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Riding the Bus
Some experiences you make; some slide flat under your belly straight into your gut, and they don’t ask permission.
In the beginning of the summer, Babs, Cin, and I took a trip to Atlantic City to take part in a show with some other dancers. At the end of the show, we all sang "America the Beautiful" and the audience, mostly soldiers, joined in. All the girls were dressed in dusty blue slacks and held riveting guns. When we performed our number, the men yelled, "Shake it Sister!" But when we all sang our song about America, our off- key, injured voices skipping in the darkness, the smell of summer flung through open windows, well, it’s the only time I can remember everyone being patriotic and not being embarrassed about it.
And later, us gals, hair curled from the heat and humidity, sun-tanned, and still wearing our slacks, we get looks walking down the boardwalk. Women with pumps on their feet, women in skirts and white gloves, look at us like we’re the contents of an ashtray. They purse their lips, whisper and point. We mostly ignore them and walk to a drugstore to get coffee.
There are prostitutes on corners, leaning on boardwalk railings, skirted, hard feminine things. Even they look at us with scorn in their eyes.
There are two kinds of women now: those who wear skirts, and those who wear slacks. While we wait for our coffee, I try to imagine what it would be like to wear slacks every day to work, not having the freedom to remove most of my clothes during my shift.
The girl behind the counter looks us over and then says, "You’ll get served when I’m good and ready." Her uniform is dirty; there are sweat stains beneath her arms. She wears a skirt. She disappears for fifteen minutes on her break before she returns and reluctantly serves us coffee. She doesn’t brew a fresh pot but gives us the dregs of what’s left. She doesn’t offer milk or sugar.
Walking to the bus stop, men whistle at us, some try to grab at us, in general act worse than the soldiers who watched us dance. Though I had been dancing already for a few weeks, this is when I learned that being a lady depends more on your clothes than on your behavior. Respectable suits, pumps, and white gloves are armor and we don’t have them at 1:30 am when we are trying to get home.
"We salute you ladies of the assembly line and we thank you!" a few men yell from the shadows. We walk past them, stone faced, slightly damp and wrinkled, past labyrinth dark alleyways that mirror the dark waves on the shore beyond the boards. I assume I wear the same look I wear at a funeral or when buying a pair of shoes. In this place of sand and brittle words and sea salt I am dizzy with lack of perception. The slacks are warm and I can feel the sweat trickle down the backs of my knees.
We finally get our bus and squeeze in like tuna to the can. Sailors, marines, soldiers look at us sleepily or drunkenly. They don’t get up to offer us their seats. The bus lurches forward on its route; it gobbles up new soldiers and belches out others. We stand the entire time, the soldiers in their seats staring through us.
A few stops from Ocean City, a woman in heels and a white skirt and red lipstick boards the bus; men immediately stand to offer her a seat. Soldiers gaze at the dusty circles on the knees and seats of our pants. We got the pants from friends of Cindy’s who actually work in riveting factories, for ten hours a day, building the bombers that men will fly.
The bus passes the barely swaying shapes of colorless, hanging laundry.
It starts to rain. We pass beach houses and trees on the way home. I try not to notice how much darker the sky seems as the bus jolts over bumps in the road. I turn, see the dark eyes of a soldier on me.
"You want to sit down?" he says but doesn’t get up. I see him elbow the soldier sitting next to him and smile. "You can sit on my lap, Baby." The row of soldiers erupts in laughter. The soldier in back of me yells, "Sit on my lap, Baby! I got more to offer!"
Someone pinches my ass, shoves me a little so I lose my balance. I pitch forward, my hands landing on the soldier’s chest. Next to me, Cin gets in his face. "Fuck you and your lap," she says. His brawny arm shoots out; he pulls her down on his lap. She squirms in his embrace.
I grab reach for a pole to steady myself. Men whistle and cheer.
I put my high-heeled foot up on the soldier’s seat, next to his knee, and start to dance, gyrate. Like I do in the club. I start to sing America the Beautiful. Babs and Cin join me in singing. The bus quiets down. The soldier eventually releases Cin and she stands up, dances along with me. I steal a glance at Barbara May, who moves her body and her mouth in the darkness. We do not dance like ballerinas or sing like choirgirls. We don’t have those kinds of voices, those kinds of legs. Men who minutes ago resembled damp pants hung out to dry sit taller in their seats. The bus driver glances at us several times. A barrel-chested man missing two fingers on his right hand, he joins us in song, his voice booming into the salt night.
We are costume and labor, red, white and blue flags rippling in the wind, moving in a bluesy groove on a hot, dark bus past midnight; we become something they can once more understand.
Still, when I get off the bus, I feel like a greasy make-up towel, discarded, hung over the back of a chair, or bits of rhinestone flung off a costume, winking diamond-green in a corner somewhere.
America is made by all kinds of people. Soldiers. Swimmers. Dancers. Fighters. Women in dusty blue slacks who build bombers. Lazy people. Strong, hard people. People with swollen feet who dip ice cream and serve coffee. People who wash dirty uniforms. People who feel that the continuance of life depends on them. People who think they don’t make any damn difference at all. I look at Babs and Cin as we walk home to our tiny apartment. The streets are, of course, deserted. We are glass girls building summer.
Before I slip into bed, I take off my pants and fold them as carefully as if the pants are an American flag. All night, my dreams poke, probe, push, and drink me in, truer sisters than any I’ve ever had. I dream that the Statue of Liberty has unfettered her hair, which hangs to her waist like silky moss ropes. She is wearing pants. At her feet is a giant picnic basket filled with salami and cheese and wretched steaming soup, which she passes out with the arm that is not holding the torch up to immigrants arriving by steamship. "Lonely Eve," she whispers, over and over again. "Eat."
Peasants do not understand why things float. They are superstitious. The water around the Statue of Liberty dries to a dark stain. The stain runs through the streets of New York City. I am fascinated by the mechanics of illusion. I see and reach for an American flag but it flaps out of my reach, into the wind that’s like the wheeze of an old priest. Then I am standing in a dump of sea reeds, holding a salt-caked fishnet. Tangled in it is the body of a blue-dead woman with greasy red rouge on her lips. I look up to see the Statue of Liberty towering above me in the marshes. She turns into the Black Madonna statue. Hordes of peasants appear and kiss the black paint off her hands and feet. She bends down with her studied red lips and white teeth and exposed blue hands and kisses me. Then she whispers, "You are the result of the love of thousands."
The statue cries. I taste the salt in her tears. I think of Sarah, the woman mentioned most often in the Bible. Fifty-six times. I know, because when I was a girl, I counted. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a baby in my middle region. I ran my small hands over my flat stomach. I was swollen with fear and I prayed. I prayed to the black Madonna but my prayers were grammatical. Philological. I hadn’t yet found them in the stars, or in the diesel fuel of a night bus carrying tired soldiers and dancers in pants.
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