Notes on a Silencing

by Lacy Crawford

I knew it marked me, to be this vulnerable, but I couldn’t stop the questions from coming into my mind, nor the sadness that followed them like fish on a line. My only hope had been to bury it all beneath sweetness and hard work. I was resigned to be a pretender.

I stood before that mirror in the second-floor bathroom of Brewster House, aged fifteen and almost unable to swallow, and determined that somehow my desire was to blame.

In the boys’ room, I had been unwilling to get caught and give up my perfect record and all I had achieved at school. Moments later, back on the path, I’d made a new bargain: I’d leave school altogether, as long as I never had to say what had just happened to me.

Among them all, there were some really nice kids. I’d met several, but for whatever reason, I hadn’t tried hard enough to talk to them and meet up with them again.

When the subject was a male, the verb was active and transitive: Henry boned Alexa. When the subject was a female, the verb was passive: Alexa was scored or got railed or got boned.

If my fear made me cynical, it also made me cold. I looked at a third former eating an orange like it was a burlesque show and made up my mind. That she might have been an artist or a goofball or a kid with this funny old habit with navel oranges, far from home, just fourteen? Never occurred to me.

I don’t think there exists a better way to untangle a girl’s admiration for a boy than to try to coach him through calculus.

The world was the same, too. But I had become aware of how it fit together in a new way. As though I’d come across a set of maps: here I’d spent all my life thinking the land contained the lakes, and just now discovered that in fact the earth is blue and we’re lucky to be afloat.

On this path from held to hurt, you could move in only one direction.

We were people on this earth. This life was all we had. It was all we fucking had, and life, my life, could not be determined by cruelty like this. It could not be allowed to stand.

Those trees, that expanse, formed the horizon of my courage, small as it might have been. I loved them.

“You don’t want to go digging, Jim,” he told my father. They had not previously been on a first-name basis. “Trust me. She’s not a good girl.”

“I’m telling you,” she’d say, Cassandra-like. “They will bury our daughter before they let this get out.”

I did not care about other children. I didn’t know who they were and I figured they’d have to take care of themselves, just as I had.

Take away anything, I thought. My school, my friends, my parents’ love. But do not dare tell me what I wanted, who I was on that night when I took your call and thought that you were sad.

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.

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.

John Buxton, the vice rector with whom I had never had a conversation and never would, had known that I had visited this clinician in town and had called him directly to discuss my private medical records.

It was hockey I thought of when I read about the agreement. I pictured two teams of young men scraping and slamming on the bright new ice, and how we imagine they are rivals when really they’re kings.

We weren’t remembering what had been done to my body, but what had been done to my reputation.

Lacy’s doing! Not a good girl. How powerful they had made me, these men, in denying the truth.

The work of telling is essential, and it is not enough. There is always the danger that the energy of the injustice will exhaust itself in the revelation—that we will be horrified but remain unchanged. The reason for this, I suspect, is that these are stories we all already know.

To hear these stories spoken aloud is jarring, but not because it causes us to reconsider who we are and how we are organized. It is only when power is threatened that power responds.

After all, the boys told everyone the story of our bodies in that room. The school took the news in stride. Despite their precious patter about goodness and virtue, my offense wasn’t what I did, and it certainly wasn’t what the boys did. It was that I showed up in a pediatrician’s office in my hometown with the clinical evidence of a crime. It was...

What I wanted was to find some way to release my peers from their shame. I wanted to show them the secret letter buried in each of their files, the one where the institution aligned against them determined how to keep them quiet, this blueprint of patriarchal silence. So that voices like the vice-rector’s—you are bad, your family must not look closely here—will roll off them and onto the grass, and they will tell, and tell, and tell.

“Love,” he said, “you want to know what I think?” I did. He held me and said, “Burn it all down.”

“Looking back, I realize maybe we weren’t all sluts. Maybe something else was going on there.”

Taken together, the stories I’ve heard describe a school where teachers preyed on boys and then, following the beginning of coeducation, teachers preyed on both boys and girls, a tradition that gradually handed off its violence to small groups of boys, year after year, who took advantage of or violated their peers.