The Story of Beautiful Girl

by Rachel Simon

  Finally Drummer gave up.

  That night, like every night, Homan sat down in his yellow chair. Everyone thought he came here after dinner because its big seat fit his long legs. But there was a secret reason. Beneath the seat, hidden by the black cloth that covered the coils, pushed deep inside, was his money. If they had known, they would have laughed, since in this place they pooled their money and bought everything together. Though to Homan, his money was important not because of what it could buy, but because it was the one thing he’d held on to all these years.

  The yellow chair, which he’d positioned just so in the center of the common room, embraced him. Someone rolled him the plastic ball he liked to hold whenever music was playing, and he set it on his lap. Then, as the musicians began strumming guitars and beating drums, Homan felt the vibrations come through his feet, the seat, the armrests, and the ball, which he hugged, allowing the sound to pound through his body. It felt as if the chair were a boat, rocking him from all around—along with his money and memories and the feeling he could not name.

  He sailed along, feeling the music. And he couldn’t resist—he thought of Beautiful Girl. Though it wasn’t a memory of them together. It was an image of her now, in the Snare: lying in her bed, looking out to the tower clock, waiting for a man who’d never returned.

  Don’t think on her no more.

  One of the guitarists was lighting up the Tingling, just like every night. Homan lifted his gaze from the ball, reached out his hand, and raised the Tingling to his lips. The smoke went up into his mind like a chimney broom and swept all his thinking away.

  He passed the cigarette to White Butterfly. Then he folded himself again around the ball, far away from Beautiful Girl, and let the music pound into him like a storm.

  PART III

  SEEKING

  The Parade

  LYNNIE

  1980

  How could you still be in bed?” Lynnie heard Doreen say as she came up from dreams that June morning. “I thought you couldn’t wait for today.”

  With sleep still holding her eyes closed, Lynnie couldn’t remember what Doreen was talking about. Everything felt the same: the stiff mattress and bleach-scented sheets, the mumblings and morning stretching of other residents, the potent School smell. Actually, that wasn’t true. Taxpayers were now demanding changes, so there were fewer residents. Newly concerned officials were poking around, too, so the stench had been blanketed with Lysol. Even Doreen was no longer close enough to lay her hand on Lynnie’s bed, because the cottages had gotten partitions that created sleeping rooms for six, with each resident having lots of room beside her bed, as well as a chest of drawers—for her very own clothes. The drawers weren’t locked, either, and the toothbrushes weren’t shared, and the food wasn’t mushed, and the work treatments were supplemented by honest-to-goodness classes. In Lynnie’s art class, she’d learned painting, etching, even mosaics.

  Whenever Lynnie thought about these changes, she felt the same flutter of happiness that came when she dabbed canary yellow or orchid pink or lime green on a page. But there was one aspect of life she hoped would not change: Doreen still slept in the same area as Lynnie. Having her friend beside her, talking away until they drifted into sleep, helped Lynnie face the emptiness of every night, and knowing Doreen would be up on her elbow by sunrise, flipping through the magazines she was now allowed to receive, motivated Lynnie—despite the shadow images she still saw whenever she thought of Buddy and the baby—to open her eyes to every day.

  Seven years had passed since John-Michael Malone had set the dominoes of change falling at the School, and in that time Lynnie had come to understand something surprising yet also unsettling about change: When the art teacher brought in pastels for the first time, or Doreen was granted a subscription to People magazine, change made Lynnie’s spirits dance. But every time the beds were rearranged and Lynnie faced the possibility of Doreen being moved to a far-off room, Lynnie would slump back into the same numbness she’d felt after Buddy and the baby had vanished. Thank goodness Doreen would always speak up, saying, “You think I’m going anywhere, you got another think coming.” They’d been spared the worst kind of change.

  “Hey,” Doreen said again, jostling Lynnie’s shoulder. “So are you getting up?”

  Lynnie said, “Give me a minute.” Her words came out slower and muddier than the speech therapist, Andrea, kept assuring her they would. Still, the words came. Learning to speak again had been a long process made up of many tiny steps, each taking endless afternoons of frustration. Luckily, everyone who mattered to Lynnie had grown used to what Doreen had dubbed “Lynnie-talk” without giving confused looks or running roughshod over her careful enunciation, and their patience encouraged Lynnie to keep trying. The reactions of others were actually another lesson she’d learned about change. When change happened to an individual, it happened to everyone around her—sometimes in ways she wished for, though sometimes in ways she wished against.

  Lynnie, opening her eyes, looked at Doreen, who was standing dressed beside the bed.

  “Then you’re going?” Doreen asked. Her voice had a pleading tone.

  Now Lynnie remembered what day it was. She reached up and wrapped her fingers around Doreen’s. “Yeah. I’m going.”

  Doreen shook off Lynnie’s hand. “Well, I’m not.”

  “Don’t be that way.”

  “I’m not being any way,” Doreen said, sitting down hard on her bed. “I’m just not going.” She picked up her pillow and threw it at the partition. Then she curled into a sitting ball and said she wasn’t coming to breakfast, even though it was their last breakfast here.

  So it wasn’t as uplifting as Lynnie had been expecting to step outside A-3 into the sunshine of early summer and see two attendants stringing a banner between handheld poles. Nor did her heart stir when she caught a glimpse of circus trucks pulling into the lot—still presided over by a uniformed Albert (what would he do with himself after today?)—and see, inside the wheeled cages, camels, horses, and an elephant, all wearing the same sparkling saddles she hadn’t seen since the circus stopped coming years ago. “It’s going to be a big day,” Mr. Pennington, the new superintendent, told them at movie night last week, “so we’re bringing the animals back to celebrate.” Also coming back would be John-Michael Malone and his cameras, out in the open this time. Over the last many months, as Lynnie had imagined this morning, she’d been sure she’d feel exuberant—one of many big words she’d heard Andrea use about today, though which was too difficult for Lynnie to pronounce. But Doreen’s resistance to the festivities and the momentous event they were marking had dampened Lynnie’s exuberance. Doreen had made no secret of her feelings all along, as word spread that the School was finally being shut down and everyone would be moved to, as Mr. Pennington said, “new arrangements in the community.” “I don’t want any rearranging,” Doreen would say. “I’ve lived here since I was a week old. This is my home.” Lynnie understood, though like most of the residents, she couldn’t wait to leave. Maybe this was because she once knew a world outside the walls: kitchen cabinets she sang inside with Nah-nah, Betsy Wetsy dolls she played with under the table, a restaurant where she screamed out, “Burger!” But maybe it was because she’d been in that world for three glorious days and so did not fear what lay out there. That was what Doreen called it—out there—spitting out the words as if they were food that had gone rotten but that Lynnie knew Doreen was just too scared to eat.

  It was so odd to do so much for the final time: walk to the dining cottage, see attendants—there were no working boys or girls anymore, and attendants no longer wore uniforms—feeding residents who needed help. (No one said “low grade” anymore. They said “severe” or “profound” or “low-functioning.”) Lynnie wondered what would become of each. She already missed Gina and Marcus, whose parents had taken them home. Where would Barbara go? Christopher? Betty Lou? Their families had never shown up. Kate said: “It’s the ones with the involved fami
lies who’ll do better.” Lynnie asked why some families just disappeared. Kate said, “There are probably many reasons. But I can assure you: Someone in every one of those families feels a hole in their heart.”

  “Maybe Doreen’s parents will come for the parade,” Bull said last night. But by the time Lynnie finished breakfast, neither Doreen nor her parents had shown up. Well, Lynnie thought as she left the smells of hash browns and scrapple behind her, she could keep hoping, even if Doreen said she didn’t care. If Lynnie could change so much she could learn to speak, Doreen’s parents could change, too.

  Lynnie tried to keep her mind on hopeful thoughts as she got on the path and headed toward Kate’s office. Otherwise, she knew, the sadness she felt about losing Doreen might combine with all the other sadnesses she was passing right now—the cottage where she’d been placed until Kate rescued her, the hospital cottage where she’d met Tonette, the cornfield, now gone to seed. And with that much sadness, even circus animals wouldn’t matter.

  Lynnie turned her gaze from those sights, forcing herself to see more cheerful places—and there were many. After Uncle Luke was finally asked to resign, Smokes and Clarence quit. So for seven years (seven! she could say every number—up to one hundred!) Lynnie had been able to walk the grounds on her own. She could even, once the rules had loosened, roam far and wide, drawing paper in hand. The farm animals and tractor had been sold for, as Mr. Pennington said, “new sources of revenue,” but the empty barn remained. She could see the path to the barn now and thought of how pleased she’d been whenever she’d set out for an afternoon. She’d settle herself outside the red barn doors, content in the sunlight, and draw little stories she saw happening in front of her, about squirrels and fox and geese. Hannah said Lynnie was a great artist, and she would know, because after years of jobs that made Hannah’s brow tight when she spoke of what she did for a living, she opened an art gallery. She brought a few of Lynnie’s pictures back with her once after a visit and told Lynnie that when she showed them to customers, they widened their eyes and said, “They’re really good.”

  Lynnie’s parents hadn’t said much about her artwork, though they’d come to visit. A few years after Lynnie met Hannah again, her parents flew in from their retirement home in Arizona, met Hannah at the airport, and showed up at the School. They didn’t look like the people in Lynnie’s photo; she hugged them anyway. With Hannah urging them on, she and Lynnie showed them around the School, her mother making shy smiles, her father clearing his throat. When she showed them the drawing her art teacher had tacked on the wall—of a blue-and-green horse, modeled after Hannah’s little toy, which Lynnie still kept in her pouch—they didn’t say more than a clipped, “Nice.” They kept taking a step back from her, too. She wondered why, but when she moved as close as she usually stood to Doreen or Kate, they did it again. It looked like things would get easier when they brought her back to their hotel, only it was just a different kind of hard. Mommy said, “It was wrong, Lynnie,” as she dabbed a tissue behind her glasses. Daddy said, “We had no choice back then.” Then no one seemed to know what to say. She wanted to tell them about her Lynnie Day books and how Horton and Ferdinand and all the rest had shown her how to draw pictures in a sequence, so they would add up, page after page, to a story. But she hardly knew all those words, and for some reason her mouth was even less cooperative than usual. Even with Hannah prompting conversation among everyone as best she could, Lynnie started to feel as if she were wearing clothes that could never be made to fit. Finally Hannah put on the TV and Lynnie was relieved.

  She knew she should love them. Yet when she looked at them, she didn’t feel as she did for Hannah or anyone she’d come to know on these grounds: Doreen, Kate, Buddy, the baby. She knew at one point she had loved her parents. But change had come to them all.

  So Lynnie saw Hannah a few times a year, though she saw Mommy and Daddy only once more. It was a few years later. They brought her to their hotel room again, saying they were going to celebrate Passover. Waiting for her in the room were people Lynnie didn’t know—her brothers, she was told, and their wives. The brothers hugged her right away and let go just as fast. They laughed fake laughs through their noses. Everyone sat at folding tables and chairs, and the wives presented food covered in plastic wrap. Then everyone opened a book with almost no pictures and read a story aloud. It was about Pharaoh and Moses and letting my people go, and Lynnie wanted to follow it, but half the words were in another language. Daddy kept saying, “Pay attention, Lynnie.” Mommy kept saying, “Lynnie, stop fussing with the forks.” Hannah kept telling everyone to stop interrupting Lynnie, she needed time to pronounce her words. The brothers kept sending each other looks. And Lynnie wasn’t allowed to eat except when they told her she could have this piece of matzo, that spoonful of charoses; and then when she ate some maror, she felt as if a bee were stinging her nose. She sat back from the table and closed her eyes. They began fighting after that, saying, “This was a stupid idea,” and, “You never forgave the temple for turning you away because of her, and suddenly we’re devout?” and, “You can’t make up for lost time. What’s done is done. I bet she doesn’t even know what God is.”

  “I know,” Lynnie said, her voice in a tone Andrea would call too soft, so they never heard. And she did know what God was, because she’d seen Him on movie nights. Sometimes He was a column of fire that scared people, sometimes He was George Burns and was nice to people. Kate said God created everything and loved everyone. But like reading and being around family and speaking easily, knowing God seemed to be something only other people could do.

  She should not think about God now. She should look around at the places she’d never see again. There were so many that reminded her of Buddy, and every single one brought back the sweetest feelings. This tree, where they’d stood hidden in the leafy shade and Buddy had waited with patience as she clumsily practiced his signs. This window, where she’d watched Buddy getting a cow from the pasture—the same cow whose calf he helped birth not long after, a feat that made her know he could help her give birth, too. Oh, and this tunnel entrance: the very one where she waved good-bye as he ran off to set out the ladders they then used to escape.

  Every one of these places made her feel full of all the colors that had ever been, yet trapped in the numbness at the same time. He was gone, the baby was gone, and now Lynnie would be gone. He would never find her when he came back. She would have nothing of him and the baby except memories.

  Maybe that was why, as Kate’s office came into view for the last time, Lynnie let herself have a thought she’d never allowed. All this time—twelve years—she hadn’t talked to Kate about the baby. She hadn’t even drawn the baby, except that one time in those first few weeks. But for years after, Smokes and Clarence had been around with their dogs, so she couldn’t take the chance, and when they finally left the School, she still feared the fate of the nursery.

  Maybe, though, it was time to say something to Kate. Kate had told Lynnie her new home would be safe and secure. Lynnie would have her own key, and the staff who worked there would keep out anyone who shouldn’t come in. If that was really true—if Smokes and Clarence and officials who could put her baby in a School wouldn’t be able to reach her—then it would be all right for Lynnie to talk about the baby. No: about the child. No: about her daughter. These words came to her like comets, leaving glittery trails of pleasure. The baby was now older than Lynnie had been when she’d come here. And she was Lynnie’s flesh and blood. Did she have the artistic gift Lynnie and Hannah shared? Did she like to sing? There were twelve years of page turnings to learn about—her daughter was almost a teenager. And now Kate could help her learn about that teenager. She would ask Kate as soon as she reached her office: Could she take Lynnie to the old lady’s farm at last?

  “Lynnie!” Hannah cried out from behind Kate’s desk. “The big day is finally here!”

  Lynnie, standing in Kate’s doorway for the last time, looked from Hannah to Kate. Hannah
wasn’t supposed to get here until the parade began. Yet Kate had the file cabinet open and was holding a stack of Lynnie’s drawings, and Hannah was taping up a box.

  “You’re early,” Lynnie said, unable to stifle her disappointment.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” Hannah said, her smile falling. “I wanted to help Kate.”

  “It’s okay.” But how could Lynnie say anything to Kate now?

  “You’re speaking so well these days,” Hannah said.

  Lynnie understood that Hannah wanted to talk them away from the poor start to the conversation. Andrea had taught her that speaking was about a lot more than breath and volume and pronunciation; it was about knowing when to be the leader and when to let others run the show. Hannah was looking at Lynnie as if her speaking were a huge achievement—which, as Andrea and Kate always said, it was. So Lynnie decided she could talk to Kate later. Then she wouldn’t show her disappointment now and would instead reveal the pride she genuinely felt.

  Lynnie said, “I practice.”

  “Well, it’s paying off.”

  “I want to get better.”

  “You will. Leaving this place will make many differences in your life. You’ll be doing more speech therapy. You’ll be learning to shop at stores. You’ll be living like everyone else.”

  Lynnie corrected her. “It’s a group home.”

  “Well, that’s like everyone else.”

  “Not really.”

  “Okay. But it’s your own home. Yours and Annabelle’s and Doreen’s.”