Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  Instead I looked, permitted myself to really look, at Budge.

  His mouth protruded in a way I found vaguely aggressive, almost like a primate’s. He swung his hips like a lion. Except for the spray of hair, I could not see the boy in him. This was exciting—the cruelty of it, his cruelty, was exciting. This was the truth. About the world, I mean. When he hissed about needing to finish what his friends had started, I didn’t have to deny anything to him, or pretend to be someone I wasn’t.

  “Tonight,” he whispered, coming in close.

  “I don’t think Candace would appreciate that,” I finally replied. His girlfriend had grown close to many of my friends. She was on our hockey team. I liked her, too. She had thick blond hair and a practiced brusqueness that stood out in contrast to the glamorous frigidity of so many of the prettier girls. A New Yorker, private-schooled, no one’s fool, already planning for an MBA and an island summer home. Her roommate was Nina, the angelic chorister who sang with me in Madrigals. I couldn’t guess why Candace had chosen to date Budge, but I didn’t give it much thought. One hoped for the pleasures of an idiosyncratic harmony.

  “Candace will never know,” he said.

  God knows she didn’t need protection from me. I couldn’t protect anyone. My friends were already acting strange. I wasn’t going to police a girl’s boyfriend. Those sorts of scruples belonged to a world that was too precious for me.

  At the same time, I believed Budge when he said that no one would ever know. After all, Rick’s and Taz’s girlfriends still, two months later, did not seem to know what had happened in that room. They passed me in the hallways same as always, long-legged and indifferent. I understood from this one of the rules of war: what happened to girls like me did not matter, did not even register.

  All sorts of things were possible at school. Behavior that was dignified and visible rode atop a wild landscape of unspoken thieving and mischief. I wasn’t wrong about this. Years later I learned which girl’s terrible mononucleosis, so severe it had sent her home for a term, was actually the third trimester of a pregnancy. I learned who was avoiding faculty come-ons after check-in, and who was courting them. In the moment, unable to shake Budge, I thought I grasped this about sex at St. Paul’s: some girls got to be girlfriends, and they were escorted and protected, even if they had not been chaste for years. Other girls got abused. On this path from held to hurt, you could move in only one direction.

  I kept walking. We pushed through the doors and into the Schoolhouse. The steps were loud with bodies rushing up and down.

  He leaned into me. “You and I are kinda friends,” he said. I considered whether this was true. “I don’t think Rick and Taz should get the last word. You know what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t.

  “I think I can show you how it should be. Done right.”

  I ignored this and turned the corner for class. When I looked back, just before heading into French, he was still standing there, in the hallway, watching me.

  By that point, halfway through my junior year in high school, more of my friends were sexually active than weren’t. There was nothing particularly momentous about having sex at St. Paul’s. Third formers did it in the shower, fourth formers did it in the back of Memorial Hall, everyone did it at someone’s house over a long weekend away from school. I hadn’t made a fetish of my own virginity, and had no fantasies about how and when I would give it away. Nothing much beyond protecting it from Rick and Taz, at least—but that was not for the metaphor of innocence. That was because I didn’t want to get pregnant or die of AIDS.

  Budge’s dark genius was to speak only of my virginity. He didn’t even say “have sex.” His repetition—I am going to pop your cherry—made the idea of virginity itself seem absurd. You’re going to deflower me now? I was already a step ahead of him. I knew virginity to be the teacup construction of a world that holds female sexuality to be a possession. And it hurt me. The thought hurt. It reminded me only of what I had lost. To speak of my virginity was to mock me, and Budge knew it. It was the glass slipper without the ball.

  Furiously, almost feverishly, I ran in my head a mathematics of dominance. I would hold on to and cherish and groom this splintered lack of experience only to hand it over to a man, who would—listen to the words—take it from me? (No man receives a woman’s virginity, no matter how freely given.)

  No, thanks.

  If it was something they wanted, then by God it was nothing to me: Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s. Nothing to see here. Nothing to steal.

  He followed me. He showed up in every doorway. “Fine,” I told the boy called Budge. “Fine.”

  After that our encounters became something almost darkly sweet. We were conspiring to take away this thing that we both knew was a lie. It was like planning a surgery, a bit grueling but necessary, with the inherent power differential that one of us would be wounded and one of us not. I moved from class to class in a bell of silence, resting my throat (which had broken out in sores again) so I could sing at evening rehearsal and avoiding the eyes of people who might have been my friends. I needn’t have bothered—they weren’t trying to make contact with me. My friends didn’t exactly speed up when I joined them on a pathway, but they no longer waited for me, either.

  When I saw Budge, I could relax into the candor of his brutishness. He knew everything there was to know.

  “Your room or mine?”

  “Not mine,” I said.

  “You on top or me?”

  “Me.” Definitely me.

  “Tonight?”

  “I have Madrigals.”

  “After?”

  “That’s check-in.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Budge, I have to go. I have a math quiz.”

  It was almost protective, the way he watched me walk away.

  When I was twelve and in the eighth grade, my best friend, Wendy, was five foot six and I was four foot nine. She had started her period. I did not have even the beginnings of breasts. My hips were as narrow as my brother’s. There was not a womanly hair anywhere on my body. I was miserable.

  “Mutt and Jeff,” said the teachers, as we girls walked down the hall.

  “Mutt and Jeff,” said Wendy’s parents, picking us up from skating or soccer.

  “Mutt and Jeff,” said my mom. I figured, incorrectly, that I was the mutt.

  Still, my parents started to worry. My dad wasn’t tall but he wasn’t short, and my relatives on my mom’s side were quite big. “I just don’t understand it,” Mom said. “My grandfather was positively statuesque.”

  I had been an average-size child, so we’d never had reason to worry about this. “Just hang on,” Mom said hopefully. “I promise you things will start to change.”

  When they did not, she took me to see my pediatrician. He was close to retirement by then. I did not like him, but I don’t remember him being unkind. Mom thought he was brilliant (he’d had a fellowship at Harvard; he was on the faculty at Children’s in the city). The fact that he was old was what she loved. “Intuition is worth more than anything,” she said. “Once, when you were little, he heard you talk and said, ‘This child has strep.’ And he was right. I’ll never forget that.”

  I was measured and weighed, and Dr. K. plotted these points on a standard growth curve. It was true—I was falling quite demonstrably behind. He leaned into my mother and said something quickly and quietly to her, and she left the room. The doctor put his head out the door and then returned with a nurse. While she stood by, he had me undress to the waist, lie back, pull my knees up, and let my legs fall open. I remember exploding with misery at what I was being forced to reveal. I squeezed my eyes shut. Gloved, he used his fingers inside me and a palm on my abdomen to confirm that my reproductive organs were in place and intact. There was blood on the paper when he was done.

  “You can get the mother now,” he said to the nurse.

  Later, Mom said, her eyes sideways, “It’s all fine. Your parts are all there,
they just haven’t started to develop yet. So that’s good! We just have to be patient.”

  I’m told they use ultrasound now, along with basic blood-work and X-rays of growth plates in the hands, to resolve questions regarding the onset of puberty. I’m old enough to appreciate such progress. There is nothing to hold against the pediatrician; my grandmother, after all, was pregnant for eleven months. And my mother was stitched extra tight for my dad.

  I was still growing fast on the late-December morning I went to Budge’s room to lose my virginity. I knew my hymen was already broken, so I wasn’t frightened, and I had no wishes for connection or affection, so I couldn’t be disappointed. I had never felt stronger at St. Paul’s School than I felt that morning. There was a dark lashing force inside me, and I thought this was something I could use. The sense was that Budge and I were teaming up to kill someone.

  He lay back on a rotting sofa. His dorm was one of the single-story, 1970s-era, squat buildings on campus, and it glowered like a bunker at the downhill edge of the Schoolhouse lawn. On the sofa we were at ground level, looking up at the row of masters’ houses on the hill. Frost sparkled on the grass. A thin sun was rising over campus. He was not expecting me to appear in his single room then, long before Chapel, and I appreciated having the element of surprise. This was my doing, all of it.

  He used a condom. It stung a bit. He looked at me as though I were something he needed to retrieve, a puzzle, a football caught in a tree: far away, mouth pursed, frowning. I looked back and hated him. We would never so much as have a conversation again, and I wanted him to hurry up.

  When he was done I pulled my jeans back on and walked back to my dorm to get dressed for the day.

  Then for a while nothing happened. I have no recollection of Christmas that year, except that I was very sick again. My pediatrician’s office tested me for mono. It was negative.

  In January I returned to school, and one morning in that dead second week of January—flat light, rutted ice—I again left Elise in her dark and overheated room and walked alone to breakfast.

  I crossed the low edge of the quad and continued onto the frozen path along the Library Pond, from which the dark trail snaked up toward Drury House and my former calculus tutees. (I was no longer asked for extra help with problem sets.) I came to the road and crossed back up the hill toward the Wing entrance of Upper House, pulling open the great wooden door and hearing it squeal and slam behind me. Cold air followed, and still more of it pressed in from the wall of windows on my right. The name panels on the left were dull. It was icebox light, blued with shadow, and even in this pretentious Gothic corridor you could feel the forest all around you.

  I found that going to breakfast was a better way to start the day than not. The kitchens were warm, and the bustle of people feeding themselves helped me feel less lonely.

  I turned off the hall and climbed the stairs to Center Upper to pick up my friends. The fire doors were always closed (the terror of fire was the sole constant of the buildings crew, who’d have quit and left the state if they knew how many candles and bongs were lit around campus each afternoon and night), and when I pulled open the door onto my friends’ hall, the wheeze of the self-closing hinge caused them to look up. Caroline, Sam, Brooke, Maddy, Meg, and Tabby were sitting on the floor as always, backs to the wall between their respective doors, books in their laps, preparing for the day.

  “Morning,” I called out.

  Whatever withdrawals on their friendship my deviance had made, these girls had sustained some affection for me until just now. I had finally reached the limit. All of my friends, every one of them, looked down as suddenly as if the floor had vanished beneath them. It was Budge, I understood. Candace was their friend, and I could not be excused. I had no idea how they’d found out. Again, I’d said nothing. I had thought what I’d done was only about destroying myself, and that no one else would discover it, or care.

  I waited a moment longer. It was excruciating, standing there, but also fascinating: an entire hallway of wonderful young women, friends I had laughed with and skated with, friends whose heads had balanced on my shoulder when the winding shivers of the soccer bus put us to sleep, friends whose adventures with boyfriends and lovers I knew in minute detail—these friends were refusing to acknowledge me in any way. They were performing something for me, I knew. Indifference is easy. It takes a surprising amount of energy to shun a person.

  “Fine,” I told them. I turned, and went down to breakfast alone.

  The day warmed and water dripped from rooftops and tree branches. Crossing back to my dorm after classes, I passed my urban friends from fourth form walking together arm in arm, shiny and brittle with their usual conspiratorial glaze. Twin miniskirts. Fresh lip gloss.

  “Hey, ladies!” I said, passing them.

  They stopped on the walk and grabbed each other’s forearms, aghast, and then began to howl with laughter.

  I thought, For walking? For saying hello? Their cruelty was clear, but I was agitated by what seemed an absurd irrationality: I could find no reason for their reaction. It breaks my heart to write that—I was looking for the rules, as though my situation were a chess position I needed only to study long enough. I am not sure anything speaks more clearly to my naivete than this. Because I knew—I felt, as surely as we all felt the rumbling of the steam wending its way beneath the lawns—that beneath the strictures of gentility at St. Paul’s School was a hunger for excess. Nowhere on its campus, or indeed in the world it purported to prepare us for, could you lose your head. Rage was inappropriate. Desire was inappropriate. Grief was inappropriate. Even joy was inappropriate. All you should want, or need, was your goodly heritage—this was from the school prayer, the psalm appointed for April 3, 1856, the first day that boys received instruction at St. Paul’s School: “The lot has fallen unto me in a fair ground; yea, I have a goodly heritage.” We heard this regularly from the chapel pulpit. How convenient that it should reinforce privilege, this notion of heritage, which slipped so effortlessly from the fruits of biblical lands to the fruits of American race- and class-based striation. Students tossed around the word goodly. Got a goodly bagel there, huh? A goodly cigarette, by any chance? A bland adjective made even more arcane by its unusual form; nobody really wanted a goodly anything, but ingratitude was not an option.

  The contours of my downfall were so spectacular that they permitted the luxurious pleasures of scapegoating. There was something in my story for everyone: the kids who felt marginalized because they were not white, or wealthy, or academically excelling; the kids who felt the heat of their own indiscretions, whether discovered or not; the kids who felt ignored by boys or by girls; the kids who needed reinforcement that they alone belonged at St. Paul’s School, and all the rest of us were impostors. You could laugh at me, rage at me, gape in disbelief at what I had done or allowed to be done. I could do nothing about it except hoist up my book bag and walk away, sporting my freckles and a hankering for the Ivy League.

  I worked through the variables like they were homework. Hate-sex on a single occasion with Budge was not acceptable, but sex from the age of thirteen with numerous boyfriends was fine. You could put a bra in a boy’s mailbox, okay, but you could not get taken advantage of by two sixth formers you’d never speak to again. Was it the combination of Rick and Taz, followed by Budge? Was it as simple as not having a boyfriend—in which case my problem was not what I had allowed to be done to my body, but that it had been done by the wrong men?

  Or was it something else about me—something everyone but me could see?

  If you go to their room, you get attacked. If you permit yourself to get attacked, you get sick. If you do something that would break your parents’ hearts, your grandparents will toss your baby blanket. Lose farther, lose faster. It was like chalking the names of the dead on the blackboard wall. I’d fucked Budge the way firefighters torch the remaining grasses so the inferno has nowhere to go. But this thing kept getting bigger.

  I listened
to those girls’ mad-hatter laughter ringing off the pavement. They were giddy with hate. I had thought, I will be less and less and less. I had thought I was basically nothing now. But I inspired such fierce emotion, and these reactions were in inverse proportion to my own sensate awareness of myself. I couldn’t eat much, or sing much. I walked everywhere alone. I changed for hockey in a corner of the locker room, not wanting my teammates—who included Budge’s girlfriend, Candace—to see my body. On the ice I was largely benched, too sick and too uncoordinated to win a spot on the lines, though I traveled everywhere with the varsity team. I appeared in my assigned seats for Seated Meal and for Chapel, and always in class, but nowhere else. I made myself as silent and as slender as I could. But I was a wick, held fast and burning. I could not seem to put it out.

  A week or so later, I was walking from my room to class when something detonated at my feet. I stopped. There was nothing there. But yes, there was: water, or something dark, spreading across the sunlit walk. Then another crash hit behind me. I turned. Now I saw the shreds of latex scattered around. They curled ugly and gray as toenails in the grass. A third crash—close enough to sting—and I looked up.

  I was walking behind Simpson House, the girls’ dorm opposite mine in the quad. Budge’s Candace lived there, and I spotted her and a friend in a second-story window. They ducked down and then reappeared, and Candace hurled another condom water balloon my way.

  “Cunt!” they screamed.

  “Disgusting slut!”

  “Whore!”

  I waited until they had to reload, then kept walking.