The Last Chairlift

23. “ALMOST PERFECT” OR “NO STRINGS ATTACHED”

I’ve not described in what way my mom became a wrestling fanatic. I know I haven’t given you a picture of how she behaved at wrestling matches. My teammates loved her and her behavior, but she embarrassed me. That several of my teammates were in love with my mother—not least, the smallest of them, our starting 110-pounder—further embarrassed me. I doubt that Coach Dearborn had a crush on my mom. The coach wasn’t flirting with her on the dance platform at the Front Street wedding—their single-leg lunges were just lunges to him.

Coach Dearborn never lost his temper—he would reprove us when we lost ours. “Getting angry is a distraction for wrestlers,” he told us. Yet he was as delighted as my teammates when Little Ray lost her temper at wrestling matches; she mostly vented her frustration at referees. Speaking diplomatically, as he was inclined to, Coach Dearborn said, “The quality of refereeing in New England is not what I was used to in the Big Ten.”

I once asked Molly if my mother had been cheated by a low score when she’d been a slalom skier, in competition. Or, in some other way, had Little Ray been unfairly judged by a racing official? “I didn’t know her when she was competing, Kid,” was all Molly said about it.

There was an episode at an away match—in the James Gym at Mount Hermon, where Little Ray kept calling the referee “Baldy.” The ref was beyond bald. He was also guilty of not penalizing—of not even warning—the Mount Hermon wrestler for stalling. The wrestler kept crawling off the mat. He was making no effort to get off his belly and his elbows. He was losing the match, just trying not to get pinned. It was the first match of the day—in those years, the lightest weight class always wrestled first—and my mother knew our 110-pounder had the hots for her. When I’d introduced them to each other, Matthew Zimmermann couldn’t look at her—he could barely speak. My mom was flirting with him when she told him—in her wide-eyed, exclamatory way—they were in the same weight class.

There are a preternatural number of wrestlers named Matthew. As you might guess, they’re all called Matt. Not Zimmermann—we called him Zimmer or Zim. In those years, at an all-boys’ school, last names were the norm. The teachers addressed us by our last names. We called our close friends by their last names.

Zimmermann was a scrappy 110-pounder, but my mother thought he lacked the requisite killer instinct. When he was winning on points, he was content to coast—he didn’t go for the fall. When he was being beaten, he stopped trying to win—he just tried to stay off his back. Zimmer’s lack of aggression could cause my mom to yell at him. (“You can kill this guy, Zim—just kill him!” she would scream.) But she saved the worst things she was capable of saying for the referees. “You need glasses, Baldy, if you can’t see he’s stalling!” she hollered at the ref at Mount Hermon. He heard her—I’m pretty sure everyone heard her. When the wrestlers went off the mat, the ref blew his whistle. While the wrestlers were returning to their positions in the center of the mat, the ref stared at my mother. My mom stared back. The whistle was still in the bald referee’s mouth, but he hadn’t blown it, when Little Ray said, “Maybe glasses and a wig.”

It was very quiet in the old James Gym while Coach Dearborn and the beyond-bald ref were talking. When the coach went over to the bleacher seats, where my mother was sitting—in the front row, at mat-side—he invited my mom to come sit on the bench with the Exeter team. There was scattered applause from the Mount Hermon crowd when my mother joined me and my teammates on our bench—my teammates applauded, too. Coach Dearborn made my mom sit next to him. I was relieved that the snowshoer wasn’t with us at Mount Hermon. Mr. Barlow was traveling with the JV team.

“We’re happy to have you sit with us, Ray,” Coach Dearborn told her, “but you can’t talk to the referee from the team bench.”

“So I can’t tell him that refs wear black-and-white-striped shirts because they have sex with zebras?” my mother asked.

“Not from the team bench, Ray,” Coach Dearborn said, smiling at her. It was clear the ref had only partially heard her. She’d raised her voice when she mentioned the black-and-white-striped shirts, and again when she said the zebras word. She behaved herself for the rest of Zimmer’s match. When the referee actually warned Zim’s opponent for stalling—it was just a warning, not a penalty—Coach Dearborn gave my mom a cautionary look.

“Finally,” Little Ray said quietly—to the coach, not the ref.

When the matches were over, there was the usual milling around on the mat. Some of the wrestlers were shaking hands with their opponents, some weren’t. I was nervous when I saw my mother approach the referee. Technically speaking, she wasn’t talking to him from the team bench, but Coach Dearborn and I—and, of course, my teammates—were listening closely.

“I’m so sorry I called you ‘Baldy’—that was just mean,” Little Ray told the ref. I know my teammates felt a little let down.

Later, in the basement of the old James Gym, by the lockers for visiting teams, Coach Dearborn took me aside. “I’m very fond of your mom—as are your teammates, Adam,” the coach began. “But I believe Mr. Barlow would agree with me—as a rule, she shouldn’t sit with the team. We’ll see this ref again, and the way he calls stalling isn’t likely to change—if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I told him. I was nodding my head off, in a way that would have made Em proud. Not counting my uncles and the snowshoer, most of the Exeter faculty didn’t call me Adam—I was more commonly called Brewster. By calling me Adam, Mr. Dearborn made me feel like family. A wrestling team can be a family, if not exactly like my family.

I loved my family of four, counting Molly. Of course I knew there were other families who would consider us strange, but we were not strange to me—just different. I try to apply this principle when I consider my mom as both an object of desire and a substitute mother to my wrestling teammates—those physically self-abusing boarding-school boys away from home, missing their mothers and without any girls their own age around. Mothers—I mean someone else’s mother—can provide lonely young boys with a lot of erotic stimulation. Little Ray was small and sexy, and my wrestling teammates weren’t used to girl jocks. The wrestlers were also undone by how flexible and strong my mother was.

Before she met Molly and Elliot, I’d not seen my mom flirt with anyone. After she married the snowshoer, and she was living with the snowcat operator, I never saw Little Ray flirt with anyone her own age or older. But my mother flirted with my wrestling teammates. She was very aware of her effect on boys and younger men. Don’t think I’m fantasizing—fantasizing about older women is what boys and younger men do.

Coach Dearborn invited my mom to wrestling practice. You’re always changing your level or your angle in wrestling. Coach Dearborn had seen my mom’s single-leg lunges; he wanted her to show my teammates how she did her squats and wall sits, too. That’s how the practice started—innocently enough, with my mother in sweatpants and a T-shirt, just demonstrating her ski exercises to the wrestlers. Explosiveness counts, in skiing and in wrestling, but before long my mom was rolling around with the other lightweights in the wrestling room—not just with the snowshoer. Little Ray took down Matthew Zimmermann with a picture-perfect double leg—what nowadays is called a freight-train double. She dropped her shoulder lower than Zim’s waist and drove through him—her hands holding both cheeks of Zimmer’s butt, her head tucked under his rib cage, as she stuck our starting 110-pounder on his back.

“I see someone’s been paying attention to her takedowns—that’s how to hit a double leg,” Coach Dearborn said.

“I told you,” the little English teacher said. “Ray would have been a heck of a one-ten-pounder.”

Zimmermann had the wind knocked out of him—he lay gasping on his back. My mom’s ministrations to him were a weird mix of more than motherly affection and training-room talk.

“Zim, listen to me,” she was saying as she bent over him with her hair falling in his face. “You got to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth, or you’ll hyperventilate.”

The way she’d straddled Zimmer reminded me of the night she’d shown me the snowshoer kiss. I doubted this was the best way for Zim to regain normal breathing.

“No, no—purse your lips and blow out like this,” my mom was telling our gasping 110-pounder as she blew in his face. Was I the only one in the wrestling room who noticed Zimmer had a hard-on—not a known symptom of hyperventilation—or were his sweatpants just bunched up from the way Little Ray had driven him to the mat?

Before I knew what became of Matthew Zimmermann, I used to be afraid of what would become of him. What if Zimmer married an older woman, a dead ringer for Little Ray? I pictured poor Zim as attracted to older women who drilled him with freight-train doubles. Then they blew in his face and gave him hard-ons while he gasped for breath.

As for the beyond-bald referee, the one with a limited understanding of stalling, it was a home match, at Exeter, where we saw him again. It was the first time Molly had come to see me wrestle, or maybe she’d come to have a look at how Little Ray behaved around the wrestlers. My mom and the night groomer were not sitting on the team bench; they were at mat-side, in the front row of bleacher seats. We were wrestling in that gladiatorial pit in the Thompson Cage. The legs of our fellow students dangled above us, their faces peering down at us from the board track above. The students sat on the L-shaped entrance to the wooden running track that circumscribed the dirt track below. From the mat, we could hear the starting gun for the runners and the hurdlers in the cage.

This was the first time my wrestling teammates had seen Molly, even from a distance. It was winter—the snowcat operator and my mom were wearing their après-ski stuff, not the most flattering attire. Even so, because the trail groomer was a goddess in my eyes, I was shocked that my teammates had eyes only for my mother. You can learn a lot about point of view from writing, and from sexual desire.

“Who’s the big blonde with your mom, Brewster?” one of my teammates asked me.

“That’s Molly—she’s my mom’s best friend. Of course she’s a skier,” I said.

“She’s a humongous friend and skier,” Zimmermann observed, speaking strictly as a 110-pounder. He’d been skipping rope and was sweating—what he liked to do to get his heartbeat going, just before he stepped out on the mat.

Fittingly, it would be Zimmer’s match—as usual, the first of the day—that exposed the beyond-bald referee’s failure to warn or penalize for stalling. Zimmermann’s opponent got taken down twice and decided to stop wrestling. Zimmer took him down, let him go, and quickly took him down again. It was 4–1, only halfway into the first period. Zim’s opponent, on the bottom, turned himself into a table. On all fours, head up, the guy spread his hands and knees apart—he was unbudgeable. Keeping his arms and back straight, the staller blocked every move Zimmer made on him.

“What’s he doing on the bottom?” Coach Dearborn calmly asked the ref, who did not respond. Zim cranked on the guy’s arms. He jacked up the guy’s ankles and ran him forward like a wheelbarrow. But the staller would not be broken down—he was committed to being a table.

“Stalling on the bottom?” the snowshoer suggested to the referee, but the ref remained oblivious to stalling.

“This is baloney, ref—he’s stalling on the bottom!” my mother screamed. At least she didn’t call him Baldy.

“Cross-face cradle, Zim!” Coach Dearborn barked. That’s what I’d been thinking, but Zimmermann was a little frustrated. He was on his toes, his chest on the guy’s back, slapping the guy with the cross face—first one side of his face, then the other.

When the ref blew his whistle, he penalized Zim for unnecessary roughness—one point for the staller. Zimmer was still ahead, 4–2.

“Zim!” Coach Dearborn said sharply. “Let him go. Take him down again.” Zimmer gave the guy the escape. It was 4–3 at the end of the first period. Sometimes the crowd quieted down between periods. There was some murmuring on our team bench—to the effect that penalizing Zimmermann for unnecessary roughness missed the whole point about him.

“Zim is more of an insufficient roughness guy,” one of my teammates said.

Then Little Ray jumped to her feet and shouted point-blank at the bald ref. “Not even a zebra would fuck you!” my mom told him.

Yes, the zebra-fucking idea had a context—not that everyone who heard her knew the context, and everyone had heard her. I was sitting next to Coach Dearborn, who quietly said, “That pretty much sums it up, Adam—not even a zebra.”

“Not even a zebra,” the snowshoer said, so softly that it sounded reverential.

We could all see that Molly had her arm around my mother. The trail groomer was guiding my mom toward the exit. I would only later consider that the night groomer knew something about the nature of competition. Molly didn’t want to leave anything in the hands of a bad official. The ref couldn’t throw out Little Ray if she was already leaving.

“Not even a zebra!” some students in the crowd were shouting.

“We’re witnessing the birth of a mantra,” Elliot Barlow said, as Zimmer built a lead against his flagging opponent. Zim just kept taking the guy down and letting him go. Two points for a takedown, one point for an escape—you can build a lead fairly fast.

I was warming up for my match when Zimmermann spotted my mother and Molly. Zim had taken my seat on the team bench, where he’d been looking all around for my mom. Little Ray and the trail groomer were sitting with the students on the board track above us—“the outfield seats,” my mother called them. She’d told me she liked being at mat-side, where she could see the wrestlers sweat and hear them breathing.

I’ll always remember that day. Seconds before I stepped out on the mat, I saw Zimmer wave to my mom, who waved back. Molly still had her arm around her. It was the day Not even a zebra started gaining momentum. Among my teammates, it would one day acquire the status of a sacred chant.

In a book almost no one read, I told the zebra-fucking story—only I had someone else’s mother say it. I thought my mom would appreciate that I’d changed the story to protect her. But Molly later told me that I’d hurt my mother’s feelings. “Ray thought you didn’t give her credit, Kid,” the snowcat operator said.

Over time, a pattern was established. Molly would be the one to tell me what my mom thought of something I’d written. Apparently, Little Ray wondered why I didn’t write about her. “Who are all these other mothers? They’re not me!” she would wail to the night groomer. “There are always mothers, but who are these women? Did I make no impression at all on him?” my mom asked Molly, who would report to me.

“Does my mother really want me to write about her?” I asked Molly repeatedly.

“No, of course not, Kid,” the trail groomer told me. “Ray doesn’t understand fiction. Ray doesn’t read fiction. Except yours.”

This pattern of behavior was a two-way street. I learned I could complain to Molly about those things my mom wouldn’t tell me about; for example, I thought Molly could persuade my mother to tell me who my father was. Or suppose Little Ray told the night groomer first? Maybe then my mom would let Molly tell me.

The night after Not even a zebra was when the idea of Molly as a go-between blossomed. When Molly and my mom came back to Exeter together—usually, to see me wrestle—the sleeping arrangements were different. The snowshoer’s apartment in Amen Hall didn’t work with four of us. If my mother and Elliot slept together, that meant Molly had to sleep with me. After the wedding night, there seemed to be some ambiguity concerning the consequences of my being in the same bed with the snowcat operator—perhaps not the healthiest thing for a teenage boy.

In those years, when my mom and Molly had an overnight in Exeter, they stayed in my mother’s bedroom at the Front Street house. Naturally, my mom slept in my attic bedroom with me. Of course I knew Little Ray would leave me alone, at times—when she was visiting Molly, or when we were disturbed by an impromptu punctuation lesson from the ghost of the semicolon emeritus. My mother didn’t enjoy Granddaddy’s ghostly visits. It was hard for her to be reminded of the time when he still talked. I understood why his monologues upset her. She didn’t care to remember how the faculty emeritus had doted on his Little Ray, before her pregnancy rendered him speechless. It was after one such haunting—“Boys, boys,” the ghostly grammarian began—when my mom got out of my bed and stomped down the attic stairs.

“I’m not a boy, Daddy—I never was—which, you may remember, is why I could get pregnant!” Little Ray was calling, all the way down the stairs. The diaper man’s ghost continued to address me in the plural. I’d fallen asleep when the night groomer got into bed with me, maybe at my mom’s prompting.

“You can tell me what’s on your mind, Kid,” Molly said in the dark. “Only if you want to tell me.”

I had plenty to say. I’d not stopped wanting to know who my father was—I’d just stopped asking my mother. “I know the snowshoer has asked her—she won’t tell him anything,” I told Molly.

“I’m in the club, Kid,” the snowcat operator said. “Ray won’t tell me, either.”

Elliot Barlow had long been a go-between for me. Now I had two. I was already telling the snowshoer what I wished my mom would tell me. “You have to give Ray more time, Adam,” Elliot had said. “It might be easier for her to tell me or Molly first.”

The night when Molly told me she was in the club, I began to understand what the little English teacher had meant. Like Little Ray, I was keeping a secret. I hadn’t even told Nora and Em. If I told anyone, I was beginning to think, it might be easier for me to tell the trail groomer first.

I knew the snowshoer wore my mother’s clothes. Okay, he missed her—we both did. But, even when my mom was away, I didn’t wear her clothes. Yes, they were close to the same size. Although Elliot had to stand on his toes when he kissed her, and Little Ray had ten or twelve pounds on him, her clothes fit him.

I know, I know—my mother kept her clothes in the snowshoer’s bedroom in Amen Hall. I could understand his temptation to wear her clothes to bed. But—by the wrestling season of my third year at the academy, when I was seventeen—Elliot was in the habit of dressing himself in Little Ray’s clothes whenever he was in our faculty apartment. In the evening, students often knocked on our door—wanting the snowshoer’s help with their homework, or because they had other problems. What if one of the students saw the little English teacher dressed as a woman?

Because my mom was a jock, a lot of her clothes weren’t very feminine, but Elliot was into her makeup, too. Little Ray kept most of her makeup in the snowshoer’s bathroom. Elliot liked her lipstick, her eyeliner, her eye shadow. When he put on her face powder, every trace of his beard disappeared. He had a light beard.

When you love someone who’s different, you worry about them more—you’re always looking out for them. In my childhood, I was aware of my grandmother’s efforts to protect my mother. I was conscious of trying to protect her, too. When I was a student at Exeter, I looked out for the little English teacher. We usually went to wrestling practice together. I was always checking him over. Was he wearing the right clothes? Were there any telltale traces of my mom’s makeup in the area of Elliot’s eyes or lips?

That night when the night groomer got into bed with me, when I knew I wasn’t dreaming her—Molly was just wondering what was on my mind—I almost told her about the snowshoer’s cross-dressing. I was disappointed when the snowcat operator fell asleep. I’d wanted her to hug me, or give me a good-night kiss. Instead, I was left alone with my hard-on and my desire to touch her. Of course I didn’t touch her, and soon I was asleep.

When I woke up with her arms around me, and I felt her breath on the back of my neck, I was dreaming I was with Molly. Then her hips snuggled closer to me. Even in the dimness of the predawn light, I knew the body next to mine was too small to be the trail groomer’s. “Is this my Adam?” my mom whispered in my ear. “I have just my one and only—it sure feels like him.”

“It sure feels like you, too,” I told her.

“Of course it’s me, sweetie,” my mother said, clinging to me. “It’s what we do.” But for how much longer would we keep doing it? I wondered.

In the dim light, and with my back turned to her, I felt safe to speak. I knew she couldn’t see my frightened eyes. I thought I could keep the fear out of my voice. “Do you know that Elliot wears your clothes?” I asked her.

“Do I know?” my mom cried, hugging me harder. “Oh, sweetie—of course I know! I’m always dressing him in my clothes—Elliot loves my clothes!” she cried. “It’s what we do,” Little Ray repeated.

“But is it safe—is the snowshoer safe?” I asked her.

“Oh, sweetie—don’t be afraid,” my mother said. The dawn was breaking as she turned me to her, holding my face in her hands. She could see my eyes. “Adam, we can’t make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are—we can only do what we do, sweetie.”

“But if we love people, we want them to be safe. Isn’t that the foremost thing?” I asked her.

“The foremost thing we want for the people we love isn’t necessarily their foremost thing—is it, sweetie?” my mom asked me.

“I just want the snowshoer to be safe,” I said. “I love him—I don’t want anyone or anything to hurt him,” I told her.

“Elliot wanted to be a little girl when he was a little boy,” my mother told me. “Elliot is a woman, sweetie—she just wasn’t born one.”

“He,” I corrected her. “Elliot is a man at an all-boys’ school,” I reminded her.

“She,” Little Ray corrected me. “Elliot is a woman to me, sweetie. She’s almost perfect for me, isn’t she?” my mom asked me.

“Almost perfect,” I could only repeat. I was once again seeing them on their wedding night—how they were when they were leaving for their honeymoon on the cliff, how my mom had told Elliot to keep hold of her. I was once more lying in the night groomer’s arms—not yet beginning to understand how some people change, and some don’t. Only now I realized I would forever be praying for this precarious and precious triangle to hold on. Please stay on the cliff, I would always be praying—to all three of them.

“Oh, don’t cry, sweetie—don’t be afraid,” my mom repeated. She held me in her arms, the way she had when I was a child.

“Are you saying, ‘Keep true to the dreams of thy youth’—is that what you’re telling me?” I asked her.

“Oh, my—that’s pretty! I like that,” my mother told me. “Is that something you read, sweetie? Who wrote that?”

“Maybe Melville,” I answered.

“Oh, him,” Little Ray said, disappointed. A lifetime of hearing about Moby-Dick had predisposed her to dislike Melville, though she’d never read him. I was quoting what the author had pasted to his writing desk—Nana had told me about it. At the time, I didn’t realize that Melville hadn’t written it—I just liked the sound of it.

When the snowshoer took my grandmother and me to see the 1956 film adaptation of Moby-Dick—the John Huston version, with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab—we all hated it. At least Ahab dies—he doesn’t go home to his wife—but New Bedford isn’t New Bedford, the great white whale looks like a bathtub toy, and all the poetry is lost.

“They lost the hyphen, too,” Nora had observed. She’d seen the poster, not the movie. “That Dick is just one more white Dick in a sea of white Dicks,” she said. “I’m not seeing it.” Em just cringed at the thought of a sea of white Dicks.

After I’d seen the movie, when we were riding home in the snowshoer’s VW Beetle, Nana said: “That film was not true to the dreams of Mr. Melville’s youth.” She didn’t elaborate to Elliot and me on the admonition Melville had pasted to his writing desk. It turned out that Schiller had written it.

“Keep true to the dreams of thy youth”—ah, well, who wouldn’t like the sound of that? But sometimes—for example, when you’re born a boy and you want to be a girl—that’s a tall order.

“Well, I like it—even if Moby Dick wrote it,” my mother suddenly said. “And that’s what my snowshoer is doing, Adam—she would have been a pretty girl. She’s keeping true to the dreams of her youth.” Little Ray took a deep breath before going on. “And that’s what I was doing, sweetie—when I had you,” my mom told me.

“When you what?” I said.

“When I wanted a baby—all mine, my one and only, no strings attached. I was keeping true to the dreams of my youth when I had you, sweetie,” my mother told me.

“Who was he?” I asked her.

“He was just some kid, sweetie—he was younger than you; he wasn’t shaving. He was just a boy who couldn’t take his eyes off me. You know boys like that, don’t you?” my mom asked me. “He was small,” she whispered, kissing me. “He would have been a pretty girl. What he meant to me, Adam, was that you would be all mine. That’s what ‘no strings attached’ means, sweetie,” my mother said.

I was no longer writing in those clunky notebooks with the popping rings—they reminded me of meeting Rose. Mr. Barlow had found better notebooks for me in Harvard Square. They had hardcover bindings—like real books, but with blank pages—and the ones I liked best were the size of paperback novels. The pages were unlined.

This happened after my conversation with my mom in my attic bedroom, where she told me my father would have been a pretty girl. I’d been writing in one of my notebooks at the kitchen table of the Amen Hall apartment I shared with the snowshoer. I don’t remember why I got up from the table—probably to get a glass of water, or to make myself a cup of tea. I do remember leaving the pages of my writing notebook open.

In the 1960s, I never saw those notebooks that had a hymnal ribbon. I love those notebooks—you never lose your place. At Mr. Barlow’s kitchen table, I used the salt and pepper shakers to hold my notebook open. The little English teacher wasn’t snooping; he just happened to see what I’d been writing.

It isn’t surprising that I’d written down the two most indelible things my mother had said in her most recent, and most candid, conversation with me. The first was about Elliot Barlow as a woman; the second was about my very young father.

Nor is it surprising that the snowshoer thought I was contemplating two titles. I don’t know why, but I’d written down the two things my mom said as if they were titles:

“Almost Perfect”

“No Strings Attached”

“I see you’re having a title dilemma,” the little English teacher told me, when I came back to the kitchen table. I saw what he was looking at. I’d not told him these stories. “I’m aware I don’t know the context—I have no idea what you’re thinking,” Elliot said. “Both phrases are trite, but ‘No Strings Attached’ is more clichéd than ‘Almost Perfect’—I think it’s a worse cliché,” the snowshoer said.

“I wasn’t really thinking of them as titles—they’re just a couple of things my mom said,” I told him.

“Oh, of course, they sound just like your mom—they work fine as dialogue,” the little English teacher assured me.