The Last Chairlift

8. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM?

A small geography lesson might help. Stowe is in northern Vermont, closer to Montreal than to Exeter. North Conway is in northern New Hampshire, closer to Maine than to Vermont. And Exeter is in southeastern New Hampshire—Exeter is nearer to the seacoast, even nearer to Boston than it is to Vermont. In New England, the roads running north or south are slightly better than the ones going east or west, but in the 1950s and the 1960s, the roads in New Hampshire and Vermont weren’t very good at all. “And if it’s snowing,” my grandmother used to say, “you can’t get anywhere from somewhere else.”

In the ski season, this was why my mom never came home to see me. Stowe to Exeter and back was a long drive, and it would be snowing somewhere along the way. But my mother did drive from Stowe to North Conway and back—in those days, not an easy drive but a more manageable trip. The way this worked was my mom would trade places with one of the ski instructors at Cranmore Mountain. The Cranmore ski instructor got a change of scenery (and a chance to ski some new runs) at Mount Mansfield, while my mother gave ski lessons at Cranmore. This way, in the two busiest weeks of the ski season, neither ski area was missing a ski instructor. And this meant my mom had two weeks every winter to teach me to ski.

In elementary school, in junior high school, and in prep school at Exeter, I managed to remain a beginner as a skier. In those holiday weeks, there were mostly little children in my mother’s ski lessons for beginners—even after I’d started shaving and had already learned to drive.

The effort this took—the strain on my mom, and on me, of my unwillingness to improve as a skier—required a lot of patience. To stay pleasant, to be positive—we were never unhappy with each other—that was the key. And at night, we were demonstrably affectionate. I truly loved these two weeks every winter of not learning to ski—of staging falls, of letting my perfectly adequate stem christie revert to a sloppy snowplow turn. I think my mother loved these two weeks every winter, too; she not once lost her temper or showed the slightest sign of frustration. “Oh, Adam—your weight on the downhill ski would work better, sweetie. But I know it’s hard to remember.”

No, it wasn’t; it was hard, so purposely, to appear I had forgotten. I skied so slowly, perpendicular to the hill, sometimes my skis would just stop—even on a steep slope. Other skiers yelled at me for blocking the trail. When my mom led a line of beginners through their turns, I went last. The eight-year-olds would already be in the lift line when I got to the bottom. In those years when all the parents were afraid of polio, the other mothers asked my mother if I’d been a victim—or they inquired if I had some other handicap.

“Oh, no,” my mom answered cheerfully. “My dear Adam just finds skiing potentially dangerous. Adam has always been tentative.”

There was nothing tentative about Nora, who fiercely upheld her beginner status as a skier by being reckless.

“Skiing in control is the goal, Nora,” my mother told her futilely—in control would never be Nora’s goal. She threw herself down the mountain; she hurtled ahead. Nora never was perpendicular to any slope, however steep; she pointed her skis downhill and schussed.

“I’m not into turns, Ray,” Nora told my mom.

“My dear Nora,” my mother said sweetly, “I’m more concerned that you’re not into stops.”

Nora was more of an athlete than I was, and she was braver; she schussed till she crashed. While my mom was carving her perfect turns, instructing us beginners to turn where she turned—to follow her, if we could—Nora would blow by my mother in a blur.

“In control, Nora!” my mom would call after her. “Oh, that dear girl,” my mother would say, turning to one of the eight-year-olds. “That dear Nora was born to do things her way—I just hope she doesn’t hurt herself, or someone else. On skis, it’s better to be in control.”

But hurting herself, or someone else, was of no concern to Nora. She was up to the task. She’d been a big kid—she was a big girl, who would become a big woman. Her professed hatred of skiing had begun with the clothes. Ski pants would never be Nora’s friend.

“You’ll be happy you have hips aplenty in your childbearing years,” Nora’s mother had told her. Aunt Abigail had hips aplenty, and boobs galore. But Nora had other plans for her hips—childbearing was not in Nora’s plans.

On skis, my mom had observed, Nora was good at keeping her balance or recovering it, and her weight helped her go fast; at high speed, and not losing her balance, Nora could be out of control and get a long way down the mountain before she crashed. Yes, Nora skied too fast; she was too out of control to turn or stop safely. But doing things safely would never be her style.

My mother said Nora was a good enough skier to know when a crash was coming. When Nora knew she was crashing, she would find a guy and take him down with her. It was how she liked to fall, with a young man under her; it was always a hotshot skier, the same type of dickhead who reminded her of her cousin Henrik.

Nora—on the verge of losing her balance—would suddenly crouch down and tackle a skier she’d found offensive, her strong arms wrapped around his hips. I saw Nora knock guys out of their bindings; I saw her separate skiers from their goggles and gloves. Huge hunks of snow slid down the slope, dislodged by the force of their fall. The guy always landed under Nora, cushioning her fall. The tackled skier would be screaming or gasping in pain—or he would lie unmoving, as if dead.

You could tell when Nora wondered if she’d killed someone; she pulled off her ski hat (later, her helmet) and pressed her ear to the unmoving skier’s cold lips. “I can hear or feel if the fucker’s breathing,” Nora told me. “You can’t fake not breathing, Adam—not for long.”

On skis, Nora liked what she weighed. The house where the North Conway Norwegians lived had a serious-looking scale—the tall kind, one boxers and wrestlers would use. The scale was a hulking presence in the upstairs hall; it was too big for any of the bathrooms. I don’t know if athletic-minded Norwegians do things ritualistically, but Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan did. Every New Year’s Day, we children were weighed in the upstairs hall. The annual weigh-ins were required of us all: the North Conway Norwegians (those girly-girl blondes), Nora, Henrik, and me. We were always weighed in our pajamas. Nora was the heaviest.

Her senior year in prep school, Nora weighed 170 pounds, minus whatever her pajamas weighed. When Henrik was fully grown, he was taller. Henrik would be over six feet tall; Nora was five-ten, and counting. “I’m five-eleven,” was the way Nora put it. And Nora was a very solid 170 pounds; as fast as she skied, when she hit you, she hit you hard.

Legs were broken in these collisions, but not Nora’s. Knees needed surgeries, but never hers. In the leather-boots days—long, wooden skis with cable or bear-trap bindings—there were more lower-leg injuries, but not once Nora’s. My first skis were wood, of course. I believe they were made by the Paris Manufacturing Company (South Paris, Maine), and they had Kandahar bear-trap cable bindings. Or perhaps these were Nora’s first skis. So much of the past—I mean, my past—has been narrated to me by my older cousin.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were telemark men, free-heelers till their dying days; they loved their nipple-tipped Nordic skis. I remember my uncles telemarking in the 1970s. Most alpine skiers switched to heel-and-toe safety bindings in the 1960s.

“Those old cable or bear-trap bindings caused more than a few spiral fractures of the calf,” I remember my mom saying.

Such fractures were not unknown among Nora’s victims—along with the upper-body injuries you would expect from such high-speed, hard-impact falls. Separated shoulders and broken collarbones were common, though never Nora’s. And if Nora tackled you and landed on you, there might be broken ribs and concussions, too. What made safety bindings safer was that they released when you crashed, and your skis came off. But skis have sharp edges; when two skiers crash together, facial lacerations can occur. Nora was proud of the scars on her face.

One time, her stitched eyebrow opened at night and bled on her pillow; in the morning, Nora’s face was stuck to her pillowcase. The girly-girl blondes were shrieking in the upstairs hall, grossed out by all the blood. Another time, Nora broke her nose; her nose was pressed against some guy’s sternum when she drove him into the hill. His sternum was cracked—arguably a worse injury than a broken nose.

“It was only a hairline fracture,” Nora said with a shrug. “And look at me—I have raccoon eyes. I couldn’t pick up a pervert, looking like this,” she added, pointing to her two black eyes.

But I had the feeling Nora liked her injuries, if not as much as she liked injuring dickheads. For one thing, if Nora had an injury, she had an excuse not to ski. And there’s no doubt that Nora liked looking a little roughed up. In our Cranmore Mountain years, I was not aware of Nora’s interest in picking up anybody—not even a pervert. Nora not only dressed like a tomboy; from the moment she’d been sent away to Northfield, Nora had made what her mother called “a haircut statement.”

“It’s called a crew cut,” Nora said; she made a point of not saying this in the exclamatory fashion of those dramatic Brewster girls. “How come when boys have a crew cut, it’s no big deal?”

Some guys thought Nora was a guy. When she wore a ski parka that was long enough to hide her hips, or an oversize sweater—it had to be huge to conceal her breasts—the prominent jut of Nora’s jaw and her broad shoulders gave her a masculine appearance. And on skis—even when she was just walking on skis—Nora could maintain a manly swagger. Not so off skis, when her hips were involved in the process. With her hips in the picture, or her boobs, it was evident to anyone that Nora was a woman.

As for those hotshot skiers lying under her on a ski trail—in particular, those dickheads who’d had their wind knocked out or were concussed—imagine their surprise when they regained consciousness with their quivering lips pressed against Nora’s ear. I’m guessing the questionably erotic confusion of the moment suddenly stood in contrast to Nora’s bristling crew cut, her handsome but hard-looking face—the granite jaw, the tight-lipped smirk that passed for Nora’s cruel smile.

But I’m making too much of the heroic example Nora set for me. Yes, she helped me endure those winter ski trips up north. But Nora’s rebellious antics notwithstanding, what stands out for me are those two weeks every winter when my mother and I were together—in particular, our nights.

“Oh, boy—a sleepover, Adam!” my mom would exclaim, in her little-girl way. “Aren’t you excited?”

Yes, I was—at any age. I always was. My mother made me feel that a sleepover with me was her favorite thing; in retrospect, perhaps it was. I know this from Nora: Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were ceaselessly disapproving that my mom and I shared a room together during her North Conway visits. For a time, we were given a room with a queen-size bed; to the dismay of my rigidly conventional aunts, my mother and I had sleepovers in the same bed. But that would stop before I became a teenager; when I was eleven or twelve, my aunts persuaded the North Conway Norwegians to give my mom and me a bedroom with two twin-size beds.

“My mother and Martha will even find a way to die appropriately,” was Nora’s response. Indeed, they would.

(I’m a little sensitive to the subject of the deaths of aunts in my novels. Unkind critics have complained how I dispatch, or dispose of, the unlikable aunts in my fiction, but these critics never knew Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha. Any deus ex machina device would not be too improbable for them.)

Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha interfered with my mom’s and my sleeping arrangements. What business was it of theirs?

“As much as we like to cuddle, sweetie—even as small as we are—I think we’re too big to sleep all night in a twin bed,” my mother said; she sighed dramatically. She let me know how sad she was about it. She told me we could always sleep in the same bed together, and we would—provided the bed was big enough.

Even in that North Conway bedroom with the twin beds, we would cuddle together in one of the twins—if only until one of us fell asleep, usually my mom. She’d been skiing all day; when her last ski-school class was over, she took a run or two with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan. These were black-diamond runs, for experts only. For a few years, the Vinter brothers could keep up with her; then they got too old to try. Abigail and Martha could never keep up with Little Ray.

Skiers at Cranmore Mountain mostly remember the Skimobile—those little cars on the wooden track—and the European-run ski school. But I remember those sleepovers with my mother. How we would talk and laugh. How soon I forgot how much I’d missed her. How quickly my resentment vanished.

My mother didn’t drink a lot; she said she was “too small for alcohol.” She drank only beer, at most one or two. She told me two beers made her tipsy, but I liked her when she was silly—when her voice was a girlish whisper, or when she giggled like a child. Sometimes, on a two-beer night, the most confounding non sequiturs would slip out, often following a pause in her speech. She would speak in a childlike whisper—secretively, as if someone could be listening to us. We would be lying in the dark, and my mom hadn’t said anything for a while; naturally, I was beginning to think she’d fallen asleep. Then her whispering, seemingly apropos of nothing, would start.

This happened in one of those twin beds in North Conway. I don’t remember how old I was, but I was already listening to Moby-Dick—my paying attention to language was more advanced than the rest of my development. (I had my mom’s small hands—and, according to Henrik, my poor penis was like my little finger.) I was in the gentle process of disentangling myself from my mother’s arms; I was about to get into the other twin bed, where I would have more room.

“Have you seen them?” my mom whispered in the dark.

I waited until I thought she’d gone back to sleep; it had sounded like something she might have said in her sleep. I felt her lips brush my ear. “You haven’t, have you?” my mother whispered.

“I haven’t what?” I asked her. “Have I seen whom?”

“Oh, silly me!” my mom exclaimed. “Was I talking in my sleep?” At the time, I thought she was.