Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  Shep’s lean top lip was deft, perfectly precise. I hadn’t had much practice kissing before, but where, in the preteen fumblings of my ninth-grade classmates, a boy had sensed an opening and pushed forward, tongue out like a hunting lizard, Shep understood that distance was sweet. He’d retreat the tiniest bit. We could make out against the stacks in the library and my back didn’t hurt from arching away from him. He held me upright and tight in his arms. I wanted more. He kept it this way. He was fastidious and his breath always smelled of mint. It got so I’d walk the paths back to my dorm with him—I, as an underformer, had earlier check-in, so he would drop me off—and I’d breathe as deeply as I could to catch the mint mixed in with the scent of thawing earth. What a blessing it was that Warren House was way off in the farthest corner of campus! It took forever to wander those paths. Beneath lamps, he’d stop me and lift my chin, and not care who saw us kissing right there in the dusk.

  A decade or so later, when I was in graduate school in Chicago, I came across a feature about Shep in the non-celebrity pages of People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” issue. The rabbit smile was come-hither now, as I’d known it would be, and he had grown into his shoulders. People wrote about his family, his skiing, his Ivy League degree, and his work ethic. They wrote that he was a catch for any woman. I thought, You don’t know the half of it.

  After a few good-night kisses, that spring when I was fifteen, I felt brave enough to ask Shep about the blue satin bra and our missed meeting in the old library. We were sitting on the low-slung sofa in his room, alone this time, trying to find things to talk about. I asked about Shyla to get him talking, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.

  “So whatever happened with, you know…?” I said.

  He pressed that fine lip even finer and gave a left-handed shrug. “Yeah. That just wasn’t going to work out.”

  I waited.

  “It was just way too…” he said. He looked off across the room, toward his bed. I was imagining a lusty heartbreak. I was thinking I hadn’t seen her in a while and maybe she’d been devastated and had to go home. Shep looked back at me, some mischievous light in his eyes, and then he reached his arm around my shoulders and across my chest, above my breasts, hooking me into him. With a turn of his free arm at my back he twisted me facedown onto the sofa. I didn’t resist, so he guided me there, to the cushion, and then unwound his arms.

  I wasn’t afraid. He had never tried anything with me before, never taken me by surprise; if anything, I wondered if he would ever try to touch me beyond holding hands and kisses. I took a full breath of rancid air from his sofa, utterly baffled, waiting to see what he’d do next.

  “That’s a wrestling move,” he told me, as I sat up. “I just pinned you.”

  He was a varsity wrestler, and a pretty good one. I’d tried to watch a meet once but had been too embarrassed by the sight of him in his singlet and padded-ear helmet. I hadn’t even told him I’d been in the stands.

  “Cool,” I said. I smoothed down my shirt.

  “There’s pretty much nothing you can do to get out of that,” he said. “That one’s a killer.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I can show you others,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  He nodded. Poor guy, he was more frightened by Shyla and the promise of her shiny bra than I was. All the kissing? It wasn’t prelude—it was, quite simply, where he was. It would have been hell for him not to be boning and scrumping all over the place. He was a sixth former and an athlete. I knew what other guys would expect of him. My chest was tingling from where he’d held me with his forearm. My breasts were untouched. He smiled, and his top teeth stuck out.

  “Okay,” I said. “Show me another good move.”

  He hopped to his feet. “Come on!” He helped me up, hand wrapped around my wrist, and stood me in front of him, showing me how to widen my stance, how to get moving and stay light. We grappled. His arms were alarmingly strong, but his focus, which was not on me, left me puzzled. It took me a long moment of watching him hop around, arms ready, to recognize this feeling I had, a deeply familiar mix of tenderness and condescension, for what it was: sisterly. Shep might have been my little brother. We might have been at home roughhousing, ages ten and five.

  We were dancing around the little space between his bed and his sofa. I waited for him to make his move.

  “I kept your note, though,” he told me, grinning, and then he gently threw me to the ground.

  That April, Shep was admitted to Cornell. Tennis season had started. I was going to sign up for the housing lottery with the Kittredge girls so we could all live together as fifth formers. Shep would be off to college, where he could start over again as the fully fledged heir come into his own instead of the scrawny boy with the rabbit grin and the cooler, bigger friends. We were united in our potential, but our ambitions depended on one day getting away from each other.

  But we kept dating for another few weeks. Why not? To leave the common room after Seated Meal and see someone attractive waiting for you? To walk with that person down the long chilly hall and out into the spring night? Why quibble about things like love or a fetish for wrestling throws?

  On his way out of St. Paul’s, Shep was helpful to me in decoding the place—I had the sense he was preparing himself to leave by parceling out his experience for my naive ears. One night, walking back to my room, we worked through the problem of the tennis team. I’d been frustrated by my inability to advance. Spots on the varsity and junior varsity squads were managed via a ladder, with players ranked 1 through 14, the top six forming the varsity singles team. Every week, during Thursday practice, we’d play a challenge match against the teammate one rung above or one rung below us. This was to ensure that our ladder was as accurate as possible, and to keep us in fighting form. I had beaten every girl on the bottom half of the ladder, and then I’d beaten the fifth former in seat No. 7, earning me her place and a shot at varsity. But the coach would not let me challenge the girl at No. 6. Every week I again played the girl I’d already beaten. She was given the chance to unseat me, but I could not advance.

  When I asked, the coach explained that as a fourth former I had plenty of time to shine, and that I ought to focus on my game and let her worry about the rankings. This stung. Winning made me uncomfortable, just as the Ferguson nomination had made me feel painfully visible. Was I behaving inappropriately by wanting to challenge up, being ungracious or arrogant? I knew I was a stronger player than at least a few of those girls above me. Was it wrong to want to prove it?

  “Oh, good Lord,” said Shep, his arm around my waist. I felt through my leather flats how the earth was soft now. Even the shadowed edges of the ponds were iceless. The buddies had ditched their Levi’s cords for cargo shorts, and my urban friends, whom I didn’t see much of anymore, had debuted in class a series of miniskirts that made our tennis skirts look like kilts.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Just think about it. Think who’s number six.”

  “Fiona?” A fifth former who was unfailingly friendly and kind.

  “Precisely.”

  “She’s a sweetheart.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “So I’m not allowed to beat her?”

  Shep was smiling. “Not as long as you’re playing on those courts, you’re not.”

  I pictured our shiny indoor courts. The facility had not been open long and still smelled of rubber and lemon cleaner. I loved playing there. It was loud and thrilling, the surface fast, no rude New England gusts to shove a ball off course. I puzzled until I realized: the courts bore Fiona’s last name. On every map, on the transom, in our athletic calendar. We played on Fiona’s courts. I remember the shape of the woods around us as Shep and I turned up the lit hill toward Warren House. I found at once that he was absolutely right about why I was stuck on the tennis ladder, and that I did not care. I loved Fiona. I didn’t want to kick her off the courts named for her family. This was just ho
w things were at the school. The labyrinth was mine. I was in it. With the Ferguson nomination, with the arrival of spring, with Shep, the place had committed to me, and I would be faithful in return.

  “Next year there’ll be more spaces on varsity,” Shep said. “Then you can kick her ass and it’ll be okay.”

  I wished he’d come back and watch.

  I told Shep about the Ferguson exams. “That sounds horrendous,” he said, laughing. But I’d loved the essay questions my teachers had drawn up. I wrote about Willa Cather and Manon Lescaut. I worked precalculus problems with the galloping pleasure of new confidence. “You’re a total nerd,” Shep teased.

  “Absolutely.”

  Shep came up to the third floor to hang out with me until intervis hours were over. My roommate had found friends on the opposite side of campus and was home as little as possible. Shep was careful and anxious, like me. Usually when we were in my room, I sat on my bed with my back to the wall and he sat in my desk chair, alternately chatting with me and making fun of my photographs from home. But this night he sat next to me on my bed, both of us upright. No feet were on the floor, but we dangled them in parallel over the edge of my flowered comforter.

  “Maybe you could come visit at Cornell,” he said.

  We both knew I wouldn’t. I kissed him. Mint, the feel of his smile on my own mouth.

  “Maybe you can come back and visit me here,” I said.

  “You’ll have moved on to someone else.”

  “And you’ll be dating some college babe.”

  “I sure as hell hope so.”

  I tried to throw him, using one of the moves he’d taught me. He let me wrestle him down. “Excellent,” he said, patronizing. I was on top of him now, pinning him, and I wasn’t thinking of anything except that at that moment his hand was undoing the sash at the back of my dress, and then I felt his hand on my skin, under my dress—modestly, because he kept my skirt down, reaching his arm up past my waist toward my breasts, as best he could figure out how.

  “Do you know this move?” he whispered.

  I shook my head no.

  His arm was trapped between my skin and my drop-yoked dress, which suited both of us just fine—it was electric but it was limited, a hot wire of touch, just exactly right.

  He kissed me again. And at that moment, the door to my room swung open and my adviser, Ms. Shay, was standing there.

  We scrambled. Shep jumped to his feet. I gathered my skirt under me.

  “I promise we weren’t,” I stuttered. “It wasn’t.” All of the lights were on. We were fully dressed. Already I was forming my defense, and in spite of myself I was beginning to cry.

  Ms. Shay looked to Shep. He ducked his head. She said, “You may go.”

  Without a word to me, he left.

  “You can come talk to me about this when you’re ready,” she told me, and closed the door.

  I marched downstairs in a tumble of indignation and terror. My urban friends signed out for weekends to the Cape to have sex all night long! Shyla delivered lingerie at lunchtime mail drop! Everyone knew who was boning whom in the library, the choir stalls, the lower-school woods. And Shep hadn’t even done anything to me! He only ever taught me stupid wrestling throws!

  Ms. Shay, my mother said, looked like a Botticelli. Tall and graceful, with a heart-shaped face, a cherub’s red lips, and dark curls held in a loose clip at the nape of her neck. She was married to a novelist we glimpsed only occasionally. Their marriage was foundering, and we intuited this instability from her wide eyes and soft attentions. She fixed me with a look far too forgiving to provide fuel for my self-important defense. I crumpled before her at the door to her apartment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She was quiet.

  “I promise you I have never done anything inappropriate. We have only kissed.”

  She nodded.

  “He likes to make me do these wrestling moves.”

  Her eyebrows went up.

  “It’s sort of annoying, actually.”

  Now she smiled.

  “Lacy,” she said, and I shivered. I hated to hear my name like this. Ms. Shay was the one Dr. Miller had written to about my Prozac. Ms. Shay was the one who monitored how often I walked across the dark road to call home and cry from the pay phone by the gym. She knew how sad and lonely I’d been, how needy I was, and I felt deeply betrayed by a world in which she was the one to catch me when I was finally not desperate, to catch me almost doing something that was nothing compared to what everyone else was up to, but that was everything to me. I felt trapped by my own reckless feelings: too much sadness on the one hand and too much happiness on the other. Either way, it seemed, I was going to have to be reined in by an adult who would look at me this way—head tipped, mouth pursed, arms crossed over her long, lovely sweater.

  “It’s almost the end of the year,” she said. I understood exactly. Don’t fuck this up now. She was going to let me go.

  “I know.”

  “Good.” She looked at the clock. It was a while until ten. “I trust you’re in for the night?”

  “I’m in.”

  The Kittredge girls and I were down at the Lower School boat docks, working up the courage to strip down to our swimsuits. Brooke’s boyfriend, Andrew, had been new as a third former, and as a veteran he introduced us to spring swimming at the docks. It was possible only on the rarest of hot days, after the sports season had ended but before the final commitments of the year.

  The pond was murky and cold, not terribly deep. Grasses pushed up from the mud all along the shore, and we were a short reedy curve away from where just four months earlier we’d laced up skates. I studied the spot where the hot chocolate tables had stood. How could the earth change so utterly? How could I?

  With the arrival of exams, the sixth formers were readying themselves to graduate, and the school’s intricate scheduling came apart. It was a release, a loosening of the daily corset around our attention. My friends were gleeful. I imagined something more like a breakdown, as if these gaps between commitments at the end of the year signified a great beast stumbling in its gait, falling to its knees. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Survived the work. Found these friends—these friends! Giggling and sidestepping around the old wooden boards, dipping their fingers in the water to exclaim how cold it was.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, just do it,” said Brooke, already in a black two-piece. Andrew lay back shirtless beside her, one hand calmly on her belly. A few of his friends had joined us too—Kent and Mike and Clem, all fourth formers like us. These were boys who talked about things, who did not regard conversation as a sniper’s convention and who seemed to have thoughts beyond our bodies (and theirs). Kent sang in the choirs and a band. Mike practiced piano in the music building every day. Clem had been dubbed “Nuprin” by the older boys in his dorm after the popular advertising slogan of the painkiller—“Little, Yellow, Different, Better”—because he hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, was quite tawny-skinned for a white kid, and sometimes had a weird sense of humor, but everyone liked him. He wore his nickname with good cheer.

  Together we all offered encouragement to Maddy, who was quivering like a waterbird, her arms crossed, hems of her shirt in her fingertips, paralyzed by the presence of Brophy farther up the bank on the grass.

  “He’s with a million other guys,” said Brooke.

  “That doesn’t help!”

  “He’s not watching you.”

  But we were all watching Maddy. The big guns were about to be revealed. I’d seen her changing, of course, casually, as girls did—in the locker rooms and before Seated Meal. But her breasts in a swimsuit would be a revelation even to those of us who knew her well. Anyone’s body, held plainly in the daylight, was a revelation then, my own included.

  Andrew sat up. “Maddy, honey, you’re beautiful. Don’t worry about it.”

  “You’re all beautiful,” said Clem.

  “Ditto,” said Kent.

  A light
breeze moved over the water. I felt I was moving too. In the late May sun, the chapel tower was as saturated with color as the dumb cutouts I’d had to make back in the winter.

  Maddy pulled off her shirt. She shook out her hair and sat down. Nothing happened. We all laughed.

  I was self-conscious too, but I didn’t say anything about it, and nobody noticed. I pulled off my shirt and dropped my shorts and lay down quickly on my towel in my one-piece swimsuit. The sun blanketed me. I thought of Mom, how soon I’d be going home.

  “All right!” said Brooke. “Who’s going in?”

  They did, one by one—the girls diving and the boys tucking into cannonballs that swamped the old wood and our towels. Still on the dock, Sam and I shrieked.

  Then she narrowed her small face at me. “Last one in!”

  We let the others pull themselves up and out before taking our places at the end of the dock. I waited after Sam dived. She surfaced, gasping and smiling. I waited so long that the moment passed, and I felt chilly and wanted to change my mind.

  “Come on! It feels awesome!”

  Sam was climbing out. My friends were dripping and hopping, shoving and hooting on the docks, shining like fish. I dived in.

  The water felt gorgeous. An envelope of cool that opened around me and closed me in. I arced up gracefully, imagining myself doing so. Just before my head broke the surface, I felt a sharp drag on my right thigh, and my leg began to burn.

  “Jesus!” I sputtered, coming up.

  Nobody heard.

  I paddled a bit, looking down. I couldn’t see anything, but my leg was searing.

  Leeches? Weeds? What lived in New Hampshire ponds?

  Legs dragging, I pulled myself to the dock with my arms and hoisted myself up. As I left the water, blood poured off my right thigh. Something had sliced me from high up, near my crotch, all the way down to above my knee, forming a long, thin C. The combination of the injury and the scummy pond water made my body look greased with blood. There were screams, but not from me. I was just breathing. I worried about getting blood on everyone’s towels.