Riding the Bus with My Sister: A True Life Journey

by Rachel Simon

  We stroll onto the course, holding ice cream cones and golf clubs. The course is designed around a waterfall, with rock cliffs and tumbling streams. "Beautiful, isn't it?" I ask.

  "Mmmm," Beth mutters, not looking.

  She whacks away at one ball after another. Some spiral into the water. But some actually stay on the green. A few find their way to the hole. At the eighteenth, she even gets a hole in one.

  "Hurray for the Sheriff!" I say, clapping my hands.

  She smiles, but the ball gets swallowed up, and unlike the previous seventeen times, does not return. Her smile fades, and she stares too long at the empty hole.

  "Game's over" I say. "The ball won't be coming back"

  She keeps staring at the hole. "What happens to it now?" she says.

  She does adjust, as best she can. At twenty-eight, she learns to ride the bus to and from the sheltered workshop. At twenty-nine, she develops a social life with people in nearby group homes, one of whom is Jesse. By thirty, she has adopted the grammar of this new world.

  "That workshop place iz stupid. I know someone who don't go anymore."

  "'Doesn't,' Beth. You know the right way to say it."

  "Doesn't. He got a job working at a grocery store. But he don't like it there either."

  I correct her until an acquaintance who's a sociologist tells me, "She's doing this deliberately so she can feel she fits in where she lives."

  I understand that, but I wish my colleague could explain away the other things that are happening. Beth and I used to discuss family matters, sometimes the local news. But now—as she turns thirty-one, as she realizes she's unhappy at her job and leaves the sheltered workshop, as she begins and leaves jobs busing fast food tables and collecting carts at store parking lots, as she spends long sessions in front of the TV—all she'll talk about is the weather and sitcom stars, or she'll gossip about people I don't know. Our back-and-forth conversations end now, too; if I tell her that I just sold my first book or moved into a house with Sam, she glazes over. If I take her to a movie, she falls asleep. If I take her to a scenic park, "I'm bawd." So I sit with her in front of sitcoms, staring at the clock. Either I yawn all the time I'm around her, or she catches me so off-guard that I'm speechless. "I finally got back at my roommate" she crows to me one afternoon. "I gave her some Ex-Lax and told her it was a chocolate bar and she ate the whole thing and she was sick for three days! Aaah-hah."

  "I can't figure out how to talk with her anymore," says Laura.

  "I am so bored around her" says Max.

  "She doesn't want to visit me," says Mom.

  "She doesn't want me to visit her," says Dad. The strain between them has gotten worse. He offers to take her shopping whenever she's willing, but she's rarely willing anymore.

  And as the years pass, a dark voice comes to life inside me. It finds fault with everything she does, and with myself for not knowing how to deal with her. Whenever we're together, it erupts without warning like a geyser. I hate it. Oh, how I hate it.

  She is thirty-two when we all receive letters that say I wAnt To live. on my Own.

  We call. "That address is downtown, Beth, in a kind of rough neighborhood."

  "What if you get broken into?"

  "Do you know not to let in strangers?"

  "Fires," we say to one another. Electrical shocks, hunger, mildew, muggings, too much macaroni, too little heat, loneliness, roaches.

  Dad says, "I'd much prefer it if you stayed in a group home"

  "I'm moving out on my own"

  On her snowy moving day, Jesse and her aides help her haul boxes up in the elevator. She brings her bed from home. The agency gives her other furniture, which she doesn't care for. "We could pawn it," Jesse tells her. "Whuz that?" she asks. He shows her, and they make some money, and she uses it to purchase things more to her liking. I want NEw things, she writes me. I Dont want LEFTovER.

  I worry as much as everyone else about how she's doing, but not enough to visit. I am falling downhill in my relationship with Sam, as my fear of closeness increasingly causes resentment on both sides; now, when we lie on our sofa after work, we listen to Sam's records in silence. Knowing I must leave, yet desperately not wanting to, I am in a private panic most of the time. I rarely think about anything else, even my sister. Besides, whenever I call, her phone just rings and rings. Isn't she ever home?

  "I think she's on the bus," Max tells me.

  "All day long?" I say.

  "You got it."

  "That's impossible."

  "Just call her at night."

  I do, here and there. But I am breaking up with Sam and am too overwhelmed to cope with anything more. When I finally leave the house I share with him, I send Beth a letter with my new address, and I mention casually that he did not move with me. In her letter back, she does not ask what happened. I feel that she doesn't care, and with my need for more income and new work I conveniently don't have time to visit her.

  So for years, every week I write her a card, festooned with stickers, and labor to come up with new topics.

  Every month, Max brings his children to see her from their home a few hours away, and she sits on her floor and plays cars with them until he drives everyone to Dad's. There the Sheriff and her former driver give each other an awkward hello and focus the visit on the kids.

  Every year, Laura flies east from her home in Colorado. She takes Beth to a diner, where they chew their meals in mutual resentment and, if they're lucky, make strained conversation.

  Every few years, Mom visits from North Carolina. She tries to edit all the you shoulds from her vocabulary before her motor home gets within a hundred-mile radius. But inevitably she ends up in a mall with Beth, spitting out the forbidden words as Beth hurtles past displays of matter-of-fact bras or sensible shoes.

  And every day, Dad sits at his dining room table, watching a bus approach the stop a block from his house, wondering if Beth just might get off for a spontaneous visit. Day after day, year after year, it pulls up to the curb and hovers for a moment, and sometimes he even recognizes her curly hair in the front seat, her toucan-colored shirts vivid in the bus window. He waits, trying to will the bus door to open. But in a moment the bus just rolls on down the street. Finally, he says "I give up" and keeps his back turned until the bus pulls away.

  It is the middle of a December night. I am thirty-nine, and Beth is thirty-eight, and I am lying in bed in my apartment, staring at the ceiling. My editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer needs a new piece from me, and I'm supposed to call tomorrow with an idea. I can come up with nothing at all.

  In disgust, I flip onto my side and find myself staring at the bedroom curtains. They are dark, as always, but a sliver of window that the fabric does not cover blinks at me. I expect to see only night beyond the glass, but then I notice a full moon.

  It's too bright and, combined with the noise in my head, will certainly keep me awake, so I sit up to pull the curtains closed. But as I peer up to the light, I remember Beth turning our attention to the moon over and over as we drove to our grandmother's apartment so long ago. I think of what she used to say: "Moon's following us!" Suddenly I realize why this image has stayed with me all these years. It's not because the moon's the big thing and we're just puny underneath and she had it all reversed. It's because no matter how far you drive, or how hard you hide, you can never leave the moon behind. Perhaps this is what she meant all along.

  I stare at that moon a long time. It is the holiday season, and we still exchange presents. I have shipped these gifts to Beth for years, or kept them around until I saw her again—the following spring, fall, whatever. But as the moon pours light down on me, I think, Maybe I should actually go to see her this year. Maybe I'll call my editor and put him off. It's time I went to visit my sister.

  December

  Swans and Witches

  The beautician shakes open a purple haircutting cape. "Beth," she says, "you can sit here, okay?"

  Beth, blushing with a rare case of
shyness, plops into the salon chair.

  Then the salon's best, Cindi, Marilyn, and Amy, flutter around her. Each looks as primped and radiant as a model, and each is wearing a Santa elf cap in tribute to the season.

  I have taken Beth to receive one of her holiday presents: a makeover, courtesy of Bailey and Rick. Once again, her bus drivers have gone far beyond the call of duty, and, once again, I am astonished and moved. Not only that, but they purchased it for her in the most patient—and purple—salon in town. In fact, I pointed out the amethyst awnings, door, and front desk, as we walked in.

  "Can we try some color in your hair?"

  "Have you ever had a manicure?"

  "Shall we remove some of the hair from your face?"

  Bailey called me with the idea. Ever the optimist, he said, "It'll give her a whole new perspective. Once she sees how good she can look, it'll pick up her self-esteem, and that might motivate her to develop herself a little more."

  She was not enthusiastic, as the appointment was scheduled for a weekday afternoon and hence would interfere with her time on the buses. But she consented anyway; as she told me, she didn't want to hurt the drivers' feelings. Now the center of attention in the salon chair, Beth fluctuates between looking giddy, overwhelmed, and irked, as the beauticians flip open style magazines and powder her up, admiring her small hands and her fine, curly hair.

  "Look, Beth," I say. "Purple chairs. And rainbow-colored candy canes in the dish."

  Marilyn approaches with hot wax, and Beth says, "I don't want that thing on my face."

  "It's called waxing," Marilyn says. "It'll shape your eyebrows."

  "But it hurts," she says, shoving Marilyn away with the force she reserves for dentists.

  "Sometimes beauty hurts," Cindi says.

  "No pain, no gain," Marilyn says, drawing near again.

  Beth, with a second, determined push, propels poor Marilyn across the room.

  "Well, you don't have to get wax to be beautiful," Cindi says, catching on.

  "You'll look beautiful without it," Marilyn concludes in a sunny voice, putting the paraffin away.

  They are real troopers. I decide to tip them generously.

  Besides, Beth doesn't need the waxing. They dye and snip and style and blow-dry, they try to smear on lipstick despite her inclination to jolt back as if getting an electric shock, they transform her nails into canvases for glittery art, and a new loveliness emerges. Bailey has a perceptive eye; Beth now has the kind of sultry attractiveness that I've seen in glossy magazines.

  "Wooo-hooo," Cindi says, like the admiring hoot of a cartoon train, though Beth does not bother to glance in the mirror.

  When we finish up, Olivia stops by to see the results. "Gorgeous, Beth," she says in the lobby of the salon as Beth grabs for her coat.

  "Spectacular," I agree.

  "Yeah," Beth mumbles indifferently, and it occurs to me that, within a day, she'll probably wash her curls back to their familiar, air-dried style, and within hours she'll paint whatever five-and-dime polish she's got at home over Amy's careful designs.

  The three of us walk toward the parking lot beneath a row of trees bathed in sunlight. Olivia lavishes praise on her, but all Beth wants to discuss are the reasons Olivia should date Cliff. Olivia responds sweetly, slipping in those monthly questions wherever the opportunity presents itself: "Are you obtaining the services you desire? Are you getting the help you need?"

  I watch them go through this routine—Beth, looking as glamorous as she ever will, yet speaking as distinctively as always—and find it a bit unsettling, like watching an impersonation of my sister. Still, I must admit that she looks striking. I sigh, sad that her new appearance will be so short-lived.

  Then Olivia pulls out a camera.

  "Hey, Beth," I say, "now it's your turn."

  She says, "Only if you'll be in the picture, too."

  "Sure," I say, and Olivia nods. Then, agreeing to mail me the negatives, she sights the two of us through the viewer. As I follow Olivia's gestures and move closer toward my sister, I notice that Beth isn't smiling and I'm reminded of Dad's photo shoot that Halloween when we were kids. Suddenly I understand that Beth doesn't want to look like a swan any more than, way back then, she wanted to look like a witch. I feel a rush of respect and squeeze my arm around her shoulders. She still won't smile at the camera, but she lets me hold on, even after Olivia says "Cheese."

  Still, this new look is so stunning that I can't help but admire her all evening, as we sit on her love seat watching Facts of Life and paging through her latest scrapbook. She doesn't seem to mind; as soon as we boarded the buses after Olivia's departure, Beth reverted to her usual self, regardless of whether the drivers gave her wolf whistles or expressed their appreciation in quieter ways. In fact, by the time we finished up for the evening, she had become almost silly with happiness; we laughed about nothing and everything, all the way back to her apartment. I'm glad that I am staying over tonight and that tomorrow I will be driving her to Max's house for our holiday celebration, that our time together will be extended.

  Her high spirits seem related to more than our salon adventure, though; I think they are also the result of the season. Beth mailed a huge stack of cards right after we finished our last run this evening. She received several in her mailbox, too, and then, up in her apartment, eagerly showed me the many others that are displayed on her coffee table, since her dining table is piled high with the wrapped gifts she has been buying for months. She tells me she bought Brut after-shave for the male bus drivers, Christmas ornaments for the women, and toys for Max's kids. She's beaming about her purchases. And about something that's wrapped up for me, too.

  "Open it now," she says, handing me the hefty, rectangular package.

  "I'd rather wait," I say. "I'm planning to give you your present later on, at Hanukkah or Christmas, whenever I see you."

  "So?"

  "So I'd prefer to wait."

  "Really?" she says, dipping a nail polish brush into a bottle of glossy shocking pink. "Why would you do that?"

  In a playful mood, we go to bed, and, I think, Wow, everything's okay. I feel myself opening up to friendship and possibility, and she must be responding to that. I respect her for simply being herself. She can laugh with me. We are beyond conflict at last.

  I sleep well, and when I wake at seven, I discover that she's been considerate enough to stay in her room, rather than bound into the living room and click on the TV. Groggy but with elevated spirits, I make my way into her bedroom, and find her already washed and combed back to normal, putting the finishing touches on her thank-you cards for the makeover.

  I say, "It's so thoughtful of you to let me get an extra hour of sleep. And I'm so impressed that you wrote your thank-you cards already. You're more polite and prompt than almost anyone I know."

  She says, "Well, there was nothing else to do, with you out there in the living room."

  I look at her. She doesn't appear angry and in fact seems to be pushing herself to smile, but it is not the relaxed, warm smile I saw last night, and her tone is surprisingly cross. What could possibly have gone wrong since we went to sleep? Maybe if I remain kind and try to communicate more clearly, whatever's troubling her will fade. So I say, "What I mean is, I appreciate your waiting for me to get up before you turned on the TV."

  "I only did that because Jacob told me I have to."

  Her smile stiffens at the halfway mark and, as I stare at her, trying to grasp the source of this sudden hostility, the smile falls. She looks back at me, bright-eyed, clean-faced, and annoyed.

  "What happened?" I say. "Why are you upset with me?"

  "I don't kno-oh."

  "I thought you liked having me over."

  "I do. But I like it when you leave."

  "I am going to leave. Today. With you. But I can't evaporate overnight."

  "I know."

  "So what do you want me to do?"

  "I don't know"

  "How could you not kn
ow?"

  "I don't know."

  I exhale and look away. This will pass. It has to; we've got too good a thing going. Just sidestep the friction, I decide, just get back to normal as quickly as possible.

  I say, "Well, I think I'd like to take a shower before we get on the road. Can I use one of your towels?"

  "If you want."

  "Yes, I want. That's why I asked you."

  "Well, I can't stop you."

  I take another deep breath, and boom, the dark voice starts again: After how hard I've worked to understand her, she resents my presence! All year long I've listened and tickled and eaten on buses and slept on goddamned sofa cushions on a dusty floor, and she can't give up an hour and a half of time and lend me a measly towel? She's a selfish brat—no, not a brat, she's not a child. She's an adult. A self-centered, obstinate—no. She's a damned-if-you-care-about-her, damned-if-you-don't, you'll-never-figure-her-out person.

  Stop it. I must be the big sister. The one who can make allowances. The one who has no needs. The one who must take the higher road. Forever and ever and ever.

  Calmly I say, "Beth, that's not a very nice thing to say."

  "Iz the truth. I'm just telling it like it is."

  Restraining my anger so forcefully I hear a quiver in my voice, I explain what I know she was already taught by my father and Vera: that there are certain courtesies a host offers a guest. If a guest asks for a towel, for instance, the host says yes. "It's another way to show Jacob's do-unto-others idea. Do you understand?"

  "Yeah."

  "Okay. So, can we try it again?"