The Last Chairlift

31. WHERE HAVE THE BANANAS GONE?

My grandmother was ninety-one in 1973. She said there’d been more phone calls for me at the Front Street house since Mr. Barlow had moved to New York. “The calls are mostly from Jasmine, dear,” Nana told me. Jasmine had learned to hang up whenever Dottie answered the phone. Dottie had done her best to discourage Jasmine from phoning my grandmother’s house.

One time, when Jasmine had called and asked for me, Dottie was blunt about it. “Any self-respectin’ woman would just get over it—shit is shit,” Dottie told her.

“It didn’t happen to you,” Jasmine replied in her imperious fashion.

“I should be phonin’ you, Jasmine—I was the one who cleaned up your shit,” Dottie reminded her. There’d been another time, Nana told me, when Jasmine phoned the Front Street house and Dottie had labeled her a “walkin’ shitstorm.” I should have known better than to tease Dottie about it.

“I think, Dottie, it’s safe to assume that Jasmine is still walkin’—she’s only fifty-two,” I told Nana’s veteran housekeeper.

“I think, Adam, it’s safer to assume that Jasmine is still shittin’—for as long as the old bag is still livin’,” Dottie added.

It would not have been hard for Jasmine to find the phone number for Rachel Brewster in Manchester, Vermont—my mom and Molly didn’t have an unlisted number. But my mother usually wasn’t the one who answered the phone. When Jasmine called my mom and asked for me, Jasmine didn’t know she was talking to Molly; Jasmine didn’t know Molly. “Adam isn’t here,” the trail groomer told Jasmine.

“I know you’re Adam’s mother,” Jasmine began. “I am an older woman who has slept with your son—I’m probably your age,” Jasmine told the snowcat operator.

Molly was as blunt about it as Dottie. “If you’re the bed-shitter, you’re a year older than Adam’s mom—if you’re the bed-shitter, go fuck yourself with a two-by-four,” Molly told her.

“Is that Jasmine? Poor Jasmine!” my mother was calling, from another room, but Molly had hung up on the bed-shitter. Once, when Jasmine called, I happened to be staying with my mom and Molly. I was helping Molly with a risotto; my mother answered the phone. “Who shall I say is calling?” Molly and I heard her say. “Is this the Jasmine?” my mom then asked. Molly and I just looked at each other; I kept stirring the risotto. “It’s poor Jasmine!” my mother told me, not bothering to cover the mouthpiece of the phone. I just shook my head; my mom got the message. “Adam can’t come to the phone right now,” my mother told her. Molly and I could hear Jasmine’s rising voice—it reached us at the stove. “Well, I’m certainly not going to tell him all that!” we heard my mom say.

“Tell her she must have a vagina as big as a ballroom!” the ski patroller shouted from the stove. “The risotto is ready, Ray!” Molly called to my mom, who was getting an earful from Jasmine. Among the many things Jasmine was saying, she must have said the wrong thing—or one of those things you should never say to someone’s mother. The trail groomer and I would not hear my mom use the word poor when she spoke of Jasmine again.

“Well, that’s not what I hear,” Molly and I heard my mother say to Jasmine. “I hear you’ve got a vagina as big as a ballroom,” my mom told her, hanging up the phone.

It couldn’t have been easy for Jasmine to find Nora’s number; Nora had changed her name, and she had an unlisted number. Nora thought “Winter” was a better stage name than “Vinter”—maybe not in Norway, but Nora had never seemed especially Norwegian. Two Dykes, One Who Talks wasn’t an act associated with last names; the two of them were called Nora and Em, not by their last names, but Nora Winter was known to be their spokesperson. Nora was the one who did the interviews—obviously, no one interviewed Em. At the start of the 1970s, I didn’t know Em’s last name, and I was one of the few who knew she’d been an Emily. Yet somehow Jasmine found Nora’s unlisted phone number in New York.

When Em answered a phone call, all she did was breathe into the mouthpiece until Nora came to the phone. The first time Jasmine called for me, she must have thought I was the one not speaking to her; Jasmine must have imagined she’d finally found me. She’d asked for Adam and heard Em’s breathing. “It’s you, isn’t it? You penis breath!” Jasmine shouted. This was not a welcome image to Em, who began to growl into the phone.

Nora, who was sitting on the toilet seat, could hear Em growling from the bathroom, where the door was closed. “I’ve told you not to answer the phone—just let the fucker ring, Em!” Nora was yelling, but Em was engrossed in Jasmine’s litany of the younger, bigger penises she was regularly enjoying in my absence. Nora told me later that Jasmine had used the springy word to describe one of the eager penises in her exciting new life; the image of a springy penis had particularly repelled Em.

Unlike Nora, Em had experimented with having a boyfriend—this was in high school, before she met Nora. Unlike Nora, not everything about having a boyfriend was repulsive to Em—just the penis part. According to Em, everything had been okay: the cuddling, the kissing, the fooling around. Then the penis came into the picture. In Em’s pantomime, she made the approach of the penis look like a one-eyed eel. In her penis pantomime, Em did a full-body slither. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, in the shape of the letter O—Em’s mouth looked like a single, sightless eye.

When Nora came out of the bathroom and interrupted Jasmine’s call, Em had taken one of the cushions off the couch and was stomping on it—the phone held fast to her sweaty ear. The couch cushion must have represented the springy penis Jasmine had conjured, and Em was clearly killing it. “Who is it?” Nora asked Em, taking the phone from her. Em’s pantomime—how Granddaddy’s ghost had scared the shit out of Jasmine—would not have been difficult for Nora to interpret. “Everyone knows you shit in bed,” Nora said to Jasmine; I know exactly how Nora would have said this, as if she were bored by bed-shitters. “Everyone knows your pussy is a subway station,” Nora also said tiredly, hanging up the phone.

The next time I saw Nora and Em, and Nora told me about Jasmine’s phone call, Em had perfected her pantomime of Jasmine’s pussy as a subway station. It had potential as a skit for Two Dykes, One Who Talks, I thought—together with Em’s pantomime of how Jasmine had shit in bed—but Nora told me that, even at the Gallows Lounge, they had to be careful how they put down straight women. There’d been some anti-lesbian backlash from the Gallows’ audience, and the comedy club had dropped Eric’s All-Gay Band—meaning Eric. But Eric wasn’t funny, I pointed out—only the homophobes had laughed. The comedy club wasn’t necessarily being anti-gay because they dropped Eric’s act, or so I thought.

What did I know? I had no firsthand experience with the kind of sexual hatred Nora and Em (or Molly and my mother) were exposed to; I had no idea what the audience at the Gallows Lounge really thought about Mr. Barlow’s getting groped in Eric’s lap, but I certainly could tell that the snowshoer wasn’t comfortable about it.

“It was the seventies, for Christ’s sake—everyone was angry, everyone hated someone or something,” Nora would say one day. “We thought the war in Vietnam was dividing us, but there was more divisiveness among us than we knew,” Nora said.

The Gallows would drop Prue, the Tongue Kisser—so would I, but for different reasons. Prue wasn’t funny enough for the Gallows, and I could never be reassuring enough for Prue. Mr. Barlow would stop seeing Eric, who was too young and too demonstrably affectionate for the snowshoer, who was clearly not at ease in Eric’s lap at the Gallows Lounge; the snowshoer still had to be careful, even in New York. Even Eric managed to restrain his affection for Mr. Barlow as a woman. Eric hadn’t become an all-gay band because he wanted to be with a woman.

I hadn’t known that Mr. Barlow had been copyediting his parents’ novels, which no doubt fueled his disdain for their actual writing; Elliot saw firsthand how badly they wrote. The little Barlows’ U.S. publisher had given Elliot the training to be a copy editor—he’d taken a course at one of the publishing institutes, and he’d done some freelance jobs with supervision. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the little English teacher had taken to copyediting, or that he’d proven his worth as a copy editor to the little Barlows’ U.S. publisher, who’d connected him to other publishers in New York. When the snowshoer moved to New York City, he already had a job and some close contacts in publishing.

The long-termism of Mr. Barlow’s decision-making was impressive. For how long had he planned to become a woman? Certainly Elliot Barlow was suited for copyediting, but had he been prescient enough to consider that that profession might work well with his transitioning to female? Yes, people in publishing are usually liberal or progressive—they’re more tolerant than most—but I mean in addition to that. Copy editors aren’t the most public people in publishing; they don’t even take their authors to lunch. I published three novels with the same publisher before I met my copy editor. Copy editors work behind the scenes; for all you see of them, they might as well be working at home.

Or was Mr. Barlow prescient enough to imagine he would one day be able to support himself as a freelance copy editor, one who actually worked at home? When the snowshoer moved to New York, of course he could have found a job teaching English and coaching wrestling at any of several schools in the city. I’m sure he had outstanding recommendations from Exeter, but it wouldn’t have worked out for him. How could Mr. Barlow be a schoolteacher and a coach when he became a woman? Surely someone would object—if not the kids, their parents or another teacher. Someone would say it was inappropriate for Elliot to use a women’s washroom at the school; the women, especially the schoolgirls, wouldn’t feel safe in the same washroom the little English teacher used. Of course I couldn’t imagine women or girls being unsafe with Elliot Barlow.

“Imagine Elliot as a woman, all four feet nine of her, being safe in a men’s washroom with a bunch of boys or men,” Molly said.

“Or in a men’s locker room with a bunch of wrestlers, sweetie,” my mother said.

As Nora had said, in the seventies everyone was angry. But what the snowshoer wanted to do would never be safe or easy, not even as a copy editor.

The snowshoer was living in his parents’ pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth Street. The little Barlows were rarely in New York; Elliot was welcome to move into their bigger bedroom, but he chose to stay in his childhood room. His women’s clothes filled his closet—they were my mom’s clothes, the snowshoer first told his parents. Some of them were. My mother cared little about clothes; she knew what Elliot liked to wear, and she loved giving him her clothes. But it made me sad that the snowshoer still had a hidden life, even after getting away from Exeter—a life he hid from his own parents. “From her own parents, sweetie,” my mom kept correcting me. She knew him so much better than I did, I would one day realize—knew her so much better, I should say. I loved them all—I completely sympathized with Molly and my mother, with Nora and Em, and with Mr. Barlow. Yet I would always be an outsider to their sexual differences; I would always be just an observer, and a slow learner, as Nora knew. Some writers are.

I’m not saying Nora was wrong to be disappointed in the seventies. Nothing that seemed progressive was progressive enough—basically, that was Nora’s point. The sexual revolution or the women’s movement, feminism or gay liberation—whatever you called it, whatever you wanted, it didn’t go far enough. Sexual discrimination and sexual violence were still around; sexual intolerance didn’t go away. I get that. I’m not saying the seventies were great, but I was paying closer attention in the eighties; I hated them more. Of course, whenever I said how I hated that decade, Nora corrected me. She said it was Ronald Reagan we hated, but Em had hated him first. In the 1980s, Nora and Em’s onstage shtick was often about Reagan and AIDS. Two Dykes, One Who Talks also went on the warpath against Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, and those two angry women went after Cardinal John Joseph O’Connor. I could see it was complicated for Em to pantomime the Roman Catholic Archdiocese’s position against safe-sex education in New York City public schools, condom distribution, and the cardinal’s condemnation of homosexuality—not to mention the unchanging Catholic opposition to abortion. I get that, too.

In the 1970s, I was becoming a fiction writer, what Nora called a horse with blinders on—but the process requires a kind of tunnel vision. I prefer to say I was indulging in what John Updike called “a fiction writer’s childish willingness to immerse himself in make-believe.” I would write three more novels in the seventies; the fourth one, my first bestseller, would make me self-supporting as a writer. I didn’t need to teach English or creative writing to make a living. My first reader, Elliot Barlow, would become my copy editor.

In that decade, I would also write two more screenplays that wouldn’t be made as movies, but I would keep writing screenplays—as I’ve said, often concurrently with whatever novel I was writing. Sometimes I would start a story as a screenplay—it was a way to visualize the story, to see if I wanted to try writing the story as a novel.

Take my mother’s story: I’ve tried to begin it as a screenplay, but the story doesn’t add up. Real life is so sloppy—it’s full of coincidences. Things just happen, random things that have no connection to one another. In good fiction, isn’t everything connected to everything else? In my mom’s story, I thought I understood her secrecy; there are things you don’t tell your parents, things you should keep from your children. Of course the ghosts were confusing. Where did the ghosts fit in the story? And when your kid grows up, do you still have to keep the secrets from your kid—even the sexual secrets?

Nora traditionally took my mom’s side. Ray’s relationship with Molly spoke for itself, Nora always said. Little Ray was a lesbian, Nora would keep reminding Em and me. When my mother decided to get pregnant, of course she would have chosen the smallest penis around. “Why wouldn’t she?” Nora was always asking Em and me; Nora thought we were too harsh on my mother. “You should just get over it, kiddo—you, too, Em—because Little Ray was probably on the lookout for a smallish penis,” Nora told us. Then Em would do her “Returning to the Womb in Protest” pantomime.

If I’d shown Nora and Em the early pages of my Aspen screenplay, I would have had to relive the ceaseless speculation on the subject of whether or not my mother and Mr. Barlow did it. More to the point, since my mom lived with Molly, had Little Ray and the snowshoer ever done it? “Speaking of smallish penises,” Nora always said, when this subject came up. It was Nora’s opinion that all guys had to do it, all the time—even someone as small as the snowshoer.

Em felt differently, and rather strongly, about Elliot Barlow. Em adored the little English teacher; she was always hugging him, or spontaneously picking him up, or just holding him in her lap. “Honestly, Em—the way you handle the snowshoer, it’s as if you think he doesn’t actually have a penis!” Nora told her.

What Em told us took a while. Even for Nora, Em’s pantomime wasn’t easy to understand. I would see Em do Jerry Falwell onstage at the Gallows. Granted, the Christian Right didn’t have a lot of fans at the Gallows, but the audience got Em as Jerry Falwell ahead of Nora’s interpretation—even a conservative Christian could have understood Em’s pantomime of Falwell’s “AIDS is the wrath of God upon homosexuals.” It was harder for Nora and me to understand what Em was trying to tell us about Mr. Barlow. Em was undertaking a sexual odyssey, which she wasn’t enjoying—that much was clear.

“The snowshoer didn’t do it with Ray—not once, not ever, not even blow jobs?” Nora was guessing.

I could see by Em’s reaction that Nora had perceived only the tip of the iceberg. Em nodded, but briefly, barely interrupting her pantomime of sexual propositions and rejections. A vaginal activity was suggested, then spurned; an anal alternative was offered but declined, three times. Wait a minute! I was thinking. We all knew Elliot had two boyfriends after Eric’s All-Gay Band—he’d had three boyfriends, counting Eric.

“Are you saying the snowshoer doesn’t do it?” I asked Em.

Before Em could respond, Nora asked her, “You mean, he doesn’t do it with women, right?” Em shook her head; she hadn’t hesitated. Em pointed her index finger at me, like a gun—her thumb straight up, like a cocked hammer. But she didn’t shoot; Em did nothing to imply pulling the trigger.

In Mr. Barlow’s new life in New York, he’d broken up with three boyfriends rather quickly. Or had they broken up with him? We’d only heard Elliot’s reasons for finding Eric unsuitable. We never knew what was wrong with Charlie or Dave, but those three guys might have broken up with the snowshoer if he didn’t have sex with them.

“You’re saying the snowshoer never does it—not with women or with men,” I said to Em, who was nodding her head off. She lowered the imaginary gun; she wrapped her arms around herself, looking sad and lonely. What Em wanted us to know was that Mr. Barlow wouldn’t do it—he simply didn’t pull the trigger.

“Bullshit!” Nora said. I knew what Nora thought of guys: they couldn’t leave their dicks alone; guys had to pull the trigger. Em shrugged; she didn’t expect Nora to agree with her. Moreover, Nora was angry that I’d understood what Em meant—I hadn’t needed Nora to translate Em’s pantomime for me.

Yet now I couldn’t understand what Em was saying; she went off on a tangent, pointing to herself and Nora, as if this new pantomime were old business between them. Em was performing a kind of shorthand pantomime—Nora understood her immediately. “Well, that’s entirely different—I get that, Em, but you’re not a guy, for Christ’s sake!” Nora told her.

Em just shrugged; she hadn’t expected Nora to agree with her about this, either. Nora had to explain it to me. When Nora and Em were first together, Em told Nora that she hadn’t been doing it with anyone. If Em hadn’t met Nora, Em said she would have continued not doing it with anyone—not even with another woman. This was what Nora thought was “entirely different” from the idea of the snowshoer not doing it, because Em wasn’t a guy.

It was all just weird to me, and I didn’t really think about it, not then—nor did I have a strong opinion about it. At the time, in the 1970s, it didn’t seem vital to know if Elliot Barlow actually did or didn’t do it—with anybody. At the time, I just knew I couldn’t stop imagining doing it with Em.

I’d noticed that Charlie, the snowshoer’s second boyfriend, was not physically affectionate to the snowshoer in public. Even in the privacy of Mr. Barlow’s apartment, Charlie was restrained in his physical displays of affection; Charlie would rub Elliot’s shoulders when Elliot was standing over the stove, cooking. I would ascribe Charlie’s reticence to his being older—Charlie was Mr. Barlow’s age, and a fellow English teacher. As for Dave, the third fleeting boyfriend, he was a little older than Elliot. Dave didn’t touch Mr. Barlow, not that I saw. “Dr. Dave,” Nora always called him. Dave didn’t specify what kind of doctor he was.

Once, when Nora asked him, Dave seemed purposely evasive about it. “In order for me to see you, your doctor would need to refer you to me,” Dave answered her.

“Why didn’t Dave just say he was a specialist, or what kind of specialist he was?” Nora asked Em and me. Em was doing a doctor pantomime, pretending a banana was a stethoscope. She pulled up her sweater and listened to her navel with the banana; then she pulled her sweater up higher and listened to her breast, or to her bra. “What the fuck are you listening for?” Nora asked her. Em shrugged; now she was listening to her armpit with the banana. “She’s Dr. Dave—she doesn’t know what her specialty is,” Nora explained.

Naturally, this became one of their routines at the Gallows. It was very popular. People in the audience would request the act; they would shout out for “The Specialist.” Nora always got a laugh when she asked the people who made the request if they had a banana. This led some fans to put bananas on the stage, but having bananas onstage could be confusing. Em had more than one routine with a banana.

One night at the Gallows, I was there with the snowshoer and Dr. Dave. I’d warned Nora that Dave was going to be there. Mr. Barlow had already seen Nora and Em do “The Specialist”; he’d loved it, but he still hadn’t told Nora or Em or me what Dave’s specialty was. The night Dr. Dave came to the Gallows, no one was shouting for “The Specialist,” but there were already a bunch of bananas onstage. Nora and Em were waiting for the applause to die down.

“What are the bananas for?” I heard Dave ask Elliot.

“You’ll see,” the snowshoer said.

Nora knew how to quiet the crowd. She took a banana from the bunch and handed it to Em. “I hear you’re seeing a specialist,” Nora began. Dr. Dave laughed as hard as anyone at the show; the snowshoer sat smiling beside him, the two of them not touching. It didn’t really matter, not then, but nobody told Nora and Em and me what Dave’s specialty was.

As an act, “The Specialist” kept evolving. I liked the most gynocentric version. “I hear you’re seeing an OB-GYN extra,” Nora begins. Em appears to be taking her pulse with the banana. “Extra what, Em?” Nora asks her.

This was what the seventies were like for us. We were at liberty—we had liberty, we took liberties. We felt free to say and write whatever we imagined. We felt free to live the lives we chose. We didn’t see the pushback coming. We failed to imagine both the passive and aggressive forms the pushback would take.

“What are the bananas for? Long time passing,” I remember Nora used to sing.

“Where have the bananas gone? Long time ago,” the snowshoer sang back to her. I admired how Mr. Barlow stayed friends with his former boyfriends; Elliot was always happy to see them when they were with new boyfriends, and the snowshoer’s old boyfriends always seemed happy to see him.

I asked Nora and Em if lesbians were like that—if they stayed friends with their former girlfriends. Boy, was that the wrong thing to ask. Em shrugged; then she did a sexy little dance. “What do you mean—you don’t know?” Nora asked her. “If you left me, and I saw you with another girlfriend, I would tear off her tits and dance on her dead pudenda!” Nora told Em, who started to cry. Em kept doing her little dance, but she went on crying. “If I left Em, and she saw me with another girlfriend, Em would just cry,” Nora told me, but I saw how Em was dancing. It was not exactly a dance on anyone’s pudenda; it was more tender and more complicated than that.

Just for fun, I asked my mom and Molly about it. “I would never leave Molly, sweetie,” my mother immediately said. “If I ever did, and Molly saw me with another woman, Molly would tie the woman to the snowcat and drag her up and down the mountain—until her tits fell off or froze, or her twat fell out, or something,” my mom said.

Nora would have been comforted by this kindred theme, I thought, but I couldn’t look at the snowcat operator, who immediately said, “That is not what I would do, Kid—and, by the way, I would never leave your mom,” Molly told me.

“But you would do something to the other woman, if I was with her—wouldn’t you?” my mother asked Molly.

“I would make her look at you, Ray, while I strangled her—so that you would be the last person she saw, as she was dying,” the snowcat operator said.

“You see, sweetie? That’s what I meant,” my mom said.

My mother and Molly came to New York to see the snowshoer; they liked coming to New York for visits, more than they had ever liked Exeter. In the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth, my mom slept most of the night with Mr. Barlow in his childhood bedroom. When I was visiting at the same time, I slept on the couch in what Elliot called the study. At night, I could hear my mother’s bare feet, padding back and forth between Mr. Barlow in his little bedroom and the bigger bedroom, where she slept with Molly. Nothing had changed: my mom and the snowshoer were still married; they always would be. They still couldn’t keep their hands off each other; they were still hugging or wrestling or giving each other piggyback rides, or they were curling up on couches or in chairs together. There had never been an edge, and there was no discernible edge now, to the way Molly called them the lovebirds.

At one time or another, I remember when my mother and Molly met Eric, Charlie, and Dr. Dave. “This is Ray, my wife. I’ve told you about Ray—she’s never around in the ski season,” the snowshoer often said. My mom already knew who Elliot’s boyfriends (or his former boyfriends) were, or she’d paid attention to what Mr. Barlow had told her about them.

“You’re as pretty as my husband said you were,” my mother told Eric when she met him, giving the much younger man a hug. And we were all at Pete’s Tavern, that old place in Gramercy Park, when we ran into Charlie, who was rubbing someone else’s shoulders at the bar. “I’ve heard all about you, Charlie, and I’m jealous,” my mom told the other English teacher in Mr. Barlow’s life. “No one ever rubs my shoulders when I’m cooking,” Little Ray said to Charlie.

“You don’t ever cook, Ray—Elliot and I do all the cooking,” Molly reminded her, but my mother was laughing. She was just having fun; everyone was laughing.

Once, when we ran into Dave, he was with a woman. Was she a patient or a date? Did Dr. Dave have a girlfriend? No one knew; no one seemed to care. “This must be your mom—she looks just like you, only she’s prettier,” Dave said to me.

“This is my wife, Ray—this is Dave,” the snowshoer said, beaming.

“I’m so glad to meet you. It must not be the ski season,” Dave told my mother.

“I never dated a doctor,” Ray began, taking hold of the doctor’s hands. She had a strong grip, from all the ski-poling. “There’s stuff about me I could only say to a specialist,” Little Ray whispered to Dr. Dave. He was charmed by her.

All of them made me feel welcome and at home with them, all the time, although I was the outsider among them—the straight guy with a questionable history of unfriendly former girlfriends.

Once in a while, I ran into Rose on the academy campus. I didn’t ask her about her muscle spasms. Our friendship wouldn’t recover from her headfirst, self-exposing descent of the attic stairs.

“There are worse things than limping,” Rose told me.

It was Maud who warned me my grandmother was “losing her marbles.” Maud ran into Nana in downtown Exeter, where Nana said she’d parked her car but couldn’t find it. Maud knew we didn’t let my grandmother drive—not after she’d driven into the garage and kept on driving, through the back wall. Maud knew Dottie drove Nana everywhere.

My grandmother mistook Maud for poor Rose. “Your limp is much better, dear—if I didn’t know you had a limp, I would scarcely have noticed it,” Nana told Maud.

“I’m Maud, Mrs. Brewster. I broke my arm, I had a cast for a while,” Maud said to her. “Rose had a wicked limp, but her limp is all gone now.”

“How are your muscle spasms, dear?” my grandmother asked her. Then Dottie showed up. “What on earth are you doing here, Dottie?” Nana asked her housekeeper.

“I was lookin’ for you!” Dottie told her.

“As for exposing yourself on the stairs, dear,” my grandmother was saying earnestly to Maud, “the best thing you can do is not think about it.” Maud knew what and how much I’d seen of Rose, as poor Rose was descending the attic stairs. Maud had told me she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Maud believed Rose’s sex life was ruined by her unthinkable exposure.

“This is the one with the busted arm, Mrs. Brewster—not the one with her whatsis in the air, all the way down them attic stairs,” Dottie tried to tell my grandmother.

Dottie had also warned me Nana was “slippin’,” as she put it. “She makes tea all day and night, but she don’t hear the kettle singin’,” Dottie said.

“So she’s losing her hearing?” I asked Dottie.

“She’s losin’ more than her hearin’, Adam. When she takes the kettle off the burner, she leaves them flames burnin’—she’s gonna burn the house down, if she don’t piss herself to death first,” Dottie said.

“She’s incontinent?” I asked Dottie.

“I don’t know about that, Adam, but she’s just standin’ there pissin’, when she don’t know she’s pissin’—them diapers don’t work, you know, if you don’t remember to use ’em, and she won’t let me put ’em on her,” Dottie said. “As for them two aunts of yours, them two will hasten her death,” Dottie added.

When my grandmother was napping, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were “showin’ ” the Front Street house to Realtors. “Them two aunts of yours don’t trouble themselves to introduce visitors to the hired help, but I’d know a Realtor in the dark, Adam—them Realtors smell the same as them morticians,” Dottie assured me.

I already knew from Nora that her mother and Aunt Martha were impatient to inherit the Front Street house—they intended to renovate the house for resale while they waited, if Nana didn’t die in a timely fashion, Nora had said. Uncle Martin had already retired, and Uncle Johan would be retiring soon. Those two old downhillers were looking for property up north, in ski country; my conniving aunts were scheming with Realtors on ways to make a killing on the Front Street house. My beer-drinking uncles were innocent of my aunts’ conspiracies to cheat my mom out of her share of the inheritance, but Nora and I knew Nana was deteriorating; Nana would soon require assisted living, beyond Dottie’s care.

The facility for old folks of means in the Exeter area was not in a safe location for the elderly who wandered off, or had otherwise lost their marbles. On the riverbank at a bend of the Squamscott River, the assisted-living facility overlooked the mudflats (at low tide) or the water (when the tide was in). River Bend, as the old folks’ home was unimaginatively called, was bordered by water or mud, and by the town golf course. The location was equally ill advised for a golf course; errant golf balls would be lost in the river, or the golfers would sink to their knees in the mudflats in a doomed effort to retrieve their badly hit balls. The addled patients at River Bend would wander into the water or get stuck in the mud; if the patients who’d lost their marbles roamed the other way, they risked being bonked by golf balls.

The dumb but oft-repeated joke among the Exeter townsfolk who could never afford River Bend was that many of the patients had already gone around the bend, or they soon would be going around it. When the tide was out, it was possible to wade across the Squamscott River, where one of the addled River Bend patients was once found wandering among the black Angus beef cattle, talking to them while they grazed. This had happened when I was at the academy, but it was still the talk of the town. Even my grandmother had heard of it, and somehow remembered it.

“Don’t send me to River Bend, please—not till I’ve gone completely around the bend,” Nana had said. She was still saying it—even in her sleep, Dottie had confided to me. Even when Nana was napping, and the Realtors were assessing the Front Street house—looking for renovations (at my grandmother’s expense) that would jack up the asking price—my grandmother kept saying, “Don’t send me to River Bend, please.”

As children, both Nora and I remembered my mother telling us that Nana had an unfounded fear of cows—maybe not so unfounded, Nora and I now thought. Even in her sleep, Mildred Brewster was imagining herself doomed to converse with cattle. I’m guessing Nana never knew why the renovations she would pay for were necessary.

It was still the 1970s; the real shit hadn’t started. As Nora was always saying, there was shit in the offing. Nora usually meant this politically. The shit in the offing part of Two Dykes, One Who Talks was called “The News in English.” Onstage, of course, this political satire of the news began with Em’s pantomime; Em wrote all their material. The English translation was all Nora. Naturally, there were differences of opinion between them regarding the fidelity of Nora’s translation.

Em’s spontaneous pantomimes were always ad-libbed. Yet Em got cross when Nora went off-script while they were performing. My empathy was with Em—she was the writer. Em didn’t like it when Nora ad-libbed her monologue.

As written, “The News in English” was prescient about Ronald Reagan’s rise to power. Nora and I missed it. “Why would a former sports announcer, actor, and president of the Screen Actors Guild not seek a third term as governor of California?” Em wrote. It was 1975, and this was a difficult question to put into pantomime. Nora gave the audience at the Gallows a faithful English translation. “I wish Ronald Reagan would be governor of California forever—we’ll all be safer if that cowboy stays in California,” Em had written. Nora faithfully translated this bit, but she went off-script for a moment—Nora always had to add her two cents’ worth.

“For Christ’s sake, Em, you don’t need to worry about Ronald Reagan—he’s a second-rate actor; he isn’t going anywhere,” Nora said. This got a laugh at the Gallows, but I didn’t laugh, and Em was furious. I understood the impromptu pantomime Em was doing; I knew her pantomime was off-script, too.

Nora had been wrong about second-rate actors before. “Paul Goode isn’t going anywhere,” she’d said. Em knew that everyone at the Gallows had surely seen The Kindergarten Man. Em’s pantomime of the anxious kindergartner at the urinal required no translation. We remembered Paul Goode lying under the toilet stalls, holding a handgun against his chest; Em didn’t need to act out that part.

What needed a new pantomime, at least new to me, was Em’s enactment of how manipulable American voters were. It was clear what Em was imitating when she squatted onstage, but Nora took some poetic license with her English translation.

“It doesn’t take a first-rate actor to manipulate American voters”—that’s my best guess at what Em’s pantomime was saying.

It was Nora’s way of saying things that would get Em in trouble, not only this time. “Even a second-rate actor is good enough to dupe the dumber-than-dogshit American people,” was the unfortunate way Nora interpreted Em’s pantomime.

No one laughed; even at the Gallows, there were murmurs of disapproval. The management of the Gallows would complain to Nora about it. “You can’t translate everything the Canadian acts out,” Nora was told. The dopes in charge blamed Em for it. Whenever Nora said something too anti-American, the management at the Gallows Lounge—speaking of dumber than dogshit—held the nonspeaking Canadian accountable. To anyone who ever saw Nora and Em onstage, the most inflammatory things Nora said were all in the way Nora said them.

You can’t call the American people dumber than dogshit—no one can. As Nora would say, the American people are the most sacred cows in American politics. No American politician can get away with saying anything derogatory about the American people, but Nora just let it fly—Nora wasn’t running for political office.

Em was the one who saw Ronald Reagan coming; she was the one who was worried about him. Em also saw how the audience at the Gallows reacted to what Nora said about the American people, and she was worried about that. She knew that the audience at the Gallows generally loved Two Dykes, One Who Talks, but not this time. Em was the one who saw the hatred coming.

Nora just let it fly. “What are the bananas for? Long time passing,” Nora kept singing. At first it was funny, but the way Nora sang it, it sounded like a dirge.

“Where have the bananas gone? Long time ago,” the snowshoer sang, in his beautiful but elegiac voice—in her beautiful but elegiac voice, I would soon (I would finally) learn to say. Like Ronald Reagan and the hatred, the elegies were coming, too.