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.

Sitting in my lit closet with the door closed while the night murdered the day sometimes helped.

I felt trapped by my own reckless feelings: too much sadness on the one hand and too much happiness on the other.

you could roll a car ten times and never hit anything taller than Queen Anne’s lace.

Then Dad drove us home through the cool rain, the trees bending low and green.

I was both rising to an adult comprehension of the fallibility of appearances and sinking toward an awareness of the ugly contortions of discretion.

He was a true buddy, usually faintly redolent of marijuana and, like all his kind, masterly at affecting indifference to any form of authority or routine.

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.

Everything glistened but nothing grew. I lived alone with my dangerous-looking Belgian shepherd and failed, year by year, to build a life. The plan was to drown myself in the Thames, though I left the door open for other actors to play the water’s part. It is an oversimplification to say this was all the fault of what happened at St. Paul’s. But the problem found its teeth there.