Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  I knew better than to tell my dad about this even bigger house. By day, Mom and I met up with Linley and her mom. Our mothers hit it off. Linley’s mom was divorced from her father, but folks referred to him happily as “The Wallet.” Mom thought this was hilarious. Linley didn’t seem to care. Everyone was beautiful, and there was fresh powder on the mountain, and the air was delicious with the smell of burning pine. I was trying to work out how much of my new moneyed world I was supposed to inhabit—when was I adding to my family’s sense of stature, and when was I not?

  My dad was a spectacular skier, so good that when he wore a blue ski suit, he’d have snake lines of skiers following him, thinking he was an instructor. And my grandfather had thought God lived in those mountains. Though I was clumsy and cold in Vail, I let my time on the mountain feel like the closing of a gap. I’m still learning, I reminded myself. I’m not very good yet. I’d stand up on my skis, lay them parallel, inhale deeply, and push myself down the fall line. One good stretch of balance would lead to a turn I couldn’t make. How quickly I lost control. I’d catch an edge, get catapulted sideways, and spread all of my limbs out in an effort to stop myself, losing equipment all over the mountain. It took long moments of stillness to inventory my body and make sure nothing hurt too badly. Snow up my sleeves, snow down my back, ice in my hair. Then, blinking, I’d hike back up for my missing ski or poles and try again. Linley and her friends waited for me but made no effort to help me down these treacherous patches. I was grateful. I’d have been embarrassed to be seen, and they’d have been embarrassed to see me. What I appreciated most of all was the assumption—which I inferred from their absence and my solitude on these double-diamond slopes—that I could handle myself just fine. I had no business being up there, but I’d sooner break a bone than admit that the gentler slopes were where I belonged.

  We returned to a cold campus, but by the end of March you could feel the sunlight on your skin, and at night the ponds failed to freeze. Slush gave way to open water. The light of our street lamps reappeared on its surface. Before Seated Meal, Shep stopped right in front of me, made his rabbit grin, and asked, “Hey, you want to hang out tonight?”

  I’d been practicing for this. I might even have made a little shrug.

  “Cool,” he said.

  The great doors opened, and people streamed by. Somebody thumped Shep hard to heave him forward into me, and by the way he smiled when we tangled I thought I could tell that he didn’t mind at all. I loved this far more than I loved the feel of his body.

  “How about you come up to Wing?” he asked. I’d never been in that boys’ dorm. I had never been invited.

  “Okay.”

  “Because you have a roommate…”

  He was right—she would have ruined conversation. I smiled.

  He suggested 8 p.m. We separated to report to our assigned tables—like our seats in Chapel, seating at formal supper was always assigned. Twice a day the school wanted us precisely where they had placed us. (“That’s so they know you haven’t disappeared,” said Mom. There was a famous story about two students at Groton who failed to appear in Chapel because they were at Logan Airport on their way to the Bahamas. They spent three days on the beach and were expelled upon their return. Mom loved this story.)

  I did not eat. I sat in that grand candlelit hall and looked down at the front of my dress in case I might catch myself becoming the sort of young woman who went to a senior’s room to hang out. I could not. My flowered dress was tied with a bow.

  After supper I found my library sofa, occupied it as regally as a duchess until time ran short, and just before eight returned to my room to drop off my books and change clothes. I chose jeans and a turtleneck beneath a wool fisherman’s sweater, blue with a white patterned band across the chest. Over that I zipped my parka to my chin and added a scarf for my ears. I stepped into my trusty duck boots and tucked my gloved hands into my pockets. Shep’s dorm was a seven-minute walk via a shortcut up a lamp-lit, leaf-covered path. The leaves were soft and smelled of earth. I looked like I was going to set lobster traps in the North Atlantic.

  “Warm enough?” asked Shep’s hallmate, eyeing me on the stairs.

  The boys had their doors propped open with cinder blocks to try to cool their rooms. The campus of St. Paul’s School was heated by an enormous boiler system, housed in what we called “the power plant,” which was forever churning in a dense pocket of trees at one edge of campus. The heat was never turned on before October 1, no matter how chilly the September nights, but from that day, each room’s radiator sounded a whole kitchen’s worth of pots and pans. They hissed and shrieked. We fiddled with knobs and got scalded, or ended up with a dud and had to sleep in a parka. No matter where you were on the school grounds, flung as it was across ponds and fields, the pressure of those boiler pipes ran beneath and around you. It kept us alive in the winter; it was also, in its strange animation, vaguely sinister. After a freeze you could make out where the pipes were buried because green strips of grass persisted, lush as July, shrugging off snow.

  Someone on Shep’s hall had raised the window at the far end of their corridor as high as it would go. There was no screen. This was the third floor of a building atop a hill. If I started from a run, I could have launched myself halfway across campus. The open window did not seem legal. Condensation dripped onto the sill.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  Shep, appearing in his doorway, laughed. “Come in.”

  Other friends were in his room: one boy was on the sofa, and one sat astride a desk chair. I recognized the student named Juan, a baseball player. I did not know the other boy at all. Shep said, “Have a seat.”

  It was either the bed or the sofa, next to the boy I didn’t know. Hands still in pockets, parka still zipped, I perched on the open end of the couch. Shep leaned against his desk, his legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. He had a habit of bending together paper clips and twining them with his fingers, and he did this while we talked.

  What did we talk about? I have no idea. I was working too hard to understand the shape of this setup: three boys, one girl; three seniors, one fourth former. I had been to boys’ rooms before, but only those of classmates (for study projects or in a group to see guys who dated my friends), and in each case I’d known my role: either be smart and useful or unobtrusive and friendly. I’d let my eyes drift over the boys’ spaces. I studied their foul nests of school-issue sheeting, the absurdly sophisticated components of their competitive stereo systems stacked like the instrument panels of commercial airliners, their posters of Neil Young and Cindy Crawford. I’d tell my little story about the Crawford family reunion in downstate Illinois somewhere, which my dad had been excited about for a while, and how Cindy hadn’t shown up but had been on the list, which meant that she was my cousin, kind of.

  Maybe I told this story again to the seniors. I would have wanted to offer them something, and I was anxious not knowing what I was expected to produce. Was I auditioning? Had Shep changed his mind and asked me up so they could make fun of me? But to be alone with Shep would have caused me a different sort of fear.

  On this evening, it was simple goodwill that surprised me. These boys, with their open faces and curious grins, their teams and classes and work and college plans, proved to be normal, friendly, bright young men who seemed to occupy the school more honestly than I did, as though I had climbed a flight of stairs and come upon the real students, the ones who knew a St. Paul’s I had not found.

  After an hour or so Shep accompanied me back down the hall. We’d left plenty of time for me to walk alone back to my dorm before check-in. The open window sucked cold from the night like a flue. At the bottom of the stairs, he leaned down and kissed me. I felt the hair at my temples dancing, which was from my smiling, or from a breeze. This was no more or less strange than anything else. Benediction could appear out of nowhere at school. It was less common than cruelty, I thought, but every bit as mysterious, and all the sweeter for this
.

  The only person I told at first was my friend Caroline.

  We were all a little bit in love with Caroline, the whole school was. Not just for the heavily lashed blue eyes, tall thin body, and high cheekbones—there was a lot of that at St. Paul’s. Caroline was unassuming and quick to smile, an artist and a Joni Mitchell lover, fond of candles and horoscopes and swishy, colorful, handmade clothes. Then she’d put on black heels for Seated Meal and senior boys would groan when she passed. She wrote her friends casual notes illustrated with cartoons of our latest mild anguish—a physics exam, a slip on the way to Chapel—and in her rendering would be a sympathy that we could borrow for our own. She was the friend who reached for a piece of hair that had fallen into your eyes. She noticed when you were coming down with a cold. As we’d grown to know each other as fourth formers, I’d wanted to be able to offer something like what she offered me, but I couldn’t think what I had to give. I’d suspected I could find her in the art studio, stealing an afternoon for her work. She was at her easel with her back to the door.

  “Sooo,” Caroline prodded, “how was it?”

  “Just a kiss,” I said.

  She replied, “Delicious.”

  Telling her, the kiss became even better than it had been.

  I’d never been in the advanced art studio before, because I’d taken only the standard survey art course, Visual Design (or Vis Des), taught by grumpy Mr. Atterbury, whose breath was so redolent of booze that when we came to the welding unit we joked he’d ignite. One of my tasks in Vis Des was to recast a photograph of the chapel in a new color palette by affixing cutout swatches of complementary colored paper. This was an exercise I abhorred. Snipping and pasting when I could have been reading, or napping, or getting ahead in math?

  Caroline was holding an actual palette in her hand, arrayed with gobs of pigment. I wanted to press my fingers into it.

  “Did he use tongue?” she asked.

  “Not much.” Just right, I thought.

  “Bad breath?”

  “Good, actually.”

  “Hands?”

  “No, nothing.”

  Caroline beamed. “Lacy-o! I like this guy!”

  She was working in oils, which we lowly Vis Des students never got to do, and she stood back from her easel so that I finally noticed what she’d been working on. It was a portrait of a woman. Caroline had completed the contouring of her subject’s cheeks and mouth and was bringing forward the eyes, but the hair was still a suggestion and the background untouched. The work was dynamic, as though this woman, whoever she was, was quite literally coming into existence on the canvas. My friend had pencils behind each ear and paint all over her arms.

  “My God,” I said, staring at her work. “That’s amazing. Who is that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You’re making this up?”

  She tipped her head at her woman. “I think I’m more letting her out.”

  Of course. Caroline could put color on white and make you think, That’s a person. Whereas I had no idea what was in front of me.

  Behind her easel a form-mate of ours was working on his own canvas. I hadn’t noticed him before, but he’d allowed us our privacy while I was gushing about Shep. I didn’t know Pete Walters well. He was neither buddy nor jock, a self-contained blond guy who was handsomer than his social standing would suggest, but also more aloof than you wished him to be. He had a brother in the sixth form who was a redhead, and once, looking at him in Chapel, I had wondered what it might have been like to have my own brother at St. Paul’s. But my brother was five years younger, so we couldn’t have overlapped anyway.

  Pete’s painting was a hyperrealist depiction of a row of telephone poles along the edge of a desolate road. The earth was yellow and the sky blue, the road gray, and on each telephone pole’s outstretched arms was a Jesus nailed as on the cross. It was one hell of a Jesus he’d painted: head bowed in death, blood weeping from the gash in his side, over and over and over, growing smaller and smaller toward an empty horizon. It was impressive and horrible. As for what it meant, I figured there was a compelling message in there somewhere, maybe about manifest destiny or the rape of the earth, and I’d think about it later.

  “Holy cow, Pete,” I said.

  He smiled. “Yeah?”

  “No, really.”

  Caroline stepped out from her own easel. “I know, isn’t Pete doing cool stuff?”

  The three of us stared. I counted six Jesuses. I remembered that my mother had once told me that her father, my grandfather, was not a part of her life because he had decided to go work for the telephone company when they were first stringing lines across the West, and my great-grandmother had said that no son-in-law of hers would work for the utilities. “He just wanted to climb telephone poles,” my mother had told me, disgusted, and I remembered wondering what was wrong with that. It must have been obvious, though, because he’d vanished when my mom was an infant and never returned. I did not even know his name.

  “My grandfather worked for the telephone company, stringing wires across the West,” I said. More and more at St. Paul’s I found myself saying things that sounded like a script I’d been working on almost long enough to pull off.

  “Really?” Pete asked.

  “Yeah. He loved it. The freedom. Climbing the poles.” This must have been true, if he’d left his wife and baby daughter to do it.

  “Gosh,” said Caroline. “I had no idea, Lace. That’s really cool.”

  Pete made big eyes at her. “It’s very cool.”

  If it weren’t for the verisimilitude of the dead Jesuses, I’d have guessed Pete might be in the painting studio solely to be close to Caroline. But he had talent. And some serious angst, too, from the look of his work. He puffed his hair off his forehead and squinted. “I don’t know,” he said. “Something’s not quite speaking to me.”

  There was a long pause. We heard the stream rushing behind the art building. Pete stood sweetly, his apron doubled at his waist. His painting was accomplished and grotesque. It was a very St. Paul’s project: more intention than meaning and more striving than intention. We three kids cocked our heads at the Jesuses and tried to come up with the right thing to say.

  Pete began to laugh. He said, “Maybe it’s a little too…”

  Caroline laughed with him. “Determined…”

  Pete said, “Naked…”

  I added, “Ambiguous…”

  “A bit too, what-in-the-heavenly-fuck?”

  I was thinking about my grandfather climbing telephone poles. I was interested for the first time in how a family with a baby might fall apart. For ambition? Adventure? For a job?

  Thirty years later, after my grandmother died and I inherited her journals, I learned more. The marriage was collapsing by the time my mother was due to be born. Someone else took my grandmother to the hospital. My grandfather stopped by Maternity to leave a box of caramel candies and a message: if the baby was a boy, he said, he would contest the divorce. This was in 1950. The baby was a girl.

  Caroline sobered us up. “I don’t know what it’s about, Pete, but I can tell your heart is in it.”

  He gazed at her, smiling wide. My friend had said the perfect thing in the moment, and had also hit on what I most wanted. I wanted to feel my heart, to feel it moving toward something that was not me. Seeing my peers with their bright canvases made me ache. I had no art, no imagination or devotion. Convention seemed to suggest a boyfriend was the solution. I thought about Shep and figured I’d give that a try.

  A few weeks later, Caroline, pushing too hard to recover from knee surgery (a hockey crash had torn her ACL) and rehabilitate while rowing crew, fell into exhaustion. She had discovered that she was, pound for pound, a rowing powerhouse. Her bones were light and her stroke long, and now she was not just a beauty but a known athlete too. Colleges were paying attention. But she couldn’t eat enough to keep weight on. Her blond hair fell limp to her shoulders and never grew much longer. I noti
ced her looking thinner than usual, and when she held her tea at breakfast she shivered, even though the windows were open to the sun.

  We walked together to Chapel, slowly—she was still in a brace. “I think I just need a nap,” she said. “But I can’t get any rest in Kitt.” Her dorm was my dream—awash in friends—but to her it was a zoo. “I just need some space. You’re so lucky to be in Warren, Lacy-o. You can just disappear.”

  If only I could have borrowed her perspective on my own life.

  “Come to my room after lunch,” I told her. My roommate would be away with her team, and I’d be at tennis practice. “You can have it all afternoon.”

  When morning classes ended, I raced back to Warren House. I made my bed, brushing grit off the sheets, folding back the top coverlet, and tucking it all in tight. The flowered duvet matched the flowered pillow sham, and my mother had included a little flowered pillow in a complementary bloom. I pounded them all to expel stale air and make them look fresh. I lined up my shoes at the base of my closet and shut the door. Behind my bed was the window, at this time of year filled with new green. Finally, I tore a square from a notebook and wrote, Sweet dreams, and set this atop the pillows.

  When I finished tennis practice, the day was withdrawing its warmth. It was still early in the season for New Hampshire, and as the sun lowered, the cold came back fast. I ran from the courts and sprinted up the stairs, legs goose-bumped. My room was dark, the light having moved. The bed was remade, and a new note read:

  Best nap I’ve ever had. Thank you, kind friend.

  I saved it, so I could remember how it felt to take care of someone I loved.