Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  I said, “Sorry.”

  “Nope. Not carbon. Hang on.” He reached back across his bins and pulled a blue ball, marginally bigger. He set this in my cast. It rested against my thumb, but when I waved my arm, it too fell out.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said again.

  He ignored this apology too. “Okay, so not oxygen. Hmm.”

  He stood up and perused the table. It was odd to be alone in a room with any teacher, but particularly this one. I studied his back. His shoulders were broad and round, with his square head poised between them like a great gate hung on two pillars. His shirt strained against his torso. He was coaching Rick that spring. Also Budge, and so many of the others who had catcalled and propositioned me, who had made every hallway a gauntlet. In an hour or so, this man would be out on the field shouting things that Rick had to obey. It was intoxicating to be near someone who had such power over them. I felt urgently that I should be doing or saying something.

  He was murmuring. “I’m just trying to think which will be exactly…”

  “Sorry, but what are these?”

  He did not turn. “Elements.”

  He returned with a larger Styrofoam ball, fire-engine red. “We use them to make models of molecules,” he said, tucking it into my casted hand. It made a small crunching sound as it went in, and held fast. “Bingo.”

  With a firm tug on my arm he pulled it out, then took up a sharpened pencil and began to drill it through the center of the Styrofoam.

  “You could do all sorts of things with this,” he went on. “A fork. Maybe even a tennis racket.” Once the ball was speared with the pencil, he wedged it back into my cast, pencil lead down, and slid a piece of paper in front of me. “Okay, try.”

  I moved my arm, and the pencil moved.

  “How about your name?”

  I wrote Crawford. I had very little control, but the word was legible.

  “Good! That should do it.”

  It wasn’t good. Nothing was solved. I could not outprint a preschooler this way. And in fact it hurt, because my hand inside its cast pressed against the ball at the precise spot at the base of my thumb that was broken. But how could I complain to The Rock about Styrofoam? He was on his feet, restacking his bins.

  “Okay, thanks,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I was desperate for something more. “Um,” I stammered. “So, which is it? Helium?” The only element I could pull up.

  He frowned. “Helium is tiny.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “No, that’s sodium. Which you generally know in part as salt. Everyone in my lab will know you’re working with a salt there. Good luck.”

  I sat the Ferguson exams. Religion was first. I began printing each essay with my salt ball, but it was slow and my thumb ached. I switched to my left hand and used a normal pen to write several more paragraphs on that side. Finally, running out of time, full of frustrated ideas, I turned my pages upside down and left the room. It was worse in the afternoon, for English, when my hand was already sore. Back in my dorm, I tossed the silly salt pencil into my footlocker before dragging it back across the door.

  On Sunday evenings at seven o’clock, a small, optional Vespers service was held in the Old Chapel. The cornerstone of this building had been laid in 1858, in the field alongside the Lower School Pond. Ten years later they’d sawed the place in half and expanded it north and south, adding a transept. The cross shape it formed was still contained by the roundness of the space, wholly unlike the enormous thrust of the new chapel just up the grassy way, which had itself been deconsecrated, sawed apart, expanded, and made holy again, as the school grew in size and stature. We did not use the Old Chapel often. Until the spring of my fifth-form year, I’d been inside only twice: for the First Night Service, when the rector gathered us newbs to bind us up and attempt to distract us with prayer from the car doors slamming in the lowering light; and on the cold night in January 1991 when the United States invaded Iraq, and the tolling chapel bell invited students to gather there. Where the new chapel was magnificent, it was also domineering, and the site of too much daily turmoil to offer solace. I didn’t even need to enter the Old Chapel to draw a sense of quiet—just its shape in the middle of campus, curled and impervious as a sleeping cat, was enough.

  Sometimes I’d thought about going into the Old Chapel by myself to sit. Maybe I’d try to pray. But I was worried I’d be discovered there and forced to reveal something I’d rather not. I never so much as tried the door. Was it unlocked? Could we go there whenever we wished? I wouldn’t have known whom to ask.

  I took a long run almost daily that spring, and each time I would finish jogging just as the path turned past the Old Chapel. I used my runs to begin to dream of a world not colored by St. Paul’s—surely there were cities not dominated by alumni, offices where I could work, little coffee shops I could waitress in where nobody would care. I pictured one by the beach, maybe in California, which I had never seen. Another in a European city, likewise unseen, its narrow street ribbed with light. If one of the great sources of misery for all high schoolers is the illusion that high school will never end, the reach of power implied (and wielded) by the alumni and trustees of St. Paul’s School threatened that in our particular case, that nightmare was real. It’s odd, because the Old Chapel was an original building—core to the campus and its history—and might have been the root of the place. But with the completion of the new chapel, it seemed to me that the school’s soul had jumped across the green to inhabit the soaring new expanse. Ritual always did love majesty. What was left in the Old Chapel was humble and patient. I aspired to both virtues. And I sympathized with a space that seemed unmoved by spectacle.

  I was finishing a late run on a Sunday in April when I emerged from the woods to find Marion, our choir’s star soprano, walking alone down the path to Vespers. I called out to her.

  Marion offered me her trademark smile: gap-toothed, wholly sincere. When she sang she tilted her head and softened her eyes, as a mother does singing a lullaby, so that her sound was made more beautiful by the pleasure you saw on her face. I was always embarrassed to be singing alongside her, but she encouraged me.

  “How far’d you go?” she asked. It was exactly the right question.

  “I don’t know. I ran for ninety minutes.”

  “Blinking Light?”

  “Fisk Hill, then around and back to Long Ponds.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Want to come to Vespers?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. At seven.”

  “But—” I gestured to my sweaty clothes, my dumb pink plaster cast.

  “Oh, who cares about that? Come on.” She took my good arm. “Nobody goes anyway.”

  I pictured the priest. “Is it Reverend S.?”

  She screwed up her face. “God, no. Do you think I’d be going? Radley.”

  It was rumored that Marion’s parents were geniuses who were also unwell, and that she might have had her own apartment in New York, or Boston, or Maine. Her aunt was a powerful trustee of the school, and Marion seemed to have special knowledge of everyone on campus, from the third-form Japanese exchange student whom she knew because they were both virtuosos on the violin to the women who sorted our mail in the post office. “Marion!” I’d heard one of them rasp, seeing her enter. The postmistress was usually glimpsed only through your open metal box, if she happened to shuffle past at just the moment you were peering in.

  “I’ll sit far away, then,” I said. Between my shirt and my cast, I was pretty sure I smelled horrible.

  “You’ll sit right next to me,” said Marion.

  Inside, the chapel smelled softly of dust. It was still warm—the day had been sunny, the wood had taken it in—but I knew it would be cold by the time we left. Ms. Radley stood quietly with her prayer book in her hands. I recognized that the slim, red-bound volume must be her private copy—my mom used hers in services too—but Ms. Radley rarely wore her clerical garb
. She taught Religion and violin, and was mother to two students at the school, a girl older than I was and a boy younger. There was no Mr. Radley, as far as I could tell. She wore her dark hair short, with sprays of gray creeping out from her temples. Her lean body and utilitarian clothes were mannish in a way I found appealing but did not yet recognize as queer. All I sensed was a quiet objection—an objection to everything collared and exalted. I had watched her carefully from my chapel seat but had never been lucky enough to have a reason to talk with her. I couldn’t think what to say—Hey, my mom’s a priest too?

  Ms. Radley embraced Marion and nodded her head in greeting to me. I sat quickly.

  We were the only two students there. No matter. Ms. Radley led us as if there were a hundred people in the space, speaking the service clearly and carefully.

  What a nice thing, I thought, to come to Chapel on Sunday evenings. What a quiet hideaway this is. Again I had the feeling I so often had at St. Paul’s, that I had stumbled upon a dedicated practice that my peers had discovered for themselves—in the art studio, on a playing field—and thought it remarkable not least because I had failed to find such a practice of my own.

  When Ms. Radley spoke certain prayers, her voice, already a bit hoarse, took on extra air. I leaned in to listen:

  Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or

  weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who

  sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless

  the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the

  joyous; and all for your love’s sake.

  Marion and I said, “Amen.”

  It was not a prayer I’d heard before. I decided that anyone who spoke the words work and watch and weep the way Ms. Radley did was someone I needed to be close to. She said them with her whole mouth, intently. I had never thought about the word weep much before. I’d considered it for wounds, perhaps—something unsightly. Nobody I knew wept. When we were upset, we cried. We sobbed. We blubbered or bawled, we got hysterical, we freaked out. Her voice made me consider whether there might be honor in sorrow.

  But the words that stirred me most were shield the joyous. I said goodbye to Marion and walked back to my dorm with my arms wrapped tightly around my core. The sun was down and I was chilled, walking across campus, and far from joyous. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt even halfway happy. Maybe this is why the phrase struck me as so generous and so wise. Of course the weeping needed protection—but the joyous too? I considered the notion that good fortune was tender. It soothed me to think that compassion might be aimed at the lucky. Maybe it gave me a way to feel I mattered. Even if I was not reveling in the riches of school, even if I was not among the dancing heirs, I might serve as a shield for those who were. Caroline. Samantha. Brooke. Maddy. Marion. Everyone who belonged there, everyone who was kind. I thought I could settle for that.

  Every Sunday I went back to hear the reedy tones of Ms. Radley’s work or watch or weep this night.

  I asked Marion how I should approach Ms. Radley about advising my Independent Study Project, or ISP, on biochemical depression and the creative genius. It was a pretentious topic, I knew—just the memory of myself on the ski lift, hand intact, pride inflamed, rattling on about aesthetic sensibilities made me wish a blizzard had come up just then. But in the proposal I was working up, I didn’t intend to claim either depression or genius. I meant to construct the inquiry to have enough novelty and grain to pass muster with the faculty who approved such projects. The main point of it all was to be left alone. (Hence independent project.) And it was informed by my own experience, however flimsily. I had, after all, taken Prozac for about ten months, which allowed me to borrow a small portion of authenticity, though I mentioned nothing about this to anyone. The drug hadn’t made me feel any different. But the experience had caused me to begin to pay attention to the fact that a new, partially scientific notion of “biochemical depression” had taken root in the popular imagination, or at least in as much of it as I could monitor through periodicals in the school library.

  This was all before the internet, with only a newly computerized card catalogue and a librarian to help me access databases better suited to doctoral candidates. I followed book to article to book like a set of torches on a tunneled hall. My investigations began, of course, with The Bell Jar. Sylvia Plath was every sad Waspy girl’s patron saint. We all but knew her: look at her face! She’d have been on the field hockey team! After Sylvia’s dreadful end I moved on to Ted Hughes, imagining it was sophisticated of me to leave the girl and join the men. Everybody knew “Daddy,” but who knew “The Hawk in the Rain”? From there I encountered a range of English poets: Stephen Spender’s crew, including Auden as a young man, before he’d been bloodlessly anthologized. I glanced past Virginia Woolf, whose intelligence and self-possession frightened me—I placed a marker there, to return to when I was older—and came back the long way to the T. S. Eliot of our Religion class.

  Still, women’s verse appealed to me more: Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Maxine Kumin. Mom told me that as a child in Rome she had played with a girl named Jorie Pepper who was now the poet Jorie Graham, and I figured this would help me somehow. I imagined them: one girl growing up to make these poems, the other growing up to make me. Carolyn Forché taught me the beginnings of the language of witness, though all I understood at the time was the jolt a reader felt when a writer described crisis without mediation.

  I read Van Gogh’s letters to Theo. Biographies of Michelangelo, Mozart, and Beethoven. I had no clue what disciplines I was paddling in, nor even on what shores a discipline might form. What I was watching, with all the fever of a voyeur, was the practice of passion. These examples were startling alternatives to the life of my own mind, to the steady, frozen-rain fear that made everything glassy and fragile. I was terrified to break through. All I wanted was to break through. I thought I recognized the feeling contemporary artists recalled when asked how they felt in treatment with new psychotropic medications and they described being dulled and divorced from themselves. They wanted off the drugs and back into the storm. I envied them their sense of direction, even if it led to unspeakable misery.

  I returned to Plath and her men with a love of the rack and the screw. Sitting in the soaring alcoves of the new library, I read to myself, softly but out loud. If I studied keenly enough, could I borrow these writers’ fire? It was not so different from my little girl’s logic that kneeling on hard wood made God more likely to hear my prayer. I did not understand how a person fashioned a self. But the books I found seemed to lead from one to the next as though someone had gone up ahead and laid them out for me. I rise with my red hair.

  I finished my proposal and prepared to present it to Ms. Radley. I hoped from the way she led Vespers that she would agree to supervise me. I just couldn’t begin to think how to explain why I was doing this project, or why I was asking her.

  “Just come to my Religion class,” suggested Marion. “Eighth period Monday. You can ask her right afterward.”

  “And say what?”

  “How about just tell her what you want to write about?”

  “But won’t she want to know why?”

  Marion’s smile was almost pitying.

  I asked, “Will you stay while I talk to her?” I needed so much from Ms. Radley that I was frightened to approach her.

  “Um, if you want me to.”

  “She has no idea what this is about.”

  Marion said, “Do you know what this is about?”

  Of course not. “I’ve got a very thorough proposal,” I said.

  “Then I think she’ll be happy to say yes, Lace. But I’ll stay if you want.”

  When I appeared at the door to their class, Ms. Radley was shrugging into a sweater—it was still chilly in the evenings—and on her way out she suggested we meet at her home when we might have more time.

  “Just any time?” I asked, feeling panicky.r />
  “Well, unless I’m on duty. If I’m on duty, you can come talk to me in the dorm, but we’ll have more privacy at my home.”

  Marion gave me her lullaby smile.

  This planning of Ms. Radley’s attention was a revelation. My encounters with faculty had almost always taken place in a check-in scrum or while walking in a crowd. Halfway through each semester, Mrs. Fenn handed me my interim grades on a small piece of computer paper and said, “Congratulations.” It hadn’t occurred to me that a teacher could invite me to her home for a conversation. I was grateful for this.

  I waited until a Tuesday night I thought she’d have free and walked across campus to the little white house where she lived.

  She was among the faculty who did not live in a dorm, though she was assigned to one for check-in and advising, as almost all masters were. Somehow, the truly mild girls ended up in the dorm she oversaw—the musicians and poets, girls like Marion. I wondered again who decided housing assignments. For the sixth form I was planning to request to live with the Kittredge girls, though it wasn’t likely they’d put my name down too. We had arrived at a passable détente, as thin-lipped as the new spring over the lawns. I could sit with them at breakfast if I wanted to. I could join them on the path between classes. My company was welcome so long as Budge’s Candace (they were still going strong) was not with them. If I saw her there, I kept my distance.

  Ms. Radley heard me on the step before I knocked.

  “Come in.”

  The room was cozy and low. She sat beneath a floor lamp with a brown satchel at her feet, yarn twining up into her lap. Her knitting needles were ice-blue and flashed beneath the lamp. Books and papers were stacked everywhere, and musical instruments leaned on stands in a corner. There was a golden retriever on the floor. The dog’s tail thumped.

  “Good girl, Raz,” she said. And to me: “Now, what’s the plan?”

  She gave me so much space, it did not occur to me to wonder what she knew.

  “Well, I want to do an ISP. About the connection between biochemical depression and the—”