Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

We were blessed with excellence, and excellently blessed, and our schoolwork and sports teams and choirs and clubs and shoulders thrummed with the Calvinist confidence that is actually a threat: if you do not become spectacular, it means you are not us. We got sick a lot.

In my very first week at the school, I had been taken up by two classmates, also fourth formers, who trailed urban sophistication (Washington and New York) and Samsara perfume. They thought I was hilarious and sweet. I thought they were holograms.

Particularly in light of what came later, I have wondered if the girlfriends’ refusal to come after me was a deliberate act of grace. Plenty of people vilified me, but these two never did—at least not to my face. “Maybe it happened to them too,” offered a classmate in graduate school. She was writing a dissertation on various versions of the embodiment of pain. The queer theorist beside her said, “Then that’s bullshit, because they needed to rally behind you.” This latter thought had never occurred to me. What a wonder. Can you imagine? We don’t expect such things of girls, from girls, for girls. I was beyond grateful to be treated to simple silence.

Our chapel was among the oldest and largest examples of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in the nation. It seated eight hundred and was nowhere near capacity even with all of us in our assigned spots, four mornings a week and occasional Sundays. Its majesty seemed always to contain some rebuke. We gathered, I felt, like pebbles at the bottom of a deep lake. You could never amass enough to reach the daylight.

In the wintertime, Seated Meal dropped to two nights a week, on the theory that it was too dark and cold for us to have to dress up after sports every evening. Nights we did not have Seated, we could shuffle up to the dining halls and choose our spot among the two rooms set aside for cafeteria dining—they were called Middle and Lower. Middle was brighter and larger than Lower, though still, on winter evenings, almost industrial in the way the black windows glowered at us.

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.