To See You Again Read Free Page B

what time it is, what day. With whom she is. She struggles for clues, her wide eyes scouring the dark, her tentative hands reaching out, encountering Susannah’s familiar, fleshy back. Everything comes into focus for her; she knows where she is. She breathes out softly, “Oh, thank God it’s you,” moving closer to her friend.

Greyhound People
    As soon as I got on the bus, in the Greyhound station in Sacramento, I had a frightened sense of being in the wrong place. I had asked several people in the line at Gate 6 if this was the express to San Francisco, and they all said yes, but later, reviewing those assenting faces, I saw that in truth they all wore a look of people answering a question they have not entirely understood. Because of my anxiety and fear, I took a seat at the very front of the bus, across from and slightly behind the driver. There nothing very bad could happen to me, I thought.
    What did happen, immediately, was that a tall black man, with a big mustache, angry and very handsome, stepped up into the bus and looked at me and said, “That’s my seat. You in my seat. I got to have that seat.” He was staring me straight in the eye, his flashing black into my scared pale blue.
    There was nothing of his on the seat, no way I could have known that it belonged to him, and so that is what I said: “I didn’t know it was your seat.” But even as I was saying that, muttering, having ceased to meet his eye, I wasalso getting up and moving backward, to a seat two rows behind him.
    Seated, apprehensively watching as the bus filled up, I saw that across the aisle from the black man were two women who seemed to be friends of his. No longer angry, he was sitting in the aisle seat so as to be near them; they were all talking and having a good time, glad to be together.
    No one sat beside me, probably because I had put my large briefcase in that seat; it is stiff and forbidding-looking.
    I thought again that I must be on the wrong bus, but just as I had that thought the driver got on, a big black man; he looked down the aisle for a second and then swung the door shut. He started up the engine as I wondered, What about tickets? Will they be collected in San Francisco? I had something called a commuter ticket, a book of ten coupons, and that morning, leaving San Francisco, I’d thought the driver took too much of my ticket, two coupons; maybe this was some mysterious repayment? We lurched out of the station and were on our way to San Francisco—or wherever.
    Behind me, a child began to shout loud but not quite coherent questions: “Mom is that a river we’re crossing? Mom do you see that tree? Mom is this a bus we’re riding on?” He was making so much noise and his questions were all so crazy—senseless, really—that I did not see how I could stand it, all the hour and forty minutes to San Francisco, assuming that I was on the right bus, the express.
    One of the women in the front seat, the friends of the man who had displaced me, also seemed unable to stand the child, and she began to shout back at him. “You the noisiest traveler I ever heard; in fact you ain’t a traveler, you an observer.”
    “Mom does she mean me? Mom who is that?”
    “Yeah, I means you. You the one that’s talking.”
    “Mom who is that lady?” The child sounded more and more excited, and the black woman angrier. It was a terrible dialogue to hear.
    And then I saw a very large white woman struggling up the aisle of the bus, toward the black women in the front, whom she at last reached and addressed: “Listen, my son’s retarded and that’s how he tests reality, asking questions. You mustn’t make fun of him like that.” She turned and headed back toward her seat, to her noisy retarded son.
    The black women muttered to each other, and the boy began to renew his questions. “Mom see that cow?”
    And then I heard one of the black women say, very loudly, having the last word: “And I got a daughter wears a hearing