The surgeon was jovial, full-bellied, and chatty. My thumb was definitely loose, he said, but there was some resistance there. I should heal just fine in time.
By now the St. Paul’s School year had officially ended, and everyone had gone home. The egret would be fishing by himself beneath the falls. The soccer fields would be unmowed, the meadow quiet.
One afternoon, an old friend from my elementary school called the house. My mom came bounding up the stairs to my room to tell me. She made the wide eyes that were meant to suggest extra importance: a friend was calling! An old friend! I should not miss the beneficence of this.
Natalie was herself just home from Deerfield, a noble boarding school that had gone coed with her class. She had been praised for the independence and confidence she demonstrated in being willing to break new ground. Deerfield was in central Massachusetts, too far from St. Paul’s to be part of our regular sports competitions—we drove to Andover and Exeter, Groton and St. Mark’s, but we played against Deerfield or Choate only when a team or a player rose to a regional level of competition we called New Englands.
“Hey!” said Natalie. I warmed to her. She seemed exceptionally kind.
We exchanged awkward pleasantries about being home. Her brothers were driving her nuts already. I said my own was obsessed with baseball cards. I asked after her dogs, Bucket and Rose, and she asked after mine. Hearing her voice was as if in a dream. Boarding school had divided us. She did not know me, nor I her. It seemed more likely that somewhere the two of us were playing together, still aged nine, trading stickers and practicing bubble letters with paint pen on our Trapper Keepers.
“So,” said Natalie, after a pause. “What’s this I hear about St. Paul’s?”
My heart pounded. “What about St. Paul’s?”
“Just that something happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“No, I hear that you had to come home.”
“It’s summertime. We’re home.”
“But I heard it was about something sexual? A sexually transmitted disease?”
“There’s nothing,” I said. “I’m fine. I have to go.”
“No,” she said. “There are all these people saying that—”
I hung up the phone and went downstairs.
“How’s Natalie?” asked Mom.
“She’s fine.”
“Are you two going to get together?”
“She’s traveling.”
“Oh. Well, it was nice of her to call. You girls used to be so close.”
So it was there, then, in Lake Forest too. I didn’t know how this nightmare had traveled, and I did not yet know how the gossip had begun. But the speed of the secret’s spread felt to me like an enormous tension, a coiled potential. There was nowhere I could go to be safe from it. What were they going to do, burn me at the stake?
Here the cruelty of girls at school had been useful: I was already quite skilled at self-exile. My old friend Natalie and I never spoke again.
In the second week of June, Dr. Kerrow called my house. The culture from my throat had tested positive for herpes simplex virus. She was very sorry.
My mother put her back to the kitchen cabinets and slid to the floor, like her bones had gone to powder. I looked at her down there, and then I took the phone from her hand and talked to Dr. Kerrow myself. We had a cordless phone in the kitchen, so I could carry the handset into another room. I walked quickly and with purpose.
“Please, could you tell me?” I asked the doctor.
Dr. Kerrow explained. It would never go away, but after ten or twelve years, most patients found that their outbreaks ceased. I could learn over time how to stay healthy and have the least chance of discomfort. The good news was that everything else was negative, so we didn’t have to worry anymore.
“Is that why I had a fever?” I asked her. “Why I couldn’t eat?”
All of those things, she said. But my body would rarely be that sick again. That was just the initial onset of the infection. The virus would hide in my nerve endings and be reactivated periodically, but never systemically like that, and probably not as painfully.
I was pacing the border of my great-grandmother’s dining room carpet, boxing the room: wall, wall, wall, window. Wall, wall, wall, window. I asked the doctor, “Can I give it to other people?” What I was picturing when I asked this was Scotty and an ice cream spoon.
She waited a long moment. “It is contagious, yes, of course. But honestly, your infection is so far out of the way, I’m not sure how you could transmit it to someone. You’d have to really work at it, I mean, to get that deep. And I can’t imagine…”
Wall, wall, wall, window—
She said, “I don’t think you need to worry about that right now.”
“Do I need to tell people?”
Again she waited. “The only person you might tell about it, I think, is your husband.”
My eyes filled at the thought. The simple certainty the doctor evinced in saying the word.
“But,” she continued, “I need to tell someone, I’m afraid. I have to call and add this to my report.”
“The school?” I squeaked.
“No, no. The police. It’s up to you what you want to tell the school about your own health. That’s private. But I really don’t think you should hide this from them. They ought to know what’s going on on their campus.”
The disgust in her voice at the words school and campus would become familiar to me. For a long time I didn’t understand why people intoned the words this way, and I assumed it was because they thought St. Paul’s was full of snobs. Which of course it also was.
But for now, I thought it was in my control what to say about my throat. Because Natalie’s call had been simply too awful, and too extraordinary, to consider, I removed it from my consciousness, setting it aside as a curiosity, like a museum diorama: What if everyone in the world of New England boarding schools knew about this? What if saber-toothed tigers had survived? Shiver. But here in the real world, no one could know, because I myself had only just found out! Dr. Kerrow offered to see me again to discuss my throat further, if I wished. She called in a prescription to prevent future outbreaks. She told me to take good care of myself and call her anytime.
I went back into the kitchen, where my mother was still on the floor. Her face was streaked with red.
“Give me the phone,” she said, staring straight ahead. “I need to call your father. The shit is about to hit the fan.”
But my parents’ version of shit was not all that impressive, or else they didn’t have much in the way of a fan. We didn’t even have a lawyer. My father walked down the hall to the den where he kept his home office to call the vice rector and tell him this latest news.
Bill Matthews responded calmly: “How do we know she didn’t give it to the boys?”
I didn’t hear these words the moment they were spoken, but I saw my dad hearing them. His body seemed to pause in its animation, and he wore a look I had never seen before. His mouth funneled down into jowls previously invisible, and his eyes shrank not by narrowing but by deepening into his skull. I saw this look once again a few decades later, when my father was trying to handle a large and terribly anxious dog. Dad was enormously fond of this dog, had raised it, and without provocation it came back up the leash and sank its canines into Dad’s hand. I watched my father curl in pain. He made no sound. He did not discipline the dog or defend himself or even look angry. This was the way he looked after Bill Matthews said what he said.
Matthews went on. “You don’t want to go digging, Jim,” he told my father. They had not previously been on a first-name basis. “Trust me. She’s not a good girl.”
Dad ended the call.
Up in my room I wrote longhand letters to Scotty, at home in Pennsylvania. I had always wanted a love interest I could write to, and it didn’t matter to me that Scotty wasn’t the epistolary sort; there was a fair chance my envelopes were stacked up somewhere on his mother’s
kitchen counter, collecting toast crumbs. I suspect I even found it liberating that he wouldn’t take seriously any of my posturing, my writing about summer moons or locusts or being sixteen. He wouldn’t even have recognized it as posturing, because I wasn’t professing anything untrue—I was just allowing the characters of the books I was reading to bloom into being, then writing as though I were those women: zany or careless or devoted or stifled, but always with the self-possession of a character whose relevance is assured.
That spring the perennial books of Tom Robbins had swept through the fifth-form girls—Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Jitterbug Perfume—and I finished them at home. How could we not have loved madcap mentions of hot, unpunished sex and actual menstrual periods? These books were ziplines over the tundra of the theologian Paul Tillich—look, there’s grief, there’s death, there’s faith! Everything in the Robbins canon signified, in a zany way, and I tried to imagine that this kaleidoscopic scattering of meaning could extend to the entire world. For example: the heroine in Jitterbug Perfume receives curious deliveries of beets, and I had read, in English class, Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen. Therefore, beets. A small confluence had to mean something—whether it was about crops and sugar, sweetness and sun, the relevance of the earth to writers, or something else entirely, I didn’t ask and I didn’t care. Ideas were roads out of town. Where next?
I drove myself everywhere, preferring to be out of the house, where I couldn’t sense my mother’s agony. I leaped at the chance to pick up two onions for supper and drove three towns over to buy them. I entered a large tennis tournament—one I’d done very well in the year before, held on concrete courts behind a prairie high school two hours west of the city. The fencing around the courts was twelve feet high to keep the wind from blowing balls a mile east, and crabgrass bowed against it. The other competitors were all regulars on the scene. My first-round match was at eight a.m. I met my opponent, set up my rackets and water bottle, and lost the toss. She served. A not particularly strong first serve, hard and flat. I was ready. When the ball hit my strings, my hand failed. My racket flew, twirling, and clattered on the ground. The ball lolled at my feet.
I picked it up, walked to the net, and waited for her to approach. When I shook her hand, my thumb was shaking so hard she jerked back, as though I’d stung her.
“That’s it?” asked the girl, a leggy fighter with a low ranking from a southern suburb.
I said, “Congratulations.”
“But you don’t even want—”
“I can’t.”
She had twin ponytails and the hair leading to them was ribbed with bobby pins. Sweatbands on both wrists. Some good-luck charm glinting around her neck. “You’re a terrible sport,” she said, more curious than cruel.
“You won. Be happy.”
I retrieved my things and walked back to the car.
In town one day I ran into the mother of a grade school classmate. Phoenix Weinberg had joined our class just before we all scattered for high school, but I’d liked her, and I’d really liked her mom. Like my mother, Mrs. Weinberg had been a model before having her daughter. Unlike my mother, she’d married a Jewish architect and moved into a rural farmhouse where the displayed prints from her modeling years included a nude photo of her draped by a python. Mom never saw this, but she didn’t have to. Mrs. Weinberg told people she had only one child because she would “try anything once.” She’d survived late-stage cancer before having Phoenix, and her daughter grew up knowing it might come back. Fee was a girl in a hurry, the first to have a boyfriend, the first to flirt and flatter. She was also the first in any moment to laugh. To the farmhouse Fee’s father attached a lofted great room with globe lights and slices of sky. In the raftered kitchen, from a free perch, a parrot teased the dog by name. The original butcher block still bore a fretwork of ax marks. Mrs. Weinberg had pointed these out to us when we were in the seventh grade: “You’d hold the chicken’s head right there.”
Even more fantastic to my eleven-year-old self had been the multiple ropes of pastel fairy lights in Fee’s room. Mom scowled. “But why? Do they even celebrate Christmas?” Dad suggested these likely posed a fire hazard. I didn’t bother describing the long, ribboned mobiles that hung ceiling to floor and which Fee passed through like a fish does a wave.
Mrs. Weinberg was running errands in town, heading straight for me on the sidewalk, statuesque as ever. In equal measure I wanted to hug her and I wanted to hide.
“Please call me Barbara!” she said, seeing me. She still had her aviator sunglasses with laced-leather guards at the sides, the ones she might have taken off the face of a fighter pilot. Her tulip lipstick broke around a smile I studied but could not crack. She seemed genuinely happy to see me. She must not have heard a thing.
“Where’s Fee?” I asked.
She was traveling with her dad. Phoenix was fine, Phoenix was great. How was I? How was school? A senior now! How could that be?
I must have shown her something, because she pulled off her sunglasses and lowered her head to me. Her beauty was almost awkward up close—the size of her lips, the planes of her cheeks.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Something bad, actually, I said, almost involuntarily. Something actually pretty bad had happened to me at school, and now the police were getting involved, and I didn’t know how to talk to my parents about any of it.
We were standing in front of the bank in my little town. Mrs. Weinberg didn’t shiver and she didn’t look around. She said, “Would you like to come over sometime and have a cup of tea and talk about it?”
I drove out to the farmhouse without telling my mother. Driving those roads and highways on which I’d only ever been a passenger wasn’t unlike all my running at St. Paul’s. I was making places mine, practicing being alone in an uncharted world. I saw a dead raccoon in the middle of Waukegan Road that had been painted over with a fresh double-yellow line. I passed the Sara Lee factory that had been built hard by an old church graveyard. Once, when we were little, Dad told us that was where they buried you if you ate too much pound cake. It didn’t occur to me until that summer—the summer I was sixteen—that this was a joke, that he’d looked in the rearview mirror and told his children this because he was bored or frustrated or sad, some tiny cruelty nipping at his thoughts.
Mrs. Weinberg came to her door in tight jeans and motorcycle boots and seemed unsurprised to see me. Mr. Weinberg was in his studio, she explained. The parrot liked to hang out with him there. The dog was asleep on the planked floor. Mrs. W. set a mug in my hands.
I told her about Rick and Taz.
“Well, what fuckers,” she said. “How dare they.”
I wanted to push against this to see if it held. “But then I went and lost my virginity to a guy I don’t even talk to. And I’ve made some bad decisions since then.”
“Well, of course.”
She had enormous eyes, lashed like a cartoon.
“Of course?”
“Sure. You’re devastated. They stole your self-respect and ruined your sense of boundaries. It’s natural to take some time to get those things back.”
I sipped my tea. It had a complicated taste, like a burned garden. “How long, do you think?”
She watched me. She’d considered it a good sign that I had shared what had happened, but now she was seeing chaos.
“I think it can take a long time. But I also think there are things you can do to help yourself.”
I waited.
“You need to take care of yourself, Lacy,” she said.
“I don’t know how to do that.”
She smiled. “First of all. Where are you going to school next year?”
“I’m going back,” I said quickly.
She smooshed up her lips in a fierce, quizzical smirk.
“No, it’s best. Really. I have one year left, I have friends, I have a boyfriend.” I knew better than to mention college applications, because Mrs. Weinberg wouldn’t have cared about t
hose the way my family did.
“I can’t imagine you won’t find those things somewhere else.”
Helpless, I told her, “There is nowhere else.”
“I see. Well, then, you’re going to have to get a bit creative, aren’t you?”
I thought of the Tom Robbins books—which were silly, I knew they were, but they enveloped me in a fantastical trance that allowed me to think, for a period of time afterward, that the world was wider and sparklier and less threatening than I knew it to be. I could coast for an hour or longer after a good run of pages. Was this what she meant?
“I’m doing an independent study project with a teacher I really like.”
She nodded. “Tell me about the boyfriend.”
“Oh, Scotty.” As though he were a known quantity in the world. “Well, he’s really sweet. Mellow. He used to go out with my close friend, but she left the school, and we just kind of came together.”
“More tea?”
I was failing her. The elixir was too strong—she was offering me a form of care I could not yet accept. And I was beginning to have the strange sense that I was betraying my mother by being here. I didn’t share this stuff with Mom. I did not think there was any way I could.
“And he knows? The boyfriend?”
“About what happened? Yes. Well, the bare bones of it, yes.”
She nodded again. “The school must have been flat-out stunned when they heard those assholes got you sick. I bet that shocked them, huh?”
I didn’t want to admit the truth, which until now I had not considered—that no, actually, Mr. Matthews hadn’t seemed shocked at all.
Notes on a Silencing Page 25
