But when I think of Tim, my stomach twists with a sense of guilt, and a memory of betrayal I can’t quite place. It wasn’t about a person. It was about the absence of a person. I liked Tim well enough, but I was using him, plain and simple, for protection, and he was far too emotionally aware to pretend that I was an active participant in this couple we were forming. I remember him saying my name, as though to wake me up from a trance, and then, after watching my face for a moment, shaking his head as though I’d disappointed him. I remember him gradually spending less time with me and more time with his roommates and friends.
I was pretending to be nuts, but I was actually cracking up, too—utterly disconnected and careless. In choir I had almost completely lost my voice, so the only time I could hear myself was in the empty stairwells of my dorm, where the acoustics were so sharp that the tiniest tone was amplified. I didn’t talk much, but I did practice alto lines in the stairwells. My grades remained almost perfect. I slept around five hours a night. I arrived at the rink for hockey practice and watched the last of the varsity boys’ practice—Rick Banner was terrifically tall on skates, taller than Budge and his sidekick, than any of them. I watched them to prove I could, to prove to them, and to myself, that I was not afraid. Their blades cut and cracked the ice. They sent sprays of shavings in every direction. The rink’s coldness was so dry I could barely breathe. I saw those men as sharply as if they’d been etched onto the air. I heard every sound of their skates. I could not seem to lose them in a scrimmage or a crowd. But Tim I saw as though he were on the wrong end of a telescope, small and wobbly, smiling his huge smile.
By spring break, we had fizzled out. I was aware that he was angry but didn’t try to determine why. I just couldn’t bring myself to act.
“Lacy must be happy,” Mrs. Fenn wrote to my parents in her adviser note that semester. “She sings in the hallways.”
8Spring 1991, Fifth Form
When I told a therapist in my mid-twenties about how I fell skiing in New Mexico on spring break of that year, fifth form at St. Paul’s, and broke my hand, she suggested that I’d done so intentionally. “Not that you planned for that particular bone,” she said, to clarify. “But that you needed a visible injury to allow you to admit to harm.”
I’m as open as anyone to the notion of the unconscious working the borders of intention, and I appreciate the line of authority she was trying to offer me—to suggest that some part of me was aware of my situation and powerfully able to alter events to draw attention to it. How tempting it is to fold accidents into our own narration. To think that it wasn’t as simple as sitting back on my skis at the end of the day, on a mild slope, and stumbling onto my outstretched right hand, my ski pole acting as a lever to hyperextend my thumb so that the tendon pulled away a bit of bone. But in fact, it was. It took less than a second and very little speed. It’s called skier’s thumb, and I went home from the mountains and back to school in a bright pink cast.
“Crawford Curse,” said my mom.
I am not sure a dumb fall on a rich ski hill qualifies as bad luck. On balance, I think that if you’re a sixteen-year-old on skis on spring break, you are still officially in the good-luck category.
Mom added, “But at least it was the last day, right?”
I didn’t tell her that if I’d known how easy it was to break a bone, how much power you could generate from sliding just a little bit fast, I might have found a way to die. Could it be done gently? Could I have it happen before I knew it was happening, just disappear without having to do the dying?
The morning I fell, I had been walking across our rented condo in full-body long underwear, heading to find my ski socks, when my father, already dressed and eager to get on the lift line, looked up from his newspaper and said, “Lacy. Where did you get that figure?”
I froze. Mom shouted from the bedroom. “Jim!”
Dad’s face was guileless. He meant it only as a compliment, an impulsive expression of surprise. My shape was mature, attractive, and this shocked him. It was such a simple slip. But my skin felt iced. He’d seen me as a woman, not his child. Not even a woman: a body. So I was right: even here, even to him, the girl I had been—the person I had been—was gone.
I did not answer my dad. The question seemed particularly cruel because my figure would have come genetically from him and my mother, so that he was, in a way, complimenting (implicating?) himself. I’d had nothing to do with it.
“What?” Dad asked, in response to my mother—half puzzled, half defiant. He wore a fallen smile.
I was in ski school all day, buried in fleece. Our instructor, Blake, was something of a local legend for his freestyle skiing. He was raffish and attractive, in his mid-twenties, and when he wasn’t teaching teenagers in ski school he hurled himself off cliffs and did full-layout flips on the way down. At lunch in the busy cafeteria he was high-fived so often he just stopped making his hand available. The rest of my ski-school classmates competed to come up with a story or a joke to catch his attention, but I thought he was dull.
“So, ah, Lacy… what grade are you in back in—what did you say—Chicago?”
“I live in Chicago,” I said. “But I’m a junior
