This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet. —Rumi
“Are you in the right place?” the woman pushing the broom asked me.
Maybe not. I mean, I didn’t look like I belonged there. I was in a riotous, flowered dress. Tight in the bodice with cleavage. A white sweater, skimpy with no buttons. I’d worn the sweater for the plane, in case I got upgraded to first class.
That sweater was lazy and didn’t do its assigned job. If I crossed my arms and pulled up both sides, I could catch the edges in the middle and force it to cover my chest but only briefly before it slipped down and away.
As the only concession to comfort, I had on some old flats. For running between planes.
So of course, I understood what she saw, what anyone saw—some kind of ungainly goose, a day-tripping Yankee, who’d flown off course. What was I doing in her bus depot? I belonged on a flight out.
I’m a New Yorker, and I was visiting my mother in Florida. I had spent the early hours of the morning at my connection in Charlotte Douglas Airport.
At the airport, I was watching the gate agent and hadn’t noticed a young woman move up to stand next to me. The lady was small, under five feet. Perfect, like a doll. Long hair, carefully coiffed. Across from her, seated, was another woman, clearly an influencer, taking selfies, flipping her hair, and making sweeping gestures into her cell phone.
“Where are you on the stand-by list?” came a voice. The words hung in the air.
I looked from the influencer back to the little lady next to me. I waited for someone’s lips to move. It was like a feat of ventriloquism.
Young people rarely even see me now, let alone speak to me. I’m over sixty and usually invisible. Typically, I don’t get grilled on where I am on the priority list, as I wait for a flight. I try to recede into the background, beneath the noise of travel.
Yet the edge in her voice gave me a start.
“I have seniority but that may not matter here,” I said.
She and I were standing by for an 8 AM flight to JFK, and my airline app listed 18 people in the virtual line ahead of me for 9 remaining seats. All appeared to be there in person, with twenty minutes until boarding. You could tell by their eyes, glued to the board behind the gate agent, and the way they were standing, arms tight against their sides, clutching their phones. Agitated. They were crowding the agent. They were paying passengers, bumped or late to their earlier flights, and the flights back home to New York were facing wind advisories. There was a good chance that later flights to LaGuardia—where the short runways off the water make wind shear a menace—would be canceled and then any flights to JFK would fill up with those angry LaGuardia wannabes.
I hoped to get into New York later that morning. That way I’d have the afternoon and Sunday to prepare for work. I had my laptop, and my phone, of course, so I could work anywhere. But waiting in an airport with the lunch you packed when you were still seeing double from fatigue is awful. Wilted broccoli with Caesar dressing and a small Ziplock bag of unsalted pecans? That said, as long as I got back before orientation for my new job, I would deal with the discomfort.
“Your seniority ‘may not matter?’” the lady said, quoting me and still giving me her profile, “Well, I hope it means nothing. I’ve waited long enough for this flight.”
What did she mean? Was this a plea for commiseration? No, it was out-and-out competition for real estate, as if an airline ticket wasn’t just a share in a flying co-op. And the disrespect was odd. Seniority is the term the airlines use. Yet I could have been her grandmother, and she was still ready for a fight.
Had she already bullied the other challenges to her boarding pass?
I have been a guest of the airline since I was 19 years old, some 40 years and counting. I owe the advantage to my mother, a 20-year employee, now retired. For us, flying isn’t free but it is discounted. I still have to wait for a seat. A week earlier, I had flown into Orlando from Brooklyn to see her. I’d gotten stuck in Charlotte then, too. It was 12 hours total travel time before airport security opened, and then rushing from gate to gate, trying to get on a flight south. You don’t blame anyone if you get stuck. You make your own way.
The young lady squeezed directly in front of me to make sure the agent saw her. Most seat assignments are automated in a clearly defined pattern but any last seats were hand-picked by the gate agent. Still, nine people had to miss the flight for me to get on.
It didn’t look good.
There was very little chance the gate agent was blind to the young lady. Still, she kept going up to lean on the podium and would get waved back. She began seething. If you believe in auras, you would have seen her swathed in a livid purple cloud, with lightning flashes and the smell of something burning, like rice when the water has evaporated from the pot. Sweet, all right, but combustible.
Then the lady and her influencer friend were allowed to board. It was a moment out of beauty pageants. They gave a rushed acceptance speech, snatching away their boarding pass yet smiling back at us graciously, throwing in the princess wave to the less fortunate, and then running, slap-thighed down the ramp to the plane.
Ah, well. I was not surprised; the odds were against me. I left the gate and went to look at the departures board on the wall next to it. Three of the following flights to LaGuardia had been pushed from that Saturday afternoon to Sunday morning.
Tens of airline customers began to pool around several of the gates. It was official; getting home was going to be a problem if I tried to fly there. I had to find another way to New York.
I called my mother. That kind of phone call, full of hectic decisions, is what she thrives on.
“Have you looked for a rental car?” Yes, I had, and it was too expensive to rent.
“What about the train?” It didn’t matter; the trains from Charlotte were booked solid.
“What about the bus?” Mom said.
Yes, what about the bus? The last time I’d been on a long bus ride was in South America, when I was a teenager.
I bought a bus ticket on the phone app and took a cab to the Charlotte bus station. It was just the beginning of feeling like I was out of my element. Yet why was that? What was so complicated about taking a bus?
One April Saturday, several years ago, I agreed to meet a friend and her daughter at the Newport Centre Mall. I came off the warm PATH train from Manhattan into the cold, windy day, and immediately saw the only creature who wasn’t rushing in and out of the entrance, a bird, about the size of a well-fed pigeon, mottled brown, and tipped over onto the wet pavement.
What was it doing in Jersey City, Wall Street’s not-so-distant cousin with tall glass towers and concrete plazas? Had it been swept into the plate glass?
Other shoppers stepped around me, as I leaned over to see if it was still alive. It had a long beak, one that could reach worms or small insects deep in the loam. I recognized it as a kind of waterfowl, a kind of overgrown Sandpiper.
Its eyes were closed. Yet I noted the flutter of the feathers on its chest. It was breathing.
I had read that if a bird were in shock, one could warm it up to save its life. A scarf would have come in handy but all I had was a newsboy’s cap. It was a variegated brown tweed, an NYC street special and my favorite. For a moment, I thought about bird mites. In my best hat. Yet there was nothing for it. I scooped the damp bird into it and pulled the sides up to see if a little R and R would restore it. The bird’s colors and the tweed were the same.
It was no songbird, it weighed at least half a pound, and it barely fit in the cap. Tucking it into my arm, like I was carrying a football, I advanced through the revolving door into the bright, loud shopping center. Maybe it would warm up on the way to finding my friend and her daughter.
I was still looking for the duo when the bird became conscious. I could feel it regain its weight in my hat, against my arm. In another 5 minutes, it began to get comfortable, scrabbling its legs to get them under itself, and tucking its beak deeper into the tweed cap, as if it were nesting. By the time it began to do more than fidget, pulling its beak above the rim of the hat, and extending a wing, I was back by the front door of the mall and able to put it down. The weather was still awful. I rolled it forward into a decorative planter and under a small bush so that it was shielded from the direct effects of the wind. It fluffed up and hopped a little, keeping me in sight with one eye.
When I came back out, maybe an hour later with the women and their packages in tow, the bird was gone.
Of course, I wondered what it was. I looked it up on the train home. It was a Timberdoodle. Or depending on where you are when you see one, a Brush Snipe, a Bogsucker or Hokumpoke. “Hokumpoke” may refer to the stop-and-start, bouncing walk it does, as if it were bracing against the sway of a boat or a train. Call it what you will, the loss of habitat—an erosion of forests—brings it to the city. It was not a rare bird, certainly, except to me on the day.
The ticket on my phone was evidence that I was permitted beyond the velvet ropes. It read that I’d start in Charlotte and then there’d be two stops, Washington, DC, and Philly. In fact, there would be a bunch—including Raleigh and Baltimore. Time spent on a Greyhound bus was like saltwater taffy, condensed at some points and stretched at others. We slid into several small-town bus stops, unmarked junctions, where only the locals would know that the Greyhound stopped there.
The Charlotte bus station was built in the heyday of planes, trains and hefty automobiles and before air conditioning. I had my choice of six doors to come in, all were open, and at 10 a.m. the summer heat was already rising, flowing in a soft suffusion, the color of buttercups.
It was a cavernous waiting room. No doubt it had a history of accommodating crowds.
That morning there were only five people, trying to sleep, in hard, waffle-wire bucket seats, some with hoodies over their eyes to keep out the sun. Wayward young people, making themselves smaller, fitting in, unlike me, fat and sassy, with clothes that shouted, as if “I have money” were a French clarinet. To underscore that image, I was toting a huge bag and standing by a tidy roller suitcase that still had airline tags on it.
No, I wasn’t traveling light, not like the way I’d arrived at my mother’s.
“The boxes on the chair are for you and my grandson,” my mom said. It was the night before my flight home. They were uncirculated coins from the Franklin Mint, advertised as collectors’ items, that she’d bought with the money from back-to-back shifts at the airline reservations office.
For ten years, my mother was a specialist on what the airline called the help desk. She had invented the role. She was a problem-solver and knew better than most of the reservation agents how she could help. She was also loyal to the airline and didn’t want the brand to lose market share and gain a tarnished reputation. Reservations agents tagged them as “Irates.” Irates were ticket holders who got transferred to her when they were already shouting with impatience.
Only a couple of people on her team in reservations could stand the work. It was different from a regular reservations job where you booked the flights for people. In the 1970’s, the only other way to plan air travel was with a travel agent, which could be costly. So customers (usually) appreciated the free help. Until they got stuck somewhere.
My mom was their last hope and resort after missed connections and delayed flights from mechanicals to acts of God.
She talked to dozens of angry people, seven days a week, who were stuck somewhere in the U.S. or overseas. They thought nothing of screaming into her headset about the injustice of buying a seat and then not getting to use it, as planned. I sometimes wonder if that’s why she went deaf so young.
Customers were even angry at her for how slow the Sabre system was in accessing their travel record. One day I was sitting in the Pittsburgh call center with her when she dropped her voice to a soft, honeyed tone.
“I’m sorry but Mehetabel is having a bad day. She’s down right now. Let’s see if I can cheer her up. It may take a minute to get that information for you.”
There was a loud buzz from her headset. I leaned in.
My mother was in her mid-forties then. She turned to me, smiling, her hazel eyes glimmering, the copper in them matching the color of her curly hair. She had that look when she knew the passenger had begun to listen to her.
“’Mehetabel?’ she said into the headset. That’s her name, that’s my computer.”
I could hear the laugh from the other end of the phone.
“You like that? (There was a sudden staccato sound.) Yes, she can be moody. But we’ve learned how to work with her. Ah! She’s back up now. So let’s see.”
There was no shouting after that.
Sometimes my mother took in customers whose travel got short-circuited in Pittsburgh. They stayed at our house. Later, at least one woman, a French national, invited my mother to visit her at home. And so Mom did.
“Mehetabel,” she called her computer system. It is Old Testament. It means “God Rejoices.” What’s that expression? “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht?” God laughs at our plans.
The airline wasn’t so sanguine. One day not long after I overheard the call, they asked Mom to quit it, specifically, to stop anthropomorphizing Sabre. Perhaps they deemed it unprofessional.
The system still went down but nobody tried to disarm the angry customers, using humor to distract them. And, in that way, some small grace was lost.
Back to the coins, that my mom wanted me to take home. There were ten boxes, they were heavy, and they were nothing I would ever collect. But I knew what they stood for. They were hazard pay from her years at the airline. I found room in my bag.
So, there I was in the bus station, and I stood out. The maintenance worker’s comment was my cue to change clothes. I had a half hour before the bus came. I approached the bathroom, noticing that the folks in the seats were following me with their eyes. Hell, what was I thinking? I could easily get mugged. How was a public bathroom in Charlotte any safer than one in New York? I decided I wasn’t going to stay in there long enough to find out.
Inside the restroom, someone had taken up residence. Cheap make-up was spread out on the counter, and all kinds of underthings were thrown over the handicapped stall, as clearly, someone was trying to dry out her hand wash.
I chose a stall and closed the door.
The woman who was pushing the broom came in to clean. Or maybe to clear out drug users.
“Anyone in here?” she said.
I jumped.
Yes.
“Is this your stuff?” she said in my direction when she heard me unzip my luggage.
“Yes,” I said, thinking she meant my sweater, thrown over the top of the bathroom stall, and my shoes and bag at the edge of the closed stall door.
“Well, clean it up,” she said. “You’re not allowed to live here.”
That was a surprise. First, I didn’t belong in the station. Now I was called to task for the little room I was taking up. The broom lady must have had a second job as a parole officer.
I pulled on camo jeans, a short-sleeved t-shirt, a zip sweatshirt and sneakers. I took the boxes of coins out of my suitcase and lined them up in my tote bag. I put my glasses on and hid my red hair under a baseball cap.
When I left the bathroom, I saw who the maintenance person meant; a shadow of a woman crossed my path. She was bone thin, and her face, gaunt. An addict, by the looks of her.
The bus was called 15 minutes later. The doors were cordoned off like they do at nightclubs. As if taking a bus were luxury travel. Yet there was only one door in use. There was only one bus. There was no line, at first. Just me, leaning against a wall and trying to blend in.
The woman with the clipboard approached me on cat feet. She wore her braids wrapped in a neat top knot, with no make-up on and didn’t need it, an abiding glow on her such that she didn’t require the reflective yellow tape on her vest. She was tall and quietly took up space. It occurred to me that she was someone important, but I couldn’t tell who. Somehow, she projected “safety.”
It was the vest. She reminded me of a crossing guard, former NYPD, near our public school back home.
“Are you taking the bus to New York?” she asked politely, smiling without showing any teeth.
Ah. She was the bus driver.
We were interrupted by a gangly man with graying hair. Like an air dancer advertising a dealership by the side of the highway, he was randomly waving his arms and bending his knees for emphasis. He was reminding her of something she had forgotten to do.
“Not right now,” she said calmly like she was speaking to a child. He went away, arguing under his breath, back to wrangling two big blue Samsonites against a counter.
“Yes?” she asked. “New York?” “Yes,” I said.
I put my suitcase in the hold of the bus and began to wrangle my bulky shoulder bag down the narrow aisle to my assigned seat, 5D. Two steps in, I could see someone was already sitting in it.
He had black, cork-screw hair that hung to mid-chin. I could see the top of his red shirt, polyester by the looks of it.
“Sit anywhere,” he said. “There aren’t that many people.” That made sense.
Other passengers boarded.
“Hey,” he said then. “Is this anyone’s?” He was talking to the rest of the bus. It was a bottle of sore throat spray in the pocket of the seat in front of him. No one claimed it.
I decided to sit in the row where I was standing, catty-corner to the driver.
She was my first bus driver. The first for my trip home and the first since my road trip when I was 18.
The last time I’d been on a long bus ride, it was from São Paulo, Brazil to Asunción, Paraguay. 20 hours by myself. I had sewn the little bit of money I had into the hem of my jeans and had two bread rolls with butter to tide me over. I had expectations of getting the rest of my food on the road, where I’d heard road stands delivered a fare that was cheap, and good.
None of my family knew where I was. Only my friend, Dan, knew my plans. We hoped to meet near the border. The exchange program restricted how much money I had access to. At the time, I thought it was meant to stop any teenage antics like mine. After all, death squads were running through the countryside. Looking back, I’d say that my mother’s payment of $500 was probably taken by the Brazilian government.
Whoever kept the money, I didn’t have it so to pay for the trip I raffled off a small, pink transistor radio I’d brought from the U.S. I should have had a visa but risked traveling without one because I knew I’d be stopped if I applied. It didn’t occur to me that I’d be in worse shape if a Paraguayan border cop saw me, and I only had a Brazilian ID. I’d have to fake it with my newly minted Portuguese.
No sooner was I on the bus in São Paulo than I got into a political debate with the guy in the seat next to me. I was able to maintain the conversation for 45 minutes until I slipped up on a verb conjugation. You know, something like, “If I were you” but I’d said, “If I was you,” which no true Brazilian would get wrong. While North Americans have mostly abandoned the subjunctive tense it is mother’s milk to South Americans.
My seatmate caught me. He began to whisper furiously. Was I really against the Communists who had taken over? Did I believe in “Order and Progress” as the Brazilian flag said? If I loved the lyrics of the Chico Buarque song, “Afasta de Mim Esse Calice,” as I had declared, did I truly support the fight of the Brazilian people, their very artists, against the ongoing regime? Was I a socialist like him?
Surprised by the turn of events, I stammered a reply.
I had tried to pass for someone I wasn’t. I was an imposter. His derision was complete. With his arms folded in annoyance, he rested his head against the window and fell asleep.
My fellow passengers came and went as quickly as the view changed from the bus window.
I fell asleep on the next stranger’s shoulder and woke up with a little slobber running down my cheek. He was kind and didn’t seem to mind. The next time I awoke, some of the new passengers were plump, bossy chickens with their farmers in tow. The men and women held the birds on their laps and put the empty cages on the floor of the bus. The hens had a lot to say every time the driver made a sharp turn. Brazilian bus drivers have a well-deserved reputation for being fearless and maybe crazy. Ours was no exception as he swerved frequently, over-correcting. As we climbed mountain roads, rounding blind bends, we barely avoided oncoming traffic that swung wide, over the double yellow, and into our lane.
The farmers bent over their birds, their little queens, cooing to calm them.
I arrived without further interruption at the border between Brazil and Paraguay. And that’s a story for another time. Yet that first trip made me realize that I could travel on my own, even without a firm plan.
The second one, too, was further confirmation that I could work without guide wires. Yet it didn’t start out so propitiously. By the time we boarded for New York, I had taken a big dislike to the air dancer-man. He wouldn’t leave the driver alone.
Once he was ensconced with his sandwich and drink, in the first seat near the door, he began to tell her how to back the vehicle out. Admittedly, there wasn’t a lot of room and she had to keep the vehicle’s large turning radius in mind.
“No, no,” he said. “Pull up and try again.”
I was sitting behind him and suddenly regretted that I hadn’t taken the seat I’d been assigned, further back. I wanted to tell him to quit it, that he was going to cause an accident. What right did he have to kibitz a woman doing her job?
The driver, however, listened to him without objection and tried again to make her k-turn out of the lot. Before she straightened out, a small car coming in honked at her, seeming to demand respect for the little space he required.
“Oh, hey!” the driver said, waving. “That’s Jimmy,” she told the man. “I know,” he said.
Oh, okay. So the driver and the passenger knew each other.
Air Dancer peppered her with questions and remarks on the way to Raleigh. About halfway through the 3-hour trip, he fell asleep. The driver got a call on her earbuds about some family matter. The man woke up. She turned to him to tell him about it. It sounded pretty personal. I was glad I hadn’t said anything to the guy.
An hour later we stopped in Raleigh, where the man got off, and went to get his luggage. She turned to the rest of us and told us we were changing drivers. She told us we had to take our things with us and reboard. We’d have half an hour to get lunch. It wasn’t a question. She assumed that we’d need to get refreshments. It was a lovely bit of manners. A calling card from the South. Outside, I heard her ask Air Dancer where he had parked their car. I had read that relationship wrong; they were husband and wife.
Back at the bus, the new, Raleigh-based driver ordered us into line and asked for evidence that we’d already been on the bus. He wasn’t going to put up with any foolishness. He had a wiry kind of energy; he was itching to be gone.
A man in his 70’s, tall and thin with close-cropped, salt and pepper hair, he made the uniform look good. His hands were knobby, as if he’d worked plenty of jobs and driving a bus was the easiest.
At that point, 7 or 8 new people were joining the trip. The guy in front of me near the bus undercarriage was the one with the corkscrew curls. He was skinny. There were three pockets in the back of his shirt, usually where cyclists carry items they need for a race. The jersey had colored emblems printed all over it. United Parcel Service, Fed Ex, USPS. It was piling, and rose in the back, stretched out as if a shorter, fatter guy had worn it first.
“Do you ride a bike?” I asked.
“No, I picked this up in Texas. Isn’t it great? I like it because I imagine all those UPS drivers and postal workers competing against each other. You know, athletes.”
What athletes? My mail carrier in her mid-fifties, was not competitive by any means. My UPS driver might have played ball in her high school days, but I’m guessing that she doesn’t even work out now, although at 6’2” she could probably guard the basket.
“Oh, okay,” I said, nodding my head in what turned out to be halfway to a “no, I don’t get it” head shake.
“I spent two weeks on the street in Texas,” he added. He didn’t name Austin, known to offer more services. He mentioned some other place, where it sounded like he couldn’t get help. A place probably less friendly to the down-and-out. The temperature had been in the triple digits. I could see then that he was red, as if he’d suffered exposure. His hands were rough, burnt. He looked like he was in his late 30’s but that could have been the sun.
The driver was distracted by a question from the other side of the bus. The Texas guy flashed me a sly smile, then slipped up the bus stairs.
The driver came back and made short work of the line, asking passengers to throw in their own bags. I saw how the others didn’t care where their bag landed. If I’d had anything breakable in my luggage it would have been mashed by then. I adjusted my heavy tote on my shoulder and showed him my ticket on the phone.
“What is this?” he said to me, looking at my phone.
“My ticket?” I hazarded.
“No. Where is the ticket you got from the last driver? I don’t need this damned thing. Show me the one that tells me you’ve already paid.”
I was still drowsy from the ride but his tone made my heart leap in consternation. It never occurred to me that the electronic ticket wasn’t good enough. What did he mean?
In response to my blank look, he gave me a worn, canary yellow, index card, with four numbers hand-written on it. It was the number of the bus I’d been on and would be on for the next 10 hours.
“Keep this with you,” he said. “Show it when we tell you to.” I boarded.
I spent a few more hours dozing. At the next stop, a man came on with his friend and told me I had his seat. The bus was filling up. I looked at the Texas guy who was in my seat and walked back.
“Can everyone just get to their assigned seat?” I asked loudly. It had already been a long day. It never occurred to me that perhaps the guy in 5D didn’t have his own seat. He didn’t make a fuss. He got up to walk further back.
“Hey, is this yours?” I said, showing him the throat spray left in the pocket. I’d forgotten it was the bottle he had found earlier.
He turned, smiling, and accepted it graciously with both hands, as if it were a gift.
I remembered then that it was not his, and that he’d tried to get it to whoever owned it. Looking back, I recall he was standing by the baggage compartment under the bus when other people were putting their luggage in but I didn’t see if he had any bags of his own. In fact, I’m pretty sure he didn’t. And I never saw him show the bus driver a yellow card. He sneaked on.
“Sit anywhere,” he’d said. “Anywhere?” The guy wasn’t worried about sitting in an assigned seat. He didn’t have one. He was just hitching a ride North. Like me, earlier that morning, at the airport.
In Baltimore, a woman with three kids got on. She was lively, maybe 40. They spoke French. The boys, all under the age of 12, were only interested in gaming and using the onboard toilet.
“Non,” she said, “S’arrêt.” She tweaked the ears of a nine-year-old. He stayed seated, complaining in French about having to pee. You don’t have to speak French to know when a boy needs to use the facilities. She relented. An older child took him back. The youngest scampered after. Three boys in the tiny bus bathroom.
Apparently, there is nothing like peeing-while-male on a moving bus. Their shouts and laughter rang out from behind the closed door.
And then we were an hour away from the Port Authority. After that, I’d have a 45-minute subway ride home to Brooklyn. So Practicality called. I matched my steps to the motion of the bus, in a kind of swaying quick step, back to the bus bathroom, using the backs of the empty seats like the courtly arms of dance partners. It felt familiar, finally. I recognized the halting rhythm of a Hokumpoke.
Mickey Greaves writes like she’s robbing a bank, and the reader is the bag man. It’s creative non-fiction. She learned how to write from poets. And Sylvie Bertrand at The Writers Studio. Lucia Berlin, and Jo Ann Beard are two favorites. She was heavily influenced by the abstract painter, Perry Greaves, and now her son, the rapper, Twombly.
Her stories and poems appear in Passengers Journal, Cagibi, Please See Me, Poydras Review, and Cross Cultural Poetics. Mickey is on the masthead at two journals.
Her writers group, The Scrawl, is on Zoom going on three years. Writers who want to learn more should reach out. She is on IG @mickeygreaves