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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 was also 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 aid.”

I smiled to myself, although I suppose it wasn’t funny, but something about the black defiant voice was so appealing. And, as I dared for a moment to look around the bus, I saw that most of the passengers were black: a puzzle.

The scenery, on which I tried to concentrate, was very beautiful: smooth blond hills, gently rising, and here and there crevasses of shadow; and sometimes a valley with a bright white farmhouse, white fences, green space. And everywhere the dark shapes of live oaks, a black drift of lace against the hills or darkly clustered in the valleys, near the farms.

All this was on our left, the east, as we headed south toward San Francisco (I hoped). To our right, westward, the view was even more glorious: flat green pasturelands stretching out to the glittering bay, bright gold water and blue fingers of land, in the late May afternoon sunshine.

The retarded boy seemed to have taken up a friendly conversation with some people across the aisle from him, although his voice was still very loud. “My grandfather lives in Vallejo,” he was saying. “Mom is that the sun over there?”

Just then, the bus turned right, turned off the freeway, and the driver announced, “We’re just coming into Vallejo, folks. Next stop is Oakland, and then San Francisco.”

I was on the wrong bus. Not on the express. Although this bus, thank God, did go on to San Francisco. But it would be at least half an hour late getting in. My heart sank as I thought, Oh, how angry Hortense will be.

The bus swung through what must have been the back streets of Vallejo. (A question: why are bus stations always in the worst parts of town, or is it that those worst parts grow up around the station?) As our bus ground to a halt, pushed into its slot in a line of other Greyhounds, before anyone else had moved, one of the women in the front seat stood up; she was thin, sharply angular, in a purple dress. She looked wonderful, I thought. “And you, you just shut up!” she said to the boy in the back.

That was her exit line; she flounced off the bus ahead of everyone else, soon followed by her friend and the handsome man who had dislodged me from my seat.

A few people applauded. I did not, although I would have liked to, really.

*  *  *  *  *

This was my situation: I was working in San Francisco as a statistician in a government office having to do with unemployment, and that office assigned me to an office in Sacramento for ten weeks. There was very little difference between the offices; they were interchangeable, even to the pale-green coloring of the walls. But that is why I was commuting back and forth to Sacramento.

I was living with Hortense (temporarily, I hoped, although of course it was nice of her to take me in) because my husband had just divorced me and he wanted our apartment—or he wanted it more than I did, and I am not good at arguing.

Hortense is older than I am, with grown-up children, now gone. She seems to like to cook and take care; and when I started commuting she told me she’d meet me at the bus station every night, because she worried about the neighborhood, Seventh Street near Market, where the bus station is. I suppose some people must have assumed that we were a lesbian couple, even that I had left my husband for Hortense, but that was not true; my husband left me for a beautiful young Japanese nurse (he is in advertising), and it was not sex or love that kept me and Hortense together but sheer dependency (mine).

*  *  *  *  *

A lot of people got off the bus at Vallejo, including the pale fat lady and her poor son; as they passed me I saw that he was clinging closely to his mother, and that the way he held his neck was odd, not right. I felt bad that in a way I had sided against him, with the fierce black lady in purple. But I had to admit that of the two of them it was her I would rather travel with again.

A lot of new people began to get on the bus, and again they were mostly black; I guessed that they were going to Oakland. With so many people it seemed inconsiderate to take up two seats, even if I could have got away with it, so I put my briefcase on the floor, at my feet.

And I looked up to find the biggest woman I had ever seen, heading right for me. Enormous—she must have weighed three times what I did—and black and very young.

She needed two seats to herself, she really did, and of course she knew that; she looked around, but almost all the seats were taken, and so she chose me, because I am relatively thin, I guess. With a sweet apologetic smile, she squeezed in beside me—or, rather, she squeezed me in.

“Ooooh, I am so big,” she said, in a surprisingly soft small voice. “I must be crushing you almost to death.”

“Oh no, I’m fine,” I assured her, and we smiled at each other.

“And you so thin,” she observed.

As though being thin required an apology, I explained that I was not that way naturally, I was living with an overweight friend who kept me on fish and salads, mostly.

She laughed. “Well, maybe I should move in with your friend, but it probably wouldn’t do me no good.”

I laughed, too, and I wondered what she did, what job took her from Oakland to Vallejo.

We talked, and after a while she told me that she worked in Oakland, as well as lived there, not saying at what, but that she was taking a course in Vallejo in the care of special children, which is what she really wanted to do. “ ‘Special’ mean the retards and the crazies,” she said, but she laughed in a kindly way, and I thought how good she probably would be with kids.

I told her about the retarded boy who got off the bus at Vallejo, after all those noisy questions.

“No reason you can’t tell a retard to quiet down,” she said. “They got no call to disturb folks, it don’t help them none.”

Right away then I felt better; it was okay for me not to have liked all that noise and to have sided with the black woman who told the boy to shut up.

I did like that big young woman, and when we got to Oakland I was sorry to see her go. We both said that we had enjoyed talking to each other; we said we hoped that we would run into each other again, although that seemed very unlikely.

*  *  *  *  *

In San Francisco, Hortense was pacing the station—very worried, she said, and visibly angry.

I explained to her that it was confusing, three buses leaving Sacramento for San Francisco at just the same time, five-thirty. It was very easy to get on the wrong one.

“Well, I suppose you’ll catch on after a couple of weeks,” she said, clearly without much faith that I ever would.

She was right about one thing, though: the San Francisco bus station, especially at night, is a cold and scary place. People seem to be just hanging out there—frightened-looking young kids, maybe runaways, belligerent-looking drunks and large black men, with swaggering hats, all of whom look mysteriously enraged. The lighting is a terrible white glare, harsh on the dirty floors, illuminating the wrinkles and grime and pouches of fatigue on all the human faces. A cold wind rushes in through the swinging entrance doors. Outside, there are more dangerous-looking loiterers, whom Hortense and I hurried past that night, going along Seventh Street to Market, where she had parked in a yellow zone but had not (thank God) been ticketed.

For dinner we had a big chef’s salad, so nutritious and slenderizing, but also so cold that it felt like a punishment. What I really would have liked was a big hot fattening baked potato.

I wondered, How would I look if I put on twenty pounds?

*  *  *  *  *

Early mornings at the Greyhound station are not so bad, with only a few drunks and lurching loiterers on the street outside, and it is easy to walk past them very fast, swinging a briefcase. Inside, there are healthy-looking, resolute kids with enormous backpacks, off to conquer the wilderness. And it is easy, of course, to find the right bus, the express to Sacramento; there is only one, leaving every hour on the hour. I almost always got to sit by myself. But somehow the same scenery that you see coming down to San Francisco is very boring viewed from the other direction. Maybe this is an effect of the leveling morning light—I don’t know.

One day, though, the bus was more crowded than usual and a young girl asked if she could sit next to me. I said okay, and we started up one of those guarded and desultory conversations that travel dictates. What most struck me about her was her accent; I could tell exactly where she was from—upstate New York. I am from there, too, from Binghamton, although I have taken on some other accents along the way, mainly my husband’s—Philadelphia. (I hope I do not get to sound like Hortense, who is from Florida.) Of course I did not ask the girl where she was from—too personal, and I didn’t have to—but she told me, unasked, that she worked in an office in Sacramento, which turned out to be in the building next to mine. That seemed ominous to me: a girl coming from exactly where I am from, and heading in my same direction. I did not want her to tell me any more about her life, and she did not.

Near Sacramento, the concrete road dividers have been planted with oleander, overflowing pink and white blossoms that quite conceal oncoming traffic in the other lanes. It is hard to believe that the highway commissioners envisioned such a wild profusion, and somehow it makes me uneasy to see all that bloom, maybe because I read somewhere that oleander is poisonous. Certainly it is unnaturally hardy.

The Sacramento station is more than a little weird, being the jumping-off place for Reno, so to speak. Every morning there are lines for the Reno buses, lines of gamblers, all kinds: big women in bright synthetic fabrics, and seedy old men, drunks, with tired blue eyes and white indoor skin, smoking cigarillos. Gamblers seem to smoke a lot, I noticed. I also noticed that none of them are black.

A large elevated sign lists the departures for South Lake Tahoe and Reno: the Nugget express, which leaves at 3:40 a.m.; the dailies to Harrah’s, starting at 9:05 a.m.; and on weekends you can leave for Reno any time between 2:35 a.m. and 11:15 p.m. I find it very hard to imagine going to Reno at any of those times, but then I am not a gambler.

*  *  *  *  *

Unfortunately, I again saw that same girl, Miss Upstate New York, the next few times that I took the correct bus, the express at five-thirty to San Francisco. She began to tell me some very boring things about her office—she did not like her boss, he drank—and her boyfriend, who wanted to invest in some condominiums at South Lake Tahoe.

*  *  *  *  *

I knew that Hortense would never believe that it was a mistake, and just possibly it was not, but a few nights later I took another wrong bus, really wrong: the local that stops everywhere, at Davis and Dixon and Fairfield, all down the line. Hortense was going to be furious. I began to work on some plausible lies: I got to the station late, this wrong bus left from the gate that the right bus usually leaves from. But then I thought, How ridiculous; and the very fact of Hortense’s being there waiting for me began to seem a little silly, both of us being grown up.

Again most of the passengers were black, and I sensed a sort of camaraderie among them. It occurred to me that they were like people who have recently won a war, although I knew that to be not the case, not at all, in terms of their present lives. But with all the stops and starts the trip was very interesting; I would have been having a very good time if it were not for two things: one, I was worried about Hortense; and, two, I did not see again any of those people who were on my first wrong trip—not the very fat black woman or the skinny one in purple, or the handsome man who displaced me from my seat.

Just in front of me were an elderly man and woman, both black, who seemed to be old friends accidentally encountered on this bus. They exchanged information about how they both were, their families, and then the woman said, “Well, the weekend’s coming up.” “Yep, jes one more day.” “Then you can rest.” “Say, you ever see a poor man rest?”

Recently I read an interview with a distinguished lady of letters, in which she was asked why she wrote so obsessively about the very poor, the tiredest and saddest poorest people, and that lady, a Southerner, answered, “But I myself am poor people.”

That touched me to the quick, somehow. I am too. Hortense is not, I think.

Across the aisle from me I suddenly noticed the most beautiful young man I had ever seen, sound asleep. A golden boy: gold hair and tawny skin, large beautiful hands spread loosely on his knees, long careless legs in soft pale washed-out jeans. I hardly dared look at him; some intensity in my regard might have wakened him, and then on my face he would have seen—not lust, it wasn’t that, just a vast and objectless regard for his perfection, as though he were sculptured in bronze, or gold.

*  *  *  *  *

I haven’t thought much about men, or noticed male beauty, actually, since my husband left, opted out of our marriage—and when I say that he left it sounds sudden, whereas it took a long and painful year.

Looking back, I now see that it began with some tiny wistful remarks, made by him, when he would come across articles in the paper about swingers, swapping, singles bars. “Well, maybe we should try some of that stuff,” he would say, with a laugh intended to prove nonseriousness. “A pretty girl like you, you’d do okay,” he would add, by which he really meant that he thought he would do okay, as indeed he has—did, does. Then came some more serious remarks to the effect that if I wanted an occasional afternoon with someone else, well, I didn’t have to tell him about it, but if I did, well, he would understand. Which was a little silly, since when I was not at my office working I was either doing some household errand or I was at home, available only to him.

The next phase included a lot of half-explained or occasionally overexplained latenesses, and a seemingly chronic at-home fatigue. By then even I had caught on, without thinking too specifically about what he must have been doing, which I could not have stood. Still, I was surprised, and worse than surprised, when he told me that he was “serious” about another woman. The beautiful Japanese nurse.

The golden boy got off at Vallejo, without our exchanging any look. Someone else I won’t see again, but who will stay in my mind, probably.

*  *  *  *  *

Hortense was furious, her poor fat face red, her voice almost out of control. “One hour—one hour I’ve been waiting here. Can you imagine my thoughts, in all that time?”

Well, I pretty much could. I felt terrible. I put my hand on her arm in a gesture that I meant as calming, affectionate, but she thrust it off, violently.

That was foolish, I thought, and I hoped no one had seen her. I said, “Hortense, I’m really very sorry. But it’s getting obvious that I have a problem with buses. I mix them up, so maybe you shouldn’t come and meet me anymore.”

I hadn’t known I was going to say that, but, once said, those words made sense, and I went on. “I’ll take a taxi. There’re always a couple out front.”

And just then, as we passed hurriedly through the front doors, out onto the street, there were indeed four taxis stationed, a record number, as though to prove my point. Hortense made a strangled, snorting sound.

We drove home in silence; silently, in her dining room, we ate another chef’s salad. It occurred to me to say that since our dinners were almost always cold my being late did not exactly spoil them, but I forbore. We were getting to be like some bad sitcom joke: Hortense and me, the odd couple.

*  *  *  *  *

The next morning, as I got in line to buy a new commuter ticket, there was the New York State girl. We exchanged mild greetings, and then she looked at the old ticket which for no reason I was clutching, and she said, “But you’ve got one ticket left.”

And she explained what turned out to be one more system that I had not quite caught on to: the driver takes the whole first page, which is why, that first day, I thought he had taken two coupons. And the back page, although another color, pink, is a coupon, too. So my first ride on the wrong bus to Vallejo and Oakland was free; I had come out ahead, in that way.

Then the girl asked, “Have you thought about a California Pass? They’re neat.” And she explained that with a California Pass, for just a few dollars more than a commuter ticket, you can go anywhere in California. You can’t travel on weekends, but who would want to, and you can go anywhere at all—Eureka, La Jolla, Santa Barbara, San Diego; you can spend the weekend there and come back on an early Monday bus. I was fascinated, enthralled by these possibilities. I bought a California Pass.

The Sacramento express was almost empty, so I told the girl that I had some work to do, which was true enough. We sat down in our separate seats and concentrated on our briefcases. I was thinking, of course, in a practical way about moving out from Hortense’s. That had to be next—and more generally I was considering the possibilities of California, which just then seemed limitless, enormous.

*  *  *  *  *

Actually, the Greyhound system of departure gates for buses to San Francisco is very simple; I had really been aware all along of how it worked. Gate 5 is the express, Gate 6 goes to Vallejo and Oakland before San Francisco and Gate 8 is the all-stop local, Davis, Dixon, everywhere. On my way home, I started to line up at Gate 6, my true favorite route, Vallejo and Oakland, when I realized that it was still very early, only just five, and also that I was extremely hungry. What I would really have liked was what we used to call a frappe in Binghamton, something cold and rich and thick and chocolate. Out here called a milkshake. And then I thought, Well, why not? Is there some law that says I can’t weigh more than one-ten?

I went into the station restaurant, and at the counter I ordered a double-scoop milkshake. I took it to a booth, and then, as I was sitting there, savoring my delicious drink, something remarkable happened, which was: the handsome black man who so angrily displaced me on that first trip came up to me and greeted me with a friendly smile. “Say, how you, how’re you doing this evening?”

I smiled back and said that I was fine, and he went on past with his cup of coffee, leaving me a little out of breath. And as I continued to sip and swallow (it tasted marvelous) I wondered: Is it possible that he remembers me from that incident and this is his way of apologizing? Somehow that seemed very unlikely, but it seemed even more unlikely that he was just a friendly sort who went around greeting people. He was not at all like that, I was sure. Even smiling he had a proud, fierce look.

Was it possible that something about me had struck him in just the right way, making him want to say hello?

In any case, I had to read his greeting as a very good sign. Maybe the fat young woman would get on the bus at Vallejo again. Maybe the thin one in purple. And it further occurred to me that traveling all over California on the Greyhound I could meet anyone at all.