“What about you, Lacy-o?” asked Caroline softly. “If you could have anyone.”
I looked around. It was delicious to picture these boys singing or playing the guitar to me. It was also silly, a fairy tale, and not only because I would not have risen to their attention. I did not yet know even how to imagine a relationship with a boy. I didn’t consider them individuals who had things to offer that I might share—conversation, say, or experiences we might have in common. I could think only of transactions: what it would feel like to be adored by one of them, and how that would elevate me at the school and keep me safe. Also what they would expect from me in return. The crushes I nursed were dalliances of fantasy that left untouched my real fear of intimacy, in whatever forms it would eventually take.
“I just don’t want my name to end up in here,” I told my friends, pointing at the name panels along the walls. “It’s depressing. I just really don’t want to spend eternity in Lower.”
I was spared further questions by the sight of a third former who had come in to eat alone. Amelia was known as cocky, which meant she was not sufficiently obsequious for a freshman girl. Not only was she willing to eat alone, for example, but she would do so, as a third former, in Lower. She was a knockout. She could barely close her full lips over her white smile, and she flashed that thing at everyone, boys and girls, losers and stars. We watched in silence as Amelia set her tray down, picked up an orange, peeled it with her long fingers, held it at the end of her slender arm, and then commenced to eat it like an apple. Juice ran down her arm and chin. The whole room had fallen silent.
We didn’t know it then, but she’d be Famous Grandson’s girlfriend before long.
“Pardon me while I make my banana into a dick,” said Brooke, holding up her own dessert, and then, with us red-faced and bursting, she did just that.
What I mean to suggest is a kind of hierarchy of attraction that mirrored, in its forms, the ranked dining halls, the successive libraries (old and new) and successive chapels (old and new), the striations of value both earned and unearned that made a star hockey player more important than a star wrestler and a legacy girl more desirable than a girl from town. You could have lined us up on two sides of a dance hall, boys here, girls there, and, after ten good minutes of inspection, predicted most of the couples that formed. (You might have kept some couples separate, thinking they were siblings.) Though increasingly I felt that I would be the last girl on campus ever to have a boyfriend, it was not love that troubled me. I was fascinated by hate. The forms it took at St. Paul’s seemed to offer lessons I imagined were crucial. I did not dare look away. I watched as a black girl, unassimilated and beautiful, walked through the common room to a meal. The uneven pigmentation on her face was striking, but so were her eyes, and altogether she had a calico appearance I found arresting. A white boy her year called out to her from a clutch of boys: “Hey, Sarai!” And she turned, face open to them, to hear him say, “Two-tone went out in the seventies!”
We all—boys and girls—saw that Sarai was gorgeous. If she’d been courted by a different white boy, we might be able to say that the community had its off individuals, as communities do. But of course this did not happen.
If my fear made me cynical, it also made me cold. I looked at a third former eating an orange like it was a burlesque show and made up my mind. That she might have been an artist or a goofball or a kid with this funny old habit with navel oranges, far from home, just fourteen? Never occurred to me.
The name panels on all the walls were of particular interest because I was not entirely sure what my name would say, if and when it ended up on one.
I had been christened Lacy Cahill Crawford. The first name was my great-grandfather’s, and Cahill also was from my father’s side.
But when we’d filled out my formal paperwork for my enrollment at St. Paul’s School, the summer before fourth form, Mom did a curious thing.
“Let’s give you another name,” she said.
I understood that she meant an additional name. Her pen hovered over the lines on the form, red on thick white stock.
“Um, okay.”
“What’s this?” Dad came close. He was eating from a bag of pretzels, and he stood over the table crunching. Mom was seated and held her pen in two fingers in the air, like the former smoker she was, while she thought.
Paperwork, in my family, was always a bit performative. Mom’s handwriting grew large and rounded, almost Gothic. She avoided common abbreviations, even if this meant spelling birth dates into the margins, and pressed hard enough that the pen made a sound. After her ordination, she started adding a little plus sign at the end of her signature, which I didn’t understand at the time was a common habit among priests and meant to suggest a blessing being given, as a little cross. On the medical forms she completed for her children, she’d enter our full names and then, on the blank line following Sex, rather than Male or Female, Mom would sometimes write No.
“How about de Menil?” Mom offered. I had never heard the name before, and couldn’t picture its letters.
“What’s that?” asked Dad.
“De Menil,” she said. “You know, the art collection in Houston? Way back on Pete’s side of the family we’re related.”
Dad ate another pretzel. “Huh. I hadn’t known that.”
“Yes,” said Mom. She explained that her beloved grandmother, who had died several years before, used to talk about a great-great-uncle who had come up with his siblings through New Orleans. I’d heard this story. Almost everything from that particular family line had been stolen in a home invasion in St. Louis ages before, but the robbers had missed a ladies’ fan, ornate silk and paper, that someone’s great-great-great-great-grandmother had brought from France and waved in front of her face during the steamboat voyage up the buggy Mississippi. One of these relatives had stayed behind in New Orleans. I liked this ghost, the man who had stayed—there was a suggestion of booze, cards, some fallenness. I imagined him putting the rest of them on the boat with their petticoats and silk fans and disappearing into the city streets. He’d escaped us all that way. Nobody alive even knew his name.
Mom wrote, in her distinctive hand, Lacy Cahill de Menil Crawford.
Dad didn’t protest this change, and I, standing barefoot in our kitchen, didn’t understand it. Why did I need another name? What would this give me that I didn’t already have? Now that I had it, would I be okay?
I didn’t think of the word impostor. It would have been useful to have this word to describe the way I felt in the world every day, given how much my smallest mistakes burned me, and how I figured they marked me as not belonging, but I didn’t try to describe that feeling even to myself. The word for my mother’s adding a new name was wish. I thought I understood the spirit of it, and how it was consonant with the school itself. When we had toured St. Paul’s, I’d been so struck by the school’s beauty that it had seemed all pretend. It looked like what a child might dream before ever having seen an actual school: in bright red crayon, a schoolhouse here, with a tower, for learning; and an enormous red chapel like a cathedral here, for singing; and here a gray library rising out of the pond, and here and here long stone footbridges for zooming across; and here and here, gray and white manors where the kids will sleep. There’d be a flagpole and woods to run in and a white egret fishing beneath a waterfall. There’d even be a dorm hidden high on a hill in the woods, like a castle, and stained glass, and an ice rink, and a boathouse…
So why not get a little imaginative ourselves? Why not make me into anyone we wanted me to be?
Almost twenty years later, I met a man at a dinner in London whose name really was de Menil.
“Oh,” I said. “That’s my middle name.”
He said, “No, it’s not.”
“Actually, it is. One of my middle names.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh, okay, well—”
“It can’t be.”
“Ah,” I said lightly, intri
gued. How could this stranger deny me my name, any name? “Well, it is.”
“The de Menil name was conferred in title by Napoleon,” said this man, “and we have traced every single person who possesses it. You cannot.”
My mother may have gotten her genealogy wrong, but if she had intended to give me a boost into a world of holdings and pride, her aim, it seemed, could not have been better.
By the middle of fourth-form year I’d sort of gotten used to seeing my name written this way or, as it often was, abbreviated on a computer form as Lacy Cahill deM. The school used complete names wherever possible, and especially if you were honored to have your name read in Chapel. The sole exception to this was when the rector, at the end of the day’s news and just before the hymn, would announce a disciplinary action, and in this case it was one’s familiar name and nothing more:
“Benjamin McKenna has been suspended for violating the expectations of intervisitation.”
“Lucretia Turner has withdrawn from the school.”
Then the organ pipes would explode above the noise of our whispering, and the faculty, seated all along the walls looking in, would stare at each of us to ensure we sang.
I wondered how they’d fit my whole new name on the boards at St. Paul’s once I graduated. Some of the longer names had to be abbreviated, and their capitals, periods, and Roman numerals ended up looking silly. Maybe, in victory, I’d drop the de Menil when I left.
For now it was a secret Mom and I shared, an extra name like a good-luck charm she’d tucked in my pocket that was also, happily, a little joke on the school. You want heritage? We’ll give you heritage. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, she’d have said.
So, Lacy Cahill de Menil Crawford.
In February of my fourth-form year, I heard it read aloud.
I hadn’t been paying much attention in Chapel. The rector had begun intoning the full names of classmates, and before I figured out why this was happening, he came to mine.
In the carved chapel seats opposite me, my adviser’s face lit up.
More names followed, beautiful words I thought evoked places, not people: Heath. Pell. Gallatin. Troy. This last name I recognized as my friend from soccer, who went by Robin and was already writing novels in her room after supper. After a moment, I worked it out: we were the fourth-form nominees for the Ferguson Scholarship, the highest academic prize offered to underformers. It was named for the celebrated nineteenth-century alumnus Henry Ferguson, and it aimed to confer the gravitas of decades and of his particular genius. Candidates were nominated by their teachers in a process wholly opaque to us. In a few months’ time the nominees would be pulled out of class to sit for a series of personalized exams in each of four subjects. The Ferguson was qualitative in the extreme, forbidding and admired, a test of the individual.
And I, without any anticipation at all, had been nominated.
My mind wheeled. My teachers—Ms. Conklin in English, Ms. Clunie in French, Ms. Zia in math—did they really think I was bright? Was I really doing well? I knew my grades were good, but whose weren’t? We were all accomplished. We’d gotten the small-fish-in-a-big-pond lecture a dozen times as we’d tried to acclimate to this new school. There was nothing special about me.
Outside Chapel, my friends clustered around me with congratulations. Caroline hugged me. Sam gave me a fake Groucho: “I bet you think you’re pretty shmaaht.” Brooke said, “Wow, man!” They were genuinely proud, and their kindness gave me space to savor this honor. I walked the path to the Schoolhouse in the heart of their banter.
Ducking among bodies between classes, working my way upstream to French, at the end of a long Schoolhouse hall, I bumped into someone. “Sorry,” I said, and tried to go around, but the someone moved left to counter me.
I looked up. Khaki pants, blue jacket, rabbit smile half-open on his face: it was Shep. Library Shep. Well, Not-Library Shep. Whatever had happened with Shyla and her blue lingerie, I didn’t know. I hadn’t bothered to keep track.
“Hey,” he said, looking down at me. “Congratulations.”
“Oh. Thanks.”
“I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
It had been only about an hour, but I didn’t point this out.
“It’s pretty cool,” he said.
“Yeah. I’m surprised.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Shep. “You’re like a Doogie Howser, aren’t you? Are you even fifteen?”
“Last week.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
The second bell was about to ring; our bodies were tense with the anticipation of it. The halls had emptied. His smile opened up, and I thought, Gosh.
“Well, cool,” he said.
I nodded. Had there ever been a day this cool?
“Hey,” said Shep. “See you around.”
“Yeah. See you.”
Then he was in the common room on the way to lunch.
“What’s up?” he said. I raised a hand. He’d been waiting for me, and now that I was there, he drifted off with his friends and I with mine. We fell into line with our trays.
“What was that?” asked Caroline.
“Um, Shep.”
“I know who he is.”
I hadn’t told them about the whole blue bra thing. I wasn’t sure whom I was protecting, but it had never seemed germane. “He’s being really nice to me about the Ferguson nomination,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it’s about,” said Brooke, behind us.
I turned. “Why? What?”
“Just saying.”
“Come on, Lace,” said Caroline.
I had gone from invisible to obviously appealing in one morning? “Come on, what?”
“He’s not seeing anyone,” reported Brooke.
“He will be soon,” said Sam.
“What? What?” I felt panicky. This mix of excitement and concern was entirely new.
“Oh, come off it,” said Brooke. “That boy wants you.”
“I think he’s cute,” offered Maddy.
Sam said, “Totally.”
I looked for him as we ate, but he was in Lower with his friends, and today we were eating in Middle, as we were supposed to do. My friends got in line at the salad bar. The dance instructor was there, as usual, watching his dancers make their choices. My friends weren’t dancers, but they brought back plates piled with iceberg and watery cherry tomatoes.
I choked down half of my PB&J. I had no appetite. How wonderful that was, to have no appetite: for once, not to feel I needed something I did not have. Why eat at all? Why ruin this beautiful run of fortune with consumption? I sat. I waited. I didn’t dare to smile.
Spring break spanned almost the entire month of March. My parents took my brother and me skiing in Vail. This was a triumphant and sentimental return for my father. As a boy in the 1950s, Dad had piled with his brothers into the back of the family station wagon for the drive from St. Louis to Colorado in the first years of the big ski resorts. Dad told us about the car full of sleeping bags and comic books, how happy his father had been on skis. My grandfather called the mountains God’s country. When we arrived in Vail some forty years later and checked into the time share Dad had found, he stepped out on the balcony and gulped mountain air, holding his face toward the sky. I quit the little apartment and found my friend Linley, one of the Kittredge girls, whose family had a house a stone’s throw from the gondola.
I didn’t really understand why my parents gaped when I described drifting down from her door to the back of the lift line. At school, Linley seemed a lot like me, I thought, with one brother and a dog and similar tastes in music, and I’d imagined our circumstances comparable. I was just privileged enough to assume that my family was about as well-off as other kids’ families, except of course for the flagrant consumers, like my city friends with their Chanel suits, or the son of the scion in his limousine. Everyone knew about them and everyone rolled their eyes. I did not understand th
at wealth was shifty and could be shy. Off campus, the small grandiosities I observed among my friends in the dorms bloomed into full occupation of their impossible lives. Linley put her skis on at her own back door, stepped off into the snow, and floated over everything in her path, her blond braid barely lifting off the back of her parka. I was terrible, tripping and shivering behind her, but I’d been on skis only a few times before, and by now I was used to this feeling of forever failing at what my peers had mastered. I did not question that it should happen not only on campus but in the world too.
At dinner the first night, my father cut me off mid-sentence: “I do not want to hear how good Linley is anymore.” I was stunned. We were champions of excellence. We always admired performance. I thought he’d be as proud of Linley as I was. How could he not love that I was hanging with someone whose bedroom was basically a stop on the gondola? This was what they had wanted, I thought. Or had I now, with the convert’s zeal, fallen too far into my adoration? Where precisely on this wild chain of privilege did my father wish me to be?
The next night I followed Linley home to a party at another house, a chalet. We arrived there on skis, aimed at an elevated slate platform by the back door, and continued until our ski tips slid into the gutter-sized gap between the bottom of the platform and the snow. It was dark under there so I couldn’t see, but once I had wedged my rental skis in all the way to my boots, as Linley and her friends had, they instructed me to kick out of my boots and step up onto the slate. In my socks? Yes; the stone was heated. My skis disappeared. There was someone in a room down there who had pulled them in, to be sharpened and re-waxed for later.
Inside, teenagers filled a home movie theater. I couldn’t see anyone because the captain’s seats were huge. Names were thrown out—Oggie, Tyler, Tad. They were drinking beers as though this were a bar. Linley and I watched for a bit. We padded around the mansion in our warm socks. I don’t remember collecting my skis to return, but I felt guilty that the house crew had had to sharpen and wax rentals, as though unowned equipment was somehow beneath their efforts.
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