Bus Stop

You’re back and legs ache this morning, like every morning. You run a hand through your hair, it’s thinning, another piece falls out. It’s a hairnet day. You wear it like a helmet, trying to protect what little hair you have left. But at least you can still get up today. You need to make the house ready in case your son visits on his way home from the bus center. He’s a good boy in spite of running away to Tokyo after a fight with your husband, long since departed. The house is feels empty and hot. You have your breakfast, okayu*, just like you used to make when he was sick. It’s about all you can really take now, a few of your teeth have just clear fallen out. In a way it’s like being a little girl again. You mutter to yourself as you work, thinking about what you need to do today. You’ve got to go to the store and buy more rice, always more rice. You can never have enough rice.

Then it’s your special time, the bus time. You’ll get on the bus and ride it over and over again until the end of the line. It’s the same routine everyday, you have the notes to remind yourself. Your son drives the bus all around the city and never makes you get off because you’re his mother and he loves you. You think he knows it’s you but is afraid to say it because he wants you to think he’s still sulking in Tokyo. He doesn’t want you to know that he was the first to break, a stubborn boy just like his father. I won’t tell him that I know it’s him. You think pleasantly to yourself as you try to will yourself to clean a little, who knows, today might be the day that he says to you “Okasan* let me help you carry your rice back home.” And you will make him tea just like you did when he was studying for high school exams and he will drink it and ask you to make all his favorite foods, miso soup with a few shiitake mushrooms, you’ll even make katsudon*, just the way he liked it. It was only a special treat then but for his homecoming nothing is too good. You look in the fridge and remind yourself that you only need to buy more rice today. Because you can never have too much rice. You collect your plastic bags and go to the store.

It’s a good grocery store with good prices. You buy white miso, panko*, fresh shiitake mushrooms; you won’t have time to soak dried ones and a decent cut of pork to make tonkatsu* out of. After collecting the last of the katsudon ingredients you pick up a small bag of rice. The bigger ones are too heavy for you and you won’t be able to make it to the bus stop. They store will insist on calling a taxi if you pick up a bigger bag. They don’t listen to you when they say your son, the bus driver will help you once you get on the bus. Why do young people always think they know best? Why do they always smile at you in a strange way? You pay cash like everyone else and load the bags until they feel like they might burst. They won’t. These plastics bags can last for weeks, they are good a sturdy, like you.

Kyoto is always hot in the summer, and humid. The humidity sticks to you, trying to make you stop. The benches for other bus stops seem to be calling you but you must be strong. If you sit down now you might not get up again; at least that’s what the cramping in your legs tell you. With the strength of mountains you move centimeter by centimeter to your son’s stop. You don’t sit on the bench because you know you will have difficulty getting up from it and then your son will have to come assist you and he will be so startled that he won’t come home with you today. If he knows you know he’ll flee back to Tokyo tonight.

His bus comes. You know it’s him. It’s mostly empty as this is the start of the line. Your house is closer to the second stop but it’s anything for a few more minutes on this line with him. You take the step up, none of the young people in headphones offer to help, as if you’d accept. You are not some decrepit old woman. You take a seat closest that’s up the first stair your right as you enter the bus. No one sits by you. They all look relived that you didn’t try to sit in the priority seats. What do college students need priority seats for?

At each stop the bus gets more crowded, people talking in different languages, but they all blend together. You can’t tell one from the other. You put your bags in the seat next to you. No one sits by you and no one can. You close your eyes and start to sleep. It’s a dreamless sleep punctuated by background noise of your son announcing the stops. Somewhere along the way you sleep deeper than you intended. There is a warm hand on your shoulder. You look up in your surprise to see it’s a bus driver…who is not your son.

It’s all clear for a moment. Your son would be sixty-one by now, retired or getting ready to. He’s never called or written, never came back from Tokyo. Your brain tries to wrap itself around this reality testing. You assure the bus driver that you don’t need an ambulance, you don’ t live far from here and will make it home ok. You get off the bus and stand for a bit, thrown into utter confusion about where you are and why you are there. You don/t even like katsudon, it’s too rich for your stomach to take.

Feeling even more exhausted you stare out at the cars passing on the busy street. Another bus comes, going back to your home. Your son is driving this bus and the relief you feel is immense. Ha, must have gotten on the wrong bus. You really are getting old, more forgetful. Of course he wouldn’t have been on that bus, how could he help you carry your rice home if he finished his route at this stop?

Beaming, you get on the bus and take a seat up the first stair to your right.

Okayu- soft rice, a dish usually given to sick or older people Okasan- mother

Katsudon- a deep fried pork cutlet and egg over rice

Panko- Japanese bread crumbs

Tonkatsu- a deep fried pork cutlet

On a bus in Kyoto there was a very disheveled woman sitting in the seat next to where I was standing. Sometimes she was sleeping sometimes she was mumbling to herself. She kept grocery bags in her seat even though the driver told everyone to move their stuff since the bus was utterly packed. I didn’t see where she got on or where she got off.