Premeditation

My bus driver, Pete, wore his hair longer than any adult male I knew, except for my dad, back when he was an honest to God hippy. I have a photograph of my father as a young man, his copper hair cresting his belt buckle, about four inches longer than Pete’s. Pop’s head was thrown back while he laughed, and my mother is there, looking up at him, and I like to think I was born out of the love and wonder that is enmeshed in that look. She’s in a minidress, her hair parted severely down the middle, twin braids laddering to its short hem.

I started riding with Pete my freshman year of high school. He had two tiny photographs paperclipped to his sun visor. One was of his infant daughter, posed in a ruffled dress the pastel colors of Easter eggs. There was another one of his wife, their daughter on her lap, and though she was smiling, it didn’t reach her eyes. She wore her hair like she was still in high school. Huge, cake bangs aqua netted into place, and she rimmed her blue eyes thickly in matching blue eye liner.

In the mornings, Pete played Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath at a low volume. Sometimes, he murmured along. I heard him because I always sat in the first seat to the left, behind him, so he could look up into the massive rear-view mirror and see me. The mirror was convex and I liked being able to observe everyone behind me, all the way to the back of the bus, without them knowing I was watching. If “Tangerine” came on, Pete and I would lock eyes, then mouth all the words in tandem. It was a secret between us, because of my hair, which is more orange than my dad’s copper. Pete wore concert tee shirts and jeans with ripped out knees. Pink Floyd, the Dead, and a steady rotation of the Beatles and Bad Brains, who he actually saw. I owe him there. But I read his shirts for clues to who he was, and he wasn’t like the boys in my class who liked to think they’d personally discovered the Beastie Boys.

I think music is what kept my dad hanging on so long. The nurse would give him his morphine, and I’d slip those huge headphones on him, and he’d close his eyes, and look peaceful until sleep ate him up, and sometimes he looked ancient, and sometimes like a baby, and sometimes? Honestly? Dead.

I played junior varsity basketball my freshman and sophomore years, and he drove for the games we traveled to for extra pay because he was a father now. He told me a lot when everyone else was sleeping, even the coach. It was scary: I understood this, to be a bus driver with a family and a house payment. He never saw his life unfolding like this, shelving RC Cola and filling vending machines in between carting school kids in a giant yellow sardine can. He played guitar, not so much as he did in high school, but sometimes, late at night, on his front porch or on his couch. He’d feed me album titles to check out, in these late-night drives, and I did, searching through my dad’s collection until I found the title, slipping the vinyl out of the sleeve, holding it like my pops taught me, and laying the needle down really gently. Music was how I survived. And you know, that time with Pete was like a drug, especially when it seemed the whole world was sleeping and we were in between where we’d just left and the homes that were waiting for us. It felt like we were inside a secret, and maybe possibility lived there too.

I think music is what kept my dad hanging on so long. The nurse would give him his morphine, and I’d slip those huge headphones on him, and he’d close his eyes, and look peaceful until sleep ate him up, and sometimes he looked ancient, and sometimes like a baby, and sometimes? Honestly? Dead.

Before morphine though, it was weed. My mom sat me and my brother, Jimmy, down in the kitchen, both of us D.A.R.E graduates. This was plant medicine, not really an illegal substance, for nausea and pain and appetite and ease, and right, it wasn’t legal, but it was like To Kill A Mockingbird, the book she taught every spring to high school seniors the next tiny town over—man’s laws are imperfect, and sometimes you break the law to serve the actual spirit of the law. My mom and I had a fight then, about that book, and about how, really, it was totally different, and um, we’re white and it’s 1992 in Podunk, Illinois, and no one was going to break our door down, arrest us, like they did her student, Arbutus, who had just turned eighteen. How was it okay because dad had cancer, but not, say, for the stoners under the bleachers at lunch? Like, don’t they deserve an easing of their pain, their discomfort? My mom opened her mouth like a fish, like I’d used her words against her and stolen her ability to use new ones. Then she shrugged, her face twisted, and sighed, so deeply that her whole body shuddered. Then she emitted the sound of cloth being torn. My mom saved old sheets and used to tear them into cleaning rags. It was like that, only it was her voice, and the sound of being torn asunder and coming apart. My brother and I gathered her up and held her together. Locking our arms around her, she quaked, and we wordlessly understood that this was how it was now.

Pete was the bookend to my school day. After my dad died, Pete was the only one who never pretended or ignored the fact that my life was unrecognizable to me. I told Pete it was scary being a girl, because he was father to one and I thought he should know. Because girls I’d known all my life became strangers in high school, and boys I’d known all my life did too. Plus, I knew anything could happen at any time, like my dad dying at the end of my end of sophomore year, and my mom losing forty pounds because she was too sad to eat, and suddenly, she was smoking Virginia Slims, and my younger brother, who’d always been a shit, was all grade-oriented, acting all married to his girlfriend and uber-obedient to my mom. And how a house could totally feel different because someone isn’t in it. Or a life. Pete nodded. He said he never doubted.

Once, walking down the hall, I stopped to watch my mother pull the top sheet tight and tuck my father into the hospital bed in the living room as though he was a child. He was watching her. His face was open and radiant and joyful. “Patricia,” he said, “I adore you.”

I was in the marching band because I did love music, and the routine of it kept me tethered. One night, two weeks after I turned sixteen and got my license, I went to the after-football-game-dance as a lark. I was wearing my dad’s old Frank Zappa tee shirt, my green Converse with lines from “Lady Lazarus” written across the toes, hair in a high ponytail, and my mouth a slash of red, red, red. My little brother, Jimmy, was a freshman and I watched him dance three slow numbers, his hands in his girlfriend’s back pockets, his lips on her neck and my stomach turned.

Once, walking down the hall, I stopped to watch my mother pull the top sheet tight and tuck my father into the hospital bed in the living room as though he was a child. He was watching her. His face was open and radiant and joyful. “Patricia,” he said, “I adore you.” And my mother, who had been all motion and purpose, froze, and I watched as her body loosened, the tension in her muscles melting visibly and she looked at him, and then stepped closer. She saw him, under his sickness and the ravaged costume of cancer that he wore, and he was not a child, and for that moment their gaze held, not simply a sick man to be tended to. “I adore you,” he repeated, and she pulled back the tucked sheet she had just perfected, mechanically, and she climbed in with all her clothes on, even her shoes, and I saw my father wince, his face go pale with pain, and how he willed his body not to react and she was the big spoon to his little spoon and she kissed his neck, a nuzzling of kisses and whispers, and my father, adjusting his body to whisper into her face in return, saw me there, watching. He smiled, a smile of bewilderment—of love and joy and sorrow, and he regarded me, and I saw he adored me too. I saw devotion, the plaiting of love and willing commitment, and how, even if he wasn’t scared to die, how much he wanted to live here, with us, as long as he could, and seeing this, I fled.

I didn’t even wait until the stupid slow song was over. I told Jimmy I was feeling sick to my stomach, and it wasn’t a lie. Pete had married the first girl he ever slow danced with, and he cautioned me not to mistake first love for only love. He said that love was true, and it mattered, but that there isn’t THE ONE. All those slow songs lied, he said. Jimmy was fourteen, but when I was fourteen, Kelly June Temple left halfway through freshman year and never came back, and we all knew why, and it was the same reason Pete got married—a baby. I told Jimmy I was done, time to go, and he heard it in my voice, so he didn’t complain. He never did, he just absorbed whatever got thrown his way, and thinking about that just made me feel sad and lonesome.

In the parking lot, it took some time finding our sad, run-down, powder blue Chevelle. When we did, there was a red, rusting pickup truck blocking us in. As we approached, the headlights came on, so I couldn’t see who the driver was. Jimmy went toward the passenger’s side window, but I told him to get in the car. I wasn’t scared.

It was Pete. I hadn’t seen him since I started driving for real. His hair was shockingly different—shorter, like a banker or some wanna be suit. I could see comb marks in his brown hair, and it didn’t look bad, just adult.

“What did you do to your hair, Pete?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, “Sold out.” He seemed slightly drunk or stoned. I was just getting familiar with what these things looked and felt like. “I made you something,” he said, and he turned on the overhead light, and gestured to a cassette tape on the passenger side seat. I saw a partially smoked jay in his ashtray.

My dad let me try smoking it once with him. “Bets,” he said, Deep Purple playing in the background, “in some ways, dying has given me a weird permission. This would never have happened otherwise. One toke, two max.” I studied him as he exaggerated how to hold it pinched between thumb and index finger, how to inhale, hold, exhale. I put my lips where his lips had been. I held smoke in my lungs that he had held in his lungs seconds before. “One, only,” he said, frowning, “I’m rethinking this. Maybe we don’t mention this to your mother. Or, maybe, not until I’m good and gone.”

I didn’t look at him. I acted like I was listening intently and hadn’t heard what he just said. “Deep Purple is so much more than ‘Smoke on the Water’, Dad. Does the world know this?”

“Bets, will you get me a grape popsicle? Let’s enjoy purple popsicles to Deep Purple.”

Three weeks later, he was dead, and his popsicle stick was adhered to his bedside table, a sticky artifact I left as a shrine of sorts to what had felt to me, fleetingly, like a perfect moment of happiness with the man I loved most in all the world.

That night in the parking lot, Pete looked at me like he’d never seen me before, his eyes all over my face. Greedy. He put his hand on top of mine, which was resting on his windowsill, but his grasp was sweaty and clutching. He said he’d been waiting. For me. He wanted to take me driving. In the country. Just to talk. Listen to music. Maybe we’d park, but just to kiss. Jesus, he’d thought about what it’d be like to kiss me. While Neil Young sang “Cinnamon Girl.” Or “Helpless.” Or both.

It was a bewildering thing to say to me, but he’d waited for me, and there was some power in that for a sixteen-year-old girl who’d never had a boyfriend. I said simply, truthfully, “I’ve got to get my little brother home. Please move.”

“I’ll follow you,” he said, a whisper, like we’d agreed to something.

I got in the car, my knees were shaking.

“Who was that?” my brother asked me.

“Nobody,” I said.

“Some creep?”

“Because only creeps are interested in me?” I was snide, but his question sobered me.

“Something like that.”

I didn’t put the radio on. I resisted the urge. I was thinking.

“Seriously. Who was that?” Jimmy asked. “I couldn’t see because he had his headlights on. Creepy as shit.”

I could feel his eyes resting on my cheek.

“Guys can be gross, Bets,” he said, “like you can’t imagine. I’m telling you, Betsy, some guy blocks you in, hangs around waiting, lurking in the parking lot—it’s not normal.”

I stilled my knees, calmed my voice, and gripped the wheel. “Get used to the fact that your sister drives men wild.”

Jimmy drew his breath in, sharp, so I said, “Joking. Seriously. It was just my drug dealer.”

He turned away. “Everything’s a joke with you.”

“It was my chemistry lab partner—too cool for dances, but not too cool for parking lot reminders that we meet tomorrow at the library.”

I could lie like it was living ivy reaching up and grabbing stone. Like the lyrics in some song only I knew. I was just good at it. And I thought of Pete and how he’d lie to his wife and to himself. And the lies had started, maybe, because of me. And I saw all the lies I told, growing up the side of his house, around and over the windows where his baby slept.

I got us home like normal. Put it in park, and removed the key. “I’ll be right behind you,” I said to Jimmy, “just have to grab my band uniform and clarinet out of the trunk.”

Jimmy walked backward towards the door, making sure I was telling the truth.

I heard Pete’s truck, but he’d killed his lights. He idled in the alley.

“Betsy,” he called, only it was long and drawn out and musically hushed—two half notes, a step up for each syllable. I thought about how the air would feel on the back roads going too fast. Smoking that roach, singing “Helpless” in a careless duet. In the dips, the cool would be enough that he’d have reason to put his arm around me. He’d hand me a beer, and we’d sing to the mix tape he made me. Had he made it as a soundtrack, hoping I’d go with him? Would he be shy at first and then bold because he’d been out of high school for what? Six years? Eight years? And he’d taste like cheap beer and smell like discount shampoo and man deodorant. My mom would be pissed I took off without checking in, but she was always pissed at me these days it seemed. My mom would wait up for me, chain smoking, worrying, until I came home with some made up story to obscure the truth.

And I saw him, really saw him—scrawny and fourteen and still so full of love for me. Just a kid. The last time, honestly, I’d see his love so out in the open, not hidden, shielded, or masked. Like a baby, his face screwed up like he was holding a cry burst back.

But then my little brother turned on the back-porch light, and he stood in its yellow spot light, like he should have a microphone. A moth head butted the naked bulb, again and again, a frantic and desperate and sad percussion. Jimmy shielded his eyes, as though I was lost in the sea of a concert audience, calling to me, first softly, then the cadence building like a chorus, a repeated refrain, until he yelled all of my names so all the letters seemed edged with fear, rimmed in neon alarm.

“Bets. Betsy. Elizabeth. Elizabeth Marie. Elizabeth Marie Watts.”

And I saw him, really saw him—scrawny and fourteen and still so full of love for me. Just a kid. The last time, honestly, I’d see his love so out in the open, not hidden, shielded, or masked. Like a baby, his face screwed up like he was holding a cry burst back.

Pete’s baby girl couldn’t walk or talk yet, even though she was like two? Three now? I shouldn’t have known such a thing, but I did. He told me right before I took my driver’s test, the last afternoon I rode the bus. And he shook his head, dazed, and looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “What am I going to do, Bets?”

It was the same question that scared me into feeling generally rotten because my life seemed all stretched out before me, but I couldn’t fathom what I was going to do with it. I acted like I didn’t hear the big question, hanging out there for all of us to dread. What are we all going to do before we die?

I said, “You should play her music. That’s what my dad did. I was singing before I was really talking, dancing before I could walk, or so the story goes. Music is supposed to be awesome for babies.” And I looked out the window for the rest of the ride, the first time I didn’t meet his eyes.

I was a kid. I was just a kid. How could he not see that?

I turned to Pete’s shadowed form and I said, just loud enough so he could hear me, “Fuck you, Pete.” Because he’d waited in the dark for me, in a way that made it clear he thought I’d get in his truck, shut the door, put on the seat belt, and trust him even when our town’s lights disappeared. I trusted nothing. Nothing. Everything he told me seemed suddenly premeditated, handed out for sympathy, manipulation even, and I didn’t really know anything about him. I knew him in the school bus and here he was, out in the world, thinking I had been waiting just for him. Waiting. I thought about my mom, wrapped in her robe, sitting on the couch, waiting until I was inside and safe. My mama. She was so alone. I thought about Pete’s wife, on a couch, her child asleep and her husband gone. I saw her tuck her legs beneath her and reach for the television remote, her face a page across which her defeat and exhaustion were written, just like they were written on my mom’s face.

“Go home, Pete,” I said. Part of me hoped I’d leveled him, the way I’d been leveled by my dad dying. And then, I did something that felt good in that moment, but that rises up in me some nights like a question I can’t ever really answer. I said, “You’re fucking pathetic. You have a family. You’re an adult. Act like it.” If Pete had kept his hair long, it would have curtained his face when he hung his head, and I wouldn’t have seen the shadowed planes of his face so nakedly exposed. Exuberance crescendoed within me, and why? Why would his shame-guilt make me feel like I had the power of a conductor? Or the authority, say, of a drum major? But I did.

I gripped my clarinet case, and threw my marching band uniform over my shoulder. I ran for the light and my brother, who still waited shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other like he was counting the bars of music before his solo, but really, he was just hoping to catch sight of me.

I sang out to him, my voice clear and strong, “Coming, Jimmy. I’m coming.”