Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  Given the chance, I would finish her off.

  Then we drove the six hours to St. Louis. I was back in jeans, and I brought into the back seat a pillow from my bed, a yellow Walkman with several mixtapes, and the remaining rag of my baby blanket, Nigh-Nigh, which had come home in my suitcase. I had no books in the car because I got carsick, so I smashed the pillow against the cold window, spread my blanket over my shoulders as best I could, and listened to Linley’s Colorado mix (Clarence Carter, the Eagles, the Steve Miller Band) while we drove south the length of Illinois.

  In the passenger seat Mom was tense. I didn’t know whether it was fact or myth that my father’s family disliked my mom, but the resulting conflict was part of my earliest memories and that made it true. I had cousins I had not met. My father had a brother who lived twenty minutes away, but we did not see him. Dad, aiming for balance, landed on evasion—“I think it’s just such a shame all around”—and his equanimity felt to me disloyal. I had long before taken my mother’s side. As I got older, I looked forward to discovering what it was that they did not like about Mom because, I assumed, it must be true about me too. I was her girl; I meant to do more of whatever it was. I saw my grandparents once a year, and they did not appear to enjoy it.

  “They hate me, and they hate my children,” Mom said, in the car on the way down.

  Dad just said, “It means a lot to me to see my parents.”

  My father had grown up on a small street in suburban St. Louis called Black Creek Lane. Behind it was an actual creek where as a boy he’d pulled newts from the mud. When I went down there to look, there were only rocks ringed by wet earth. There was always something evading me at this house, some animal truth I could not put my finger on. I figured it lived like the dried-up creek, in the past.

  My grandmother Ginny had birthed three sons in the immediate postwar years while my grandfather, whom we called Big Jim, was in Asia with the merchant marine. My father, their eldest, was expected to be born during one of my grandfather’s leaves, but Big Jim’s stay at home came and went, and the baby did not arrive. “The doctor told me October,” said Ginny. Dad was born in the last days of December. “He was in there for eleven months.”

  Not until I was older did I realize that my grandmother, who had a bachelor’s degree in child psychology from Sarah Lawrence, had spent her entire life thinking my father gestated for eleven months. There was no question about paternity—no reason for the doctor to lie or be cavalier except that he simply didn’t know or care. And my grandmother apparently had had withheld from her enough information about the female body to not understand that the doctor was wrong. I could not believe, when my grandmother told me this, that she had been subjected to such crap; either the doctor was crazy or the 1940s were hell.

  But then, after my brother was born at the end of the 1970s, my mother’s obstetrician joked that he had put in an extra stitch or two for my dad. So.

  Once my father finally arrived, in late 1945, Big Jim requested leave to visit his firstborn son. My favorite story of my grandfather’s is the only one he ever told me: “I put on my dress whites to go meet your dad in the hospital, so he would be proud of me.”

  I see it so clearly, it’s as though a photograph survives. Big Jim, six feet and change, with his narrow, handsome face and bright blue eyes, standing at attention before a hospital bassinet, waiting to be admired.

  We arrived at Black Creek Lane and piled out. My grandparents came to the door. Ginny was a square woman with blunt-cut hair and a set jaw, no bullshit, the sort who ran all the ladies’ boards and golfed in culottes wide enough to upholster a loveseat. She leaned toward me and said, “Mwah.” My grandfather, tall, thin, and twinkly-eyed, like an emaciated Santa Claus, leaned back and stuck out his hand. “Well, hello there!”

  My brother and I were toting our stuff. “Whatcha got there?” asked Big Jim, and my brother began showing off whatever handheld game console he’d traveled with that year.

  “Oh, this is just my blanket,” I explained, holding it up. “I’ve had it forever.”

  My grandmother’s face soured. “You’re what? Fifteen?”

  I nodded.

  She frowned at me. “Much too old for that stuff.”

  She turned for the kitchen. The turkey had been cooking for a while, but there was no lovely aroma. Mom sensed trouble. “When did the bird go in?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Ginny was a disaster on the domestic front, but she did not pretend otherwise. My dad told a story about the harried night she took cans from the wrong shelf, opened them into a pan, and served warmed Alpo on noodles to her sons. Ginny laughed. “And you liked it.”

  My grandfather had a few tricks with children, most of which involved snookering us about our bodies. He’d tweak your nose and then exclaim that he’d taken it, displaying his fist with the thumb protruding from the fingers—such a reasonable facsimile that anyone under six reached a hand to her face to check for damage. Or he’d threaten, if you angered him, to lift you up by your ears. No child could resist this, so we’d anger him right away. The way to make my grandfather mad was to call him “Grandpa.” The title made him feel old. We walked right up to him and said, “Hi, Grandpa!” so he’d do his trick—stand behind us, grab our earlobes one in each hand, and lift us up, bearing the weight of our bodies by pressing his chest against our backs, even though it looked like being hung by your ears. But the business of not being made to feel old was deadly serious. “Don’t you all rush to my hospital bed,” he liked to instruct us. “If I wake up and see you there, I’ll know I’m dying. Don’t you ever do that.”

  When my grandfather really was dying, in his eighties, my father and his siblings visited his hospital room one at a time. Big Jim also specified that to avoid competition none of his children should be permitted to speak at his funeral service, so no one did.

  My grandfather’s greatest trick, though, and the one that made us squeal, was the one he called the Indian Death Lock. We’d sit with our legs crossed, in the position called Indian style by white families like mine. He’d reach an arm down between our legs and grab the bottom ankle. Thus clamped, it was impossible to uncross your legs. You ended up just grinding your joints into each other—there was no way to free that bottom leg with his hand there. The claustrophobia was quick and terrifying, and his release a moment later made a kid giddy.

  My brother was going through just this exercise, my grandfather pinning him on a chair, while I tucked away my bag with my mixtapes, Walkman, and Nigh-Nigh. Mom confirmed with my grandmother that my uncle Michael and his family would be joining us too.

  “And the turkey is how big?”

  Ginny rounded her arms. “Oh, like this.”

  “Only one of them?”

  “Anyway,” said my grandmother. “Who’d like a drink?”

  My parents didn’t care for martinis, but my brother and I got soda pop. That’s what it was called in St. Louis. Our favorite was Mr. Pibb. It made Mom wince.

  My grandfather released my brother and turned to me. “So, how’s that school in, ah, New England?”

  “It’s fine, thanks.”

  “You learning a lot up there, are you?”

  “Yep.”

  The fuse sputtered. “Well, good,” he said. “Virgie, I’ll make drinks.”

  I wandered back into the kitchen. I always paused before coming into this room, where my father had been a child, as though if I were quick and quiet enough, I could catch a glimpse of him hopping up into his chair—big-eared, athletic, a legendary student. I’d have settled for a scribble on a wall or a ding in a baseboard.

  We were greeted in the kitchen by Rose, the African American housekeeper who had worked in my grandparents’ home for more than thirty years. Rose moved silently and had no front teeth. Her hair was a tiny knot at the back of her head. By then she would have been well into her fifties, and her skin was unlined, creamy to the touch. Beside her we were a snappy, swaggering, mottled crew. Rose had been night
nurse to all of my cousins, most recently Alison, who that year was just four, and she had sat long afternoons with two of my great-grandmothers before their deaths—one the January prior, and one just that spring. I can’t complicate the Mammy cliché with any information about Rose’s life or character because, of course, I don’t have any. She was an angel to us. And I knew nothing about her except that she was the only person in my grandparents’ house who came down to the floor to talk to a child.

  I showed her Nigh-Nigh. She rubbed a corner between her fingers and said, “I remember.” I believed her. She hugged me and my blanket close, my bodacious ta-tas smashed against her thin chest.

  In her elegant and sophisticated memoir Black Ice, Lorene Cary, St. Paul’s School Form of 1974, writes of her bravado upon arrival as one of the first African American students and one of the first girls to enter the school:

  I had no idea that wealth and privilege could confer real advantages beyond the obvious ones sprawled before us. Instead, I believed that rich white people were like poodles: overbred, inbred, degenerate. All the coddling and permissiveness would have a bad effect, I figured, now that they were up against those of us who’d lived a real life in the real world.

  I’d have been the first to agree with Cary: if I was not a poodle, I was certainly a fool. But sensing how little I understood about the world outside my small life made me timid rather than wise. I knew that Rose lived in the real world. She was missing teeth, for heaven’s sake. But I also saw proof of a rougher existence in her unearthly skin: her beauty seemed to me related to loss, as though her agelessness had been earned by years, her wrinkle-free eyes proof not of ease but of the extreme hardship she had transcended. This was a Christian fantasy. That it was founded in paternalism made possible by my race-based privilege did not change the fact that she nursed every cousin from the cradle and then, when it was time for my grandparents to die, showed us how to handle that, too. It was Rose who took the phone on the Sunday afternoon in February when I, holding a six-week-old, was unsure whether to book an emergency flight to St. Louis because my grandmother was failing. “She’s awaiting on you, Miss Lacy. She’s gonna meet that baby.”

  His entire life, my grandfather made a quiet project of supporting Rose. Her children and their children had their educations funded, no questions asked. Physician appointments. Rent, cars, winter coats. Nobody ever talked about this.

  Lorene Cary also writes, in Black Ice, about falling apart when she learned that her mother, back home, was ill. The rector, concerned, summons her and asks why she doesn’t just go home to visit. “I’m sure your teachers would be more than happy to excuse you to go home to see your mother.” He doesn’t imagine that Cary doesn’t have the money for a weekend jaunt. I would not have imagined it either. The thought would never have occurred to me that kids didn’t go home for Thanksgiving for any reason besides not wanting to. Cary describes how the school came up with the money for her to go see her mom. She accepts it uneasily; in the context of a sense of tokenism she shared with the few other African American students on campus, it was hardly a simple gift.

  But she also writes, of boys at St. Paul’s:

  Some talked over us as a matter of course; others were pointedly deferential. I remember being glad that I wasn’t one of the white girls. Boys stared at them. I watched them looking from one to the other and then back again to one particular girl or some part of her: her hair, her arm, the nape of her neck.

  When I think of what it might have been like (what it might be like) to be black at St. Paul’s, I consider that my experience of the assault might be useful: by taking the measure of the loss of what, at school at least, I had imagined I was entitled to, I can see what I had assumed would be mine. From here I might begin to consider what was not meant (was never meant) for others.

  Only one of the boys who assaulted me was white. I don’t think there’s anything more to be said about that.

  After a few more uneventful hours in the kitchen, my grandmother, poking at the dull bird, asked my mom whether it was finally time to take it out of the oven.

  “Are the juices running clear?” asked Mom. She was sitting on her hands to avoid taking over.

  My grandmother said, “What juices?”

  The bird, never thawed, was a carbonized shell. We made a late-night Denny’s run. I had never seen my mom in a Denny’s—she did not believe in franchised establishments—but she slid into that banquette like she’d been born to it. My brother and I couldn’t believe our luck. We got bottomless drinks with lots of ice. The plates ran with gravy. There were chocolate sundaes.

  On the way home the next day, Dad announced that he wanted to push through, so we would be stopping only for gas. We never spent more than a single night with my grandparents, and this was one of the few times we stayed even that long. A pall beyond the ordinary covered us: my grandparents, having buried the last of the previous generation, were putting the family home on the market and moving to Florida. This concession to time had unsettled my parents, and they were snappish. I put my headphones on to avoid the fallout in the front seat.

  “They are terrible,” Mom said, because she wanted my father to apologize.

  It was the last thing he’d do. Dad said, “They’re my parents.”

  “Well, they’re still terrible.”

  “Alicia, please.”

  “Did you hear them ask about Lacy’s classes? Or James’s soccer?”

  Dad softened. “Oh, no, I didn’t—”

  “Right. Because they didn’t.”

  “Ah. Maybe they forgot?”

  “They hate us.”

  Dad did not respond.

  My brother fell asleep.

  Outside the windows, the cornfields were overwintering like farms of pins, a whole horizon full of matchsticks. If I had somehow managed to open the door and jump out of the car without dying, without anyone noticing, could I have run off into those fields? How far would I have had to travel before I came to a place where I could start a new life? I remember visualizing the perpendicular angles of momentum: how our car was barreling forward, Dad at the wheel, hands at ten and two, mirrors minutely adjusted, and how my door—against which I was curled—would open out, at ninety degrees. What if I just shot off in that direction? I pictured moving away east while they continued north. Our lines would never, ever converge.

  In Grundy County, Illinois, about a hundred miles south of home, Dad pulled into a gas station. We all got out to stretch our legs. With Mom watching keenly, I sprinted across the freezing tarmac to use the foul restroom at the back of the service building. Enormous trucks rocked on the pavement. Still more were pouring north, heading toward the first major interchanges south of Chicago. I was grateful to tuck back into the warm car and let Dad nose us onto the entrance ramp and speed toward home.

  When we arrived, I carried into the house my pillow and my Walkman, my little bag with its set of mixtapes, and the trash from our snacks. Nigh-Nigh was not there. We looked under the seats. We looked in the trunk. We emptied our duffels to the canvas. The blanket was gone.

  “Do you remember having it this morning?” asked Dad. “It must still be at my parents’ house!”

  We called Ginny and Big Jim. Nope, they said. Absolutely not here. Lacy must have taken it with her. We set everything by the door. She takes that thing everywhere, doesn’t she?

  I didn’t remember. I couldn’t picture it with me on the way back home, but then again I’d been so absorbed in my fantasies of running off into some other life that I hadn’t noticed much of anything at all. I must have brought it with me, though, right?

  “Well,” said my grandmother, “it’s not the end of the world. It was time to be done with that.”

  I’d kept my blanket with my things, I knew I had—I’d been so embarrassed by my grandmother’s reaction that I hadn’t left it out anywhere. I hadn’t even slept with it that night. I did not myself remove it from my bag.

  “But how could it just
vanish?” asked Dad. “It’s the strangest thing.”

  Mom’s eyes got huge. “It must have fallen out at the gas station!”

  Dad held his face. “My gosh, Alicia, you’re right! That’s the only explanation!”

  I could have cried. The rocking, roaring trucks.

  The next morning at dawn, Dad popped his police-radar detector on the dashboard and sped to Grundy County. He taped MISSING BLANKET signs all over the gas station, plus those at other exchanges and in a few nearby towns. He even listed a reward for the return of Nigh-Nigh.

  It never did turn up. For a long time, before I figured it out, I hoped the terrible prairie wind had blown my blanket off the pavement and into the cornfields, just as I had imagined running into them myself. That would be an okay fate, I thought, beneath the skies and the stars. Better than beneath a tire.

  Around sunset, Dad came home from Grundy County dejected. “I’m so sorry, Say-see,” he said, rubbing my shoulders, as if he knew what was gone.

  Christmastime at St. Paul’s was glorious. In choir rehearsal, the sopranos were working on the full King’s College descants, so that my friends sounded like the live BBC broadcasts of the Cambridge Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols that my mother played, as loud as the radios would go, throughout the house every Christmas Eve morning. We wore our holiday best to Seated Meal and poured hot chocolate into plastic mugs to carry across the starlit paths. Masters spangled their doorways with blinking fairy lights. During the day, Murph and Sarge, the surly Security guards, wore red Santa hats on patrol.

  One morning Budge, the rooster-headed hockey player, strode up behind me and said, “I think it should be tonight.”

  I thought, Bodacious ta-tas. I thought, Round yon virgin mother and child. I thought, Fuck you.

  If I’d had Elizabeth Bishop in my arsenal by then, I would at least have had a road map for this descent. Practice losing farther, losing faster. When I finally read her “One Art,” I recognized the defiance of the devastated overachiever. Of course! Chuck it all. But I wouldn’t read Bishop until sixth form.