The Story of Beautiful Girl

by Rachel Simon

  She put her hands to her neck.

  “This was a bad idea,” Kate said, throwing the car into gear.

  Lynnie pulled at the collar of her coat.

  “Are you okay?” Kate was saying as she quickly turned the car around.

  Lynnie pushed her chest with her hand, trying to get the trapped air out.

  “This was stupid,” Kate said, straightening the car. “I’ll get you out of here in a second.”

  They were facing him now. He was many houses down, and he didn’t seem to notice them, leaning on a phone pole as he was, bent over coughing.

  Lynnie tried to suck in air. She couldn’t. She tried and tried. Nothing.

  “You shouldn’t see this,” Kate said, driving toward the bent-over body. She reached across the seat. “Don’t look.” She put her hand across Lynnie’s eyes.

  “No!” Lynnie said. And all the air that couldn’t get out went out. She sucked in a fresh breath. “I want to see!”

  “It’s upsetting you.”

  “No,” Lynnie said again. “Look at him. Slow down. Look.”

  Horror and shock on her face, Kate slowed the car. As she did, four houses from this wobbling man, he let go of the pole, took a step forward, and collapsed right into a mud puddle.

  “Stop,” Lynnie said to Kate.

  “Are you sure—”

  “Yes.”

  Kate stopped the car and they looked out the windshield. They were right before him now, but he didn’t see them. He was on his side, his face half in the mud.

  “He’s a mess,” Lynnie said.

  “You got that right.”

  “He’s a drunk.”

  “You’re probably right about that, too.”

  “Geez.”

  “Are you okay?”

  The choking was gone. The breathing came easy. She touched her chest and felt her necklace.

  “What do you want to do, Lynnie?”

  She thought of things she’d seen people do. She’d seen a TV show where a gang of kids came upon a homeless man in a park and poured drinks all over him and kicked him and laughed. She’d seen a woman have a fight with a bus driver and call him names and spit at his feet. She’d seen Smokes himself go at a working boy and crack a broom handle over his head.

  She wanted to do all of that to him. She wanted to jump out of the car and bite him. But she didn’t bite anymore, and she didn’t want to kick a person, even this one. She wasn’t sure if she was still scared of him or if she just didn’t want to bother.

  “Go,” she said.

  Kate hit the gas. “We can drive right to the police. We know where he lives.”

  “No.”

  “Please, Lynnie. You can identify him. It’s only right that he should pay.”

  “I don’t want to go to the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…”

  “Because what?”

  Past him now, they neared the corner.

  “Can you help me say a word?” Lynnie asked.

  Kate turned to her. “Sure. You start and I’ll finish.”

  “Because he’s pa… path… pathetic.”

  Kate smiled. “You don’t need my help.”

  Lynnie said, “And you know what, Kate? I’m not.”

  “That’s right,” Kate said. “You’re not.”

  Lynnie thought about turning around in her seat to see him one last time. But it felt too good to be facing forward.

  At three o’clock, back in the Capitol building, Lynnie sat down in the large room where the hearing was to be held, and a man in the front of the room stood up. “Our hearing today concerns the potential closing of the remaining residential institutions in the Commonwealth. We will take comments from members of the community.”

  One by one, each of Lynnie’s friends went to a seat in the front of the room and spoke their case. Lynnie could barely listen. She kept rolling her drawings in her hands.

  Finally: “Lynnie Goldberg.”

  She rose, flashed a smile at Kate, and went to the front of the room. There she sat in the big wooden chair and faced the legislators.

  “I am Lynnie Goldberg,” she said, taking care with every word. “From 1957 to 1980, I lived in the Pennsylvania School. I want to tell you my story, and I brought something to help me.” She unrolled her drawings and held the first one up. “This is how the School looked to me when my parents took me there. I was scared. I didn’t know what it was. Bad things happened, and I will not tell you them all. But I will tell you some.”

  And she showed them through her art. Meeting Tonette. Mopping the dayroom. Getting shoved around by angry residents. Eating mush. Folding laundry. Stepping over floor puddles to use the lavatory. Hiding her art in a file cabinet. Being afraid of attendants with dogs.

  She did not mention Buddy or… Julia. She did not say she looked out her window at night even now, imagining where, under the stars of Cup and Feather, her husband and her child might be.

  The legislators listened with serious expressions. One woman got wet eyes. One man held his fist to his chin.

  “That’s why we have to close all the institutions,” Lynnie said when she finished.

  She stood up and was aware that the other advocates were applauding her. She smiled at them, relieved she’d found the courage to speak for herself—and for so many others, too.

  “I did it, Kate!” Lynnie said as they burst out of the elevator into the rotunda. She grabbed Kate’s hand and moved fast.

  “You did,” Kate said, letting herself be pulled along. “You talked in public, Lynnie. And your art has gotten so good! I’m so glad you asked me to be here.”

  Lynnie threaded through the people milling about the rotunda until she and Kate reached the center. “It’s been some day,” Kate said, her voice soft though still seeming to lift off into flight.

  “One of the best days ever,” Lynnie said, louder, her voice flying higher.

  Then she tilted her head back and looked up into the dome, so very high above her head, and whispered the word she’d thought about for hours, the word that helped make her strong at the hearing: “Julia.” The word took wing as it left her mouth and rose into the air. It circled higher and higher and finally disappeared through the glass. Surely it would soar unseen across the state, across the world, and look down to the land and find her.

  Dust

  HOMAN

  1995

  According to the map,” Sam said, slowing the van, “we are at the School.”

  But Homan had already seen the stone walls. He didn’t need to turn to Jean, sitting beside him in the back, as she interpreted Sam’s speech into sign. He hadn’t gotten thrown off by the changed scenery—acres of new houses across the road, now swelled to a highway—or by the many changes that had happened inside him after he’d made the leap to American Sign Language, struck up friendships with folks who worked at the Independent Living Center with Sam, and taken classes. He’d learned so much in the last years: how to transform those printed bird tracks into letters, then words, then flocks that carried him across the pages of books; how to understand maps, money, the rules of driving. Still, he instantly recognized those walls.

  And there was the gate, black and tall, its tips spiked as spears. Beyond it, high on the hill, was the tower, its clock face replaced by the words “Veterans Medical Center.” Sam—whose name, Homan now knew, was Terence, though he’d always be Sam to him—had pulled the van to the shoulder, and even though Homan’s view was broken by passing SUVs and eighteen wheelers, the sight immediately pumped revulsion—and longing—through his veins.

  He’d figured that would happen. Soon after the window to communication opened, he lost interest in the Tingling, and as he read and learned, he became repelled by how easily the School had made him disappear. While he was pleased he’d worked out a good deal with King and Queen (decent income plus the room and board he already had at their Buddhist retreat), had grown more sure of his talents (starting a side busin
ess modifying beds, vans, and wheelchairs for friends), and had set his sights high (he’d just gotten an application to study engineering), he still wished he could wallop the big shots who’d looked down their noses at him and the guards who’d strutted about like cocks. Yet at the same time, he’d come to wonder what had happened to the School—and to Beautiful Girl and Little One. The first question took a lot of research to answer. The other question, he couldn’t answer. How could he, without knowing their names?

  What about you? Sam asked one day as Jean, a hearing person fluent in sign, interpreted. Jean was Yellow Dress, but now she wore skirts and blazers, and she and Sam were married.

  What do you mean, what about me?

  There must be a file on you somewhere. It might have just enough information from Redhead, or someone, to get you Beautiful Girl’s name.

  They never knew who I was.

  What’d they call you?

  How would I know?

  For a long time, Homan gave himself grief for wanting to know what happened to them. Twenty-seven years had gone by. Beautiful Girl might have passed away, and if she hadn’t, what business did he have thinking about her? Or Little One? They’d be in their own lives, maybe even with their own families and friends and jobs. He was long gone from their thoughts.

  It’s basic curiosity, one friend told him; we all feel that with our first romances. Another offered, It’s guilt.

  We have a different theory, Jean signed one night before she and Sam got married. You keep thinking of her because you still love—

  Homan walked away so she couldn’t finish her sentence.

  Then a month ago, Sam and Jean made an invitation. They both had job interviews in Washington, D.C., and decided to drive across the country. They wanted to see Yosemite, Mount Rushmore, maybe even places they’d been when they were younger. Homan could come, too.

  I’ve got a job.

  Isn’t there some place you’d like to see?

  No.

  It won’t feel like a road trip without you.

  What part of No don’t you understand?

  Yet when he went back to his little house that night and lay on his futon, Beautiful Girl came to him for the first time in so very long. Her dream self—not a fuzzy shape, but detailed and full and luscious—climbed into bed beside him. He turned to her, and there she was, gazing at him in the moonlight. Her body, though, wasn’t touching his, her expression was unreadable, and despite how much he wanted to lay his fingers on her warm skin, he held back. She was a dream, only a dream. Instead, he raised his hands and asked what she’d been doing all these years. She pointed toward the wall, which suddenly revealed itself to be covered by her drawings. He peered at them, but before he could recognize any, they faded before his eyes, becoming blank. By the time he looked back at her, she was gone.

  The next day, he told King and Queen he wanted time off. The next week, he took care of all the maintenance they’d need while he was gone. And just before he left, he slit open the bottom of his yellow chair, removed the money, and finally, at long last, put it in the bank.

  They took Sam and Jean’s van. He and Sam shared the driving, with Jean interpreting. And now they were here, and the gate was open.

  Let’s go in, he signed.

  It was the smell he couldn’t believe as the van rolled past the gate. Not the stench, which wasn’t apparent, but the Pennsylvania countryside. Homan lowered his window and breathed in. The scent was just as it used to be this far from the cottages: grassy and earthy and clean. Beautiful Girl had loved these smells, though she’d never been free to roam all the way down the drive. It was he who used to come here when the guardhouse needed repairs, giving his lungs a break from the odors in the cottages. Now the guardhouse was gone, and the grass was a few inches higher than had ever been allowed. Did anyone coming through this gate guess what this place once was?

  The first building came into view as they continued up the drive, a gleaming five-story hospital. Made of red sandblasted stone, it had flags flying from poles, a portico at the entrance, and rows of tinted windows with not a single bar among them.

  He wondered what it replaced. The drive curved in new ways, and he couldn’t remember.

  He looked out the passenger window. Jean was facing him, but his eye was drawn past her to—he realized—the administrative building with the tower. Although it was ancient, it looked better than ever, with freshly painted trim, uncracked marble steps, a polished railing.

  He climbed past Jean and threw open the van door.

  Positioned before the steps, he regarded the tower. The stone was as gray as he recalled, the corners as sharp, and as his gaze rose up, he remembered the first time he’d stood here. How enraged and frightened he’d been, locked in handcuffs, clueless about where he was. He’d come into the town of Well’s Bottom seeking nothing more than a place to sleep for the night.

  He thought of that night now. He’d jumped off a train and found himself in the borough, looking for food and a safe place to sleep until morning. In the back alleys, he’d come across a jacket someone had left in a yard, then he’d helped himself to a loaf of bread inside the back of a bakery. Satisfied, he’d curled up in an alley behind a bar and slept. And that would have been it.

  Except that just as the sun was rising, he saw, right before him, a trash can with an upside-down lid. The lid had captured water, and when he rose to his feet and looked into it, he saw his reflection. He was dirty, and his teenage beard was more ragged than it had seemed with his hands. But with a razor and some soap, he could look good, even respectable. Maybe even like someone who could walk into a train station and get treated like a regular human being.

  O muh. He tried to say his name aloud, his first effort to form a word with his voice in many years. A vibrating feeling came into his throat, though with no way of telling how he sounded, he put his hand before his lips to feel the air. O muh. He smiled. He was a person who could amount to something. Didn’t he know how to steer a car? Hadn’t he survived in the outdoors?

  Muh nuh O muh. My name Homan. He banged on the lid. Muh nuh O muh!

  The light came up hard from behind.

  He spun around.

  Police! He hadn’t known they were there! He’d been too stuck on his voice!

  He fought like the dickens to get away. But they grabbed and cuffed him and drove him to a jail, then a court, where a judge decided he was a thief, too slow-witted to understand them, a danger to others, and sent him here. He remembered being hauled out of the car right in front of these steps, terrified and confused. And saying to himself, as he stared up to the clock, Be a cold day in hell ’fore you use that voice again.

  Now he looked down the tower, one window at a time. Dark. Dark. Dark. Even the one to the left of the front staircase, the office for the big shot’s—no, Luke Collins’s—secretary. Homan mounted the steps to get a better look. A small sign was screwed into the oak door: BUILDING CLOSED. He peered over the hedge and looked into the window.

  The room was nothing more than walls and a floor. There was no one to get back at now.

  He turned to the van. You see any signs stopping us from driving over the grounds?

  You want to do that?

  No. But I have to.

  All the cottages remained, and as Sam drove slowly past, Homan saw BUILDING CLOSED affixed to every door. There was the cottage where he’d met Shortie and Whirly Top. The dining cottage, where he’d stolen sugar cubes. The laundry, where he’d given her bouquets of feathers.

  And there was the path where he’d sometimes seen the other deaf man stuck here, an African American who loved uniforms and used signs Homan thought meaningless, though which probably weren’t, any more than Homan’s had been. He’d finally figured it out. Homan had learned a dialect the McClintocks’ father had picked up in deaf school, a black dialect of American Sign Language. Whites didn’t know it, off in their own schools as they were down south. Apparently some blacks didn’t, either.

/>   How far Homan had come to know all this now. If only he’d known a sliver of it then.

  Turn toward the fields.

  The barn was pathetic, with vines covering the sides, a tree growing through the roof. He’d kept her drawing of the sea in that barn. He’d held it up many mornings, fascinated by the aqua water pushing against the rocks and foaming along the tower to the side. He could not get into the barn now, but what did it matter? If the cornfields had become beds of wildflowers, and the staff huts had been wiped off the map, that drawing had surely become dust.

  I don’t get it, he signed to Jean as they approached the cemetery, now almost entirely overgrown. Why have they left all this here?

  Maybe it’s just too much land and they couldn’t find someone who’d want to take it over.

  The drive took them back toward the main building, and Homan thought, Maybe no one wants to deal with ghosts.

  After returning to the new hospital building, they worked through a succession of offices until they found the right bureaucrat.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much,” Mrs. Raja said after she’d rolled her desk chair to sit in a circle with them so Jean could interpret. “I do know that everyone who lived here was moved back with their families or into smaller facilities. Some of those are nearby and some aren’t. I could give you a list of the agencies.”

  We don’t have her name, Homan signed.

  “Isn’t she a relative?”

  He paused, then flashed on the image of her face coming toward him that last night, the old lady’s dress flowing from her shoulders, the pantomime ring he’d placed on her finger.

  Yes.

  “But you don’t know her name?”