All I knew, for certain—on the night of the day I met him—was that I had to call my mother. I was waiting for my aunts to leave—to go home to their laughing Norwegians—and for my grandmother to begin her business in the kitchen. “The supper business,” Nana disparagingly called her efforts to make dinner for the nonspeaking emeritus and me. My grandmother wasn’t a good cook; she didn’t enjoy cooking.
What finally persuaded my aunts to leave the Front Street house, to go home to their good-humored husbands, was that my grandmother began reciting from the marked passages she’d been reading to herself in Mr. Barlow’s annotated copy of Great Expectations.
“Listen to this, Adam—Miss Havisham on the subject of love. Let this be a lesson to you,” Nana said, before she began to read aloud. Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha exchanged dire looks; they were roused to sudden-exit mode. “As follows: ‘I’ll tell you what real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation, utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter—as I did!’ That’s Miss Havisham in a nutshell!” my grandmother proclaimed. “The little English teacher knows how to read!”
Upon hearing Miss Havisham’s proclamation, I was not greatly encouraged by the prospect of real love. Through a dining-room window, I observed Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha’s hasty retreat. The very idea of love as utter submission was repellent to them. And Nana wasn’t finished. In her years with the deluded, now-silent emeritus, my grandmother was used to an audience of one. At least I was a responsive audience.
Another passage the little English teacher had marked prompted Mildred Brewster to keep reciting. “And there’s this, Adam,” Nana said with gloomy solemnity. “May you be spared such a moment of recognition as this—namely, the conviction that most of your happiness lies behind you, and the lion’s share of your loneliness looms ahead. This is poor Pip’s view of the marshes at night: ‘I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.’ May you be spared such awful loneliness, Adam,” my grandmother most solemnly said.
“I’m going to call my mom now, Nana—while you fix supper,” I said. Under the circumstances, I tried to sound as hopeful as possible, knowing that the supper business conducted in my grandmother’s kitchen rarely turned out well. Still reeling, as I was, from the demands of real love, which included giving up my heart and soul to the smiter, I was no less devastated by the prospect of freezing to death while receiving no assistance or kindness from the indifferent stars. “What’s a smiter, Nana?” I asked her.
Handing the little teacher’s copy of Great Expectations to me, my grandmother was making her stoic way to the kitchen, where I knew her expectations were modest. “A smiter is one who strikes a heavy blow, Adam—either with the hand or with an implement,” Nana said. It didn’t sound good, either way, but I was now alone and could call my mother.
During the ski season, calling my mom in Stowe was not in the devastating category of Pip’s seeing “no help or pity in all the glittering multitude”; nevertheless, I faced some uncertainties when I made these calls. In the first place, my mother knew how much I missed her; I had to be careful, especially at the beginning and end of the call, not to make it apparent that my missing her was the reason for my calling her. If she could hear how much I missed her in my voice, she would cry—then we would both feel guilty.
Of lesser importance, yet also of an uncertain nature, was that I had only a vague idea of where she lived in Stowe—not to mention, with whom. She’d told me she had a “bunch of roommates”; usually, when I called, either my mom or Molly answered the phone. “Just picture a kind of dormitory for girl jocks, Adam—that’s where I spend the ski season,” my mother said. I’m sure she had no idea of the unease and arousal she had conjured up for me, her thirteen-year-old son, lying awake with conflicting images of girl jocks—her fellow ski instructors or ski patrollers, and there was at least one female trail groomer in the aforementioned bunch of roommates.
Molly was first and foremost a trail groomer. I’d not met Molly. I’d only spoken with her on the phone, when I called for my mom. Little Ray had met Molly at Cranmore, where the mountain had a reputation for “advanced trail-grooming technology,” as Molly put it; she’d been a snowcat driver at Cranmore before she took her technique to Stowe. Now Molly was driving what they had for piste machines at Mount Mansfield and Spruce Peak.
I remember when Molly first told me about the “vintage snowcat” she used to drive on the “graveyard shift,” when she’d been a night groomer at Cranmore—a 1952 Tucker Sno-Cat. I didn’t know anything about working vehicles; Molly had to explain everything. You had to climb up on the tractor treads in order to get in the cab. The Tucker had a stick shift, a clutch pedal, no brake pedal—just a hand brake. Molly had put in the radio and the heater herself. The Tucker Sno-Cat didn’t climb very well; Molly had to drive it up the service road and down each trail. She said the Tucker had tipped over a few times when she was going crossways on the hill. Foxes followed the snowcat, chasing the mice the roller scared out of the snow. The slats of the roller broke up and packed down the snow—“the roller leaves the snow looking like skiers have been sidestepping up the trail,” Molly explained. She saw the eyes of animals reflected in the snowcat’s headlights. “The game wardens say there are no mountain lions in New Hampshire or Vermont, but I’ve seen them,” the night groomer told me. She’d seen mountain-lion tracks in the snow, too; she knew all the animals by their eyes and by their hoof or paw prints. After Molly moved to Stowe, and she was night-grooming, she said she’d been on the lookout for Bigfoot Bob. He was a friend of hers, a nighttime snowshoer. His bear paws left big tracks in the snow—“as if an elephant has been blundering around,” Molly said. She was sympathetic that Bob worked all day and could snowshoe only at night, but she didn’t want him to be on the trails when she was grooming. “I don’t dislike Bob—I don’t want to kill him,” she told me.
Molly’s job sounded exotic. I wanted to go night-grooming with her. My mother told me Molly was the mountain’s chief equipment operator. Molly occasionally filled in for the guy who plowed the parking lots and access roads at the ski area. Molly would also sub for the lift operators, and she was in demand as a ski patroller, too.
The night I called my mom to tell her about the little snowshoer, I thought I wouldn’t say anything about him to Molly, if Molly was the one who answered the phone. I was worried that Molly might have mixed feelings about Bigfoot Bob.
I often called during Nana’s supper business. If my mom answered, I knew Molly had the early shift on the snowcat—“from when the lifts close till midnight,” my mother had explained to me. If Molly answered the phone, I knew she was on the graveyard shift, which went from midnight to sunrise—even until the lifts opened, in the morning. Sometimes, when I called my mom at night, she said she was waiting up for Molly. “I like to have a beer with her when she gets home,” my mother had told me.
It was around suppertime of the same day I met the snowshoer when Molly answered the phone. “This is Molly,” she always said.