Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

“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?

“Is it okay if I tell your father?” “Yes,” I said. She nodded. “Later.” I agreed. The Lanes would be with us all day. We’d drive to the country club for lunch on the patio, overlooking the greens. I’d offer to take his children to the pool. The trick would be to get into the water without being seen in my swimsuit, to stay submerged until he left for another Scotch and soda. At some point Mom talked to Dad. I wasn’t there when she did. It was decided that nothing should be done about Jed Lane’s little bit of droit du seigneur, and the less said, the better. We’d just not have them stay the night anymore. And no more lunches downtown. This stuff happens. It’s infuriating, said Dad, but it does. So that was that.

That July, that August, I was both rising to an adult comprehension of the fallibility of appearances and sinking toward an awareness of the ugly contortions of discretion. Maturity: people lie, or at least deny, and you must too. Maturity: this means you can do things you are not supposed to do.

Trying again: the story of what he did would have attached to me, the high school sophomore out of bed in the small hours, like a cursed baton he’d passed to me on the stairs while my parents and his wife and his children and my brother slept. Why invite all of that? I imagined my family’s concern and understood it, and I took it in stride.

And in court I would have had lots of company arguing I wasn’t pure. The reason I hate to write what happened on that card table—what I did on that card table—is because it’s a defense attorney’s dream. Aha! Desire! As though my choice on one night cost me the benefit of the doubt forever. The blanket projection of proto-consent, cast across all the days and nights of my life.

I include the events of the summer I was fifteen in open defiance of this presumed vulnerability, and to force into view what is to me the chilling logic that a girl who has explored a boy’s body, or permitted her body to be explored in any way, is thereafter suspect as a victim.

In other words: it’s open season on her. In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.

I had no idea this could happen to me—the pure prey I had become, without leverage, without recourse. This encounter with power was shocking and wordless and I did not understand. What next? My jeans were unzipped. I kept my hand clamped over myself and thought AIDS, pregnancy, STDs. I’d had “health class” as a fourth former, and I remembered. If I could protect my virginity, I’d survive this.

The simplest way I can tell the story of my assault is to describe how the boys made me feel I was no longer a person.

It’s a curious thing how children are wired to ask for help when hurt or frightened—Ouch! Help me!—but shame turns this inside out: I can survive this as long as nobody else ever knows. As though secrecy itself performed some cauterizing function, which, of course, when it comes to the matter of self-delusion, it does. I couldn’t talk about what had happened without having to let myself think about what had happened. The secret served me.

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?

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.

Indifference is easy. It takes a surprising amount of energy to shun a person.

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.

School leadership talked to people about me. They had conversations with students, but not with my friends. They talked to the school psychologist, the school’s lawyer, and the physician in the infirmary. I do not know the substance of these conversations, but in the third week of May, the school psychologist, Reverend S., Vice Rector Bill Matthews, and the rector, Kelly Clark, sat down with the school’s legal counsel and arrived at the formal conclusion that, despite what I had claimed, and despite the statutory laws on the books in their state, the encounter between me and the boys had been consensual. They also concluded that they would not abide by state law and report the incident to the police. The authorities were not notified. They remained in the dark.

What she didn’t understand, I was convinced, was that I was a rising sixth former at an elite boarding school where you could either get counseling or be perfect, but not both, and that if you were not perfect, you were not safe. People would know you needed help. A psychiatrist visited campus one day a week and I’d never asked for a meeting with him, but I knew most of the kids who did. Success at St. Paul’s was not predicated on resilience or transcendence but on destiny, which meant you did not show defeat, not ever.

“Sure. You’re devastated. They stole your self-respect and ruined your sense of boundaries. It’s natural to take some time to get those things back.”

I felt a small surge of courage. Since Dr. Kerrow had explained to me about statutory consent, I’d held the idea like a fabulous gemstone—too precious to trot out, almost vulgar to wear, but a resource that might buy me passage in war. The law, it turns out, anticipates naivete, or at least allows that when a child and an adult engage in a sexual act, power will occupy so much of the province of desire (if indeed there is any) that wanting would be inauthentic. Consent is not possible. No matter what anyone else claimed, the law said it was not my fault.

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.

There is no way I could have stayed at school if I had let myself see what these lawyers, teachers, and priests had done. But I don’t think I could have figured it out even if I had been willing, because as far as I knew, the school had found out about my herpes only after my doctor had tested me for it at home. And by then the previous sixth formers had graduated, and everyone else had gone; there was no one left to gather and tell.

I learned that while the fallen woman may keep her unloved door plain and her drapes drawn, her circle small and her fire low—if she’s wise, I suppose, she will—the path to her back stoop will be well-traveled. I guarantee it.

This.

“The denial by the listener inflicts…the ultimately fateful blow,” Brison writes. If nobody believes you, part of you cannot survive. I grasped this instinctively.

I worked—I still work—to restore the boys’ humanity as a way of restoring mine: they were symptoms of a sick system, they were tools of the patriarchy, they were fooled by porn. But then the school went and did the same thing, denying my humanity, rewriting the character of a girl and spilling all her secrets to classmates to tempt them into shunning her. The teachers, rectors, lawyers, and priests of St. Paul’s School lied to preserve their legacy. It would take decades to learn not to hate the girl they disparaged, and to give her the words she deserved. It was the school’s inhumanity I could not—cannot—overcome. Because now I was up against an institution that subsumes human beings and presents a slick wall of rhetoric and posture and ice where there should be thought and feeling. Thus is the world, this world, made. I saw it everywhere.

Smoking gun. I had heard this before, from the pediatrician decades earlier. She’d used the phrase to explain to my mother how the sores in my throat were so far down that they all but precluded the possibility of consensual activity—never mind that my age negated consent altogether. When the doctor had said this, my mind had conjured a hot gun shoved in my mouth, muzzle right where it hurt.

Why now?’” A typically defensive question, and I could dismiss it for its insinuation that I had some underhanded motive whose tell was my delay in availing myself of the criminal justice system. I’m not sure what motive that would have been—I wasn’t suing, wasn’t pressing charges. But that wasn’t the point of the question. The question tries to portray the victim as the predator, the one with a clever plan. It aims to throw the whole circumstance on its head.

It’s so simple, what happened at St. Paul’s. It happens all the time. First, they refused to believe me. Then they shamed me. Then they silenced me. On balance, if this is a girl’s trajectory from dignity to disappearance, I say it is better to be a slut than to be silent. I believe, in fact, that the slur slut carries within it, Trojan-horse style, silence as its true intent. That the opposite of slut is not virtue but voice.