Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  I walked, weeping, down the hall. Our small den was walled with bookshelves and had a window that faced east, where the yard was in dusk. There were no soft last beams of light here. Just a shaggy hedge, friendly, settling in for the night beneath a cover of gnats. Maybe I was wrong—maybe what terrified me was not darkness but the relinquishing of light, the letting go. I stood for a moment watching the cool yard, and then I searched the shelves for Huis Clos so I could get this death thing sorted out.

  The bookcases were terrain I knew well. My father’s sections: photography, physics, chess openings. My mother’s: fiction, classics, theology. Half a wall of Encyclopædia Britannica, an ancient family Bible, and, in the cabinet beneath, my mother’s portfolio from her days as a model, in London, before she married my dad. She’d been a ringer for Kate Moss, but with better teeth. I’d lie on the carpet and turn pages of her. This was the only room in our house where I was allowed to roam. Every new discovery introduced a complication, but it’s ever thus with knowledge: I’d read Roots in the fifth grade and spent weeks feeling almost betrayed that my mustachioed science teacher used the word flux to refer to simple scientific variability when, in this magnificent book, it meant diarrhea suffered by slaves. Everything I knew about sex came from the Clan of the Cave Bear series, the orphaned white woman raised by Neanderthals finally finding the lone white man who is wandering prehistoric Earth, looking for her. In a somewhat related investigation, I’d stolen the instructions from a box of Tampax in my mother’s bathroom cabinet and, finding no correlation between the illustration and my own body, snuck the page into the den to look for clues in the anatomical transparencies in the A volume of the Encyclopædia.

  Sartre was not present on my parents’ shelves, but (in the French section now) I thought Les Fleurs du Mal sounded right. For the next few days I worked the poems with my French-English dictionary. Baudelaire did not help. “I find comfort in knowing that I will be with my Lord in heaven,” said my father, which also did not help. Sitting in my lit closet with the door closed while the night murdered the day sometimes helped.

  This season of fear when I was thirteen lifted as mysteriously as it had lowered. I was able to eat again. I took new comfort in the way my mother left radios on in various rooms and switched on the network news every night promptly at five-thirty. Other adult things began to make sense: cocktails, fast cars, the prattle of gossip. I reshelved Baudelaire.

  I knew it marked me, to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t stop the questions from coming into my mind, nor the sadness that followed them like fish on a line. My only hope had been to bury it all beneath sweetness and hard work. I was resigned to be a pretender.

  But St. Paul’s was shrewd. The wheels of the school’s fates picked out my darkness and assigned me a lonely old girl and a lonely dorm room and a lonely and angry roommate, and the stone library offered up not dates but death scenes. There was a shaking out to the place, a reckoning of the sort that spiritually dynamic spots—mountains, graveyards—are known to deliver. I could not thrive, I thought that first fall, and my parents would not let me come home.

  At the airport, I thanked Stewart and then walked purposefully alone into the terminal so Gaby could kiss him goodbye. I didn’t see her again, not checking in for our flight or on the plane to O’Hare, not in the terminal, not at the curb where my mother waited in the car. How did Gaby do that, just disappear into the world like any other adult on her way home? If I was going to stay at St. Paul’s, something would have to change.

  I found my answer in my parents’ house the afternoon I arrived for Thanksgiving break, in a glossy magazine on the kitchen counter. This was the year Vanity Fair ran William Styron’s essay about his suicidal depression, and the headline, “Darkness Visible,” spoke to me as if by name. I snatched the magazine and took it into my closet and closed the door.

  Mom had warned, looking at the magazine in my hand: “Styron writes about a woman who has to choose which of her children will die in the Holocaust.”

  I knew he was my guy. In particular I was struck by this:

  The fading evening light—akin to that famous “slant of light” of Emily Dickinson’s, which spoke to her of death, of chill extinction—had none of its familiar autumnal loveliness, but ensnared me in a suffocating gloom.

  Solemnly, so as to preserve credibility, I waved the magazine at my mother and said, “This is me. I’m chemically depressed.”

  I am not surprised that she agreed. My sobbing phone calls from St. Paul’s would have exhausted and unnerved her. Within days I had an appointment with a top adolescent psychiatrist who was—my luck!—enrolling patients for a study. How convenient it would have been to determine that my brain was the problem. I wished this, too: much easier to take a drug than give up our dream of my schooling. And it was an interesting problem I’d introduced—chemical depression was then still new, still a bit fancy. “Maybe things are starting to turn around for you,” said Mom, after securing the appointment at Northwestern Memorial, in downtown Chicago. “Things are looking up.”

  Dr. Derek Miller was British and had worked alongside Anna Freud in London. His accent alone would have sunk me, but the gravitas of his dark suit and hard squint made me want to be the best depressive I could possibly be. The study was to investigate the effects of brand-new Prozac in adolescent patients. There were actual Rorschach tests, white cards with black splotches. I proposed that one was a butterfly on a windshield. I thought I was reaching a bit when I described another as a mother holding her dead child. But hey, Styron! Dr. Miller mentioned this last one to my mom in his private conversation with her following my assessment. When she repeated it to me—cradling a dead child!—she sounded almost proud.

  The doctor agreed that my marked clinical depression and associated lack of self-esteem were unlikely to abate on their own. The cause was almost definitely some combination of a strong biological predilection and certain environmental conditions, the specifics of which were unknown to him. We didn’t stay long to talk.

  Dr. Miller wrote to Ms. Shay, my adviser at school, to work out how I could retrieve my medication. The school didn’t want me to keep it in my dorm room—Prozac was new then, and the school worried about pills getting lost or stolen. It was determined that the infirmary would hold the bottle, and I’d visit once a week for seven capsules in a matchbox-sized manila envelope. I kept them in the top drawer of my school-issue dresser, beneath my socks and underwear and alongside the dish towel–sized remnant of my baby blanket, Nigh-Nigh. Almost every newb had some transitional object hidden away. Get to know someone well enough and you’d discover a bear in a jacket pocket or the frayed rabbit that lived beneath the pillow. I even knew boys with Legos that they said were for math class somehow.

  I told no one about my Prozac. There was no need. After all, I wasn’t seeing the school counselor, the way some students were, for emotional distress. I certainly hadn’t been referred to the psychiatrist who visited campus a few days a week to see more troubled students. Dr. Miller thought I was well supported. He wrote to Ms. Shay that he did not feel I needed to see a psychotherapist at that time, but that I should be discouraged from calling home at all hours in tears. Perhaps I could call him instead, he suggested. I never did.

  Anyone well-versed in narratives of sexual assault might sense here the gathering contours of a familiar landscape: this girl is a damaged girl. She’s damaged in a way that makes her needy, that will cause her to seek out the inappropriate, transgress the proper, and probably lie. I mean, come on, the kid was on Prozac before Prozac had even been approved for use in children! There’s something just off about her already. We catch the wobble. Would it surprise you that this child came in for trouble in the coming months? Wouldn’t you expect just that?

  This bias sits as brightly in my mind as anyone’s. I hesitate to mention Dr. Miller. And it’s true that I would not have considered him part of this story, had the school not later done what it did. After those winter consultat
ions I never saw the doctor again. But when we send a child into someone else’s care, we take pains to detail everything that our child might possibly need, every possible reaction or concern, as a defense against the unknown. My parents let the school know all about Dr. Miller’s assessment, and how he’d prescribed Prozac for me. The school, acting in loco parentis, therefore had a record of my every possible vulnerability. I took my pill once a day, as directed, and felt certain, because they’d told me this, that no one would ever have to know.

  3

  Fall 1990, Fifth Form

  Ten days or so after the assault, just before Halloween of my fifth-form year, my throat began to hurt in a jagged way, as though I had swallowed a piece of glass and it would not go down. In the dining hall, I sipped ice water onto my tongue and then tipped my head back to let it run down my throat, because the act of swallowing caused the glass-edge to grind into me again. When I got really hungry, I did this with skim milk. The milk filled me up more than water did.

  Back in Brewster House, where I was assigned my fifth-form year without any of the friends I had signed up to live with (unfortunate lottery, said the school; Crawford Curse at work again, said Mom), I went to the bathroom at odd hours so I could be alone to lean over the sinks, put my face right up against the mirror, and open my mouth as wide as possible.

  There was never anything to see. I’d close my mouth and look at my reflection, as though there might be traces visible on my skin. Instead, I saw my whole family staring back at me. I had my father’s eyes, hazel and smaller than my mother’s, and not wonderfully wide-set like hers. I had his mouth and chin, too, with thin lips. My high forehead was from my mother’s mother—a mark of intelligence, she claimed—and already I saw in my squared jaw my father’s mother’s profile, held in lamplight over her needlepoint. Entirely mine were the remnants of an underbite that, until it was corrected via years of orthodontic procedures, gave me the dogged expression of a TV orphan—in every photo from my earliest years, I look determined as hell. My brother pulled from our grandfather the light blue eyes. But I got Mom’s cheekbones, and from the redhead genes that hopscotched through the generations on my father’s side I’d lucked into the strawberry-blond hair that my mother called “glorious.” It was my great-great-grandfather George Lacy Crawford who’d last had red hair, and I was given his name.

  However imperfectly they all came together in me, I was theirs, and they wanted this school for me. So much so that my parents had been willing to send me across the country to receive what they believed was, hands down, the best education the nation could offer. Saliva accumulated in my mouth. I’d spit in the sink and then open my mouth again, wider, and peer down my nose until my eyeballs ached because there had to be something there. If I could find it, I could deal with it.

  I understood that this was happening because of what I had done. I just didn’t understand how. I knew the morality but not the mechanism. It didn’t matter. I accepted completely that if you suck two dicks in a boys’ room after hours, you will end up with a Pharaonic visitation in the part of your body they rammed.

  This seems an appropriate time to mention that my mother was (is) a priest.

  To be precise, she was the first woman from Chicago to be ordained a priest in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, in 1987, the year I was twelve.

  We had always been churchgoers, every Sunday at 9 a.m., unless you were actively vomiting. My father was a regular reader of the lessons and served on the vestry. I was baptized in the same church where my parents were married and my grandparents would one day be buried. Our fealty was total. Our piety was of the Episcopalian sort that places great importance on the clothes you wear to worship Jesus the homeless Jewish carpenter before driving straight from church to the country club for brunch among other families who, like you, are white, Anglican, wealthy, and heteronormative, because nobody else is permitted to join.

  “What is there to understand?” said my father, when I was finally adult enough to ask. “I’m a Christian, and this is my club.”

  Discreetly, Dad wore a metal cross on a cord around his neck, never visible beneath his Turnbull & Asser shirts and Hermès ties. Nights he read to my brother and me, and after switching off the lights we recited the Lord’s Prayer and our God Blesses, naming every member of the family and all pets, teddy bears, bikes, blankies, and assorted teachers and friends. When Dad ran in the mornings, his five daily miles before dawn, he told me, he prayed. He talked to Jesus about his life, his family, his questions. He’d come home and have breakfast with the papers and make the 7 a.m. train to the city, returning twelve hours later to a beautifully cooked supper from his wife, who, the year my brother was born, when I was almost five, decided to begin seminary.

  Of the two of them, Dad was by far the more devout. He talked about God and the church without irony or ambivalence. Mom worried about getting her nails done before celebrating the Eucharist. She chafed at the constant use of the male pronoun in the Book of Common Prayer, and would loudly sing, at the doxology, “Blessed is she who comes in the name of the Lord.” She was willing to spill wonderful details from the back-of-house operations, such as the silent jockeying that went on, when more than one priest was presiding over a service, to determine who would have to polish off the wine in the chalice (because no blood of Jesus could be spilled) after it had been passed through the entire crowd. “There are actually things floating in there,” she told us. “It’s vile.” I knew which deacons wore heavy metal concert T-shirts beneath their cassocks, and who at the altar had Oreos under his seat. Mom let us peek inside the tabernacle, where the spare communion host was kept once it had been sanctified, when the little red light burned to signify the presence of God. I watched boxes of wafers, not yet holy, being unwrapped, simple as saltines.

  Over pots in our kitchen Mom practiced breaking the bread. She worked on the clarity of her enunciation in prayer, and labored over her preaching, which was praised by her seminary professors. I recognized this pride. I’d always seen it. It was the same high focus with which she cooked and served us dinner, in deep pasta bowls warmed in the oven and topped by a chiffonade of basil leaves grown on her windowsill. We ate with rigorously enforced manners and directed our conversation over a centerpiece hand-arranged from her own gardens.

  When might vanity become devotion? Or was the question better posed the other way around? Because it was never an option to do things differently, not for her and not for us. Clothing had its own taxonomy. So did dining and travel. So did women. There were wonderful people out there. Mom loved a classy lady, dignified and reserved: look for her in vintage Lagerfeld or Halston. Mink in winter. Wool bouclé in spring. Linen or silk in summer. She ate a chopped salad and sent an engraved card the next day, even if she had treated. Nonetheless, iconoclasts were welcome—Mom’s best friend in seminary was a defrocked nun. There was also a category for ditzes and one for fools, and one—characterized as best I could tell by bleached-blond hair and hard eye makeup—for women who, Mom said, “looked rode hard and put away wet.”

  And then she’d go out there on Sunday mornings and turn crackers into the body of Christ. There was no higher form of rightness than righteousness. Beyond that, I never knew the nature of Mom’s calling, but I’d have been comforted to hear something of her conviction. Those years she was in school, part-time because we were so young, my brother and I learned not to take the bait when certain other adults in our community tipped their heads and said, “So, your mom’s gonna be a priest, huh?” There were people, we knew, who did not want to be blessed by her. There were people who thought her horrible for thinking she might bless anyone at all.

  As for myself, I gave up on God as Mom progressed through seminary. Not because I didn’t believe, but because I considered myself undeserving. In church we were told that Jesus listens to us and weeps with us. I was the chorister who sang, a cappella, the first verse of “Once in Royal David’s City” to open the Christmas Eve service, standing at the
back of the darkened sanctuary in my robes and trying not to vomit from nerves. I took to heart the message that Jesus suffered like we did so that God might show us understanding. But I did not have much claim to suffering. If indeed God listened to the cries of the world, I thought, he ought to handle the hearts of several billion people before he tuned in to me. My own form of devotion was to avoid asking for anything at all.

  The lone exception fell when I was nine and our choir director announced a new music education scheme that meant medals would be awarded to top choristers. We saw them in advance, silver medallions on silky blue ribbons. The medal for head chorister was even larger and threaded on scarlet satin. That it was mine, should be mine, was as clear to me as the ribbon was bright. I was good. I could sight-read. I worked with a hymnal privately at home. Rehearsal was my favorite hour each week.

  On the night before medals were to be announced, I got down on my knees. I moved away from my area rug and onto the hard floor so it would count more. I asked clearly, kindly. I felt a new presence as I prayed, as though my willingness to make a request opened something in my heart. I would be an even better Christian now, an even better girl.

  Sunday morning we were gathered in our robes around the altar, and the director, smiling widely, slipped a blue ribbon over my head. She awarded head chorister to my classmate Elizabeth, a mild girl with sea-glass eyes who always sang a tiny bit off-key, and whose father was our parish priest. Standing right over us, he beamed.

  “Well, of course Elizabeth got it,” said my mom, on the way to brunch. “Her dad’s the boss. Really, you can’t get worked up about stuff like that.”