FICTION

Aunt Laney’s Bus Ride — Part 1 of 2

Choices we wish we had made

When she woke up, it was late afternoon, and someone was sitting next to her in the aisle seat. She tried to collect herself as best she could, smoothing her green cotton dress while working her jaws to re-seat the upper plate that had come loose during her short nap. Several strands of snow-colored hair had fallen out of the bun, and she pushed these up and away from her face. After a few seconds, she recovered the position she had maintained for most of the day, sitting erect in the vinyl seat, her big black purse placed neatly in her lap with its strap twisted exactly once around her left forearm, hands folded daintily on top. Through the bus window, she watched the scenery speed past — pine trees with occasional mangrove thickets where the highway crossed a river or a bayou.

My Aunt Laney came to visit us in the early part of this year. She insisted on riding the bus even though I had offered to buy her an airline ticket. I couldn’t understand why she would want to put herself through that ordeal, an eighteen-hour bus ride when she could have been here in a couple of hours by plane, but that is the way she wanted it. She is my favorite aunt, my mother’s younger sister, and the penultimate child in a family of seven children. She is older now, merely an icon, a place holder, of her former self. Still, Laney is, for me, the epitome of youth and energy and fire.

When I was a boy, I stayed at my grandmother’s house while my mother worked. Laney was the first girl I ever really knew. She was in high school then, a drum majorette for the school band. I would sit for hours in the front yard watching her practice the baton. Twirling and tossing and catching it under the huge old sycamores with their skin-smooth trunks. After school, she worked in the candy department at Kress’s, and occasionally she would bring me caramel popcorn or double-dipped chocolate-covered peanuts. Perhaps my most vivid memories of that time were of Laney’s music and the strange effect it had on her. It was the music of the 1950s, full of movement, color, and emotion. The Chordettes, Bill Haley and the Comets, The Platters, and, of course, Elvis.

Laney’s prize possession was an old record player. It was box-shaped and covered in unpretentious brown vinyl with a single plastic handle on its top surface. She would carry it into the kitchen and place it carefully on the Formica tabletop, opening the latches as if it were a lockbox containing money or jewels. After selecting a record from her stack of 45’s, she would check the speed selector (I liked to play the 45’s at thirty-three and a third RPM for fun) and click the on/off switch. The little built-in monaural speaker sounded tinny and artificial, but the music was still able to get under Laney’s skin. She would close her eyes and move and sway with the music, mouthing the words along with the record. Sincerely by The McGuire Sisters was her favorite. I still remember the exact point in that song where a scratch on the record caused it to skip and repeat the same few lyrics over and over again until Laney stopped swaying and nudged the player’s arm.

I saw Laney again a few months ago at Grandma’s funeral. She looked so sad and alone that I asked her to come and visit my wife and me. She said she would think about it, but I didn’t really expect her to accept. She called two weeks later and said she’d love to visit for a few days, so I made all the necessary arrangements, including the crazy bus ride.

A totally different me

The person who sat next to her now must have moved from another seat. (Surely, she could not have slept through a stop!) She didn’t feel crowded or annoyed at the prospect of sharing her space with another passenger. Actually, it felt kind of good to have another person close by after sitting entirely alone all day long.

Her fine sense of etiquette did not allow a direct look at her new traveling companion, but there were hints and indications as to what kind of person it might be. A light scent of perfume, a faint rustling of crinoline, the distinctive click of a lipstick closing. The sun’s last blushing rays showed a reflection in the window as the pretty young woman bent to return the lipstick to her bag.

The image in the window held up an unlit cigarette and said, “Excuse me, would you mind?”

The older lady turned her head slowly and feigned a dignified surprise. “I beg your pardon,” she said, smiling warmly.

“Would you mind if I smoked?” asked the girl, still holding the cigarette gracefully between her first two fingers. She was stunningly young and beautiful. Her shoulder-length hair, turned up and out in the popular style of the day, was the color of fire with highlights and patterns of lightness that seemed to shift and move like glowing embers. Layers of stiff white crinoline were visible beneath the hem of an enormous blue hoop skirt, and below that, the girl’s pale calves led to the inevitable bobby socks and black and white Oxfords. “It’s okay,” she said presently, “I’ll just wait for the next stop. I shouldn’t be smoking so much anyway; Joey hates it. It’s just that I’m a little nervous.”

“No. No, go ahead. It’s perfectly all right.” The old lady wanted to be friendly and was willing to endure cigarette smoke in exchange for a little companionship. She stared past the girl toward the crimson horizon. “Isn’t it a beautiful sunset,” she observed.

“I guess so,” the girl replied, “I don’t really like sunsets that much. A sunset means the day is over and all those things that you wanted to accomplish but didn’t get around to will never be done.”

The old lady smiled, already enjoying the conversation. “Well, there’s always tomorrow, dear,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe,” said the girl with a dreamy look in her eyes. “But nobody really knows what happens when you go to sleep at night. What if you wake up each day as a completely different person? I mean, it feels like you’ve always been who you are today, but what if it’s all an illusion? I think tomorrow I’ll be somebody else. Somebody with different dreams, different likes and dislikes, a totally different me.”

Both women sat quietly for a while and thought about this impromptu and unlikely theory of the universe. The girl was the first to speak again. She switched the cigarette to her left hand and extended her right toward the old lady, saying as she did, “My name is Karen Owens.”

“How do you do,” the old lady replied, “I am Elena Brac, but everybody calls me Laney.”

“Why?” asked Karen as they lightly clasped hands.

“Why what?”

“Why does everybody call you Laney if your name is Elena?”

“Well,” Laney began, “I come from a large family. I guess the younger nieces and nephews had trouble pronouncing ‘Elena’ and started to call me ‘Laney’ instead. The name just stuck, and everyone started using it.”

Karen was still not completely satisfied with this explanation. “It doesn’t bother you that people call you something other than your real name?” she asked.

“Oh, I suppose it did at first, but I’ve been Laney for so long now that it feels like my given name. It just doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“Are you traveling by yourself, Elena?”

“Yes, I’m going to Pensacola to visit my nephew.”

“Really?” Karen exclaimed. “I’m going to Pensacola too, to see Joey.”

“Joey?”

“He’s my fiancée,” explained Karen. “Wow, it still feels strange to say that. We were engaged this past summer, but we haven’t had much time together since then. He’s in the Navy. Lieutenant J.G. Joseph Collings,” she said with pride in her voice.

“You must be very excited,” said Laney. “Is he stationed in Pensacola?”

“No, his ship is in port there for a few weeks. He called me on the phone yesterday and said ‘get on up here as fast as you can,’ so here I go.”

Laney smiled approvingly and said, “How nice.”

When Aunt Laney graduated from high school, she immediately went to work full time to help support the family. Her father, my grandfather, had died years earlier. I don’t remember much about him, but Grandma never spoke kindly of him. If she is to be believed, Grandpa was a drunk and a rabble-rouser.

Laney had a very serious affair with a young man when she was twenty or twenty-one. I was still young enough so that all I learned about it is what I could glean from snatches of adult conversation or gossip. His name was Ronny or Danny or something like that, and he was a serviceman. Grandma didn’t approve of him. But then Grandma disapproved of every spouse her children brought into the family, my own father included. The whole episode culminated in a very emotional event, the details of which I have never been able to completely discern. Apparently, there was a shouting match between Laney, her boyfriend, and my grandmother. The net result was that the boyfriend left and was never heard from again.

In the following years, Laney’s role in the family became increasingly well-defined. Her only sister, my mother, had already married and the boys quickly grew up and married or joined the service. The youngest quit school in the eighth grade and went out to seek his fortune.

I don’t think Laney made a conscious decision to stay home and take care of her mother, but that is the job that eventually fell to her by default. When Grandma became ill and could no longer make a living for herself, the dependent-provider roles suddenly reversed for her and Laney, and my aunt found herself in a situation from which escape was very unlikely.

It was completely dark outside by now. The electric lights within the bus were dim. A few people had turned on reading lights, but for the most part, the mood and the lighting were subdued and relaxed. Laney and Karen sat quietly for a while, but they both knew that a certain spark had passed between them, signals had been exchanged, and they would most likely continue their friendly conversation before the all-night trip was over.

TO CONTINUE ON THE BUS RIDE WITH AUNT LANEY, CLICK BELOW:

Jim Dutton © 2021