There is a contemporary inquiry into shame that suggests that shame is not as deeply rooted in guilt as in power. Considering the work of evolutionary biologists, psychologists studying the physical manifestations of shame noted that they closely resemble the behaviors of mammals trying to demonstrate subordination to a more powerful individual. Unshackling the notion of shame from ideas of right and wrong strikes me as helpful, at least where sex is involved. In my experience, shame is not the wholehearted burn that follows a realization of guilt, which we consider to be shame’s obvious antecedent, but rather a surplus of displeasure that adheres to one party—and always the less powerful one. Shame is messy and pervasive. It does not attend to the course of misbehavior. Often enough, in fact, I think we have the order on this reversed: shame goes around seeking its object. I found Budge. There was nothing of pleasure in that for me.
I thought about the condom balloons in my fourth- and fifth-period classes, French Lit and History of the Second World War, and while I walked back to my dorm (via an alternate route) to eat some crackers out of a drawer for lunch. I was lucky it wasn’t colder, and that I hadn’t taken a direct hit and had to go back to change out of wet clothes. I looked out my window across the meadow. We’d had early hockey practice that morning, so a long free afternoon stretched ahead, and the sun was still cold but high. It would have been nice to nap. But I’d made a decision.
I crossed the quad again and went into Simpson House, where Candace lived. I turned left and climbed the stairs to the hallway where I figured her window must be. With the same undirected impulse to clarity with which I’d unbuckled the pants of that Southern graduate at a party in Chicago a lifetime before, I needed to identify what was so ferocious here. I thought if I could just know, I could stop the falling apart. It all seemed a big misunderstanding. Nothing I had done was motivated by carnal desire, and wasn’t that supposed to be the sin? Couldn’t we work this out?
Candace’s door was propped open with a shoe, and I could see that she was in her room. I stood outside for a moment. She was folding laundry, opening and closing drawers. There were no voices, so I thought she might be alone, which meant I’d chosen a felicitous moment.
I knocked.
“Hello?”
She leaned her head to peek at the door.
“Oh, my God,” she said, face darkening. “No.”
I kept my distance in the hall. “I’ll go if you want me to. I just thought there might be some things you wanted to say to me.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
“Okay, well, you’re throwing things at me.”
“You deserve it.”
I didn’t necessarily disagree.
I said, “Can I come in?”
“I don’t even know. I guess. Whatever.”
“Thank you.” I pushed through her door, let it close gently again on the sneaker, and stood there just at the threshold. She was in front of her dresser, so that it blocked her body from mine, and I sensed that she would stay there. Across the room were three windows—she’d lucked into a bright room—including the one she’d have been sitting behind to hurl condom balloons at me. I wondered if the condoms were otherwise kept in the top drawer of the dresser she was now reorganizing. I’d never bought condoms. Where did she go to buy them? Were they for Budge? Of course they were.
“Candace,” I said, “I’m sorry. I had no intention of hurting you.”
She folded furiously: turtlenecks, long-sleeve tees, short-sleeve tees. She did not look at me once. “You are a slut. Do you understand that? And you have no friends. None. All of our friends hate you now. You are disgusting. Do you understand?”
I did not reply.
“And then you go and fuck my boyfriend. Are you kidding me? Did you think you could get away with it? Did you think he was going to break up with me for you?”
I said, quietly, “I have no desire to be with Budge.”
“Hunh.” She snorted. “Then why did you screw him?”
Well, the truth, even if I’d had it, was not going to come out here. Not to someone who would bag it up and hurl it back in my face. I thought for a moment, watching her ball socks, and said, “I can’t explain that. But it wasn’t just me, Candace. I wasn’t alone in that room. And I’ll never talk to him again, if that helps any.”
“Yeah, well, it doesn’t. But don’t worry. He hates you too. He’d never talk to you anyway.”
It hurt to consider whether this was true.
“I don’t want anything from him.”
“Oh, yeah? Who’s next? Seriously, who are you going to fuck next?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to go now. I just wanted to say I’m sorry. And I understand that you’re furious, and I don’t blame you.”
She exploded. “Don’t blame me for what?”
I got even quieter. “Nothing. It was a figure of speech.”
“You’re a fucking joke.”
“Okay. Thanks for letting me come up.” I turned and wriggled through the space between the door and the jamb. I didn’t want to touch anything, as if the whole room were electrified with her hate.
She called out, “Don’t ever talk to me again.”
“No problem.”
There was a moment.
“Lacy.”
I paused in the hall.
She was looking my way, and there were tears all around the rims of her dark eyes. “I love him. Okay? I love him.”
Now I was crying too. “Okay,” I said, through the wobble in my throat. And then I turned and left.
I do not remember any hour that winter so cold as ice-hockey practice. The dehydrated air of the rink scored my throat, and when I sprinted I tasted blood. I was sick, too, with the endless colds we passed around, often feverish. I could not cough for the pain. It felt as though I inhaled alcohol instead of air.
I had made the varsity team, but I rarely saw playing time; our team was led by Sarah Devens, the closest thing to aristocratic athlete Hobey Baker that St. Paul’s School had seen in eighty years. She was from Massachusetts, not Main Line Philadelphia, but you could picnic beneath a statue of her Devens forefather in a Boston park, and she demonstrated joyful, graceful mastery of every sport she attempted. I saw her spiral a football fifty yards into the arms of a football player who wasn’t expecting it. On an all-school trail run, she covered root-tangled forest miles in five minutes and forty seconds each. When we played other teams, their coaches arrived with strategies to contain her, and they looked up at Sarah and down at their clipboards as though there were no one else in uniform. The few other female pre-Olympians in New England knew who she was, and they met Sarah, and she them, with the dignity and mutual respect of generals on a battlefield.
This prowess would have made her enormously popular even if she hadn’t also been kind. It seemed impossible, seeing her in action, but inside those torrents of competitive energy spun a bright, steady self, held almost gyroscopically still and centered. I did not know Sarah Devens well enough to call her “Devil,” as her friends did, but I knew, as everyone did, that the sporting nickname worked precisely because she was anything but evil.
I sat on the freezing bench during hockey games all over New England and watched her play. She had a slapshot that hooked the back of the net from across the rink. I was a little bit frightened to share the ice with her. I had not developed a sense of where I was out there, so although I was fast, it seemed skaters came at me from nowhere. My helmet made me feel not protected but constantly in danger of ambush.
Candace had made the varsity team too. She was a strong player, much better than I was, and her jocular wit suited the physicality of hockey. My friends had rallied to her side. I sat alone, dressed alone, and did not attempt to talk or cheer. I never pretended to belong. Our coach, Ms. Royce, was Candace’s adviser. Royce, as we called her, was just out of college, and with us she sometimes made the mistake of trading on collegiality rather than maturity, aiming for affection rather than
respect. Royce liked to know who was dating whom. She commented on new dresses and haircuts. She lamented not having a beau herself. She was dismissive of me, which might have been because I was useless to her as a player. But I suspected it was just as likely that Candace had told her about my transgression with Budge.
One of Royce’s favorite exercises for us was a sprint game called Categories, in which groups of skaters, identified by some code, would sprint to the end of the rink and back. We’d line up, she’d shout, “Anyone with blond hair, skate!,” and off would go the blondes.
“Anyone with brown hair, skate!”
“Ponytails!”
“Bangs!”
And so on.
(If you’re wondering if she ever called out locs or dreads or braids, the answer is of course no.)
It was important that we all get the workout, so if you were the only redhead, you’d wait patiently until your category was called, then skate like hell while your team watched.
Deep January or early February, we had been losing games despite having Sarah Devens on the first line. We did not have a deep enough bench to compete against the bigger schools closer to Boston. Sarah was frustrated. Royce was frustrated. We were all exhausted and unwell, tired of the term, tired of the cold. To liven things up, Royce created new sprint categories.
“Anyone who has ever been kissed, skate!”
Laughter broke out across the line, then every girl skated. We returned to the line and waited.
“Anyone who has ever kissed…Reid!”
This was surprising, but then again Royce was young and we could see she was aiming to be fun. Reid was a sixth former. His girlfriend, Jess, skated.
“Anyone who has ever kissed… Miller!”
A fifth former skated.
“Bart!”
These were the easy ones, the long-term, highly visible romances. Royce knew enough of our histories to get most everyone out on the ice. One by one, delighted, girls skated. I saw it coming but could not escape. Did I imagine the moment’s pause, the intake of ice air, before she came to it?
“Anyone who has ever kissed Budge, skate!”
With sharp cuts of her blades Candace started off down the ice, but they were looking at me. Royce too. From my spot at the end of the line of girls, I could not read the expression on her face—whether this was payback or accident.
I considered skating. I considered digging my edges in and sending myself off, just to say, Yes, I did it, I thought it would save me. But then I’d have had to turn and skate back.
But also: I had never kissed Budge. We never kissed. I leaned on my hockey stick and looked up the line at my helmeted teammates, their long ponytails dull in the blue-white shadows. A sob was cupped in the base of my throat. I could not breathe myself free of it. I heard the canister lights buzzing over us. Candace carved a quick and triumphant lap out and back, and our friends cheered her return.
Royce looked down the line. I was the only one left. I hoped she didn’t care whether I sprinted or not, that she realized it hardly mattered for our team whether I took that extra lap.
She called out, “Anyone who has ever kissed Rick Banner, skate!”
No one on the team had kissed Rick Banner. Everyone on the team knew this. He had always dated the girl he was dating now. Her roommate was on the ice with me. My belly lurched; I felt bile creeping up my throat, and the burn was remarkable.
My father once told me something about the legendary hockey player Hobey Baker. It was commonly known that he was the last casualty of the war, dead in a plane crash that followed the armistice, tragically, by hours. Dad looked up at the plaque that bore Baker’s name there in Gordon Rink and said, “Hey, Lace, you know what? People only think Hobey Baker died in a tragic crash.” I followed his eyes, listening. “People think it was a terrible accident. But actually that might not be so.”
He explained that there was no good reason for the crash that killed Hobey Baker. The war had ended, and Baker had his papers to go home. He’d asked to fly one more time. His squadron objected—why take the risk?—but he insisted. The weather was fine. He was an expert pilot, the very best.
“People who know the story,” said Dad, “think it was not an accident. That he had come to the end of his time as a flying ace, which was the highest accolade a young man could achieve. He was on top of the world. After St. Paul’s, after Princeton, after being a hockey star that famous—well, there was nowhere left for him to go. And people think he realized that, and crashed his plane because he could not face going home to a normal life. He just said It will never be better than this and flew right into the ground.”
I knew why my father told me this story. Dad had been a member of the Ivy Club at Princeton, the eating club Hobey Baker had joined back in 1912. Dad would have learned his insider’s mythology there. Writing from Cottage Club, the eating club next door, F. Scott Fitzgerald had borrowed Hobey’s middle name, Amory, for the hero of This Side of Paradise. The story my father told was not to him tragic. It was about a kind of mastery.
I too found self-destruction more interesting than bad luck. I admired it. Nothing was taken from Hobey Baker, I calculated, nothing visited upon him that he didn’t ordain. The only thing he’d ever had to give up was his own future.
I could die. That was a choice. My father might even understand.
I didn’t skate to Rick Banner’s name. After Royce finished the kissing sprints and let us go, I changed in silence and left the locker room alone. When I was halfway to the rink doors I heard someone behind me, quietly, sneakers on the rubber mats. I stiffened, waiting. Would I be hit? Spit upon? How soon until they laughed?
My follower caught up and threw an arm around me. It was Sarah Devens, superstar. She had never touched me before. We’d never exchanged more than a friendly hello.
“Hey, Lace,” she said, resting her arm heavily across my shoulders. She was shorter than I was and seemed endlessly powerful.
I did not reply, just waited.
Sarah sighed, a long and sad sound. We walked together. After a few more paces, she pulled me in to her in a kind of sideways hug and stayed with me like that for a moment. I ached to hear what she would say next. I could not so much as offer her a word of my own.
But she withdrew, and when I looked back she was with our team captains and others, including Candace, and they were stony. I was no glutton. I would not ask for more. I took Sarah’s moment of solidarity and turned it over in my mind. I remembered the weight of her arm on my shoulders.
I still don’t know what she might have meant to say, if there was anything else she had meant to confer. I never asked. Sarah Devens killed herself four years later, but we haven’t gotten there yet.
Crack-ups at St. Paul’s were almost always observed in retrospect, beginning with the rector’s announcement in Chapel that a student had withdrawn from the school, for the rest of the semester or for good. A brilliant ballet dancer would get thinner and thinner until one day we learned she’d gone home on a health leave, and then, on the walk to the Schoolhouse from Chapel, her hallmates would reveal the details. A suicide attempt with pills, usually—she’d swallow everything she could get her hands on, prescribed and unprescribed, and wait to be found. One student arranged herself holding her mother’s picture on her chest, as though she were in her coffin already. Nobody succeeded while we were students there.
Or a boy would get caught “partying”—alcohol or drugs—in such a conspicuous way that it was clear he wasn’t even pretending to adhere to school rules. It was difficult to know when behavior was truly manic, because we all worked all the time anyway in our fever to perform, and sometimes this pace extended to rule-breaking, too.
Withdrawal from the world was the final course of action, and this was the progression I’d been witnessing in my hallmate Elise, close up, without realizing it. When I felt her starting to disengage from our friendship, panic moved in my stomach. It couldn’t have been disapproval of me—she was any
thing but judgmental, and sex was a field she considered expansive and ill-suited to shame. I hadn’t wronged her, had I? I wondered whether she might, hearing great gossip about me, have felt left out, not learning from me what everyone else seemed to know. In a similar position, I might have suffered such a petty injury. But that wasn’t it either.
Elise refused breakfast, lunch, and most dinners, managing to buy snacks from the student Tuck Shop during its open hours mid-morning. She stopped carrying Simone and Jean-Paul around with her. Because I was so impressed by her, I found a happy explanation for everything: She wanted to be left alone with her sophisticated thoughts. She had moved past French existentialism and was weighing which intellectual movement to embrace next. She realized that the quality of our existence is only a matter of perception. And so on.
Then, in February, Elise withdrew completely—left the school and went home.
I got a note. She added our favorite quotations at the bottom: “Be always drunken.” And, from Religion’s latest assignment, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Her handwriting was elegant, long and sloping, almost masculine in the way she compressed open spaces and crowded her lines to take up room on the page. In my large, careful hand I copied her quotations onto separate pieces of paper and taped them over my bed. Down the hall, Maintenance retrieved her school-issue cot from the basement and removed the tacks that had held her scarves over the windows. They dialed down the radiator and left the room bare and cold.
I was again nominated for the Ferguson Scholarship. I cringed when my name was read. I worried that the sound of it, released in the chapel, would remind people how they hated me.
My sixteenth birthday was approaching. What did I want? Sweet sixteen, my parents said. Sweet sixteen, said Mrs. Lane. Sweet sixteen, said my adviser, Mrs. Fenn. Did I have any requests?
I am not sure if it was before or after the actual day, but one night around that time I again received a late phone call. I went down warily, disbelieving.
Notes on a Silencing Page 18
