The Story of Beautiful Girl

by Rachel Simon

  Lynnie angled her gaze away from Martha. Martha thought at first that she was being shy or meek. But something told her there was more in this movement than words could say. She followed Lynnie’s eyes. They were directed at the tiny window on the far living room wall, the one Martha had tried to look through at the very start of the storm.

  The window was open. And the figure of a man—Number Forty-two—was tearing across the east field, arms bent at right angles, legs fast and powerful. He dove into the woods.

  Martha turned back to Lynnie. This time her emotion was clear. It was one Martha had felt herself but had never worn on her face. Defiance.

  “You’re not listening,” Clarence said to Lynnie. He shoved her toward Martha. “Thank the lady. Do your most cultivated grunt.”

  Lynnie was now so close that Martha could feel her breath, but this time Lynnie didn’t turn her gaze toward the window. She leaned in so her lips pressed against Martha’s ear.

  Martha could feel Lynnie’s breath warming her neck. She braced herself for the one word Lynnie knew, the one Martha had already heard. The one that meant defiance.

  “Hide,” came Lynnie’s whisper.

  Martha pulled back and looked at Lynnie. The face showed nothing.

  Martha leaned in once more. “Hide,” Lynnie said again, and added, “Her.”

  “What’d she tell you?” Clarence said. “Was she a good girl?”

  Lynnie held herself still. Then she turned her face toward Martha’s.

  Martha looked into her eyes. They were not dull. They were green and pretty and, yes, different. But they knew how to hold back tears and were doing so right now.

  Dr. Collins said, “We’ll be going.”

  “They got him?” Clarence asked.

  “Not yet, but he won’t get anywhere tonight. It’s too dark, the river’s flooded, and he’s got to be exhausted. They’ll pick up his trail tomorrow.”

  “It’ll be Forty-two’s lucky day,” Clarence said.

  He tugged Lynnie away. Martha felt the breath leave her cheek, and she stood without moving, her eyes locked onto Lynnie’s as the young mother was pulled across the room and turned toward the door. For a second Martha wondered if she had truly heard those words, yet they rang so loudly inside her, she knew she was not mistaken. Finally Martha pulled herself together and hurried to the doorway. The door still sat wide open, and she looked outside. Dr. Collins was getting into his sedan. The police cars were turning around. In the still-falling rain, Lynnie was being marched down the porch steps without an umbrella.

  Martha shifted her gaze to the staircase inside her house and looked up to her second floor. Then she turned back toward the doorway. “Lynnie,” she called out, and on the bottom porch step, the fragile figure, arms bound across her chest, white dress already soaking in the rain, paused and looked back.

  Remember everything, Martha told herself. The green eyes. The curly golden hair. The way she tilts her head to one side.

  Then Martha stepped onto her porch and said, with more certainty than she had ever known before, “Lynnie, I will.”

  The School

  LYNNIE

  1968

  Turning from the old lady’s voice, Lynnie walked down the flooded driveway of the farmhouse, ankles sloshing through water, Clarence at her heels. Her body still ached from the birth. But this water felt purer than the water she waded through when the lavatory clogged and awful liquids puddled on the floor. Finally, after so many years of such horrible things, she had something of her own: one pulse from which she’d found strength, another pulse to which she’d given life. Then Clarence shoved her, and it all came back. Everything had been taken away. After three days of freedom, she had nothing, not even the choice of where to put her feet.

  Her arms were bound, Clarence was keeping her in line, and soon she would be punished at the School. The School. That’s what they’d called it in front of the old lady. The residents who could talk referred to it more honestly, saying “this Dump” or “Sing Sing.” For a long time, in Lynnie’s mind, where word-shapes drifted about, sometimes finding form, sometimes not, she’d thought of it as simply the bad place. Then, when she learned Buddy’s sign for the School—Buddy, she said to herself, mind-speaking her name for him with exhilaration—she thought it was perfect: a trap that snaps closed on an animal. And knowing her feet were being marched back to that trap, Lynnie had a sick sensation and felt like she wanted to bite someone. But she would not bite. It would make matters worse.

  The back doors of the sedan were already open. In the driver’s seat sat Mr. Edgar, the heavy man who worked for Dr. Collins. Usually Lynnie saw him only from the window of the laundry building as she piled clothes into the rolling bins. He’d be walking to the administrative cottage, where Lynnie’s friend Doreen, who delivered the mail, said everyone spoke “a lot of high words.” Now, coming close to the sedan, Lynnie could see Mr. Edgar’s hair. Slicked with Brylcreem, it held the ruts from the comb, the way fields held plow marks in the mud. Beside him sat Dr. Collins. He was bent over Lynnie’s chart, fountain pen in one hand, cigarette in the other. Lynnie took all this in, though she did not know the words “Brylcreem” or “chart” or “fountain pen.” She did know the words “Dr. Collins,” but the residents were expected to call him “Uncle Luke” instead. Lynnie, though, didn’t call him anything—soon after she’d come to the bad place, she’d stopped speaking. Uncle Luke had never noticed. To him, she was just one of three thousand residents, and he was, as Doreen said when he waltzed down the paths, giving tours to well-dressed people, “the kind of person who couldn’t walk by a lavatory faucet if it was clean enough to show his own face.”

  Uncle Luke wasn’t even noticing her now, as she passed his window—he was concentrating on adding notes to her chart. She stuck her tongue out at him, though before he even glanced her way, Clarence clamped his hand on her shoulder. “There you go,” he said, his tone polite for Uncle Luke’s benefit. Then he pushed Lynnie into the back and slammed the door.

  She tried to see through the windshield to the farmhouse. The headlights went only so far, and all she could make out was a rectangle of light from the doorway and the silhouette of the lady who’d said she’d do what Lynnie had asked. Lynnie had worked so hard to speak those words—Hide her—and her heart had lifted at the old lady’s answer. But Lynnie could not see the tiny window in the attic, much less the edge of the woods.

  Clarence slid through the other door, and Lynnie pushed up against her window. She had to get out. She had to find Buddy. Yet there was no way out, and all she could do was gulp air. This was not good—if they knew you were afraid, they’d be rougher. She tried to think about Kate, the attendant with the red hair and sweet temper. Instead her mind fixed on Smokes, the attendant with the dogs, and her gulps just got faster. So she resorted to an old habit. When she was little and her body felt floppy, she liked how rolling her head made colors flow like ribbons. After she got what the doctor called muscle tone, she still rolled her head, only with her eyes closed, because she’d discovered that when she stopped a head circle, her mind landed in another place and time. It was like washing machines: After the spin, you find lost socks. So as the sedan headed down the sloping drive, she rolled her head until she landed outside of now.

  “You don’t own anything in this dump,” Lynnie’s first friend, Tonette, was whispering, “except what’s right inside. So keep it there.” In the hospital cottage on Lynnie’s intake evening, Tonette pointed to her head. She was tall, brown, and skinny, with hair like springs in a pen, and she handed Lynnie a bowl of Jell-O. “I’m telling you so you start on the good foot.” Taking the Jell-O, Lynnie didn’t follow the reasoning: “Things’ll be easier if you keep to yourself.” It wasn’t until what happened to Tonette a little later that Lynnie decided to stay quiet.

  Clarence shimmied toward Lynnie. “Looks like she lost weight on her adventure,” he said. Uncle Luke and Edgar paid no attention. “I’m just telling you,” Clar
ence added, his voice louder so they’d hear, “for those files.” Lynnie didn’t always understand other people’s actions, much less motives, though she did grasp that Clarence had no genuine desire to help them. He just wanted them to praise him to his sidekick, the attendant everyone called Smokes.

  Lynnie almost swung her feet up to shove him off but controlled herself, knowing he’d lash her ankles together. Instead, she looked out the window. If Buddy was among the trees, she wouldn’t have to fight Clarence—Buddy would just run up to the car, haul the door open, and save her. The sedan reached the turn onto the country road, and suddenly a sight rose out of the dark. It was the small lighthouse man she’d seen earlier tonight, when they’d come around the bend of this road, searching desperately for a place to rest. She’d touched Buddy’s arm. It was so much like the one from long ago, with her sister, and that had been a safe place. She’d once drawn it for Buddy: a tall, strong place by the sea. She wanted to explain to Buddy earlier tonight that the lighthouse man was how she knew they’d be protected. But the baby was in her arms.

  Clarence, following her gaze, looked at the lighthouse man, too. Then he turned forward, threw his arm across the seat, and touched her shoulder. The feel of him brought back so much she did not want to see: the bucket, the growling dogs, the taste of cloth. She shrank away; he just moved his arm closer. As the sedan drove past woods and other houses, she wondered, Was Buddy in that yard? Behind that tree? How long would it be before they ran away again? Before she held the baby in her arms?

  How Lynnie wanted to batter Clarence with her feet, to bite and writhe and shriek. Yet she couldn’t. When Buddy came to break her out, she had to be in her usual cottage, which she wouldn’t if they tossed her in solitary. So she pressed her feet to the floor and clenched her teeth. Then she looked out the windshield onto the long country road, hoping Buddy would appear before they crossed the river.

  She woke when the sedan was slowing down. It was still night, and beside them was the high stone wall of the School. She’d missed the bridge over the river. She’d missed whatever glimpse she might have had of Buddy. Her chest hollowed with disappointment. Above the stone wall, she could see the rain had stopped, but with the clouds too thick to allow the sight of even one star, her throat went acid with sorrow. Over the summer, Buddy had taught her that stars wheeled slowly across the sky throughout the night. Now, without any stars to be seen, she had no way to gauge how close they were to morning.

  Then the tower clock came into view, rising on the hill. The clock was all a person could see from the road, the wall sealing off everything except the gate. But the sight did Lynnie no good; she couldn’t read clocks. Still, as Mr. Edgar hummed to the radio, Clarence drew on his pipe, and Uncle Luke snored, she stared at the clock. It glowed yellow as a moon, and with the rain on its face, it seemed to be crying.

  Only twice before had she taken in this view. Three nights ago, when she and Buddy had run off, she’d looked back. There it was, the clock that lit all the cottage windows. Buddy pulled at her arm and made his sign for run. With his hand in hers and her trust in him, they ran.

  But there was another time, before Buddy, Kate, Doreen—even Tonette. Lynnie was little then, the small self she still hid inside, like a tiny bowl hidden inside a larger one. She lowered her eyes now and looked inside to that smaller self, to the time before she first saw this view, to the time when she had no idea about stone walls.

  In that time, she knew the world of her kitchen, where she played inside the bottom cupboard with her sister. They’d open the wooden doors, pull themselves into the kingdom of pots, and put cake pans on their heads for hats. Her sister knew many words. She knew how to move them up and down, too, into a song. Lynnie would take her sister’s arm and grunt into her wrist, feeling vibrations. One song was their favorite: A-tisket, a-tasket. A green and yellow basket. I wrote a letter to my love. And on the way I dropped it.

  Lynnie didn’t know about dining cottages then. She knew about dining rooms, and the underside of the table, where she and her sister kept Betsy Wetsy dolls and looked at Mommy’s and Daddy’s shoes when they were sitting with serious voices, saying things like “accepting this tragedy” and “her hopeless future” and “we’ve done nothing to deserve a retarded child,” while her sister played jacks and Lynnie picked at the knot in Daddy’s oxfords. Her sister would ask if Lynnie knew what was cooking and then name the smells: “potato latkes”… “hot chocolate.” Lynnie loved smells. She loved putting her face in wool coats under the beds. To this day, she could still smell the sweet scent of her sister’s chewing gum. She could even remember placing her cheek on Mommy’s perfumed chest when she hoisted Lynnie from under the table, saying, “I just can’t do that.”

  Although so many years had passed since then—years of bedrooms with forty beds, all with iron frames—Lynnie could still remember her bedroom. It had two pink headboards, one for her bed, one for her sister’s—“Nah-nah,” the first word Lynnie could say (“Finally,” Mommy said, hands clasped in joy when Hannah called her into the bedroom, her face glowing)—and windows with curtains. Lynnie remembered a bathroom, too, but for a long time she sat on the changing table instead, as Daddy said, “Five already and still in diapers and making sounds like a baby.” “Please don’t keep bringing it up,” Mommy said, removing the pins from her mouth.

  Lynnie could conjure up the living room, too. It had a carpet and fish tank and books. Books were not as fun as fish. Nah-nah would sit on the couch and read while Lynnie pulled herself along the floor on her arms to watch fish with their shiny colors. “She still doesn’t crawl?” Aunt This One said from behind. “She’s already six.” Aunt That One said, “It’s been obvious for years that Dr. Feschbach was right.” Mommy said, “She’ll crawl. She’ll walk.” “She’ll never go to school,” Aunt This One said. Aunt That One said, “And think of the shame”—here she whispered—“that her sister will feel, once she can understand.”

  Mommy cried. And other people’s crying did something to Lynnie. It came at her like a storm and burst inside and thundered until she had to push it out of her chest, so she’d flip on her back and kick and scream. It always worked, because soon the crying would stop. Sometimes Nah-nah would come to her side, saying, “She doesn’t understand.” Only Lynnie did understand. The way to get rid of crying was to kick sadness back into the air.

  And Lynnie could still see a restaurant. She could walk by then, and they went inside and sat at a booth, and her parents asked what she wanted. “Burger!” she squealed, one of the biggest words she knew by then, and people stared. They stared again when the food didn’t all make it into her mouth and dribbled like finger paint down her face. The waitress came over with extra napkins. The waitress did not stare. The waitress did not look. Daddy said, “I wish you’d listen to reason,” Mommy got ready to cry, and Nah-nah suddenly said, “Let’s hold hands to the car,” and they went to sing Elvis in the backseat.

  Then there was that place called a synagogue, with stained glass and a huge room they walked past to reach a rabbi at a desk, where Mommy sat holding Lynnie on her lap against her big, hard belly, saying, “Everyone’s got their opinion. You know where my husband stands. So I turned to books. Dale Evans said the only place for her retarded daughter was at home. She said the girl was an angel. But Lynnie’s, well, embarrassing.” She swallowed hard. “Pearl Buck had a retarded daughter, too, and she said they’re happier among their own kind. But Lynnie’s my little baby!” The rabbi folded his hands and said, “I think you’ll regret sending her off. It would feel as if you exiled her into the wilderness.” “Thank you, thank you,” Mommy said, and started to sob, and then Lynnie’s chest was hurting so much, she threw herself to the floor, bucking and wailing, and then Mommy was saying she was sorry and hauling Lynnie away.

  And she could bring to mind a playground. Nah-nah in her Brownie uniform ran off to jump rope with friends, and Lynnie stayed in the sandbox, drawing with a stick—circles rolling into cir
cles like a Slinky—until a boy came and stomped all over her design, and then she was on top of him, slapping away. Right away, Mommy was running, pushing the stroller with the twins, flying into the sandbox, pulling Lynnie off the boy, yelling at Hannah on the way home for not watching her sister. “Admit it,” Daddy said that night as Lynnie sat at the top of the stairs and Nah-nah, beside her, hummed their favorite song, taking Lynnie’s arm and, for the first time, pressing her lips to Lynnie’s wrist. But Lynnie still heard Daddy. “She’s almost eight. If we don’t place her now, this is what every day will be like. For the rest of all of our lives.”

  Then she was sitting a long time in the car. She was in the back, flipping the ashtray lid on the door up and down, up and down, when Nah-nah suddenly said, “Is that Lynnie’s school?”

  Lynnie looked up and saw the tower. It rose behind a stone wall, taller than the temple, and Lynnie felt proud. She was going to school, and her school was so big.

  The car turned at an opening in the wall and pulled up to a gate.

  “It looks like it should have a moat,” Nah-nah said under her breath.

  Daddy heard. “Remember our talk last night,” he said.

  Mommy said, “Act your age, Hannah.”

  Nah-nah turned to Lynnie, and in her eyes Lynnie saw a look she’d never seen on her sister before. Much later, after Lynnie took a dictionary of words and understandings into her mind, she remembered this moment and knew how to identify this look. In other faces before this first view of the stone walls, she’d seen pity, or fear, or ridicule, or contempt. In Nah-nah’s face she’d seen only playfulness and affection. At this moment she saw guilt.

  Then a guard was opening the gate, and they were driving up the hill toward a cluster of buildings. Her parents pointed, describing what they knew from the brochure and Uncle Luke’s letters: Those were the cottages where the residents lived, each for a different classification.