Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  It was another male voice.

  “Johnny Devereux.” A student who had already graduated. I hadn’t known him at all, but I knew about his family. His parents were nationally recognized humanitarians who had addressed the school in Chapel. Their son’s name was listed on award plaques for character and athletics. I was pretty sure he was in the Ivy League now.

  “Yeah?”

  He’d heard I was amazing in bed. He’d heard I was the sexiest thing at St. Paul’s School. He’d always wanted to try me out. He was going to drive all the way to campus and pay me a visit.

  “Oh, right. Okay. Whatever.”

  I ended the call. Where did this stop? I climbed back up the stairs, finished my homework, brushed my teeth and washed my face, and went to bed.

  I don’t know what time it was when he came through the door. We had no locks; I don’t know who let him into the dorm. I don’t know why I didn’t realize he’d meant what he said. He came in smelling of the cold and did not switch on a light. I sat up, my heart crazy, not sure who this was or what he meant to do to me. I’d been sleeping on my stomach, as I did. He sat on my bed and took off his shoes, his hand on my back.

  “Baby, it’s Johnny.” He pulled back my sheets and ran his hand along my body.

  There wasn’t time to think. I had to stay quiet. You started this. Sort it out. He’d driven all the way to St. Paul’s. He was an adult. An Ivy League star. I remembered his father’s face addressing us from the lectern in Chapel. And I remembered that his father had been—might still be—a St. Paul’s School trustee.

  What would this man do to me if I said no to him now?

  Shame drowned me; more of it meant nothing.

  I lay back down on my stomach and cried into my pillow while he fucked me from behind, and then in no time at all he was gone.

  In math class, I began doodling on the edges of my worksheets. First I worked Elise’s quotations in elaborate Gothic lettering that made them look taken from tombstones. Then I sketched out landscapes behind them: a castle on a hill, a bare-branched tree. I silhouetted a big black bird in the tree. I wrote lists of words that moved me: dovecote, awakening, remedy.

  Moving between the rows of desks one day, Leighton Huhne—the happy augur of a good term from the year before—caught sight of my page and said, “Dude. You are a freak.”

  As expressed in the school vernacular, this was a near-total compliment. To be a freak of this sort was to be creative, independent, interesting. Leighton was a buddy, and he’d have appreciated the morbid scenery and script I was embroidering all class long because it was consistent with the buddies’ fascination with the Grateful Dead and the aesthetic that surrounded the band.

  I looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Totally. Dude. Check this stuff out! What’s your deal?”

  This was a complicated question. I knew better than to pretend to answer it.

  “No deal,” I said casually. “Just passing time here.”

  He tapped two huge fingers on my page. “That’s way cool.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Vidster.” (Affectionate derivation of vid, which itself comes from video, as in good vid or bad vid.)

  I let this wash over me. There was an opening here, and I couldn’t believe I’d lucked into it.

  He continued on up the rows, shaking his shaggy head in slow appreciation.

  Some of the buddies managed to exist at St. Paul’s without appearing to invest in anything. They shuffled to classes by day and got high at night. A few played squash—shockingly well, given their lack of focus—and a few were in school bands. But for the most part they existed in their own good-natured fog of odd wit and poor hygiene. The masters granted them clemency on these and other counts. One day that fall, a buddy who was Muslim (one of the very few Muslims I ever knew at St. Paul’s) had stood up in class and shouted, over the teacher’s voice, “LOOK AT THAT TREE!”

  Everyone turned to find one of the thousand sugar maples right outside the window, perfectly crowned, aflame with fall.

  “THIS ONE MOMENT BELONGS TO THAT TREE! THAT TREE IS INCREDIBLE! THAT TREE DESERVES TO BE LOOKED AT! STOP EVERYTHING AND LOOK AT THAT GODDAMNED TREE!”

  The teacher waited until this outburst was complete, then quietly asked everyone to get back to work. Nobody said much beyond that. It was just what this guy did, just what some students did: they’d see a tree and be so moved they had to shout about it. Total freaks.

  I savored the moment with Leighton Huhne for a day or two. I was so hungry for kindness that his compliment felt like a proposal. Why had he been friendly? Why was he not appalled by me?

  My problem, I figured, must have been one of allegiances. I was a tri-varsity athlete, a top student, a chorister—I wanted to be admired. Of course I would become a pariah for any break from this routine. But what if I didn’t want any of those things? What if I just drew crazy moonscapes and spouted poetic epithets and pretended not to care about anything?

  If I simply went crazy, would they leave me alone?

  “You should come hang out sometime,” said Leighton.

  The first time I visited his room, I sat on the floor in front of the big easy chair where he was slumped. Dead bootlegs played on the stereo. His wall of tapes made the room look like a bank vault. He was from Colorado and knew Linley. (The coordination of social class around St. Paul’s meant that most everyone from a certain city or even state would know everyone else from that place, and the farther you went from New Hampshire, the truer this was. Choose a student from Hong Kong, he or she would know every other St. Paul’s student from Hong Kong long before setting foot on campus.) Leighton told me Linley was doing well, was happy back home, that she and her brother were good people. I said I missed her.

  He never mentioned Rick or Taz or Budge or Candace. I was keen to make sure that version of me was never invoked—not in the slightest. I asked about the music, and he talked for a while about some concert venue called Red Rocks and a crazy bridge between “Dark Star” and “Brokedown Palace.” While we chatted, I reached over to his giant socked feet and began to rub them.

  “That feels amazing,” he said.

  “Doesn’t it?”

  The point was to be nuts. I was aiming for a kind of beatific vacancy, as though I could return to innocence by way of insanity. I rubbed his feet for a while, then got up, utterly aloof, and went back to my room in time for check-in. I felt certifiable. But my act worked: Leighton, disarmed or otherwise unconcerned, invited me to meet him and some other buddies in another sixth former’s room to get high. I’d never even seen pot before. On the appointed evening I ducked under the tapestry that was hung, in open defiance of fire-safety rules, across the threshold, calling out, “Hello?,” and was immediately and loudly shushed. Two dressers faced me—another obstacle to any faculty member who dared to venture in. I cut right around them and found a cavelike space beneath loft beds, where a group of guys huddled toward what I gathered was a bong.

  It was red plastic, the size of a child’s telescope, and translucent. It bubbled in a pleasing way. The closest referent I had was a lava lamp, or the tiny red oil lights that my childhood friend Wendy had on her Christmas tree and which made my dad hysterical with fear. “Boiling oil is basically a bomb! That tree would go up in a heartbeat!” I recognized the smell of pot, and for the first time knew what it was.

  “’Sup?” someone said.

  “Hey.”

  Leighton patted the floor beside him. “You’re up next.”

  I scooched into place and waited. The bong was held to my face. Across the circle, a student I’d never spoken to flicked open a lighter and held the flame to a little metal cup at its base.

  I stared.

  Leighton whispered, “Inhale.”

  I pointed to the mouth of the bong. “There?”

  Everyone laughed. “Yeah.”

  I lowered my face to the red plastic opening and inhaled as best I could. The snap-snap sound of the student’s lig
hter flint pleased me, like a train clicking over its track, like we were together helping me arrive somewhere else.

  My cheeks puffed fat as a chipmunk’s, I raised my head.

  Everyone laughed again. “No, inhale,” said Leighton. He patted his chest and filled it, to show me.

  I had never so much as smoked a cigarette, but I gulped some of the fiery air in my mouth down into my lungs. The moment I did, I realized my mistake.

  My throat tore open. I was ignited, I was sure of it. The pain was astonishing. I hadn’t remembered. I hadn’t thought.

  I burst out coughing and crying, and the first smiles that had appeared around the circle closed quickly into faces of concern.

  “Dude. Is she okay? Are you okay?”

  I had to cough, but coughing was awful. Tears were running down my face, and I was waving a hand in front of my mouth as though to cool myself.

  “Jesus.”

  “Okay, no tokes for you, kiddo.”

  “Christ.”

  “Is she, like, allergic?”

  “Maybe she’s just super-wired to weed.”

  Someone laughed. “Totally. Like, built for it. Like, a Polaroid with weed. Just show it to her and she lights up.”

  Leighton clapped me on the back. “Awesome. Welcome.”

  I didn’t even have to talk. I sat there, watching the red bong glow from hand to hand, listening to the laughter and the crackle of the flame in the bowl, the endless, low, insipid tones of some long-ago Dead concert on the stereo. I waited to get high, but nothing happened. My throat hurt so much that I let spit pool in my mouth before I worked up the courage to swallow. One guy across the way smiled a particularly large smile at me. He had long red hair that fell in a lush drape over his face, and he kept pushing it aside so he could see me. I thought how funny it would be if we became girlfriend and boyfriend, how much shit people would give us for both having red hair. He had the same idea. This was Timothy Macalester. He was interested in social justice, Northern California, and smoking weed. In no time at all he was walking me to class and home at night, and I never again had to pretend to try to get high.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, Tim and I. He was thoughtful and independent and funny and mild, and I remember best his enormous smile. It took up half his face, and he coupled it with the longish red hair in a silly way, but because he was not self-conscious, all you saw was a really nice guy whose face could make you smile. Everywhere we went, we were told we’d have redheaded children. I was just happy not to be alone.

  He never asked about Rick or Taz or Budge, and I never volunteered anything about them. He liked to kiss. This was fine with me, though my body remained cold—whatever high glitter had swept through me the spring before, kissing Shep beneath the lamplight, was gone now. We did not engage in much beyond this. I recall only vaguely our intimacy. It was my duty as his girlfriend, I understood, and it was a small price to pay for the fact that other boys had stopped promising to, say, fuck my freckles on the way to Environmental Science class. No more calls from college men seeking a quickie.

  But when I think of Tim, my stomach twists with a sense of guilt, and a memory of betrayal I can’t quite place. It wasn’t about a person. It was about the absence of a person. I liked Tim well enough, but I was using him, plain and simple, for protection, and he was far too emotionally aware to pretend that I was an active participant in this couple we were forming. I remember him saying my name, as though to wake me up from a trance, and then, after watching my face for a moment, shaking his head as though I’d disappointed him. I remember him gradually spending less time with me and more time with his roommates and friends.

  I was pretending to be nuts, but I was actually cracking up, too—utterly disconnected and careless. In choir I had almost completely lost my voice, so the only time I could hear myself was in the empty stairwells of my dorm, where the acoustics were so sharp that the tiniest tone was amplified. I didn’t talk much, but I did practice alto lines in the stairwells. My grades remained almost perfect. I slept around five hours a night. I arrived at the rink for hockey practice and watched the last of the varsity boys’ practice—Rick Banner was terrifically tall on skates, taller than Budge and his sidekick, than any of them. I watched them to prove I could, to prove to them, and to myself, that I was not afraid. Their blades cut and cracked the ice. They sent sprays of shavings in every direction. The rink’s coldness was so dry I could barely breathe. I saw those men as sharply as if they’d been etched onto the air. I heard every sound of their skates. I could not seem to lose them in a scrimmage or a crowd. But Tim I saw as though he were on the wrong end of a telescope, small and wobbly, smiling his huge smile.

  By spring break, we had fizzled out. I was aware that he was angry but didn’t try to determine why. I just couldn’t bring myself to act.

  “Lacy must be happy,” Mrs. Fenn wrote to my parents in her adviser note that semester. “She sings in the hallways.”

  8

  Spring 1991, Fifth Form

  When I told a therapist in my mid-twenties about how I fell skiing in New Mexico on spring break of that year, fifth form at St. Paul’s, and broke my hand, she suggested that I’d done so intentionally. “Not that you planned for that particular bone,” she said, to clarify. “But that you needed a visible injury to allow you to admit to harm.”

  I’m as open as anyone to the notion of the unconscious working the borders of intention, and I appreciate the line of authority she was trying to offer me—to suggest that some part of me was aware of my situation and powerfully able to alter events to draw attention to it. How tempting it is to fold accidents into our own narration. To think that it wasn’t as simple as sitting back on my skis at the end of the day, on a mild slope, and stumbling onto my outstretched right hand, my ski pole acting as a lever to hyperextend my thumb so that the tendon pulled away a bit of bone. But in fact, it was. It took less than a second and very little speed. It’s called skier’s thumb, and I went home from the mountains and back to school in a bright pink cast.

  “Crawford Curse,” said my mom.

  I am not sure a dumb fall on a rich ski hill qualifies as bad luck. On balance, I think that if you’re a sixteen-year-old on skis on spring break, you are still officially in the good-luck category.

  Mom added, “But at least it was the last day, right?”

  I didn’t tell her that if I’d known how easy it was to break a bone, how much power you could generate from sliding just a little bit fast, I might have found a way to die. Could it be done gently? Could I have it happen before I knew it was happening, just disappear without having to do the dying?

  The morning I fell, I had been walking across our rented condo in full-body long underwear, heading to find my ski socks, when my father, already dressed and eager to get on the lift line, looked up from his newspaper and said, “Lacy. Where did you get that figure?”

  I froze. Mom shouted from the bedroom. “Jim!”

  Dad’s face was guileless. He meant it only as a compliment, an impulsive expression of surprise. My shape was mature, attractive, and this shocked him. It was such a simple slip. But my skin felt iced. He’d seen me as a woman, not his child. Not even a woman: a body. So I was right: even here, even to him, the girl I had been—the person I had been—was gone.

  I did not answer my dad. The question seemed particularly cruel because my figure would have come genetically from him and my mother, so that he was, in a way, complimenting (implicating?) himself. I’d had nothing to do with it.

  “What?” Dad asked, in response to my mother—half puzzled, half defiant. He wore a fallen smile.

  I was in ski school all day, buried in fleece. Our instructor, Blake, was something of a local legend for his freestyle skiing. He was raffish and attractive, in his mid-twenties, and when he wasn’t teaching teenagers in ski school he hurled himself off cliffs and did full-layout flips on the way down. At lunch in the busy cafeteria he was high-fived so often he just stopped mak
ing his hand available. The rest of my ski-school classmates competed to come up with a story or a joke to catch his attention, but I thought he was dull.

  “So, ah, Lacy… what grade are you in back in—what did you say—Chicago?”

  “I live in Chicago,” I said. “But I’m a junior at a high school in New Hampshire.”

  This was on the ski lift. He took turns riding in the quad chair with us, striving to be inclusive. Our feet dangled over evergreens. The sodden quiet of snow cover. Distant peaks.

  “New Hampshire, huh? Is that like for juvie?”

  “Ah, no. It’s for academics.”

  “Oh, like tutoring?”

  “Yeah. Sorta like that.”

  “Got it. So what subjects, then? Like, math? Reading?”

  I was pissy, hungry, arrogant. “Actually, I’m putting together an independent study project looking at the relationship between biochemical depression and the creative genius.”

  “Oh. Sweet.”

  “Yeah.” I felt lousy, listening to myself. The girl on the other side of him on our chair was applying ChapStick. “I’m just interested in why poets are always killing themselves.”

  “Oh, right. Rock on. That is cool.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  I was following with his other students in a line down the last slope of the day when I sat back, overwhelmed with something I could not name, and fell on my hand. Blake took me to the first-aid clinic himself. He’d skied enough to know what it meant that I could not move my thumb.

  Not a big deal. I might need surgery, I might not. An orthopedist could determine this later.

  “Rock on, poet girl,” said Blake, once they’d read the X-ray. “I always give a prize to the kid who manages to ski hard enough to land a fracture.” He patted me on the head, then high-fived the emergency-room physician on his way out.

  It wasn’t until after they casted me that I worked out there was no way to hold a pen, much less a tennis racket. No playing my best sport, no shot at the No. 1 singles spot, no joining my team. How would I write my essays, do my homework? I could type, but it would have to be one-handed, and back then the only computers were in the computer lab. I took my discharge instructions and a bottle of strong pain relievers back to the condo, where Mom helped me get out of my ski clothes and taped a Ziploc bag over my hand so I could shower.