Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

  “Two, Lacy is a drug dealer who has sold her Prozac and other drugs to students on campus, endangering them.

  “Three, Lacy regularly abuses privileges and circumvents rules on campus.

  “Four, Lacy is a promiscuous girl who has had intercourse with a number of boys on campus, including the accused.

  “Five, Lacy is not welcome as a student at St. Paul’s School.”

  Dad lowered the page and aimed his eyes at me, querulous and hard, with my mother beside him avoiding my face. The moment when he might have laughed at that drug-dealing bit had passed. The moment when we might have started punching out windows had passed too. They just stood there, opaque, like a Wasp update of that exhausted hardscrabble couple in American Gothic—graph paper instead of pitchfork clutched in Dad’s hand.

  I could not get past Prozac. I was hung up on that word. It sounds ugly to begin with, inorganic and cheap, and I had to dig a bit to think why I was hearing it now. Nobody knew I’d taken the drug. Who told them? Why did they care? I’d never lost a pill, never given one away. The idea that I had sold that or any other drug was insane. There was not a shred of evidence of that, not the smallest whisper.

  Unless, of course, you were willing to flat-out lie. Unless you were willing to access a girl’s medical records without her consent and share what you found there with the administration (and all of her schoolmates). Unless you were willing to manufacture accusations to poison the place for her and poison her for it. Then you could say whatever you wanted.

  Who were these deans? Or doctors? Or lawyers? Or priests? Who were these people?

  “Oh my God,” I said. My throat was hard against the threat of vomit, which would have burned terribly.

  “Basically,” my father said, his voice rasping, “they’re promising to destroy you.” The rasp terrified me. My dad sounded so old.

  I hadn’t, up to this point, wanted to think of St. Paul’s School as they. I’d fought the dissolution of the lawns and classes and people I knew into a faceless institution, monolithic and cruel. That had felt too easy to me, too binary—what you would say if you’d never been a student there. But I was the fool. This was not the game I’d thought it was, a civilized dance of virtue and discretion. I’d been so careful and so worried. They’d just quietly been taking aim.

  Now my mother was looking at me imploringly. I tried to understand her meaning: What did she want? The fight, or not?

  Dad continued. “Lacy, they’re saying that you’ve had sexual partners.”

  I dragged my mind from the thought of being a Prozac dealer to the far less interesting accusation of teenage sex. That’s what bothered him most?

  He said, “That the two boys were not the only ones. Is that true?”

  When I did not reply, my mother burst into tears. My father turned and took her into his arms. He looked over her shoulder at me and shook his head.

  I said I was sorry.

  Mom sobbed. He held her.

  “It’s not what we wanted for our daughter,” he told me, and they left my room.

  My mother did not come downstairs for dinner that night. She cooked and left bowls on the counter for my father to serve. My brother was unusually chipper, half as a defense and half to claim his advantage. My father was polite but cold.

  I replayed his words in my head. It’s not what we wanted for our daughter. It seemed to me that all I had ever done was try to give them what they wanted. This, our mutual disappointment, might have given us an opening to talk to one another. But nobody started that conversation, so we never did.

  The school’s characterization of me as a drug dealer was the boldest lie I had ever encountered. Like all lies of its degree, existing wholly without truth, it felt violent. Discourse was now impossible. The conversation we’d been having with the school ceased. All speech that followed was cannily performative, every line parry or thrust. I imagine I could have convinced a court that I had never sold drugs. Any student caught doing so was immediately expelled; besides, there was a tight ecosystem of students involved in illicit substances, and not one of them would claim membership with me. The assertion that I was selling Prozac rather than, say, cocaine is laughable. But the intent of the accusation was not to posit fact. It was to threaten me.

  And, of course, they’d changed the subject. Nobody was talking about the boys or what they had done. It would take all my energy to reclaim myself from the wanton, derelict, criminal blow-up doll of a girl the school had dropped over the side of their ship, and they knew this. They weren’t playing for justice; they were playing for reputation. Which means one deploys not evidence but innuendo.

  What college looks mildly on the application of a student accused by her prep school of dealing drugs? My parents, meanwhile—creatures of their own time and culture—would have preferred a drug dealer to a whore. A junkie can be rehabilitated, after all.

  Decades later, reading my pediatrician’s report of my account of the assault, I was surprised to realize that the story I was reading had a genre. Plain and simple, it reads like the synopsis of a porn flick. I had never seen pornography when I was in high school, so I could not have recognized it then, but now it was obvious: the summoning-the-nurse setup, the buzzing-the-secretary setup. The men the girl doesn’t know call her up and tell a laughable lie, which she falls for. When she arrives, they are all business. First one cock, then the other. She doesn’t ask any questions and they don’t offer any explanations. She needs to keep quiet because she might get caught. Once they’ve both gotten off so deep in her throat that she can’t breathe, they tell her, “It’s your turn now.” Only when I refused and climbed back out the window would the clapper have come down. In the movie they would have fucked me again, and I’d have performed multiple screaming orgasms.

  As an adult still searching for some understanding, I allowed this question: Could the boys have believed that would happen? Is there any possibility they imagined that pornography might be real, that I was in on the lie from the beginning?

  Did they think we were sharing something after all?

  Of course, there’s nothing intimate about the sex in porn. The story the school told about my using and dealing drugs was just another version of this, squarely in keeping with the genre. An absolute, boffo lie, lewdly fictitious. We all knew it—they did and we did. My protesting (“Oh, but I’m not a drug dealer!”) would be little more than foreplay. Their lie was meant not to convince, but to compel. That’s how it works. That’s the entire point. Nobody cares about how you get there; details are a waste of time. The story has one end: no matter what, the girl is going to give it up.

  My parents did not speak to me again about what happened at St. Paul’s. The conversation simply ended.

  We managed logistics the way people do when planning a trip, referring to possible pitfalls like weather or delays, preparing mindfully. At some point I made the necessary formal statement over the phone that I did not wish the police to move forward with criminal charges. It would have been hopeless to try to support their investigation without my parents supporting me.

  As soon as it became clear that there would be no charges, the school, which had been so certain I was a criminal drug dealer, found no reason not to enroll me for the sixth form. I was welcomed back. Here was the contract, as I understood it: I would not speak of the assault, and they would not do anything to interfere with my applications to college or my progress toward graduation. My father had made it very clear to the school’s lawyer that he expected this.

  That was all just fine with the school. The damage to me was done. It had reached my old friend Natalie even before it reached me.

  My father tore the sheets of conversation notes off his graph pad and placed them in a red folder and put the file away.

  Almost a decade later, when I was in graduate school in Chicago, I was home for the weekend. My parents had recently moved houses. Dad was clearing out files.

  “I have no reason to hang on to this,” he
said, holding out the red file. “Would you like it, or should I shred it?”

  I opened the cover and saw the five accusations, in my dad’s line-of-ants hand. I began to shake. This surprised me—I had no idea so much force remained. It had been a long time. I closed the file. I’d never considered that this document might still exist, but of course it did—and here it was. Drug dealer. A bolder version of me, an older one, would have laughed. Maybe I’d have been a lot happier if I’d done a few drugs, she might have said. Maybe I ought to go find some right now, roll a fat one with this here graph paper.

  I carried the red folder as if it burned, and I brought it with me, buried in my bag, to my next appointment with the therapist I was seeing. Margaret was a PsyD who specialized in Jungian analysis; she and her husband, also an analyst, worked on gender archetypes and roles in relationships. He had published several books on masculinity and ran workshops on manhood. Margaret was reputed to be very good with survivors of sexual violence. Both therapists practiced out of a beautiful home in Hyde Park, a few blocks from the campus of the University of Chicago, where I was in the Department of English Language and Literature. Despite my affinity for narratives, I found Margaret’s Jungian approach unsatisfying—we were constantly extrapolating from my experience to something universal, which erased details and dovetailed too nicely with my own impulses to denial. I was quite self-destructive in those years and had been for some time, though this could be hard to see. (A PhD program is an excellent place to mask self-hatred.)

  I told Margaret about the file, holding it quivering between us. She had a suggestion: leave it with her. A safe, third space. If I wanted it back, it was there; if I didn’t want it back, I didn’t have to do anything at all. This suited me.

  Periodically, once we’d stopped meeting, Margaret would email me to ask about the file. I was never ready for it. I moved overseas, changed my life, met my husband. Started a family.

  Many years later still, investigators sought to corroborate my account of what the school’s lawyers had said to my parents, because it sounded to them like a possible obstruction of justice. They proposed that it might reveal an attempt at witness tampering. Could we retrieve the file?

  Of course we could. I looked up Margaret to make sure she was still at the same address before giving her a call. Not long before I typed Margaret’s name into Google, her husband had shot her in the head. He then killed himself, too. I read her obituary instead. They’d had no children, and there was no clinical executor of her estate.

  I called the Cook County Department of Justice, but they rather understandably had better things to do than help me track down my old red file. I spent an hour on the phone, being passed between departments. Oh, domestic violence, said one woman. Let me put you through to someone else. She clicked, and the line went dead.

  10

  Fall 1991, Sixth Form

  My mother flew with me back to New Hampshire to begin my sixth-form year. She did not wear what she called her dog collar, though she’d floated the idea. She was imperious in her planning, laying hard generosity on every aspect of getting me settled: new sheets and blankets, a bedside lamp, an account with a local deli so I could order soup when my throat was bad. This fierce focus was all she betrayed of her terror at bringing me back. That, and the way she’d clutch my arm, just above my elbow, whenever we passed through a doorway. I ended up stepping into new spaces half a stride ahead of her, my arm dully aching in her grip. This is how we presented ourselves on a hot afternoon to Brewster House, where again I had been assigned to live, to search the bulletin board for the number of my room:

  9.

  I knew it already. The smallest room in the dorm, in previous generations a storage space, fit only for an anchorite who might receive handouts of food through her half-panel window, which was adjacent to the dorm’s back door. There was a Room 9 in each of the four buildings on the quad, and by unspoken law it was always given to a third former. We all felt tender for the freshman who had drawn the short straw. It was almost a badge of honor.

  “Maybe it’s a mistake,” said Mom.

  My friends were all in Brewster too. Caroline and Sam had the long, bowling-alley double on the third floor, with the dormer windows. Brooke and Maddy had sunny singles on the second floor, Meg and Tabby the equally sunny singles beneath them. Obviously the school had granted my wish to live with my friends, but the room barely fit a bed. I saw it and understood that St. Paul’s had not been planning on my return. My mom saw it and understood that St. Paul’s was intent on punishing me, and she turned on a Ferragamo heel in the direction of Mrs. Fenn’s open door.

  “We’re going to change this right now.”

  I’d never seen this version of my mother before. Mom could be arctic in her expectations, but she was never a pushy broad.

  Mrs. Fenn, ever mild, followed us back down the muggy hall and peered into the gloaming of Room 9. What she said next was the last thing I expected:

  “Yep, I agree with you. Let’s just go on up and make a change.”

  And like that, I had a sunny single on the top floor, right near my friends. The third former who’d originally been assigned my room got the storage space. She never knew what she’d lost. I could not believe what I had gained. Not the real estate—though that was wonderful, I had room for a dresser and a chair—but a sense that the school would comply.

  “All right, then,” said Mom, hands on hips, looking around the bright surfaces. “See? Things are looking up. Things are going to be different now.”

  This sort of vague injunction to fortune was the closest we came to talking about what had happened. I felt it would be cruel of me to raise it, and besides, here Mom was with a motel room in Concord, spending two whole days shuttling me back and forth from campus to town. At a housewares store down by the river she bought a spring-loaded curtain rail and hung little sheers over my twin dormer windows, which had a view of the quad. I missed the meadow and wondered about my ingratitude. Her ministrations made me feel newly vulnerable, as though the impression of plenty might invite attack.

  Take the room. Mrs. Fenn’s willingness to give it to me didn’t seem to emerge from her own measured constitution. I sensed some precondition, and though it was ostensibly working in my favor, that it existed at all hardened my defenses. It proved there was indeed an entity on the other side of the scrim, an adversary I was going to be wrestling with all year. Who was it? The rector? The trustees? Some composite figure of priests and lawyers? I sometimes imagined I’d caught a glimpse in certain features of the landscape, such as the thrust of the chapel tower and the occasional downspout gargoyle. This anodyne body of history and power, previously blind to me, was now, I knew, aware. And angry.

  Mom watched me skid my school-issue dresser across the floor until it sat as close to the door as possible, perpendicular to the entry. I moved my bed alongside the wall behind it. When I opened the dresser drawers, the door to my room slammed into them and opened no further.

  “Won’t that drive you nuts?” asked Mom. “Your door is going to bang into those drawers all the time. What if a friend is coming to say hi?”

  I didn’t tell her. It would have caused her heart to seize in her chest. Instead we went into town and bought a bright wall calendar to attach to the back of the dresser. I told her I would lie in bed last thing at night and count the days.

  “I will, too,” she said, soft tears now finally in her eyes. “Goddammit, I will, too.”

  Those first days, life at school came together. My room, my dorm, my friends. Soccer and singing. I ordered up mountains of books and articles from the thrilled librarian at the desk for my ISP. Scotty returned from Philly. I buried my prescription for my throat deep in my footlocker, a large bottle filled at the pharmacy at home so nobody would know.

  To the world, as to myself, I attempted to appear blasé. I remembered the dismissive hauteur of those senior girls back in my newb year, and sometimes I wore that cloak now, shivering into it
and shivering out. It wasn’t really in me to be cruel. I advocated mercy for the third former from the Upper East Side who walked into Meg’s room after sports and helped herself to face cream—an unimaginable crime in the days of our youth. We considered ourselves gracious and nuanced. The newb was let off with nothing but a firm scolding (which seemed to shock her nevertheless). But sometimes I also pretended not to see these young girls from my dorm, passing them on the way into meals or to Chapel. I saw them abort their greetings, just as I had, being met with blind eyes, and I pretended not to see this, either.

  I wondered what they knew. I wondered what anyone knew.

  Then, a few days into our return, Scotty invited me after supper to the Tuck Shop for ice cream. I nestled on the bench opposite him and raised my spoon. It was all the same—the warm night, the meadow air, sweet Scotty there—and I was stronger now.

  Scotty said, “Hey, Lacy, I’m going to have to stop, you know, hanging out.”

  My spoon was still aloft. But I was very cool.

  “You’re breaking up with me?”

  “Yeah.” He winced, and then smiled a bit.

  “Why?”

  I was almost inured to surprises by now, but this one got me. Scotty had written back over the summer. It took a few weeks, but a note had arrived. If you’d smashed three cellar spiders on card stock it would have been more emotive (love, Scotty), but he wanted me to come visit—our mothers worked it out, with the result that I had spent three August days floating around in a little boat with an outboard motor at a summer paradise called Thousand Islands.

  I threaded worms onto his hook while Scotty drank beer and smoked. His older brother was a phantom of cool, delivering pot and beer, sometimes pizza. His sister had fetched me at the airport, barefoot in a leaf-green MG. I thought I pleased his mom with my conscientious manners and the little cachepot I’d brought on the plane as a hostess gift. Scotty had been furloughed from his job over at the marina for filling the water tank of a yacht with gasoline. Or it might have been vice versa, he wasn’t sure, but anyway they got really mad. So we puttered around, the two-stroke engine giving us an excuse to fail to make conversation. The islands we skirted were discrete and tiny, some of them holding only one house, ringed by gravel and pine trees, a gentle wash of wind and wave like a halo around each one. We motored somewhere and went cliff diving. We motored somewhere else for sandwiches. Scotty pointed out Skull and Bones Island. I had already been thinking it looked spooky, but a lot of those little islands did, so I didn’t understand he was showing me the territorial home of the powerful Yale secret society. I figured someone had died there—maybe it was the site of a Native American massacre? A cholera outbreak? Scotty wasn’t interested in Yale—Thousand Islands was filthy with Elis, in their faded blue caps, but he was the tail end of old money’s ambition-quashing habit, his the generation that gives up entirely on private docks and heads out west to major in ceramics.