To the Sailor on a Greyhound Bus, 1964
You were traveling north, 450 miles, along the western side of Lake Michigan. I was traveling north, 500 miles, along the eastern side. We were headed home to our respective villages on Lake Superior, that vast inland sea. I had just visited my older brother in Ann Arbor, where he’d put me on the bus at 6 p.m. in the middle of a snow storm and handed me a dollar for snacks. It had been a long night of Clark bars, bottles of root beer with rust under the cap, and itchy thighs from my old wool skirt. Around midnight, my bus crossed the Mackinaw Bridge—black ice as far as the eye could see—and turned west to stand with its engine running at a two-pump, fluorescent-lit gas station. Another Greyhound was parked nearby, and you got out with a few other passengers. The bathrooms were accessible only from the outdoors with a key kept by the cashier. I watched you shift from foot to foot in the snow as you waited outside the men’s.
It was January. Three o’clock in the morning. I was fourteen.
You were so handsome in your uniform, with your dark blue wool jumper piped with white. Your white cap, tilted just so. The wide bell bottoms with those cool buttons on the front flap. You were probably an eighteen-year-old recruit, just finished with basic training at Great Lakes Naval Base, on leave until you were assigned a duty station. But to me, you were glamorous.
I was sitting in the back next to a frosted window, my feet in impractical penny loafers instead of winter boots. Outside, the frozen swampiness of second-growth forest stretched along both sides of the highway.
When the bathroom break ended, you climbed aboard my bus. Do you remember?
A few years before I met you, when I was ten or eleven, I often stayed with my godmother Lottie, a seventy-something German-American who watched me when my parents were out of town. One sunny afternoon in Lottie’s kitchen, I prattled on about boys in my class—Billy said this and Bobby said that and Jimmy’s cute and… Lottie was at the sink, her back to me. Over her shoulder, she said, “Don’t get pregnant. It’ll kill your mother.” I was dumbstruck. Her matter-of-factness filled me with fear. “Me?!” I sputtered. Me? Pregnant? I didn’t even hold hands.
When you sat down next to me, I pulled my purse out of the way to make room. I remember feeling flattered, chosen. There were many other empty seats.
My mother never talked to me about sex, about a woman’s yearnings, about how to manage the complicated urges of an adolescent girl with a rapidly changing body. My desires had no names. An older girl, Bev, once told me a joke about rubbers that I didn’t get. I went to my mother and asked, “Mom, what’s a rubber?” A shadow passed over her face. She mixed herself another Manhattan on the rocks. “Those are galoshes, honey. That you put on your feet.” I was no longer allowed to play with Bev after that.
As the moon flickered in and out of the serrated treetops, you asked me who I was, where I was going. I told you my name, and that my father owned a hardware store and was the part-time mayor of our small town. What I didn’t tell you was that I no longer invited friends over because of his drinking. Then, you made the move of so many crew-cut boys back then: a casual flinging of an arm over the girl’s back seat, not touching her—just, you know, relaxing. I froze at first. I stared straight ahead, my face expressionless to conceal my nervous delight, and pretended it wasn’t happening. You stared straight ahead, too.
I leaned in, resting my head on your shoulder, avoiding eye contact with the other wool-coated passengers. I was young, naïve, and unconscious about my body. My desires were buried deep under the loam of shouldn’t couldn’t better not think about that or I could get in trouble. Your hand slid forward onto my chest, inch by thrilling inch, until it felt the soft contour of my bra. I pretended I wasn’t desperately lonely, the last child left in a family imploding from drink. I pretended I wasn’t hungry for a loving touch, for love itself. I pretended our gentle, fairly chaste, upright pressing, hugging, and pawing wasn’t really happening and that no one else could see us. I felt heat rising in my chest and savored the feeling of being desired.
The bus ride was two and a half hours. I remember the warm moisture in the skin of your neck, the drowsy drifty feeling of our mouths mashed together. The snow-covered trees sliding by the window. The feeling of your arm around me, affectionate and protective.
We had such a good time. Did you really need to tell your mother?
“In a strange way, you did me a favor. You created a bridge between 3 a.m. time-stopped breathlessness and bright-as-noon reality. By telling, you connected the dream world with its consequences.”
Our hometowns were 35 miles apart. The bus dropped me off first, at 5 a.m. at Abba’s gas station, a squat red brick building with one gas pump next to the one bank in town. My father’s white Ford idled nearby. When we got home, I collapsed into my twin bed.
The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is one big small town. The population density might be only nineteen people per square mile, but those nineteen people talk. The phone woke me around lunchtime. I put on my bathrobe and walked into the kitchen just as my mother was hanging up. She stared at me strangely. The cat rubbed against my legs.
“Honey, did you talk to somebody on the bus last night?”
I froze. The dream space on the Greyhound bus was separate from the morning light in this kitchen; they were not supposed to collide. I tried to conceal my shock. “I don’t know what you mean.” I had never lied to her face before.
“I just got a call from a lady in Hancock. She said her son Steve and you were…”
I frowned and shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Must be somebody else.”
My mother paused, looking at me. I shrugged again and picked up the cat. I dashed up the stairs, feet clumsy from the shame of my mother’s stare on my retreating back, watching me in a way she hadn’t done before.
What did you tell your mother? That you’d met a nice girl on the bus from L’Anse and gotten to know her? That you’d found an easy girl to mash with? (“Easy.” That’s what we called it then.) Or, most shameful of all, that you’d met a horny girl desperate to make out?
In a strange way, you did me a favor. You created a bridge between 3 a.m. time-stopped breathlessness and bright-as-noon reality. By telling, you connected the dream world with its consequences. This was before birth control pills, before Roe v. Wade. I had to be awake, more careful.
I waited until college to have sex for the first time, with a boy I loved. Soon after, thanks to my enlightened Hungarian physician, I started taking birth control pills. (“School virst. Zen babies.”) The pill freed me to play, explore, celebrate being alive. Sex in the 1970s—after Vietnam, before AIDS—was joyful and free.
My godmother, my mother, your mother. At the time, I thought of these women as repressive forces trying to stomp on the freedom of a girl. But they, too, must have known about stolen kisses, about steam in a back seat or on a bus, the bliss of two melded bodies. They also knew the social and physical consequences. They just wanted me to be safe. Without their protection, I could’ve ended up living in a tiny apartment above the Ben Franklin store with a passel of children, trapped in a miserable marriage, wondering why life had passed me by. Instead, I got out. I learned enough about alcoholism to escape it. I had children when I was ready to, not before.
Now I am an old woman of seventy, married to a man of seventy-eight, and I often wonder what happened to you. Did you have a girlfriend waiting for you that dawn at the bus station? Were you sent to Nam? Did you marry and join a softball league and raise blond children in a small Upper Peninsula town?
It occurs to me only now as I write this, fifty-six years after that dreamy night on the bus, that maybe it wasn’t you who revealed our little tryst. After all, how many sailors report their make-out sessions to their mothers? Someone else on that bus must have watched us, someone who recognized you. I picture a woman with a scarf covering her hair, a pocketbook on her lap, tight lips. Someone much like my own mother. I picture her reaching home, calling your mother. When your mother confronted you, maybe you revealed my name reluctantly. Maybe, like me, you hoped our warm interlude on a Greyhound bus racing to the far north would forever remain our secret.
You may be pleased to know, dear sailor, that my husband is also a Navy man, a doctor posted to a hospital in the Philippines during the war. Each night, we still pull each other into a long embrace, skin against skin. Life itself. Remarkably, my husband can still fit into his Navy uniform after all these years. I photographed him recently standing in front of our fireplace. Dress blues, brass buttons, four stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his chest. His white officer’s cap, tilted just so.
Dr. Jay Rothenberg in his dress blues.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maija Rothenberg returned to literary writing after a twenty-eight-year career as an independent business and medical writer in Chicago. She is writing an essay collection about her Finnish-American childhood in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and becoming a Jew at age fifty.
Read Maija’s “Behind the Essay” interview in our newsletter.
Header photo by Kimon Maritz.