The doctor agreed that my marked clinical depression and associated lack of self-esteem were unlikely to abate on their own. The cause was almost definitely some combination of a strong biological predilection and certain environmental conditions, the specifics of which were unknown to him. We didn’t stay long to talk.
Dr. Miller wrote to Ms. Shay, my adviser at school, to work out how I could retrieve my medication. The school didn’t want me to keep it in my dorm room—Prozac was new then, and the school worried about pills getting lost or stolen. It was determined that the infirmary would hold the bottle, and I’d visit once a week for seven capsules in a matchbox-sized manila envelope. I kept them in the top drawer of my school-issue dresser, beneath my socks and underwear and alongside the dish towel–sized remnant of my baby blanket, Nigh-Nigh. Almost every newb had some transitional object hidden away. Get to know someone well enough and you’d discover a bear in a jacket pocket or the frayed rabbit that lived beneath the pillow. I even knew boys with Legos that they said were for math class somehow.
I told no one about my Prozac. There was no need. After all, I wasn’t seeing the school counselor, the way some students were, for emotional distress. I certainly hadn’t been referred to the psychiatrist who visited campus a few days a week to see more troubled students. Dr. Miller thought I was well supported. He wrote to Ms. Shay that he did not feel I needed to see a psychotherapist at that time, but that I should be discouraged from calling home at all hours in tears. Perhaps I could call him instead, he suggested. I never did.
Anyone well-versed in narratives of sexual assault might sense here the gathering contours of a familiar landscape: this girl is a damaged girl. She’s damaged in a way that makes her needy, that will cause her to seek out the inappropriate, transgress the proper, and probably lie. I mean, come on, the kid was on Prozac before Prozac had even been approved for use in children! There’s something just off about her already. We catch the wobble. Would it surprise you that this child came in for trouble in the coming months? Wouldn’t you expect just that?
This bias sits as brightly in my mind as anyone’s. I hesitate to mention Dr. Miller. And it’s true that I would not have considered him part of this story, had the school not later done what it did. After those winter consultations I never saw the doctor again. But when we send a child into someone else’s care, we take pains to detail everything that our child might possibly need, every possible reaction or concern, as a defense against the unknown. My parents let the school know all about Dr. Miller’s assessment, and how he’d prescribed Prozac for me. The school, acting in loco parentis, therefore had a record of my every possible vulnerability. I took my pill once a day, as directed, and felt certain, because they’d told me this, that no one would ever have to know.
3Fall 1990, Fifth Form
Ten days or so after the assault, just before Halloween of my fifth-form year, my throat began to hurt in a jagged way, as though I had swallowed a piece of glass and it would not go down. In the dining hall, I sipped ice water onto my tongue and then tipped my head back to let it run down my throat, because the act of swallowing caused the glass-edge to grind into me again. When I got really hungry, I did this with skim milk. The milk filled me up more than water did.
Back in Brewster House, where I was assigned my fifth-form year without any of the friends I had signed up to live with (unfortunate lottery, said the school; Crawford Curse at work again, said Mom), I went to the bathroom at odd hours so I could be alone to lean over the sinks, put my face right up against the mirror, and open my mouth as wide as possible.
There was never anything to see. I’d close my mouth and look at my reflection, as though there might be traces visible on my skin. Instead, I saw my whole family staring back at me. I had my father’s eyes, hazel and smaller than my mother’s, and not wonderfully wide-set like hers. I had his mouth and chin, too, with thin lips. My high forehead was from my mother’s mother—a mark of intelligence, she claimed—and already I saw in my squared jaw my father’s mother’s profile, held in lamplight over her needlepoint. Entirely mine were the remnants of an underbite that, until it was corrected via years of orthodontic procedures, gave me the dogged expression of a TV orphan—in every photo from my earliest years, I look determined as hell. My brother pulled from our grandfather the light blue eyes. But I got Mom’s cheekbones, and from the redhead genes that hopscotched through the generations on my father’s side I’d lucked into the strawberry-blond hair that my mother called “glorious.” It was my great-great-grandfather George Lacy Crawford who’d last had red hair, and I was given his name.
However imperfectly they all came together in me, I was theirs, and they wanted this school for me. So much so that
