Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  May I suggest a substitution? The gun will not go off. It will be the man.

  When I called home that fall, I never asked when Mr. Lane would fly up to take me to supper. Instead I sobbed and begged my parents to let me come home. This had to be done from the pay phone behind the gym rather than the one in the basement of my dorm, because I didn’t want other kids to hear. I crossed the road and stood beneath the fluorescent lights, bugs whapping and zipping, and cried until three minutes to ten, when I hung up, wiped my face, and crossed the road back to check in for the night.

  My mother would get very quiet when I called from the pay phone in tears. My father would step up. “You have to give it a try. You need to stick this out.”

  What could I say that would sound the alarm? As a parent, I can imagine heaps of tips: Shyla’s bra or my lone Holocaust investigations or purging lessons in the girls’ bathroom. The full bottles of vodka that I weighed in my hands in my urban friends’ room, the brands the kids loved in those years, lettering bright as aquarium fish through the liquor (not for nothing was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son, who lived across the quad, nicknamed “Stoli”). What if I had mentioned the newb book, and how the girls in it were rated to two decimal points each? This was the semester my big-city friends were wild-eyed with the news that a new student in their dorm—a doll-sized cross-country runner who was as kind as she was fast—was getting beaten up by her sixth-form hockey-star boyfriend. I am trying to remember if I knew already that the dance instructor told his girls, pre-professional ballerinas, that having sex would improve their turnout. I’m trying to remember if this was the fall that sixth-form boys swapped peroxide for shampoo in the bottle belonging to a black student, so that his hair glowed as orange as the maple trees. If this was the fall they held down an American Sikh student and pried off his dastaar.

  The private devastations I reported left my parents unmoved. I described the day when I heard a fifth former blasting my favorite song, a Kate Bush dirge, a floor below me and I went down onto her hall to tell her I loved it, and she just gaped at me—positively stone-ass blanked me—until I cottoned on that I was not supposed to even be on her hall, much less talk to her, because I was a new student. She continued staring as I turned around and let myself back out through the fire door, back upstairs to my newb bed in my newb room with my newb sensibilities, where I belonged.

  My father said, “Oh, that’s too bad.”

  “Maybe she’s just shy,” said Mom.

  “Maybe she didn’t hear you. You said her music was loud.”

  “Do you want me to call your adviser and talk about it?”

  Mom would have let me come home, but Dad had a rule. “One year. You have to make it through the year, then we’ll reevaluate.”

  I threw out my best shots: my roommate was mean, and when I got dressed the other day, she watched from across the room and told me she wished she could merge our bodies so that she had my tits and tummy but her thighs and butt.

  “Maybe she meant it as a compliment.”

  “Yes, she envies you.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Well, does everyone have a boyfriend? I should think you’d be concentrating on your studies.”

  “I can’t make friends.”

  “What about those lovely girls we met at Parents’ Weekend?”

  “They go to the Vineyard every weekend with their boyfriends.”

  “That seems inappropriate.”

  “Yes, better you stay at school. Use the time to meet people!”

  “I don’t belong here.”

  “Oh, but you do. The school said as much when they admitted you. How bright and capable you are.”

  It was cold, by then, at the pay phone. I kicked frozen gravel.

  Mom said, “By the way, did you hear about Cecily?” A classmate of mine from grade school, who was among the small group from my hometown to start boarding school that fall. She’d gone to St. George’s in Rhode Island. “She just came home. Gave up. She couldn’t hack it.”

  When Thanksgiving break finally arrived and we were free to travel home, I shared a car to the airport with Gaby, a fifth former from my hometown who had gone to my small elementary school. Gaby wore her red hair cut bluntly just below her chin, and when I scooted into the back of the livery car, on the opposite end of her seat, she did not peek out from behind it, much less smile at me. I was too exhausted to care. Besides, she was taciturn in a way that I appreciated—she seemed cynical, which suggested some individuality. Also, I knew a curious fact about her: she liked to wash her feet in the sink at night. I’d learned this the year before from a ninth-grade classmate, Connor, who had spent middle school loving her hopelessly. The closest he’d gotten to dating her was a nightly telephone call of the endlessly wandering, knotted-cord sort we engaged in then. During those calls, Connor told me, Gaby washed her feet in the sink. He heard the water splashing and the slap-squeaking of her soapy hands. After Connor hung up with Gaby, he would sometimes call me just to talk about her.

  I didn’t mind. I wasn’t interested in Connor, and in any case I was struck by the image of Gaby, balanced before her sink, phone pressed between her shoulder and her chin, washing her feet one at a time. I was strictly a shower girl, because I was a competitive tennis player, which meant I spent summer days scalloped with crusts of sweat and sunscreen. I had never washed only my feet. It had never occurred to me. To wash only your feet struck me as so luxurious it might be inappropriate. And to do this alone, in the summer evenings, every night? It was almost a ministry of self. I loved imagining it.

  Sometimes, on the phone with Connor, I’d tried putting my own toes under the faucet, but the bathroom was small and the narrow pedestal sink high, and I ended up slipping. My mother, coming up the stairs, paused on the landing. “You’re not on the phone in the john, are you?”

  Before I’d left for school, she arranged a lunch with Gaby and another Chicagoland Paulie, Helena, during that summer of the foot washing. Helena was the daughter of a powerful Chicago philanthropist who chaired the boards of hospitals, schools, and museums. Like Gaby, Helena was a rising fifth former. As an older girl, a returning student, and the child of a famously giving mother, she would be welcoming and kind. I would meet Helena and Gaby downtown, where Helena lived, and have lunch with them in the city. Then Gaby and I would take the Chicago & North Western commuter train an hour back north, to our hometown, and I, before even setting foot on school grounds to begin my fourth-form year, would have two friends.

  It didn’t turn out that way. In the parlor of the charity matron’s mansion, Helena asked me who my “old girl” was—the sixth former assigned to be my advocate and buddy through my first year. I’d received a nice letter from the girl chosen for me, welcoming me to the school community. She’d heard I played tennis and wanted to introduce me to her roommate, who was number one on the team. She promised to find me as soon as I arrived on campus to help me learn my way around. When I named this girl, Helena and Gaby aimed red faces at each other, then fell to laughing.

  I couldn’t think what I’d done to cause this response. Maybe there was no one there by that name? Maybe I had said it—Susie—wrong?

  “Nothing,” said Helena, finally. “She’s just kind of a loser.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s kind of…big.”

  “Oh.”

  I was either too young or too impressionable to respond to cruelty with anger. Instead I set about recalibrating my world. I concluded that the sixth former who had written to me was not in fact kind and inviting, but a big loser. I’d get to school and I’d work out why.

  Then they asked what dorm I’d been assigned. Warren House, I told them, pleased that I remembered what had been written on the white form letter mailed to my home. This time their faces stayed aghast. Could it be any worse? Was I marked for misery in some way?

  “No, nothing,” said Helena again. “It’s just a new dorm, way out away from, like, everyth
ing.”

  Well, at least I’d know where the center of campus was, and where it was desirable to be.

  “I don’t know anyone in Warren,” added Helena, as if I weren’t clear on who she was by now.

  Gaby turned to her. “Kelly got shafted into Warren.”

  This was the girl whose music would summon me down to her floor, and whose icing would send me wordlessly straight back up again. The knowledge of it would drop into my mind like a coin into a slot as I stood there staring at her staring at me. Kelly. Of course. You got shafted into Warren. She was a friend to these girls, but I knew nothing about any of it sitting there in Helena’s living room, waiting to head out for a summer lunch.

  “Oh, right,” said Helena. “That sucks.”

  On the way to the restaurant, Helena took Gaby’s arm ahead of me on the sidewalk. I kept up so I could hear them talk. “Wow, Gab,” she said. “We’re fifth formers now.”

  I could think of nothing to say. I was obsessing over big Susie and my hopeless dorm. The cold exhilaration of total uncertainty had been replaced by the certainty of gloom. After lunch, which was in the café of the Neiman Marcus store on Michigan Avenue (my mother had zipped a few twenties into my little canvas purse to treat), Helena hailed a cab. I guessed Gaby and I would head back home. It was sooner than I’d hoped—nothing good had happened, and I had hoped for something good—but I’d be relieved to settle onto the train. Maybe Gaby and I could talk. We had Connor in common. We had summer evenings in our small town in common. And this big New Hampshire school, which I was slated to begin.

  Helena stepped forward to open the taxi door for me—so polite, so adult—here, finally, was the daughter of the mother I’d heard so much about. I slid onto the seat. With Gaby on the pavement beside her, she called out “Chicago and North Western Station,” slammed the door, and the driver pulled away from the curb. They were rid of their charge.

  The city block slid along the windshield, slipped so easily across its face as we moved forward. I was surprised by the back of the driver’s head. Would he talk to me? What should I say?

  It was fine. What fourteen-year-old can’t take the train alone? Still, I piped up and asked the driver to take me to the address of my dad’s office in the inner Loop instead. Nobody but Dad expressed surprise to see me there, alone at midday, so I waited, reading in a chair, until I could ride home with him.

  Now that I was an actual fourth former, in my faraway crappy dorm with my loser old girl, poor Gaby still had to ride with me back and forth to school. Our mothers had arranged this, and I felt sorry for Gaby that she had to suffer it. I’d have been happy to take the bus into Boston and transfer to Logan Airport by myself, finding solidarity in the apathy of public transportation, but that would have terrified my parents. Early on the morning that we were released for Thanksgiving, I climbed into the livery car to find not only Gaby but her boyfriend, too. He was the son of the scion, and the car was his treat.

  “Huh. You’re Lacy,” he said.

  I said hello. The leather seat was delicious—deep gray and soft as a cat.

  “You’re also from Lake Forest,” he said.

  His stating the obvious made me nervous—like he was calling my bluff. What was I supposed to say to these things?

  But this boy, Stewart, was smiling. “Another Lake Forester,” he said. “Another little Lake Forest redhead.” Cajoling. I saw now why he was smiling: it was silly, how similar we all were, the Waspy girls from the same towns.

  I nodded. “I am.”

  “Lake Forest is like the Greenwich of the Midwest,” he mocked. Stewart was himself on the way home to Connecticut. “You guys are so sweet to be proud of your snooty little prairie town.” He nudged Gaby, and I saw through the scrim of her hair how her cheeks rose in a smile. “I always tease Gaby that she lives in a junior-varsity suburb. You’re JV Greenwich. You guys aren’t starters. But that’s cool. We like you anyway.”

  I loved him for saying this. I loved him for finally calling out one tiny corner of the vast labyrinth of hierarchies that ruled the world of St. Paul’s School. Status was our first language, one that had to be learned, instantly, if you did not arrive fluent (and many students did); and it functioned like some primitive, instinctive form of communication beneath the surface of every exchange. We knew the grammar of privilege (lacrosse over track and field, low-slung corduroys over khakis, old station cars over luxury vehicles) and could infer from silence where the greatest power lay. You could not discuss the hierarchy, and in any case we had no words for it. In fact, where it held sway, there were no words. No student from an old Boston Brahmin family would ever admit to knowing her name was iconic, or that it was, say, carved on a lintel beneath which we passed every day. This is why they laughed so hard when I asked who Martha was, and where you could buy her wine.

  Say what you will about Stewart’s father, he actually worked for a living. The taurine jowls of the man’s face, pixelated on A1 of my dad’s newspaper, were still boyish cheeks on Stew, and the son’s eyes were round and sympathetic. Just the fact of being a known quantity set Stewart outside that first, almost royal set of Paulies—kids who passed without any wake through the halls that held their granddaddies’ ghosts, winning prizes and gaining admission to Ivy League schools and needing nothing, troubling nothing, admiring nothing. Their families summered on islands where homes cannot be bought. Their fathers worked, if at all, with silent currents of cash. When you discovered that someone’s mom’s name was Abigail Adams, well, believe it. There were no accidents.

  “Tom Buchanan had his polo ponies brought up from Lake Forest,” I told Stewart. I’d read Gatsby right around the time my family moved from a small development to a larger home on a main road, the summer I was twelve. Across the street was a country club that had at its founding been a polo club. I liked to imagine that Daisy’s horses had been stabled there, beneath the trees I could see from my window—enormous oak and ash crowns that moved softly at night.

  “Yeah,” said Stew. “He bought them in Lake Forest and got them the hell out of the Midwest.”

  Gaby hit him, and after he flinched, he reached, laughing, and took her fist so he could unfold her fingers and hold her hand.

  In Stew’s limo we escaped the gates of the school with its demure white sign, and traveled down Pleasant Street toward Concord and the river, and from there to the highways. I kept my face to the glass to give the couple space. I saw each clutch of forest and granite escarpment for the first and last time, dignified it with my seeing, and bade it all farewell. St. Paul’s just wasn’t going to work out. I was thinking about the ponies, was my problem. I wanted to understand them (How were they chosen? Who loaded them into the trailers? Who rode east with them? Who greeted them when they arrived?) when I should have been, like everyone, smitten with Daisy, and the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.

  “It’s the Crawford Curse,” said my mother about my dorm assignment, my old girl assignment, my infelicitous roommate situation. “Things never work out for us.”

  That hadn’t been the case before St. Paul’s, as I remembered. And to most anyone observing my family from the outside, things were working out quite well indeed. So the problem was me. Was I.

  My parents always did say I was sensitive. “You’re being very dramatic,” said my dad, finding himself unable to imagine what I felt. I learned from a young age to anticipate moments when I was likely to come in for this response. In the eighth grade, I’d been subjected for a short while to a particularly ingenious bit of bullying from a male classmate who used a portable tape recorder to record me in class and then replayed awkward moments over and over to a clutch of other boys in the hall. They held themselves and shook with laughter. I went home hived from crying. My father called the boy’s mother, who ordered her son to produce his tape recorder. I sniffled politely while Dad listened through the phone, so assured in my indignation that I felt almost sorry for the tape-recording monster.

  But D
ad’s face settled, then brightened. “Oh,” he said. “I see.” He turned to me, relaxed and frank: “There’s no reason for you to be upset. I heard the tape. It’s just recordings of you answering questions in class. You sound very bright. I’d actually be proud.”

  “Dad,” I said, still crying, still twelve years old. How could I explain? “This makes me want to kill myself.”

  He frowned. “I don’t think that’s a solution.”

  Then there had been a period, following eighth grade, when for six weeks or so I became inconsolable just as the sun began to sink toward late afternoon. This was in summer when I could find no clear reason for sorrow. Long light on the oaks and elms. Two parents, a younger brother, some toy spaniel dogs (we bred them, so for a few years there were puppies). Tennis lessons and afternoons at the pool and church on Sundays. Yet that summer, I watched the sun begin to set and grew nauseated with terror. I was aware that the crisis concerned death, but I had no way of working with that awareness. What frightened me was not the idea of an ending—mine or anyone else’s—but the glimpses I thought I was catching, in panicky micro-bolts, of nothing. Nothing! The idea of it sent my belly dropping like a trapdoor. The universe tended toward nothing. Relentless nothing. Arcs of cold white bending away to invisible warps in space-time (I had read Stephen Hawking, at my dad’s suggestion) and nowhere, not anywhere, a hand or a heart. The terror was unsolvable because no light could survive that dark. It awaited me. I had no choice.

  “That’s Huis Clos,” said my mom, when I tried to describe my crisis. “No Exit.” Mom had grown up in Europe, where her stepfather worked. She spoke five languages and read four. She had her hands in a bowl of fruit salad when she told me about Sartre, tossing everything but bananas with a generous snow of sugar, orange juice, and a splash of Grand Marnier. She popped a blueberry into her mouth. “It’s about the trap of mortality. I think we even have it in the library.”