Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “Yes, yes,” she said. She let loose a knitting needle and held out a hand. “Give me the form. I’ll have a look.”

  “—the creative genius. I was thinking to include three subjects, namely Sylvia Plath, Mozart, and Van Gogh—”

  “Sure.” She set the page down, unexamined.

  “—and I’ve got several texts lined up that address the pharmaceutical research, which is really new, and I can contact this psychiatrist at Northwestern if I need to for an interview…”

  She nodded, eyes on her work. I spun faster, but I was running out of impressive things to say. Finally the dog groaned, and I stopped talking.

  “Oh, Raz,” said Ms. Radley. “I bet you’d like a scratch.” She looked up at me.

  I went and sat next to the dog and pushed my fingers into her fur. There was a dangerous unraveling in my chest. I sensed it beginning and I tightened my entire body against it.

  “Where are you living next year?” asked Ms. Radley.

  “I don’t know. I know where I’d like to be, but so far I haven’t had much luck with the housing lottery.”

  “That can happen.”

  The dog scooted closer and heaved herself upside down. I rubbed the pink skin of her belly.

  “Raspberry is very happy,” said Ms. Radley.

  I was beginning to cry. I fought it, swallowing and blinking. I thought about Cliff Gillespie and his elements. I thought about the bike in the water. Nothing was enough to stop the tears.

  “Are you looking forward to sixth form?” she asked me.

  “I’m looking forward to my ISP. I mean, if it’s approved, if you’re comfortable with it, of course. And I’d like to start Italian, if they can find a teacher. And it’ll be good, I guess, to be at the top of things.” By which I meant that Rick and Taz and Budge and all of them would be gone. I was almost there. So close. “And college, of course…”

  “Yes, yes.”

  The dog was snoring. Ms. Radley said, “You’ve got free afternoons with that hand, do you?”

  “I do. I run.”

  “Where?”

  “Around campus. Blinking Light. Boat Docks. The woods.”

  “Hm. I wonder if you might take this one with you sometime.” Ms. Radley aimed a tethered needle toward the dog. “She loves the woods.”

  “Really? I could do that?”

  “Her leash is right over there.”

  “That’s great. That would be amazing. The woods can be kind of creepy. I’d feel so much safer with a dog with me. I’d feel so much better.”

  “Good.” Ms. Radley raised up her knitting and examined something close under her lamp. “Sweater for my daughter.”

  “I wish I had a dog in my room,” I said suddenly. “At night.”

  I heard the needles clicking again.

  “I wish you did too.”

  She hadn’t asked me any of the questions I’d been sure of. Tell me about your plans for the project. Tell me how you will balance this with your course load as a senior. How many pages? With what supporting evidence? What outside sources? Initial bibliography? Tell me about yourself. About your mother, who’s a priest, like me. Prove yourself.

  “Lacy,” she said. “You know that I have to be a chaplain to everyone.”

  I didn’t understand. “Of course…”

  “So you will see me being friendly with people who have been horrible to you. That is my job and I cannot change that.”

  “I would never ask you to—”

  “But,” she continued, still without looking over at me, “if you ever feel unsafe, at any hour, you just come right in through that door.” She gestured with her needles. “It’s unlocked. The guest room is just there. There is a bed made up. No need to wake me, and you know Raspberry. Just come up and you may sleep there. I will vouch for you.”

  I couldn’t talk. My tears fell onto the dog’s fur. Ms. Radley knew this, and did not look my way. It was generosity on top of generosity, delivered without fanfare and without any expectation of reply. I hardly knew what to do with myself. I was silent, terrified of the flood.

  She went on knitting for a while, until I found the courage to thump the dog twice in valediction, stand up, say thank you, and get out of there. Any longer and I’d have dissolved. She had me bring her a pen from a table so she could sign my ISP form, and I held that page in my good hand all the way back down to my dorm.

  I was at the Tuck Shop, buying myself a blueberry muffin. The shop sold highly processed baked goods wrapped in cellophane. They were wet to the touch when you unwrapped them, and I liked to microwave them for half a minute to make them even softer, so they wouldn’t hurt too much when I swallowed.

  Because I still didn’t know what was wrong with my throat, I considered each new outbreak of sores to be a punishment. This time I wasn’t so sure what I’d done—I hadn’t had much to do with any boys lately—so I figured it must be that I’d thrown in the towel on the Ferguson exams, especially after The Rock went to so much trouble to help me. But the weather was finally warming. The air was humid, raising steam over the meadow when the sun broke through. Afternoons were properly hot. So close, the end of the year. So close.

  “Hey, Lacy,” said a voice behind me. The tone was sly, on the tilt, and I braced for an insult.

  But when I turned it was just Scotty, Elise’s Scotty, the boy she’d left behind when she’d withdrawn from school. He gave me his impish smile and made a little wave.

  “What’s up?” I said. I marveled that his hair was still shaggy, a giant pouf all around. It hadn’t gotten any bigger all year, which meant either that it grew that long on its own but no longer, or that he carefully trimmed it to exactly this mess. Either way it was interesting, nonthreatening.

  “Have you talked to Elise?” he asked.

  I hadn’t. It hadn’t occurred to me. Do soldiers still in foxholes write to the ones who got to go home?

  “No. Have you?”

  He shook his head.

  He wore low-slung cords that were covered in what looked like plaster. Hand-swipes were visible across his thighs. But his shirt was an Oxford button-down that still bore the sheer planes of an iron, and seeing him in it I imagined his mother, how her loving him kept all of this together.

  “What’s that you’re eating?” he said.

  I held up my paper plate.

  “Oh,” he said, and scratched at the back of his head. He did this absentmindedly, when he was anxious or without a thought, not because something itched.

  “Want some?”

  “Oh, naw. I’m good.”

  His accent was almost Southern. “Scotty, where are you from again?” I asked.

  “Philadelphia.”

  I knew nothing about Philadelphia. I wasn’t even sure where it was.

  “Cool.”

  “You’re from Chicago.”

  “Yep.”

  “Cool.”

  “Yep.”

  I balanced my plate and waited.

  “All right, well, see you around,” he said, and smiled at me again.

  “See you around.”

  I missed Elise, too. I was moved by how much Scotty must have loved her, to approach me like that, out of the blue. I wished I could conjure up something of her, but now that the school year was almost over and she’d been gone for a few months, it seemed almost like I’d imagined her—dreamed up a kind intellectual girl just down the hall who would walk places with me and read beside me at night. Maybe I had dreamed her up. She was the perfect projection of my better self, but she had disappeared right around the worst night of my life so far, the night Johnny Devereux came to my room. Even a fantasy can put up with only so much.

  Then at lunch Scotty’s roommate, Gus, bumped into me, on purpose, nudging me in the side with his plastic tray.

  When I turned, he was smiling.

  “Um, hi?”

  I’d never spoken with Gus before. He was a buddy, like Scotty, well-ensconced in the community of them. As rising sixth
formers, my classmates were beginning to gather force, and Gus and Scotty, who had been well-liked by upperformers, would now be much admired as seniors. They wore a new confidence on their shoulders, and swung their hips the tiniest bit more as they moved down the halls, taking their time, ensuring they’d be seen.

  “Scotty’s got a crush on you,” said Gus.

  This was the last thing.

  “On me? What?”

  “Don’t tell him I told you.”

  I was sure they were messing with me. Someone wanted to lure me somewhere, see me naked, goad me into some new and vile compromise.

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  Gus was grinning. “What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About Scotty.”

  “Oh. Um, I think he’s nice. He’s from Philadelphia. Elise loved him a lot.”

  The grin wavered. “Yeah. That sucked.”

  “I’m sure she’s much happier at home.”

  “No kidding.”

  Students were moving all around us, gathering food or dropping off their trays. Cutlery clacked and chairs scraped across the floor. Odors of tater tots and ammonia mingled and soured. The halls were a zoo. Our conversation would not go unnoticed, though—Gus talking to me, like this, in the open, would not go unnoticed. His attention would benefit me. I wondered what mine would cost him.

  “Well, anyway, about Scotty,” he said.

  I waited for him to say the anyway thing, but that was all he’d meant to convey.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed it before moving away.

  I found a note in my post-office box that my ISP had been approved. Advisor, the Reverend Molly Radley. A shiver ran over me. I walked out of the post office and into the sunshine. The flag snapped high on its pole. Students crossed everywhere. I was stitching hours into days like the boards of a rope bridge: I’d go to lunch, then go pick up Raz for a run through the new-leafed woods, then shower before dinner, and then when I left the dining hall to head to the chapel for choir rehearsal (we were working on the pieces for the commencement services now) there would still be lavender light in the sky and in the ponds. Then tomorrow, and the next day, and another few weeks, and this was done.

  The prospect of sixth form I would tackle after I’d had some rest.

  Scotty’s roommate, Gus, had gotten into the habit of knocking into me or elbowing me or in some other way offering a slightly aggressive note of affection whenever he saw me around campus. I had no idea how to react. I’d met a few of Gus’s and Scotty’s friends during the brief spell I’d dated Tim, but their attentions panicked me. I had gone from too shy and intimidated to talk to boys I didn’t directly know to paranoid about who hated me or wanted me to suck his cock. I could not tell, just looking at an approaching face, what he intended to send my way, and it seemed any given student could switch back and forth, depending on his mood and the moment when I happened to cross his path. The consequences for guessing wrong were extreme. The sixth former who lived next door to Rick and Taz, whom I had never met in any capacity, set on me daily a steady glare. And once, as I passed alone, he said simply, “You’re awful. I hate you.”

  Gus persisted in his good-natured, little-brother way, and Scotty, appearing in the hallways or on the paths, would follow up with genuine questions: How was my hand? Where did I take the dog? Whose dog was it, anyway? When could I play tennis again?

  Though he was not big, Scotty had a spot on the varsity lacrosse team, which made him dangerous. I was spikier than I might have been because of this. I never watched him play, but sometimes as I headed out for my runs I saw him with the rest of the boys, pouring out of the locker room on their way to the fields. Lacrosse players wore full pads above the waist but only athletic shorts below, leaving them top-heavy as bulls, the broadest and tallest among them—like Rick Banner—appearing to be superior creatures still gathering from the head down, like you’d caught the djinn just at the moment it bloomed from the lamp. Scotty’s shoulders were already surprisingly broad, given how slight his body was, and of course his hair made his head seem huge anyway. The lacrosse gear just emphasized the shape he already had. I saw him and laughed, and then, as I left through the white gates and onto state roads, I wondered about this laughing.

  I was beginning to see why Elise had kept him around. His absentminded goodwill was cheering. He was an antidote to so much intention.

  Scotty asked me to meet him one night at the Tuck Shop. I arrived after choir. The streams were alive in the meadow; the grass rustled. He bought a pint of ice cream and set it between us, then plonked down two plastic spoons. I didn’t know he had the munchies, and he didn’t know ice cream was about the only thing I could eat without pain.

  We polished it off. When our spoons clicked in the ice cream, he dug in further and smiled up at me. There wasn’t much more to say about Elise—we’d been over that—but I understood our abandonment of her as a topic to mean something about a development between us.

  Just before check-in we wandered down the path, back toward Brewster House. My belly was jumpy with ice cream and gratitude, though I didn’t understand the full mechanics of the latter. Spending time with Scotty—and more to the point, being seen spending time with Scotty—had had a rehabilitative effect on my reputation around campus. He was popular enough with other boys to command respect, and when I was with him, this extended to me. Caroline asked me what was up with Scotty, how it was going. Sam mentioned something about my new beau. I didn’t comment, not least because I didn’t actually know what was happening. Scotty and I had nothing in common, he was kind to me, and he hadn’t tried to fuck me. It might have been some sort of celestial accompaniment, as though Elise were looking out for me from afar. Whatever it was, I did not ask questions and I did not boast.

  Walking through the low point of the meadow, Scotty and I came to a pocket of cooler air that had gathered there like a winter ghost.

  “You know,” I heard myself say, “something really bad happened with Rick Banner.”

  Scotty said, “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. And Taz too.”

  “Well, like what?” He put his arm around my shoulders.

  “Like, they called me,” I blundered. “I mean, Rick called me. To cruise. And, like, Taz was there, which I didn’t know. And they told me to be quiet. And did stuff to me.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “You know,” I said, because I was sure he did. “Stuff.”

  He was quiet. Our feet shuffled on the sandy path. It was re-gritted by the grounds crew every winter, for the ice, and melted off into tiny dunes in the spring.

  “Not sex,” I said, to clarify, and because I was afraid I’d frightened him off.

  “Hm.”

  “Just oral stuff.”

  After a while he said, “Yeah. I’m sorry about that. That sucks.”

  Scotty wasn’t cruel or quick enough to intend the pun. I sensed a foggy bit of regret, some concern. Most important, he did not remove his arm from my shoulders.

  “So anyway,” I said.

  We climbed back up out of the meadow, into the warm evening air, and stopped by the back door to Brewster House—the door I’d snuck out, the one where, shattered, I had walked back in. The door that opened to the power plant and the meadow and the back of campus and that shared a view with my window, one flight up.

  “Hey, Lacy.” He sounded eager, and I understood we were starting a new conversation now. “Wanna hang out?”

  I looked at Scotty in the sulfured light of the utility bulb mounted over the stoop. He was cute. His hair was haloed. A little cloud of bugs swirled above us, like an echo of his hair.

  “Sure,” I said.

  He smiled at me for a long moment. “Cool.” He kissed me.

  I consider now that he might have been stoned out of his mind, that he might not have known how to respond to what I’d revealed. (What I’d revealed! And the ground did not open up, and the trees did not splinter and col
lapse, and the moon did not slip, and I did not explode.) But somehow he knew enough to open the door for me, and then let me go in, up to my room, alone. I figured that was perfect. It irritates me now that I needed to be desired in order to be able to tell, but I understand: if my shame emerged from the sense that I was dirty, ruined for love, then a person I could talk to would be one who looked at me and thought he might love me anyway.

  But is this really true? Or was it that the words were welling up in me, as the season was, and it was only a matter of the right company on the path?

  In any case, nothing more happened that night. I couldn’t have worked it out myself, but if you’d done the math—how to care for the girl I was just then—you’d have come out exactly there.

  Years later, after I graduated from college and moved to California, I acquired a trained security dog, a sleek and leonine Belgian shepherd whose leash I would slipknot around my waist before going out for very long runs. I swore up and down that her fearsome presence had nothing to do with my personal safety. I just liked dogs, and I particularly liked this breed. We’d run for three or four hours without stopping. At that time in my life I liked to choose a difficult route and then double it—add a mountain, say, or every set of stadium stairs in the arena. I’d put some mad money in my sock, and off dog and I would go.

  I learned that there wasn’t a contest I set for myself that I could not finish unless I made one critical mistake: to look up before the end. The moment I scanned the top of the hill, my legs lost their courage. The instant I saw the chutes at the finish of the marathon, my chest tightened like an asthma attack. The trick was to never know how close you were, because relief was the killer of drive.

  With about two weeks remaining in the school year, my fifth-form spring at St. Paul’s, I finished a run in the woods, dropped a panting, leaf-dragging Raspberry back at Ms. Radley’s house, showered, grabbed a bite of supper, and headed for the library to continue studying for finals. I had exhausted myself on my exegesis for Reverend S., a grand thesis on the feminine aspects of the Holy Spirit for which I had drawn heavily on outside sources and even corresponded with an old professor of my mom’s from seminary, a classicist who preferred the Coptic Bible but would work from the ancient Greek if he had to. The resulting thirty-eight-page masterpiece, heavily footnoted, stacked and stapled and multiply blessed, felt as weighty to me as a slab of my own flesh. I was sure Reverend S. would be knocked out. I had calculus nailed; French would be fine; English was always fine. Eutrophication of lakes and streams for Environmental Science? No problem. I could formulate acid rain in my sleep. The year was mine. The cast was off my hand, but I’d gotten good at writing left-handed anyway; my right thumb was so weak it was easier to do so. I was happy to shower properly. Scotty knew, when he took my hand, to approach from the left.