The Story of Beautiful Girl Page 24

  With fear stoking her chest, Martha peered around the open door.

  Julia was propped up in bed with headphones on, listening to her stereo. The only light in the room came from the amplifier, but it was enough for Martha to see their dog, Reuben, on the bed, too, his furry head in Julia’s lap. She was petting him.

  Martha crossed the room and sat on the bed. Julia, apparently feeling the mattress move, opened her eyes. At first she started. Then she removed the headphones.

  “I’m sorry, Grammy,” she said.

  Martha took in Julia’s face in the blue amplifier light and thought how grown up she was looking. “Are you apologizing for what you did tonight?”

  “It was stupid.”

  “I’m glad you see that.”

  “I don’t even like the taste of wine. But when they passed it to me, I would have been a real loser if I’d said no.”

  “Julia, you know you’re not a loser.”

  “And then we went to the mall and everyone was joking about my stupid old slacks and Miranda bet I wouldn’t have the guts to steal a nice pair of jeans. So I just went into Filene’s and…” Julia blew out air, and her curls fluffed away from her forehead.

  “Oh, Julia. You used to have such nice friends.”

  “But Miranda and her friends, they’re the school princesses. When they think someone’s cool, everyone does. And when they started letting me hang around, it… it just felt good.”

  “I didn’t know you felt bad before.”

  “You don’t understand, Grammy. These are the cool girls. Everyone wants to be like them. So one day”—she gazed away, as if to remember—“I bought this four-pack of lip gloss with the greatest colors and brought it to school. And after basketball practice I went to the bathroom where they all met every morning, and just as I expected, Miranda came in. I started putting one of the lip glosses on and I was afraid she’d ignore me like always, but she”—Julia sighed with pleasure—“she asked to try one. She’d never even talked to me before. And then Diane and Patti came in, and said how pretty my lips looked, and I just felt like, Wow, and passed the rest around to them. And when we walked out of the bathroom, we were all together, and I felt everyone look at me in a new way. It was so great. Don’t you see, Grammy? I never felt that way before. I always felt clumsy and ugly and poor. Like I… like I was retarded or something.”

  Martha caught her breath. She wanted to seize Julia and shake her, make her realize what she’d just said.

  Instead, she breathed through her seething and exasperation, and on the fifth exhalation she heard herself say, “I’m disappointed in you. Friends who make you feel you don’t measure up are not friends.”

  Julia said nothing, but tears had begun rolling down her cheeks.

  “Your future is too precious to throw away for anyone.”

  Again, Julia remained silent, eyes toward the ceiling as if trying to muster strength.

  “We’re going to bring you to and from school every day, and you need to get your grades back up. No more basketball team or drama club. You are grounded except for school. Any extracurriculars will be in the form of a job. Do you understand?”

  Julia drew her gaze down and looked directly at Martha. “How come you don’t ever talk about my parents? Was there something bad about them or something?”

  Martha sat back. She felt her chest heaving, and in the silence that followed, she looked into Julia’s eyes and saw, past the challenging stance, the self-loathing, the effects of the wine, Lynnie. And Martha knew, as she hadn’t until now, why she couldn’t tell Julia the whole story. It wasn’t only because Martha wanted to restrain herself from teaching Julia a harsh lesson or because she wanted Julia to be grateful for her sacrifices. It was because Julia’s low regard for herself had taken her into misguided friendships, petty crime, and, now, bigoted words. Maybe someday she’d be ready for the truth, but not when she thought so disparagingly, so dismissively, about people like her very own parents.

  “No, Julia,” Martha finally said. She cleared her throat to push the anger from her voice. Then she added, in her usual soft, caring tone, “They were not bad. They were not bad at all.”

  “Who were they? What were their names?”

  Martha took a breath. “Lynnie. Your mother was named Lynnie.”

  “And my father?”

  Martha gazed away, seeing him now, and said wistfully, “Such a handsome man. And Lynnie… she was so beautiful.” Then she looked back.

  Julia was still crying, but a smile had emerged through the tears.

  The next day, while Julia was at school, Martha and Pete took Reuben for a walk on the beach. They used to walk two miles a day with Rodney. By the time he passed away and they got Reuben, Martha’s pace had slowed, so they shortened their walks to half a mile. Now they walked only a short way along the beach.

  “When we first met,” Martha said, “you told me Julia would break a lot of hearts someday. I think she’s broken her first.”

  Pete looked at her as Reuben ran along the water’s edge. “Gary hated everything we did when he was a teenager. You just keep going, and one day they’re human again.”

  “You were young. You had time. I might not.”

  “I’ll be there for her if something happens to you.”

  “You’re no younger than I am.”

  “There’s Gary. He and Jessica said they’d step in if they had to.”

  “Denver’s so far away. And she barely knows them.”

  “It’s going to work out.”

  “Just promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “If I go when she’s still… like this—”

  “Stop talking this way.”

  “I have to. I need to think about what you should do.”

  “She’ll get through this phase soon.”

  “I don’t know about that.” Martha turned to him and took his hands. She made a sad smile. “Just promise me you won’t tell her until she’s mature enough to hear.”

  He reached forward and smoothed back her white hair. She felt so lovely in his hands. She felt so loved in his eyes. She felt fragile and worried, yet sure this was the right thing.

  “Okay,” Pete said finally. “I promise.”

  Martha suddenly felt so light. Everything seemed just the way it should be. It was so much like the final day of school, when she would look out the window and see the last child walking toward home, and she would know that her work was complete.

  Show Me Your Sign

  HOMAN

  1988

  Homan wasn’t expecting anyone that morning. It was his day off, and he liked to start days off by inching across the sleeping mat, reaching into the ceramic bowl, rolling a cigarette, and inhaling the Tingling. Then he’d spend the day working on projects of his own devising. Today he planned to test out his new gutter cleaner, a long pole with a hinged metal claw at one end. He’d been working on it—or, really, not working on it—for weeks and still hadn’t finished. The Tingling did that to a person, made him not mind sitting around all day in his yellow chair, watching TV. Luckily, King didn’t care about the spicy aroma Homan carried around; he was too busy greeting guests after they pulled up to the front lot in their sleek cars, then gathering them in the room with the bamboo floor, where he’d tap a stick against a cymbal and they’d all sit on their knees and breathe. As for Queen, she was caught up in paperwork. And everyone else was gone. The farm was gone, too. King and Queen had moved farther north from the city, and since Homan was a good worker, they’d taken him along. No matter that at the farm he’d grown crops, and here—a sprawling wooden house in the mountains, surrounded by oaks and pines, with mats on the floors and sculptures of a bald, fat man in the private sleeping rooms, where guests came and went, some of them actors he saw on TV—he did janitor work and maintenance. It was still a fine arrangement. Homan worked six days a week and in return got a little house out back, all the rice and vegetables he could eat, and no fuss about the
Tingling, which he grew in his garden. This the life, he’d think, when he thought. But it wasn’t his habit to think.

  Which made him almost ignore the Christmas lights flashing around his ceiling this morning. The lights were one project he’d completed soon after they’d moved here. Discovering he liked privacy, he’d messed around with a buzzer until it turned on a string of Christmas lights, blinking them on and off until they got his attention. When he showed his invention to King and Queen, King’s lips rose in admiration. So Homan rigged up lights in the main house, too, for when guests weren’t meant to talk. They were always startled the first time they saw the doorbell lights flashing, and then, when he caught them looking at him as he went about his work of polishing floors and tending the grounds, their faces would be showing respect.

  He got up from the sleeping mat and nudged aside the curtain on the front window.

  Standing by his door were King and a young woman. She looked like many of the lady guests—long hair tied with a fabric knot, loose pants that rustled in the breeze, flowing blouse. But she was younger and had a brown shawl wrapped around her shoulders.

  King never brought anyone to Homan’s house, and as Homan let the curtain fall back, he remembered noticing some people hanging around last week after their stay ended. They’d pointed up to the Christmas lights, then talked with King and Queen in their office. Maybe King had decided to hire more help, and Shawl Lady was it. Homan wondered if he might find himself lying beside her, the way he had with White Butterfly just before her friends showed up one day and drove her off, or after her, like he had those few months with Purple Hair. It had been a long time since he’d lain beside anyone. It had been a long time since he’d had fellow workers. He hadn’t thought of these things in ages and didn’t want to start now.

  Confused, he opened the door.

  Shawl Lady smiled brightly at Homan, and her hand emerged from under the fabric draped about her arms. Only after Homan extended his toward her did he realize something didn’t measure right. Shawl Lady’s hand was at her elbow.

  He froze, hand in midair, and let her reach for him.

  Then King made the motion of steering a car—his sign for taking a trip to the city. He lifted his eyebrows as if asking, Is that okay with you?

  Homan wasn’t sure. If it had been a long time since a woman had shared his bed, it had been even longer since he’d seen anyone with differences. He eyed Shawl, thinking of the Snare for the first time in… he didn’t want to count.

  As King gestured to his car, Queen came across the yard from the main house. Homan could see behind her to the room with the bamboo floor, where the exercise lady was putting the guests through her moves. What could be so important about going to the city—now—with Shawl? Homan glanced inside his little house. He could close the door right now and go light up a Tingling. But he turned back. Everyone had a look of expectation.

  For so many years, they’d been good to him.

  Warily, he stepped outside.

  He knew the way into the city. They drove him there a few times a year, when they needed help loading supplies. Once he’d even gotten into the driver’s seat, remembering the fun he’d had with Sam, driving as he blew bubbles, Sam tapping Homan with his stick to get his attention. But King had smiled in a way that said, Nice joke, and Homan decided he preferred riding in a Tingling haze anyway. So it was as a passenger that he’d taken the trip to the hilly city, each time seeing, as they came down from the mountains, how the world was changing: more houses, more stores, more lanes on the roads, more cars in the lanes. The closer they got to the city, the more things changed. New restaurants were appearing, many of them with gold-colored arches, playgrounds for kids, clowns waving at cars. Then there were billboards: a boy riding a bicycle in front of the moon, a pouting blonde in lace undies who held a microphone, fat TVs where all the shows were nothing except yellow writing. On every trip, the growing number of changes unsettled him—the world was turning, and he wasn’t turning with it. As he watched the sights get more and more crowded, the feeling he could not name would flash inside him again. When he’d get home he’d roll a huge Tingling, till he tried not to leave home at all.

  And today, on top of all that uneasiness, Shawl was sitting right beside him in the back of the car. Queen kept turning from the front to talk to her, but Shawl just nodded or shook her head, making a shy smile to Homan every time. It was almost as if she didn’t want to offend him by speaking, though he realized that was a dumb-assed thing to think. Sure, she different like them at the Snare, only no one there ever polite.

  No, you wrong. What about Beautiful Girl? She more than polite. She—

  Don’t you go thinking on her. That spilt milk.

  It seemed to take longer than usual to reach the city, and though he didn’t want to, his thoughts about folks at the Snare got him thinking, for the first time in years, about how many people he’d cared for then lost. Blue and the McClintocks and Mama. Shortie and Whirly Top. Sam. White Butterfly. None had created the emptiness he’d felt since Beautiful Girl and Little One, but all had left sorrow inside. Once, he remembered now, he’d fancied life as a big drawing, but that idea had come to seem boneheaded. No way was life a creation of purpose and reason. Look at him. No matter how much he’d poured himself into each person, when Blue got in the path of Mr. Landis’s shotgun or Beautiful Girl was nabbed by police or Sam disappeared behind a shut door, those chapters in his life ended. What was the meaning in that? Each person must be in charge of his own drawing—period. But as the car crossed onto the red bridge, and Homan remembered standing in the salt water so many years ago, he questioned whether he was in control of his own life at all.

  In the city, after they crawled along the foot of the hills, through streets with too many cars and bicycles and young people and sidewalk vendors and panhandlers, Shawl suddenly leaned forward and pointed to a parking lot. King turned in and pulled behind a one-story building, and after Shawl pointed to a parking space, King cut the engine. Then King, Queen, and Shawl opened their doors, so Homan did, too. He stood up and watched while they talked. Shawl seemed pretty sure of herself and at ease in this lot. What was this place, anyway? He looked. A long ramp ran along one side of the building, and a blind man was making his way up it with a dog. Homan looked back at Shawl. She smiled and began walking toward the ramp, and as the blind man and the dog entered a side door, she gestured that they were going to do the same. She had to be kidding. Walk through that door? And get trapped in there for years?

  He folded his arms across his chest and stared at her.

  Finally, after nothing they did coaxed him in, a young man came out of the door. He didn’t have a dog or one-of-a-kind arms. Actually, he looked like singers on TV: tall and skinny, with black clothes and hair cut like an Indian, straight up in tufts. Shawl waved to Indian Tuft, and he waved back. Strangely, he didn’t use his mouth. He was nearing them now, and hearing folk always flapped their jaws by the time they got this close. Could that mean—

  Then Indian Tuft stopped before Homan and looked at him in a friendly way. Homan turned. King and Queen were behind him, she smiling, he wrinkling his brow. Things were getting even more confusing, especially when they motioned for him to face forward again. There he saw Indian Tuft begin making the kinds of gestures he made—bending his elbows, rubbing his fingers, pressing his palms out, thumbing his chest, sagging his shoulders, circling his head. It was exciting to see familiar movements until he realized there was nothing to them. These signs were like the ones the official at the Snare had tried on him. They had no meaning.

  Homan looked at Shawl. Her eyes were fixed on him, though not in a way he could understand. Slowly, he turned back to Indian Tuft, who’d lowered his hands.

  Homan glanced to one, then the other. Their eyes were waiting.

  Then Homan did something he hadn’t done with anyone since Beautiful Girl. He signed a full sentence. You ain’t making no sense.

  Indian Tuft shot Shawl
an uncomfortable look. Facing Homan again, he made more meaningless gestures.

  Was he making fun of Homan? Everyone looked as if they were waiting for… what?

  Why you making fun of me?

  Indian Tuft went on some more.

  I ain’t no fool.

  Homan fled to the car, threw himself into the back, and slammed the door. Shawl had some nerve, setting him up like this! And King and Queen—just going along with her! He hoped they felt sorry, letting him get mocked like that. He hoped they drove off and he never saw Shawl again. He wrapped his arms across his chest and stared ahead, fuming. Only after many minutes passed did he peek over to see the four of them standing around, wearing long faces. Like they had something to feel miserable about? He leaned against the far door, pressing the window to his cheek. Wishing he had his Tingling, he tapped a soothing beat on the glass.

  So he missed the last thing that happened. As King and Queen walked off from Shawl and Indian Tuft, a young man working at a desk inside the building happened to glance out the window. He saw a familiar face in a car, comforting himself by placing his cheek against the glass. The young man whirled around and wheeled down the hall at top speed, braking as his co-workers came back into the building.

  That night, Homan was ambushed by a dream.

  It began in a desolate place. The land was slanted like the ramp, with the tan sand and dry bushes of a desert, and the sky neither day nor night. In his hand was a bottle of wine. A man appeared in the distance, moving slowly, and Homan, having no use for wine, decided to offer his bottle as a gift. Then Homan realized this was the blind man from outside the building. Homan clapped his hands so the man would find him in this desert land. The man turned to face Homan and signed to him—and his signs did have meaning. You ain’t at the end. You still gots a long way to go.

  Suddenly Homan saw he was surrounded by people he’d known, all of them with differences. There was Shortie and Whirly Top and Man-Like-a-Tree. Sam. The McClintock boys. And there was Blue. Blue! Running toward Homan, his face holding his big-brother love. He came up close, his hands speaking with speed and excitement.