Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “Hang on,” I heard myself saying. “Hang on.”

  I sat back down and cupped water out of the pond and poured it onto my leg. The moment the blood was washed away, the slice re-illuminated itself.

  “Holy fuck,” said Brooke.

  “What the hell?” asked Kent.

  Andrew said, “Oh my God, Lacy. Just wait. Just hold still.”

  There were shouts up the docks and onto the lawn, where the fifth formers—now almost sixth formers—were lying about, as though they’d been blown there. Someone’s boom box was playing, and a few guys were tossing a lacrosse ball back and forth with tasseled sticks. Turning back to the water, I saw, as the surface settled, what I had hit: a bicycle on the bottom, its rims glinting. I’d managed to dive toward it and turn up to the surface so that my thigh ran across the rusty derailleur like a ham through a meat slicer. In a million years it would have been impossible to repeat.

  “But nobody saw that!” said Brooke, pointing. “Nobody ever saw that!”

  “Christ,” said Kent. He squinted at the water. “That thing’s probably thirty years old.”

  I got up and started limping toward the shore. The dock was short but splintery and uneven. I was starting to feel faint but knew I was fine. I would be fine. It was just startling, and it stung.

  I was aware of people pounding up around me, and others coming down to meet us at the shore. Someone very tall wrapped a towel around my shoulders and then scooped me up like I was a child.

  “Got her,” he said.

  “Take her to the infirmary.”

  “Take her quick.”

  I didn’t need to be carried, but it wasn’t a bad idea. I closed my eyes. My leg really was burning. Behind me I heard the boys strategizing how they would hoist the bike from the bottom.

  “The thing was rusty,” someone said.

  “It’s not safe.”

  “Go get Security.”

  “Go get her adviser.”

  “Does she need an ambulance?”

  The infirmary happened to be just up the hill from the shore where we’d been swimming. The student carrying me was huffing hard as he carried me over the grass and onto the short stretch of road to the infirmary door. Someone else had gone ahead, so a nurse met us there.

  “Thank you,” she said. I was set down, and she guided my arm across her shoulders. “Come on in now. Thank you, all of you. Thank you.”

  My towel was soaked with blood. She gathered up new towels for me to sit on, and pressed another on my leg. In a few moments the bleeding slowed.

  “You could take a stitch or two here,” she said, pointing to the top of my thigh, “but it’s not necessary. How do you feel about just waiting?”

  I didn’t want someone stitching me in the place where she pointed. I shivered. My suit was puckering, and I smelled the froggy musk of the pond on my skin and in my hair. “I’d just like to get clean and dressed.”

  The nurse had me lie back with gauze pressed to my thigh, and she covered me with a blanket. I watched the ceiling: white, tacky. I considered how it was only ever observed by sick people, and wondered if surfaces absorbed the aches of those who studied them. This ceiling deserved some sun. I deserved some sun.

  A doctor came in and lifted the blanket, dabbing gauze along the length of the cut.

  “Found something special, did you?”

  I didn’t answer this.

  He’d checked my health file. My tetanus shot was up to date. The bleeding was slowing. “I think you’re going to be just fine.”

  I thanked him.

  I wondered where Shep was, whether he would have helped me up to the infirmary and then back to my room. I was in a swimsuit, after all. How would that feel? What would he think?

  But he was with his fellow sixth formers somewhere, and my friends appeared in a cluster at the door—wet-haired and eager—asking after me, peering around the room.

  It was a fearsome bandage I sported for the last week or so of fourth-form year. Everyone heard about the bicycle. I was congratulated for hitting the jackpot, mocked for aiming for underwater hardware. I was secretly proud. A visible wound counted for something.

  I raised twin singeing currents down the tops of my thighs by replaying in my head the swan dive, the graceful arc, the slice. I remembered how I’d stood, in my bathing suit, alone on the end of the dock like it was a ship, with all of those students behind me and the pond and the forests in front of me, and gone off those boards with summer on my shoulders and pride in my chest.

  I did nothing I hadn’t seen or known a zillion other students to do. As I had with Shep, when Ms. Shay came through the door. I was straining to burst into this place, into life at St. Paul’s. Look at how sophisticated and bright and beautiful they all were, we all were. How lucky. How fated. How good! I felt I measured each leap and made it fairly.

  Not you, replied the school. Not you.

  I did not win the Ferguson Scholarship. After Ms. Shay caught us, Shep never kissed me again. I watched him walk with his class down the chapel lawn to graduate. In the hugging, tearful scrum that followed, he embraced me, and I held very still so I could hear and feel the extra attention I hoped he’d pay me. But he released me and moved on. I haven’t seen him since.

  Why would I? We had not belonged to each other, we’d belonged to the school. There was majesty in the chapel soaring over us, in the valediction of the departing class. Majesty on the green June lawns. Majesty in rising up to the next year. This was both the glory and the slap of the place: take it or leave it—the school, like time, did not care. It continued on. Yours to decide what to love, or if, or how.

  5

  Summer 1990

  My father insisted that I learn to drive on a manual transmission automobile. That’s how he said it, and not stick shift. He said it was important for safety reasons, because what if someone needed to be taken to a hospital, and the only car around was a manual?

  Mom said, “Yes, or if her date is too drunk to take her home.”

  “Right.” Dad turned to me. “Then you just take the wheel.”

  When they spoke like this, I tried to imagine the shared history that informed their dire scenarios. Who’d been drunk? Who needed a hospital? They’d met when they were seventeen and twenty-one and married at nineteen and twenty-three. Their wedding portrait, silver-framed on the bookshelf, showed an impossibly young Mom, her bashful eyes downcast. Five years into their marriage I was born, and after another five years my brother arrived and was given the same name as our father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Neither of my parents drank much. Dad went to work. Mom wrote sermons and baptized babies. Our toy spaniels had asthma, and bows in their ears.

  So this left me, my life, to provide crisis. I wondered when it would begin.

  “Absolutely,” said Mom. “Your great-grandmother Petey always told me to keep what she called mad money in my shoe.”

  “Who was mad?”

  “She just called it mad money, is all. Shisha, she’d say, be sure you tuck your mad money away before you leave that door, because you just can’t trust a young man.”

  Dad nodded. “I’d agree with that.”

  Dad owned a used BMW that was by then ten years old, and the summer I was fifteen he drove me and my new learner’s permit in this car out to the empty parking lot by the middle school in what we called West Lake Forest. Weekend mornings the lot was abandoned. The soccer fields I’d played on when I was little spread out beyond—you could roll a car ten times and never hit anything taller than Queen Anne’s lace. Past the train tracks began rows of corn that did not end until the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It’s all built up now, but back then, in the early light, this pavement marked the edge of the map. The school was dark, energy-efficient, dun brick and black glass. I had never been inside.

  I got behind the wheel. Dad explained to me how a car’s transmission works, forking his fingers to demonstrate cogs engaging. He told me that a good driver knows by the
sound of the engine how fast it is spinning, and that I should downshift to decelerate so the engine took as much of the work of braking as possible. The car shuddered all over. Our backs ached from jolts. But I thought nothing on earth could make him happier than my easing out the clutch and, using sound alone, determining exactly the right moment to send the car smoothly into second, and then third, and then—along the long exit lane to the road—fourth. “It’s a two-step,” he said. “It’s a dance.”

  After a few weeks Dad upped the ante. “What you need to learn now is how to skid. And that means rain.”

  While we waited, he cleared his intentions with the local police department. There was an officer who sang in our church choir and liked to stop by our house on his motorcycle just to check up on things. We suspected he had a crush on Mom. Dad sold his skidding plans as student-driver education, which wasn’t untrue.

  Finally in July came a dripping mist. Saturday morning, lights on and wipers slow, Dad and I drove out to the middle school before 7 a.m.

  “What driving is really about is mastering what you can’t anticipate,” he told me, getting out of the car and motioning that I should join him. As I passed him, swapping seats, he handed me the key. “Now, go straight, and go fast.”

  The school loomed darkly. The windshield was steaming up, and droplets streaked across the glass at my side. First, second, third. “Okay…” said Dad, and then he reached his left arm over and yanked the wheel hard—“Now!”—sending us into a right-hand skid. He braced his arms on the dash (no air bags in this old sedan) and waited for me to stop flailing and steer into the swerve, allowing the car to catch and shoot out, like a swimmer exiting a riptide. It was a sharp turn, but the tires found the ground. My heart was wild. I stopped the car, forgetting the clutch, and the engine stalled.

  “That’s okay!” he said, exuberant. “That’s it! Did you feel that? How we were hydroplaning, and then you got the tires back under the car and regained traction?”

  Yes, if that’s what you called that, then yes, I felt it.

  “Terrific,” said Dad. “Let’s do it again.”

  He threw other things my way. He pulled the wheel right or left, turned dials, switched off the ignition. I learned to work with panic: just a healthy physiological reaction to going faster than I wanted to go. A skid? Just misguided momentum. A shudder was the engine begging for gas. The car shrieked and smelled. “That’s okay!” said Dad again. “That’s a car doing what it’s built to do.”

  When it was over I imagined the steel panting, like I was, bowed over its tires. Then Dad drove us home through the cool rain, the trees bending low and green.

  Where I feel defensive in telling this story is, I sense, exactly where I need to steer. This means going where I’d rather not go. Physics dictates that your only choice for regaining control in a skid is to head in this new direction. It’s the first thing that happens in a sexual assault: somebody grabs the wheel and shit starts turning, fast. Next thing you know, you can’t find the ground. You’re on a mattress, say, pushed up beneath a window. The entire time I was in the boys’ room, my feet never touched the floor.

  I have a friend whose vocation is supporting Native American-led institutions on tribal reservations. These institutions serve indigenous women, children, addicts, the grieving. Andrea is a skilled navigator of predatory power structures, and because she’s been my friend since I was in grade school, she knows what happened at St. Paul’s. Recently I found myself telling her, again, about the bind I found myself in once I landed on the boys’ bed. The faculty adviser lived right through the wall, I explained, pointing severely, as they had done, as if across a room. (Andrea did not go to boarding school.) “I got it,” she said. I continued: “His name was Mr. Belden. He taught computer science and did not know me from Eve. He’d have come in and found me, a fifth former, out of my dorm after check-in on a raft of mattresses with two sixth-form boys in their underwear. Can you imagine what he’d have thought of me?”

  “Yeah,” said Andrea, “I think I can.”

  I opened my mouth to continue, but then she said the opposite of what I thought she was thinking.

  “Any mature, boundaried adult would have seen a fully clothed girl with two naked men and said, ‘One, why is she here? And two, why are you not wearing clothes?’”

  I was in my fifth decade of life when my friend said this to me. Her construction alone was boggling: the accused you would have been them. And I got to be simply she.

  It had never once occurred to me that Mr. Belden, storming in and flipping on those dentist-office lights, might not have blamed me.

  Why?

  So here’s what I don’t want to write about.

  In between driving sessions, my family hosted the Lane family for a weekend “in the country,” meaning our suburban town. I’d forgotten the promise that Jed Lane had made a year before to fly to New Hampshire and see me; deep in my new world at St. Paul’s, I’d forgotten about the Lanes entirely. They drove up from the city with gifts and a bottle of wine. Mr. and Mrs. Lane were given the guest room that was next to my parents’ room, at the end of the upstairs hall. Morgan, their little boy, was billeted in my brother’s room, and Lilibet, younger than I was by several years, shared my room at the top of the stairs. My family had never had guests like this before, and our house was as festive as Christmas. The dogs swirled around Mrs. Lane’s feet. Jed—Mr. Lane—cut back and forth across our kitchen, mixing drinks. Their children had inherited his grin. They were bold, adored. The locusts were loud in the oaks and my mother’s roses were in bloom. She opened the French doors. Everything my parents wanted for me, for us, was on the hoof.

  That night, though, I couldn’t sleep. As a fifteen-year-old I found sleep cagey, receding when it was intended and swamping me in the day. I woke up too hot in my sheets, everything all wrong. I’d go downstairs in my nightgown to watch television. We had an old set in my dad’s office, where the bookshelves were, and down there, nobody in the sleeping house would be awakened by the sound. This was the first year we had cable. I flipped idly through the stations: nothing, something, nothing. I was sitting on the floor, right up close to the set, so I could keep the volume low.

  Was it eleven or eleven-thirty or twelve when Mr. Lane appeared in the doorway?

  I turned. His grin first, Cheshire cat, as my eyes adjusted to the hallway where he stood. He was in boxer shorts and a white undershirt, and he held a silver flask in his hand.

  I hopped up, conscious of my knee-length nightgown, conscious of not having a bra on underneath it.

  He said, “Can’t sleep?”

  “I was just going to bed,” I said. “Just now.”

  But this meant switching off the set, which would leave us in darkness, and getting past him to get to the stairs. I looked directly at him to keep his eyes off my body.

  “If you say so,” said Mr. Lane.

  He had a little tummy under his shirt. I hated its softness. I’d have hated a well-built body, too, though differently.

  He turned and retreated into the hall.

  Prickling with nerves, I waited a few long minutes, and then, when I heard nothing, I scooted down the hall to the bottom of the stairs.

  He was there, a few steps up. The grin again.

  “I’m just going up,” I said.

  “Not without giving me a good-night kiss.”

  “No.”

  “You have to give me a good-night kiss.”

  The kitchen on one side was dark, the hall on the other side was dark. Our only light fell through the hall window, from the street lamp at the foot of the driveway. I took a step up onto the staircase. Jed Lane was two stairs above me, where there was a slight curve and the steps narrowed.

  “Come on. Just right here.” He pointed to his cheek.

  I darted into the air alongside his face, pantomiming his silly European air-kiss, and he reached his hand behind my head and caught me. He smashed his mouth on mine and stuck his tongue inside
. Liquor.

  I remember being disgusted but not alarmed. I pushed him off and ducked under his arm up the stairs to my room directly at the top. I closed the door quietly and then leaned against it, half in case he tried the knob and half because that seemed like what you should do in a situation like this, when you were fleeing up the stairs at night. I was playing snippets of other lives, other dramas, in my head because I did not want to think about what had happened just now.

  His little girl was asleep in my room, honey hair on the pillow. I couldn’t get to my parents at the end of the hall without encountering him again, so I pulled on shorts and a T-shirt and sneakers and climbed out my window. From there it was an easy gutter-hang to the driveway. I was careful to latch the screen behind me so Lilibet wouldn’t wake up alone in a strange house and be in danger of climbing out too.

  I ran to my grade-school friend Casey’s house half a mile or so east and threw stones at his window, but he didn’t appear. So I continued east to the beach and sat in the sand until the sun rose over Lake Michigan.

  Was I sad? I remember being frightened, though not of Mr. Lane. I was frightened that some other man might find me there at the public beach, in the park, and take me. I didn’t imagine what he’d do next, but I kept remembering Jed Lane’s hand on the back of my head, the way I’d had to use even the strength of my neck to push myself away. I turned often to peek over my shoulders. The bluffs were still.

  When I came back in through the back door, Mom was making coffee. The Lanes were not down yet, but I heard feet thumping around upstairs.

  “Where were you?” she asked.

  “Out on a run.”

  “Okay. Where were you?”

  “I just had to go for a walk.”

  “Why are you not telling me the truth?”

  I held her eyes to show her I was lying but not hiding.

  “I just had to get out.”

  She watched me, and I saw her shoulders rise and fall. She dropped her eyes to the cabinets, blankly, and then raised them again. She had a dish towel in her hand and she balled it up before speaking, like she was packing a snowball. “Lacy.” Her voice was low. “Did something happen with Jed last night?”