City Busses

Everybody is staring as hard as they can out of their respective windows. The handicapped ramp is slowly lifting the twisted body of an old woman in her wheelchair up to the bus's entrance. Another woman wearing a teal and fuchsia windbreaker, who always accompanies and who I have assumed to be her daughter, waits behind. Once boarded, she counts out change for the both of them, two sets of $1.35 clicking like pebbles through the machine.

There is always an embarrassed scramble when we stop by the trailer park to pick up this woman and her elderly mother. The other patrons of the bus move as quickly as they can without actually looking at their source of repulsion. The bus driver - and this is one reason I believe he is a father - gently waves the lounging college students out of their front seats without a hint of annoyance. I always sit just in front of the side door of the bus, close to the front but never so forward that I have to move for the handicapped and elderly that technically have priority.

"Everybody to the back," he calls, sometimes through a microphone. "Everybody, make some room."

This bus drive is my favorite. He is younger, probably in his mid-30s, and has that kindly blank and sandpaper blond head of a father with little girls and a schoolteacher wife. He doesn't wear a name tag; the bus drivers never do. Donning his fingerless work gloves, he secures the older women's wheelchair to the floor with carabiners and vinyl straps. The presumed daughter looks on, gently stroking the wispy silver hairs floating from her chin.

The battle for ownership of the public transportation system in our better-than-average midwestern cities is played out every day we pick up this waddling and rolling pair. I'm one member of the college student team, those of us amassing student debt and putting off car payments and through the beauty of tax breaks getting our bus passes for free. That's what we feel the bus should be: our domain, for cool young environmentalists and hip kids between bike routes.
But every Wednesday this speechless woman waddles out from her trailer park, wheelchaired and indeterminately ailing parent in tow, and invades our territory and reminds us that busses really are for the poor. Busses are for those who cannot and never will be able to afford a car, but can scratch together fare whenever they need to get to a doctor's appointment or the unemployment agency.

And on Tuesdays we stop by the mall and pick up the 45-year-old McDonald's worker who always chats up the bus driver, asking about kids in elementary and sick grandmothers with breast cancer. And on Mondays we pick up the 7-foot tall man who stares at his gloves and hollers Stevie Wonders songs in the back.

The older woman nods her head into her chest, a line of spittle trailing onto the front of her fourth of July embroidered sweatshirt. Her daughter has seated herself just behind her in my aisle, and I only get a brief glimpse of the patchy red skin spreading across her neck before she turns around. Our eyes meet and we stare without smiling, her eyes widening behind her square glasses. We are utterly foreign to each other, but for now we are both going to keep our seats.