The School Bus Driver
The school bus driver was named Jai. It rhymed with chai. He was looking at his wife’s breasts in a photograph. They were tight and perky in the white spandex top she wore. Below that, her bikini bottom was just a patch of cloth in the front, held up by thin strings tied into a small bow. She was sitting on the white sheets of an unmade hotel bed and looking straight at the camera, her knees tucked underneath her. The school bus driver thought his wife looked odd in these vacation pictures. She’d never posed this way before, for him. Her black hair was set in big soft curls and she looked like a child’s doll: blue eyelids, long artificial eyelashes, round rosy cheeks, red lips. She would never, on her own, make herself up like this. This bikini would never be something she’d choose for herself. “Hee keyow,” she would say, shaking her head in disapproval if he ever suggested she wear anything even slightly revealing. This bikini must have been Frank’s idea.
“Oh, Frank. He’s such a goofball,” she said, giggling, trying to make light of the whole thing. Frank was her boss at Coffee Time.
The school bus driver had intended the trip to Laos to be a surprise gift for his wife. She was working long hours these days; she deserved a nice vacation. He bought one plane ticket (it was all he could afford at the time), thinking she’d go alone to see her family. But when she asked Frank for time off from work, he said she could go—if he came along.
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“I’ve always wanted to see a foreign country with a native,” Frank had said.
He was in almost every one of these photos, smiling and posing with her cousins, parents, grandparents. But in the photos where Jai’s wife was in the white bikini, it must have been Frank behind the camera. There were so many of her alone.
The school bus driver and his wife lived in a newly built brick house—two-car garage, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a finished basement. There were two other houses exactly like it on the block. The developer was supposed to tear down the neighbouring shopping mall and parking lot to build more new homes like theirs, but there was some problem with the fees, the licences, the zoning approvals—it got too messy for the builder to deal with. So now, there were just these three identical brick houses between a shopping mall parking lot and a tall apartment building, all facing a busy main street. The developer needed to unload these homes quick, so no one questioned whether the bus driver and his wife could really afford it. Still, they owned a home of their own now, even if they couldn’t quite manage the mortgage payments. How could they, with the school bus driver working part-time and his wife making minimum wage at Coffee Time? They just barely made the monthly payments.
Sometimes when they were very short on money, the school bus driver’s wife would come home with extra cash, saying that Frank had given her a bonus at work. She said it was a bonus for her good work. “Just this one time. This bonus. For my good work,” she said. Frank was really good to them in that way.
Since her trip to Laos with Frank, the school bus driver’s wife had started to put in longer hours at work. She came home much later than usual now. At first, she blamed the bus schedule—they didn’t come as frequently after dark. She said, “You don’t know how scary it is, to be a woman standing there at the bus stop at night. I hold my keys in my hand and put them between my fingers so I’m ready to defend myself against some pervert. You just don’t know! ”
It didn’t make sense to him, but she was right. He didn’t know what it was like for a woman. The school bus driver suggested he pick her up after work. But she laughed and said, “Not in that big yellow thing you drive.” So she arranged for her friend Frank to pick her up on the way to work and to drive her home too. He was going to and leaving from the same place and at the same time, after all. It was only reasonable.
Frank drove a dark-green Jaguar. It was fancy. You never heard the engine at all, creeping down the street to pick up the school bus driver’s wife or to drop her off after work. He took good care of this car. Even in the winter, when there was snow, Frank’s car was always newly washed and polished. All year round, he kept it like this.
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When the school bus driver thought about how things used to be, he would remember what his wife used to smell like when she first started working at Coffee Time, a bit like burnt coffee beans. He had to admit to himself that she seemed happier now, not having to rely on public transit. Now she smelled of cigars. Frank’s cigars. The scent was a bit metallic and dusty. Frank probably smoked in the car. That’s how the smell got all over her like that.
The first time it happened was on a Saturday afternoon. Frank came over. He rode up in his dark-green Jaguar and parked it in their driveway as if he lived there now. The school bus driver thought it was odd for Frank to stop by on a weekend, when his wife didn’t have to be at work. She greeted him at the door, invited him in. The school bus driver was watching television in the living room, but they did not join him.
His wife said they had to talk about work. “Very boring,” she said.
They went into the bedroom. The lock clicked into place.
He wondered what they were doing, if they were naked together. If so, how they kept it all so quiet. He didn’t want to make a big deal of it.
“Why don’t you want me to have any friends!” his wife said when he asked her about what happened in the bedroom with Frank. He hated arguments. He would do anything to avoid them. He had thought of forgetting this whole thing, but he didn’t want to be seen as spineless or, worse, not caring. Other times, when he tried to protest, to confront them, Frank would step in, his face red and sweaty, the white patches of his hair damp and rumpled, and say, “Be cool about this.”
Sometimes he was certain Frank was mocking him, but it was just too awful to think about. How could he be sure, and to whom could he bring this up? His wife would just say he was jealous of their friendship, and accuse him again of not letting her have any friends. He didn’t want to seem like a possessive, jealous husband, even if that’s how he was feeling.
“Jay. People form this kind of friendship in this country,” she said.
He thought for a few seconds that she was talking about someone else, or to someone else. But then he realized, that’s what his name was now. Jay. Like blue jay, a small blue bird, a little dot in the sky. He wanted to remind his wife that his name was Jai. It means heart in Lao! he wanted to yell. But then she would just remind him how men in this country do not raise their voices at women. Or tell him to practise his English. “No one here knows jai means heart,” she would say. So what if that’s what it means? It doesn’t mean anything in English. And English is the only language that matters here.
“That is just the way things are here,” she said.
And if he was going to live here, he had to learn to adapt and fit in and not be so uptight.
“Be cool,” she said in her perfect English, sounding just like Frank.
On Monday morning, the school bus driver went to the parking lot to dig his bus out of the snow. He took the shovel he had bought from Canadian Tire and started shovelling around the wheels. It had snowed five inches overnight, but the snow was light and fluffy; it hadn’t had time to harden or turn into ice yet. The shovelling was easy. In less than ten minutes he moved the snow out of the way as easily as if he were dusting. He did not really have to shovel the bus out—the tires could have handled it—but out of habit, he did.
He thought about clearing off the snow from the top of the bus. He didn’t want the snow to fall off in chunks and land on a car driving behind him. But even with the shovel he couldn’t reach the top of the bus on his own and he hadn’t brought a ladder. For now, this would just have to do. When the school bus driver was done shovelling around the wheels, he threw the shovel on the floor of the front seat and turned on the engine to warm up the inside of the bus. From the driver’s seat, he noticed a yellow slip of paper tucked underneath the windshield wiper.
Another one.
He went outside again, grabbed the parking ticket, and folded it until it became a tiny square. He tucked it into his wallet, underneath a picture of his wife. It was an old photo of her, in black and white, taken when they were still in Laos. She was smiling. Her hair was parted in the middle, her face plain, her smile shy. Next to the photo was a plastic flap that held his driver’s licence. He looked at his first name. Jai. It rhymes with chai. It means heart. Heart.
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