The Last Chairlift

27. SEXUAL POLITICS, A FIRE, JEALOUSY

When did everything become political? In America, I didn’t notice when or where the politics started—I just woke up one morning, and everything was political. In America, I wasn’t paying attention when those things that divided us were just beginning.

I graduated from Exeter in 1961. That year, on the night of October 5, I was in Pittsburgh. It was a Thursday night, before the ski season, and my mother and Molly were in Exeter; the two ski jocks were staying with the snowshoer, but the three of them were having dinner with Nana in the Front Street house.

Since my graduation from the academy, my mom had stopped pretending that she lived with Elliot Barlow. Little Ray lived in Manchester, Vermont, with Molly—not only in the ski season—but Ray visited Mr. Barlow in Exeter frequently. In the winter months, the snowshoer often drove to Manchester, where he stayed with my mother and Molly. If my mom had married the little English teacher under publicly false pretenses, those two lovebirds were not pretending to love each other—they truly did love each other. As Molly had told me, “There’s more than one way to love people, Kid.”

“Since when are women a sexual minority, or are we just treated that way? For fuck’s sake, we’re half the population!” I had grown up hearing my mother say—to someone on the radio, or on TV, or even in the room—but for many years I’d not been paying attention to the context. I’d heard her say this without really understanding.

Then, one time—I was an academy student, we were at Nana’s dining-room table, the snowshoer was there—Aunt Abigail said something, and the context was perfectly clear.

“Honestly, Ray, you sound like Nora, or like someone Nora’s age,” Aunt Abigail said.

“Or like Nora’s friend Em—like what Em would say, if she ever said anything,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“I didn’t learn that women were treated like sexual minorities from Nora and Em,” my mom said. “I’m a woman, you know,” Little Ray said. She was wearing a snug little sweater, and when she said the word woman, she stuck out her boobs and shook them at her easily shocked sisters.

This made everyone but Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha laugh. Naturally, Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan laughed the loudest, but Molly was there—the ski patroller had a loud laugh—and even my grandmother laughed a little.

It was wrestling season; because I had a cauliflower ear, it hurt when I laughed. When I touched the little plaster cast, Mr. Barlow (who was also laughing) frowned at me and shook his head. My ear was pulsing, but I could hear just fine.

“I was treated like a sexual minority when I got knocked up and had my one and only,” my mom was saying. “Unwed mothers are treated like shit, you know,” she said, looking straight at my evil aunts.

“What I mean, sweetie,” my mom said to me, in a much nicer voice, “is that I had some exposure to how sexual minorities get treated—when I was just an unmarried mom. I mean before I was with Molly, sweetie—I know you know what I mean.”

I must have nodded—perhaps cautiously, given my throbbing ear. “Of course the Kid knows what you mean, Ray,” Molly said, but my mother had worked herself up; she couldn’t stop. She was talking to me, but I knew who her audience was: my seething aunts, who were glaring at her across the dining-room table.

“Molly and I are actual sexual minorities, sweetie—women like us get treated even worse than unwed mothers,” my mom said.

“I know,” I told her, but she was looking at the little English teacher. Elliot was sitting next to her, between her and Molly. From the way Mr. Barlow suddenly jumped in his seat, I could tell my mother must have touched him (just as suddenly) under the table.

“The smaller the sexual minority, the more vulnerable the group—they get picked on the worst, don’t they?” my mom asked Elliot.

“That’s right, Ray,” the snowshoer said.

Like homophobe, transgender wasn’t yet part of our national vocabulary, but I saw how my awful aunts were looking at Elliot Barlow. They were on to him as a cross-dresser; whenever this dinner party with a context happened, it was definitely after the message from Moses.

With her empty fork, not a magic wand, my grandmother appeared to be conducting an unseen, unheard chorus—her daughters’ momentarily silent but eternally discordant voices. “Girls, girls,” Nana softly chided them, as if their glaring at one another was as bad as raising a ruckus.

No one spoke, no one laughed—not even my uncles, who behaved like children when the topic of conversation was off-limits to them. Uncle Martin picked an olive out of his casserole and dropped it in Uncle Johan’s beer. Uncle Johan found a green pea in his casserole and he put it in Uncle Martin’s beer.

The sexual-minority subject had been near-constant background music in the years I was growing up. I was always hearing it, but I wasn’t really listening. I didn’t hear the politics in sexual politics—not at first. Then, one day, I did.

Whenever that dinner-party moment of belated enlightenment happened, and I don’t remember exactly when it was, I was not in Exeter on the Thursday night of October 5, 1961, when the fire started. Naturally, my grandmother couldn’t have invited my mom and Molly and Mr. Barlow to dinner without inviting my aunts and uncles, too. It was Aunt Abigail who inquired if Nana had burned the casserole. The snowshoer later told me that the casserole was no better or worse than usual; the dinner guests had been eating it, or pushing it around on their plates.

“Mine isn’t burnt,” Uncle Martin said.

“I ate mine—I didn’t notice it was burnt,” Uncle Johan said.

“Not that you would notice, Johan,” Aunt Martha told him.

“Maybe the dessert is burning,” Aunt Abigail said to Nana.

“That blueberry thing—the bottom is always burnt,” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“There’s nothin’ burnin’ here!” Dottie called from the kitchen.

“I do smell smoke,” the little English teacher said.

“I smell smoke, too,” Molly said.

My mother got up from the table and opened the door that faced downtown, in the direction of the academy. “There’s more smoke outside—there’s a fire somewhere,” my mom said.

“The academy can’t be burning—it could never burn!” Aunt Abigail cried indignantly, presuming an institution of such superior learning was divinely protected from anything as ordinary as a fire.

“The smoke isn’t coming from the academy,” my mother reported. “It’s coming from the seminary.”

The door to the outside was still open when the fire alarm blew from the Exeter Fire Station. It was about nine o’clock at night, Mr. Barlow later told me.

Dottie had cleared the dinner plates and the casserole; she was serving the blueberry thing. Now she clomped upstairs to the attic, guessing she could see the flames from the window there.

“It’s the seminary for girls that’s burnin’!” the diners could hear Dottie calling from upstairs.

“It’s your old school, Rachel! Don’t you want to see the fire?” Aunt Abigail cried, but my mom had closed the outside door; she’d sat back down at the table.

“The burnt part is better with vanilla ice cream on it,” my mother reminded Mr. Barlow, indicating the blueberry thing.

“It’s where you went to school, Rachel! Don’t you care at all about it?” Aunt Martha asked her.

“We’ll just be in the way at the fire,” my mom answered. “I don’t think about that old place, one way or another.”

The final class had graduated from the Robinson Female Seminary in 1955. The lower floors of the towering old building had been boarded up to prevent further vandalism; this meant the vandals were targeting the windows of the upper floors. The floors themselves, only God knows why, were oiled annually—the wood was “super combustible,” Elliot would tell me. The flames shot a hundred feet in the air. My uncles wanted to watch the fire from the attic window, but my aunts insisted on seeing the flames firsthand. There would be two thousand onlookers; the inferno raged for hours. It was almost two o’clock in the morning before it was under control.

“You’re not even going to see it, Rachel?” Aunt Abigail asked my mother again.

“Nope,” my mom said.

“Rachel cares more about her sleeping arrangements than her old school!” Aunt Martha chimed in.

“Rachel never cared about school—not about any school!” Aunt Abigail cried.

“Girls, girls,” Nana murmured.

The Hampton and Stratham fire departments were called in, but there was no saving the seminary, where my mother never took to the subject of domestic science—cooking and so forth, what the seminary’s founder, William Robinson, had once called “the practical duties of life.” Not Little Ray’s duties. Molly and the snowshoer did the cooking and the household chores.

I can imagine the undue stomping in the hall, prior to my aunts and uncles making their dramatic exit to see the fire. “Be sure you close the door after yourselves, not to let more smoke in!” my mother called to them. But, as Elliot described to me, notwithstanding Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan’s efforts to close the door, either Aunt Abigail or Aunt Martha reopened it and left it open.

“Rachel would rather eat the blueberry thing and pursue her sleeping arrangements than pay proper respect to her old school!” Aunt Abigail was shouting from the driveway.

“Rachel doesn’t care a fig for education!” Aunt Martha shouted.

When Molly got up to close the door, she gave my aunts a piece of her mind. “You two are as stupid as skiing on bare ground!” the ski patroller called to them.

The way my mother was rubbing the neck of her beer bottle against the neck of Elliot’s might have been misunderstood by anyone unfamiliar with their relationship—or so Molly told me later, when I called from Pittsburgh. The toast my mom proposed at Nana’s dining-room table was repeated by all. “Here’s to the Robinson Female Seminary,” Little Ray said, her beer bottle suggestively rubbing the snowshoer’s beer bottle. “Burn in peace!”

“Burn in peace!” even my grandmother repeated.

Dottie must have liked Molly’s epithet for my awful aunts—stupid as skiing on bare ground was understandable in Maine.

In my imagination, I would denigrate and kill off no end of awful aunts in future novels and screenplays—a “fink of womanhood,” I would label one such disapproving and frosty soul. She was known to put down couples who lived together as man and wife—either if they weren’t married, or if (in this imperious aunt’s unflagging judgment) they shouldn’t be.

I pitied my fictional uncles, too. “As for Uncle Bob,” I would write, “there were times when living with my aunt Muriel must have resembled a religious observance—the kind of demanding devotion that fasting requires, or perhaps a nocturnal trial (such as staying up all night, when going to bed would be both customary and more natural).” Poor Muriel. I would kill her off in a car crash:

“The car, which my aunt Muriel had been driving, was hit head-on by a drunk driver who had strayed into Muriel’s lane,” I wrote. I didn’t give her a chance to survive “the carload of partying skiers.”

As for my fictional mothers—oh, boy. Where to begin? When to stop? No, I didn’t write about Little Ray; she was right not to see herself among my made-up moms. But I would write about my mother’s circumstances, and mine.

Molly told me that my mom really hated this passage: “Even if my father’s identity and his story were painful to my mother—even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents—wasn’t my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?”

“There was nothing sordid!” my mom said to Molly. “I’m not selfish, am I, sweetie?” my mother asked me.

And there was this passage—again, I thought, faithful to the situation between us but not intended as a portrait of her (Molly assured me that Little Ray had hated it): “One day, I always thought, she would tell me about it—when I was old enough to know the story. It was, apparently, the kind of story you had to be ‘old enough’ to hear.”

My mom didn’t use Molly as an interpreter to let me know how she felt about this passage: “I was aware that my mom was pretty, and I was increasingly conscious of how the other students at an all-boys’ academy regarded her.”

“You know how boys are, sweetie. I can’t help it that I’m pretty, can I?” was all my mother said to me about it.

It’s hard to know what I might have written about my mom and Matthew Zimmermann—I mean, if Zim had actually married an older woman who resembled Little Ray, or if there’d been anything of an actual nature between them.

They would see each other only three more times, following Zimmer’s graduation from Exeter. Although Zim had a delayed growth spurt during his freshman year at Yale, the former 110-pounder was an undersize 123-pounder at the weigh-ins for the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association championships at West Point in 1962. Zim weighed in wearing his wrestling tights and his singlet; he had his socks on, too. I watched the bar when he stepped on the scale; it didn’t budge. In those days, the lightest weight class in college wrestling was 123 pounds. The other wrestlers were naked for the weigh-ins, or wearing only their jocks. I was the Pitt 130-pounder at West Point. Only two of my freshman teammates had made the trip from Pittsburgh with me; the other Pitt freshmen were injured or academically ineligible. With only three Pittsburgh wrestlers in the tournament, we’d come to West Point without a coach.

“You’re going to kill our guy at one-thirty—I can almost kill him,” Matthew Zimmermann confided to me at the weigh-ins. I saw the Yale 130-pounder when we weighed in; we wouldn’t meet in the tournament. “Look at me,” Zim suddenly insisted, standing on his toes in his socks. “I’ve actually been growing, a little—I’ll bet I’m as tall as your mother now.”

“You’re a little taller—she’s only five-two,” I reminded him.

“I’m almost five-four, and I’m still growing!” Zimmer cried. “Is your mom here? West Point is a long way from New Hampshire or Vermont—I was afraid it was too far for her to come, and I know it’s the ski season,” Zim said worriedly.

“She’s here—she and Elliot Barlow made the trip, a long drive,” I told him. Matthew Zimmermann looked like he might faint—not, I knew, from cutting too much weight.

“She’s here—she came all this way!” Zimmer exclaimed, clutching his singlet at his heart. I was embarrassed for him, and although he’d grown taller, I was afraid he was going to get killed at 123 pounds. Zim said he was convinced he was going to get killed, too.

“How much do you weigh, Zim?” I asked him.

“Between one-fifteen and one-eighteen, as a rule. Once I got up to one-twenty, but I was constipated,” Zimmer admitted.

They were weighing in the upper weight classes; I was getting cold, standing around in just a jock. I could see that one of my teammates, our Pitt 177-pounder, had to take off his jock to make weight. He’d been cutting down from 195. Some of Zim’s fellow 123-pounders had cut down from 135 or 140. I was a 130-pounder, but I normally weighed 145 or 150. I could tell that Matthew Zimmermann had been spending a lot of time in the weight room, in addition to trying to eat his way up to 123 pounds.

The remoteness of the United States Military Academy at West Point on the Hudson makes a visitor feel isolated there. The river and the surrounding trees were dark gray in February; winter looked as constant as the soldiers guarding the entrance gate. The buildings were austere—beginning with the bad-smelling, overheated barracks, where the visiting teams slept. In the vast dining hall, the uniformed cadets seemed to size up the traveling wrestlers as if we were a military enemy. In the huge gym, with a wooden running track above—like an elongated version of the pit at Exeter—they were posting the brackets for the tournament weight classes on the walls. My two Pitt teammates and I were looking over the matchups, as were most of the other wrestlers.

Not Matthew Zimmermann; he had found my mother in the bleacher seats and was sitting next to her. “It doesn’t matter who I draw in the preliminary round—I’m going to get killed,” Zim told her. “It doesn’t matter that I’m still growing—I’ll never be big enough.”

“I love how small you are, Zim—if you come to Vermont, I’ll teach you how to ski. You don’t have to be big to have fun skiing,” my mom told him. “Just look at me!” Naturally, Zimmer needed no encouragement to look at my mother; he couldn’t stop looking at her, though his pride in being taller than her was short-lived. It clearly confounded him to hear that my mom loved how small he was; it might have made Zim wish he would stop growing.

As the snowshoer later observed, the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates was a tough tournament; the small shred of Matthew Zimmermann’s confidence in himself as a wrestler was undermined by my mother’s tempting offer to teach him to ski. Zimmer was pinned so quickly—in the opening period of his first match—I missed the move that led to the fall. I didn’t even notice which college or university his opponent wrestled for. Zim didn’t notice, either; he couldn’t even remember how he’d been pinned.

“The guy had me in a three-quarter nelson, then he switched to a kind of front headlock, then he switched to something else,” Zimmermann explained. He was wearing his warm-ups, and he’d curled up in the bleacher seats with his head in my mother’s lap.

“The guy hurt Zim’s neck,” my mom told me. Zim made a painful effort to nod, slightly. “Don’t move,” my mother said, hugging him.

Mr. Barlow brought a bag of ice, wrapped in a towel, from the training room. Zimmer seemed content that his tournament was over—he was more than done for the day; he declared he was “definitely done with wrestling.” Matthew Zimmermann lay enraptured in my mom’s lap, where she secured the ice bag against his neck. I could imagine what Zim was imagining: this was how the après skiing would be, the two of them packed in ice, shivering. Elliot and I just looked at each other; we could see that Zim was already shivering, or he was quivering in anticipation of shivering.

“How are the hands—how are your fingers doing?” Elliot asked me, to change the subject. The snowshoer could see I’d taped my right index finger to my middle finger, to keep that index finger from flopping around. When you tear or detach an extensor tendon in a finger, you can’t bend or extend that finger. And the snowshoer knew I’d been putting off the surgery in the palm of my right hand till the end of the wrestling season. The Freshman Easterns was an end-of-the-season tournament for me and my fellow Pittsburgh freshmen.

Elliot also knew that my two teammates and I had come to West Point without a coach; he would be our coach for the two-day tournament. I was unseeded at 130 pounds, as was our Pitt 147-pounder; the seeding committee didn’t think we were potential place winners. I didn’t think we were, either. On the other hand, the Pitt 177-pounder was seeded first—he was a likely finalist. I’d looked over the brackets in my weight class. If I made it through the quarterfinals, I would see the number-two seed in the semifinals—he was a kid from Cornell.

I don’t remember who I beat in my first two matches; in both cases, I got the first takedown and held on to a small lead. In the quarterfinals, I pinned a guy from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I remember the school he wrestled for because Mr. Barlow was the only one who knew how to spell Rensselaer. My Pitt teammates were impressed by the snowshoer, but they were perplexed by Matthew Zimmermann; I’d introduced them to “my former teammate from boarding school,” as I described Zim. When Zimmer wasn’t at mat-side for my matches, he went back to the bleachers and my mother’s lap.

“You know, that kid from Yale is hanging out with his mom in a kind of unnatural way,” our Pitt 177-pounder pointed out to me.

“Actually, he is hanging out with my mom in an unnatural way,” I explained.

“Is that a boarding-school thing?” our 177-pounder asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I told him. “I think Zimmermann just has an unnatural thing for my mother.”

“It would be more unnatural if he had that kind of thing for his own mother,” our top-seeded 177-pounder assured me.

The Pitt 147-pounder had heard everything we were saying, but he hadn’t said a word. He won his first two bouts, but he lost in the quarterfinals, where he appeared to be permanently lost in his own thoughts.

I didn’t wrestle badly in the semifinals, but the Cornell kid was better. It was a close match, but I gave up the first takedown and could never catch up. I don’t remember if the Cornell kid won the weight class, or if he lost in the finals to a kid from Lehigh or Penn State. In a wrestling tournament, you’re pretty much thinking only about yourself. By losing in the semis, I could still have placed as high as third or fourth, but I lost my first consolation match (the following morning) and was thereby eliminated from the tournament.

My opponent was an Army boy—a home-crowd favorite of those military academy cadets in gray, leaning over the mats from the wooden track above the gym. A consolation match can be a free-for-all. Both wrestlers have already lost once; there’s the feeling that you have nothing to lose. My last match in a Pittsburgh uniform was a high-scoring one; as Coach Dearborn had forewarned me, a free-for-all wasn’t the kind of match I would win.

The snowshoer was observant enough to notice how much better I’d become as a wrestler. He also observed that I didn’t care if I lost my match against the kid from Army. I wanted to lie down with my head in my mother’s lap; I wanted Zim to see me lying there, with no place to put his head. “I’ll come see you in Vermont, you know,” I told my mom. “You can’t teach me to ski—not again; we’ve already tried that—but I’ll come see you and Molly, anytime you like. You don’t have to invite Zimmer to come see you, or are you starved for company?”

“Oh, don’t be jealous, sweetie—you’re my one and only!” my mother cried. “Zim is only invited if you come, too.”

I didn’t care if she taught Zimmer to ski, but I suppose I sounded a little jealous when I told my mom that I didn’t want to see Zim with his head in her lap—not even if he broke his neck skiing into a tree.

Not to quarrel with Mr. Barlow’s assessment, but I didn’t think the Freshman Easterns was that tough a tournament. Back in Pittsburgh, I knew, there was an ineligible freshman who could have kicked the ass of every wrestler in the 130-pound weight class without breaking a sweat. But, to be fair, my jealousy—if that’s what it was—had distracted me from the wrestling at West Point. I don’t even know if our Pitt 177-pounder, who pinned his way into the finals, won or lost his weight class against a kid from Navy or Maryland.

My teammates and I would take a bus from West Point to the Port Authority in New York, and from there we were on a longer bus ride—back to Pittsburgh, where I had nothing but hand and finger surgeries to look forward to. Unlike Matthew Zimmermann, I was not done with wrestling, but I sensed I was done with the competition part. On our two bus rides, the Pitt 147-pounder never spoke; he remained lost in his own thoughts. As for our 177-pounder, whether he was a champion or not, he was as silent as a runner-up. Either he’d lost in the finals or he’d seen me spend the second day of our season-ending wrestling tournament with my head in my mom’s lap. I’ll bet our 177-pounder won his weight class, but I know he’d observed that I had a thing for my own mother. There’s no question that my two teammates saw me hanging out with my mom in a kind of unnatural way.

In the locker room at West Point, after I’d lost my last match of the tournament, Elliot Barlow had kept on coaching me. “Don’t get down on yourself for losing, Adam—you’re not in New England anymore. And don’t be embarrassed if your mom makes you feel jealous—she doesn’t mean to, but sometimes she makes me feel jealous, too,” the snowshoer said.