There is a woman who rides the express bus from San Francisco to north Berkeley; she looks Scandinavian but she was born and raised in LA. According to her neck she is around fifty, but she colors her pale hair and she is not fat; from a distance she looks thirty-five. She is tall, maybe five foot ten, slim, blonde, blue-eyed. Her hair is thin and very straight, her eyes protrude, and her long fingers are knobby, with cuticles which are triangular instead of oval.

She wishes she had at least an exotic name, but her mother called her Mary. Just Mary. Tall and modest in sensible shoes, with little makeup and no conversation. She grew up in North Hollywood and she went to Grant for high school before she came to Cal. She went to Cal before she entered the work force. She got stuck in a secretarial rut when she went to work.

She hates LA. In her opinion, coming from there is just one more thing that makes her nondescript.

Mary had childhood asthma. They caught it early and she carried an inhaler everywhere with her. It was another thing that made her different in a sorry way. A lot of kids were wheezing a little then, but most of them didn’t tote meds.

Poor Mary. She grew too tall too young and of course she hunched. She was luckily blonde, but she burned almost as readily as an albino, so the same LA sun that bleached her thin hair white blistered her shoulders and required her to coat her nose in zinc oxide.

She wore coke-bottle-bottom glasses until she got contacts at seventeen. The contacts helped her see better but made her protruding eyes wetter. Her hair was hopeless: too thin to style and too straight to curl.

She grew up an only child in LA. In fact, after her father left them when she was twelve, she lived alone with her toxic mom. Mary who hated the sight of her toes was a kid in a barefoot place. Knowing she should have been happy about all the swimming pools, especially with her asthma, she spent her young life avoiding the sunlight.

She believed that her life would begin when she got out of LA. She enrolled at Cal in 1967, at the age of eighteen. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had the smoothness of youth. She had the long blonde hair, and while it was neither thick nor luxuriant, it hung down her thin back without a frizz.

She wore battered blue jeans well on her long legs, and her knobby feet looked no worse than anyone else’s, especially if the looker was on acid: then all feet were indescribably ugly…

She took sociology and anthropology courses, and she took up smoking. First Tareytons and later Benson&Hedges (menthol). She tried a lot of marijuana (and thereon discovered the tastiness of peanut-butter-and-marshmallow-creme sandwiches), a modicum of mescaline, a little LSD. As soon as she could she got rid of her virginity (to a neighbor-friend named Tom), but she didn’t enjoy that; she paced around her apartment afterwards, waiting thirty-two hours for the sperm to die.

She liked sex a little better two years later, with a young man she loved. She met Wayne in a classical archaeology survey course – he was a TA – and they started talking and dating and finally screwing, to the point where Mary kind of enjoyed it and was ready to try some variations. But then Christmas came along and Wayne went with her to LA. And was so put off by Mary’s mother that they ended up arguing enough to break up, and they never managed to reconcile.

After that Mary tried a woman – her own friend Barbara – but she liked lesbian love even less than the heterosexual kind.

She looked at her features in the mirror, and she saw she was ugly. Pop-eyed, with insufficient chin and a harsh nose. Thin-lipped, pasty-toned, wet-eyed. But still, if she tossed her hair about so it draped her thin cheeks, if she tipped her head back so her chin became more prominent, if she squinted a little and hazed the whole picture, she thought she could pass. Mary tried to be hip, but she loved Barbra Streisand.

Wayne backed away from their relationship after he and Mary spent that Christmas with her mother. He had little time for anything but his lab work, and then he went to Eastern Europe for research, with no definite idea about returning.

Mary took her bachelor’s degree in sociology and got a job in an insurance office in Oakland.

She tried to have a relationship with her friend Barbara but that didn’t work. She occasionally dated. She bought a small house in Berkeley. Time passed.

She cut her hair and started coloring it. She wore short skirts for a time and had sex with a few married men. She was always slim, and she looked good from behind. With a wig and a bit of cosmetic surgery she could have been a knockout. As it was, she knew her eyes were too watery and prominent, and her hair was still hopelessly thin and straight.

She rose as far as she could as a secretary in her company, and then she got a few more raises and began earning more than her job was worth. This caused some of her co-workers to resent her, which didn’t enhance Mary’s quality of corporate life. In general she was not a happy person.

It can take over an hour to commute home on the express bus. With little traffic and an aggressive driver the run can be made in thirty minutes, but that day was slow. There was the usual delay in the curve onto 80. This quarter’s driver doesn’t like to change lanes so he never gets in the HOV corridor on the freeway. Most regular riders think he’s a bit too cautious and courteous.

Mary was on the bus, wishing her mother were dead. She was sitting on an aisle seat as usual, not reading as usual, feeling emotional about her mother’s recovery from pneumonia. She had just learned that her mom would make it. The woman has the constitution of an ox. Advanced Alzheimers housed in a strong body. And it’s not even like she can move her mother north for the duration. Mary’s mom still has a few Lutheran connections in LA who comfort her and can help care for her.

Mary is in a dead-end job. She has enough in savings; along with her mother’s money, she can afford to quit. She knows that she has to move back to LA. She was realizing that, trying to accept it, during that long commute.

When the bus reached her stop, the driver neglected to release the back door. Mary was standing at the back steps waiting for the green light that would allow her to push the door open when the driver began to leave the bus stop.

She didn’t yell “back door!” the way most riders would. She didn’t even pull the cord in emphatic panic. She took the door handle in her right fist and began rattling it violently. At the same time she shrieked “Let me out! Stop! Let me off!” as if her life depended on it. All the while she faced the exit door, not the driver.

The driver stopped the bus. Impulsively he yelled back at Mary, “All right, already! Jeesh. Take it easy! You don’t have to yell…” but she pushed the door open and proceeded, no hurry, off the bus and on her regular route down the street.

The next day, and even the day after that, the driver reminisced about Mary’s panic when the bus got to that stop. Then he didn’t mention it any more.

The regular riders agreed that she was deliberately taking another bus. Embarrassed of course. But after a few days they knew she was gone.

Nowadays it takes no time at all to get to LA.