The Last Chairlift

19. “I SAW ME IN YOUR EYES”

For another thirty-five years, I wouldn’t go to Aspen; I didn’t set foot inside the Hotel Jerome. “You couldn’t get me to go there for breakfast,” as Molly said. But you should be careful what you purposely put off doing; over time, the importance of doing it grows. I also put off falling in love and getting married. At first unconsciously, then consciously, I chose unmarriageable girlfriends. Naturally, most of my girlfriends didn’t know I thought they were unmarriageable. You should be careful about that, too.

I was almost fifty when I first got married; my much younger wife was only thirty-four. In my years of unmarriageable girlfriends, I’d learned to avoid younger women; they were more likely to be marriageable. When you make a point of not looking for the girl of your dreams, this has consequences. When you go out of your way to avoid any woman who looks like she might lead to a serious relationship, you get used to lying to yourself. I got used to being attracted to girlfriends who didn’t attract me.

My mother met my future wife before I did. My mom gave her ski lessons. Little Ray and the snowcat operator decided that this young woman might be the one for me. My mom and Molly would hold on to each other—no falling off the cliff for them.

“Now that you’ve met the right woman, don’t ever lie to her, Adam,” my mom would say. “Lies of omission count as lies, sweetie—they can be the worst ones.” This really rubbed me the wrong way.

What a hypocrite my mother was. Imagine her telling me that lies of omission counted as lies. Hadn’t she demonstrated that lies of omission could be the worst ones? She’d not told me about her and Molly! She’d let me discover them as a couple—in their unforgettable, upside-down embrace. “Molly and I were thinking of the best time to tell you, sweetie—we thought after the wedding would have been best,” was how my mom put it.

“That was an apology, kiddo—just get over it,” Nora would tell me, but not even Em would nod her head to that. Em and I were on the same page when it came to a lie of omission of that magnitude. My mother should have told me about her and Molly. This was why I didn’t heed her advice about lies of omission. Nora had tried to set me straight: “No one knows more than Ray about lies of omission. You should listen to her on the subject, kiddo.”

The past is everlasting. In my new life, with my new wife, I got off to a bad start. I should have forsworn the lies of omission, including how I put off telling her about the ghosts. In my defense, I was remembering my experiences with some previous girlfriends—the ones I told about the ghosts. With a few of my most unmarriageable girlfriends, telling them about the ghosts was a good way to initiate the process of breaking up with them. Usually, they thought I was kidding. If I insisted that I was one of those people who saw ghosts, they thought I was crazy and broke up with me.

There were the disbelieving girlfriends who asked me to prove it. When my grandmother was still alive, I took the disbelievers to the Front Street house. When the semicolon emeritus appeared, there were mixed reactions to him. Like Molly, there were women who didn’t believe in ghosts, or they simply didn’t see them; in their eyes, I was a nutcase. This is a relatively painless way to break up with someone. Yet when the disbelievers saw Granddaddy’s ghost, of course I would be blamed for their paranormal experience—as if the supernatural manifestations were all my fault.

“When you want to break up with someone, you’re going to get blamed for it—no matter how it happens, sweetie,” my mother told me. She had a point, but I took her advice on this aspect of love with a grain of salt—as Dottie said they were always saying in Maine.

In poor Sally’s case, I was not trying to break up with her when I took her to my attic bedroom and she saw the spirit of punctuation perfection. Sally was my first girlfriend. I was very fond of her. I didn’t want to break up with her. I just wanted to make out with her, and I knew Nana and Dottie wouldn’t intrude; those two were fussing around in the kitchen, where my grandmother was struggling over one of her mystery casseroles. “When you’re in your attic bedroom, I’m leavin’ you to your own business, Adam—if I need ya, you’ll hear me hollerin’ from them attic stairs!” Dottie had told me.

I suppose I was hoping to impress Sally. I’d told her that my grandfather was a ghost; she said she wanted to see him. She wasn’t challenging me—she sounded like she believed me.

Nora had a way of compartmentalizing my girlfriends—“the overweight one” was Nora’s shorthand for Sally. “Didn’t Sally get stuck in a shower?” Nora was always asking me—thus pigeonholing one awkward moment as the epitome of my “fat-girl infatuation,” as Nora referred to my first girlfriend experience.

This seemed unkind of Nora, who was (as she’d always been) a big girl. But I’d already noticed—at fourteen, going on fifteen, when I was a first-time student at the academy—how overweight girls were discriminated against, often cruelly. I took their side; I felt sorry for them, but I was truly attracted to them. Did their bigness in juxtaposition to my smallness have something to do with my attraction to them? My mom said she thought so.

“Duh!” Nora said, when I asked her about it.

I met Sally at a high school dance. There were dances in the gym at Exeter High School on the weekends. The students were the same kids I’d known in elementary or junior high school, but now that I was attending the academy, I felt ostracized at those dances. The high school kids either ignored me or they treated me as if I’d snubbed them.

The pretty girls were always with someone; they were already dancing. Before I went to my first dance, the snowshoer warned me about cutting in. “The townies who go to the academy are not very welcome at the high school dances, Adam—just don’t cut in,” Elliot had told me.

The not-so-pretty girls were dancing with one another, or they sat waiting to be asked to dance. I noticed that no one asked the overweight ones, and the heavier of them were disinclined to dance with one another; maybe they thought dancing together would just call attention to how big they were. I saw Sally sitting by herself. Even when she was sitting down, I could see how big her boobs were and how tall she was. I knew I would come up only to her collarbones.

Our first dance was a slow one. I was slow-dancing at eye level to Sally’s boobs to “Old Shep” or “How’s the World Treating You?”—’56 was a big year for Elvis. A few of the cooler couples were quick to laugh at us.

“They’re laughing at us because I’m small,” I said to Sally.

“They’re laughing at us because I’m fat,” Sally told me, without hesitation.

“I don’t think you’re fat, but I know I’m small,” I told her.

“I know how to shut ’em up,” Sally said, pulling my head to her breasts and holding me there. This was when I got the idea of making out with her in my attic bedroom; this was also when the disc jockey decided to switch from slow Elvis to fast Elvis.

First my face was pressed against Sally’s boobs, and we were dancing to a dead-dog dirge; then Elvis was singing “Blue Suede Shoes” or “I Got a Woman,” and I was trying to hang on.

Fast-dancing with Sally was an exercise in staying out of her way. I soon realized Sally was intent on doing damage to the couple who’d laughed at us the quickest and the loudest. Sally hit the couple hard, mid-twirl, hipping them across the gym floor, where they fell together in a tangled heap. “Oops!” Sally said, twirling back to me. I realized she was more agile than she looked.

I liked her so much, I even introduced her to my mother and the little snowshoer—this was in the fall, before the ski season, of course. But there was nowhere Sally and I could have made out in Mr. Barlow’s faculty apartment; it was a small apartment in one of the academy dormitories. I would have had to bring Sally into the dorm, where all the Exeter boys could get a look at her. I was afraid of the comments one of those cruel boys might have made. I was brand new, as both a faculty brat and an academy student. Many of those Exeter boys were smarter and more sophisticated than I was. I felt I was an outsider among them.

I liked how clear Sally was about the rules for making out; she was exceptionally clear about the guidelines. Compared to Sally, my later girlfriends would be vague or misleading or self-contradictory about the regulations regarding touching or no touching. “We keep our underwear on—there’s no touching anything that’s inside our underwear,” Sally told me, as we were going up the attic stairs. “Rubbing is okay—we can rub against each other, anywhere we feel like it,” Sally said.

“Okay,” I said. At fourteen, who wouldn’t be okay with that? And what if I hadn’t said a single word to Sally about Granddaddy’s ghost? What if the never-a-headmaster had just shown up, blathering about punctuation marks? It’s hard to imagine that would have turned out any better. Exeter is a small town. Everyone knew Lewis Brewster was dead; everyone had heard how he’d died.

Like many things, ghosts are a cultural problem. People who haven’t seen a ghost expect to see their prevailing fantasy of a spirit: a gauzy shape, a vague presence, or the mere sensation of a spiritual life; a bodiless voice, a cold draft, a chair that moves. People who don’t know ghosts aren’t expecting a person who seems real.

There we were, in our underwear in my attic bedroom, Sally and I, rubbing each other everywhere; we were kissing and touching everything, except those parts of ourselves that were inside our underwear. It was twilight, and we were writhing around under the skylight. This time, the late Principal Brewster was talking about commas.

“Boys, boys,” he began. (Trust me: Sally didn’t look like a boy.) “The poor comma can’t do everything, my dear boys—you expect too much of it,” my youthful-looking grandfather said.

I noticed that Sally had stopped rubbing herself against me; she’d stopped touching me, too. This could mean that Sally was sexually satisfied—more likely, she’d lost interest in me, I was thinking. I didn’t notice that Sally had stopped breathing.

“A comma fault, also called a comma splice,” Granddaddy’s ghost was saying, when Sally caught her breath and started screaming. Her screams were of no concern to the deceased faculty emeritus, who decided to sit beside us on the edge of my bed.

Sally ran screaming into the bathroom—a very small bathroom—formerly the attic closet. When I was born, there was no bedroom in the Front Street house to accommodate a live-in grandchild. Once there was a bedroom for me, in the attic, the closet was converted to a bathroom. It was too small a bathroom, to begin with; the shower stall was even smaller. “It doesn’t matter how small the shower is,” my mother told Nana. “My one and only is going to be small!”

It was too small a shower stall for Sally. What was she thinking when she got in the shower in her underwear? In the first place, Sally never meant to turn the water on; she wasn’t trying to take a shower. Sally was trying to get away from the ghost. She sized up the shower as entirely too small for the ghost to get in with her.

Sally’s nonstop screaming had started a debate between my grandmother and Dottie in the kitchen, two floors below.

“I hope that’s not a loss-of-virginity scream—that girl is much too young,” Nana had said. (Dottie would tell me—not then, but later—how she’d answered my grandmother.)

“That sure as shit sounds like too much caterwaulin’, and the wrong kind of caterwaulin’, for a loss of virginity to me, Mrs. Brewster,” Dottie told my grandmother. Sally’s prolonged screaming had sounded like “a toolbox situation” to Dottie, who was prescient enough to have brought her toolbox, when she called up to me from the bottom of the attic stairs. “Is there somethin’ or someone in need of fixin’, Adam?” Dottie called.

By then, the situation in the shower stall had worsened. Poor, overweight Sally had slipped and fallen; before she fell, she’d inadvertently turned on the shower. The cold water must have surprised her; then the hot water had scalded her. She’d contorted herself to get away from the stream. She lay wedged against the door—I couldn’t open the door because she was pressed against it. Her bra and panties were thoroughly soaked, and thoroughly transparent. “Don’t look at me, Adam!” Sally wailed. “Don’t let the ghost get in here!” she cried.

But Granddaddy’s ghost had vanished; he’d heard Dottie calling from the bottom of the attic stairs. Not even death had saved the infant emeritus from his fear of Dottie and her Seeing Eye dog harness.

“You’re going to need your toolbox!” I was calling to Dottie. I could hear her clomping up the attic stairs.

“I could tell by all the caterwaulin’—I know a toolbox situation when I hear one, Adam,” Dottie was saying.

“Dottie will help you,” I said to Sally. “Dottie isn’t a ghost.” The way she was wedged in the shower made me reconsider Sally’s agility.

“You’ve seen too much of me, Adam,” Sally moaned. “When you think of me, you’ll remember me this way,” she added. I knew it was true; I couldn’t refute it, then or now.

“Holy shit,” Dottie said, when she saw what the toolbox situation entailed. “You get out of here, Adam—go talk to your grandmother, or somethin’,” Dottie told me. “Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” Dottie said to Sally. “This stupid shower wasn’t built for a full-size person, but there ain’t a door I can’t get off,” Dottie said. I put on my clothes and left the two of them, with Dottie at work removing the hinges to the shower door.

“My nipple got burned by the hot water—just one of them,” I could hear Sally telling Dottie, as I went down the attic stairs.

“Don’t you worry, sweetheart,” I heard Dottie say. “I know what works for a scalded nipple—I just gotta get this fuckin’ door off first.”

I helped my grandmother in the kitchen and the dining room while Dottie was attending to Sally. I was surprised how relieved Nana was to hear what had happened to poor Sally. I felt awful about Sally’s humiliation in the shower, and her scalded nipple. Not knowing, at the time, about Nana’s conversation with Dottie, I was unaware that my grandmother had imagined far worse. Now, in retrospect, I’m not at all sure that Sally’s loss of her virginity would have been worse.

“I saw me in your eyes—what you were thinking,” was all Sally would say to me about it, ever. I knew, even before Dottie brought her downstairs to the dining room, that Sally and I were finished. Her blouse was a little too sheer to wear without a bra, but Sally sat through dinner while we listened to her underwear in the dryer. You couldn’t quite see her nipples through her blouse, but the Band-Aid covering the scalded nipple was very clear. Dottie wouldn’t tell me what Down East remedy for relief she’d put on the nipple, or on the Band-Aid. “Just a dab of somethin’,” was all Dottie would say. For a big girl, poor Sally didn’t eat much of Nana’s mystery casserole while we listened, interminably, to the clicking sound made by Sally’s bra in the dryer.

Mr. Barlow suggested I write about it. “Your first girlfriend, your first heartbreak, and hers—that’s a short story, Adam,” the little English teacher told me.

I called the short story “I Saw Me in Your Eyes”—Sally’s title, of course. What Sally had seen in my eyes was pity; once she’d seen how I pitied her, I could never take it back.

“You should save your pity for your fictional characters, Adam—pity is a good thing, in fiction,” the little snowshoer said. “Real women, on the other hand, do not take kindly to your feeling sorry for them—real women want to be loved, not pitied,” Mr. Barlow told me.

It meant a lot to me that the snowshoer liked my short story, and the title. I admitted to Mr. Barlow that I’d been tempted to call the story “The Scalded Nipple,” but I chose Sally’s title (as I thought of it) instead. The snowshoer assured me that I’d made the right decision.

“There’s more pity in Sally’s title,” Mr. Barlow said.