Notes on a Silencing Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by Lacy Crawford

  Cover design by Lucy Kim

  Cover © Pari Dukovic / Trunk Archives

  Author photograph by Camille Quartz

  Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group

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  First Edition: July 2020

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  ISBN 978-0-316-49154-9

  LCCN 2019947036

  E3-20200615-DA-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Notes on a Silencing

  1: October 1990, Fifth Form

  2: Fall 1989, Fourth Form

  3: Fall 1990, Fifth Form

  4: January 1990, Fourth Form

  5: Summer 1990

  6: Fall 1990, Fifth Form

  7: October 1990, Fifth Form

  8: Spring 1991, Fifth Form

  9: Summer 1991

  10: Fall 1991, Sixth Form

  11: Alumna, SPS Form of 1992

  12: Investigation, 2016

  13: Summer 2018

  14: September 2018

  15

  Discover More

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Lacy Crawford

  For girls on the stairs

  and for S, N, and T

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  I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty.

  Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

  Author’s Note

  This is, among other things, a story of slander, of how an institution slandered a teenage girl to coerce her into silence. To survive, the story of slander must resonate. An entire community is therefore implicated, and also burdened. I believe this is especially true for a school. We were young. The institution was always the greater power.

  Most names and identifying details have been changed, particularly those belonging to my schoolmates.

  Notes on a Silencing

  1

  October 1990, Fifth Form

  One evening around eleven o’clock, a young man called a girl on the phone. This was a few decades ago, and they were students at a boarding school, so he called the pay phone in her dorm from the pay phone in his. Someone answered and pounded up three flights of stairs to knock on the girl’s door. She was not expecting the call. He was a senior—a grade ahead, but a couple of years older—and he was upset. Crying, she thought, but it was hard to tell, because she barely knew him. He said something about his mom, swallowing his words. He wanted the girl’s help. Please.

  She knew the senior because she had helped his friends in math class. He’d joked in the hall to her once that maybe she could help him sometime. It had been a surprise that he’d sent his attention her way, and this phone call was a bigger surprise. Something must have happened, she reasoned. Something very bad.

  She had no roommate that year and lived across campus from her friends (an unfortunate turn of the school housing lottery). Her parents were a thousand miles west. It will tell you something about her naivete, and maybe her character, that to her the strange specificity of the senior’s request—for her help, and no one else’s—is what made his summons feel important, and true.

  School rules forbade leaving the dorm at that hour, but she knew, as they all did, how to let the back door close without rattling the latch. She skirted pools of lamplight where campus paths crossed. His room was in shadow. He pulled her up through the window. She landed, in his hands, on a mattress, and she felt and then dismissed surprise—beds could sit beneath windows, of course, there was nothing wrong with that.

  His roommate was on the bed too. She didn’t know the roommate at all.

  Neither of them had shirts on. Neither of them, she saw, as her eyes adjusted, had pants on.

  She said, “What’s wrong?”

  They shushed her and gestured toward the wall. Each student dormitory incorporated at least one faculty apartment, where the head of the dorm lived, sometimes with a family. Mr. B.’s apartment was right there, they warned. Her voice through the wall would bring him in, blazing.

  He would catch her (she realized) after hours in a male dorm with two undressed seniors on a bed.

  Suspension. Shame. Her parents’ shame. (College!)

  There was a moment while she waited for the one who had called to tell her how she could help him. He pressed her down. When his roommate did this too, she understood that she could not lift these men and would have to purchase her release a different way.

  Four hands on her, she said, “Just don’t have sex with me.”

  Instead they took turns laying their hips across her face. Their cocks penetrated her throat past the pharynx and poked the soft back of her esophagus, so she had to concentrate to breathe. The repeated laryngeal spasms in her throat—the gag reflex—caused her throat to narrow and grip their dicks rhythmically.

  Someone unbuttoned her jeans and stuck his fingers inside her.

  When they were finished, she climbed out the window and walked back to her own dorm, keeping to campus roads this time. There were two security guards who patrolled the grounds in a white Jeep. The kids called them Murph and Sarge, and they saw everything. But they did not see her.

  She found the door as she’d left it, gently ajar.

  After a long shower, she slept.

  This happened in the fall of my junior year in high school, when I was, as we said—using the English terms—a fifth former at St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. I have told this story, or some version of it, dozens of times since then. I have told it to parents and friends and therapists and boyfriends and lawyers and strangers. I have been recorded telling it to detectives. I have written it in fictionalized form, work that took years and went nowhere. I have gone years in new cities not telling it at all.

  It’s not a remarkable story.

  In fact, it’s ordinary. A sexual assault at a New England boarding school. (A boarding school! I was assaulted in privilege; I have survived in privilege.) What interests me is not what happened. I remember. I have always remembered.

  What interests me is the near impossibility of telling what happened in a way that discharges its power.

  I like to imagine there was a moment, maybe immediately afterward, when my sneakers hit the sandy soil beneath their window and I was free to go, when I might have grabbed the incident by the tail and whipped it around to face me so I could see exactly wh
at was in its eyes.

  I had a therapist once, in my early twenties, who suggested that I might describe the event to her and then “never tell it again,” positing a future in which I would have no use for it, which is a way of saying that the assault would have no use for me. She was talking about moving on. I was still mired in the search for remedy.

  A note on terms: it took a very long time to find the right name for what happened to me. I was too stunned to think rape when I pleaded with them not to have sex with me, though rape, in the traditional sense, was precisely what I meant to avoid. I had been raised to believe that by every metric, the most serious thing a girl could do was have a penis in her vagina. Not even Mary the mother of Jesus had done that. Certainly I had not. It had not occurred to me what else these two boys might do.

  Rape was serious, and I thought—and wanted to think—that what happened to me didn’t really count. I did not understand how the boys’ violation was of me, rather than only a part of me; I did not understand that self-esteem and safety weren’t held like treasure between a girl’s legs, but could be plundered in other ways. This conclusion was neatly congruent with my sense of my body and in particular with a wordless marrow urgency that pulsed, in those first days, with forgetting all about it. I had no purchase even on a name.

  For years thereafter, I envied the monosyllabic force of the word rape. Say rape, and people get it. People know the telos of the encounter (intercourse) and the nature of the exchange (nonconsensual). Whereas I had no label. I did not think rape applied, and in any case I refused it, as my private way of caring for other girls; I considered it important to reserve the word for those who would use it to describe their own assaults. I meant this as a form of respect.

  Twenty-five years after I’d left St. Paul’s, a detective with the Concord Police Department sent me the 1990 New Hampshire criminal statutes. The terms for the penetrative events of that night were felonious sexual assault (because I was under sixteen) and aggravated felonious sexual assault (because I was held down). I found some satisfaction in this clarity, but only some. I read the statutes over and over. Nowhere in them does the word rape appear. Legally, in New Hampshire as in many other jurisdictions, there are only degrees of assault—descending circles of violation. This is a marker of evolving jurisprudence, because 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.

  I was looking for it, though. I was looking for the word for the worst thing. For the thing that had not quite happened to me, but which would, when it happened to a girl, trigger rescue, awaken the world, summon the cavalry. As an adult I knew better than to think rape would do it, but still I must have believed it was out there. Still.

  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. And this leaves the listener to wonder: if it wasn’t rape, then what exactly went on? Which means a person, however kind and concerned for you, hears the term sexual assault and is left either guessing or trying not to guess which part of you was violated and in what ways or what you did or how far it (you) went.

  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.

  Victim is a whole other kettle of fish.

  When I woke up the morning after the assault, my throat hurt. This often happened. We were five hundred teenagers in a New England boarding school dominated by architectural grandeur and mediocre plumbing. The buildings were either icy or boiling. In the cavernous bathrooms, we learned to yell “Flushing!” before the surge of cold water into the john caused every running shower on three floors to scald. Our windows breathed frost. We woke to glazed lawns and ran across them, athletes, with hair that was always wet. We ate like rats at the back of a bakery, arriving in Chapel with buttered bagels in our pockets. We were wealthy (except for the few, obvious, who were not), well-turned, and in the process of refinement, and our homesickness was a small candle beside the hard-banked fires of our own becoming. Our headmaster, the rector, told us from the pulpit that ours was a “goodly heritage.” Senators, bishops, authors, barons, moguls, ambassadors, peerless curators of life of all kinds had preceded us—schoolboys then! We dragged our fingers along the letters of their names, carved in paneled halls.

  Once, during my time there, a man pushed through the double glass doors of the reading room in late morning. We looked up from books and peeked around red leather chairs. The man found the student he was looking for and bent to talk to him, and then he left. The room exploded—appropriately, of course, which meant quietly enough, in rapt whispers. The man was George Plimpton, and he had come to say something to his son, who was a student there.

  My point is that we were a room full of teenagers in the early 1990s who knew George Plimpton on sight. That was our job. His appearance on a weekday morning was like a pop quiz from the world.

  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.

  For the most part we ignored it. The ladies at the infirmary, sweet and ineffective, distributed aspirin in pleated cups. I didn’t bother, and anyway, what would I have said? “I was impaled by two dicks, ma’am—may I please have a lozenge?”

  My throat got better. I did not tell my friends what had happened. I did not intimate or tease, or do the things people do when they claim to want to keep a secret but really just want to seduce with the lovely shape of their almost-telling. I did not catch the boys’ eyes in Chapel. I did not let myself look for them.

  All that stuff I just said about money and power—that’s not just setting. It’s about character. I’m trying to show what I would have given up, what I thought I would have been forced to give up, if I had gotten caught in the boys’ room. I’m trying to argue my side. That’s why I didn’t scream, see? That’s why I didn’t claw their eyeballs out, or bite. I was trying to find my place in that moment, and I could not admit to myself that the moment was violent. Also I was trying to claim my place in what seemed to me, at fifteen, to be the test of my life. I already knew the colleges on offer for those of us who excelled. I had begun to work out the reason for the tiny pauses in conversation before and after people spoke my classmates’ last names. I had learned when it was acceptable to ask where someone had spent the summer, and when you should already know. Whose father held a Nobel and whose was under indictment; whose had just been sworn in and whose laid to rest with televised honors. I imagined our adolescent channels of envy and rapport to be the headwaters of the adult currents of law and policy and finance and education and the arts that you could not, once they were deep and running fast, jump into if you missed them now. I was the older of my parents’ two children, their girl, born to a small family in a small northern suburb of Chicago, and while Mom and Dad would never have said, precisely, that St. Paul’s would be the making of me, when we had toured the place the autumn I was thirteen, my parents had been so undone that I had seen them, for the first and only time in my life, holding hands. I understood this to be my chance to find my way into my own life. Into history. Do you see?

  I know I’m stacking the deck in my own defense. Which I should not have to do, because I was a minor and the boys were eighteen and there were two of them—one of whom was on that night almost a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than me. I was a virgin. They pushed me down and—

  I’m doing it again.

  The boys, however, talked.

  By supper (which four nights a week
we attended in formal attire—suit and tie, dresses or skirts) there were eyes on me that the previous day had been unseeing. It had been a steady source of frustration for me that I was unnoticeable, in spite of the assurances of my parents and friends that I was lovely and so on. I was particularly invisible to the boys whose attentions appealed to me: athletes, mostly, but also the occasional shaggy-haired poetic genius. Now several broad-shouldered seniors were looking at me. This was from across a room crowded with students, and as people passed unknowingly between them and me, I caught shadows of respite from the heat of their eyes.

  The tradition after Seated Meal was to gather with coffee or tea in the common room outside the dining halls, a sort of proto–cocktail party training. The boys who had assaulted me were not looking at me, but their teammates stared. These boys’ eyes, when I dared to meet them, were incredulous, afire. It seemed to me the best approach was to map the threat; to determine, with quick surveying glances, which boys knew and which did not. Then I’d simply avoid the ones who knew. In case I was uncertain what they knew, one of them called a word in my direction:

  “Threesome?”

  The term hadn’t occurred to me. No term had occurred to me. The event had hardened into wordless granite, silent and immobile, and I intended to go around it.

  My friends had not heard. But already I was being asked to admit or deny, so that standing there, saying nothing, willing my aching face to be still, I felt complicit in a lie. A space opened between my friends and me. I could all but hear the crack of ground giving way.

  In the days that followed, I watched the news pass from student to student, like that horror movie where the villain hops from stranger to stranger on a city street, awakening in each civil soul a demon.