Notes on a Silencing Read online

  I understand. School days were long and exhausting, but the claustrophobic nature of boarding school, hothouse that it is, tends toward ennui: every morning, at breakfast, These people again? The nation was at war in the Persian Gulf. The Berlin Wall was coming down. But we at school knew little of anything, since there was only one television in each dorm’s common room, and it was often broken. In any case we had little time for television. No internet. The only cell phone was a satellite phone the size of a woman’s handbag, owned by the son of a scion, and you had to go to his room during visiting hours to check it out. Nothing much was happening. And even if there had been something of interest to discuss on that night or any other at Seated Meal, how often did you have a prudish junior girl, a strawberry-blond chorister who had never had sex or much of a love life at all, just up and cruise to a senior boy’s room around midnight to suck two cocks in one go? It was good stuff. I’d have been talking about it, too.

  Especially good gossip, no matter how outlandish, contains the sense of its own inevitability. How unlikely I was to have become, of a single night, a prep-school porn star! The illogic of my fall made its own case for truth. Stranger things. She just cracked. I wondered, when everyone was so quick to believe what the boys claimed, if this proved that it was my fault. There was something ugly that they had all seen in me, but I had not.

  I was young for my class, having entered St. Paul’s as a high school sophomore—a fourth former—aged only fourteen. I’d started my period a few months prior and was still surprised every time it happened. I was freckled. Just barely had the braces off. I had the knees and spindle of a girl.

  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. One of them wore Chanel suits and pearl-drop earrings, the left earring white and the right one black. One of these girls came with a boyfriend from Bermuda, who was blond and had sapphire eyes and a comical jaw, like the wrong prince in a Disney movie. When we walked into Seated Meal, when the great studded doors opened, he set his hand on the small of her back to guide her in, as though they were forty.

  At Parents’ Weekend that first fall, over supper at the nicest restaurant in town, this girl’s mother leaned close to my mom and said something, and my mother, pale with fright, excused herself to the bathroom. Later Mom told me she’d been asked if I was on the pill. The other mom had started her own daughter on it, she offered, so her daughter could “enjoy herself.”

  By Thanksgiving my fabulous fuckable friend had dumped her beach prince and taken up with a senior, and new opportunities beckoned. One plan was to steal the newb book from her boyfriend’s dorm. This was an actual stapled booklet of names, home addresses, and birthdays of the new students, typed neatly beneath thumbnail photographs. (The pejorative newb, derived from new boy, had not evolved after almost twenty years of coeducation.) It took some sneaking around to get hold of the newb book belonging to a popular sixth-form boy, but my city friends knew schedules and corridors. Giggling, we thumbed the pages. Her boyfriend and his senior chums had rated all the girls from 1 to 10, to two decimal points. I was happy to see that many of the girls I was coming to know, and whom I liked a good deal, were 7s and 8s. Some assessments struck me as harsh: a curvier girl was graded ruthlessly, and a few African American girls not at all. Other girls, shy but clear-cheeked, had pleasingly high marks. My friends were 10s, natch.

  We found my name. Under my picture someone had written: “If a fart had a face.”

  “It’s just not a great photograph,” said my New York friend, and turned the page.

  Twenty-five years later, in California, I was having dinner with a classmate from St. Paul’s who herself had been raped while a student there, though her attacker was a much older alumnus who liked to take advantage of the fact that there were no locks on our dorm-room doors. We laughed about this, drinking red wine a quarter of a century later. Imagine that—Gothic piles full of sleeping girls, unlocked doors each to each, in the middle of the New Hampshire woods! The country roads we ran on to train for our sports seasons rose and fell along decrepit stone walls, the asphalt shattered from ice and salt. The view was in all directions forested and gave onto an occasional dimly screened clapboard house. It is pure Stephen King country, adjacent to his native Maine. My friend poured more wine and said, “Imagine the book he could write!”

  I told her about my assault for the first time that night. She’d known about it but not known it, she said, and she thanked me for telling her. Her boyfriend was with us, and because he is my husband’s dear friend, I filled in some of the story: how the boys had called me on the pay phone of my dorm, and how surprising this had been. “You have to understand,” I told him, adding detail he would not have known, “that these guys had girlfriends. Beautiful, athletic women…”

  My friend interrupted me. “Cool,” she said, nailing it. “They were cool girls.”

  But they too were used, as surely as the threat of the faculty member catching me there, to lure me in and silence me afterward. The leap of self-preservation my mind made when the boys pushed me down was that no one could ever know about whatever this thing was that was going to happen, because they had girlfriends. (That was also, not incidentally, the chief reason why it never occurred to me that the boy on the phone wanted my body. He dated a beautiful senior, a girl way beyond my measure.) If it were ever known that I had scrumped with these two—the term we students used to describe what happened between boys and girls—I would be shunned. Basic social arithmetic. At the level of my thoughts, at least, I was more in thrall to those girls than I was to myself.

  That my reputation vis-à-vis their girlfriends was my concern tells me that I had immediately arrived at two conclusions: first, that a physical assault, whatever form that was to take, was assured. And second, that nobody would believe it wasn’t my fault.

  Another note on terms: the two males might be called boys or men, and I use the words largely interchangeably. They were both eighteen years of age, so legally they were adults. Men. But they were high school students, and in high school we were not men and women but boys and girls. They lived in boys’ dorms and they played on boys’ teams. They were members and, in several cases, between the two of them, captains of the varsity boys’ soccer, football, ice hockey, basketball, and lacrosse teams.

  I can’t call them guys because there is a friendly familiarity in the word that evokes a certain forbearance of behavior, as with lads, and I won’t give them that.

  Perpetrators does nothing for me. Assaulter is not a word. Attackers is useless because they were not Gauls, and so is accused, because I am not here accusing them, nor have I ever accused them. I eventually talked about what happened in that room, but so did they—long before I did, and in much more salacious terms. Nobody has ever disputed what happened between us, what body part went where. By the time I broke my silence, everybody knew, and everybody believed it was my fault. I thought that a good girl—the one they were accusing me of not being—would agree. My assumption of guilt was my defense against guilt.

  Girl works for me. I was fifteen.

  Two days after the assault, I was walking down the vaulted corridor that led from the dining halls, the place where all the names were carved, when a slovenly ice-hockey player behind me muttered, “I heard those freckles can fly.” I turned and looked at him: stained khaki pants, last year’s red-and-white letter jacket, a spray of blond hair in a near-mohawk, like the ghost of a rooster’s comb. Then I turned my eyes forward. I was walking alone, though students filled the hall in groups of twos and threes.

  “It’s true, isn’t it?” he pressed. The shorter jock beside him guffawed. “Freckles everywhere.”

  I did not turn around again. I heard their enormous sneakers scuffing the tile and I kept a measured pace as I pressed out the doors and walked down the hill towar
d Chapel and class, moving the way every bullied child in history has ever walked, eyes stinging, back on fire, wishing to vanish into another world.

  They stopped hassling me. But I made note of the incident—I was taking the pulse of the community’s awareness, and it was quickening by the hour.

  And yet the girlfriends appeared not to know. This, wondrously, given my fears, persisted. They appeared not ever to know. One of them was in my grade and on my tennis team, and we remained as friendly as we had ever been. The other was a neutral stranger in the halls, to my eyes a nearly mythical beauty, shrugging back her long, glossy hair and twining her fingers with her boyfriend’s on the way out of breakfast. It was impossible that his hand could hold hers after how it had held me down. It was impossible that these girls had not heard the news that I had cruised to their boyfriends’ room and gotten them both off.

  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.

  A few days after he’d first heckled me, again I found myself in a hall alongside the boy with rooster hair. His shuffle. His sidekick: shorter, same hair, also shorter. They had shed their other buddies this time, which is why my skin tightened when the taller one said, “Hey.” Without an audience, he must have had a different purpose in calling out to me. Something he meant to convey.

  I slowed.

  This hallway, which ran from the dining halls the length of the largest building on campus, was a glassed-in cloister, and the high windows streamed with morning sun. On the inside wall were affixed wooden panels carved with the names of more than a century of alumni, form by form. Individually they were fun to read, but collectively they gave a creepy impression of silent watchfulness, not unlike a cemetery. Sometimes I liked to try to guess, as I walked to and from meals, whereabouts on that hallway the line between life and death would fall. Which classes were mostly gone by now? Which still hanging on? Time’s shadow, tracking along. I was selfish with youth. We all were.

  The wooden benches in front of the panels were heaped with backpacks and jackets hurled by kids on their way to dine. Periodically, entryways opened onto dark staircases that led up to the three dorms that together made up this broadside length of the building. We called these dorms North, Center, and Wing. When I was there, they were respectively for boys, girls, and boys. It was somewhere around Center when the taller boy called out to me. I am not sure if it’s a trick of memory that all the other students seemed to fade away, or if he chose a moment when no one else was there, but it was just the two of them, tall and short, walking behind me for a good span of the red tile in the morning light. We were heading to Saturday classes, only a half day, and no Chapel. There was release in the air.

  I turned around and walked backward, keeping my distance.

  The taller boy smiled. He had a full, smug mouth and an ordinary name that nobody used, preferring the nickname “Budge.” There was never a day he didn’t wear his hockey jacket, but I doubt he had reason to sport anything else—he was a hockey thug. These boys were fixtures. St. Paul’s considered itself the American cradle of the sport, and prospective families were shown the pond where the first sticks and pucks had been used in a little nineteenth-century game called shinny. Our hockey fable culminated in the dashing figure of Hobey Baker, Form of 1909, the Philadelphia Main Line boy who became a legend on the ice at St. Paul’s and Princeton, and later a World War I flying ace. People always said that Hobey Baker “had it all,” meaning it was rare to find supreme athletic talent in a blue-blooded body. By the time I was at St. Paul’s, the school seemed to have settled on admitting blue bloods and recruiting athletes. These dueling cultures were clear. Budge the hockey player listened to heavy-metal rock ballads and shaved the sides of his head, while the squash-playing heirs, feeling similarly restless, grew silky locks, wrote sonnets, and traded Dead bootlegs. Budge was without subtlety. I admired this, and I felt a little bit sorry for him. Also, he had a girlfriend, a girl a grade behind me who played on my soccer team. She spoke of him as though he was a wayward stray. Everything Budge said was sarcastic, everything a joke. Was he in on the fact that he was there only for what he could do on the ice? Was this the reason for the hair, the nickname, the filthy pants and semaphore jacket?

  “Budge,” I said.

  “What’s up?” he replied.

  His sidekick was grinning.

  Budge said nothing more, so after a moment I turned back around. This sort of thing happened with Budge—he liked to provoke you and then let the clock run out. It left you wondering if you were supposed to have done something differently.

  “Hey,” he said again. “I’m gonna pop your cherry.”

  I kept walking. Autumn light streamed in. The panels of names were honeyed with sun. Pop your cherry. That ugliness rattled around the majesty of the place, a horsefly trapped in a cathedral. The beauty was immune to the puerile, and the puerile unmoved by beauty.

  “Okay, Budge,” I said, without interest. “Whatever.”

  “Okay?” His voice tightened. “You mean it?” Two paces, three. His buddy chuckled and I startled. They had closed the space behind me. “You said okay.”

  My back to them, I shook my head and rolled my eyes. Sure. Whatever. But I was losing my grip on the casual. Because how did he know I was a virgin? Why did he care? What about his girlfriend? If he was not worried about her, what other rules would he transgress?

  “I’m serious,” called Budge. I heard heat in his voice, and his buddy fell silent. “I’m going to be your first.”

  He wanted me, because he knew that for me, now, there would actually be no first. Whatever had been innocent was gone, and this was why he was trailing me down the hall on the way to math class, to loot what was left after the smashup. I hated him. If my virginity had been a ring, I’d have ripped it off and hurled it at him right there, to get it the hell off my hand. I’d have let it clatter to the floor.

  “I’m gonna do it,” he said, as I pressed through the doors and out into the morning.

  Around this time, in the first days and weeks after the assault, I became aware of a curious mind’s-eye perspective I had never held before. I saw myself as if from high above, moving across campus, going from dorm to Schoolhouse and back again. Whenever I crossed a quad, I saw the top of my own head, way down there, progressing right to left. When I approached the Schoolhouse or chapel, buildings with their own gravity, I watched myself as a tiny figure being pulled in, as though I were about to be swallowed up.

  I was always so far away as to be featureless, almost a speck, and my vulnerability was clear. How exposed I was, walking the paths! My progress across campus seemed terribly slow; it took me forever to get back inside. Why didn’t I run? The tiny-self moved about her days, oblivious to danger, almost automated in her ignorance.

  But there was also the self up here, perched aloft and fretting. And there was the rapacious threat that I sensed for my self-on-the-ground, born in my own mind, the way that all of our nightmares are entirely our own. So that when I saw myself push through the doors of Wing and head out into the morning, sugar maples burning themselves alive on either side of me and sky blue blue blue, I willed myself to get away from Budge as fast as I could. But also I imagined turning and taking him on. Also I imagined being him, and how easy it would be to ruin me. Maybe, if that happened, this tiny person would go away, and I could be free?

  Several days after
the assault—maybe four, maybe five—I began to feel properly ill. Feverish, achy, my neck wrapped in painful lumps that rose up under my ears. I welcomed such persistent, credible sensations of dis-ease. I would have to take care of myself.

  There was pleasure in the untethered focus that proper flu demands. This did not mean slacking off my classwork, or failing to deliver assignments. It was more an unshackling from constant vigilance of my own performance. I did not care who was looking at me on the way to class—I had a fever, I was deep in a scarf. I did not care whether a missed hello was intentional—I was unwell, I might not have heard. Shivering suited me. There were things I was trying to shake off, after all, and I sat there quivering like a dog in my chapel seat, letting my eyes go soft over the rows of faces in the long pews across the way. 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 my line of sight was a stained-glass window with biblical script:

  Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do

  The knowledge of the secrets of the Kingdom of God has been given to you.

  It scans well, and I tried to take in its almost-pragmatic message of encouragement. Walking the path to classes, I had its beat in my head: Now get up and go. Now get up and go. There was no city, but I substituted a hazy notion of future. I liked to think there was a direction for me, however much solitude it might demand, however much loneliness.

  In the library one evening after Seated Meal I pulled out a Bible, alive with silverfish, and looked it up.