Each movement in her life requires a conscious, deliberate decision. : Notes on a Slow Dancer

The impression one gets watching Lynda is that of a sincere, good-natured young woman who is slightly off-balance. The cant is nothing easily discernible as she bustles about the fast-food restaurant where she works, serving and clearing tables, assuring herself with earnest dedication that what she has just done is both correct and complete.

But, still, she seems somehow different than the others.

I observed her at the suggestion of customers who said she was special. I witnessed effort not normally found in what Lynda would call “regular people”--those who are not slow learners, who are not developmentally disabled, who are not mentally retarded.

Lynda Marie Rykaczewski is not one of those regular people, and each movement in her life requires a conscious, deliberate decision. Each step is a slow dance, a triumph over the simple routines that others glide over without ever having to consider the music.

By whatever label one applies to her, Lynda has overcome much in her 30 years. The mental handicap is one of them. The murder and suicide of her parents is another, for which she once bore a terrible guilt.

It took years for her to overcome the feeling that, were it not for her, they might be alive today, but overcome it she did. Life began anew. The dance was far from over.

Lynda works at Carl’s Jr. in Granada Hills, a fast-food chain that has pioneered in hiring those who are developmentally handicapped. She lives at a nearby state-subsidized home with five other women and their house parents, Edward and Mildred Spence.

The neat stucco house sits at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac and is one of four such places in the San Fernando Valley operated by Kalisuch Homes. They are halfway houses for those unable to meet the demands of independent life, a haven of learning and preparing that simultaneously offers a push and a hug.

There I began to learn about Lynda.

New Jersey-born, she was labeled a slow learner from the beginning. Three brothers and two sisters are normal.

“I just couldn’t keep up with the regular kids,” Lynda said, sitting on the edge of her bed in a back room of the house. “It was hard, real hard. . . .”

She is a sturdy woman with short dark hair, thick glasses and a smile that flickers like a candle in the wind, caught in a confusion of emotions that sometimes seem to rush her to the brink of tears.

“I found it hard for me to talk like regular people,” she said in a voice often so muffled it was difficult to hear. “Words just wouldn’t come out like I wanted them to.”

But special schools taught her to read and write, and Lynda struggled gamely for her place in an often calloused society until. . . .

The details of that time are blurry. The parents were separated. Lynda remembers her mother showing her papers and documents to give to her aunt “in case something happened.”

“In case what happened?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Lynda said softly.

The mother had gone to work that morning in a New Jersey department store. Her husband, an alcoholic, tracked her down and, after a furious argument, stabbed her to death in an open parking lot.

The mother’s screams were heard by dozens of passers-by. No one stopped to help. The case made national headlines, but when the moral clamor had subsided, the fact remained. The mother was dead, the father in prison.

“I felt I was to blame because I could never do my schoolwork, because I ran away sometimes and because I was failing in everything,” Lynda said. “I was just too much trouble.

“I hated my father for what he had done. He called me from jail one day and asked me to forgive him but I couldn’t. I said, ‘I’m sorry, daddy, I’m hanging up,’ and I did. He killed himself a year later.”

The children were taken in by an aunt. Lynda was under the care of a psychologist for years before she could overcome the feeling that she was responsible for her parents’ deaths.

She tried going out on her own once but failed, then entered an independent living program in Santa Barbara. Four years ago, she came to the Valley.

Lynda found work on her own and in June won two gold medals at the Special Olympics, which she donated to a New Jersey high school in her mother’s honor.

“I wanted them,” she says slowly, “to remember her.”

Housemother Mildred Spence believes that soon Lynda will be out on her own, managing her own life, planning her own future.

I asked Lynda what she wanted to do.

“I want my own team in the Special Olympics,” she said. “I want to show kids what I know how to do. I want to live a normal life and be a regular person.”

Surviving is difficult enough for those with full faculties, for those free of nightmares, for those to whom conquering small details do not constitute a lifetime.

The others take it a day at a time. The music of their lives is tentative but complete. The slow dancers among us teach lessons we ought to learn. They are able, at least, to appreciate the melodies.