Losing My Religion

I am defying gravity.

I glance out the window of the Greyhound Bus. We’ve been broken down in a small town in Kansas for an hour now. Everyone else has gotten off, for one reason or another, but I’ve stayed put. My mind has been too focused for me to pay attention to anything else.
I am running away. I am seizing the day; I am a million choices and chances packed into a tiny suitcase. I am doing the impossible.

“It’s going to be another hour before we’re able to get moving again, miss. Do you want to take another bus?” a portly gentleman with a pocket watch smiles at me. His eyes sparkle out from the wrinkles and his moustache curls at the ends. He almost reminds me of Santa Claus, but this is a bus not a sleigh and its July not December.

“It’s bad luck if you don’t finish a journey the way you started it.” I reply, smiling. I must sound crazy, talking about luck when mine has already been so dreadful. This is probably my fault. Momma always said bad things followed me like fleas follow a hound. Momma also said that it was bad luck to start something and not follow it through to the end.

The bus driver shrugs and goes back to the front. He looks back at me for a moment, before shaking his head and climbing down. I look back out the window at the endless fields and dust. I suppose they call it the Dust Bowl for a reason.

Thinking of Momma makes me feel mildly ill. I can see her face, bruised, and her once brightly colored tourmaline eyes dull and sunken. She was scarecrow thin, her calico dress hanging off her bony frame. She kept pressing the rolled up twenties into my sweaty palms, whispering so that he wouldn’t hear her. All her years of taking in laundry, baking bread, wiping bottoms; all of her dreams being pressed into my hands. All of it rolled into a coffee can she had hidden under our porch. I just looked at her, uncomprehending.

“Livy, you have to take a chance.” She had whispered. “This is your chance, take it.”

“Momma,” I replied, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“You can’t stay here forever. You were born under a good sign, Livy, make the most of it.”

I wipe a stray tear from my cheek. I wonder how angry he was when he found out I was gone. I wonder how long he made her stand, tied to the whipping post. It is too late for guilt. It is too late to turn back. She wouldn’t want me to do that anyway. She wouldn’t want me to feel guilty, it isn’t as if I didn’t ask, beg, her to come with me.
I am powerless to change anything at this point. I am several hundred miles away from the back woods and dirt roads of Shawnee.

I am tired. The exhaustion of my frantic escape takes up physical weight at the marrow of my bones. I rest my cheek against the smudged glass and stare up at the perfectly empty sky. It is the bluest sky I’ve ever seen and I wonder if things change color when you are free.

A girl, about my age, climbs up and into the bus. She has short flaxen hair curling perfectly around her heart-shaped face. She has opal eyes that glitter with unsuppressed joy and anticipation. She awkwardly lugs a big black suitcase. It reminds me of a coffin and I want nothing to do with it, but I still stand to offer her a hand.

“Can I help you with that?” I ask, stretching out a hand to help.

“Its ‘may I help you?’” She replies, letting me grab the handle. “You certainly can help, but the question is will I let you help?”

“Obviously you will let me, as I just did.”

She smiles, little crinkles appearing on her nose. She has a smattering of chocolate colored freckles across her nose and cheeks. She is a hand shorter than I, but she carries herself as if she were a giant, proud.

“I’m Sadie.” She says, wiping her hand on her jean shorts before extending it to me.

“Livy.” I reply, shaking her hand. I think, after I take her hand, that I should have wiped my hand on my jeans as well.

“Short for Olivia?” she asks, settling herself into a seat across the aisle from me.

“Short for Olive.” I say, looking at the gray-green top I am wearing.

“Ah. Sadie is what my mother always called me, but my name is actually Seraphina.” She wrinkles her nose, as if she has just tasted something sour. “I prefer Sadie.”

We sit in companionable silence for a moment as she adjusts herself. She looks out her side of the bus, wrinkles her nose again and looks back at me. She seems to be sizing me up, her eyes drifting over every detail of my outfit.

“Where are you going Livy?” she asks, turning so that her back is pressed against the bus wall.

“Headed up to Maine, possibly taking the first boat I can find to Europe.”

“Maine, huh? That’s where I’m going. What’s in Europe?”

“Life.” I reply, a small smile creeping onto my face.

“Life?” She cocks her head to one side and ponders my expression.

“Well, a chance for a life, I suppose.”

She looks at me, quizzically, but doesn’t ask anything else.

“Why are you going to Maine?” I ask, mimicking her posture and positioning.

“I’m going to be a teacher. An English teacher for Miss Abernathy’s School for Girls.” She says this in a pompous tone that makes me laugh. “It’s very fancy, you know.”

“I wouldn’t know fancy if it bit me.” I say, honestly. “I grew up in the back woods of Oklahoma.”

“Ah, Oklahoma! I have been through there. I have recently come from Utah.”

“What were you doing in Utah, if you don’t mind my asking?”

She gets quiet. Her eye color shifts, ever so subtly, and for a moment I wonder if she will begin to cry. Just as I am about to apologize for being so nosy, she smiles and gives her head a saucy shake.

“Why, living the American dream of course!” she says, brightly. She shifts in her seat so that she can look out the window and that ends our conversation. I don’t try to engage her again, instead tugging my small bag closer to me and leaning my head against the window again.

The bus driver huffs and puffs as he climbs back into the bus. He is followed by two or three other people, all lugging awkwardly shaped suitcases. An old lady in a pink hat and sunglasses plants herself in front of me and a man, whom I can only assume is her husband, plops down beside her. As he sits he expels a small amount of gas, leaving me breathlessly nauseous.

I try to be inconspicuous as I carefully move from my seat. The last thing I want is a confrontation over bodily functions that can no longer be controlled. With a small smile I look at Sadie, half pleading with eyes. She seems to catch my drift and, taking her suitcase, follows me to the very back of the bus. We sit across from each other, staring out of our respective windows as the bus finally starts and toddles toward an exit ramp.
Mostly we stare out of the windows, trying to soak in all the different scenes flashing past us. Every hour or so Sadie asks me a question about Oklahoma and I ask her a question about Utah.

“Is the Great Salt Lake really made of Salt?” I ask, sipping a cola. She laughs at me and takes a bite of her sandwich.

“It isn’t ‘made’ of salt, but it is the largest salt water lake in the Western Hemisphere.”

“How do you know so much?” I ask, accepting a bite of her turkey on rye in exchange for a sip of my drink.

“I read a lot.” She replies, shrugging. She smiles between bites of her sandwich, pulling off chunks for me. I offer her my other bottle of cola, but she waves me off and just takes another sip out of the already opened bottle.

In Indiana we are stopped for routine maintenance. We leave the bus and find a tiny motel room. Collapsing on the beds, we sigh in unison, which makes us giggle.

“Did you have a boy back home?” she asks, turning on her side and propping herself up on her elbow.

“No.” I say, shaking my head and staring at the ceiling. “You?”

“Yes.” She whispers. She rolls back onto her back, her silence tearing at my heart a bit. She has the bruised look Momma used to get whenever he came home after drinking and whoring.

Without thinking, I reach my hand out and take hers in mine. And we just lay there, holding hands as if we have known each other forever. We fall asleep that way, not caring that our arms go numb from hanging off the bed.

In the morning we board the bus and race to the back. I win and we trade suitcases for the day. Inside her bag is a diary, which I don’t touch, and miscellaneous clothes. Under the clothes is a layer of books. Encyclopedias, a dictionary and a couple novels. She smiles at me and winks, holding up my own diary. She opens it to the first page and I don’t stop her. I suddenly feel lighter. As if her reading my words validates me in some way. I feel like a bird about to take off for the first time.

I let her read about the beatings, the rape, Momma’s bruises and the roll of twenties that bought my freedom. I let her read about him and the whipping post. I let her read about my own Sadie being buried before her first birthday.

She never says a word, reading quietly. Every now and then she will look up at me, a knowing smile gracing her face. The smile is tight, but kind, as if she has become too brittle to really smile.

“Well,” she says, after another hour of silence. “Aren’t you going to read mine now?”

“I didn’t want to intrude.” I reply, lamely.

“And my reading your diary wasn’t an intrusion?” she replies. She pauses a moment, before adding, “Are you mad?”

“No, actually I’m relieved. I’ve never been able to tell anyone those things. Not even Momma, even though she knew.”

“I want you to read mine, then. Maybe it will help me as well.” She makes me promise that I will, then turns to watch the Indiana countryside roll by the window.

I slip my hand into her suitcase and retrieve the diary. It is a better quality than mine, with a fine leather cover inscribed with the name “Seraphina.” I am afraid to open it, afraid to read what this young woman, this stranger, has felt. To read what she has believed, what she has done.

With a deep breath, I open it to the first page.

“I am dying.” It says. “I am wilting, like a flower in a too sunny window box with no water or love.”

She lets me read. She lets me read about her forced marriage to her mother’s cousin, a man with two other wives already. She lets me read about her love for her younger brother who has gone off to Vietnam. She lets me read about a daughter she didn’t even name before she fled. She lets me read about a young man named Carson, a man she loved enough to run away for, a man who abandoned her in the mountains of Colorado.
When I come to the end, I find a pen and write her a note.

“Freedom is riding a Greyhound bus with a stranger who becomes a friend.”

In Pennsylvania, Sadie gets off. She doesn’t say a word, but she waves goodbye as the bus pulls away.

I open my diary to write and find a note of my own. I smile and twist to catch one last glimpse of the beautiful young woman who just stepped out of my life.

“Losing your religion isn’t always a bad thing, sometimes it is a new beginning. And love is becoming friends with a stranger on a Greyhound bus.”