The Last Chairlift

20. A LITTLE BEHIND GIRLS HER AGE, SOCIALLY; DEFINITELY AHEAD OF; DEFINITELY BEHIND

I decided the high school dances were off-limits, not wanting poor Sally to see in my eyes how she’d looked when she was wedged in the shower. Besides, who was I going to ask to dance? One of those girls who was dancing with another girl? They looked like girl jocks to me; maybe they were teammates, field hockey players or cross-country runners. Was there a protocol concerning cutting in on girls who were dancing together?

I asked Mr. Barlow, but he deferred to my mother and Molly. “Ask them—they know more about what enrages girls than I do,” the little English teacher said.

“The problem is the one you don’t ask to dance—she’ll hate you, sweetie,” my mom said.

“Eventually, if they’re teammates, both of them will hate you, Kid,” Molly told me.

I complained to the snowshoer that the hatred my mother and Molly had predicted from the dancing teammates didn’t sound logical to me. “Then it’s definitely true—hatred isn’t logical,” Mr. Barlow said. “A wallflower might be safer than a girl jock,” he advised me. I considered the word wallflower already old-fashioned, even in the fifties. Wasn’t it a word more in keeping with my grandmother’s generation than the snowshoer’s? And if a wallflower was a person who remained on the sidelines of any activity—out of shyness or unpopularity, or the lack of a partner—wasn’t Sally, who was overweight, a wallflower?

Surely I was just a different variety of wallflower—hence I felt a natural attraction to other wallflowers. As a new boy at the academy—one who was perceived as an interloper when I intruded upon the public school kids—hadn’t I become an outsider in the town I’d grown up in?

I didn’t meet Rose at a dance—“the clubfooted one,” Nora called her.

“The kinda clubfooted one,” was the way Dottie put it, which seemed no less unkind.

“Rose isn’t clubfooted,” I insisted. “She just has a right foot that goes awry.”

“It sure as shit went awry on them attic stairs!” Dottie had exclaimed.

“That’s enough, Dottie—please don’t. Poor Rose,” my grandmother always said.

“And the strong one on crutches, and the tall one with her arm in a cast!” Dottie declared, rolling her eyes.

“They were jocks—they just had injuries, temporarily,” I told her.

“As I recall, Adam, you only went out with ’em when they was injured—temporarily,” Dottie told me.

“Please, Dottie—that’s enough,” my grandmother repeated.

I met Rose in the library, where you might expect to encounter a wallflower. This was the town’s public library, not the academy library. Rose was such a wallflower, I didn’t even know she was a faculty brat; most faculty daughters went away to private schools. In an all-girls’ school, her parents had feared Rose would be teased, because of her limp—her lurch, Nora had labeled it. I didn’t think it was a drastic limp, though the first time you saw it, you thought Rose had tripped and was going to fall. It may not have been a congenitally misshapen deformity, but something went wrong with the right side of Rose’s body when she walked. She spent much of her time in the library doing research on limps, and reading about surgical mishaps.

The old librarian, Mrs. McNulty, who walked with a cane, always put her index finger to her lips when she looked at us—as if to shush us, although Rose and I never spoke in the library. We wrote each other notes. Mrs. McNulty must have thought that teenagers couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet in a library. Mrs. McNulty also appeared to disapprove of our writing each other notes.

“You’re always writing, usually not reading. What are you writing?” was the first note Rose wrote to me.

I had to tear several pages out of my notebook in order to explain that I was trying to be a fiction writer; I was making things up. I didn’t like to write in the academy library, because there were students (usually older boys) who grabbed my notebook to see what I was writing. Rose confided to me that faculty daughters in their teens were considered a distraction to the boys in the academy library. When the boys saw her sitting at one of the tables, they flirted with her—until she had to walk somewhere, and the boys got a look at her limp. Thus was I forewarned of the limp before I saw it. Rose and her parents were undecided about the corrective surgery proposed for her limp. “What if the surgery makes the limp worse?” was the way Rose had written it.

Mrs. McNulty was a bitch about the sound I made when I tore pages out of my notebook. I stopped writing in spiral notebooks. I began to use a loose-leaf notebook, the kind with rings. If you were careful, you could open and close the rings without making a popping sound. Mrs. McNulty had nothing better to do than watch me when I opened and closed the rings, in her hawklike anticipation of the pop. It took me a few weeks to get up the nerve to write Rose the note about the attic bedroom in my grandmother’s house. “It’s on the third floor,” I felt it was necessary to say. I’d still not seen Rose walk. I didn’t know if she could manage stairs.

“If there’s a banister, I can do stairs—no problem,” Rose wrote me back.

The first night I walked her home from the town library, I did my best not to gawk at her limp. There were academy boys who imitated the way she limped, Rose told me. Her parents’ faculty apartment was only on the second floor of one of the student dormitories, but when Rose was limping upstairs, or down, there were boys in the dorm who purposely stayed behind her on the stairs—they watched her limp. Such cruelty was unimaginable to me. I found her very pretty—in a kind of literary, damaged, tragic way.

Rose was a year older, and a year ahead of me in school; she was fifteen, almost sixteen, but she didn’t have her driver’s permit. “I’m not allowed to learn to drive,” Rose told me. “My right foot is my accelerator foot,” she said, “and sometimes I get muscle spasms when I’m sitting or lying down.” I remember how she paused before she kissed me; she was more tentative about kissing than Sally.

There are things you hear that you only later realize you should have listened to more closely. The quiet way Rose said, before our first kiss, that her muscle spasms were worse than her limp; or the first time she let me touch her small but pretty breasts, when Rose told me she was a little behind girls her own age, socially. (She did not mean the size of her breasts, I would only later realize.)

I didn’t wonder, as I should have—seeing how she struggled with the steepness of the attic stairs—why Rose hadn’t stated what the rules were for making out. The “touch this (but not that)” business had not been made clear. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to imagine that Rose might not have made out before. She was such a pretty girl, and she was a year older than me.

Why risk spoiling everything by telling her about Granddaddy’s ghost? I was thinking. Weeks would pass without the punctuation maven showing up. I thought of reassuring or dismissive things I could say if the infant-brained spirit suddenly appeared. “Pay no attention to this tiresome fool” was too cavalier to say about a ghost. I decided it would be better if I gave the phantom English teacher a direct command. Such as: “Get out of my bedroom!” Wouldn’t my taking charge of the apparition be the most reassuring to Rose? Clearly, at fourteen and dying to make out with Rose, I’d not considered the unlikelihood of my taking charge of a specter. Granddaddy’s ghost, especially as an English teacher, was not in the category of a headless horseman—or so I thought. When you’re young and inexperienced, it’s easy to underestimate the power of the supernatural—or of muscle spasms.

I took off my clothes first, leaving my boxers on; Rose just watched me, doing nothing. “Our underwear stays on, right?” she asked.

“Right,” I answered her. She sat on the edge of the bed, slowly taking her clothes off. I didn’t watch her; I had my eye on that spot under the skylight where you-know-who had a habit of just appearing. When Rose and I were kneeling together on the bed, she was still taller than I was—even on her knees. When we were lying down and kissing, and feeling each other up, I truly thought Rose was the right girlfriend for me—certainly not because I pitied her.

I mistook the muscle spasm in Rose’s right calf for her first sighting of the infant emeritus. Rose emitted a bloodcurdling cry, worthy of a first-time ghost sighting. Her right foot flopped crazily all around, and Rose grabbed the back of her right thigh—then, suddenly, the right cheek of her buttocks. She’d not told me her muscle spasms had a ripple effect on the right side of her body; the ripples ran from her calf to her hamstring to her gluteus maximus. Rose had writhed off the bed and was propelling herself with her heels, on her back, across the bedroom floor. I was looking everywhere for the diaper man, but I couldn’t see him. I had no doubt that Rose must have seen him.

As with Sally, I would only belatedly learn the gist of what Dottie and my grandmother were saying in the kitchen, where Rose’s piercing screams had reached them. “Heaven have mercy—they can’t be having sex, can they?” Nana asked Dottie.

“That sure as shit don’t sound like sex to me, Mrs. Brewster—not in any of the usual positions I can think of,” Dottie answered her.

Maybe the faculty emeritus had been lurking in the open doorway of my attic bathroom, and Rose had seen his reflection in the skylight? Although I couldn’t see Granddaddy’s ghost, I didn’t hesitate to speak sharply to him. I never imagined that poor Rose would think I was speaking to her.

“Get out of my bedroom!” I said (I thought) to Granddaddy’s ghost, who (of course) wasn’t there. Nana and Dottie didn’t hear what I said—not over Rose’s heart-stopping scream, not as far away as the kitchen—but, from Rose’s heartrending expression, I had no doubt that Rose had heard me.

“No, not you—I meant the ghost!” I said to Rose, which my grandmother and Dottie also didn’t hear; Rose clearly did. The ghost word, and her perception that I was rejecting her, gave a new urgency to Rose’s backpedaling across my bedroom floor. She’d called her wonky right foot her accelerator foot—the stated reason Rose was not allowed to drive a car—but the way she propelled herself with both her heels, on her back, down the attic stairs, suggested to me another reason not to let Rose drive. In the middle of a muscle spasm, Rose’s capacity to accelerate in reverse would have been more hazardous (and frightening to behold) in a car.

From the attic, I could only watch in horror Rose’s headfirst and rigidly supine descent of the stairs. Dottie was there—she was able to soften Rose’s fall at the foot of the stairs. Rose’s panties had been pulled down to her knees—step by step, an inch or two at a time, in the course of her harrowing descent. Commanded to get out of my bedroom in the agony of her muscle spasm, and being abruptly told there was a ghost, poor Rose had seen me at the top of the stairs. She not only knew I’d watched her fall; she saw the exact moment of my seeing her so crudely exposed.

You can’t control how you look when you see someone revealed that way. I can’t imagine the expression on my face, or how poor Rose would ever forget it. At that moment, my pity for her was apparent. As with Sally, it wasn’t a look I could take back.

In my boxers, I started down the stairs; Dottie stopped me before I got to the step that creaked. “Get dressed, Adam—then bring me this young lady’s clothes,” Dottie said. Rose had managed to pull her panties up, but she clung to Dottie, with her face turned away from me.

After Granddaddy’s death, when I was asked if my grandmother had a servant, I answered truthfully and without hesitation: “Not exactly.” During the diaper man’s decline, Dottie had taken charge of him. As my grandmother aged, I could foresee Dottie taking charge of her. Now, on the evening of Rose’s muscle spasm, Dottie certainly took charge of Rose. Dottie got Rose dressed for the dinner table. Dottie gathered Rose’s wits together for her.

At dinner, after my grandmother served the casserole, all eyes were on the recovered but clearly shaken Rose. “I don’t like to take the muscle relaxant, because it makes me sleepy,” Rose was telling us. “I take it at bedtime, so I don’t get a cramp in my sleep, but during the day—well, you know, I just take my chances.” She shrugged.

The shrug seemed to trigger the first twitch. Her fork, in her right hand, had been pushing the tuna casserole around, with no apparent purpose. When Rose’s right biceps contracted, her fork grazed her right cheek—it came close to poking her in the eye. An errant glob of tuna, pasta, and cheese sailed over Rose’s right shoulder. “Limping is safer for me than sitting, and lying down is when I get the worst ones,” Rose explained. She was doing her best to remain detached from her body’s behavior.

Her right knee suddenly struck the underside of the table, making our water glasses jump—the fork flew out of Rose’s right hand. “Or when I’m nervous, like when everyone is staring at me,” Rose blurted out. “Like when everyone is waiting for me to have a major muscle spasm, if I just twitch or something,” Rose said, twitching. It was hard to look at her, but it was harder not to.

I looked under the table for Rose’s lost fork, but Dottie had already gone to the kitchen to get a clean one. The lost fork wasn’t under the table. What caught my eye was Rose’s right foot; Rose had told me her right foot had a mind of its own. Under the table, I saw her right foot keeping time to a tune no one could hear.

I would walk Rose home. Knowing that limping was safer for her than sitting down, we had a peaceful walk, but we both knew that would be the end of it. “I’m so sorry that, if only for a moment, you thought I was telling you to get out of my bedroom,” I said to her, but she wouldn’t even hold my hand.

“I can’t believe you didn’t warn me about the ghost,” was all Rose had to say.

When I told Mr. Barlow about it, he was full of sympathy for Rose. “If you didn’t prepare her and she saw the ghost, it’s not pretty to imagine the muscle spasm Rose might have had,” the snowshoer said.

I tried not to imagine the muscle spasm the ghost of the infant emeritus might have provoked in Rose. I told Mr. Barlow I was in no hurry to write about it. “Yes, it would be better to wait. The worst stories get worse over time—you’re wise to wait,” the little English teacher said, but he couldn’t refrain from opening the Pandora’s box of possible titles for Rose’s story.

Of course Nana and Dottie had already provided the snowshoer with their details of Rose’s muscle spasm and her indecent exposure on the attic stairs. My grandmother couldn’t say her name without turning her into a title: “Poor Rose.” Dottie referred to Rose in three ways. “The Kinda Clubfooted One” was the least sympathetic as a title, in Mr. Barlow’s opinion, although I thought “The Twitcher,” which was Dottie’s favorite, would have been worse. The snowshoer and I agreed that the closest Dottie came to pity was when she called Rose, almost neutrally, “The One with the Limp.”

“I have a hard time hearing much sympathy in any title with muscle spasm in it,” the little English teacher told me. I did not tell Mr. Barlow what Rose had said the first time she let me touch her breasts. I was ashamed—I am ashamed—I misunderstood her. When Rose told me she was a little behind girls her age, socially, I should have known she was trying to tell me she was sexually inexperienced. How could I have thought poor Rose was referring to the smallness of her breasts?

I got off to a rocky start with my first two girlfriends, but they weren’t bad girlfriends. I was truly attracted to Sally and Rose; what went wrong wasn’t their fault. Not only in my adolescence, but continuing through college, I seemed to be attracted to a succession of girlfriends who were predisposed to tragedy, giving credence to Nora’s (and my mother’s) speculation that I was drawn to doom in my girlfriend-selection process.

My empathy for my next three girlfriends is as various as they were. “The Strong One on Crutches,” “The Tall One with Her Arm in a Cast,” “The Bleeder”—were they tragically inclined? In their varying ways, yes. But I was young, and so were they. Even my grandmother—even Dottie—cut me some slack because of my age, and the age of those girlfriends.

I didn’t dare go to the dances in the Exeter High School gym until someone told me Sally had been sent away to boarding school. By then, I had my driver’s license. Mr. Barlow had taught me to drive; I’d passed my driving test in his VW Beetle. During the exam, when I felt my grip on the steering wheel overtighten, I remembered to remain seated—as the little English teacher had advised me.

As for the girl jocks who were dancing with one another, I knew better than to cut in. It hadn’t occurred to me that the loners among them—the girl jocks who weren’t dancing—would be the ones who were injured. I certainly knew better than to ask a girl on crutches to dance. I first saw Caroline standing on her crutches at the periphery of the dance floor; later I saw her sitting alone in one of the folding chairs, with a second chair supporting her injured leg. On crutches, she’d appeared hulking—even sitting down, she looked very strong. When I sat down in the empty chair beside her, her broad shoulders made me feel especially small. From where I sat, her crutches—leaning against the gym wall, behind her—seemed taller than I was.

I thought Caroline was a little vague about her knee injury. “Some rotational force was applied to my right knee when all my weight was on that same leg,” was the way she put it. I had trouble visualizing this, but I don’t know field hockey at all. Caroline was still angry that the opposing player hadn’t drawn a penalty for the hit.

As for the surgery, she was somewhat more specific. “Torn meniscus—they took the whole thing out,” Caroline said, shrugging her big shoulders. She had stitches, a gauze bandage, and an elastic compression bandage over the gauze bandage. They’d instructed her not to bend her knee and to keep her right leg elevated, but she wasn’t in a cast. I thought the jocks I knew at the academy, the ones who’d had a meniscectomy, were in casts, but Caroline assured me the ACE bandage was sufficient to remind her to keep her right leg straight.

“It’s a pain in the ass to keep the stitches dry,” she told me. If she took a bath, she had to hold her right leg above the tub. If she took a shower, she had to enclose her right leg in a plastic garbage bag; she had to find a rubber band big enough to make the garbage bag watertight, in the area of her upper thigh. “I don’t have a small upper thigh,” Caroline pointed out, showing me. She indicated her thick leg, supported by the chair.

I couldn’t imagine we had anything to talk about, nor would Nana and Dottie allow this hulking brute on crutches anywhere near the attic stairs. If poor Sally had managed to wedge herself in my small shower stall, I couldn’t conceive how Caroline could fit through the shower door—certainly not with her right leg in a plastic garbage bag. Dottie still complained about the shower door. “It was easy as fartin’ to take off,” Dottie said, “but it was a bitch to put back on.”

I was about to wish Caroline all the best for her knee and call it a night when Caroline suddenly said, “You’re the skier’s kid, aren’t you? I wonder what that’s like.” I asked her what she meant; she shrugged again. “I just heard about her—girl jocks hear about other girl jocks,” Caroline said, in her vague way.

When her dad had been in the military, her family was always on the move; Caroline had lived all over the place. Now she missed the moving around. Never getting out of the town of Exeter was boring; since her knee injury, Caroline even missed the road trips on the team bus. I got the feeling that Caroline was probably ahead of girls her age, socially. I began to think about a road trip we might take together.

My mom was already in Vermont for the ski season—there was snow there by mid-November. I knew the snowshoer would let me borrow his VW Beetle. Caroline had to keep her knee elevated; she could have the whole backseat to extend her right leg. My mom and Molly had a big futon in their TV room; I explained to Caroline that we could sleep on the futon on the floor of the TV room. It was a long drive, but we had some free time during the long Thanksgiving weekend.

When I spoke to my mother and Molly about our visit, they seemed more interested in Caroline’s knee surgery than they were curious about our relationship. Molly said a torn meniscus wasn’t the skier’s friend. So-called open meniscal surgery meant removing the entire meniscus—“often for pain not related to the meniscus,” she said. “When you take the meniscus completely out, there are complications—you can cut the medial collateral ligament, and there’s all the bleeding,” Molly said. “One day, orthopedists will come up with a less invasive, less destructive procedure for repairing an injured meniscus—now they remove all of it.”

I said that Caroline wasn’t in a cast, just an ACE bandage, but Molly didn’t sound concerned. “Immobilizing the knee allows scar tissue to fill the void left by the meniscectomy,” Molly said. “Your friend just has to be careful not to flex that knee, or she could tweak it.”

I told Molly that Caroline would still have stitches when we came for a visit, but Molly didn’t seem to think the stitches were a big deal. “She’ll just have to be careful not to put any direct pressure on her stitches, not to tweak them,” Molly said. Jocks were fond of the tweak word, I was thinking.

When Molly asked me about the “injury mechanism” that led to Caroline’s meniscal surgery, I said Caroline had been a little vague concerning how the injury had happened. “For a torn meniscus, a twisting force on a loaded leg is common,” was all Molly said about it.

Jocks had their own language, I was thinking. My interest in Caroline’s knee was limited. Only later would I realize that the way Caroline had described her injury—as a rotational force applied to her right knee when all her weight was on that same leg—was pretty close to what Molly meant by “a twisting force on a loaded leg.” Maybe I’d misjudged Caroline; maybe there was nothing vague about her.

There was no vagueness about the way Caroline undressed, after Molly and my mother had gone to bed and left us to sleep or fool around on the futon in the TV room. Having heard truly all about her knee, I was not expecting there would be much making out with her. I was unprepared for Caroline to take everything off, except her ACE bandage. I made no effort to resist her when she stripped naked, but I was clearly not ready.

“Oh, cute!” Caroline said, when she got a look at me. “Don’t worry—you’ll get bigger.” When she was putting the condom on me, I suppose I got a little bigger. “This is a new experience for you, isn’t it?” she asked me. I was thinking she probably meant more than the condom part of the process, but I couldn’t speak. I barely managed to nod, before she proceeded to arrange me on the futon in an orderly fashion. The way she wanted me to lie down, on my back, suggested to me that she was carrying out a plan that she’d carefully considered. I decided that Caroline was definitely ahead of girls her age, socially. To safeguard her knee, however, Caroline had conceived of a new way to have sex—as new to her as having sex, in any fashion, was to me.

“You’re on the bottom, I’m on top—it’ll work,” she said. The superior position Caroline tried to master would have been more easily achieved by a lithe little yoga woman; there might even be a name for it. But Caroline was neither lithe nor little. When she straddled me—kneeling on her left knee, with her right leg fully extended in front of her—her ACE bandage brushed softly against my ear. It had a medicinal smell. My elbows were tucked against my chest, my hands pressed together in a prayerful position, while Caroline precariously lowered herself onto me. She looked a little off-balance to me, and she seemed to be having some difficulty locating where my penis was—not that I knew where it went or what to do with it.

Jocks are inclined to postgame analysis. Caroline would later analyze what she called the “challenging angle of entry,” and what went wrong; at the time, however, she just said, “You have to help me put your thing in the right place.” In my pinned-down position, it was unclear to me exactly where her thing was. “Not there!” Caroline sharply said. I tried not to think of poor Rose’s thing, descending the attic stairs. “Yeah, that’s it,” Caroline told me, matter-of-factly. Even under such stressful circumstances, I suddenly wondered (albeit briefly) when I had ever been this happy.

Caroline’s postgame analysis did not include exactly what went awry after we were blissfully connected; her criticism concerning the “challenging angle of entry” didn’t explain the sudden jackknifing of her upper and lower body. The throes of sexual excitement? Had she first felt a tug on her stitches or a twinge in the joint of her right knee? Did an unexpected ecstasy cause Caroline to abandon the contortions she’d attempted to safeguard her recovery from knee surgery?

“You screamed as loudly as she did, Kid,” Molly would tell me, in her postgame analysis. The bruise on my cheekbone, where Caroline’s right knee made contact with my face, was an after-the-fact discovery; it wasn’t why I cried out. When Caroline jackknifed her body, and then rolled off me, my penis was bent in a way that penises aren’t meant to bend. It seemed to me that my penis had suffered an unnatural wrenching. In jock terms, it was a serious tweak, but Caroline was the one with the knee injury. When my mother and Molly rushed into the TV room, Caroline was their chief concern. I was aware my mom had noticed the condom by how quickly she looked away.

“Come into the kitchen with me, sweetie—let Molly have a look at Caroline’s knee,” my mother said. I put on my boxers and a T-shirt, not knowing what to do about the condom. I sincerely hoped my mom didn’t intend to take a look at my penis, although I was in sufficient pain to imagine that the condom could be the only thing holding the torn or severed parts together.

“I want to unwrap that ACE bandage and take the dressing off—I want to see if there’s any bleeding where the stitches are, or if there’s any swelling,” I could hear Molly saying.

My mother was whispering to me before we got to the kitchen. “You shouldn’t have sex with a girl on crutches, sweetie—Caroline is on crutches because she’s injured. You don’t have sex with someone who’s just had surgery, sweetie!”

This had not been my mother’s reaction when she first heard the screaming, Molly later said. “That’s my one and only—Caroline has rolled over and crushed him in his sleep!” my mom had cried.

“I heard Caroline scream, too, Ray,” Molly had pointed out.

In the kitchen, my mother went on whispering. Her concerns, I thought, were not entirely focused on the well-being of her one and only. “Frankly, sweetie, I wouldn’t want to watch Caroline play field hockey, for the same reason I don’t like to imagine her having sex—because someone’s going to get injured in the process!” my mom whispered.

That was when Molly came into the kitchen. “Do we have any large garbage bags?” she asked my mother.

“Of course we do,” my mom answered her. “Do you see, sweetie?” she asked me; she was back to whispering. “That’s what happens when you have sex after surgery—now Molly has to throw Caroline’s leg away or something.”

“Caroline just wants to take a shower, Ray,” Molly told her. “Maybe you can help Caroline get in and out of the shower. Caroline and I are a little too big when we’re together,” Molly explained.

“I’m not going to take a shower with Caroline!” my mom whispered.

“I think her knee is okay,” Molly told us. “No bleeding around the stitches—no swelling that I can see, but I’ll take another look in the morning. You just have to help her in and out of the shower, Ray,” Molly whispered.

I was alone with Molly in the kitchen while Little Ray was dealing with Caroline and the garbage-bag business in the bathroom. “Are you okay?” the trail groomer asked me. I knew that as a ski patroller, Molly had had emergency medical training. But wouldn’t a penis injury be an uncommon skiing mishap?

“My penis was bent in an extreme sort of way—it still hurts,” I whispered. “Maybe I just pulled a muscle in it.”

“I don’t see a lot of penises, injured or otherwise, but I suppose I should take a look at it,” Molly told me. I showed her. “There are no muscles in a penis, Kid—just tubes and blood vessels,” Molly said. “I have no penises to compare this one to, but it looks okay to me, Kid. I’ll take another look at it in the morning—to see if anything has changed.”

“What sort of changes are you looking for?” I asked her.

“You can break the blood vessels in a penis, Kid—I’ll be looking for a hematoma, the result of broken blood vessels. The trauma can heal with scar tissue—it’s not erectile, it can’t expand or stretch,” Molly explained. “You get a hard-on, there’s a kink—your penis curves, Kid. That’ll hurt—then you need a surgery.” Since Molly seemed to know quite a lot about surgeries, I asked her to tell me what was entailed in penis surgery.

“I know more about knee surgeries, Kid. As a patroller, I’ve not seen a ski injury involving an erect penis. The only permanently bent penis that needed a surgery—the only totally wrecked penis I ever knew of personally—was one of Nelly’s former boyfriends, before her yeast-infection boyfriend,” the snowcat operator told me.

“Was it a sex injury?” I asked her.

“Of course it was, Kid,” Molly said. In the ensuing silence, she saw I was worried about a possible penis surgery. “I’m sure it’s a better surgery to have than a meniscectomy,” Molly told me, just as my mother came into the kitchen.

“It’s a better surgery for a boy to have,” my mom said inexplicably. I thought she must have overheard us talking about penis surgery, and she was making a senseless penis joke; in retrospect, I think all my mother heard was the better word and the meniscectomy.

Molly was unfazed. “We were talking about a meniscectomy, Ray,” Molly told her.

“I know you were,” my mom replied, “and I said, ‘It’s a better surgery for a boy to have’—not to repeat myself.” While this made no sense at all, I was relieved not to share my pending penis surgery with my mother, and Molly simply changed the subject.

“How’s it going with the garbage bag, Ray?” Molly asked.

“Well, that Caroline is a big girl, all right,” my mom said, “and it’s a good thing she brought her own rubber band—a big one.”

I left them talking together in the kitchen. I didn’t need to hear (again) the list of the complications Caroline faced in efforts to keep her stitches dry. I hoped I might fall asleep on the futon, before Caroline lumbered back to the TV room on her crutches, but my penis was throbbing—in pain, not in an arousing way—and even if I’d been sound asleep, I would have woken up when the full-bodied Caroline stretched herself, giggling, beside me. “Did your dick get tweaked when I kind of went crazy with you inside me?” she whispered. When Caroline spoke in a whisper, there was something insincerely little-girlish in her voice.

“It got a little tweaked,” I told her, trying to downplay the drama of the hematoma I was certain I would see in the morning, and the subsequent surgical straightening. My penile procedure would soon be a fait accompli. I could feel myself losing consciousness, as the anesthetic rushed through my veins.

Caroline couldn’t stop giggling. “Just imagine how I felt—stark naked with a couple of lesbians!” she whispered, in the unlikely voice of an annoying little girl. I didn’t like the lesbian label. As disapproving as Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were, those biddies didn’t use the word. The way Nora said lesbian—in a relaxed, offhand manner—it wasn’t a label.

“You’re the skier’s kid, aren’t you?” Caroline had asked me. “I wonder what that’s like,” she’d said. Of course I’d asked her what she meant, but all Caroline had told me was that she’d just heard about Little Ray—the way girl jocks hear about other girl jocks, she’d said. But what did that mean? I wondered now—what had Caroline and the other girl jocks heard about my mother, in the smaller-than-Chihuahua-shit town of Exeter?

I was lying beside the injured giantess—hating her, but resisting the impulse to roll onto her right knee—when I realized Caroline had conked out, leaving me to ponder what I should have said about the lesbian label.

In the morning, very early, there would not be many moments conducive to meaningful conversation. Molly wanted to have a look at Caroline’s knee, but there’d been no bleeding around the stitches, and the joint wasn’t swollen. Caroline couldn’t point to the place where she’d felt a twinge; she felt no pain now.

Meanwhile, when Molly was examining the surgery site, I slipped into the bathroom and examined my injured penis—from various angles, in multiple mirrors. It wasn’t bent, but it wasn’t erect—no hematoma, no sign of bleeding or bruising. When I had a moment alone with Molly, I told her it wouldn’t be necessary for her to take another look at my injury.

“Keep an eye on it, Kid—show it to a doctor, if you see any discoloration. I don’t like to think of you with an L-shaped penis, looking like an Allen wrench,” the snowcat operator told me. Leave it to the trail groomer to know more about tools than most guys did—more than I knew, anyway. We were in the kitchen, where Molly found an Allen wrench in the tool drawer, and she showed it to me.

That was when my mother came in. She was wearing her long johns, and she was in the act of putting on her other ski clothes (while she was trying to drink her coffee). “What do you need an Allen wrench for, sweetie?” she asked me.

“I was just showing him what one looked like, Ray,” Molly told her.

It was early on Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving weekend, but it was a workday for Molly and my mother—a busy day on a ski mountain. They were rushing around, putting on layers of clothes or stuffing more layers in their backpacks; even dressing for skiing is a pain in the ass. I didn’t expect Molly or my mom to inquire if my painful and completely unplanned coitus interruptus, coincident with Caroline’s twinge in her knee, amounted to my one and only time.

Nobody seems terribly concerned with the ways boys lose their virginity, I was thinking, when Molly—shouldering her backpack and leaning over me, as we were casually passing each other in the narrow hall—whispered in my ear. “Don’t worry, Kid—if that was your first time, the next time will be better,” the night groomer told me. Although my view of my mother was partially blocked by Molly’s big shoulder, I saw that she was watching us.

When my mom kissed me goodbye, she also whispered in my ear. “It doesn’t matter to me, sweetie—whatever secret you and Molly are keeping from me—I’m just so happy you have your driver’s license. Now you can always come see me, even in the ski season!”

There wouldn’t be much scintillating conversation with Caroline on our long drive back to New Hampshire. The sidelined field-hockey player slept the whole way, with her right leg fully extended on the backseat of Mr. Barlow’s VW Beetle—her post-op knee never gave her a twinge. I was a little disappointed that my penis had stopped hurting, too. Wasn’t it a small tragedy that there was so little to remember about the loss of my virginity? Not even the pain had lingered.

Caroline didn’t wake up until I pulled into her driveway, where I presume it was her parents I saw staring at me through a ground-floor window. I could tell they weren’t going to venture outside to meet me—they just wanted to get a look at the skier’s kid. Probably, Caroline’s parents had also heard about my mother. Their condemning faces in the window informed me of their thoughts. Look, it’s that lesbian’s boy—that woman with the little husband and the big girlfriend, the one who’s away all winter. Or was their presumed homophobia (and Caroline’s) only in my mind?

“So long, Adam,” Caroline was saying. Because she was on crutches, I fully intended to carry her backpack, but she’d already secured the straps on her shoulders, and the crutches were under her armpits—she was ready to go.

“So long,” I said. I half expected her to say that she hadn’t had this much fun on a road trip since her knee was injured. (It had been at an away game, Caroline had told me, and they’d packed her knee in ice and had stretched her out on the dirty floor of the team bus for the painful ride home.) But her So long to me, and mine to her, would suffice. It was pretty clear we’d had an awful time. Her parents’ faces in the window—perhaps condemning, maybe merely inquisitive—now looked relieved to see the obvious lack of affection in our parting.

The snowshoer cautioned me that I couldn’t be sure about Caroline and her parents—their sexual hatred seemed obvious to me, but Elliot told me that bigots could be “slippery” if you accused them outright. Caroline could say she was just kidding or that I had no sense of humor. Her parents might say I’d misread their expressions—or that I was paranoid, or I was projecting. The snowshoer had heard lots of excuses for sexual bigotry at the academy. Those Exeter boys were very smart—they could be “slippery” in ingenious ways, the little English teacher told me.

In those days—the end of the 1950s—I don’t believe I ever heard the word homophobe. There were clearly a lot of homophobes around, but the word wasn’t in use yet. If anyone had known it, it would have been Mr. Barlow, but not even he was saying it.

There may have been no name for them, but the snowshoer and I both suspected there might be more homophobes at the dances in the public high school gym than there were at the academy, although there surely were a lot of homophobes at an all-boys’ school—there were a lot of them everywhere, and they were definitely “slippery,” the little English teacher and I decided.

Meanwhile, Mr. Barlow had met a girl he thought I should meet. “I’m not in the habit of inserting myself as a matchmaker, Adam,” the snowshoer assured me. “In poor Maud’s case, however, I believe she is without prejudice, or at least disinclined to prejudge anyone—given the recent ridicule and derision she has suffered. Talk about ‘adding insult to injury,’ as they say!” the little English teacher declared.

The abused girl Elliot had met was the tall one with her arm in a cast—my last girlfriend, ever, from the smaller-than-Chihuahua-shit town of Exeter. That poor Maud had been injured made me anxious, even before I learned how. Given poor Rose—her limp, and the resultant muscle spasms. Given Caroline—the twinge in her knee, and the consequent bending of my penis, which would forever define the loss of my virginity. “What happened to Maud—how was she injured?” I asked the snowshoer.

It’s what comes of writing plot-driven novels: my mind always races ahead to the end of the action, or to the aftermath. I’m thinking of the conversation with Molly and my mother in their Vermont kitchen, when poor Maud was in the bathroom—recovering, or trying to recover. I was sitting at the kitchen table, where Little Ray was dressing my facial wounds—there were a few small lacerations, a few more abrasions. “Hold still, sweetie,” my mother kept saying, but the antiseptic hurt, and the condom (once again, under my boxers) was very uncomfortable. Molly just sat with us at the table, waiting—the can of white paint and the paintbrush in front of her. Molly was waiting to paint over the bloodstains on Maud’s cast, as soon as Maud managed to recover in the bathroom. “You never screw someone in a cast, sweetie—you just don’t!” my mom was whispering.

“Maud wasn’t the one who got hurt screwing, Ray,” Molly said.

“A cross-country runner breaks her arm—that should have told you something, sweetie,” my mother whispered. “Please hold still.”

“Anyone can trip, Ray,” Molly pointed out.

“Maud just fell—anyone can fall!” I told my mom.

“Maud took out the field of runners when she fell, sweetie. What did you think she would do when she had sex? It was her first time!” my mother cried, her voice rising slightly above a whisper. “Don’t move,” she whispered.

“I didn’t know Maud was a virgin—she didn’t tell me,” I said.

“I don’t think you usually tell someone, sweetie. Did you ask her?”

“I don’t think you usually ask someone, Ray,” Molly said.

“Someone with the capacity to wipe out an entire event—I would definitely ask her, Molly!” my mom whispered harshly. “Hold still, sweetie,” she said, sighing.

But the way Mr. Barlow had met Maud was innocent—the snowshoer didn’t have the advantage of sexual hindsight. He’d only heard about Maud as a runner. Like poor Rose, with her stigmatizing limp, poor Maud was a faculty daughter who lived in virtual hiding in academy housing. Unlike Rose, Maud had left Exeter to attend an all-girls’ boarding school, where things went haywire and she’d been sent home. Among the mixed truths and rumors Elliot Barlow had heard about Maud: she was sitting out the remainder of the academic year; she was busy making applications to other all-girls’ boarding schools; she was recovering from a nervous breakdown; she was either completely at fault or she’d been most unfairly blamed for the debacle at the start of a varsity girls’ cross-country race, a New England championship for independent schools.

Even I had heard about an unnamed faculty daughter who was temporarily out of school because of a nervous breakdown. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were quick to presume an unwanted pregnancy. In their judgment, there could be no other reason for severe emotional and mental disorders among girls. In their judgment, such girls should be kept away from the academy boys. These wayward girls had demonstrated their proclivity to get themselves in trouble. Now there was one living in a faculty apartment in an academy dormitory. What would prevent such a mental case from roaming the halls of the dorm, seeking to make herself pregnant again?

The snowshoer foresaw no such proclivity in poor Maud. He’d met her on the Exeter boys’ cross-country course—at such an early hour of the morning, the academy dining halls hadn’t yet opened for breakfast. Maud was most unlikely to find a boy to make herself pregnant there and then; the boys who ran cross-country at Exeter ran in the afternoons. Maud wasn’t startled by the appearance of the little English teacher on one of his early-morning runs. With a cast on one arm, and in a sling—one empty sleeve of her sweatshirt flapping, as if she’d lost an arm—Maud was walking the course, not running, and (as a good English teacher would notice) she was carrying a good novel in her only visible hand.

Tall and thin, Maud had the prototypical build of a long-distance runner. As the snowshoer first described her to me, “Her pretty face has an edge to it, as if she accepts her propensity for sadness, while at the same time she stands in defiance of being blamed for her public humiliation.” The novel Maud carried with her—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—identified poor Maud to Mr. Barlow as conclusively as her cast. The snowshoer knew immediately who Maud was. “Not many nice young women in English literature were persecuted as entirely unjustly as poor Jane,” the little English teacher told me.

Maud had grown up running on the Exeter cross-country course—“Never when the boys were running,” she told Mr. Barlow. She knew who Mr. Barlow was; everyone who ran had seen the little snowshoer, who was always running. Maud told him that she reread Jane Eyre whenever she was feeling sorry for herself. “Worse stuff happens to Jane,” was how Maud put it. Jane Eyre, however, had not tripped and fallen at the start of a cross-country race.

Maud admitted to Mr. Barlow that she had a tendency to flail her long arms—“to reach out for things”—when she was falling. With her long legs, Maud made giant strides in an effort to regain her balance—“super lunges,” Maud said. Maud admitted that she “went on falling for quite a while.” Observers claimed that Maud’s long arms dragged down the runners around her; her long legs trampled over the runners ahead of her, as Maud stumbled forward. On the cinder track, where the race started, Maud’s fall had a bowling-pin effect on the closely concentrated field of runners. When Maud went down, an estimated three-quarters of the entries fell with her.

Surely some of the blame belonged to the organizers—for starting a race with a crowded field on the cinder track. Okay, let the race finish on the track, when the field of runners is more spread out, but the girls should have started in a more open area—on one of the playing fields, where the runners wouldn’t have been in such close contact with one another. “I was tripped—then I was pushed, more than once,” poor Maud had told the little snowshoer, who’d read what some of the other runners had to say.

“Maud is very free with her elbows—when she’s passing you, or you’re passing her,” one girl had complained.

“She’s so tall, her elbows get you in the face,” another girl said.

A Boston newspaper that was not normally known to cover secondary-school sports, especially not sports for girls, published a photo of the catastrophic start. All you could see was a pile of girls, their entangled arms and legs every which way on the cinder track, where the elderly gentleman holding the starting gun appeared to be overcome with shock or dismay—as if he’d somehow managed to kill them all with a single shot. Nowadays might have been worse; the video-sharing possibilities could have made poor Maud a spectacle of clumsiness, a YouTube sensation in the category of funniest fall. Never mind that Maud’s arm was broken when she fell, or that her hair was pulled, her face was scratched, and she was kicked. In the pile of girls, one of the fallen runners bit Maud’s ear—after calling her “a stupid cow.”

But, as Maud herself insisted to the little English teacher—as Maud later reiterated to me—Jane Eyre suffered worse privations and emotional abuse. If Great Expectations became my emergency novel, Jane Eyre served such a purpose for Maud. The unnamed school where Maud had suffered her nervous breakdown was not as bad as poor Jane’s mistreatment at Lowood Institution, where Jane’s best friend, Helen, dies in her arms. (Maud admitted she’d had “a Helen-like friend,” but Maud’s friend hadn’t died—she was merely expelled.) Not even Maud’s loneliness at Exeter, where she was an out-of-school girl in a cast—in a third-floor faculty apartment, in an all-boys’ dorm—could compare to Jane’s agonies over Mr. Rochester at Thornfield Hall. “I’m not in love with a man who keeps his mad wife in the attic—I’m not likely to marry a blind guy, who has also lost one of his hands,” said the stoic Maud.

Maud did not tell Mr. Barlow that she may have been in love with Helen—only that Helen was her best friend and she’d been expelled from school—but Maud told me, in our first meeting. “The cast is coincidental,” she told me—swinging her arm back and forth above the table, spilling the sugar bowl at The Grill, where we were having a cup of coffee. The Grill was an Exeter student café. A faculty daughter—especially a tall and pretty one, with her arm in a cast—was a rarity there. “That I was blamed for the start of a race, where a bunch of girls ganged up on me, doesn’t matter. But poor Helen was thrown out of school—just when Helen and I were on the verge, you know,” Maud told me. Her left arm, in the cast, was restless—she swung it suddenly over her head.

“On the verge of what?” I asked Maud.

“You know!” Maud said, clutching my hand. “I was about to find out if I was a lesbian or not, but they threw Helen out. She’d slept with another girl, but it was history—it was old news, you know. Someone ratted,” Maud said, shrugging.

“So you still don’t know if you are or you aren’t,” I ventured to say. I admired her. She was philosophical in the face of unfairness, ridicule, and falling in love—like the beleaguered heroine of a nineteenth-century novel. I hadn’t loved Jane Eyre, but I’d liked it. I had liked the Wuthering Heights Brontë sister better.

Maud tapped my forehead with the rough plaster of her cast. “I’m not going to find out here, am I?” she asked me. The surrounding Exeter boys were sizing us up—at what might have appeared to them as the impromptu faculty-brat table in The Grill. And what were we, exactly, my fellow Exeter students were wondering—childhood friends, just catching up, or would-be lovers? I suppose Maud and I were wondering what we were doing together, too.

“Helen was like a character you meet in a novel,” Maud was saying. “You know, you love her, you want to know everything about her, but then the book is taken away—you never know what happens to her, or what might have happened to the two of you,” Maud told me.

“I know,” I earnestly lied to her, knowing nothing at all—not having a clue of what emotions might remain unlocked in Maud and Helen, or what emotions Maud might (or might not) feel for me. What was true, what I truly did know, was that I thought Maud was like a character you meet in a novel—a character on the verge. If Maud had been on the verge with Helen, and Helen was taken away, wasn’t Maud still on the verge? (On the verge of what, of course, remained uncertain.)

What was clear, from my first look at Maud, was that she could outrun me. Maud looked made to run. How awful for her that she might not feel welcome to compete as a cross-country runner again—at least not in those New England schools for girls Maud was applying to, where they’d all heard of “the angry stork.” She’d also been called “a heron on the attack”; these cruel appellations were attached to Maud by coaches on opposing cross-country teams. At the time, I was only running JV cross-country at Exeter. I had no doubt that Maud could have outrun me in her cast.

I might have paid closer attention to the way Maud wielded her cast, as if she thought of her broken arm as a weapon—not unlike a knight-errant exhibiting his prowess with a mace in the Middle Ages. But I didn’t dwell on this fleeting image of Maud with a mace. It was preferable to imagine taking her to Vermont to meet Molly and my mother. I’d met a girl who not only wouldn’t label my mom and Molly, but would likely think they were cool. Maybe my mom and Molly would think I was exceptionally sophisticated, or at least very grown up, to be friends with a young woman whose sexual predilection was undetermined.

As positive as Mr. Barlow had been about my meeting Maud, he cautioned me not to make sexual presumptions. “Not only about Maud,” the snowshoer added. He seemed to be saying I shouldn’t presume my mother and Molly would welcome my spending a night on the futon in the TV room with Maud, simply because Maud had fallen in love with a girl at school.

In fact, when I first proposed bringing Maud to Vermont for an overnight during the Christmas holidays, my mom sounded somewhat less than welcoming over the phone.

“You don’t have sex with a girl who’s recovering from a nervous breakdown, sweetie,” my mother told me. “And Maud is still in a cast—she’s still injured, right?” My mom must have talked to Elliot—Little Ray may even have heard what Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were saying about Maud, I thought.

“Maud likes snowshoeing,” I said. “She can use one ski pole—that’ll be fine, if we go where it’s not too steep.”

“You don’t have sex with a girl who thinks she may like girls, sweetie. Let me tell you: if Maud isn’t sure, that’s really asking for trouble,” my mom said.

“We’re not having sex—we’re just friends!” I cried. “We talk about books!” I might have more truthfully declared that Maud and I had no idea what our relationship was.

“I’m sure she’s a very nice girl, sweetie,” my mother said. Maud was a very nice girl. She’d also had a nervous breakdown—Maud was definitely still on the verge.

What I shouldn’t have presumed was to think that Maud had any sexual experience with boys. She’d no more tried anything with a boy than she’d had a chance to try anything with Helen. Why did I assume Maud had fooled around with boys, at least a little? I guess I imagined she’d been underwhelmed by boys—hence her interest in Helen. The truth is Maud hadn’t fooled around at all, with anyone. Reading good novels can make young readers seem more experienced about relationships than they are.

I had no expectations that I would make out with Maud—I wasn’t even going to try. My penis bender with Caroline was recent enough to make a platonic relationship with Maud imaginable. Reading good novels can make almost anything seem imaginable.

Maud was in the bathroom when my mother gave me a handful of condoms in the kitchen. “Just in case, sweetie,” my mom whispered. I could see Molly in the background—I could read her lips.

“Sorry, Kid,” Molly’s lips were saying. Maud was in the shower—she didn’t need any help keeping her cast dry with a garbage bag. We’d had fun snowshoeing, though I’d struggled to keep up with her, and I had two ski poles.

“It’s just because my legs are so much longer—you’re a good snowshoer,” Maud had told me nicely.

“Maud really is a nice girl, sweetie,” my mother went on whispering in the kitchen. The handful of condoms I’d stuffed in two pockets of my jeans seemed to contradict how nice Little Ray thought Maud was.

Maud was very shy at dinner. She became more animated when she started talking about Jane Eyre. Molly remembered reading the novel in high school, but my mom hadn’t read it. When Molly said she remembered Grace Poole getting drunk, my mother thought Grace was someone Molly had known in high school—not the nurse hired to look after the mad wife in the attic. When Maud carried on about poor Helen, who died in Jane’s arms, I could see my mom was confused. Little Ray was thinking of the Helen who’d been thrown out of school, the girl Maud didn’t get to sleep with—not the Helen who dies in Jane Eyre. Because my mother wasn’t a reader, she became agitated and distracted when people talked about characters in novels as if they were real people.

It is hard to know where to hide half a dozen condoms in a TV room, so I just left them in the front pockets of my jeans. There we were, on the futon in our underwear—we hadn’t even kissed—when Maud (lying as still as a cadaver, on her back) said to me, “You know, I just love Molly and your mom. I love your stepfather, Mr. Barlow, too.”

“I love them, too,” I told her, as clueless as ever.

“You know, I’ve never done this,” Maud suddenly blurted out; she sat bolt upright, whipping off her bra. “I’ve been dreading doing it the first time, with a boy or a girl—with anybody,” she said, sighing, and lying down again. Maud arched her back and wriggled out of her panties. She was once more lying as motionless as a cadaver, but her eyes were tightly closed and she was grimacing. “I might hate it, you know—you may have to stop, if I hate it,” Maud told me. “Just go kind of slow, at the start—I’ll let you know how it’s going,” she said.

“We don’t have to do anything, Maud,” I told her—hoping this didn’t make her feel that I found her unattractive, because I thought she was very attractive.

“Please don’t go away, don’t be a Helen,” Maud said bitterly, biting her lower lip. Her eyes were still tightly closed—she was still grimacing. My mother’s preparedness notwithstanding, I didn’t have a presentiment that this might be a six-condom night. Surely one condom will suffice, I imagined, proceeding slowly and uncertainly—having only Swedish and French films, with subtitles, to guide me. I’m guessing that the missionary position was never as conventionally or boringly upheld, but I was determined not to deviate from the norm. I was opposed to taking a position even remotely reminiscent of Caroline’s gymnastic penis bending. Of course I fully understood the risk I was taking—namely, that of providing poor Maud with good reason to follow her lesbian inclinations.

I expected Maud’s first-time experience might be conflicted, but how Maud manifested her sexual turmoil was somewhat surprising. I was unprepared for her to wrap her long legs around me, and arch herself into me. She certainly appeared to be enthusiastic—she was humping me harder than I was humping her. Yet Maud was also beating me, in the area of my head and face, with her clublike cast. She wielded her cast like the mace of a knight-errant in the throes of battle, and the words she grunted—with each thrust and blow—were more explicit and contradictory than anything I could recall in Jane Eyre. “Yes! No! Yes! No!” Maud kept grunting—as she arched her body into mine, as she clubbed me with her cast.

It was my mom who unwrapped Maud’s legs from around me, and pulled me off her. Molly managed to get hold of Maud’s arm in the cast, gently pinning it to the futon. More slowly, Maud managed to stop arching her back—to stop humping. Maud’s yes-no mantra trailed away to a sorrowful memory.

“That wasn’t the next time I had in mind, Kid,” Molly told me, while my mother was attending to my facial wounds at the kitchen table; Maud was in the bathroom, recovering from her conflicted experience. When Maud joined us at the kitchen table, I’d waited too long to tell Molly my thoughts: my bleeding face and ears aside, having sex with Maud had been much better than the penis bender with Caroline; the next time truly had been better, as Molly had predicted. But I said nothing. My mom didn’t know Caroline had hurt my penis, and Maud didn’t know about Caroline at all.

Besides, Maud was all wound up—she was the one with a lot to say. While Molly painted over the bloodstains on Maud’s cast, Maud gave us the Jane Eyre version of her sexual awakening—a first-person narrative of intense psychological consciousness. “I actually like sex, more than I thought I would—more than I thought I would with a boy, anyway,” Maud began. “As I told Adam, I was dreading doing it the first time, but I really, really liked it!” Maud exclaimed. I nodded, but this interfered with my mom’s iodine applications—or whatever antiseptic she was using on my ears and face.

“Hold still, sweetie,” my mother said.

“But, at the same time,” Maud went on in her intimate, stream-of-consciousness fashion, “I had very contradictory feelings—at the same time I was liking it, you know?”

“I know,” I said, trying not to move my head, but I must have nodded a little.

“We know,” Molly said, more softly.

“You’re moving, sweetie,” my mom told me.

“I don’t really like to lose control—I really, really don’t like it!” Maud declared.

“That’s a potential contradiction, all right,” Molly told her.

“Losing control kind of goes with the territory of liking sex,” my mother said as nicely as possible.

“That’s exactly what I mean!” Maud shouted, both her long arms flying up from the table. With her good arm, Maud almost spilled the can of white paint; she hit Molly in the chin with her bloodstained cast. “Sorry!” Maud said to Molly. “You won’t tell anyone what happened, will you?” Maud asked me. Naturally, I shook my head.

“Hold still!” my mom shouted. There was a moment of industrious silence, while my mother was bandaging my wounds and Molly was painting over the blood on Maud’s cast.

“Now it itches like crazy where I can’t scratch it!” Maud suddenly cried out. A look of uncomprehending horror must have crossed my unmoving face. Little Ray and Molly exchanged an inquiring glance. “I mean my arm, under the cast—where I can’t get to it,” Maud explained. “Maybe if I had a long knife—or one of those skewers you use to put shrimp on the barbecue, you know,” Maud said distractedly.

“No, no, no!” my mom cried. “Don’t you dare stick anything sharp under your cast—just don’t!” my mother said. Now that I understood what itched, I must have violently shaken my head. “Hold still!” my mom cried.

“I’ve had casts, you know, Maud—they itch,” Molly told her. “You just wait till they take them off. Then you can go nuts scratching yourself,” Molly said. We all sat at the kitchen table, considering that to go nuts scratching herself might never be a safe activity for Maud.

“On second thought, Maud,” my mom said, “start out scratching yourself slowly.”

“It should have been Helen, my first time,” Maud suddenly said. “I was thinking it should be her—I was wishing it was her—while I knew it was you, Adam,” Maud told me. I kept still.

“You should let Helen know how you feel, Maud,” Molly said softly.

“Is Helen still alive?” my mother asked. “She didn’t die?”

“That was the Helen in Jane Eyre, Ray—she’s the Helen who died,” Molly explained.

“Fucking books!” Little Ray exclaimed. “You should definitely let the Helen who’s alive know how you feel, Maud—maybe after you get your cast off.”

“I know,” Maud said, sounding subdued. “You’re my friend for life, if you want to be, Adam,” she told me. “There are worse ways to have sex the first time, you know.”

“He knows,” Molly told her.

“There are worse ways,” I agreed. “Friends for life, if you want to be,” I said to Maud. She wasn’t the right girlfriend for me, clearly, but the older you get, your friends for life mean more to you than the girlfriends or the boyfriends. In the passage of time, Maud and I would retain the awkwardness of the awkward age we were when we met, but we would stay friends. I would go on loving the tall runner with her arm in a cast, in an entirely Jane Eyre kind of way.