WOMEN GONE MAD: The Bus Shelter

The Bus Shelter

Things were not going well. Persuaded by my parents I had bought a condominium on the edge of the city, two bus rides and a subway away from my work. But my mother wanted me within calling distance so that if either of my parents died in the middle of the night I would be close at hand.
“I’ll die first,” my mother insisted. “Your father will be lost. He’ll start using butter again. And don’t let him drink too much coffee. It keeps him awake at night.”
Six months after I had deposited a down payment, they decided to move to Florida.
“Your father won’t make it through another Canadian winter,” my mother insisted. “His back will give out on him if he has to lift another shovel of snow.”
The condominium, actually it was an apartment, was not large. There was one large bedroom and a second smaller room divided up into a kitchen, dining room, and living room.
“You wouldn’t want any more space than this,” my mother concluded as she gave me a tour of the apartment. (My mother found the apartment for me.) “You don’t want to spend all your money furnishing the place.”
My parents were delighted that I had finally grown up and invested in real estate. Finally I was an adult. I had property. Like hundreds of others, I owned a little space in the sky anchored to the ground by an elevator. I hated the place. Except for the sound of toilets flushing through out the building, it was perfectly silent. It gave me a migraine.
“Just because you have your own apartment doesn’t mean that you should have young women up here,” my mother warned. “And if you insist on having women guests make sure they provide a recent medical report.”
It was condominium that I could barely afford. I tried to cut corners. I restricted myself to a couple of apples each day for lunch. I never bought the paper but picked up a discarded Star or Sun on the subway. Cable television was included in the maintenance payments so I picked up an old black and white television at the Goodwill for twenty dollars. I never went out. That wasn’t much of a problem since I had few friends.
I had to wake up at five o’clock in the morning to begin preparations for my two and a half hour trip across the city. If everything went well, I arrived early enough to have a coffee and browse through the headlines in the paper. But if the subway broke down, or the bus was held up by traffic congestion then I had to make up the time that evening, meaning that I often did not arrive home before eight o’clock. And I hated my job.
I had graduated from university with a general arts degree and no prospects and a huge debt. I took a one-year course in one of the thriving technological colleges as a computer technician. I hated computers. After applying for a couple hundred positions I received a contract position in a new high-tech company. It seemed that everyone in the firm worked around the clock and no one was so keen as the three owners. They had been old college mates and this was their first venture into business. The three amigos as they gleefully referred to each other were in a perpetual state of giddiness; business was doing well, and they could not understand why anyone in the firm was not as keen as them. Employees who were not willing to put in sixty-hour weeks found that their contracts were not renewed. When asked about a raise their retort was, “work more hours.” I felt that I was on a perpetual bubble that each day could count as the beginning of my inevitable dismissal. I could not afford to be late. Some evenings I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering if this was what the rest of my life was going to be like. I couldn’t allow myself to answer the question.
Each morning, I struggled out of bed, took a quick shower, drank several cups of coffee, stuffed several slices of toast in my mouth, dressed, and rushed out of my building and up a long hill to the bus shelter. There was never anyone else waiting for a bus. It was dark and very early. The birds had not even begun to sing their morning chorus to the rising sun. Sometimes a lone dog released by his master the evening before would follow me to the bus stop, sniffing at my feet, occasionally barking at me, looking for some form of affection I suspected. I hated dogs. And then I would stand there in the darkness waiting for the bus. I had to be early. The bus ran every twenty minutes and I could not afford to miss it. I enjoyed those moments before the bus arrived, waiting in the shelter, finally able to relax. I felt one step ahead of the rest of the world.
One morning I found someone else waiting in the bus shelter before me. She sat on one of the plastic seats, wrapped in layers of clothing, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. I tried to ignore her. She didn’t say anything to me that first morning. The bus arrived and I expected the old woman to climb on the board behind me but she did not. I showed the bus driver my pass.
“Poor soul doesn’t have any place to live,” the driver said shaking his head.
I climbed into the seat behind the driver near the door so that I could make my dash to the subway when we arrived in the station.
“She must have a family,” the driver continued as we pulled into the street. “Imagine someone letting their mother live like that! It’s a crime.”
I said nothing. I hated talking in the morning.
The next morning she was there again, smoking her cigarette.
“You’re late,” she said as I rushed into the shelter out of a howling wind. A dog had chased me all the way from my apartment building nipping at my heels.
I nodded trying to catch my breath, but did not respond. My snooze button hadn’t worked that morning and I was forced to forego my shower and coffee in order not to be late.
When the bus arrived the driver offered the old woman a ride on the bus.
“It’ll get you out the elements,” he smiled.
“Are you desperate for riders?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t charge you,” the driver explained.
“Can I smoke?” she asked.
The driver shook his head. The old woman waved him off.
The next morning was Saturday and I awakened to the screaming of my telephone. I had been called into work for a rush job.
“It’s six o’clock,” I muttered; sleep still clogging up my senses.
“You don’t want to work?” one of the bosses asked. Who knew which one it was? They were interchangeable. I said that I would be in.
I was surprised to find the old woman there again. She was sitting on her seat, smoking a cigarette and drinking a coffee. She had a coffee machine on the ground with an extension cord from the machine to a nearby house. I wondered what the owners of the house would think if they discovered that their electricity was being siphoned off.
“They got you working Saturdays as well,” she laughed shaking her head disapprovingly.
I nodded.
“What a rat race!” she grinned, her teeth yellowed from her smoking. “I wouldn’t put up with it, working Saturdays. You want a coffee?”
I shook my head. The old woman pulled out a bag she kept hidden under her seat and took out a small package of cookies. She offered me one.
“You can’t work on an empty stomach,” she said.
“No, thank you,” I said.
I slept most of Sunday, getting up just in time to watch the end of the endless round of football games on television. I hated football. I went to check my telephone messages when I noticed that the plug for my telephone had been pulled out. I was in a panic. What if the bosses had called me into work? The month before one of my colleagues had been released because the bosses said that she hadn’t been responding to her telephone messages. The rest of us had been warned that it might become necessary to furnish all of us with pagers, at our expense. I phoned work. One of the bosses answered and howled with laughter when I explained why I had called.
Monday morning the old woman was at the bus shelter once again. She had a small television set on one of the seats and was watching the news as she enjoyed her morning coffee and cigarette.
“The stock market dropped several points yesterday,” she said. “Technology stocks are down.”
That didn’t sound good. I wondered what kind of mood the bosses would be in.
“Should you be watching television in here?” I asked.
The old woman looked at me.
“Why not?”
“Well, the shelter belongs to the city.”
“You don’t think I pay taxes!” she said growling at me.
“I didn’t mean anything,” I explained. “It’s just that I wouldn’t want to see you getting into any trouble.”
“What a liar!” she cried, spitting out smoke. “You don’t want to see me enjoying myself. That’s what it is. You rich bastards are all alike.”
“I’m not rich,” I responded.
“You look rich enough to me,” she said spitting out pieces of tobacco that had stuck to her tongue.
As the days passed by, the old woman began to furnish the shelter. There was her television and her coffee machine. I noticed that she had a shopping cart from a local grocery store filled with items, parked behind the shelter. Remnants of a rug were thrown across the floor. Pictures from magazines were taped on the glass walls. One morning I arrived to find that she had put up curtains on the east wall.
“To keep the morning sun out,” she explained.
Another day I arrived to find the old woman squatting over a pale, defecating. I stood outside. When she was finished she carried the pale over to a nearby sewer and emptied it. Then she returned to the shelter took out an aerosol can and sprayed.
“Shouldn’t the city do something about her,” I said to the driver when I stepped onto the bus.
“Do what?” the driver barked at me. “You want to throw that poor soul back out into the cold? People like you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Don’t you do anything else besides work?” the old woman asked me the next morning.
I shrugged.
“Do you have a girl?” she laughed.
“What business is that of yours?”
“Not getting any,” she laughed, cackling like a cat after a bird. “I figured you must be married working so many hours. But you’re single and still you’re busting your balls. Maybe you don’t like girls.”
I turned on the old woman.
“I like girls!” I protested.
The next day the interrogation continued.
“You don’t come from this country, do you?” she asked.
“My parents were born here,” I said.
“But their people didn’t come from here?” she responded confidently. “Foreigners!” she added smugly as if she had reduced me down to some primary element of nature.
The next morning I was determined not to let the old woman get under my skin. It was difficult enough to put up with the bosses without being harassed first thing in the morning by a bag woman. But that morning the old woman wasn’t herself. She had a running nose with a terrible cough that seemed to shake her whole being.
“You’re not feeling well?”
“Whatever gave you that impression, Einstein?”
“Shouldn’t you see a doctor? If you let something like that go, it can turn into something serious.”
The old woman turned and glared at me. And with a sense of bravado stuck a cigarette in her mouth and lit it up.
All day I thought about the old woman wrapped in her clothes like an Egyptian mummy, coughing, smoking, and shaking. As usual when I got home that evening there was no one at the bus shelter. Where did she go during the day? I wondered. After I had finished dinner and the sun had set, the days were getting shorter and the nights were turning chilly, I set out for the shelter. What if she had died, I thought to myself. Would I be considered responsible? She wasn’t there. I sat in her seat in the shelter and wondered when or if she would show up. I looked around at the houses and apartments in the area, the living rooms lit up, people watching television, cars moving so purposely through the streets, people rushing down the sidewalks heading for home. It was relaxing to sit there and watch the world pass by. Like a king on his thrown, I scanned all the subjects of my realm.
Someone shook me. I opened my eyes and looked around the shelter. I had fallen asleep. I wondered how many hours had passed.
The old woman stood over me, hands on her hips.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” she barked.
“I thought you had died,” I responded then added almost apologetically, “or something.”
“And you thought you could take over!” she said with a smirk. “Oh you rich bastards are all the same. It’s not enough that you have all the goodies at the feast, you want the crumbs as well.”
I looked at the bag woman and smiled. I don’t know what came over but I blurted out something that completely surprised me.
“I’m not moving!” I said. “I like it here.”
The bag woman’s mouth dropped.
So delighted was I with my proclamation that I began to laugh, laughed harder than I could ever remember. I laughed so hard I almost doubled over and my jaws began to ache. Tears ran down my face.
“This is my shelter now,” I said.
Then the bag woman took a gun out of her pocket.