Having a car in the city is shameless if you really think about it. I would even go as far as to say it makes you a sinvergüenza, as my mother would say it. A typical passenger car carrying one person gets 25 passenger miles per gallon, while a conventional bus at capacity of 70 (seated and standing) gets 163 passenger miles per gallon.
Sinvergüenza is an insult of the highest order. Being devoid of shame is a character defect. I carry it with me, the family heirloom, in those moments as a source of comfort when the blood rises to my cheeks or when I stammer too much. I set my heart on never being a sinvergüenza. If anything, like my own mother would wholly admit, I am a woman with the shame built-in.
I can remember the first time I felt it, it’s a feeling you can quite curtail once it comes on. Like peeing. As in, it was 2005 and I was four years old that first time, peeing in the bathroom of a fast food restaurant after the car accident. To add to the present pile of embarrassment, this is the lone relic in my eroding memory of that day.
Not the singular moment of impact when my father’s car crashed into a white truck on the freeway; nor the sound of the car’s screeching brakes and tires skidding on scorched pavement and shattering tail lights. Out of my siblings’ shrieks and my own, my father’s bellowing siloed into silence over the years.
My family and I were living in Silver Spring, Maryland where my parents settled after leaving El Salvador in the late nineties. That day my father found out that Ma was being driven to her evening shifts at Wendy’s by someone else. Apparently, they both had their fair share of stepping outside the allotted lines. It seemed like it only counted as a loss of fidelity when it became domestic and mundane. Inadvertently, they were both modeling the wretched things you do when you are in love.
In the bathroom, I kept my legs curled closer into my pelvis to keep my underwear and shorts from pooling at my shins.
The police officer, a woman who cleaned the seat before my using, was a tall woman who was questioning my sister Karla and I in the bathroom. Karla, seven then, was sitting in one of the window seats in the back of the car, a bruise forming on her thigh. The police officer kept glancing over at me, on the toilet seat, and at Karla, washing her hands at the sink.
She repeated over again, “Are you okay?” The incessant question, not the event, made me burst out into tears. The kind of crying where you’re dry heaving, but nothing comes out.
I like to say these sorts of things wouldn’t happen on buses―only in cars.
I am a third-generation bus rider on my mother’s side and a real, bona fide pedestrian.
Partly because I manage to get around where I live—the suburban-urban enclave of North Bergen, New Jersey. It’s a thirty to forty minute bus ride outside of Times Square. Here, homes sit atop of one another with bodegas and other stores lining the main streets. Its entire 5.57 square miles is riddled with hilly terrain that I’ve learned to trudge through.
I rely on the bus for escape. The bus is a vehicle built with chagrined humility, unlike the standard 5-seater automobile. Its upholstered seats—usually covered in either a busy 80s design with swirling primary colors or a scratchy navy sensory purgatory—are mostly in pairs with some facing outward. Passengers can choose to sit shoulder-to-shoulder or face-to-face. A need for a semblance of emotional distance always pervades. Regular bus riders, like me, tuck themselves into corner seats facing windows. The bus is built to fit as many people in spite of this, with space and straphangers for standing.
I happen to get carsick easily, especially on long winding trips with sharp turns where a father is driving.
Last spring, my boyfriend Ammar was having a Crohn’s flare up, the first he had of this severity around me in our four-year relationship then. I was visiting him at his small college in the Berkshires in rural northwestern Massachusetts when he told me that he was in immense pain. He had to go to a hospital in Philadelphia that understood his medical history and had treated him before. By car, the nearly 300-mile trip was four hours. One we couldn’t make since I can’t drive and he couldn’t drive due to his condition.
He had managed to get a friend to give us a car ride to a bus stop to Albany. It was the first time I felt insecure about my inability to drive. It was also one of the only times he really needed me, when it is often the other way around.
Waves of nausea ebbed and flowed through me, pangs of a migraine were coming on. I thought about the time before the car accident in 2005. It made me think about my mother, consequently my father, and then about my gnawing queasiness again, from then and now.
There’s an obvious caveat to my previous statement. The men in my immediate family can and do drive. (I just can’t and haven’t.) Both of my older brothers managed to slink by the ancestral blight. My mother’s not-driving, as well her parents’, my older sister’s, and my own is not a pathology by any means. I also maintain that it is not a source of pride for us, but a result of generational inconvenient conveniences. The fact of not being able to drive and having to acknowledge it keeps us from obtaining our licenses.
My grandparents, like my parents and my siblings, were from San Miguel, El Salvador, the countryside where they lived alongside chickens, goats, and cows. It wasn’t out-of-place to walk everywhere in their village. They traipsed all over the village to sell and purchase items and went to rivers for washing clothes and as a pastime. They bummed rides from neighbors for longer distances.
Ma left El Salvador in 1999 at 26, following my father to Maryland, after he left a year earlier. She left my three older siblings with her parents before my parents could afford to get them here.
First, by bus and then by plane, Ma had long treks in between in her journey. This is to say my mother did not come of age behind the wheel. It was only until Pa was sick of her not being able to drive. When I was four, he gave her sporadic driving lessons in a parking lot of a park in Silver Spring. It was the late summer 2005, around three months before the accident. He gave her sporadic driving lessons in a parking lot of a park in Silver Spring. I was in the back, strapped in my kiddie car seat.
“¡You need to press your foot into the pedal harder!” my father repeated in the passenger seat.
My mother, the driver, gripped the wheel with shoulders tensed up high. We caught a glance at each other in the rearview mirror. I mustered my most sympathetic look.
She fidgeted in her seat, “I don’t want to accelerate too quickly.” He clicked his tongue and shook his head.
She gave it another try and pressed her foot on the pedal. The car shot forward and nearly crashed into a white oak tree before she slammed the brakes. We all heaved forward in our seats and my mother and I gasped. My father cursed, “¡Puchica vos![1]”
His interactions with her were unlike mine. On Saturday mornings, my place was atop his belly as he watched fútbol matches in the living room. By nightfall, I was nestled beside my mother on the couch, both of us tuned in to Sábado Gigante.
This driving lesson reminded me of early summer, before the car wreck, before Pa was deported to El Salvador. Pa was trying to teach me to swim in the community pool. He had put my entire body, stomach down, on his dark fleshy forearms in the pool with my limbs floating outwards like a starfish. He told me to paddle with them.
“You can’t let me go,” I whined. He shook his head, ensuring me that he wouldn’t.
Once I began paddling, he pulled his arms out from underneath me too soon. I like to think it was the same for him at the car accident, an issue of timing. His wrath couldn’t eclipse his paternal instinct. Like my mother, he just braked too late.
I thrashed for the few seconds I was under water. The taste of chlorine lingered in my throat long after he yanked me out.
We never did finish our lessons—in swimming or in driving.
On the bus from Albany to New York City, I curled into the crook between Ammar’s shoulder and neck. I’m careful not to lie into him too much to hurt him since his flare up makes him more sensitive. He sits near the window with eyes shut but unsleeping.
Displaying this morsel of affection is only somewhat of a bus faux pas. Only in buses can such a rigid display be seen as brazen. I could hear my mother’s half-disapproval. Pórtense bien. Behave yourselves. It peters out like it usually does.
Peering over him and out the window, we passed through the Lincoln tunnel and into Times Square. He adjusts himself and my arms so that one arm is draped over his shoulder, and he presses a chaste kiss to my cheek. He always helps himself to my affection. It is important to note that on many instances Ammar has admitted to his shamelessness, revels in it even. He jokingly chalks it up to being Lebanese, a pride so effervescent and unabashed. It felt foreign to someone like me, raised on headlines that framed my motherland as something to escape.
Moments like this, in his vulnerability, I consider Ammar’s long-standing offer of driving lessons that I’ve refused over the years. He even offers up his own father. For him to teach me and their 1989 navy blue Ford Probe for the cut-cost of a thousand dollars. I was learning to be well-versed in the kind of love that was devoid of my parents’ fingerprints, unmarred by past losses.
“They don’t even let you drive it,” I tell him when he insists. His parents purchased the car as newlyweds in the United States. Ammar and his family lived in Beirut, Lebanon until they moved to the U.S. when he was fifteen.
In the dark reflection of the window, I saw our melding silhouettes. I like us this way. The only way we can be on buses.
[1] Puchica is similar to “damn” or “darn”- a light curse word in the Salvadoran dialect of caliche. “Vos” is what Central Americans often use instead of “you”.
Allison Argueta-Claros is a Salvadoran-American writer raised in North Jersey. She studied migration studies, journalism, and creative writing at New York University’s Gallatin School. Her work has appeared in De Los, the Latine news initiative at the Los Angeles Times. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction, and is an incoming MFA candidate at New York University’s Creative Writing Program.