Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  In the evenings, after Seated Meal, we were allowed to wear denim. I had cutoff shorts like all the girls did, with long white strings fraying from the hems. By late May it was warm enough for these. Scotty and I took heartbreaking chestfuls of the spring night before surrendering to the library. We set up on a red couch and pretended to study. I’d review a bit, and he’d ask me questions and run his fingers along my arm. He’d just asked me to come visit him that summer—maybe in Philly, maybe at his family’s house in upstate New York—when he drew his finger along the C scar on my thigh and said, “Whoa. What’s this?”

  I told him about the bike. He hadn’t been there that day, but he’d heard about it. His shaggy head went up and down, and he laughed, his mouth hanging open. I told it lightly, feeling embarrassed by all the misfortune I’d encountered, as though it spoke to some secret desire or need of my own.

  “Lots of bad shit happens to you, huh?” said Scotty.

  “Not really.” How could I say it did, lofted high in the Robert A. M. Stern–designed library, studying my little notebooks, overlooking the grounds of my elite boarding school?

  Scotty twined the threads of my cutoffs. His fingers were blunt and always a little grimy, but I admired this as a mark of his ease in the world. I was grateful to him for not abandoning me when I had told him what little I did about Rick and Taz. I ascribed his steadiness to a sense of safety he would have acquired between the gabled estate on the Philly Main Line and the lake house in the Thousand Islands. He didn’t talk about money, and he certainly didn’t look much like a boy with money, but in his ease was a confidence I was learning belonged to a certain kind of heir.

  “I don’t think more bad things happen to me than to anyone else.”

  “Oh, well,” he said. “Seems like they do.”

  He never really disagreed with anything, just set his idea up there next to yours, as if there was plenty of room on the shelf.

  He traced my scar. I considered being shy about the shape of my thigh spilling out beneath my cutoffs on the red sofa, but I liked the feeling of Scotty’s fingers.

  I remember the sunset over the pond out the glass wall, and the clouds reflected in the water. I permitted myself a softening. Something like a valediction. You made it. Scotty’s stillness beside me, his hand on my skin, let it open up in me like a flame.

  “Gus said it was kind of nasty,” said Scotty, nodding at my scar. He was talking about the injury that caused it, but I was thinking of something else.

  “It was kind of a big deal,” I admitted. “It hurt. And it was scary.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Someone had to carry me to the infirmary.”

  “All cut up? Wow. Who?”

  And in that moment, all at once, I remembered. I hadn’t known him then, when he’d carried me, and I’d been so distracted and dizzy. But now the knowledge just appeared, like a person who had arrived to speak to me.

  Scotty felt it. “What’s up?”

  It was Rick Banner. He was the one who had wrapped a towel around me and lifted me up in his arms and brought me to the infirmary door. I remembered his voice, how I’d been aware of his arms and height while he carried me, how strong he was buoying me up. I saw how we’d looked. Like the fucking Pietà he’d carried me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Cold?”

  “No, no.”

  “Does that tickle?” Scotty made everything easy.

  “A little bit, yeah.”

  “Sorry.” He rested his hand, then took it back. “Let’s go.”

  We pressed out into the air, and the air pressed back—humid, turgid with spring. I wanted to grab it in my hands and hurl it away, it was so soft, and I was so mad. I would not be buried in new life. I would not be swamped by hope. Winter was as rigid in me as my spine.

  “Maybe let’s take a walk,” said Scotty, steering us toward the woods.

  I had not remembered. Not in math class, not when he called me, not when he lay on my face did I realize Rick was the one who had carried me up from the water. Not when I left their room, not when I ducked as he came down the hall, his head high and menacing above the carefully mussed hockey hair of the boys who surrounded him. Not when my throat was searing. Not when Johnny Devereux was fucking me. Not once had I remembered that I had been in his arms. He had helped me.

  Is that why he called me? Is that why? Because I’d gotten hurt, or because he’d been there to rescue me?

  He had been gentle. This above all broke me.

  If a person with a heart had been kind and then cruel, had chosen me…

  We were people on this earth. This life was all we had. It was all we fucking had, and life, my life, could not be determined by cruelty like this. It could not be allowed to stand.

  “Scotty,” I said, “I’m not feeling well.”

  “Oh. What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know. I think maybe my tummy. I think I ought to go lie down.”

  We veered right, around the Old Chapel settling into the dusk, and back down the road toward the quad. The grass was already damp with dew, and tiny gnats buzzed at our ankles.

  “Dinner?” he asked.

  “Probably.”

  “Next time skip it and order pizza.”

  “Yep.”

  “You need anything?”

  “I think I might be sick. I think I need to be alone.”

  “Okay.” We crossed over the waterfall. “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Sorry.” I pulled away from him and started to jog across the lawns, shaking to my fingers. The long metal door pull was cold. The air in the stairwell was cold. I went down to the basement, generously empty on an evening so close to the end of the year (even the most miserable girls could make it another few weeks), punched out my home telephone number, and waited, hoping nothing happened to disrupt this plummet because I could not start it again. Please ring. Please be home.

  Once I heard my mother’s voice, my mind got very clear.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  She offered to go get my father on the line, but I said no. I told her some boys had done something to me. Two sixth formers. They’d called me and asked me to come over, and it had been a trick. A trap.

  “Lacy,” said my mother. “Were you raped?”

  I breathed when she said this, because it meant she could handle the sharpest part—she said it, not me—and because I thought I could honestly answer no.

  “Only my mouth.”

  Then her voice dropped low—ground-floor low, everyone-off-here low. I had never heard this tone before and I wanted to weep with gratitude for it. She said, “What are their names?”

  I told her.

  “Was this last night?”

  “Um, no. October.”

  There was a pause. Then she said, quietly, “Your throat.”

  I was nodding. That was all I could do.

  “Okay. You did the right thing, telling me. We are going to bring you home. Can you pack a bag? I am going to make a few calls.”

  “No. Please don’t tell anyone.” I had no idea how ridiculous this request was.

  “I need to talk to the chaplain.” Here her voice wobbled, and the sound panicked me. If she talked to people, told people, all the work I’d done would be undone. All the precarious stacking of hours and days, all the silence and shrugging, even the lying still while they’d done what they needed to do—all of it would come apart. And everyone would talk again, and everyone would know.

  “Reverend S.? No, you don’t. Please.”

  “Fine. The rector. Or Dean Matthews. We need to tell them.”

  I saw that I had made a terrible mistake. “But there’s a few weeks left, we have—”

  “Lacy.”

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  I heard her sigh. I thought of her with almost patronizing sympathy, the poor thing, just learning what I had known all year. Whereas I was a pro. She’d get used to it. She’d see that I hardly needed to
come home, for heaven’s sake.

  She said, “I’m going to do what has to be done. Right now, that means calling the airlines. Go on upstairs and pack. Just what you need. You don’t need anything else.”

  I needed to finish out the term, with its flourish of ceremonies and award presentations, the sixth-form graduation on the lawn, the last dwindling hours of this unholy year. I needed to say goodbye to my friends so they didn’t think anything was awry, and I wanted everything smooth with Scotty so I would still be on track to visit this summer, and as a down payment on his company for next year.

  “I have five exams,” I told her. As I had suspected, this gave her pause. “I’ve worked really hard and I’m prepared and I want to get them done.”

  “Oh shit,” she said. “Exams.”

  She was not in thrall to the St. Paul’s School registrar, but to the same sense of discipline that lived in me, the one she’d raised me with. She knew I’d want to take my exams. I wasn’t a kid who would ever be grateful to get out of them. And the prospect of making them up somehow, or taking incompletes? Not in our lifetimes.

  She said, “You’re ready for them?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “God, Lacy.”

  “It will be fine. I’ll just finish them and come right home.”

  She was wavering. Exams at St. Paul’s were administered in the gym, which was set up in endless rows of desks with small stacks of blue books and nothing else. The acoustics were terrible—God help you if your stomach growled—and the canister lights, way up in the cobwebby rafters, burned holes in the top of your skull. These small miseries brought me to new heights of focus and recall. Between my left hand and my right, I could get through my exams. I knew everything. I was going to set them on fire. This year would not beat me.

  “Listen, Mom. It’ll just be another few days and then I can be finished and come home.”

  “Okay. Okay. But the very next day.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Are you safe?”

  My eyelids prickled.

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  “There’s a five p.m. out of Logan. How about that?”

  “That will be fine,” I said.

  “You will be fine. We are together now. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  The morning after I finished my exams, I returned to my room from breakfast and dragged my blue duffel bag up onto my bed. I’d made the bed, unsure what to do with my sheets. Usually at the end of the year we took a few days to box everything up. Those of us farther than a car ride from home borrowed handcarts to haul boxes and duffels to the post office to be shipped, and underformers dragged other boxes, as many as possible, out into the hallways for Maintenance to load onto landscapers’ trucks and store over the summer. There was a lengthy process of probate executed by graduating sixth formers, who left campus a few days before the rest of the students, during which prized (and often multigenerational) items were awarded to friends: floor lamps of particular distinction, or an especially soft and not fetid armchair. The unwinding of the stuff paralleled the unwinding of the year.

  I was frantic at the thought of just leaving. Would I be coming back?

  I was staring at my stuff, paralyzed, when Reverend S. knocked on my door. He opened it before I’d said come in.

  “Lacy?”

  He slipped around the door in work boots and khakis, landing in the awkward, slender space where my footlocker sat. He picked up his boot and set it on the top, meaning to slide the trunk sideways, for room, but it hardly budged.

  “God,” he said. “What’ve you got in there?”

  “Could you just walk around it?”

  He did. As I watched, he pressed his hands to his face and peered through his fingers. He looked at my walls, lingering on the quotations: “Be always drunken.” He looked at my dresser, covered, as all of ours were, in a cheap Indian tapestry and littered with hairbrush and lotions and little pots and pencils. He scanned my closet, which had no door: dresses, pants, skirts, parka. Boots akimbo on the floor. My bedside table with its little lamp. My books everywhere.

  I figured this wasn’t a good time to ask him what he’d thought of my magnificent final paper for Religion class. He said, “Your mom’s asked me to help you get packed up.”

  I didn’t hear in that what I might have—what was true—which was that my mom had called him after all, the night I’d called her, and spent two sobbing hours on the phone asking for solace and support. He said nothing of this to me either. I wouldn’t have begrudged her the need for an advocate of her own, but I’d have suggested she call lots of people before she called Reverend S. I honestly thought he had no idea what was going on. How could he, and stand there looking at my things and not at me?

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Have you started?” He was still staring at my walls. T. S. Eliot: “Here, now, always.” De Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

  “Just now.”

  “Okay. Well, what do you need?”

  What I needed was underwear, bras, blue jeans, shorts, T-shirts, and a jacket, but I was not about to open my drawers to pull these things out with Reverend S. standing in his boots in the middle of my room. He bent to a stack of books along the wall and began half-heartedly moving them to the middle of my shoddy carpet. He stepped back out into the hall and returned with some cardboard boxes, which he wrestled into shape on top of my footlocker.

  “Let’s just start loading things up,” he said absently.

  “I don’t think I should be going home today,” I told him, half to get him to go away.

  “Oh, I think you should.”

  I had got it in my head that there was a strong chance I’d be awarded one of the subject prizes for my year, and particularly in Religion, at the awards ceremony. I felt I needed to be there to collect my prize. And I thought Reverend S. would understand this, that this is what he and I were talking about without saying it.

  “Just a few more days,” I said.

  “No. Today is good.”

  “But I think I need to stay for the awards ceremony.”

  He gaped at me. His eyes bugged, as they always did, but because he let his mouth hang in a small o he looked frankly disgusted with what he was seeing.

  Then he looked away, at my bed. “You don’t need to be at the awards ceremony,” he said sharply.

  I was stunned. So there would be no prize. I took in this disappointment like all the rest. Particularly bitter because it was Religion class, which I had thought I was born to. But why this cruelty? Did he not like my paper, did he not see how hard I had worked all year?

  I turned to my dresser, eyes burning, and got to work pulling out clothes. I bundled my underwear tightly inside my shirts so I could pack it all without him seeing. He began moving my things into boxes, indiscriminately, without asking, without sorting, going as quickly as he could. I cringed to see his hands on my things. “Wait,” I said frequently, and pulled something from his grip to pack myself somewhere else. “Hang on.” An antagonism, tentative at first, grew between us into something hard. Ever the student, I thought I could see what he had found to hate. Mine was a dusty, small, overcrowded room, full of the sorts of decorative excesses that teenage girls preferred: a plant with a ribbon tied around it, a case of diet soda, stacks of hand-decorated mixtapes, a mirror covered with pictures of friends. It was an almost baroque combination of sentiment and appetite, longing and grooming. Yes, I should have been packing for days. I’d known I was going home. But this was my nest. He had no idea what I’d gotten through here. I wanted him out.

  He checked his watch. “We need to keep moving.”

  I zipped up my duffel and hauled my backpack up onto my bed. “All set,” I told him. He quit packing immediately, which gave me the impression he’d been sent for another reason—to supervise me, perhaps, rather than to get anything done. He never asked me what had happened, or how I was doing, or said a word about how he’
d come to be in my little room. I didn’t know who would finish bundling my things. I didn’t know when or even whether I would see them again.

  “Right, then. Let’s get you to the post office to meet your car.”

  I didn’t even have a chance to look a last time out that window over the meadow. I glanced, but couldn’t engage the colors till they formed the trees and gaps and brush I knew. How could I feel sadness? I had forged a self in this room. And it had been hell, but it was mine. Those trees, that expanse, formed the horizon of my courage, small as it might have been. I loved them.

  9

  Summer 1991

  In early March 1878, when St. Paul’s was not quite twenty-five years old, a measles epidemic swept through the school. Dozens of boys fell ill, confined to their rooms, and one came so close to the brink that “the whole dormitory was awake and watching as brandy was administered and he was barely saved from death by strangulation and spasms.” We learn this from August Heckscher’s St. Paul’s: The Life of a New England School, a comprehensive history from its founding to the year 1980, when Scribner’s published the book. (The Scribners all went to St. Paul’s.) Several of us had this red-jacketed hardback on our shelves at school, often a gift from godparents seeking to impress upon us the honor of our matriculation. I never knew anyone to actually read it. It served to prop open doors on warm days, cushion coffee mugs on late nights, and elevate the little bowls of Siamese fighting fish that languished on our desks. Opening the book finally, as an adult, I recognize that not even the adolescent grandiosity we displayed as Paulies could touch Heckscher’s fire: “In writing about St. Paul’s, I have felt at times that I was dealing with a minor nation…”