The Last Chairlift

21. IN CONTROL

I developed a preternatural interest in what passed for physical affection or intimacy between my mother and the snowshoer. I was pulling for them, from the start. Whatever was between them, I wanted it to work—regardless of what was between my mom and Molly. I wasn’t privy to the conversations my mom and Elliot must have had. I didn’t know what choices were available to them in the area of Exeter faculty housing.

Mr. Barlow was obligated to do dorm duty. He’d been living in a bachelor faculty apartment in Bancroft Hall—or was it Webster? I can’t remember. The newlyweds and I would move into a two-bedroom faculty apartment on the second floor of Amen Hall. Amen was not a dorm devoted to prayer; it was named for Harlan Page Amen—for eighteen years, an actual and distinguished principal of Exeter. Unlike the diaper man, Principal Amen didn’t retire—in 1913, he died on the job. A far cry from the infant emeritus, electrocuted in a lightning storm while making music on a barbecue with croquet wickets—struck down while imagining his youngest daughter had married one of her illegitimate children.

Our sleeping arrangements in Amen Hall would not escape scrutiny. I’ll bet my mother and the little English teacher took my aunts’ sexual surveillance into consideration. Our two bedrooms in Amen were similar in size and configuration. Each had a queen-size bed and an adjoining bathroom—one with a shower, one with a tub. My mom insisted on my having the bathroom with the shower. “No boy your age takes baths,” she told me. I was fourteen, not likely to drown in a bathtub. To Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, Little Ray made a different point. “Elliot and I are so small,” she told them, “we can fit together in the tub.”

Yes, those two could have fit together in that bathtub—this is true. Did they purposely let me hear them splashing and fooling around in the tub together, or were they only pretending to fool around? There was no denying their physical affection for each other. Everywhere they went, they held hands. Anywhere there was a couch, they would curl up together on it.

In our faculty apartment, the kitchen and the dining room (or the living room) was one room—not a big one. I guess we were supposed to choose which room we wanted to have, either a dining room or a living room. We chose both, or neither. There was one couch and one comfy chair. They faced the TV, which was always on with the sound off. There was a table between the kitchen and the end of the room designated for silent television watching. We called it our kitchen table.

In the evenings, the snowshoer lay reading on the couch—his head in my mom’s lap, where she played with his hair. She watched old movies with the sound off, her lips sometimes in sync with the remembered dialogue. If they were movies she hadn’t seen or didn’t remember seeing, she said she preferred to guess what the characters were saying—she believed this was better than hearing their actual dialogue. She watched TV Westerns with the sound off, too. “You don’t need to know what they’re saying in Westerns,” my mother said. Given Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, I don’t doubt that this was true.

My mom didn’t watch most of the TV shows that my grandmother saw in the Front Street house. It depressed me to see Nana slumped in her reading chair, not reading. The Milton Berle Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Jack Benny Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and (especially) The Lawrence Welk Show really depressed me. Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was a crapshoot. What had happened to the wonderful woman who’d read Moby-Dick aloud to me? My grandmother sat as if she’d been poleaxed in the chair she used to read in. The blank way she watched TV suggested that television was killing her. Fortunately, Nana’s stupor didn’t endure; she would eventually go back to Moby-Dick.

The occasional good stuff on TV perked up Nana’s and my mother’s attention. Little Ray turned on the volume for The Honeymooners and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But, for the most part, our faculty apartment in Amen Hall was a sanctuary for silent television. In my Exeter years, I did my homework at our kitchen table, where Mr. Barlow would join me when he was grading papers. The ever-changing light from the soundless TV glowed or flashed over us—a distant war in a foreign country, sanitized, void of suffering.

Even in the ski season—in the long winter months when my mom was away—Elliot and I kept the quiet television on. We went to the extreme of reading TV Guide. We wanted to be sure our TV was on the channel Little Ray would have been watching. We missed her, but it was easier for me that I had company in missing her. The academy was hard—the schoolwork was overwhelming. I was busier, but more engaged in a good way, than I’d ever been before.

Outwardly, my mom and Elliot Barlow were the lovebirds on the Exeter campus. In those months they were separated, not counting the ski holidays, did they sincerely miss each other? Was that why they seemed so in love whenever they were together? “They’re not like a married couple,” one of my friends would tell me. “It’s like they’ve just met, and are head over heels in love.” I’m not sure I know what my mother and the snowshoer were really like. I just know that I loved the way they were together, and I loved our family of three. Four, counting Molly. It was the snowcat operator who said that Little Ray and the snowshoer never stopped looking like newlyweds.

“They give you hope,” another of my friends told me.

“What hope?” I asked him.

“Hope you’ll meet someone you can’t keep your hands off—hope she’s someone who can’t keep her hands off you. That hope,” my friend said.

I would wrestle at Exeter. The snowshoer was not wrong to recommend it. He regretted he hadn’t wrestled, but he’d grown up in ski towns in Austria and New Hampshire—not exactly hotbeds of wrestling. Elliot Barlow’s first opportunity to wrestle would have been at Harvard. He thought it was too late to start. Besides, he couldn’t have competed. The snowshoer didn’t weigh enough for the lightest weight class. If you asked him what he weighed, he sounded indifferent about it. “Right around a hundred pounds,” Elliot said—he always shrugged. But I knew he weighed himself obsessively. Only occasionally, when he weighed as much as 105, did the little English teacher say he was too big.

My mom was always weighing herself, too. When she weighed as much as 120, she said she was over her limit and going on a diet. Her normal weight was 110 or 115 pounds. In our faculty apartment in Amen, there was a scale in the bathroom with the tub—in their bathroom, as I thought of it. But for most of the night, when it wasn’t the ski season, my mother slept in my bed with me.

Was it only for the sake of appearances that my mom kept her clothes in a closet and chest of drawers in their bedroom? No, I don’t think so. I believe that Little Ray knew it was more appropriate for her to dress and undress in front of the snowshoer, regardless of what their real relationship was. Of course, she kept a toothbrush and some of her other toiletries in my bathroom, and sometimes she took a shower there, but she never dressed or undressed in front of me. Whatever was innately lawless about my mother, she had her own rules about dressing and undressing.

The first Christmas they were married—my first Christmas as a wrestler—Elliot Barlow gave me a scale for my bathroom as a Christmas present. The snowshoer knew I would soon be weighing myself obsessively, as wrestlers do. He was also being discreet. I’m sure he knew that Aunt Abigail had deemed him a little light in his loafers. My aunts were outraged that my mom would marry Mr. Barlow and then leave me alone with him in the ski season. But I would always be safe with the snowshoer. The little English teacher had his own rules about dressing and undressing, too.

I don’t think my mother could be in the bathroom, Elliot’s or mine, without weighing herself. It was another bond between us; weighing ourselves was something the three of us shared. There are worse obsessions. The way I kept thinking about Em was one. Molly was my other.

Many of my wrestling teammates had observed, with heartfelt longing, that my mom and Mr. Barlow couldn’t keep their hands off each other. Wrestlers are creatures of constant physical contact. Okay, I know—wrestlers aren’t necessarily known for hugging and kissing one another, or for holding hands.

As for public displays of their year-round training, not solely indicative of their physical affection, the snowshoer and Little Ray took turns giving each other piggyback rides every time they encountered a flight of stairs. We had piggyback races in the wrestling room, carrying a workout partner in our weight class or near it. It was integral to our training, to lift and carry a body weight comparable to our own. It seemed natural that my fellow wrestlers would notice the athletic or competitive nature of the physicality between my mother and Mr. Barlow. Leave it to wrestlers to notice that Little Ray and the snowshoer were like workout partners who happened to hug and kiss each other, and hold hands.

Elliot Barlow had been a regular in the Exeter wrestling room since he came to the academy. In my first wrestling season, the winter of 1956–57, Elliot’s skills were better than those of a third-year wrestler. He was as experienced as the four-year seniors in the room. In his late twenties, the snowshoer was exceptionally fit; pound for pound, he was also stronger than anyone in our wrestling room. He’d shown up for his first wrestling practice in the 1953–54 season. He knew there would be a few little kids in the room, “right around a hundred pounds.” In those days, the lightest weight class was 110 pounds. In three years, the little English teacher would be competitive with the best lightweights in the room. By the time I was wrestling at Exeter, Mr. Barlow was treated as an assistant coach.

But the reason Elliot tried wrestling in the first place, and the foremost reason he wanted me to try it, was the coach. Mr. Dearborn had been a Big Ten champion and a two-time All-American at Illinois. An NCAA runner-up, he was overqualified for the job of coaching wrestling at Exeter—his teams dominated New England interscholastic wrestling for years. The snowshoer wanted me to try wrestling because he knew Mr. Dearborn was a good coach. My mom had wanted me to have my own faculty person at the academy, someone “like a father”—someone who treated me like his own faculty brat. Elliot Barlow was a good stepfather to me, from the start. His instinct to match me with Coach Dearborn was the first instance of the snowshoer’s steering me through Exeter.

I’d missed seeing the coach carry the diaper man’s body from the croquet court, but I remembered his doing lunges with my mom at her wedding—when I’d mistaken their lunges for dancing.

“You’ll need someone to help you at the academy,” my mother had told me. Elliot found the good teachers for me—he put me in their hands. Substitute Fathers, I would title an early novel—a bad title for fictional amalgams of my teachers and coaches. I changed it.

Coach Dearborn was an honest man. He said I wouldn’t ever be better than “halfway decent” as a wrestler—not for lack of good coaching, or good workout partners. I just wasn’t the athlete my mother was. “That you’re not very talented needn’t be the end of it,” Coach Dearborn told me. When I was a beginner as a writer, with no confidence in my talent for storytelling, I took what my first wrestling coach told me to heart. I never believed I was very talented, but that wouldn’t be the end of it.

When I started wrestling at Exeter, the wrestling room was in the basement of the old gym. The rope we climbed every day, before and after practice, hung from the low ceiling. Some of the smaller wrestlers, Elliot included, had to be lifted up to reach the chinning bar. I began wrestling on horsehair mats, which were covered with a filmy plastic sheeting—a preventative but ineffective measure against mat burns. The shock-absorbing abilities of those old horsehair mats were nonexistent in comparison to the new Resilite mats, which arrived at Exeter in my second or third year. I can’t remember exactly when this happened, but we were excited to move to our new wrestling room. It was on the upper level of the Thompson Cage—where the wooden track was. We had a higher ceiling for our rope climbing. We had more than one chinning bar. Mr. Barlow was still the best rope climber in the room—he could do the most chin-ups, too.

Coach Dearborn wasn’t very enthusiastic about lifting weights. “You want to lift, just wrestle more,” he would say. Maybe it was an Illinois or a Big Ten thing, but Coach Dearborn believed that rope climbing and chin-ups were the best strength training for wrestlers. “There’s more pulling than pushing in wrestling,” he said. Coach Dearborn wasn’t impressed by the bench press. “Just stay off your backs,” he liked to say.

All the ski-poling had helped the snowshoer as a wrestler. Hand strength matters—wrestling is a squeezing sport, too. As for our piggyback races in the wrestling room, Elliot was no slouch at carrying kids who were heavier than he was. He’d been lugging my mom around, and Little Ray usually outweighed him by ten or fifteen pounds.

In my third year at Exeter, the wrestling season of 1958–59, I became the varsity wrestler in my weight class, the starter at 133 pounds. In schools, wrestling is a winter sport. I was competing in the ski season. But now that I was facing outside competition, my mother—at first, only occasionally—came to see my matches against wrestlers from other schools.

What made this possible was that she was no longer as far away as Stowe. My mom and Molly had moved to Bromley—it was a smaller mountain and ski area, but Bromley treated them well, and they liked living in southern Vermont. My mother and the trail groomer bought a small house in Manchester. They liked the town, and the drive to Exeter was a lot less formidable than that from Stowe. (This was why I was able to take Caroline and Maud from Exeter for an overnight with Molly and my mom, but it was still a long drive.)

Some of my away wrestling matches were at schools nearer to Manchester, Vermont, than Exeter was. My mom came to see a few of my matches at other schools, but she preferred the Exeter home matches. That way, she and I could have a sleepover together in the bed we shared in Amen Hall. Exeter had wrestling matches on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In the beginning, my mother came only to the Wednesday matches—weekends were the busiest days in ski areas. But soon she was coming to see my Saturday matches, too, even though this meant her leaving Exeter at four or five o’clock on Sunday morning, in order to be at Bromley before the ski lifts started running.

I was surprised when my mom became a wrestling fanatic, but this was no surprise to Molly. “Your mother is small but strong, Kid,” the trail groomer told me. “Wrestling is a weight-class sport—you get to beat up people your own size. What’s not to love about that?”

My mom’s fanaticism for wrestling didn’t surprise Nora and Em, either. “Why wouldn’t Ray love the idea of beating up someone, even at the risk of being beaten up?” Nora asked me. “Look how awful my mother and Aunt Martha were to her, Adam—and Ray hated school, right?” I nodded, if not as vigorously as Em, who saw and understood the connection to hating school more clearly than I did. “The bitchy girls who turn against you, because you’re not getting wet over boys,” was the way Nora put it. “What’s not to hate about that?”

Em was in her advanced pantomime mode. She had studied—later, she taught—in workshops for pantomimists in Italy. If I’d not seen her enactment of vomitous retching a few times before, I would have thought she really was vomiting. “All those years they made us ski, kiddo,” Nora suddenly said, while Em retched, “don’t you think I would have liked wrestling better?”

I knew wrestlers who loved wrestling because it was an outlet for their anger, but they weren’t the norm. It wasn’t what I loved about wrestling, or about writing. In both cases, I loved the act of perfecting. What the snowshoer and I admired about Coach Dearborn was that he was a perfectionist. He sized you up and taught you what worked for you, and what didn’t.

For wrestling, good balance is important—good balance is also uncoachable. I’m slow to recover my balance when I lose it. Coach Dearborn said this was my chief weakness as an athlete, a sizable liability for a wrestler. For a skier, too, my mother had taught me—it was why I struggled with parallel turns, she’d said. “Your balance isn’t very good, sweetie,” was how she put it, as nicely as she could.

Coach Dearborn taught me to be in control. A mix-up on the mat—a scramble, a free-for-all—favored the better athlete. I learned to keep the score close; I learned that mayhem wasn’t my friend. “In a scramble, Adam, you’re not likely to end up on top,” was the way Coach Dearborn put it, as nicely as he could.

But who told me to apply this principle to writing? No one said I lacked talent as a writer—I just assumed it. From wrestling, I learned to be strategic—I was never spontaneous and I kept myself under control. If I could navigate a wrestling match, why not a novel or a screenplay? In a wrestling match, chaos is the best friend of the better athlete. But why would mayhem be the friend of any writer? Doesn’t a plot imply that you know where you’re going?

As a ski instructor, my mom taught beginners (mostly children) to ski in control. But I didn’t know her when she was a racer. I wasn’t good enough to ski flat out with her. When I saw how my mother reacted to wrestling, I had a picture of her as someone who skied on the edge. When we watched ski races together, she liked the skiers who took the most risks, the ones who looked reckless to me, those downhill racers and slalom skiers who looked off-balance, at times on one ski, borderline out of control.

My mom and Molly and I watched Franz Klammer’s gold-medal downhill run at Innsbruck—the 1976 Winter Olympics. Klammer looked to me like he was on one ski, and about to crash, the whole way. He came close to hitting the hay bales at the edge of the piste. On one of their trips to Austria, only a year or two before Klammer’s run, the snowshoer had taken my mother to Innsbruck—she wanted to see the Patscherkofel course. Molly and my mom and I watched Klammer’s win-or-crash run on TV in Manchester, Vermont. Little Ray was screaming for Franz Klammer, all the way. “That’s how your mom likes to ski, Kid,” the trail groomer told me. “Not the way she teaches the beginners.” It was the first I’d heard, from anyone, about how my mother liked to ski, but the way Little Ray behaved at wrestling matches had tipped me off. Yet hadn’t she hidden her anger and her daredevil recklessness from me? Weren’t these aspects of her nature also in the category of lies of omission?

“There’s no end to her secrets,” I remember saying to Nora. (This was right after the 1976 Winter Olympics.)

Nora gave me her tell-me-something-I-don’t-know shrug. “There’s a title in what you say—No End to Her Secrets. Maybe you can use it, kiddo,” was all Nora said. It was a better title than Substitute Fathers, I knew. I didn’t have to look at Em to know she was nodding.

I was in my thirties when Franz Klammer’s gold-medal run made my mother exclaim, “If I’d been your size, Molly, I would have been a downhill racer—slalom is baloney!” My mom and Molly were in their fifties. It was the first time I’d heard Little Ray disparage her own smallness. I’d adjusted to my mother’s falling in love with a woman as big as the night groomer, but I’d not heard her say she wished she’d been bigger herself—not even as a skier.

The next winter, in December—on the same TV in Manchester, Vermont—my mom and Molly and I were watching a women’s downhill race at Cortina. Franz Klammer, who was only twenty-three, would win the men’s downhill at Kitzbühel a month later. Another Austrian, Annemarie Moser-Pröll, won the downhill at Cortina. Molly had picked Moser-Pröll to win, but my mom was cheering for Monika Behr—Moser-Pröll’s hotshot teammate. As you may remember, if you saw her fall, that would be Monika Behr’s last time on skis.

Yes, we’d seen Monika Behr fall before. Who hadn’t? More than one of her falls—not just her last one, on that course in Italy—is repeatedly shown in video highlights, whenever winter sports are on television. Monika’s career as a downhill racer ended at Cortina in December 1976. She was Franz Klammer’s age, but she would watch herself falling in video highlights for the rest of her life. She was a crash-or-win downhiller, but mostly a crasher. Monika was an all-out, go-for-broke girl. Molly and I did not share my mother’s affection for Monika Behr. The way that Austrian downhiller skied was the way she did everything else.

After a World Cup race at Val d’Isère in 1974, she had been arrested by the French police for assaulting a photographer. Monika had hit his telephoto lens with the heel of her hand, driving the camera into the photographer’s face, injuring his eye and cutting the bridge of his nose.

She’d crashed in World Cup races at Garmisch and Jackson Hole in 1975. Both times, she’d been accused of assaulting the medics who attended to her after she was airlifted from the course. The way Monika Behr skied, she kept crashing, but she was not airlifted again until they lifted her lifeless-looking body from the course in Italy. She’d bounced from one hip to the other in that final crash, and had not appeared to be conscious after her initial contact with the piste—on the back of her neck.

There was other trouble before the Cortina crash. A fistfight with a downhiller on the U.S. women’s team at a World Cup race at Wengen in 1976—two big girls throwing punches and kicking each other with ski boots, in that restricted area behind the starting gates. Monika Behr had been screwing the boyfriend of the U.S. skier, a brash young man on the U.S. men’s team—he was not without troubles of his own. Then, just two months later, during the World Cup events and festivities in Aspen, Monika Behr had been arrested for lewd behavior in the car belonging to that same male skier; the unfortunate Monika got caught with her panties down, still screwing the guy.

No matter what you thought of Monika Behr, it was hard to watch how she fell at Cortina, or how she looked when they airlifted her that last time—she looked dead.

“Oh, my God, that poor girl—she broke her neck!” my mom cried, shielding her eyes with her hands. She wouldn’t watch the replays. Molly and I were riveted—we watched Monika Behr fall, again and again. If you’d ever skied at all, it was as hard not to watch how she fell as it was to watch.

“If not her neck, maybe her spine,” the night groomer said, after the replays. They’d made Molly a full-time ski patroller at Bromley—at first, in addition to putting her in charge of the trail grooming. Later, when they made her the director of the ski patrol, she was given a backup role in the snowcat operations. When she was over fifty, Molly was only occasionally a snowcat operator on the mountain. “I’m a night groomer when I want to be, Kid,” was how she explained it to me, “or when one of the regular fellas is sick or needs a break.”

Molly was not a neurosurgeon, but the trail-groomer-turned-ski-patroller was pretty much right in her analysis of Monika Behr’s crash at Cortina—it was a spinal injury, resulting in paralysis of both lower limbs. In her early twenties, Monika Behr became a paraplegic—a big woman, bordering on homely, in a wheelchair.

“Oh, my God, that poor girl—she’s not even pretty!” my mother lamented. Yes, I know—I’m leaving too much out. Writing screenplays will do that to you. And this was the leap I should have seen coming, but I didn’t.

Molly did. “Don’t, Ray,” the ski patroller started to say.

“Poor Monika Behr—she’ll become like one of your unfortunate girlfriends, Adam!” my mom declared. “Too big, always fighting her weight, and never was or will be good-looking—I’m talking about the younger ones, sweetie, the ones even close to your own age,” my mother said. “The kind of women you look at, but then, more quickly, you look away from—those poor women you know you’ll never stay with, not for long. Poor Monika Behr will become your type, sweetie!”

“Stop it, Ray,” Molly told her.

“I’m not even talking about your older girlfriends, Adam. I know you’re not inclined to introduce Molly and me to the older ones, but I can manage to get a few details out of Elliot—that oh-so-discreet man!—and your grandmother occasionally slips up. Dottie isn’t exactly discreet, you know. Poor Jasmine,” my mom said, after a pause.

“Sorry, Kid,” the trail groomer told me.

There was something disingenuous about how softly my mother said the Poor Jasmine part, her hushed voice sounding somewhat falsely sympathetic to Jasmine. I was thirty when I went out with Jasmine, who was fifty. Tellingly, Jasmine was a year older than my mom—closer to Molly’s age. Jasmine was one of the divorcées I dated. She liked to call her ex-husbands or former boyfriends just to give them a piece of her mind. She liked unloading her grievances on anyone who answered the phone—a new wife or girlfriend, or even a child.

Jasmine would end up being my second-most unmarriageable girlfriend. When I was ready to break up with her, I took her to the Front Street house, where my grandmother (who was eighty-nine) tried to warn me that Jasmine might be “especially susceptible” to seeing ghosts.

“It’s not just that Jasmine is as old as your mother, dear,” Nana began.

“Jasmine is older than Ray, ya know, Adam,” Dottie said.

“I know,” I told her. I’m not sure how old Dottie was—I never really knew. If Nana was eighty-nine, I’m guessing Dottie was in her seventies.

“Furthermore—Adam, dear—I don’t believe Jasmine knows you think she’s unmarriageable,” my grandmother pointed out. “Jasmine still thinks of herself as marriageable.”

“Jasmine just keeps marryin’ and marryin’, don’t she?” Dottie asked me.

“I know,” I said. The three of us were in the kitchen of the Front Street house, where we were washing the supper dishes. Dottie had already pointed out that Jasmine was the first of my unmarriageable girlfriends to have cleaned her plate of one of Nana’s gloppy casseroles. We could hear Jasmine talking on the phone, all the way from the living room. She was unloading her bitter feelings on a former boyfriend, or one of her ex-husbands—not the ex-husband who had died, I hoped. Jasmine hadn’t told me that she’d seen her ex-husband who’d died, but Jasmine had confided this to Dottie and my grandmother.

“In those restaurants in New York, where they used to go together—that’s where Jasmine has seen him,” Nana told me.

“Jasmine said he’s usually with another dead person—so she sees other ghosts, ya know,” Dottie added.

“And this is what makes you think Jasmine might be ‘especially susceptible’ to seeing ghosts?” I asked my grandmother. Dottie just rolled her eyes. “Granddaddy’s ghost just talks about punctuation—he’s never scary,” I pointed out to them.

“It’s nothin’ special, I suppose—seein’ your dead husband, with a bunch of dead fellas ya used to know,” Dottie said, shrugging.

“Adam, dear,” Nana began, “I think Jasmine believes in eternity.” I had no idea why Jasmine’s belief in eternity—her own immortality, most of all—should concern me, but my grandmother had given more consideration to Jasmine’s spirituality than I had. “I don’t think a woman like Jasmine will necessarily find this kind of encounter with a ghost soothing, dear.”

“Soothin’!” Dottie exclaimed. “When she calls them ex-husbands and old boyfriends, she tells ’em how much sex she’s havin’ with you—ya know, Adam,” Dottie said.

“I know,” I said. We were aware of Jasmine’s voice growing louder in the living room.

“A woman as old as your mother, Adam, dear, should not see the deluded, departed infant man in the bedroom of a much younger man she’s sleeping with!” my grandmother declared. “This could cause Jasmine to become unhinged,” she added.

“If you ask me, Mrs. Brewster, Jasmine is unhinged,” Dottie said.

“I’m with a young guy right now, Harold—he wants it all the time!” we could hear Jasmine yelling from the living room.

“When you break up with her, dear, she’ll be calling you, you know,” Nana told me.

“I know,” I said.

“He never tells me he can only get it up with prostitutes, Harold!” Jasmine yelled.

“She’s unhinged, all right—her pussy can’t be so special to all them fellas,” Dottie told us.

“I know,” I said.

“You mouse-dick, Harold—you squirrel-dink!” Jasmine shouted. Nana and Dottie just looked at me.

“I know, I know,” I said.

“You hamster-penis, Harold!” Jasmine screamed. The sound of her hanging up the phone in the living room was very audible in the kitchen.

“A hamster is a new dick to me,” Dottie told us.

I was considering that the eternity Jasmine believed in was of the damnation kind. What I should have remembered was that Nana had long been a pillar of prescience. Hadn’t she predicted that someone would come to harm or be killed on the old croquet court? And while my grandmother didn’t exactly tell me about my mom and Molly, didn’t Nana (in her ambiguous way) imply to me that my mother wasn’t living the bachelorette life my aunts and I had once imagined? “You’re not only the first man in her life, dear; you’ll be the only one,” my grandmother had said. “You’re all that matters to her, Adam—as far as men are concerned,” she had told me. In her beat-around-the-bush fashion, hadn’t my grandmother told me my mom was a one-event girl—hadn’t Little Ray chosen the one and only time she would ever sleep with a man, strictly for the purpose of giving birth to me?

I see now how the ill-starred girlfriends in my life reached an unwelcome pinnacle on that night in my attic bedroom of the Front Street house with Jasmine. I see now how all my girlfriends look ahead to my misguided encounter, years later, with Monika Behr.