“That’s most commendable,” the snowshoer told me. “Perhaps I could suggest another adventure story, also involving a young man—a story that’s a little easier to read to yourself?”
“Yes, please,” I said, but he could see I’d not once taken my eyes off his snowshoes. All the while I’d been babbling, my mind was racing: the bear paws before me were my escape from skiing; the snowshoer had been running on them, and I liked to run.
Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan had tried to get me on cross-country skis. My mom had tried to get me on telemarks. “Skis are skis,” I’d told them. Here before me was an appealing alternative: downhill, uphill, on the flat—on snowshoes, you just ran or walked. With the ski poles, you could go anywhere. On a ski mountain, couldn’t you keep out of the skiers’ way? Couldn’t you go up or down the mountain, off to one side or along the edge of the ski trail?
I’d been talking nonstop to a stranger about my family’s darkest secrets, which everyone in the academy community—even the youngest, smallest member of the faculty—knew. Now I couldn’t speak. The tiny English teacher must have thought I was overcome at the prospect of reading a young man’s adventure story that was easier to read than Moby-Dick, but what knocked the wind out of me were the little man’s bear paws. I foresaw a way not to ski.
“I confess I knew you were the Brewster boy, but I didn’t know about the punctuation marks,” the snowshoer said. He added: “Growing up here, as I know you have, I’m sure you must know how people talk.” I nodded; I still couldn’t speak. The adults I’d grown up with weren’t as forthcoming. Here was an honest adult, notwithstanding a small one; I wanted him to teach me how to snowshoe and how to write, but I didn’t know what to say. When the words came, I couldn’t control what I said.
“My mother is small, like you. She’s not as small as you, and she’s very pretty, but she is rather small,” I blurted out. Consciously, I’d been thinking about his snowshoes, but what came out was all about smallness—his size, my mom’s size, their comparative smallness.
“I’ve seen your mother,” the snowshoer quickly said. “No one seems small to me, but your mom is definitely pretty—she’s very pretty. I hear she’s an outstanding skier.”
“I hate skiing,” I told him. “Every ski season, it’s what my mom does instead of being my mother. She keeps trying to teach me to ski, but I refuse to learn.”
“I grew up in ski towns,” the little snowshoer said. “My parents are skiers. My father taught me to ski, but I was too small. On the chairlift, he never let go of me. The rope tow was too heavy for me; I couldn’t hold on. And there was an equipment problem: a shortage of skis that were short enough, of boots that were small enough, of bindings that adjusted enough. My dad had to shorten my ski poles, thus my poles were custom-made. I didn’t hate skiing, but it was the first thing that made me aware of my smallness as a burden. My mom got me some snowshoes; they were small enough, and you could make the bindings work with a variety of boots. I already had the downsized ski poles. My mom thought all the poling would make me stronger—then I could hold on to the rope tow, she said. But I loved the snowshoeing, and I didn’t have to be around all those bigger skiers. I’m very fond of ski towns,” the little snowshoer told me, “but I’ve stopped skiing. I just run, and I snowshoe.”
“How tall are you?” I asked him. “My mom is five feet two. Lana Turner is only one inch taller.”
“They would tower over me!” the snowshoer declared. His handsomeness was the most grown-up thing about him. “I’m four feet nine—only fifty-seven inches. Too small for Korea; they wouldn’t take me. They didn’t make uniforms that were small enough, they told me—another equipment problem,” the snowshoer added, as if skiing and the military had disappointed him equally. The subject of his smallness as a burden bothered him. “Would you like to try snowshoeing?” he suddenly asked me. There was only one car in the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, a VW Beetle. At the time, did they make anything smaller? As small as a VW Beetle looked to me, I still wondered how the little snowshoer could reach the pedals.
“Yes, please,” I answered him. I absolutely believed I was born to try snowshoeing; I also couldn’t wait to introduce the snowshoer to my mother. I knew I’d met a man I wanted my mom to meet. I wanted to hear her opinion of how handsome he was—“good-looking and small,” I could imagine her saying. Before I met the little snowshoer, I believed that destiny only happened in fiction. Yet here was my destiny, and maybe my mother’s.
The snowshoer was still talking to me, but I could scarcely hear him; his head and upper body had momentarily disappeared. He was just stowing his snowshoes in the backseat of his VW Beetle. He was telling me he had “other pairs of bear paws”; I heard him say something about the “different shapes,” quickly followed by an incomprehensible bit about the boots I would need. “If I have to take you shopping…” the snowshoer began, but I didn’t catch the rest.
When he emerged from the Beetle, and I could hear him again, he was talking about Charles Dickens. Great Expectations was the novel he thought I should read. All of a sudden, it occurred to me, I had my own expectations. How great or small, I didn’t know. Expectations for myself were new to me.
“Can I give you a lift?” the snowshoer asked me.
“Yes, please,” I answered him.
From the Thompson Cage, I could walk home in about eight minutes; I was imagining I could run home faster than the snowshoer could drive me. It had been a few years since one or more of those Brewster girls had warned me: “Don’t accept rides from strangers.”
At thirteen, I was about five feet five; fully grown, I would end up just short of five feet seven. In the parking lot of the Thompson Cage, the top of the snowshoer’s head barely reached my chin. I accepted the little stranger’s offer of a lift home—not only because I wanted to hear more about the aforementioned Great Expectations, which the diminutive snowshoer believed I should read, but because I wanted to see how he managed to drive.
I was already acquainted with the interior of a VW Beetle; it was my mother’s choice for a car, perhaps owing to her smallness, but I had never seen the driver’s seat in such a dramatically forward position. The snowshoer’s knees were almost touching the bottom rim of the steering wheel, and he didn’t actually sit on the seat. He gripped the wheel so tightly that his fanny never touched the seat. As the stick shift for the Beetle was on the floor, between the two front seats, the snowshoer reached behind him to change gears. I immediately thought that my mom would admire the position the snowshoer maintained while driving. It resembled the ninety-degree angle she held for her wall sits. And although my first trip with the snowshoer was a very short drive, the tensile position he tenaciously held was made more impressive by the small English teacher’s recitation of a passage from the opening chapter of Great Expectations. My confusion came from my not understanding he was quoting Charles Dickens. I thought the snowshoer was telling me about his own unhappy childhood, not the graveyard circumstances of a fictional character.
“ ‘As I never saw my father or my mother,’ ” my tiny driver began, reciting from memory, “ ‘and never saw any likeness of either of them (for their days were long before the days of photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones.’ ” This surely meant his parents had died without his knowing or remembering them—before the time of photography! Or so the snowshoer seemed to be telling me.