The Last Chairlift

17. SON OF THE BRIDE

I said too much to Nora about the snowshoer kiss. The beginner writer in me had been trying too hard. I overdescribed the way my mom kissed Elliot Barlow at the Front Street dining-room table. Too much detail. I overdid the part concerning the effect of that lingering kiss on the snowshoer. This was pure speculation on my part—my teenage skills at storytelling were amateurish. I never wanted Nora to know how my mother had kissed me when I was thirteen, but Nora knew there was something I hadn’t told her. The way I wrung my hands gave me away.

The night of the rehearsal dinner, I made plans to meet Nora and Em for breakfast at the Exeter Inn on the following morning, the day of the wedding. I knew the girl jocks would be competing with the caterers in the Front Street kitchen. My mom and Molly had forewarned me that I should stay out of the girl jocks’ way when they were making breakfast. It would be chaos in the kitchen, where the caterers were eager to get an early start on the reception dinner.

On a July Sunday morning, Nora and Em and I were ahead of the brunch crowd. Our rehearsal-dinner guests were sleeping in or having room service. The sophisticated little Barlows struck me as a couple attuned to room service. Like some other Norwegians I would later know, the North Conway contingent were hearty drinkers—they were definitely sleeping in. The girly-girl blondes were no doubt hiding themselves from Nora and Em.

The three of us were virtually alone in the dining room of the inn, where we were relieved not to see the twice-stricken waitress of the night before—the impressionable young woman who’d been dropped to her knees, first by Em’s orgasm, then by Henrik’s cupcake. I hoped the much-abused waitress was sleeping in, if she wasn’t already in therapy.

Our only companion in the dining room was the solitary Austrian musician. He’d brought his zither to breakfast, where we feared he might start strumming the strings. The lederhosen and the Tyrolean hat made us think the Austrian was fanatical—maybe he couldn’t go for as long as an hour without playing “The Third Man Theme” to himself. His waiter, an older man, had removed the place setting opposite him. Thus the beloved instrument was in reach across the table from the musician, though he not once touched it or spoke to it. They sat together without a word between them. They resembled an elderly, long-married couple—devoted to each other without conversation. I knew we still had to get through the “Bridal Chorus” on a zither, but I was overlooking what else might be Wagnerian about my mom’s marriage ceremony or its immediate aftermath.

At fourteen, I lacked the perspective to see our suddenly expanding Brewster family in comparison to other families. Given the dramatic effects on our rehearsal dinner caused by Em’s enduring orgasm and Henrik’s cupcake missile, I was naïve to imagine that my mother’s wedding could be anticlimactic. Considering what happened with Nora and Em after our breakfast, I should have known the day ahead would be no less awkward.

Nora—in the act of paying our waiter, the older man—spoke to me (almost casually) while she was looking at Em. “About the snowshoer kiss, as you call it, Adam—Em and I have had a hard time visualizing it, for more than a year.” I was further disconcerted by Em’s frown, and the way she nervously nodded her head. I couldn’t look at her, or at Nora. “We just can’t see it, kiddo,” Nora told me, taking my hand. “If we go upstairs to our room, maybe you can show us.”

I noticed the plural. Holding my hand, Nora led me upstairs. Em followed. I wouldn’t have dared to say Nora shared any genetic traits with those Brewster girls. Like the hips Nora had in common with her mother, an off-limits subject, I would have been risking my life to suggest that Nora was similar to her mom and Aunt Martha in other respects. Yet Nora had autocratic tendencies. Her sexual politics may have been at the opposite end of the spectrum from my aunts’ beliefs, but Nora was a sexual autocrat and a bully. The complicated part, for me, was how much I revered her—and agreed with her.

It was with the greatest trepidation that I entered the room Nora and Em were sharing at the Exeter Inn. The view of the tent for the rehearsal dinner was the first thing I saw out the open window. Apparently, the tent wasn’t going to be removed on a Sunday. I tried not to look at the unmade bed, the sight of which recalled Em’s plaintive wails. The rumpled bed represented a gladiatorial arena where Em had been sexually slain, repeatedly.

“What I don’t get, Adam,” Nora was saying, “is how you could know so much about a kiss by just watching it. I mean, there’s a limit to what you can see—isn’t there, kiddo?” I saw that Em had opened her mouth; she was pointing to her tongue. It was unnecessary for Nora to tell me what Em meant, but she did. “There’s a lot of kissing that happens inside the mouth, Adam,” Nora explained. I knew I wasn’t in the same league with Nora or Em when it came to kissing. All I could think was that Em had the tiniest teeth and the pinkest tongue. “Don’t even think about kissing me, Adam,” Nora suddenly said. I wasn’t. “You can’t kiss me, kiddo—I’m your cousin.” I was relieved to hear this, but not for long. Em suddenly moved closer. She’d shut her eyes and had lifted her face to me. She wasn’t exactly grimacing or squinting—her lips were only slightly parted. Em wasn’t so much waiting for me to kiss her as she was resigned to it. She and Nora must have talked about it, and Em appeared to be bracing herself for it. “Go on, kiss her,” Nora told me. “Show her how Ray kissed the snowshoer—then Em will show me how Ray did it.”

I’d only recently decided to be cool and detached. I was experimenting with being aloof and uncaring. This new act didn’t fit very well with my most vivid memory of the snowshoer kiss my mom gave me, which I did my best to demonstrate on Em. Em was a pretty but meek-looking mouse to behold, even with her eyes closed and her lips open. I could not dispel a conflicting image I had of the compliant and nonspeaking Em—specifically, the roaring lioness I knew was alive inside her. Of course I was attracted to her.

When it came to the meeting of mouths for a kiss, I was a novice. When I made contact with Em’s expectant mouth, I didn’t know where our noses should go. Even with her eyes closed, Em managed to show me. Since Em had shut her eyes, it seemed disrespectful to keep mine open. Furthermore, I wasn’t used to looking at anyone this closely. However, when we started kissing and I closed my eyes, I was upset by a sudden and unwelcome flashback—my mother athletically straddling me, pinning me to my bed in the attic. Here was another conflicting image to brush aside, in order to concentrate on the kissing.

Em didn’t respond to my kiss, not even a little. I touched her tongue with my tongue, but her tongue never moved on its own—only because I was pushing it around. If Em leaned into me, just a little, that was because I pressed myself against her—as my mom had pressed herself against me. Em was merely pushing back.

It would be wishful thinking on my part to say that Em’s breathing quickened, or became irregular in any way. It didn’t. There was an ever-steady flow of air from Em’s nostrils, soft and warm against my cheek, while I went on kissing her. I believe I was being faithful to the way my mother had kissed me, but I didn’t remember (or I’d lost track of) how she’d stopped. As for my remaining cool and detached, I didn’t. Once I started kissing Em, I couldn’t stop.

“For Christ’s sake, kiddo, that’s enough—you’re going to hurt yourself,” Nora said. Em was nodding her head in that irritating way she had. I was not aware I’d been straining, though as soon as Nora spoke and I stopped kissing Em, I suddenly felt I had pulled a muscle in my neck.

I was unprepared for the way Em hurled herself into Nora’s arms—not to mention how aggressively Em began to kiss her. It was hard to be a bystander to such an assault. Surely I hadn’t kissed Em as savagely as Em was kissing Nora, or had I? Now my tongue was numb, as if I’d suffered a protracted dental procedure with repeated procaine injections. Or perhaps watching the way Em kissed Nora had numbed my tongue. I wanted Em to kiss me like that.

“That’s enough, Em—for Christ’s sake, stop!” Nora said, turning away from her. Set free from performing the snowshoer kiss, Em was panting like a dog—the kiss had winded her.

“There’s no way you just saw your mom plant that kiss on the snowshoer, Adam—don’t try to bullshit me,” Nora said. “Did Little Ray plant that kiss on you? Don’t lie to me, kiddo.” Em was nodding again, in her fashion. I was exposed, or my mother was, and I knew it.

“My mom just wanted to show me how you do a kiss like that. She was just showing me—she didn’t mean it!” I blurted out.

Nora held out her arms to me; she spoke very gently. “Come here, sweetie,” she said, my mother’s word for me. I went to Nora and let her hug me; I needed someone to hug me. To my surprise, Em came closer and hugged me between her and Nora.

“My mom said you’re not fooling around when you kiss someone like that,” I told them. I was crying. “Ray told me you better know what you mean—you better know what you’re promising—when you kiss someone like that,” I went on (and on) to them. I could feel Em’s head nodding against my back, and Nora hugged me harder.

“That’s all true, Adam,” Nora said softly. “But maybe Ray shouldn’t have kissed you like that, kiddo.”

“Maybe she shouldn’t have,” I whispered. I could feel Em nodding her head harder, but she no longer irritated me—she meant well. It was a lonely but strangely comforting feeling, to realize that Nora and Em were the closest friends I had.

Nora and Em were a little extreme, but—in my extended family—who wasn’t somewhat extreme? My laughing, backslapping uncles—the North Conway Norwegians—were weird. My harridan aunts would have felt at home with their Puritan forebears at the Salem witch trials, lending their shrill voices in favor of executing the accused. Lewis Brewster—a former English teacher, faculty emeritus—had invented himself, stopped talking, forgotten who he was, and regressed to infancy. The diaper man had never made much of an income, but the Front Street house looked like money. Even the Brewster family’s money was a secret, if there was family money. My grandmother had been a Bates. Did the Front Street house speak of Bates family money? Certainly, my mother didn’t make any money. She was, as she’d always been, a ski instructor—a seasonal job.

It seemed beside the point, but because Nora and Em were still hugging me, I took advantage of their sympathy and asked Nora where our money came from. All Nora said was: “Money doesn’t make you normal, kiddo.” I would always be catching up to Nora.

I couldn’t help thinking that the Barlows’ money at least came from a visible source: notwithstanding what Elliot thought of his parents’ subliterary stature, John and Susan Barlow wrote bestsellers. I didn’t share my grandmother’s esteem for the Barlows as a fine old Bostonian family. I didn’t care how little money the snowshoer made as a schoolteacher. What impressed me was that the Barlows’ family money came from writing. That thrilled me.

But Nora took off on a tangent, on the subject of where our moral superiority came from—and both the Brewster and the Bates sides of our family got blamed. This concerned Nora more than what was secretive or unknown about our family money. Nora never failed to find Nana at fault. More than I ever did or would, Nora blamed our grandmother for our family’s air of entitlement.

It was with Nana in mind that Nora now stopped hugging me. As suddenly, she said to me—to Em, this came completely out of the blue—“You’re always letting her off the hook, Adam, but what sort of woman reads Moby-Dick aloud to a ten- or eleven-year-old boy?” I’d heard this before; I’d stopped answering this question. Nora knew I had loved it when Nana read Moby-Dick aloud to me, and Nora knew I was twelve by the time Nana finished reading to me.

But Em gave an audible gasp. Poor Em was confused. After all, we’d been talking about my mother and the questionable kiss she gave me when I was a thirteen-year-old. Em didn’t know Nora was now talking about our grandmother. In the context of the snowshoer kiss, it’s understandable that Em might have been overthinking the impropriety of my mom’s behavior. Now there loomed the imagined horror of her reading Somebody’s Dick aloud to a child. It is hard to imagine that any young woman could go to a college as good as Mount Holyoke and not have heard of Moby-Dick—at least enough to know it wasn’t pornography. Maybe Em had misheard how Nora said the title; Em had heard the dick word, clearly.

“No, no, no—Moby-Dick isn’t porn,” Nora quickly told Em. “It’s just really long.”

I can see why what Nora said failed to put Em at ease—there was a dick in what was read aloud to a ten- or eleven-year-old, and it was really long. Under the circumstances, I could appreciate why Em gave me another hug. I was touched by Em’s sympathy for me, and Nora’s. As you might imagine, it took a while to work out who’d read what aloud to me when I was ten, eleven, and twelve: that the accused reader was my grandmother, not my mother; that the eponymous Moby Dick was a whale, not a penis.

“No, Em, not ‘a whale of a penis’—an actual whale,” Nora had to explain. It was hard for me to know what Em was thinking, because she never spoke—not once, not in my presence, the entire wedding weekend. Nora knew what Em was saying with her body—Em pantomimed what she meant. And Nora had told me that Em could talk—“only when she really gets to know you.” It seemed that my giving Em the snowshoer kiss had not helped her to get to know me.

Em wasn’t the first person to be confused by the hyphen, once we’d sorted out what kind of dick Moby Dick was. I’ll never know what made Nora mention the hyphen; that the title of the novel was hyphenated, and the white whale itself wasn’t, made Em shake her head violently and squint her eyes tightly shut.

I would read Moby-Dick twice in a classroom with a teacher—once as an undergraduate, in an American literature class, and again in a master’s program. I don’t recall what was said about the hyphen in the title, or its noticeable absence in the novel when Melville refers to the white whale by name. The astounding way Nora explained the meaning of the hyphen to Em has stayed with me, though I doubt that Nora ever heard this theory explained in a classroom, or that she read about it. I would be surprised if Nora ever studied Moby-Dick, at either Northfield or Mount Holyoke. I’m not convinced that Nora actually read the novel. I believe she came to her own conclusions about the hyphen around the time Nana was reading Moby-Dick aloud to me. Nora would have been in her mid-to-late teens at the time.

“That book is an undying whale, Adam—it took Nana three years to read it to you,” Nora always said. Nora claimed that it drove her crazy to overhear Nana reading Moby-Dick aloud to me. Nora said Nana’s reading that novel to me amounted to child abuse.

It is my fondest, most enduring memory of my grandmother, but Nora cited this as exemplary of how little Nana liked or understood children. To Nora, Nana’s reading Moby-Dick to me was an example of her selfishness. “Reading Moby-Dick was what Nana wanted to do, to entertain herself—she should have tried playing with you, Adam!” Nora always said. “It made me nuts to listen to her reading to you—I had to force myself to think of something else, kiddo.”

“So you thought about the hyphen?” I asked Nora. Poor Em! First the dick word had misled her to imagine a pornographic whaling adventure; now Nora had sidetracked her with a hyphen.

“Here’s all you need to know, Em—I’ll be brief,” Nora began. “If there’s no hyphen in ‘Moby Dick,’ there are other white whales in the Dick family—Moby’s just one Dick among many. There’s a Harry Dick, a Joy Dick—even a Richard Dick, for all we know. In other words, it’s no big deal that there’s a white whale named Moby—there are other white Dicks swimming around.” I was as stunned by this less-than-comforting plot summary as Em was. It was bad enough to imagine one Moby Dick—a sea of white Dicks swimming around was another matter. “However,” Nora suddenly said, “put a hyphen in ‘Moby Dick,’ and what do you get?” Em and I just looked at each other fearfully. We knew what porn was, but this could be worse. We had no idea where Nora was going with this. “That hyphen makes Mr. Moby a one-and-only white whale; that hyphen means Moby isn’t part of a family; that hyphen makes Moby a one-of-a-kind Dick; that fucking hyphen means Moby-Dick is immortal,” Nora said. Em shivered.

“An unkillable Dick—is that your point?” I asked Nora.

“Unkillable means immortal, kiddo,” Nora told me.

“But it’s both ways, Nora,” I reminded her. “In the novel, Moby Dick, the whale, has no hyphen—only the title is hyphenated.”

All Nora said was: “Maybe Melville was being ambiguous.” Maybe Nora did read the novel, I was thinking. I would never get a committed answer out of her, not on this subject. The way Em went on shivering made me think she thought being ambiguous was as bad as reading porn aloud to a ten- or eleven-year-old. Em did not look like a woman in a hurry to read Moby-Dick, and it would be a while before I had a chance to ask Nora if Em ever said anything about Moby-Dick or Melville’s ambiguous use of a hyphen.

“A bad name for a whale or a novel, hyphen or no hyphen,” Em had said, or she somehow pantomimed this. In Nora and Em’s room at the Exeter Inn, we didn’t talk about it.

In a confounding non sequitur to Nora’s speculation that Melville was being ambiguous, Nora began to unbutton her blouse. “Come on, Em—we should get ready for the main event,” Nora said. Em appeared to be paralyzed with uncertainty. I was already edging toward the door to the hall, when Nora noticed the consternation she had caused. “The main event, you morons—the marriage ceremony, the reception dinner. That main event. We have to get into our dancing clothes!” Nora exhorted us.

At the dancing word, Em jumped on the bed, where she began an off-balance dance of a kind unknown to me. I kept edging toward the door. I remembered what had happened in that hotel room the night before, prompted by an innocent changing of clothes—that’s how the fooling around had started, and one thing led to another.

Besides, it was time for me to get dressed for the main event. I also wanted to see what the girl jocks were up to, and I was curious to know more about the two-woman job of getting my mom into her complicated wedding dress. I knew my mother needed Molly’s help to get into or out of the white wedding dress. I was still struggling to understand the corset concept, how the trail groomer would go about stuffing my mom into that dress—not least, the night groomer’s technique for loosening those laces at the back and getting the dress off her. Nora (now taking off her blouse) and Em (still dancing on the bed) did not notice when I slipped out of their room.

As I walked along Front Street from the inn to my grandmother’s house, I was joined on the sidewalk by the Austrian zither-meister. He was carrying his instrument in both arms, as if the zither were a sleeping baby. The zither man was wearing a sky-blue shirt, embroidered with white flowers. Given the jaunty feather in his Tyrolean hat, and the lederhosen, his flowery shirt gave him a festive but rustic appearance. “Edelweiss,” the old Austrian said. With a glance, he indicated the flowers from his beloved Alps. “And you, young man, are…?” the zither man asked me.

“Adam,” I told him. He seemed to consider this carefully. The snowshoer had told me that Austria was a Catholic country. I didn’t know much about Catholics. I consequently wondered if the Austrian musician was giving my name some curiously Catholic consideration. I didn’t know if there was (or ever had been) a Saint Adam. Maybe, because of the Garden of Eden business, Adam was not an allowable name for a saint? I’d been an irregular churchgoer. Nana was a Congregationalist, but she stopped making me go to church when I was old enough to be left at home alone on Sunday mornings.

According to Nora, Congregationalists were among the least religious Protestants—“they’re the kind of Protestants who believe in almost nothing,” was the way Nora put it. The Congregational Church was a plain white building within view of the bandstand in downtown Exeter. The church was called the Congo, and the worshipers did their praying and hymn-singing on the second floor, which backed up what Nora said, but I didn’t know much about Protestants, either.

As it turned out, the Austrian musician wasn’t mulling over anything Catholic in his consideration of my name. “Son of the Bride,” he said to me, in a thoughtful and respectful way, as if this were my official title. “Your mother is going to be a beautiful bride,” the zither-meister told me. “You know, she looks a lot like Valli,” he solemnly said. At the time, I’d seen Alida Valli only in The Third Man, where she is certainly beautiful, but very sad. “In real life, Valli is a baroness,” the edelweiss man intoned. “She was christened Baroness Alida Maria Laura Altenburger von Marckenstein und Frauenberg.”

I was at a loss concerning what to say about this endless name. Instead I told the old Austrian that my mom would be wearing a complicated wedding dress. It had to be laced up (and unlaced) at the back—such a strenuous task that the maid of honor had to wrestle the dress on and off her.

The zither man smiled at me, shaking his head. “That’s not for us to think about, Son of the Bride,” he gently informed me. We had arrived at the wedding tent in my grandmother’s garden. Those stone sparrows, unmoving on the rim of the birdbath, gave no indication that they’d noticed the bustling activity in the backyard of the Front Street house. Out on the croquet court, the caterers had already lit a cast-iron barbecue as big as a small car—beside it was a wheelbarrow full of briquettes. The caterers were worried about the weather forecast: late-afternoon or early-evening thunderstorms were predicted for the New Hampshire seacoast. If they could serve the food in the wedding tent before the rain started, it wouldn’t matter if the rain put out the fire in the barbecue.

“I just don’t want to be flippin’ burgers with a metal spatula when there’s lightnin’ strikin’ the whatchamacallit,” the barbecue chef said to my grandmother.

“The croquet court,” Nana reminded him.

Crawling around the big barbecue, on all fours, was the infantile Principal Brewster. He was not yet wearing his father-of-the-bride clothes, only his diaper. Dottie was in charge of him, keeping him away from the fire.

“Why is Granddaddy on his hands and knees?” I asked my grandmother.

“The principal emeritus has picked today to stop walking and start crawling—he has regressed past toddlerhood,” my grandmother said. I was wondering how the father of the bride could manage to hand over my mother to the snowshoer on all fours, but Nana must have read my mind. “Your grandfather can still stand, Adam—he only crawls when he wants to go somewhere, or leave somewhere.”

As for the procession down the aisle to Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” the decision had already been made not to allow the infant emeritus to escort the bride. Little Ray would be escorted by my uncles. The diaper man, positioned between Dottie and my grandmother, would be waiting for my mom at a safe distance from where the snowshoer would be standing; my grandfather believed the little groom to be another of Ray’s illegitimate children.

“A little unusual, maybe,” Uncle Martin had admitted.

“But a necessary precaution, perhaps,” Uncle Johan had chimed in. Ominously, I thought, my aunts had said nothing.

I saw that the edelweiss man had located the small table with the single chair in a strategic corner of the tent. He had placed his holy instrument on the table and was checking out the microphone and amplifiers. The minister from the Congregational Church came early. He may have been a lot less religious than other Protestants, believing next to nothing, but he had plenty of opinions, which he hastened to express to my grandmother. The front row of folding chairs, already unfolded and gathered in place for the marriage ceremony, should not be too close to where the bride and groom would say their vows.

The caterers had expressed a contrary view of the assembled chairs; they wanted more room at the back of the tent for the folding tables. The ceremony couldn’t be over soon enough, not in the caterers’ opinion. After all, they had to rearrange all the chairs around the unfolded tables, setting up the tent for the reception dinner.

Meanwhile, the action on the croquet court took an unpleasant turn. The two girl jocks who slept in their own small tent and took showers together had just taken a shower. They were both wrapped in undersize towels and brushing each other’s hair in the sun, in an effort to dry their hair before they got dressed for the wedding. Thus scantily wrapped in their too-small towels, and up to their own business, the two athletic-looking young women had attracted the attention of the not-very-bright barbecue chef. While waving his spatula over the preheating barbecue, and being careful not to step on the crawling diaper man, the barbecue chef kept giving sidelong glances to the two girl jocks in their skimpy towels.

There was nothing sidelong about the looks Henrik gave to the girl jocks in their fetching towels. Henrik, dillydallying with his irrelevant lacrosse stick, gawked at the girls from the stance he’d taken in the middle of the croquet court, where he aggressively occupied the space between the smoking grill and the big tent belonging to the rest of the girl jocks—wherever they were. I suspected they weren’t in their big tent, where they would have been sweltering. It was a hot, sunny day—typical of an early afternoon in July.

The girls drying their hair ignored Henrik, who kept leering at them. Henrik was cradling an old croquet ball in his stupid lacrosse stick, as if he were fondling one of his own testicles. The croquet ball—a faded maroon, long exposed to all kinds of weather—must have been lost in the bushes, where Henrik had dug it out with his lacrosse stick. It was barely recognizable as the brightly colored ball it once had been, but the crawling diaper man recognized it. The infant emeritus may have stopped speaking and lost the ability to walk, but—even on his hands and knees—the diaper man knew one of his old croquet balls when he saw it. Circling Henrik on all fours, Principal Brewster bit the distracted midfielder in the area of his Achilles tendon. Possibly Henrik’s habit of wearing unmatching socks had further enraged the principal emeritus. We’ll never know. What could the diaper man tell us?

Dottie had a harness with her, and a short leash—of the kind attached to Seeing Eye dogs. Thus was the diaper man dragged away. If a look could speak, it was easy to interpret the cursory glance Dottie gave to Henrik, who’d lost control of his lacrosse stick when he’d been bitten. Dottie’s glance gave Henrik some idea of what Dottie woulda done in Maine, where she would have bitten his throat. The croquet ball had briefly rolled free, but not for long. The baby emeritus had grabbed it and stuffed it in his diaper.

I wished I could read lips. I wanted to know the unspoken words the diaper man was mouthing, as Dottie led him (still on his hands and knees) to the Front Street house. Whatever the infant in reverse kept repeating to himself, he seemed sure about it.

“Son of the Bride,” the old Austrian musician whispered to me. “You’re not a lip-reader, are you?”

“No,” I answered him. He was returning to his small table and unattended zither.

“I am,” the zither man said, almost indifferently. “Your grandfather was saying, ‘My ball, my ball’—over and over again.”

I didn’t know if I believed the zither-meister. It was too easy to guess that’s what Granddaddy Lew had been thinking, though how would the edelweiss man have known that Principal Brewster was the only croquet player in the family?

My grandmother had left the wedding tent immediately after the biting. She’d told me she was going to rescue the caterers from Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, who were poking their noses into everything in the kitchen. I decided to leave the wedding tent, too, upon the appearance of my aunts on the croquet court, where they’d arrived with a first-aid kit to attend to the wound in Henrik’s Achilles tendon. Henrik sat cross-legged on the court while my aunts fussed over him. One of the girl jocks had picked up Henrik’s lacrosse stick. She was handling it like she knew what she was doing. The other girl jock had her hands on her hips while she stood over Henrik, looking down at him. The two girl jocks seemed to enjoy my aunts’ disapproval of the girls’ skimpy towels—not to mention how the fallen Henrik had been humiliated by a biter on all fours in a diaper.

The not-very-bright barbecue chef had gone off somewhere, taking his spatula with him. The big barbecue was smoking up a storm, but all the food was still in the kitchen of the Front Street house or laid out on the dining-room table. There were two huge Westphalian hams and giant bowls of German potato salad. There was a pantry, between the dining room and the kitchen, where the caterers were keeping the wedding cake hidden. There was no hiding the washtub of beer on ice from Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who were already drinking beer and laughing loudly about the platter of uncooked food that was going to be barbecued—salmon steaks, chicken breasts, and burgers. Apparently, my uncles found these food choices as funny as foreign films with subtitles.

I slipped upstairs to the second floor, where it seemed likely I would discover the rest of the girl jocks. Fresh from their baths and showers, with wet hair and wearing only towels, the spanking-clean girls made a formidable barricade on the bottommost steps of the stairs leading to my attic bedroom. I couldn’t step over them or make my way through them.

“Sit here, Kid,” one of the girl jocks said. She moved over and I sat on the stairs beside her, with my back against the knees of the girl jock on the step above me.

“We can’t let you go up there, Adam—there’s a battle with a dress going on,” said the girl jock sitting behind me.

“You’re killing me, Molly!” we could hear my mother screaming.

“Stop holding your breath,” the trail groomer told her.

“I’m not holding it—I can’t breathe!” my mom shouted.

“You’re being dramatic, and it isn’t helping,” we heard the snowcat operator say.

“Your wedding clothes are laid out for you on the bed in your mom’s room, Adam,” Nelly told me. I was relieved to see no visual evidence of her yeast infection. “You’re supposed to shower in your mom’s bathroom,” Nelly added.

“Then we’ll help you get dressed, Kid—all of us!” said the girl jock sitting behind me. She bumped me with her knees, and the other jocks laughed.

“That’s okay—I can manage by myself,” I told them. I knew they were kidding, but I was both agitated and excited by the prospect of all of them dressing me. “Do you have to get dressed in the big tent—all of you?” I asked them.

They all groaned. “It’ll be a sauna in there,” one of the girl jocks complained.

“We can all get dressed in Ray’s room, with Adam,” Nelly suggested. The girls all laughed again, but I had to restrain myself from saying what I wanted to say to them. I would have loved it if they all got dressed (or undressed) with me.

“Ow! That’s my rib, Molly—one of them, anyway,” we could hear my mom saying.

“If I don’t make it tight, Ray, your dress will slip down—there’s nothing but your boobs to hold it up, and you don’t exactly have humdingers,” the night groomer told her.

“I didn’t know that’s how you felt about my boobs, Molly,” we could hear my mother saying, “but it doesn’t matter what you think of them—you’re crushing them!”

“I’m very fond of your boobs, Ray,” we heard the snowcat operator say. “I’m just telling you that your boobs can’t keep your dress from slipping down—not all by themselves.”

“Ow!” my mom cried out again. “That’s my nipple, Molly, or what’s left of it—one of them, anyway.”

“Dressing you will be a lot easier than this, Adam,” one of the girl jocks told me.

“Yeah, I could dress Adam in under a minute, start to finish—the necktie and everything,” Nelly said.

“You could undress Adam in under a minute, Nelly—I don’t doubt that,” said the girl jock sitting behind me.

“It’ll take you more than a minute to tie the necktie, Nelly—everything else, in under a minute, is easy,” another girl jock said.

“I could use a little help with the necktie,” I told them. “I don’t need help with anything else.”

“Listen to me, Kid,” Nelly said. “When you get dressed, except for the necktie, come find us. We’ll take care of the tie. Then we’ll get into our bridesmaids’ dresses in your mom’s bedroom. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

“Ow!” my mom cried.

“I almost have it, Ray,” the trail groomer told her.

I went along the hall to my mother’s bedroom, where I found my clothes neatly laid out on the bed. My mom’s clothes, and Molly’s clothes, were everywhere else. The night groomer’s clothes looked huge in comparison to my mother’s small things. On the dressing table, in front of my mom’s makeup mirror, was a very big bra. I knew it was Molly’s bra—she had humdingers.

There were two razors in my mother’s bathroom, but I didn’t have to shave. To my disappointment, I was showing no signs of a beard. My mom liked to run her finger over my upper lip, because she said it was so smooth. “Don’t ever grow a mustache, sweetie,” she would tell me, but I wished I could grow one.

After my shower, when I was getting dressed, Molly’s bra watched me and I stared back at it. The trail groomer’s humdingers were even bigger than Nora’s, I was imagining. The bedroom windows were open, and I could hear the zither-meister warming up—just the first few chords of “The Third Man Theme,” as if Harry Lime were alive and lurking under the wedding tent in my grandmother’s garden.

Unquestionably, a mood of intrigue and melancholy comes across in “The Harry Lime Theme” on a zither; yet it was an unusually tranquil moment in the midst of my mother’s wedding weekend. At that moment, alone with the night groomer’s captivating bra, I was thinking that the lion’s share of the drama was surely over. At fourteen, I hadn’t learned that the things you imagine when you’re alone with a bra can deceive you.