Stranger on the bus

My morning commute begins just after 6:30 when I board the #30 city bus when it stops one block away from my house. The ride to the commuter bus station is about 12 minutes and the trip is usually uneventful. So uneventful, in fact, that a couple of times I have dozed off and nearly missed my stop.

This morning my usual comrades were on the bus when I boarded: the woman who reads a science textbook; the sleeping man in the back. Most mornings, the cast slowly grows as regulars board at subsequent stops and a few newbies join the crowd. Mornings when I am lucid, I study the new folks and make-up stories about who they are and why they are riding the #30.

About 4 stops after my own, a new woman boarded. She presented herself immediately as my research subject for the morning. Unlike most people, she didn’t have her fare ready when she boarded and had to stand and dig around in her wallet. Then, she fed two $1 bills to the box even though the fare is only $1.60. As she stood pulling the money out of her wallet, I noticed her attire. She was wearing pristine white, but not new, tennis shoes, black yoga pants, a white ski parka with black accents, grey knit gloves, and a thick black elastic headband in her chin-length dirty blonde hair. In other words – she was wearing no color at all. As she paid her fare the driver held a bus transfer out to her. She grabbed it out of his hand roughly.

From this initial information I formed my first tentative conclusion about this mystery passenger: she was on her way to the gym and running late for her yoga class (explaining the annoyed demeanor, the lack of preparedness of fare, and attire). Generally she gets a ride, explaining why she would be wearing her gym shoes (worn but clean and, hence not “street” shoes) and why she is not usually on the bus.

She sat roughly in the first set of seats (those reserved for the elderly and handicapped) right behind the driver, tossing her gloves into the seat furthest from her own and glancing at her transfer. Hoping, I assumed based upon my tentative conclusion, that it will last long enough for her to get home from the gym on the same fare. Then some puzzling new information arose: she lifted her feet one at a time and untied and retied her very clean shoes twice each, without returning then to the floor afterwards. Then she turned sideways in the seat and put her feet on the seat next to her. “Ah,” I thought, “obsessive compulsive disorder.* But is she still going to the gym?”

Meanwhile the elderly woman who carries the tapestry grocery bag was sitting in front of me. She and the new woman who needed to get to the #14 and was directly across from yoga lady and both appeared disturbed by the feet on the seat. I heard the woman with the tapestry bag mutter something unintelligible under her breath as she shook her head. The #14 woman shook her head as well. It is then I realized that I have never seen feet on the seat on the city buses here. However, none of this presented information overly problematic for my working assessment of yoga lady.

Then I noticed that her white parka had a stain on the right arm – the side of her visible to me. Just as I was trying to figure out what that might mean in terms of the OCD assessment, the bus stopped at the hospital, the busiest stop, and 5 people boarded. One of the new passengers, who, based upon attire, I assume works as a doctor, nurse, CNA, or other medical technician sat on the end of yoga lady’s section. As the nurse was lowering herself into the seat, yoga lady snatched her gloves. So, this is how it was: the nurse was sitting in a set of three seats directly behind the partition which acts as the wall behind the driver. The yoga lady’s feet were in the seat next to her and the yoga lady herself was in the final seat, turned so that she was facing the driver and the nurse instead of the center of the bus.

The nurse turned to the yoga lady and said, “Could you please put your feet down.”
“What?!” the yoga lady replied loudly.
“Could you please put your feet down.”
“What?! What?!”
“Some people are going to be sitting in that seat later and you’ve got your feet up in it.”
“What?! What?!”
“Oh, you hear me alright.” she looks at the #14 woman across from her and says, “Some people… no respect for anyone.”

Silence descended for a moment. There was so much tension in the air and the yoga lady, who I now renamed borderline-personality-disorder (but secretly feared might be more appropriately called the-dangerous-and-unmedicated-schizophrenia) woman, said “what” with such hostility that I half expected her to use the feet, which were mere millimeters from the nurse, to kick the woman.

As the bus pulled into the next stop the nurse said, “Driver, can you please ask this lady to get her feet of the seat?” The driver did not respond as he took fares and distributed transfers to the new riders. As he pulled away from the stop, he said, “Ma’am, please take your feet off the seat.”

BPD woman complied immediately, twisting around so that her knees were on the seat and her feet still of the floor. Then, suddenly, she exploded, placing both feet on the floor and leaning toward the bus driver.

“I have been mugged and harassed and pinched and slapped and people have said rude things to me and no bus driver has ever said a word and now you are telling me to take my feet off the seat?!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

“That’s enough,” I said without thinking, “how dare you speak to the bus driver and the woman next to you like that? The only one who has been rude on this trip is you.”
“She was mumbling!”
“I could hear her fine from way over here. Just behave.”
“Behave! I have been slapped and punched by drivers and passengers too.”
“Ma’am,” the bus driver said, “I am truly sorry for everything that has happened to you but I can’t do anything about it. You should call the Main Office and complain. Right now we’re doing OK. We’re just trying to get through the morning so help us out, alright?”

BPD woman continued on for a moment, arguing with the Nurse and #14 lady in the Chekhovian sense: the first talking about how she has been wronged and the others talking about common courtesy but then silence fell again as everyone realized that their words were falling on deaf ears. I was silent, angry with myself for my unnecessary moralizing. I doubt that it contributed anything to the resolution of the situation and generally I pride myself on not being easily baited.

But it wasn’t over. BDP woman turned back so that her knees were on the seat and feet on the floor but then she looked back over her shoulder at me and stared. I don’t know why she chose me, perhaps because I reprimanded her first, or because I was the only white person to speak up. Perhaps because, since I was behind her in a seat facing forward, she was most obviously in my sight line. At any rate, since I had already risen to her bait, I certainly wasn’t going to do it again, but what to do? I didn’t want to let her win by forcing me to shift in my seat in order to change MY sightline. I could just neutrally meet her eyes until one of us got off (incidentally, we had already passed the gym so there was no telling where she was going). I could pretend not to notice her stares – but that would be obviously forced. Without ideas, I turned directly toward her and stared right back trying to think of some other way out of the situation. We sat this way until she blinked. At this point I stood up, walked past her, and picked up a bus schedule. I returned to my seat, got out my phone and dialed the number for the central office. She was staring at me all the while. I turned toward her and shot her a smile as I left a message at the central office. I spoke loudly enough for her to hear me and looked her over as I gave a physical description of the customer who was causing trouble (acting in a hostile and threatening manner, I said) on route #30 bus #4139 at around 6:45 a.m. I spoke loudly about how the bus driver should be commended for the diplomatic manner in which he handled the situation. Then I hung up the phone, gave her one more smile, and got out my book.

She got out at Broadway. Everyone on the bus seemed to breathe a huge sigh of relief and the bus driver started to talk with the nurse about how that woman got on to the bus angry and must have problems at home. Then #14 lady said to me, “Did you see how she was looking at you? I thought she was going to go over there and choke you.”
“Yeah,” I said, “she was really trying to get my goat.” Trying to sound casual despite my shaking hands and the sweat on my forehead and wishing that I had done a better job dealing with such an obviously troubled person. “She’s not all there.”

*Please don't conclude that my casual use of psychological disorders implies that I think such things are trivial matters. I use them casually here because in my "make up a story" game they are value-neutral labels which have no meaning accept for the purpose they serve as possible explanations for what I observe.