by Rachel Simon
The Story of Beautiful Girl
Rachel Simon
Hachette Digital, Inc. (2011)
Rating: ****
Tags: Literary, Psychological, General, People With Disabilities, Fiction
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It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten. Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone-Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught. But before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her." And so begins the 40-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia-lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.
Amazon.com Review
It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten. Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone-Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught. But before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her." And so begins the 40-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia-lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love.
Exclusive Essay from Rachel Simon
When The Story of Beautiful Girl came out, I kept getting asked two questions. Why was I drawn to writing disability-themed literature? And was it hard to write from the point of view of characters with disabilities?
My answer to the first question begins with this basic fact: for one month every year, I am a twin.
My sister Beth, who has an intellectual disability, was born eleven months after me. So every year when I visit her for her birthday, the first thing we both say is, "Now we’re twins!" And for the next thirty days, as she gleefully moves through her days wearing the Tweety Bird shirts and using the Scooby Doo stickers I bought for her big celebration, we are indeed twins. Then my birthday rolls around, and when I visit her for that admittedly more secondary occasion, and she thrusts dozens of handmade cards at me, all of which express her happiness at my coming to see her, the first thing we both say is, "Now we’re not twins."
As with any siblings who are so close in age, we’ve shared a lot: parents, a brother and sister, a challenging family history, bedrooms, opinions, dreams, tears, jokes, anxieties, secrets, unspoken understandings, and sideways glances. So I have a reasonably good sense of how my sister feels, what she thinks, who she cares about, and why she does what she does.
Of course, there are additional layers to our relationship because of her disability. I feel a sense of responsibility toward her and she feels a level of trust in me. We’ve both always known that, whenever necessary, I will act as a go-between: I will explain to her the things she doesn’t understand about the world, and I will explain to the world the things it doesn’t understand about her.
At the same time, since she is a person with a disability, I’ve spent my life noticing--and being annoyed at--how so much of the world has got it all wrong when it comes to my sister and others like her. How she gets ignored by waitresses, snickered at by teenagers, patronized by people who assume she’s helpless, underestimated by people who assume she’s angelic. In addition, I’ve pondered many of the deepest issues about the mind. What is universal about intelligence? About sorrow and longing? About pleasure and love? On top of all this, I’ve long wondered: Why does so much of the public just not get it? And how, given that some people like my sister never get seen or acknowledged or heard by the world, might that ever change?
In 2002, I tried to do what I could to answer those thoughts. I wrote a memoir about my relationship with Beth, Riding The Bus With My Sister, which is about both her present-day passion of riding city buses and our lives as siblings from birth to middle age. The book, which was also adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie by the same name, led to my getting asked to give talks around the country. At every talk, I met more and more people with disabilities, their family members, and the professionals who work with them. They told me their stories, and I started to feel a new urge. I wanted to do whatever I could to give voice to those who had never been heard.
I realized I was in an unusual position to take on that responsibility. As a family member, I wouldn’t get bogged down by cliches and stereotypes. As someone who’d already published two books of fiction before Riding The Bus With My Sister, I wouldn’t have to stick with nonfiction, nor was I daunted by the idea of a novel. As a sister who’d stood up for Beth since the day I was conscious of my own existence, I felt a sense of mission. And as a once-a-year twin, I had developed the skill of being a go-between.
This gets me to the second question. Was it hard to write The Story of Beautiful Girl through the eyes of characters with disabilities?
I wish I could say it took a huge amount of effort. But there’s another word that’s synonymous with being a go-between: being a translator. I’ve spent my life translating the world into terms my sister could comprehend--and translating my sister into terms the world could comprehend.
So when I sat down to write the characters of Beautiful Girl and Number Forty-Two, I just did what I’ve always done. I wrote about the world’s rules and injustices and rewards and irrationalities as those characters would perceive them. And I wrote about their wonderings and yearnings and motivations and joys in ways that readers would understand.
Neither character is like my sister. And both go through adversity and anguish the likes of which my sister has never seen. But I wouldn’t say that writing their experiences was hard for me.
I would say, instead, that it was heart-opening and soul-deepening.
I would say, instead, that it was fun.
From Publishers Weekly
In this enthralling love story, Lynnie, a young white developmentally disabled woman with limited speech, and Homan, a deaf African-American man, meet at the Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded in the late 1960s. Despite strict rules, poor conditions, an abusive staff, and the couple's lack of language, Lynnie and Homan share tender moments. After their escape, a few days of freedom not only enables the secretly pregnant Lynnie to give birth outside the walls of the corrupt institution, it also secures the couple's admiration for one another. Fears of discovery force them to leave the baby in the hands of a nurturing widow, Martha Zimmer. Soon after, the school's staff apprehend Lynnie, while Homan flees. Although their stories diverge and unfold independently of one another, memories of their short time together sustain them for more than 40 years as they develop the confidence to eventually parent, learn to sign and speak, and finally, reunite. Simon (Riding the Bus with My Sister) who grew up with a developmentally disabled sister, has written an enormously affecting read, and provided sensitive insight into a complex world often dismissed by the "abled." (May)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Copyright Page
For those who were put away
Telling our stories is holy work.
—The Reverend Nancy Lane, Ph.D.<
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PART I
HIDING
The Bride’s Request
THE WIDOW
1968
At the end of the night that would change everything, the widow stood on her porch and watched as the young woman was marched down her front drive and shoved into the sedan. The girl did not fight back, bound and tied as she was, nor did she cry out into the chill autumn rain, so surely the doctor and his attendants thought they had won. They did not know, as the car doors slammed shut, the engine came on, and the driver steered them down the muddy hill toward the road, that the widow and the girl in the backseat had just defied them right under their noses. The widow waited until the taillights reached the bottom of the drive, then turned and entered her house. And as she stood at the foot of the staircase, hoping they’d show mercy to the young woman and worrying about the whereabouts of the runaway man, the widow heard the sound the doctor hadn’t been seeking. It was the sound that would always connect her to the girl and forever make her remember the man. It was the sweet, deep breaths of a hidden person. A sleeping stranger. A baby.
That November day had seemed as ordinary as any in the widow’s seventy years. The mail carrier had delivered letters, birds had flown south across her fields, and storm clouds had wheeled across the Pennsylvania sky. The farm animals were fed; the dishes were used and washed; new letters were placed in the roadside mailbox. Dusk fell. The widow lit the logs in the fireplace and settled into her reading chair. Then, perhaps thirty pages later, the clouds cracked open, releasing a deluge that made such a din that she peered over her tortoiseshell glasses toward the living room window. To her surprise, the rain cascaded so heavily, the glass looked opaque. After half a century on this farm, she’d seen no sights like this before; she would mention it in her letters tomorrow. Drawing the lamp closer, she lowered her eyes to her book.
For many hours, she shut out the din and concentrated on the page—a biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., gone just a few months from this life—but then became aware of a knocking on her door. She turned. Soon after their wedding day, when her husband was building onto the original one-room house to make room for a wife, she realized he’d never remarked on the view, with its sweeping fields, dense woods, and distant mountains, all watched over by the colorful vault of the sky. He lived here simply because the farm had been in his family and was thirty rolling miles, an hour’s drive, and a county line away from the closest town, Well’s Bottom, where she was a schoolteacher. As she’d watched the walls go up, she noticed how few windows he’d included, and how small each was, and understood she’d have to be satisfied with meager portions of the landscape. The front door, for instance, was all wood and no glass, with only a single window set in the wall to its left. But tonight’s storm obscured even that limited view. So the widow crossed the living room and turned the knob on the door.
She thought, at first, that there were two of them. A man and a woman. From under the roof of the porch, the man, a Negro, looked at her with startled eyes, as if unaware that the door upon which he’d been knocking had just pulled back. The woman beside him did not look up. Her skin was pale, and she was biting her lip. Her face was bone-bare, with shadows in every rise and dip. Was the woman as lean as she seemed? It was impossible to tell; she was covered in a gray blanket. No, several blankets. Wool, like bedding issued in the war, draped into layers of hoods and capes. The man’s arm lay protectively around the woman’s shoulders.
The widow turned back to the man. He too wore coverings, but they were not the same as the woman’s. USED CARS, read one. OPEN TILL NINE, read another. The widow recognized them as large signs from businesses in Well’s Bottom. Water was pouring off them, as it was from the sodden wool; her porch was now a puddle.
Dread squeezed the widow’s chest. Five years into retirement, she was long past the time when she knew all the faces in Well’s Bottom, and she did not know these. She should slam the door, call the police. Her husband’s rifle was upstairs; was she agile enough to bound up to their bedroom? But the man’s startled look was now melting toward desperation, and she knew they were running from something. The widow’s breath came out heavily. She wished she were not alone. Yet they were alone, too, and cold and frightened.
“Who are you?” the widow asked.
The woman slowly lifted her eyes. The widow caught the movement, but no sooner had she tilted her gaze up—the widow was slight, five feet one, and the woman before her was tall, though not as tall as the man—than the woman jerked her head back down.
Unlike the woman, the man had not acknowledged the widow’s voice. But he had noticed his companion’s quick gesture and retreat, and in response he gently rubbed her shoulder. It was a touch of tenderness, and even in the dim light that reached the porch from her reading lamp, the widow knew it was a look of caring. Yet she did not know that, in a trance of seeing what she’d forgotten she’d once felt herself, her face, too, revealed so much she was not saying.
The man looked back at the widow. A pleading came into his eyes, and he lifted his free hand. The widow flinched, thinking he was preparing to strike her. Instead he opened his fingers and flicked them toward the inside of the house, like a flipbook of a bird flying.
That’s when the widow realized the man could not hear.
“Oh,” she said, breath expelling her ignorance. “Please come in.”
She stepped aside. The man moved his hands in front of the woman. The woman nodded and clasped one of his hands, and they stepped over the threshold.
“You must be—are you?—please,” the widow mumbled, until, as she closed the door, her thin, schoolteacher voice finally settled on the proper statement: “Let’s get you out of those wet things.” Immediately she thought herself foolish; the man could not hear, the woman was focused on the lamp, and anyway, their backs were to her. As one they crept across the living room, their makeshift raincoats dripping, but the widow couldn’t bring herself to say anything. They appeared too relieved to be inside, mindful only of the closeness between them.
The man walked with muscular legs protruding from the oversize signs. His was evidently a body accustomed to labor, though why his legs were bare in November, the widow could not imagine. As for the woman, the blankets hung too low for a glimpse of anything aside from shoes—shoes that seemed too large. The woman’s gait was uneven, her posture a slouch. Yellow curls wisped out from the woolen hood, and the widow thought, She is like a child.
The fire had gone low, and now the widow drew open the fireplace screen and added a log. Behind her she heard the woman grunt. She turned. The woman was gazing at the fire, and as the widow watched, the woman’s face filled with curiosity. The man tightened his arm around her shoulder.
There were only two chairs by the fire: her reading chair, with muslin covers over the worn armrests, and the wooden chair where her husband had read his sporting magazines and westerns. The sofa sat farther back. I should offer that, she thought. Before she could, they lowered themselves to the chairs.
The widow stepped back and took them in. Her husband had lost the hearing in one ear before he’d passed away; otherwise she’d never known a person who couldn’t hear. And she’d never known someone quite like this woman. I should be scared, she told herself. But she thought of the passage in Matthew, which she’d not been in church to hear for years: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”
She moved toward the kitchen and glanced back as she crossed the dining room. They were still huddled together. The man’s hands were aloft, gesturing his words. The woman was grunting again, the sound easing like an assent.
Give them privacy, the widow told herself. Everyone needs privacy; most children could not add 13 + 29 if you stood behind their shoulders. Privacy could go too far, though; look at her husband, his heart encircled by silence. Look at her now. Except for monthly trips to the market, she was alone three hundred sixty-four days a year, one degree short of a full circle of privacy. Though there was that one
degree, Christmas Day, when the students of hers who’d blown like seeds across the country returned with children and grandchildren to visit relatives in Well’s Bottom, then stopped in at the widow’s open house. Her privacy was so complete, it was almost zero. But almost zero, her student John-Michael once said, is totally different from zero.
The widow let herself into the kitchen and put on the kettle. Yet even as she pulled down the flour, sugar, and oats she’d need for cookies, she asked herself larger questions. Who are they? Why are they out in this storm? The thought returned the pounding rain to her awareness. The river between the counties was sure to flood. She couldn’t hear her spoon in the batter.
In clear weather she could hear a great deal from her house. The songs of birds. The distant gurgle of the river. The rare vehicle out on Old Creamery Road, half a mile down the slope of her drive. Even the mail carrier’s truck, his AM radio wafting up her fields. But the best sound came when the mail carrier idled at her curb and flipped the mailbox flag from up, where she’d placed it the evening before as she’d secured newly composed correspondence to her students in the box, to horizontal, once the carrier ferried her greetings away. She hadn’t always heard that mailbox flag. Then Landon, the student who’d loved making dioramas and had grown up to be an artist, fashioned a little metal lighthouse that, one Christmas, he gave her as a gift, then attached to the mailbox with a brass hinge. It wasn’t just any lighthouse. When it was laid flat, the sign of no outgoing letters, its windows were dark, though when it was vertical, its windows lit up—and revealed the top of the lighthouse to be the head of a man. Her lighthouse man, she thought of it. How she loved hearing its brass hinge squeak.
She slid the cookie dough into the oven. Then she inched open the door and peered out.