat wool, and all you hear is hollers and titters and grumbles echoing off the lockers, and everyone's secretly judging everyone else, and I'm staring straight ahead so no one picks on me, and ahead of me a wave of quiet starts rolling through the teenagers on my side of the hall and I know what this means. It means that when I get a few lockers closer I'll see the two special ed classes, the Trainable and the Educable, ambling on the left side of the hall toward lunch. I know that if I were to stand on my toes to peer over all the varsity shoulders and shag haircuts, I'd see that the cheerleaders from my history class would be gazing at their feet, and the Black Sabbath fans from my home ec class would be looking over with curiosity, and the chess club boys from English would be offering a quick look of pity, and the jocks from algebra would be jostling one another with guffaws. But I just let the flow take me forward and then the two special ed groups come into view on the left, nine or ten people in each, walking out of step with us and one another. The Trainable students are in front. Led by their teacher, they grin and slouch, peering out at us with a kind of amazement in their eyes, as if they're surprised to see us. Then come the Educable students. I scan the bodies. There's Beth's school friend Billy in the striped shirt. She has milk and cookies with him. And there's Beth beside him, lumbering forward in her orange stretch pants and pink top, her frizzy hair almost the way Mom combed it this morning. We're a few feet from each other now, but she doesn't see me—no one in her class does. They're marching with their eyes on one another, but not giggling like my friends and I would. Instead, they look uncomfortable and walk in silence, as if they suspect they're being watched. And they are being watched: the teenagers around me are all quiet now, and walking stiffer and faster. To them, Beth's class is different. And they don't mean it in a nice way.

  Then Beth and I see each other. I give a low-key wave, and she gives me a faint smile back. I hate how I feel then. Like yelling, "Hi, Beth!" real loud, so everyone who knows me will spin around to see her and understand that these two separate worlds aren't two separate worlds at all. But once again, as we pass each other, our shoulders almost touching, I don't yell anything. Instead I let myself be pressed along with the herd. A burn rises up in my throat, but I don't speak. I go into class and swallow my disloyalty and just feel disgusted for us all.

  I hear the words people use.

  I like words. At night I go up to my room, and after I've called my friends, I write lists of words as I hang out under this big blue clear plastic peace sign that I won at a county fair. It hangs from the sloped ceiling above my bed, and I put on the Who's Tommy, which Dad gave me during our last visit, and half lie down on my bed, and twirl the peace sign with my foot while the record sings, "Deaf, dumb, and blind boy, he's in a quiet vibration land." Then, on my bed, I write lists of words. I have pages of almost-synonyms in the back of my notebook:

  PIG OUT, GORGE, WOLF, CHOW DOWN, CRAM IT IN, STUFF YOUR FACE, LICK THE PLATTER CLEAN

  wonderland, narnia, lilliput, oz, shangri-la, never-never land backside, ass, bum, butt, tushie, tuffet, derriere, can, rump, rear end

  But there's one kind of word I never write down. Kids in the halls at school use it, and teachers who talk about John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. I don't need to write it because it bangs around every day in my head:

  DIMWIT, HALF-WIT, SIMPLETON, IDIOT, REJECT, SPAZZ, IMBECILE, GALOOT, MORON, DEFECTIVE

  And especially:

  RETARD

  They'll say these like it's nothing. Teachers will say, "Obviously in the childlike actions taken by the innocent half-wit Lennie, you can see Steinbeck's extraordinary literary blah blah blah," and you're supposed to go along. I go along because what else can you do?

  But I can't go along when kids bungle a book report and smack their heads and say, "I'm such a retard." Or when someone messes up on the parallel bars in gym, and on the mats below someone else calls out, "What a retard."

  You're supposed to agree that, yes, that would be as bad as getting thrown out of the human race. You're supposed to laugh.

  I never laugh. I just stare sharply and say, "My sister's retarded."

  "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean it," they come back.

  They look away from me in the classroom after that, sometimes with their noses up, sometimes with their heads down. Either way is fine with me.

  SMACK, POW, PUNCH, SOCK, BELT, BONK, BASH, BOX, WHAM

  Then I flip the notebook to the front and go back to writing. If "kike" and "spic" and "nigger" are bad words, why not "retard"? What makes that one okay when all the rest get you sent to detention? I give my peace sign a good, hard kick.

  We don't play together anymore, but Beth still wants to. I make excuses, which is easy because I have lots of friends. I can do headstands in Susan's yard. I can make is-your-refrigerator-running? prank phone calls with Marie. I can look at fashion magazines with David, or figure out the lyrics to "You Can't Always Get What You Want" with Keiko. Or I can just sit on the bed with any of them, and we can gossip and eat chips and laugh our heads off until their mothers call out, "Will you please keep it down?" and then we can laugh some more.

  Sometimes when my friends aren't home, I boss Beth around. I know she wants to please me, so it's hard to fight the urge. "Get me a glass of water," I'll tell her when I'm in the living room watching The 4:30 Movie on Channel 7 and I'm in a bad mood that's come out of nowhere, as it does lately. "Get it!"

  She'll slink off to the kitchen to do my bidding, but glare at me every step of the way.

  Yet she keeps trying. She says hi to my friends when they come over. She gets the mail every day and delivers it to me, telling me I got a letter from Kim, or my new issue of Rolling Stone. She'll draw pictures and give them to me.

  A winter day. We are watching TV, and The 4:30 Movie has just ended, and Beth wants to turn to Gilligan's Island.

  "I want to see the news," I say.

  "Don't want news."

  "Just for a few minutes. We'll leave it on Channel 7 until the weather."

  But the real reason I want to see the news isn't the weather or the news, which is always about the war in Vietnam anyway. I want to see the great-looking reporter they have on Channel 7, this guy my friend Leslie has a crush on. His name is Geraldo Rivera, and all afternoon there were commercials saying he'd be doing some special report on Willowbrook at six o'clock. We go shopping at the Willowbrook Mall, and I want to watch him go shopping so I can tell Leslie about it the next day.

  Beth sits next to me, and the news starts. Geraldo comes on, but he's not in a mall. He's in a big, dark place where people are crying and naked, and some of the people look beat-up, and the rooms are all bare, and the walls are covered with icky stuff—

  "Thiz gross," Beth says.

  I don't know what it is, but it gives me shivers. I get up quick to change the channel, and just as I reach for it, a man with Geraldo says, "This is the Willowbrook State School."

  I flick that channel and sit back down. It's the Gilligan episode where astronauts land on the island, and Beth falls into it, glued, while I wonder what I just saw. It couldn't be about anyone I know, nothing on the news ever is. But one face had an expression that Beth sometimes wears, and I shoot a look at her and wonder: Was this one of those institutions? The places where we didn't send Beth, and thank God we never will, ever ever ever?

  It can't be, I tell myself. It's just too ... it's too not human. It's as far away from me and Beth as Vietnam. I won't think about it. I won't.

  But mostl
y, Beth tries to spend time with me, and I say no.

  "No, I don't want to watch Adam-12. I don't want to sing to your dolls."

  She gets a hurt look. "Call your own friends," I say. But her few school friends live too far away for her to reach with her oversized tricycle, which sits rusting in the garage. Or they have physical disabilities and can't get to our house without their parents help. Beth is stuck, because there are no trains or subways or buses around here. And, as she puts it, she's bawd.

  "Dominoes?" she asks.

  "No."

  "Go Fish?"

  "No!"

  "But we're twins!"

  "Only one month a year."

  She slumps off to her orange room, and I climb upstairs to my peace sign.

  ***

  I guess she puts together a plan then. She will simply ambush me at the end of my school day. It's easy—she gets home before I do, and we have a park bench on the lawn looking out to the lake. She'll just sing to herself, sit there with Ringo, and wait for my school bus.

  The first time, I hear snickering in the seats behind me as the bus pulls up. Snickering about her, I know. So when I get off and she's standing at the bottom holding Ringo, grinning ecstatically at my arrival, I usher her into the house fast, before they laugh any more.

  The next time, the snickering is bolder. I run off the bus, telling her, "Please wait inside."

  But she does not wait inside the next day, or the next. I stop saying "please" and just blow past her to get in quickly.

  Then one spring day, she can't stand it anymore. When she gets home, she finds her favorite water pistols. She slips on a pair of summer shorts and strips down to her undershirt. As my bus pulls up to our house, there she is at the curb in seminaked cowgirl glory, shooting off water double-handed, beaming up at my window.