Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Please, just come. Please, will you?”

  I had never cruised outside my dorm after hours before. I knew other kids did it, but I wasn’t sure how they got away with it. Often enough they didn’t. All year long we heard the results read aloud in Chapel. Nobody ever suggested why a student had left her dorm, but when the name of the suspended or expelled student was read, we all pretty much figured it out. Boys cruised to see girls. Girls cruised to see boys. Where else would they go? Nobody was stargazing. Security caught them and they appeared before the Disciplinary Committee to be, as we called it, D.C.’d. The committee was run by Mr. Gillespie, aka “The Rock.” He’d been at St. Paul’s for a hundred years and he would be there for a hundred more. He taught chemistry and coached varsity boys’ lacrosse, and his trademark exercise was to make the boys start off preseason training running several miles of snow-covered trails in hiking boots. Rumor had it they vomited and bled. He had a military history nobody could identify, but his hair was buzzed and his shoulders wide. When he looked your way, you did your best to smile and scooted out of view fast.

  “It’s far,” I told Rick.

  “It’s not.” He named his dorm, a one-story building at the center of campus. “I’ll open the window. You can come and I’ll see you.”

  Whatever it was he needed, I could deliver it, but his girlfriend could not?

  I found a way to make this make sense. She was a little cold. Maybe not as quick. Maybe aloof. Maybe he sensed I was more thoughtful, more able to care?

  I was working out the route: along the back path by the power plant, across a depression that flooded in spring. There would be one dangerous crossing of a lit road behind the rectory.

  “It’s late,” I said. “I’ll get caught.”

  “You won’t. You’re smart. Come on. Please just come.”

  Maybe that was why: I was smart. He needed someone really capable tonight.

  “I don’t know where, though.” I had no idea where his room was.

  “The last window by the path. I’ll wait for you. Please.”

  I was a virgin alone in a basement stairwell, at the bottom of three flights of tile steps, and my grandiosity was colliding with my fantasies, all of them unnamed. I did not think of Rick as a potential lover, not then and not ever. So not that. And not math. But he wanted something from me, something that would save him and soothe him, and the fact that he was going to this trouble to convince me meant that I must have had that something, whatever it was.

  The sense of a summons was hardly out of place at St. Paul’s. Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do. Our entire mythology was founded on our chosen-ness.

  “Please,” he said. I heard some shuffling in the background, and then he returned with a whimper in his voice. “I’m waiting for you.”

  My mom ministered to people. Why couldn’t I?

  “All right,” I said, and I hung up the phone.

  Elise had gone to bed. I didn’t bother to knock and fill her in. I changed into jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pullover jacket, laced up my sneakers, and crept back down the stairs. Another girl was on the pay phone. I heard her sad voice as I pushed out the door silently, letting it close by millimeters but stopping it before it latched.

  I remember my sneakers on the sandy path. That feeling, the whisper sound, was familiar, and a thrill. I had zoomed along trails in the North Woods, summers at sleepaway camp in Minnesota—I had been happy there, happy enough to shout and holler as I raced with my friends down the switchbacks to archery or the riding ring. I remembered the walk down to the beach after Jed Lane grabbed me. I was a feral thing, content in the dark. Here I am again, I thought. Here I am. I ran between shadows and waited, holding my breath, before taking the next angle and the next.

  Coming up out of the marshy trail, I heard my whispered name.

  “Lacy!”

  I followed the sound to a dark window. The sill was shoulder height—too high for me to climb. He bent down and took me under the arms and lifted me in. I was on a bed. I felt bad that my sandy sneakers were on a bed, and tried to shift to the edge.

  But someone else was there.

  The only light in the room came from the rise and fall of equalizer bars on a stereo system. Its light was blue and traveled. The sound had been turned down very low.

  They said, “Shhhhh,” pointing to Mr. Belden’s wall.

  I worked out that the other person on the bed was Taz, and yes, they were roommates—I guess I had known that. I’d never really thought about it before. I reasoned that if Rick was having a crisis, it made sense that his friend would be with him.

  Taz was another sixth former. His girlfriend was on my tennis team. That’s all I knew.

  But I could see Taz’s bare skin lit by the blue, a kind of chalky glow across his chest. And then Rick’s bare chest, too—and I gathered this in the moment after I learned that Mr. Belden lived right there and I could not speak without the great danger of getting caught. A Disciplinary Committee action on my transcript in the fall of fifth-form year would take Princeton off the table, immediately and forever. The two boys were on their knees. I was folded on top of my bent legs, my sneakers stuck under me, and I was still worried about the sand on the bed.

  I imagined a sort of benign confusion to this setup, not unlike what I used to feel playing Sardines as a child—that hide-and-seek game where each person, upon discovering the hiding spot of the player who is “it,” piles into the same small hiding space to wait, silently. The last person out then finds everyone all together, and is next to be “it.” I recognized the feeling of fumbling with other kids like this, being shushed and pulled into linen closets in neighborhood homes or under the porch stairs. It could take a while to work out where the bodies were and how to sit. That was part of the fun.

  I tried to get my feet out from under me. This is when I asked what was wrong, and was shushed again. And then both boys put their hands on me and pushed me to the mattress. I did not understand. For a fleeting bright moment I thought it might be another wrestling move, like awkward Shep might have pulled—Okay, okay! Let’s play! I’d go along. I strained to go along. But where Shep would have lifted his hands off me, they held me down. Then they (one? both? I don’t know) grabbed my breasts and kneaded them, and it hurt. I still did not understand. Someone went for the button of my jeans, wrenched a hand under the zipper and stuck a long finger inside me. I shot my hand down there and cupped myself, to force him out. Another face was on top of mine now, kissing me hard. I say kiss but that’s not right. It was a mouth pressed against mine, shoving and sucking, as if in preparation—with the same economy of force my mother used to cram halved lemons and heads of garlic into the cavity of a roasting fowl.

  I had no idea this could happen to me—the pure prey I had become, without leverage, without recourse. This encounter with power was shocking and wordless and I did not understand.

  What next? My jeans were unzipped. I kept my hand clamped over myself and thought AIDS, pregnancy, STDs. I’d had “health class” as a fourth former, and I remembered. If I could protect my virginity, I’d survive this.

  “Just don’t have sex with me,” I said softly, as clearly as I could without Mr. Belden hearing me, and at that point Rick shifted his hips away from mine and up onto my face.

  One of my favorite love scenes in print happens to feature this just don’t construction, when the writer and cultural critic Maggie Nelson spends a first Christmas with her beloved Harry in a San Francisco hotel room: “Just don’t kill me,” she writes, “I said as you took off your leather belt, smiling.”

  In which “just” means please, everything up to.

  I don’t for a moment believe they thought this is what I meant. But I do acknowledge that I did not choose my words more clearly, or name my terms more favorably. I see that now. I have always been terrible at negotiation.

  Rick laid his pelvis across my face an
d fucked my throat. Taz grabbed and rolled my breasts. I had to concentrate on breathing, with the cock in my throat, and I did not move any part of my body.

  After Rick ejaculated, Taz said, “It’s my turn.” Was he speaking to me? If so, these were the first words he’d ever said to me. Rick picked me up and angled me so that my face was in front of Taz’s erect cock. It protruded blue in the light, and Rick put me onto it like I was a living socket wrench. Again I did not move my body. I worked on getting air into my nose and down into my lungs on the offbeat of his thrusting into my face, of Rick slamming me onto him.

  Time got syrupy. I tried not to cry.

  After Taz ejaculated into me, Rick let me sit back on the mattress and took his hands off me.

  He said, “It’s your turn now.”

  I got up onto my knees and pulled down my jacket, which they had not taken off. I zipped and buttoned my jeans. I remember thinking, I am completely dressed. As though something were still intact. But also this stood out for me, the illogic of it—that I was completely dressed. This was proof, wasn’t it, I asked myself, that none of this made sense? That we had not just fooled around, but rather that they’d treated me like I was not a girl, not even a person? I dropped out the window, and they did not try to stop me.

  Technically, as discussed, in the lexicon of criminal justice what had just happened was felonious sexual assault and aggravated felonious sexual assault. But these terms belonged to a system of discovery and response that I did not know how to access—it might have been a language spoken on the far side of the globe. Nor did I possess a vocabulary of psychological valence—words such as consent and dissociation—that might have helped me to understand. I walked back to my room slowly, as though something might come clear.

  What they had done, I told myself, was not that bad. I had gotten away without worse, without the worst. I was fine. But I was shattered. Why? What part of me was broken? I rehearsed it over and over:

  I broke school rules and went to the room of an older boy. He and his roommate, one at a time, put their penises down my throat until climax. I left the room.

  It was not quite right.

  The problem is a flaw in the chronology. “I left the room” does not belong at the end of the tale. It belongs right after “older boy.” Because when they did what they did, I’d offered my body up to them in exchange for protection from greater theft. So:

  I broke school rules and went to the room of an older boy. But there were two undressed boys there. I left the room. He and his roommate, one at a time, put their penises down my throat until climax.

  Yep, that’s it.

  The simplest way I can tell the story of my assault is to describe how the boys made me feel I was no longer a person. Their first violation was erasure. I walked back to my dorm along the main roads, shuffling beneath every streetlight, as though to force the school to acknowledge me. I waited for Murph or Sarge in the white Security Jeep to accelerate from the shadows and stop me with a shout. But the world was different now, or I was, and nobody did.

  Or maybe the remedy I’m looking for is not a telling, after all. Maybe it’s a correction to that imbalance of power, a restoration of self to self. I went limp while I was in their control. Psychologists who study trauma and violence in all forms, across all criminal variation, identify responses like mine as normal, and have amended the old dictum to read “Fight or flight or freeze.” There is plenty of data. I was an ordinary possum.

  In fact, I find it easier to try to imagine the boys than myself that night, even though I never spoke to them again. This is an exercise in fantasy, not empathy. If I can rehumanize them, I can offer myself something too. And I might not be wrong. I might find refuge in knowing, which is feeling’s poorer relation, but perhaps a place to begin.

  For example, what if I consider them from the perspective of social class?

  Neither of the men who assaulted me comes from a family whose name is carved on school walls. Think of them that autumn. How exhausting it must have been to be strong and virile and powerful, and beginning to know that they were on campus (on the turf, on the ice) for perhaps exactly those reasons, and that this power was yoked to a system of legacy that would not admit them as men when they were through being boys. They were eighteen and seniors, and their time was already short. How exhausting it must have been to watch a girl, similarly (yet not in parallel ways) unstarred, striving and striving and striving, to hear her coaching your teammates on their calculus sets, to see her in cassock and alb singing a cappella, hair and cheeks shining.

  She could be anyone, but this is someone you can hurt almost effortlessly.

  You’re captains now. It’s your last year on campus. Why not take what you can, and kick the door down behind you when you go?

  In bearing witness, we’re trying to correct a theft of power via a story. But power and stories, while deeply interconnected, are not the same things. One is rock, the other is water.

  Over time, long periods of time, water always wins.

  What I want to know, even now, is: how?

  7

  October 1990, Fifth Form

  I experienced the new morning not as a different girl, but in a different geography. I was the same. In fact I was even more myself, fretting about things, driving hard. The world was the same, too. But I had become aware of how it fit together in a new way. As though I’d come across a set of maps: here I’d spent all my life thinking the land contained the lakes, and just now discovered that in fact the earth is blue and we’re lucky to be afloat.

  As the nights grew colder from that third week in October, the news began to spread.

  “Whoo-ee, Red,” said one football player, slapping his lunch tray down on the conveyor belt next to mine.

  As I walked into the reading room, late morning, during a free period: “Hey,” said another, watching me enter, his voice sleek with suggestion. “You can leave your sneakers on. Anytime.”

  But when I tried to remember, my body reacted before my mind could think. My stomach hurt and there was a rushing sound in my ears, as though an elevator had begun to drop. I shut off these efforts immediately. The days were shorter, there was frost on the paths. It felt right to button up. Batten down the hatches, my father, the sailor, would say.

  My plan was to keep quiet, be very good, work very hard, and slip through the net the night seemed to have cast for me. Above all, my parents must never, ever find out.

  It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.

  Plus I saw no logical reason to talk about it. Logic was the least of my modes of engagement with the event, but I was diligent. I was terrified their girlfriends would find out and hate me. I was terrified teachers would find out and have me expelled. I had no idea that what had happened in that room was against the law. I wasn’t aware of the statutory legislation—that I was underage—and I knew that the boys had complied with my request not to have sex with me. Yes, they’d held me down. Yes, it had hurt. But I went to their room, right? And did I scream or kick or bite? Finally, the boys bragged about what they did. I was not old enough to wonder whether their grandiosity was intended to mask their own shame or to normalize what they had done. I just concluded that there had been nothing wrong with their part of it, which was why they spoke of it so openly. Hence the hisses along the chapel rail as I scooted to my assigned spot in the pew. And the sixth former Budge, who, as I’ve mentioned, promised to pop my cherry.

  I began traveling with Elise. Her head full of de Beauvoir (and now Sartre, whom she thought a cad), she was unlikely to notice, or to care, what a bunch of thuggish athletes said in my di
rection. I copied her habit of wrapping a scarf all the way up my face and then pulling it down to offer a bon mot.

  “I don’t think women are actually meant to be with men,” she’d say, her breath glinting in the cold.

  “You don’t?”

  “I think maybe the best we can hope for is to be companionable without ever being truly reciprocal.”

  While I worked on this, I observed privately that Elise didn’t seem to brush her hair much anymore, just let it tangle in her scarf, where it ratted enough to suggest the sophistication of a girl without vanity. She was skipping more and more meals, leaving me to venture out alone. Elise’s skin was naturally the color of roasted almonds, but this morning it was ashy, and the early winter light made her hair brighter than her forehead and cheeks. She pulled at her scarf to give me her sleepy grin. “Don’t you agree?”

  I wanted to ask, What about Scotty? But our unspoken pact was to talk only about ideas, never people or events. I assumed this was what it meant to be mature and educated, and of course as a result we never had to so much as skirt the issue of Rick and Taz.

  “When you say companion, I think of a big wolf,” I told her. “Right by my side.” I patted my leg where a heeling dog would be.

  “Ooh, I like that. I think I’d like a leopard.”

  “What does Simone say about that?”

  The entire school community was funneling toward the big chapel: masters from their homes, students from their dorms and the dining hall, the tall, thin, long-haired rector crossing in an unbuttoned greatcoat, tails flapping, from the rectory.