No Conductor, No Mercy
"Where did that girl go, who did not feed my machine?"
The bus driver's voice still rings in my ears, thirty years later. I can still see myself, nineteen years old, standing frozen on those steps, the exact moment I realized... oh. It doesn't happen this way in this country.
Back home, a bus had a conductor. A man who walked the aisle, took your coins by hand, tore your ticket, called your stop like it mattered. You climbed on and trusted the system to carry you. Nobody asked you to understand a machine. Nobody asked you to be your own conductor.
So there I stood, coin in hand, waiting for a palm that never came. Behind me, a line of commuters shifted in that particular silence that says, without a single word, move it along. I fed my dollar in wrong, then wrong again, the machine spitting it back at me like it, too, had opinions about foreigners. The driver's question wasn't unkind. It was just loud, and public, and aimed directly at the girl holding up his entire route. A stranger finally reached past me, turned the bill face up, and fed it through without comment. I sat down burning, not from embarrassment exactly, but from the strange vertigo of being nineteen, newly married, and suddenly unqualified for something as ordinary as getting to class.
That vertigo followed me into the classroom. I turned in my first essay with the quiet confidence of a girl who'd diagrammed sentences for sport back home. It came back with a single red circle, not around an argument, but around one word. Colour.
Mind you, this was 1995. Pre-internet, pre-everything. No Google, no Yahoo, no ChatGPT, no nothing to save me. Just a Webster's dictionary and an old Britannica on the shelf, paper books and memory, and whatever I could piece together on my own.
My professor explained, not unkindly, that this letter didn't live here. I stared at that circled U like it owed me money.
Philosophy class finished the job. I dropped a line from Shakespeare into a debate the way I'd been trained, as proof of a properly educated mind. My professor asked, genuinely puzzled, whether I meant to be arguing philosophy or reciting literature. I hadn't realized America kept the two in separate rooms.
Nobody hands you a manual for any of this. You just collect the small failures, a fare machine, a red circle, a raised eyebrow, until one day they stop stinging and start becoming stories. You've built something instead. A third grammar, a third way of moving through a room, belonging fully to neither country and entirely to yourself.
I still fold dollar bills with slightly too much ceremony. I still spell colour before my fingers correct me. And somewhere on a bus in Long Island, a nineteen year old girl is still standing on those steps, learning, for the first time, that the world does not wait for you to catch up.
That's not confusion. That's Cheekyda., learning and building every step, this time with a Smile.
