Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

the legal term rape originated to describe a violation of property, not person, which is why it applied only to intercourse, and only to women.

Assault conjures violence, not violation. Hence the necessary modifier, sexual. But sexual assault puts sex right in the front window, even though the encounter isn’t, to the victim at least, about sex at all, but about cruelty exacted in domination and shame.

So, assault. There are also encounter, incident, event, attack, happening, situation, night in question, time in that room. Little-known fact about victims: they can tell whether you believe them by which term you use when you ask what happened to them.

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.

Everything I knew about sex came from the Clan of the Cave Bear series, the orphaned white woman raised by Neanderthals finally finding the lone white man who is wandering prehistoric Earth, looking for her.

Because I could not stop to tell, the telling kindly stopped for me.

“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?

That she somehow already knew struck me as no more or less shocking than the thing he had done. I gathered that I was newly arrived to where my mother was, in this world of downstairs men at night, where I supposed all women lived.

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.

They called her lucky, which foreclosed the possibility of their understanding the impact of what had been done to her.

The blanket projection of proto-consent, cast across all the days and nights of my life.

In other words: to believe in the perfect victim is to believe in no victim at all.

Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination.

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.

The novel’s unfolding was not linear, and this offended my new hunger for logic—a rigid, illiterate instinct that emerged the day after the assault, as if in open revolt against the girl with a head full of stories who had cruised to their room.

What is to be said about the fact that the teacher who reached me—who made me not only think but feel, who ignited the material at hand—was one who was abusing his power of connection with other girls? Do we call that an unfortunate coincidence? Am I betraying the women he violated by writing about how he, almost alone and without knowing it, helped me that fall?

suddenly at his seat, as though to give a toast, and shouted, “Hey!” All the tables looked up. We were in our usual circle—the Kittredge girls and now Meg and Tabby, too—and we all turned. Knox’s friend was staring hard at Caroline. “You could have had him,” said this minion, pointing to Knox. “Do you understand that?” Caroline was pale, her eyes pained. She’d been hanging out with Dave the rower for a few weeks, but she hadn’t said anything unkind, hadn’t rejected Knox to his face—she had just taken up with someone else. We girls were uncertain how to react to this boy’s eruption of righteous anger.

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?

I’d tried so hard not to crack, and now my friend, my dear friend, was asking me a question that felt like yet another invasion. I could not answer her.

The outbreaks would recur every six weeks or so, because I was not taking Zovirax prophylactically, which would have been medical protocol for my diagnosis. But the doctor at St. Paul’s did not, would not, tell me what was wrong.

Such a good girl, hanging on by a thread. Given the chance, I would finish her off.

As I got older, I looked forward to discovering what it was that they did not like about Mom because, I assumed, it must be true about me too. I was her girl; I meant to do more of whatever it was.

I saw my grandparents once a year, and they did not appear to enjoy it. “They hate me, and they hate my children,” Mom said, in the car on the way down.

(No man receives a woman’s virginity, no matter how freely given.)

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

I’d fucked Budge the way firefighters torch the remaining grasses so the inferno has nowhere to go. But this thing kept getting bigger.

There is a contemporary inquiry into shame that suggests that shame is not as deeply rooted in guilt as in power.

shame is not the wholehearted burn that follows a realization of guilt, which we consider to be shame’s obvious antecedent, but rather a surplus of displeasure that adheres to one party—and always the less powerful one.

I too found self-destruction more interesting than bad luck. I admired it. Nothing was taken from Hobey Baker, I calculated, nothing visited upon him that he didn’t ordain. The only thing he’d ever had to give up was his own future.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I liked Tim well enough, but I was using him, plain and simple, for protection, and he was far too emotionally aware to pretend that I was an active participant in this couple we were forming.

“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.”

After my mother called the school to explain what had happened, the administration, as the school itself would later tell the Concord Police Department, conducted its own “internal investigation.” I was still on campus, since the year had not ended, but their investigation did not include talking to me.

have wondered if I’m able to lose these particulars again and again because I know they’re written down, so I don’t have to take care of them—but this is a curious piece of anthropomorphism. In fact, I murdered details by the thousand that spring and summer.

“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 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.)

Teachers refused to punish me, which was another way of saying they refused to look after me. I could do anything here, because nobody was willing to see me anymore.

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.

Alex had been a top recruit to St. Paul’s. I saw, immediately, that this weight was burying him. The father was exceptional. The son was gifted and terrified.

“I guess I haven’t left because I refuse to give up,” I said.

He took my hands in his hands, and when I was still he said, “Oh, my god, Lacy. You didn’t think it was you, did you? You thought it was you?” That spot in the meadow thereafter has, in my memory, a tiny light, a little firefly point I’m sure I could still see if I ever went back. Other places on campus lit too, that fall, one by one.

And while I heard him vulgar and puerile plenty of times, never once did I hear him deploy the feminine as insult. He could hit hard enough to leave girls out of it.

lay inside that strength. It was threat turned inside out, given to me handle-first. It is possible that I owe Alex Ault my life.

And I would not call it rescue, because once I was in college and Alex and I were no longer together, I felt the old powerlessness return. I had learned nothing at all. But while we were together, it held.

After I graduated, a female vice rector had brought witness accounts, along with her concerns, to the rector and the board of trustees, and argued to remove Katzenbach from the school community. The school responded by firing her.

What had happened to me paled beside her attack—and in any case I did not yet understand how the school’s silencing of me had been, in its way, the greater crisis. But Susan must have, because she gave me a copy of a paper she’d written about the importance of being heard.

“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 carried her paper everywhere, keeping it in my bag beside my calendar and my notebooks and my student ID.

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.

There could not have been a clearer instance of the ravenous paternalistic entitlement of this school, to help itself to my doctor and my privacy even in my absence. The boys fucked my throat, and then another guy went down there too, just to tidy things up.

‘That was 1990, this is 2018. 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.