The Lady on the Bus

And here I am, sitting on the bus. I sit at the front, having to slide by a carriage to get to my seat. I sit idle; my stop is not for an hour. My iPod is the companion for the day, as it always is. And there she is, the lady on the bus. She climbs in through a doorway close to the back.


She stumbles her way over to me after ten minutes or so. I have a romantic view of things. She went, to me. That sounds nice.

It's peculiar. The way she sits down next to me is not a sit but a squat. It appears as though she is bracing herself for some kind of effort. I glance over at her, and now at the rest of the bus. It is crowded; it's the commute home. However, she doesn’t have to sit next to me. There are a few seats across the aisle. I look at my iPod, keeping secret my hope she makes conversation with me by outwardly hoping she doesn't. The lady on the bus has a pretty face.

It's a simple face. The clean contour is what gives it its beauty. The brain is not quite creative enough to invent the faces you meet in dreams; it borrows them from reality. Pleasant dreams favor the face of the lady on the bus. She wasn’t dreamlike, but dreams want to allude to her.

She squats right in front of the carriage, with a cellphone on her lap. She isn’t comfortable. She's placed herself with both legs to the right side of the carriage. The lady on the bus places a hand on my shoulder and says, “I'm sorry honey, this will take but a mo'.” I nod and smile.

Grabbing her left leg with both hands, she picks up dead weight. It is a bum leg. The leg's mass is but only appreciable; it's half the size of her right. She grunts sharply, I think, for the benefit of those looking on. Not for herself. I wonder if she has done this many times before, if the pains called for in this drill are expected. She drops the leg to the left of the carriage. Her phone falls out of her lap.

“Oh my goodness, I'm sorry,” she laughs. I pull myself out of my detached trance, just to see her frown. The laugh was not out of delight.

The lady on the bus struggles with herself for a minute, trying to get a handle of how she wants to go about picking up her cellphone. She bends to the right and she bends to the left. The carriage is antagonistic. Nobody offers her help. After a significant time she manages to pick up the phone. I didn’t see anybody offer their hand and I didn’t offer mine.

She brings the phone to her face. “Oh,” she moans. The battery and its guard have fallen off. The laborious process of manipulating useless gravity to pick miscellanea off the ground is well practiced by now, so there is no show for the people on the bus. She picked up the pieces in half the time it took for the first.

She is trying to put the battery back into the cellphone. She is fumbling and then there is more fumbling. I feel uncomfortable. I take my headphones off my ears, and say, “Would you like some help?” The lady on the bus leans on me, smiles, and whispers into my ear, “Oh, would you kindly?”

I take the phone from her and put it back together. As she is reaching her arm across to take it back, I notice her loose, leathery skin. I think of Glenda.

Glenda is from my mother's past; she is not from her future, and she certainly does not preside in the present. Gloria is a wonderful lady with a wife and a kid from a previous affair. She did some coke and heroin, “back in the day.” She has the same saggy, tough skin as the lady on the bus. They share a hearty laugh, one that gives the impression that they don't want to stop because something horrible is waiting on the other side.

The lady on the bus says to me, “Oh, thank you darlin'! Where do you come from?” I tell her Norwood, and now we are talking. She shows depth to the gregariousness that extends into humanity. She compliments the baby in the carriage directly, saying “you have a cute smile.”

She then adjusts her focus back onto the cellphone and mutters, “Oh man, this is quite the hassle. I just want to listen to my music, you know? None of my boyfriend's fucking rap bullshit.” I find myself sympathizing with her. Somehow, I do know. The invitation to “know” with her gets me.

She wires her headphones into the phone and then turns and smiles at me. A beautiful face, a modest smile, fowl breath. I smell alcohol.

She dances as much as she can, in her little space on the bus. She does not exhibit any kind of modesty or shame. She just dances and dances, mumbling the words to herself. Though she is not concerned with viewers, she is concerned with listeners. She does not sing loud enough to be heard. A man calls out to her from the back of the bus and comes forward.

He chooses a seat across the aisle. The captivity of the lady on the bus has been, in practical terms, invaded. He is wearing a Budweiser baseball cap, a wife beater t-shirt, and work jeans. He has blue eyes. The same blue eyes John Smith has.

John Smith was a lucky man who found himself an unlucky family which left him all the luckier. He was once also my uncle. He had a beautiful boy, Nick Foley, with my once aunt. As part of the deal, he became a facsimile of a father to my once cousin Henry. One evening he crept into Henry's room, slow and with care. He gently woke Nick up by whispering his name into his ear. “Henry, Henry. Wake up. John has something to tell you. If your mother ever leaves me, I'm taking Nick to New Hampshire and you are never going to see either of us again.” The man has the same blue eyes as Larry which refuses to steady because they are afraid of seeing.

The man says, “What the fuck you doing, walking around? Where in the fuck is your cane? And fucking-a, this tyke hittin' on you or something?” All the while, he is jabbing fingers at her face. Perhaps he means to scare her or perhaps he means to scare the people on the bus. I don’t think he knows his intent.

That night I went home and cried. This day I sit here and write. I don’t think there is a neat way to wrangle the emotional loose ends of my lady on the bus.