Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  It hurt. As my hand swelled I felt my heart in my palm, and at Mom’s suggestion I took a few painkillers. I remember how they softened the edges of my peripheral vision. I sat on a stool in the little eat-in kitchen turning my head swiftly and waiting for things to line up. When Blake rang the condo to ask how I was doing, my parents were grateful—and more than comfortable with his offer to take me out for a hot chocolate to cheer me up.

  Nobody carded me, walking into a bar with Blake. My cocoa was spiked and delicious. There were shots, too. One of Blake’s friends, also an extreme skier, joined us, along with a girl from ski school named Tori. She was blond and enthusiastic, with glittery pink lips, and I both judged her for being cheap and drew courage from her cheer. I can still taste the liquor in the hot chocolate. I welcomed the nausea and the spinning. I wanted to launch off a cliff. God’s country. I remember being led through the snow and wondering if I could lie down in it and never wake up. How hard could it be to die? Truly, how hard? And what loss would that be? One less prep-school girl on spring break. One less suburban doll. One less Princeton applicant, one less aspiring fool. They’d turn down the radiator in my room and leave it dark, just like Elise’s.

  At one point Blake was having sex with me while his buddy had sex with Tori just a few feet away. I saw them and I saw my cast, which was bright enough to shine in the dark of their filthy living room. That’s all I remember. I no longer cared.

  Mom was wrong about the curse. My hand was a terrific blessing. I couldn’t have chosen a better tiny bone to break to release me from the usual school routine. My hand was casted at rest, fingers and thumb in loose parallel, and there was nowhere to lodge a pen. This meant I couldn’t take notes in class. Teachers threw too much material at us for me to simply try to remember it all. “You could bring a tape recorder,” said Dad, but then what? Sit in my room and replay entire classes? It would take all night. Instead I used what I could—my left hand—and, working with intense concentration, taught myself to write with my opposite paw.

  It meant being slow. It meant being deliberate. I had to choose what to record or I would lose the thread. The effect was an engagement with classroom discussion I’d never forced on myself before. I stopped worrying about other people and started listening to them.

  I pressed out French papers with new focus and math sets with greater clarity. In Religion, I cut out the fat of pseudo-philosophical musings and said only what I meant to say. Reverend S. remained unmoved, but to hell with him. I was finally understanding what it meant to pay attention, and he’d been gassing on about that all year.

  I needed more time to do my work, and I received it. Because I could not play tennis, I was given the afternoons free to exercise as I wished. (As a fifth former with two other varsity sports, I’d have been given this opportunity anyway, but I never would have taken it otherwise.) “You could come warm up with the team,” suggested Coach Schiff, and for the first few days I did, shivering through laps around the blustery courts and stretching for no reason. “You could ride the exercise bike in the training room,” she offered, and I tried that, but Rick came in to ice down after lacrosse practice and his half-naked body in a tub made me quake. The training room was nauseating, a cesspit of overcompensation: four orthopedically designed tables on one side for administering pulse therapies and wrapping joints, and on the other side a whirlpool and the ice basin, as though we were all Olympians. Everyone, it seemed, got taped up at the trainer’s. Everyone needed to be stretched or examined. Pedaling the exercise bike smack in the middle of the room with my hot-pink cast, I felt like a sitting duck—actually sitting, my legs actually paddling, all these athletes coming and going.

  On the day Coach Schiff took the team for the long run we called Blinking Light, I joined them. It seemed like the right thing to do, though I had always hated these training runs. There were shorter routes through the woods, but they were narrow and full of sticks and chipmunk holes, best left to solitary walkers or kids looking for a quiet place to bone or get stoned. Varsity captains preferred to send their teams up the road toward the boat docks—a mile from the gym—and then ordered a left turn to a major county junction, where a single stoplight was strung across the intersection. The small pleasure of being able to leave campus was far offset by the uphill climb, two miles out, to that stoplight, which blinked red—there was not enough traffic to require anything more. We passed through woods and came out into farmland, with a house in the distance. I dreamed of seeing another human being in the world beyond school. A nice farm wife with a graying golden bun and a tray of biscuits or a pitcher of lemonade. I had always been a slow runner—that is how I am made—and I was miserable, trying to keep up. The damn stoplight never seemed to get any closer. On the soccer team in the fall our pace had been set by Coach Green, a six-foot-four ectomorph trotting alongside Meg, whose first New York City Marathon, which she would run on a whim, would earn her a racing sponsorship. Days I threw up, I was patted on the back and told to keep working on my aerobic capacity.

  Now, the early-spring sky was slate. Our tennis team was small and the girls had on their tennis skirts, which would have been a silly sight to a local resident on that country road—fourteen or so preppy girls in pleated skirts, like an image from Madeline’s Parisian orphanage. I pounded along behind them. Running made my hand ache and turned my throat raw, but when this run was over, I knew, they had to return to the courts and follow orders, while I could do whatever I wanted for the few hours before supper. This bit of time felt unimaginably indulgent. After we reached the light and turned around, I fell well behind. The woods to my left were dark, the bark of the leafless trees wet with the thaw. The pavement had no curb. Again I imagined slipping away, into the woods. How cold would it be at night? Would the farmer’s wife take me in? It was quiet enough to hear squirrels climbing. My own breath sounded explosive. I considered being frightened—I conjured the usual misshapen country recluse who might hack me to bits with the ax he happened to be carrying. But the thought didn’t take. My cast was hard. I swung it a few times as though I was hitting a forehand. It was pendulous and made me feel curiously powerful.

  When it came time to turn back toward campus, I went left instead and found the top of the trail into the woods. Ice still glazed the muddy hollows. I’d been running longer than I had ever run before, but on these curves I wasn’t tired. Instead I felt propelled by them. The earth was springy beneath me. I got faster, or it seemed I did, clipping the bigger, closer trees with my cast. I knew this path as Long Ponds, but I’d never run it in this direction, and never alone, and certainly not when the trees were bare, so I hadn’t had the chance to work out what I was working out now: where the dining hall was in relation to the chapel, with the ice rink behind; how the edge of the forest was actually just a strip before a parking lot here, and a utility road here; where the bridges ran, and why water rushed over the waterfall by Simpson House; how the entire campus was basically just wedged between the boat docks on Turkey Pond and Pleasant Street. Not much of anything at all, really. The trail emerged like a secret by the chapel, onto a path so narrow between the pond and the trees you’d worry there wasn’t room on the shore to keep from falling in.

  Maybe a student with a better sense of direction would have been in possession of this vision of her home much earlier than I was, but that was the first day I realized the shape of the school. With it came the secondary realization that the school was a place, like any other place—stationary, platted, with boundaries. It was possible to leave it. One day I would.

  I was late coming in to dinner. Caroline happened to be in the hall. She said, “Lacy-o.”

  It was a surprising kindness. I had given up on Caroline, on all of them, because of their loyalty to Candace. “Hi, Caroline.”

  “How is your arm?”

  “I just ran six miles.” I’d worked it out. “Blinking Light, then Boat Docks, then Long Ponds.”

  “Wow. That must have felt terrific. Didn’t
it get dark?”

  “Not quite.”

  She reached for my bright pink cast and held it up. “Though this thing is like a torch.”

  “Or a club.”

  She smiled, weighing the plaster. “Yeah, you could deck the shit out of someone with this.”

  We walked into the dining hall together. Our schoolmates clocked this small progression in diplomacy. I saw Sam’s eyebrows go up.

  That night before bed, I dragged my old camp footlocker out from the floor of my closet, where it held shoes and sweaters and spare shampoo, and pulled it in front of my door. All student doors opened in. I leaned across the trunk to test the knob and was able to slam the trunk with the door hard enough to let in a few inches of hallway light, so for good measure I tossed a few heavy textbooks inside. We were forbidden to block the doors, of course, in case of fire, but I reasoned that if I had to I could just open my ancient mullioned window and drop two stories to the grass. Whereas nobody could climb in.

  My reckoning with the land continued. I ran every road. Out the white gates and left; up Pleasant Street, facing traffic; across the way to a far hill, at the top of which I found a house with mountain views and a Labrador retriever who let me sit with him in the grass and look around. I went past the blinking light beneath a major interstate and into the next town before I lost my nerve. I found a quarry, a cemetery, and a park. I didn’t risk running toward Concord, where my presence might be misunderstood as leaving campus without written permission. But I pounded everywhere else. I got barked at and honked at. I remember trampling mud and new nettles. I spotted lady’s slippers, which I recognized because my mother had pointed them out carpeting damp woods in Illinois. Sometimes I imagined I was circling the place as a wolf might—as my wolf might, to mark her territory—but I never did feel I possessed St. Paul’s; more often I imagined a kind of stitching, as if I was ensuring the perimeter could never pick up and expand. As if I was nailing the place down for good.

  I didn’t think about the boys. Not any of them. I thought about the school, and whether my small catastrophes in so vaunted a place meant the world itself might wish me ill. (I was wrong to imagine a malevolent rather than indifferent world, but I had no idea how right I was about the school.) Perhaps growing up with the Crawford Curse had given me my propensity to understand what had happened to me as something broader and crueler than two boys in a dark room. Seen one way, my interpretation was paranoid—a child’s conflation of incident with environment. Seen another way, it was an easy instinct—which I believe all children have—to identify the power structures that animate any institution or society, and particularly one as preening and self-possessed as St. Paul’s.

  I’d never had much interaction with the people who in fact wielded power at the school. The rector, Kelly Clark, was to me an oddly tanned, constantly intoning priest, one of many Episcopal clergymen I’d heard from pulpits all my life. To many of my classmates he was a benevolent paterfamilias, standing beside his smiling wife with her blue, sugar-spun hair. At our every encounter he called me “Lucy,” so I felt no particular affection, but I didn’t hold it against him—why should he know me? There were five hundred of us. Leadership of St. Paul’s was the last position of his career (as it had been for almost every rector, being a pinnacle appointment), and he seemed tired, almost addled. I didn’t expect anything more.

  Around him was a ring of men: Bill Matthews and John Buxton and Cliff Gillespie. The vice rectors, who served as our deans, were not academic but sporting, their energy not pedantic but avuncular. Mr. Matthews was a legendary hockey star from St. Paul’s himself and now a championship coach. Two of his sons had played for St. Paul’s. The younger of them, who had graduated before I arrived, had a popular reputation that was burnished even in his absence, and this interested me enough to watch from beyond the boards while Matthews yelled at his hockey players. He was pug-faced and seemed angry, yapping up at them, his breath visible, the skaters towering over him on their blades. I saw his absence of gravitas as a normal, if alternative, presentation of masculine leadership—not for him the churchly bromides. He wanted pucks in nets and points on the board. I don’t remember him having much of a rapport with girls. He signed off on our requests to leave campus, and his signature often appeared on formal school communications. If you got into a tangle with the administration for complications of any reason—leaves of absence, failed courses—you’d likely be dealing with Mr. Matthews. I’d had nothing to do with him at all.

  Mr. Buxton, another vice rector, coached wrestling; had I not gone to watch Shep’s meet that long-ago winter, I wouldn’t even have known his face. Mr. Gillespie was, as I’ve said, The Rock. It was his verdict I imagined immediately and with terror when I thought I might get caught in Rick and Taz’s room and sent to explain myself to the Disciplinary Committee. He coached lacrosse and taught chemistry, neither of which I pursued.

  I don’t know by what process the deans decided that Mr. Gillespie would be the one to try to solve the problem of the Ferguson Scholarship exams. Mom and Dad thought something should be done to help me sit written exams with a broken hand, but the faculty considered it unfair to give me extra time. After all, every nominee was going to be challenged to the height of his or her personal ability; how could they know that my extra time would benefit only my motor skills without boosting my performance otherwise?

  “This is a little bit ridiculous,” said my mom on the phone when I told her no accommodation would be made for me.

  “It will be fine.”

  “It’s not fine. You can’t write.”

  At that time, I didn’t know the history of Henry Ferguson, eponymous patron of these scholarships: how he’d been shipwrecked at nineteen and forced to drift in a lifeboat across three thousand miles of the Pacific. Desperate, pounded by the sun, Ferguson had, of course, kept a journal of his trials (as any good St. Paul’s student would), which was promptly published in Harper’s upon his return (as any self-respecting St. Paul’s alumnus’s work would be). This man was no ordinary example of Puritan austerity and forbearance. By the time he was a trustee of St. Paul’s, Ferguson was regarded as an almost holy survivor. They even made him rector for a while.

  “I’m not going to win, anyway, Mom,” I said into the phone. “It’s really not worth the fight.”

  But at home in Chicago, Mom howled for Dad to come to the phone. “She can’t write!”

  “I know,” I heard Dad say. “But they make a decent point.”

  “How is that decent? She has to use one hand!”

  “But how much longer would be fair, given that? How could they calculate that? I understand it’s sort of impossible for them to be fair to all the other kids. And she’s the one with the injury.”

  “Exactly! She’s the one with the injury!”

  “Yes, but—”

  “This is outrageous. I’m flying out there.”

  “Please don’t,” I said into the phone.

  “Please don’t,” said Dad.

  Mom came back. “I just want you to have a shot at winning,” she told me.

  “I know.”

  “And you can’t do it orally? Like defending a thesis?”

  “Not if writing is part of the evaluation, and it is.”

  “But what if you can’t write? How fair is that?”

  How sweet it was, I thought cruelly, that Mom somehow had in mind that St. Paul’s was fair.

  “I will write left-handed and I will do the best I can.”

  Mom was beginning to cry. “All right, love. I know you will.”

  But the next day a typed note appeared in my post-office box: Mr. Gillespie was requesting to see me in the chemistry lab that afternoon.

  I had never spoken with The Rock. He was, to me, unapproachable and uninterested at the same time, someone who sat and waited for us to fuck up, at which point he decided what portion of our futures we had forfeited. I was the broken-handed, novel-loving humanities girl summoned to meet him in a s
cience building where the doors slammed shut on their own and the walls hummed with unseen machinery.

  I found the chemistry lab for the first and last time. The Rock was at one of the high tables, the ones topped with a black waxy substance you could carve with a fingernail. His feet were tucked into the bottom rail of his stool, and he patted the stool beside him.

  I hopped up and felt like an impostor, as though my ability to do that belied my injury.

  “It’s just a tiny piece of bone at the base of my thumb,” I offered, tapping my cast at the spot where the break would be. Hardly a shipwreck in the South Pacific. I thought he’d appreciate an impression of toughness.

  “I understand.”

  He had in front of him on the table several plastic tubs filled with Styrofoam balls organized by size and color. “Okay, now,” he said. “Let’s see it.”

  I held up my arm, feeling embarrassed by the fact that all of my running had made my cast begin to smell.

  “It’s a little bit, um, old,” I told him.

  “What’s that?”

  “Just, I can’t shower with it.”

  He shook his head to dismiss my concern, gripped my cast at the wrist with one hand, and tried half-heartedly to wedge his other fist inside the casted space between my fingers and thumb. This hurt. Then he held his fist up and eyeballed it—first in front of a tub of blue balls, then green. He took a green ball.

  “Let’s try this,” he said, and fit the ball inside my casted hand.

  It fell to the floor.