The Last Chairlift

12. INTENDED FOR LITTLE RAY AND ME

In July 1956, only seventeen months after I had met the little snowshoer, my mother married him. His name was Elliot Barlow. He was seven years younger than my mom, who was thirty-four on her wedding day. This prompted Aunt Abigail, who was categorically denigrating to older brides, to say: “That makes you the oldest bride in the family, Rachel.”

“Just wait and see how old I am,” Nora said. At twenty-one, Nora had likened marriage to a terminal disease. She was not known to have had a boyfriend.

“I suppose Nora’s waiting for the right fella,” was all Aunt Abigail would say in her daughter’s defense.

“You can’t be fussy about the right fella, Nora,” Aunt Martha had chimed in. “You just have to try one.”

“I’m waiting for one who’ll let me cut his dick off,” Nora told them. “I’ll try that one.”

Nora brought a friend to my mother’s wedding—a college girl, Nora’s classmate at Mount Holyoke. She was an Emily who’d been shortened to an Em. Was Em the name Nora gave her? Was it a way to dominate her? Em was dollish and anxious-looking; she was startled by sudden sounds and movements. Em clung to Nora or hid behind her—at times with her doll-like face buried between Nora’s shoulder blades and her locked hands hugging Nora’s navel.

To accommodate the out-of-town guests attending the wedding—for the most part, the North Conway Norwegians—my grandmother had reserved several rooms at the Exeter Inn. The inn was a short walk from our Front Street house, where the marriage ceremony and the reception dinner would take place. Aunt Abigail had assumed Nora and Em would stay in Nora’s childhood room—in the faculty apartment Nora had grown up in, with her mom and Uncle Martin—but Nora and Em chose to stay in one of the rooms at the inn. “Trust me,” Nora told us all, “Em is a noisy sleeper.”

“Em doesn’t appear to make any noise when she’s awake!” Aunt Martha had chimed in. In fact, Em didn’t talk—not for the entire wedding weekend. Em was as silent as the nonspeaking emeritus.

I questioned Nora about the noises Em made when she was sleeping, although I had to wait for the right moment to ask—when Em went to the bathroom. At all other times, Em was physically attached to Nora in her quiet but clinging fashion. “You said Em is a noisy sleeper—noisy in what way?” I asked my cousin. I was fourteen at my mom’s wedding. The extremely small groom was twenty-seven, although he looked like an undersize fourteen-year-old.

“Em has ridiculously loud and hysterical orgasms, Adam,” Nora told me. “Each orgasm sounds like it’s her first or last time.”

In 1956, my experience with female orgasms was limited to the cinematic—notwithstanding how vividly I imagined females in orgasm, all the time.

The little snowshoer had driven me to the Franklin Theatre in Durham to see more foreign films with subtitles. These were (and forever would be) a bond between us, in addition to the snowshoeing. My aunts had forbidden Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan to take me to foreign films with female orgasms. I would see my first Ingmar Bergman films with Elliot Barlow. At the time, I was relieved not to have seen Bergman with my laughing uncles. In retrospect, a missed opportunity.

My mother’s wedding was the first wedding I attended with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who laughed throughout the marriage ceremony and the reception dinner. In no way did I think of my mom’s marrying Elliot Barlow as a comedy. In fact, in my role as a matchmaker, I considered their wedding a triumph. I had worked very hard at it—even harder than I had at the snowshoeing.

I called my mother the night of the same day I met “Mr. Barlow,” as I first heard Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha call him. Not surprisingly, my shrewish aunts had recognized the diminutive driver of the VW Beetle, and they’d cruelly watched him back out of the driveway, inch by inch. My aunts were the head harridans of Exeter’s faculty wives; they had fixed opinions of every bachelor on the academy faculty. They’d been on the lookout for an appropriate or suitable bachelor for Little Ray—meaning a marriageable one. For reasons beyond his extreme smallness, my aunts had disqualified Elliot Barlow.

“What on earth are you doing with Mr. Barlow, Adam? He didn’t approach you, did he?” Aunt Abigail asked me. She and Aunt Martha and my grandmother were still glued to the dining-room windows, watching the small snowshoer navigate the treacherous driveway in reverse. I was thirteen—I was unfamiliar with the implications of the approach word. Because I’d spoken to the snowshoer before he spoke to me, I was thinking that I’d approached him.

“If Mr. Barlow was too small for Korea, I say he’s too small to drive!” Aunt Martha chimed in. She was still looking out the window, as was my grandmother.

“Fiddlesticks, Martha—you can’t blame someone for being too careful,” Nana said.

“Mr. Barlow is a little light in his loafers, if you ask me,” Aunt Abigail said; this expression, not unlike Abigail’s usage of the word approach, sailed entirely over my head. Though I detected my aunt’s derisive tone, I nonetheless imagined she’d noticed (as I had) how nimble on his feet the little snowshoer was. I needed Nora to interpret her mother’s homophobic slur for me, which Nora soon would.

“My mom and Aunt Martha think Elliot Barlow is a fairy, Adam—they mean light-footed, like a fag, a queer, a fruit,” Nora told me. Their sexual bigotry was consistent with my aunts’ convictions that the older, unmarried men on the Exeter faculty were what they deemed nonpracticing homosexuals. As for the younger bachelors on the academy faculty, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha didn’t give a young, attractive man much time to get married. As Nora put it: “If there’s a cute guy on the faculty, and he’s not hitched up by the end of his first year of teaching—well, he’s a homo in the eyes of those witches. That’s how those bitches think,” Nora informed me. “But you tell me, Adam: How’s a guy, even a cute one, going to find a girl he wants to hook up with in Exeter? It’s an all-boys’ school with an all-male faculty, and there’s no one to meet downtown! Trust me, I know,” Nora told me. “I couldn’t find a girl to hook up with, not even for a quickie—not here!”

“What did little Mr. Barlow want with you, Adam?” Aunt Abigail asked me, while she and Aunt Martha were still watching him creep out of the driveway.

“We know what Mr. Barlow wants, Abigail!” Aunt Martha chimed in. “More to the point, Adam—what did you two talk about?”

“Snowshoeing,” I answered.

“Snowshoeing!” Aunt Abigail roared.

Later, when I told Nora about her mother’s and Aunt Martha’s interrogation tactics, Nora said: “I can imagine how my mother would have said snowshoeing—as if you told her that you and Elliot had been talking about fisting!”

“What’s fisting?” I asked Nora, who sighed.

“There will come a day, Adam, when you’ll be as grown up as I am—or as grown up as you’re ever going to get,” Nora said. “Let’s leave the fisting for another day—okay, kiddo?”

“Okay,” I replied. I liked it when Nora called me kiddo, an endearment my mom only sometimes used to express her affection for me—only when she felt sorry for me, or when she was saddened by something she wouldn’t explain. Nora’s pity for me was always apparent, but it became more noticeable near the end of her college years. Maybe what happened to her at Mount Holyoke—where her aversion to men became more politicized—gave her more sympathy for me, her clueless and much younger cousin.

“Mr. Barlow gave me a book,” I told my inquisitive aunts, holding up the worn paperback—his teacher’s copy.

“A book!” Aunt Abigail cried, snatching it out of my hands. “Great Expectations—aha!” she exclaimed.

“Are there any pictures?” Aunt Martha asked. Charles Dickens had, at last, drawn them away from the dining-room windows—my grandmother included. Nora later said her mom and Aunt Martha were probably imagining that Great Expectations was an illustrated book about penile erections.

“Give the book to me, girls—it’s just a novel,” Nana told them. “Dickens didn’t write pornography.”

“There are underlined passages,” Aunt Abigail said peevishly.

“There’s handwriting in it—the midget fairy has scribbled in it,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“It’s Mr. Barlow’s book—his teacher’s copy,” I repeated. “I told him you read Moby-Dick aloud to me, Nana. I said I would like to try reading it again—to myself,” I told my grandmother.

She held up Great Expectations almost as reverentially as I’d seen her raise Moby-Dick—in a heavenward direction. “Reading this novel would be easier, Adam,” Nana said. “And there’s a young man finding his way in the story,” she added.

“That’s what Mr. Barlow told me!” I piped up.

“A young man finding his way!” Aunt Abigail cried with alarm.

“What sort of way, I wonder!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Girls, girls—just stop,” my grandmother told them. “This is a literary novel.”

“Mr. Barlow is a snowshoer,” I insisted. “Snowshoeing is my answer to skiing. I like to run. On snowshoes, I can run on top of the snow,” I told them. “And Mr. Barlow teaches writing. I’ve decided I want to be a writer,” I said.

“A writer!” Aunt Abigail screamed.

“God have mercy—save us!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

As Nora would one day tell me: “You might as well have said you were going to be a fist-fucker, Adam. Or that you couldn’t wait to get fist-fucked,” she added. (Yes, this was after the day had come—when I had grown up sufficiently for Nora to illuminate fisting for me.)

But, at the time, I was at a loss to understand the consternation Mr. Barlow had caused my aunts. I wished I could talk to my uncles about the snowshoer. I somehow knew they would hold “the runner on top of the snow” (as they called him) in high esteem. Later, when I was able to speak with them, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan paid Elliot Barlow the utmost collegial respect. The little English teacher was popular with his students. As for those students who hadn’t taken a class with him, and the ones who were inclined to tease him, Mr. Barlow’s good humor would win them over. My laughing uncles were won over by the snowshoer’s good humor, too.

At Harvard, Elliot Barlow had declared English as his concentration, Uncle Martin would tell me. The small snowshoer got a bachelor’s degree in 1951. Because the U.S. Armed Forces, in their infinite wisdom, said the runner on top of the snow wasn’t big enough, or so Uncle Johan told me, Mr. Barlow got his master’s at Harvard in 1953. In the fall of that year, the snowshoer started teaching at Exeter. According to my uncles, the only faculty who still raised their eyebrows at the snowshoer’s smallness were the old fuddy-duddies.

My aunts kept raising their eyebrows. With their lynch-mob mentality, my aunts had been sounding the homo alarm before the end of Mr. Barlow’s first year as a teacher. By the halfway mark of the small snowshoer’s second year, he met me. By then, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were in full fruit-alert mode.

As Nora would one day explain to me: “My mother and Aunt Martha were on a faculty-wives’ witch hunt; nothing got their rocks off like witch-hunting for fairies.” In Nora’s opinion, my mom’s marrying the little snowshoer saved him. Nora would later modify her opinion: “Ray saved the snowshoer’s job, anyway.”

All I knew, for certain—on the night of the day I met him—was that I had to call my mother. I was waiting for my aunts to leave—to go home to their laughing Norwegians—and for my grandmother to begin her business in the kitchen. “The supper business,” Nana disparagingly called her efforts to make dinner for the nonspeaking emeritus and me. My grandmother wasn’t a good cook; she didn’t enjoy cooking.

What finally persuaded my aunts to leave the Front Street house, to go home to their good-humored husbands, was that my grandmother began reciting from the marked passages she’d been reading to herself in Mr. Barlow’s annotated copy of Great Expectations.

“Listen to this, Adam—Miss Havisham on the subject of love. Let this be a lesson to you,” Nana said, before she began to read aloud. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha exchanged dire looks; they were roused to sudden-exit mode. “As follows: ‘I’ll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!’ That’s Miss Havisham in a nutshell!” my grandmother proclaimed. “The little English teacher knows how to read!”

Upon hearing Miss Havisham’s proclamation, I was not greatly encouraged by the prospect of real love. Through a dining-room window, I observed Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha’s hasty retreat. The very idea of love as utter submission was repellent to them. And Nana wasn’t finished. In her years with the deluded, now-silent emeritus, my grandmother was used to an audience of one. At least I was a responsive audience.

Another passage the little English teacher had marked prompted Mildred Brewster to keep reciting. “And there’s this, Adam,” Nana said with gloomy solemnity. “May you be spared such a moment of recognition as this—namely, the conviction that most of your happiness lies behind you, and the lion’s share of your loneliness looms ahead. This is poor Pip’s view of the marshes at night: ‘I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.’ May you be spared such awful loneliness, Adam,” my grandmother most solemnly said.

“I’m going to call my mom now, Nana—while you fix supper,” I said. Under the circumstances, I tried to sound as hopeful as possible, knowing that the supper business conducted in my grandmother’s kitchen rarely turned out well. Still reeling, as I was, from the demands of real love, which included giving up my heart and soul to the smiter, I was no less devastated by the prospect of freezing to death while receiving no assistance or kindness from the indifferent stars. “What’s a smiter, Nana?” I asked her.

Handing the little teacher’s copy of Great Expectations to me, my grandmother was making her stoic way to the kitchen, where I knew her expectations were modest. “A smiter is one who strikes a heavy blow, Adam—either with the hand or with an implement,” Nana said. It didn’t sound good, either way, but I was now alone and could call my mother.

During the ski season, calling my mom in Stowe was not in the devastating category of Pip’s seeing “no help or pity in all the glittering multitude”; nevertheless, I faced some uncertainties when I made these calls. In the first place, my mother knew how much I missed her; I had to be careful, especially at the beginning and end of the call, not to make it apparent that my missing her was the reason for my calling her. If she could hear how much I missed her in my voice, she would cry—then we would both feel guilty.

Of lesser importance, yet also of an uncertain nature, was that I had only a vague idea of where she lived in Stowe—not to mention, with whom. She’d told me she had a “bunch of roommates”; usually, when I called, either my mom or Molly answered the phone. “Just picture a kind of dormitory for girl jocks, Adam—that’s where I spend the ski season,” my mother said. I’m sure she had no idea of the unease and arousal she had conjured up for me, her thirteen-year-old son, lying awake with conflicting images of girl jocks—her fellow ski instructors or ski patrollers, and there was at least one female trail groomer in the aforementioned bunch of roommates.

Molly was first and foremost a trail groomer. I’d not met Molly. I’d only spoken with her on the phone, when I called for my mom. Little Ray had met Molly at Cranmore, where the mountain had a reputation for “advanced trail-grooming technology,” as Molly put it; she’d been a snowcat driver at Cranmore before she took her technique to Stowe. Now Molly was driving what they had for piste machines at Mount Mansfield and Spruce Peak.

I remember when Molly first told me about the “vintage snowcat” she used to drive on the “graveyard shift,” when she’d been a night groomer at Cranmore—a 1952 Tucker Sno-Cat. I didn’t know anything about working vehicles; Molly had to explain everything. You had to climb up on the tractor treads in order to get in the cab. The Tucker had a stick shift, a clutch pedal, no brake pedal—just a hand brake. Molly had put in the radio and the heater herself. The Tucker Sno-Cat didn’t climb very well; Molly had to drive it up the service road and down each trail. She said the Tucker had tipped over a few times when she was going crossways on the hill. Foxes followed the snowcat, chasing the mice the roller scared out of the snow. The slats of the roller broke up and packed down the snow—“the roller leaves the snow looking like skiers have been sidestepping up the trail,” Molly explained. She saw the eyes of animals reflected in the snowcat’s headlights. “The game wardens say there are no mountain lions in New Hampshire or Vermont, but I’ve seen them,” the night groomer told me. She’d seen mountain-lion tracks in the snow, too; she knew all the animals by their eyes and by their hoof or paw prints. After Molly moved to Stowe, and she was night-grooming, she said she’d been on the lookout for Bigfoot Bob. He was a friend of hers, a nighttime snowshoer. His bear paws left big tracks in the snow—“as if an elephant has been blundering around,” Molly said. She was sympathetic that Bob worked all day and could snowshoe only at night, but she didn’t want him to be on the trails when she was grooming. “I don’t dislike Bob—I don’t want to kill him,” she told me.

Molly’s job sounded exotic. I wanted to go night-grooming with her. My mother told me Molly was the mountain’s chief equipment operator. Molly occasionally filled in for the guy who plowed the parking lots and access roads at the ski area. Molly would also sub for the lift operators, and she was in demand as a ski patroller, too.

The night I called my mom to tell her about the little snowshoer, I thought I wouldn’t say anything about him to Molly, if Molly was the one who answered the phone. I was worried that Molly might have mixed feelings about Bigfoot Bob.

I often called during Nana’s supper business. If my mom answered, I knew Molly had the early shift on the snowcat—“from when the lifts close till midnight,” my mother had explained to me. If Molly answered the phone, I knew she was on the graveyard shift, which went from midnight to sunrise—even until the lifts opened, in the morning. Sometimes, when I called my mom at night, she said she was waiting up for Molly. “I like to have a beer with her when she gets home,” my mother had told me.

It was around suppertime of the same day I met the snowshoer when Molly answered the phone. “This is Molly,” she always said.

“This is Adam,” I said back to her, as usual.

“Adam who?” Molly always asked. “Is this Adam the Kid—Ray’s one and only—or is this some other Adam, up to no good?” (She knew it was me, of course.)

“It’s Adam the Kid, Molly,” I told the night groomer.

“I thought so,” she always said. “Ray!” Molly would then shout. “It’s your kid on the phone.”

Then the girl jocks would chime in; I pictured them, after skiing, stripped down to their long johns, or maybe wrapped in towels, after their showers. “Ray has a kid?” someone always cried out.

“How many kids have you got, Ray?” another girl jock yelled.

“I just have my one and only,” I could hear my mom say, before she came to the phone.

“Is this my Adam?” my mother always asked, as if—after the hullabaloo my call had caused—I conceivably could have been some other Adam, up to no good, as Molly never failed to inquire.

“I’ve met someone important,” I told Little Ray, not beating around the bush.

“Quiet, please!” my mom called to the girl jocks, who were still horsing around in the background. “Adam has met someone important, or so my boy says,” I heard my mother whisper, to someone else.

“Uh-oh,” a girl jock whispered back—maybe Molly. I also heard the someone important part repeated a couple of times.

“Make sure your kid has condoms, Ray!” one of the girl jocks shouted.

“Get your boy out of town, Ray—have him come live with us!” another girl jock called out.

“Yeah, right—Adam the Kid will sure as shit be safe with us,” someone (not Molly) said. I couldn’t discern more than that from the girl jocks—only their constant murmuring, frequently interrupted by a laugh as short and explosive as a bark.

“Tell me everything, Adam,” my mom was whispering. “Who have you met, sweetie? Tell me, tell me.”

“A snowshoer!” I blurted out.

“That’s funny—Molly almost ran over Bigfoot Bob just the other night,” my mother told me. “Trail groomers sometimes have an adversarial relationship with snowshoers,” Ray explained, keeping her voice low. Her expertise regarding all matters related or tangential to the ski business couldn’t deter me from telling her what I wanted her to know. I somehow knew the snowshoer was intended for Little Ray and me; he was not just my snowshoer.

“Go on, go on—tell me everything, Adam,” my mom repeated.

I did. My aspirations to be a snowshoer and a writer, which of course became confusing to my mother when I mentioned Great Expectations—failing to be clear that it was a novel.

“Sweetie, wait!” my mom cried. “What kind of great expectations did Mr. Barlow give you?”

When that was sorted out, there were various pitfalls of misunderstanding awaiting us in the area of Mr. Barlow’s extraordinary handsomeness. “Are you saying you find Mr. Barlow very handsome, sweetie?” my mother asked me.

“I’m saying I think Mr. Barlow will strike you as very handsome—good-looking and small,” I emphasized to her.

“Oh, Adam—are you fixing me up with someone?” my mom asked. “Oh, sweetie—that is the sweetest thing!” she cried. It had occurred to me, of course, that I was consciously matchmaking for my mother.

“I think you’ll like him,” was all I said. “I know you’ll think he’s handsome—good-looking and small,” I repeated.

“Adam: promise me Abigail and Martha didn’t put you up to this,” my mom suddenly said.

“I don’t think they like Mr. Barlow!” I told her. “Abigail said he was ‘a little light in his loafers,’ or something; ‘the midget fairy,’ I think Martha called him,” I said.

“Well, that explains why I haven’t heard about Mr. Barlow from those two,” my mom softly said.

“Mr. Barlow said you were ‘definitely pretty’; he called you ‘very pretty’—really, he did,” I told her.

“Mr. Barlow said that about me?” my mother asked.

“I told him you were ‘very pretty,’ and he agreed with me—he’s seen you,” I said. I even told my mom how Mr. Barlow drove his Beetle—with both hands holding tight to the steering wheel and his ass not touching the seat, as if he were doing wall sits and driving at the same time.

“Adam, sweetie—just how small is he?” she asked me. “Surely, Mr. Barlow isn’t smaller than me!” my mother asserted.

I should have known his size would be the clincher. At the time, I didn’t know all the reasons why. “Mr. Barlow is much smaller than you—he’s four feet nine, only fifty-seven inches. He doesn’t look like he has to shave,” I told her.

“My, oh my,” Little Ray said suddenly. There was a shiver in her voice, as if she were cold or had seen a ghost. “Sweetie,” my mom whispered, “Mr. Barlow doesn’t look as young as you do, does he?” She knew by the pause; I was reluctant to tell her. I could hear her teeth chattering. Her voice had given me the shivers.

“Mr. Barlow is small for a thirteen-year-old,” I said, speaking strictly as a thirteen-year-old, “but his hands are bigger than mine.”

“But how young does he look, sweetie?” my mother managed to say. She must have been visibly shaking. There was no more murmuring among the girl jocks, and not a single laugh.

“His handsomeness is the most grown-up thing about him,” I told her. “Mr. Barlow is unusually young-looking, if you know what I mean,” I added. That was all I could further contribute to our conversation, which had turned stone-cold.

“I know what you mean, all right,” my mom said bitterly. “Have you seen any ghosts, Adam?” she suddenly asked me.

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“I have to go now, sweetie,” my mother whispered. “We’ll deal with the ghosts when the time is right—okay, kiddo?”