By Margaret Camille Berliant

The bus is filthy, the windows grimy, she can barely see the billboards she passes on her way home and somebody has pissed in the back again which is why she always chooses a seat by the driver, and safely she says, Good evening sir polite, as always, like her mother taught her, but in English because she forces herself to even think in English, but the driver acts as though she is invisible even though she sits on this bus at the same time and in the same seat five days a week on her way home from cleaning Mrs. Everly’s house and before she leaves for her office cleaning job, because she doesn’t want to sit in her apartment by herself, after a dinner of moro de Habichuelas, in front of the one window that faces the air shaft and watch the first snowflakes float down, down, down, worried the layers she has on to keep her warm come February won’t be enough and like those snowflakes she thinks that any chance of being surprised is melting away after 5 years in America, with the same routine of cleaning bathrooms, five of them on Mondays, and dusting shelves on Tuesdays, and doing floors on Wednesdays — because Mrs. Everly is predictable in how she wants that big old house cleaned and she cleans, and mops and dusts and comes home with the hope that a weekly letter from mami has arrived, always signed xxoo we love you and miss you and thank you for the money for the boys and sometimes included is a picture colored with a pencil from Luis and a sentence or two from Alejandro, her sons, her loves, now 15 and 9, and she tells them in her letters back, as she stares at the flat black and white picture of them, that one day they’ll be surprised when they hear the wheeze of the buses brakes and see her step off into the humid air and tread the dusty road and walk into the house her arms heavy with hugs and kisses for them and she will look in their eyes and see all the English phrases she has learned for a surprise written on their faces, oh yes they will be happy campers, her boys will be left speechless, she could knock them over with a feather, and coming home like this will knock their socks off and take their breath away but for now she has to do as mami said,

— give what you want to get, 

—putting a hand into her purse and she feels her daily pay of 4 $20 bills, 1 $10 bill, 1 $5bill, 5 $1bills wrapped with a blue rubber band from Mrs. Everly’s kitchen junk drawer and she unrolls the dollar bills and when the bus stops she walks down the steps, nearly slipping on the watery black vinyl before her good-by is taken by the wind and she enters the corner bodega where it’s comfortable to say buenas noches to the black haired girl behind the plexiglass shield at the register who is tapping at her phone with long pink nails and who doesn’t raise her head but says hi and as she’s walking down the cereal aisle she wonders what this young girls hopes and dreams are and it ignites in her a remembrance, in Spanish, of what she wished for at that age which was to be swept off her feet by a handsome man with black eyes and a willing smile and she thinks it’s funny that her mami told her that if you sweep your feet you can prevent a marriage but she was told too late — so she takes a one dollar bill from her money roll, as she does the last Friday of each month, and places it behind a box of Fruit Loops, and as she walks down the bread aisle she chooses to place another bill under a loaf of Wonder bread, and another under a bitter orange, and the last two tucked under a box of Pampers and a bottle of Coco Rico where she pauses to imagine how the people who find these dollars will feel, the surprise, the delight, she can almost see a little boy Luis’ age begging his mami for the drink and finding the bill tucked behind it and running to her and the mami is infected by the surprise too which causes some shift from her predictable life and some satisfaction in being able to give to others what she herself would like and before she exits the bodega she goes to the register to purchase a box of cracker jacks because then she has a surprise and today it’s a pink plastic ring — and after walking the blocks to her apartment she places the ring in a glass bowl in the center of her table to be nestled amongst the other surprises, 65 whistles and magnifying glasses and comic booklets and baseball cards and stickers and animal figurines and charms and she goes to the corner of the room and with a sigh that can be heard in Spanish or Ukrainian or Tagalog or Farsi or any language, for its meaning is universal, she pulls open the closet door and takes off her apron and black dress and places them on the hanger for tomorrow. 

*   *.  *

For Margaret Camille Berliant, writing is a logical extension of her lifetime love of stories. Her mother and grandmother before her brought family lore to life through the art of vibrant storytelling. Teaching the deaf helped her understand the value of language in all its forms, and her years of work as a psychotherapist revealed the power in the language of the heart. She lives in Rochester, New York.