Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  Elise sighed. The bells began to ring. You had to not only be inside the doors by eight but be on your way to your seat, or you received detention. The several sets of doors—enormous wooden panels with Gothic studs—were policed by fifth-form chapel wardens. When the last of the eight o’clock bells sounded, things got interesting. Tina worked the left door straight ahead of me: one-half of a set of East Asian twins, she would let me slip through. But Morris, on the right, had two brothers, two uncles, and a father with St. Paul’s diplomas, and he’d guillotine you.

  “Simone would say go to Paris,” Elise said.

  “With my wolf.”

  “Oui, avec le loup. And books.”

  “And your leopard.”

  “Yeah. I think I’m going to break up with Scotty.”

  “You’re what? Why?”

  But she was cutting left, toward the entry closest to her pew.

  “I don’t know,” she said, with her usual breathy detachment. “See you.”

  Morris, at the door, eyed me. “Well, good morning,” he said. The leer of a milk-toned, eyeglass-wearing Wasp such as this looks not unlike the result of a full ophthalmic exam. He held me in his dilated, unfocused stare, but he let me through.

  When I could persuade Elise to come to meals, we’d swing through Center Upper, where Caroline, Sam, Brooke, and Maddy—along with two new friends, Meg and Tabby—would be sitting in the hall, notebooks out, waiting for us, and all together the eight of us would go to eat. This made the dining halls mostly safe. I walked to choir rehearsal with Sam, who sang too. Back in the dorm, I brought my books to Elise’s room and joined her on the futon on the floor, blues playing, windows darkened, to work.

  With the rest of our form, we were hacking through Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be, a mid-century existentialist’s argument for affirmation in the face of such annihilating concerns as guilt and death. I was in my element. My Religion instructor was a new chaplain, Reverend S., a young father whose faintly protruding eyes always looked to me just on the verge of tears. Mom had met him as she did all Episcopalian clergy, introducing herself as “from the Diocese of Chicago,” but his response was chillier than I thought that deserved. Reverend S. pressed out a smile and said, “Fred.” Come on, I thought, how many moms are on the inside? How cool is that?

  I resolved to be his best Religion student, for her sake if not for mine. Because he was the school chaplain, my thinking went, if I was his best student, I’d be the best Religion student in the form. I felt born to it. I loved thinking about language and being and faith, and the more I thought about such notions, the less I worried about my failure to harness them. Whatever small affinity I might have had for this form of inquiry was bolstered by my confidence in my years of exposure to liturgy and Scripture, and the grandeur of the concepts neatly eclipsed my true concerns, which were only growing.

  When I called home that fall, as I did routinely so my parents would not worry, I was often surprised by an impulse to tell my mom that something bad had happened. My throat grew cottony with the threat, and approaching tears made it hurt more. I learned to defend against this by talking about Religion class. How can we know God through the Gospels? I’d offer. In the beginning was the word, Mom would reply, growing animated, and Dad would “ring off” to leave us to it. The world was made from language, Mom said, therefore the divine was immanent in language. God lived in books. She got out her notes from seminary to feed our discussion and mailed me xeroxed chapters of Mary Daly on feminist ecology and Paul Ricoeur on the nature of being. What I wanted, of course, not that I understood this then, was to make a connection with my mother so she could take from me the horrible pain I was in. But I could not do this, so I hoped instead to make a connection, however tenuous, to my mother via my teacher—also a priest, the chaplain, the young father. I knew a lot about a certain God, but nothing I could use. What to say to the boys harassing me? What to do with my throat or the fact that I found myself shivering when I was not cold?

  I tried to formulate questions a chaplain would jump to answer:

  What does it mean when you feel marked? What if you think hope is self-indulgent and foolish? What if God doesn’t listen?

  But Reverend S. did not respond to the questions I posed in my papers. I supposed he considered them rhetorical, or at least not meant to invite a pastoral response. The text sought an ontological conception of the notion of despair, and that’s what Fred wanted. Fine. I had hoped Religion would offer me rescue in a form I recognized. Instead I worked Tillich’s sentences the way I worked calculus sets: Fear and anxiety are distinguished but not separated. The truth of the vitalistic interpretation of ethics is grace. These constructions made sense, but they did not touch me at all.

  Elise, sprawled beside me, wearing fetching reading glasses she didn’t need, said, “Hey, listen to this: ‘Be always drunken.…With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.’”

  “Where’s that?” I flipped the pages.

  “Not Tillich. Baudelaire.”

  “Makes more sense,” I said, and it did. I didn’t need help defining despair. I needed help feeling like a living girl. “That one’s not in Fleurs du Mal, I don’t think. Is it?”

  “Don’t think so. But then it shows up in Long Day’s Journey into Night…” Elise was, as usual, way out ahead of me. “Let’s go to Paris and write plays,” she said. I scribbled in my notebook: Paris. Read plays.

  In Modern Novel, Mr. Katzenbach spent classroom hours forcing us to notice odd fragments of narration in Catch-22, places where someone complains of being cold. We were all cold. What was the big deal? The novel’s unfolding was not linear, and this offended my new hunger for logic—a rigid, illiterate instinct that emerged the day after the assault, as if in open revolt against the girl with a head full of stories who had cruised to their room. Mr. Katzenbach hollered at us all: there was a secret in this book, there was a haunting. He made us identify every moment of this strangeness in the pages, what felt to me a tiresome scattering of ill-fitting detail, and list them all on the chalkboard. He wrote SAVE on the board so our list was preserved as it grew. The book was baffling—iterative and told from several points of view—and Mr. Katzenbach had us track each story line too. “And then what?” he fired at us. “And then what?” Character by character, we called out plot points, cracking the spines of our books so we could rifle faster. Sweat flew off his forehead onto the floor. After he had a student take over the chalk, he pounded on the board with his fist, sending up tiny yellow puffs.

  What is to be said about the fact that the teacher who reached me—who made me not only think but feel, who ignited the material at hand—was one who was abusing his power of connection with other girls? Do we call that an unfortunate coincidence? Am I betraying the women he violated by writing about how he, almost alone and without knowing it, helped me that fall?

  Mr. Katzenbach demonstrated how the narrative of Catch-22 unfurled in a circular motion. He plotted every scene in space graphically, following chronology and character, using every last blank bit of board to reveal the spiral thus created. With his curled hand he traced the figure, drawing his finger in toward the center. Before us was a labyrinth, a closing in. What was at the center? What were we reading toward?

  “What,” he howled, “can you NOT ESCAPE?”

  He directed us to open the book to a page near the very end and recited from memory the scene in which the hero, Yossarian, opens his friend Snowden’s flak suit to find a hole has been blown in his guts. Snowden’s intestines spill free. I thought his injury was tragic, of course. But I was haunted by the fact that the living man alone knew that his friend was dying.

  Do something do something DO SOMETHING! I thought.

  “I’m cold,” said Mr. Katzenbach, softly, repeating Snowden’s final words. “I’m cold.” He waited, drawing out our attention, which was entirely his. Hushed, he continued: “‘There, there,’ says his friend. ‘There, there.’”


  Our eyes were shining.

  “That, my friends, is war.”

  Then, mopping his brow, he released us to the bell.

  Walking into breakfast one morning, Caroline sidled up to me and said, “Lace, did something happen with Rick Banner?”

  “No.” I said it before I even thought it. It emerged reflexively. And then there was ringing in my ears.

  She was silent.

  We stepped up into the common room outside the upper dining hall and then fell into the line along the hallway that led into the kitchen. There were notices pinned here on a bulletin board, and I pretended to read them. Schedules for laundry collection, community service opportunities. An athletic calendar showing home and away games.

  “Okay,” she said quietly.

  In my mind I begged Caroline to say something else. I had no intention of deceiving her. It was a rejection of our friendship to refuse her question the way I had. It would make her angry, as well it should. But what else could I do? How could I help this?

  At the beginning of fifth form, the sixth-form heartthrob Knox Courtland had declared, first through back channels and finally open proclamation, his love for Caroline. But she’d had eyes for someone else: a fellow rower, enormously strong, with what she called “floppy hair.” She loved the way his hair bounced around when he walked, the contrast between this and his oversize smile and muscled body. In a few years he’d be an Olympian, but at St. Paul’s he was just a sixth former named Dave. And not fit to date Caroline, thought the friends of Knox Courtland.

  One evening in lower dining hall, not too many weeks before Caroline asked me about Rick Banner, one of Knox’s friends had stood suddenly at his seat, as though to give a toast, and shouted, “Hey!”

  All the tables looked up. We were in our usual circle—the Kittredge girls and now Meg and Tabby, too—and we all turned. Knox’s friend was staring hard at Caroline.

  “You could have had him,” said this minion, pointing to Knox. “Do you understand that?”

  Caroline was pale, her eyes pained. She’d been hanging out with Dave the rower for a few weeks, but she hadn’t said anything unkind, hadn’t rejected Knox to his face—she had just taken up with someone else. We girls were uncertain how to react to this boy’s eruption of righteous anger. Brooke was gape-mouthed, already starting to laugh. The rest of us were horror-struck. Now this sixth former pointed at our friend Caroline and yelled, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” He picked up his tray and kicked back his chair, and his friends, Knox among them, followed, heads hung. As he passed us, he leaned low and added, “Dave is a tool.”

  Caroline would have been able to understand domination. She’d have accompanied me to tell a teacher. She’d have listened.

  Why could I not tell?

  The memory existed behind what I can best describe as a narrow and tensile membrane that felt more than anything like a part of my very body, and I had a pure, instinctive unwillingness to break it, as though to push through it would be to tear open some part of myself. I’d tried so hard not to crack, and now my friend, my dear friend, was asking me a question that felt like yet another invasion. I could not answer her.

  We made it to the kitchen, picked up our trays, and skipped the hot meal line for the coffee and tea tanks. I popped a frozen waffle into the toaster. Caroline made her tea. She had a green apple on her tray, and she stood with me by the bread and toasters and gobbed some peanut butter onto her plate with a spoon.

  Ordinarily she’d wait for me there, chatting, while my waffle wound its way beneath the heating coils. But today she picked up her tray and walked off toward our friends.

  By the time my waffle dropped down I was no longer hungry. I buttered and loaded it with cinnamon sugar anyway. I always ate like a toddler. I wore my parka and gloves, like a girl visiting Grandma. I was ridiculous. I set my tray down at my friends’ table, ashamed of my own food, and dropped into the seat behind it.

  I got a few strained smiles. My heart might have stopped. The news had reached my friends; here it was.

  My throat had been hurting for a few days, which was a good enough reason not to eat. Brooke was complaining about a class, and Maddy was giggling. Caroline hacked slices off her apple with a dull cafeteria knife. I scoured my brain for a clue about how to handle this, the slipping away of my confidants, but I couldn’t find any solution save saying the thing I absolutely could not say. There was nothing else that could cause them to see.

  At five minutes to eight we tossed our trays on the belt, slung our bags off the floor and onto our shoulders, and pressed out the door onto the path. Students were everywhere, surging into the day, and if you’d been watching, you’d have seen me walking with a bunch of girls, as though I belonged. But the stain had touched them, and now I had failed Caroline, too. I sensed that from here the descent would be rapid indeed. I had no idea where it would lead.

  As I’ve said, first, I got sick.

  My initial visit to the infirmary was useless. I have only slivers of memory of being feverish in an infirmary bed, shades drawn against the fall blaze, hearing the voices of my schoolmates on the walks. I thought I was crazy, and that my throat was either swelling up to suffocate me or peeling away to rawness, as though what had passed there had to be sloughed off indefinitely.

  Finally they prescribed the medication I needed, but without telling me why I needed it. The Zovirax, an antiviral, did its job. I never saw a sore (I still never have; there is no way I can examine a place so deep). The outbreaks would recur every six weeks or so, because I was not taking Zovirax prophylactically, which would have been medical protocol for my diagnosis. But the doctor at St. Paul’s did not, would not, tell me what was wrong.

  When I arrived home for Thanksgiving, Mom was there in the pickup lane at O’Hare, hazards flashing, with a basket of strawberries waiting for me in the car. She hugged me quickly in the pools of exhaust. “Get in, get in! It’s cold! You’re home!” She handed me the fruit. “Figure we’ll start getting you vitamin C right away!” I had been so sick, after all.

  Her face betrayed nothing but pleasure, so neither did mine.

  That year we spent the day of Thanksgiving itself at the house in St. Louis where my father’s parents had lived for more than thirty years. Our family traveled to accommodate the varying urges of an extended group much longer on obligation than affection. What was inviolable was that my father should snap his Christmas card picture of his children before Thanksgiving weekend got away from him. He’d have forgone the feast if necessary, but never the three-by-five matte of his two redheaded, freckled children in their holiday finest. He’d then spend every evening of the first week of Advent humming carols and pasting copies of the photograph into hundreds of cards. His list, groomed from year to year, included fellow parishioners from the Episcopal church in town, club friends, parents of our childhood classmates, tennis partners, colleagues on charitable boards, and certain business associates and old classmates (including Mr. and Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton). I wasn’t wild about the thought of Jed Lane having a picture of me, but how could my parents leave family friends off the list? Many of us were subjected to this, growing up in my town and in towns like mine. I might have been okay. But then I put on the dress.

  Mom tightened up her face and said, “Oh.”

  Dad said, “Gosh.”

  “What?” I asked. That summer Mom had accommodated my adolescence by buying me a black velvet Christmas dress with a square neckline that belted tightly at the waist. I was quite thin—I couldn’t think what was wrong.

  “Just…bodacious ta-tas,” Mom said. She covered her mouth with her hand.

  I worked out what that meant. My skin flushed sharply, and I shivered into the velvet. I looked down so my hair hung across my chest.

  “You can say that again,” said Dad.

  Now, I have never been buxom. In spite of my fervent youthful hope, that is not my fate. I was raised on the old line about needing no more bosom than c
ould fill a champagne flute (a very narrow vessel in my home) and had resigned myself to a braless existence. I’d started the physical process of puberty relatively late, and consequently my body had continued to change while I was away at school. Some combination of being almost sixteen and losing some weight around the rest of me had given the impression of larger breasts than my parents remembered. The dress was gorgeous. It set off my hair in a way that made me proud. I had planned to take it back to school to wear to the Christmas formal dinner, and then, beneath my choir robes, for the service of Lessons and Carols.

  “We can’t send that out,” Mom said, still looking at me.

  “No, I guess not,” said Dad.

  My brother was staring. “What?” He had just turned eleven.

  “Your sister’s figure, is all,” said Dad briskly.

  My brother was unmoved. “Oh.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  Mom had recovered. “It’s no problem, sweetie. It’s just that it’s inappropriate for a girl your age to have breasts that large. Maybe we could try another dress? Let’s go up and look.”

  Upstairs she held out hangers for me. I dropped the velvet and slipped into red wool. She pulled my hair in front of my shoulders and smoothed it flat. “I have all these zits,” I said. “And my teeth are too small.”

  “Oh, no,” said Mom, still moving my hair. Her touch made my stomach hurt. I wanted so badly to cry. “Oh, you’re exactly the girl I used to hate in high school. The blond one with the big boobs.”

  Hate. I grabbed onto that word like the fin of a shark. I wasn’t blond and I didn’t have big boobs, but I was fascinated by the thought of my mom as the girl doing the hating because, I realized, it was exactly what I feared: that my mom would learn what I had done, and hate me.

  I tolerated the veneer for the duration of a photo shoot. Mom swept blush on my cheeks and gloss on my lips, and finger-combed the hair at my temples. My brother grinned his new grown-up-tooth grin. I put my arm around him. Such a good girl, hanging on by a thread.