The Last Chairlift

7. ALL ABOUT SEX

Keep in mind that my mother was the baby in the Brewster family, and then I was—hence the alleged accident of Little Ray’s birth was perceived as a precursor to the unplanned nature of my own coming into this world. This was the threefold, presumptive opinion of my aunts: that Little Ray and I were both unplanned; that a resultant chaos attended our births; that an ongoing haplessness would doom the rest of our lives.

To this joyless conviction, steadfastly upheld by Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, my grandmother had (albeit briefly) shone on my birth an unverified but undimming light—namely, what if I had been planned? What if I were no accident at all? If Rachel Brewster had intended to have me, didn’t that make me the sole reason for my existence? Since I had a mom who chose to spend six months of the year away from me, you can perhaps appreciate why I would cling to this hope.

I don’t mean I never saw my mother in the ski season. She never came home for Christmas and New Year’s, or for my March break; she was working as a ski instructor, and those were the busiest times in the ski season. However, she came to North Conway to see me—in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and again for the week of my March break.

My Christmases and New Years were spent “up north,” in the hearty companionship of the New Hampshire Norwegians. The Vinter side of my family was not universally positive. Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were ceaselessly optimistic. Robustly busy men, they took charge of us kids—not just waxing or sharpening our skis, and fussing over our boots and bindings, but rallying our spirits when we were tired or hungry or cold. Martin and Johan were endlessly active and cheerful outdoorsmen; they were not the suicidal Norwegians Ibsen brings to mind.

My uncles weren’t fjord-jumpers, but they were Norwegians, which once led me to believe they must have seen or read an Ibsen play. They’d named their children Henrik and Nora. As it turned out, Nora would inform me, Henrik had not been named for the playwright, and Nora herself was in no way the Nora in A Doll’s House. “Though let me tell you,” Nora told me, darkly, “if I had three children, I would abandon them. If I had one kid, I’d be out the door.”

Nora had her fjord-jumping moments; she was the pessimistic Norwegian on the Vinter side of my family. Nora was the eldest of us cousins, the one and only child of Uncle Martin and Aunt Abigail. In the war Nora bravely waged with her judgmental mother, she won my heart. I thought Nora knew everything, and she was usually forthright to me about what she knew. Those Brewster girls—Nora’s mom and mine, and Aunt Martha—were clever at keeping things from us children, and from their own parents. “Maybe even from one another,” Nora had hinted to me.

“Why would they keep things from one another?” I asked Nora. She was six years older than I was. As a child and a teenager, I didn’t just love her; I idolized her.

“Your mother is the most mysterious—she’s the smartest one. My mom and Martha are dolts,” Nora said.

I was ten or eleven. Nora would have been sixteen or seventeen; she was already driving. It must have been summer vacation, because we were lying on the beach at Little Boar’s Head. It was subversive of everything that had heretofore been implied to me about my mom’s intelligence, to hear she was the smartest one.

Champion of Little Ray that my grandmother was, even she disparaged my mother’s lack of a proper education. While Abigail and Martha had been sent away to Northfield, my mom had refused to leave home.

“Well, truth be told, Adam,” Aunt Abigail said, expanding on this theme to me, “Little Ray wasn’t much of a student.”

“If she’d applied to Northfield, they wouldn’t have taken her,” Aunt Martha had chimed in.

Mildred Brewster wanted her daughters to go where she had gone. Abigail and Martha would be Northfield girls; they went to Mount Holyoke, too. That my mother insisted on staying home for high school limited her to whatever local education was available to girls. I’ve read that Exeter’s Robinson Female Seminary, which opened in 1867, once had high-minded intentions—an academic school for women, with standards similar to those upheld for the men who attended Phillips Exeter Academy. But most of the girls who went to the school did not go to college. In 1890, the Robinson Female Seminary had reevaluated its curriculum; in the name of domestic science, needlework and the culinary arts were added. My mom never commented on her years in high school. She showed no interest in sewing or cooking. I had the impression that she cared little for homemaking—it was hard to imagine that she’d ever studied it. Maybe the Robinson Female Seminary was where she’d learned to hate domestic science.

That my mother had flunked out of Bennington in record time conclusively proved to my aunts that Little Ray was intellectually subpar. That my mom went to Bennington in the first place was sufficient to relegate her to intellectual inferiority in Abigail’s and Martha’s eyes.

Bennington wasn’t one of the estimable Seven Sisters—the constellation of liberal arts colleges in the northeastern United States, all of them (historically) women’s colleges. It had further been suggested to me that my mother might have been “mentally lacking”—these were Aunt Abigail’s very words.

“Maybe Little Ray is a little damaged,” was Aunt Martha’s undermining way of putting it. Martha implied that my grandmother had been too old to get pregnant, or that this was what Nana had believed—meaning my mom had surprised her. Abigail and Martha further speculated that the sperm count of the principal emeritus was “lacking oomph,” or perhaps this was what Nana had believed. Nora needed to explain to me what a sperm count was—knowing Nora, she may have made up a good story about the oomph part.

“Trust me, Adam,” Nora said that summer (I did). “There are ways of being smart without going to the best schools and colleges. Your mother is the smartest of all the mothers.”

“You don’t mean she’s smarter than Nana, too—Nana’s also a mother,” I pointed out. At ten or eleven, I was no match for my more mature cousin; truth be told, I would never be a match for Nora.

“I do mean your mom is smarter than Nana, too,” Nora told me. “The conformity begins with Nana. My mother and Martha go along with it—they’re conformists. They’re sheep!” Nora insisted. “But not your mom—she doesn’t do what she’s supposed to do, and she’s still not doing it. It’s stupid to do only what’s expected of you. Your mom has balls, Adam—big ones,” Nora assured me.

Nora was my confidante, my most trusted informer, and my ally in a common cause: we both hated the imposed trips up north, though for different reasons. In my case, I had to share a bedroom with Henrik—Uncle Johan and Aunt Martha’s one and only. Two years younger than Nora, four years older than me, Henrik had been bullied by Nora, and—without Nora around to protect me—Henrik bullied me.

That I was always wearing Henrik’s outgrown underpants seemed to be reason enough for him to revile me. I wore both Nora’s and Henrik’s hand-me-down clothes, but not Nora’s underpants. While Nora was a tomboy, and she dressed like one, Aunt Abigail had made her wear girls’ panties. Henrik thought I should have worn girls’ panties, too—“especially the ones Nora bled in,” as he put it. When I pointed out that Nora’s panties had no hole for me to pee out of, Henrik said I had “no penis to speak of.” In Henrik’s view, I was a mama’s boy—I should have sat on the toilet and peed like a girl.

In Nora’s case, she shared a bedroom up north with various Vinter girls—her female relatives among those North Conway Norwegians. These blonde girls were not tomboys; they were girly girls, around Nora’s age. The blondes dressed to seduce boys. “Ski sluts,” Nora called them. When the blondes made fun of her for dressing like a boy, Nora beat them up.

“We should share a bedroom,” Nora told me. “We’re not going to fool around; if you tried, I’d beat the crap out of you. This is more of the Brewster conformity business; this is more of the shit concerning what we’re supposed to do. Your mom would know better—your mom would let us sleep in the same room. I bet she’d let us sleep in the same fucking bed.”

“My mom’s not around enough to make the rules,” I pointed out.

“You have to get over the part that she’s ‘not around enough’—that just goes with who your mother is,” Nora told me.

I was eleven or so before I accepted Nora’s reasoning on this point. I hadn’t started at Exeter yet, and Nora would have been around seventeen. We had moved on from the matter of my mom’s independent way of thinking to the speculation that Nana was not surprised to find herself pregnant with my mother. Both Nora and I believed it was no accident that our grandmother got pregnant with Little Ray. As Nora told me: “The prospect of being left alone with the principal emeritus loomed large for Nana. I’m telling you, Adam, Nana knew perfectly well she could get pregnant—I’m sure she meant to. Who would want to be left alone with Principal Brewster?”

“Maybe he was more fun when he talked,” I suggested.

“I remember when he talked,” Nora said. “The old crock of shit never shut up!”

It was my opportunity to ask—as I had asked Nana, to no avail—“What made him stop talking?”

“Your mom didn’t tell him she was pregnant—not that I blame her!” Nora exclaimed. “She was nineteen, she wasn’t saying who your father was, she had no plans to get married—your mother didn’t want to marry anyone.”

“But my mom told Nana, right?” I asked Nora, who nodded.

“And Nana told the principal emeritus. Knowing Nana,” Nora said, “it would have been a long story—if not the whole story.”

“The Moby-Dick version,” I said; Nora nodded again. “And that’s when Principal Brewster stopped talking?” I guessed.

“Not quite,” Nora answered. “The principal emeritus started to sob; he couldn’t stop sobbing. At last, when he managed to get control of himself, he cried out, ‘Not Little Ray!’ After that, he was done talking—he stopped speaking,” Nora told me.

“Why does our family have so many secrets, Nora?” I asked.

“Why do you wring your hands? So what if they’re small? When you’re old enough, Adam, you’ll have secrets,” my older and wiser cousin said.

There was another up north reason Nora and I were soul mates: our mutual resistance to learning to ski, though we resisted a variety of ski instructors (my mom included) in diametrically different ways. We went to opposite extremes of not learning.

Nora and I would stop short of that fairly common crime among first cousins; we would never have sex with each other. We weren’t that brave, but we were partners in crime. Our more timid rebellion—our determination not to love skiing, in a ski-loving family—was what Nora and I did instead of having sex with each other.

I was fourteen, soon to be fifteen, when Nora said the following to me. Keep in mind that Nora was already in her twenties. “If you’re not old enough to get this, Adam, you soon will be,” Nora began. “The issues we have, about being Brewsters, are all about sex.”

When I was falling asleep at night, trying not to think about sex, I would envision myself in the “Let me buy you a drink” scene in Shane—that moment when the handsome but small Alan Ladd slugs the bigger Ben Johnson, knocking him through the saloon’s swinging doors.

When I was still awake, and my thoughts were all about sex, I would think instead of the “lowdown Yankee liar” scene—the shoot-out, when Jack Palance gets gunned down and is buried by the falling barrels.

“Shane, look out!” I could hear Brandon De Wilde calling. In the darkness of my bedroom, I could hear the ensuing gunfire, followed by silence, then the music rising. My thoughts, of course, were still all about sex—as if the sex were what Brandon De Wilde should have been warning Shane about.