“I thought your father taught you to ski, and your mom got you some snowshoes,” I interjected. Now, naturally, we were both confused. The snowshoer’s eyes never left the street ahead of us, though he could scarcely see over the steering wheel, which he fiercely gripped in his small but strong-looking hands. I was convinced his mother had been correct in thinking that the ski-poling would make her small son stronger. Yet what was I to make of the snowshoer’s telling me that he’d known his parents only by their tombstones?
We had pulled into the driveway of my grandparents’ Front Street house, where the smallest English teacher in Exeter history stopped the car. He leaned back in his seat as he regarded me. “That was a quotation, Adam,” he told me calmly. “That was the second sentence of the second paragraph of Great Expectations. I thought the circumstances of the young, first-person narrator—namely, never knowing his parents—might resonate with you and what little I know of your somewhat similar circumstances.”
“I see,” I said. The sentence he recited had resonated, all right. I sat in the Beetle while the part about deriving your only knowledge of your parents from their tombstones went on resonating.
There was another car in the driveway—Aunt Abigail’s station wagon. Therefore, I was not surprised to see the querulous faces of both my aunts in a dining-room window; those two biddies went everywhere together. Soon my grandmother’s benign face appeared in an adjacent window. I could imagine what they were thinking. Who is bringing our Adam home? Who is that weird little man? However, Exeter being Exeter, my gossipy aunts would have known all about the handsome but miniature snowshoer. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had made it their business to know everything about everyone.
I could see that the obstacle presented by Aunt Abigail’s station wagon was bothering the little snowshoer. There was nowhere to turn around in the driveway; he would have to back up into Front Street.
“Backing up could have become a sticking point in my driving test,” the snowshoer was saying, “but I somehow managed.” He adjusted his rearview mirror, twice; he kept glancing in his side-view mirror, as if he might have missed something.
Exeter being Exeter, the snowshoer not only knew I was “the Brewster boy”; he knew my first name, too—he’d called me “Adam.” I was about to ask him his name, but he was rummaging through the Beetle’s glove compartment, where he found and handed to me a tattered-looking paperback of Great Expectations.
“Forgive the underlinings, all the marked passages—it’s my teacher’s copy,” the snowshoer said.
“All the better, I’m sure,” I told him. It struck me as an unlikely coincidence: the very novel he thought I should read just happened to be waiting for me in the glove compartment of his car. Then the snowshoer explained how he never drove anywhere in the Beetle without what he called “an emergency novel.”
“If I drive off the road and am lying upside down in a ditch, unable to move my legs or get out of the car, I want to have something good to read—an emergency novel,” Exeter’s smallest English teacher explained.
I thanked him, and got out of the car. I hope I was sufficiently sensitive to the little snowshoer’s fear of backing up; I made a point of not watching him back out of the driveway. Besides, I couldn’t wait to start reading Charles Dickens. At thirteen, I lacked the experience or the suffering to regret anything I’d done. No one close to me had died—not yet. No encounters or interactions with ghosts—not yet. As for Great Expectations, I couldn’t imagine how a story that begins in a graveyard—about a lonely boy who is accosted by an escaped convict “among the graves”—would become my emergency novel.
12. INTENDED FOR LITTLE RAY AND ME
In July 1956, only seventeen months after I had met the little snowshoer, my mother married him. His name was Elliot Barlow. He was seven years younger than my mom, who was thirty-four on her wedding day. This prompted Aunt Abigail, who was categorically denigrating to older brides, to say: “That makes you the oldest bride in the family, Rachel.”
“Just wait and see how old I am,” Nora said. At twenty-one, Nora had likened marriage to a terminal disease. She was not known to have had a boyfriend.
“I suppose Nora’s waiting for the right fella,” was all Aunt Abigail would say in her daughter’s defense.
“You can’t be fussy about the right fella, Nora,” Aunt Martha had chimed in. “You just have to try one.”
“I’m waiting for one who’ll let me cut his dick off,” Nora told them. “I’ll try that one.”
Nora brought a friend to my mother’s wedding—a college girl, Nora’s classmate at Mount Holyoke. She was an Emily who’d been shortened to an Em. Was Em the name Nora gave her? Was it a way to dominate her? Em was dollish and anxious-looking; she was startled by sudden sounds and movements. Em clung to Nora or hid behind her—at times with her doll-like face buried between Nora’s shoulder blades and her locked hands hugging Nora’s navel.
To accommodate the out-of-town guests attending the wedding—for the most part, the North Conway Norwegians—my grandmother had reserved several rooms at the Exeter Inn. The inn was a short walk from our Front Street house, where the marriage ceremony and the reception dinner would take place. Aunt Abigail had assumed Nora and Em would stay in Nora’s childhood room—in the faculty apartment Nora had grown up in, with her mom and Uncle Martin—but Nora and Em chose to stay in one of the rooms at the inn. “Trust me,” Nora told us all, “Em is a noisy sleeper.”
“Em doesn’t appear to make any noise when she’s awake!” Aunt Martha had chimed in. In fact, Em didn’t talk—not for the entire wedding weekend. Em was as silent as the nonspeaking emeritus.
I questioned Nora about the noises Em made when she was sleeping, although I had to wait for the right moment to ask—when Em went to the bathroom. At all other times, Em was physically attached to Nora in her quiet but clinging fashion. “You said Em is a noisy sleeper—noisy in what way?” I asked my cousin. I was fourteen at my mom’s wedding. The extremely small groom was twenty-seven, although he looked like an undersize fourteen-year-old.
“Em has ridiculously loud and hysterical orgasms, Adam,” Nora told me. “Each orgasm sounds like it’s her first or last time.”
In 1956, my experience with female orgasms was limited to the cinematic—notwithstanding how vividly I imagined females in orgasm, all the time.
The little snowshoer had driven me to the Franklin Theatre in Durham to see more foreign films with subtitles. These were (and forever would be) a bond between us, in addition to the snowshoeing. My aunts had forbidden Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan to take me to foreign films with female orgasms. I would see my first Ingmar Bergman films with Elliot Barlow. At the time, I was relieved not to have seen Bergman with my laughing uncles. In retrospect, a missed opportunity.
My mother’s wedding was the first wedding I attended with Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan, who laughed throughout the marriage ceremony and the reception dinner. In no way did I think of my mom’s marrying Elliot Barlow as a comedy. In fact, in my role as a matchmaker, I considered their wedding a triumph. I had worked very hard at it—even harder than I had at the snowshoeing.
I called my mother the night of the same day I met “Mr. Barlow,” as I first heard Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha call him. Not surprisingly, my shrewish aunts had recognized the diminutive driver of the VW Beetle, and they’d cruelly watched him back out of the driveway, inch by inch. My aunts were the head harridans of Exeter’s faculty wives; they had fixed opinions of every bachelor on the academy faculty. They’d been on the lookout for an appropriate or suitable bachelor for Little Ray—meaning a marriageable one. For reasons beyond his extreme smallness, my aunts had disqualified Elliot Barlow.