Even to me—at thirteen, a sexually inexperienced boy—it was shocking to hear the smallness of the snowshoer expressed in these terms, in the small enough for me way. I hoped no one would ask her to explain. I wished for an irrefutable ending.
That was Little Ray’s intention: to make this point, to end exactly here. Like her other tangents, this had been no tangent at all. Didn’t she begin by holding the snowshoer’s face in her hands? She knew all along she was going to kiss him.
It was a kiss I should have seen coming, but I didn’t—no one saw it coming, except my mother. The lawlessness of the kiss made it unwatchable. Everyone but Elliot looked away. It was a kiss you wished someone had given you. The lawlessness of the kiss made you want it. I wanted someone to kiss me like that.
14. A JUDGMENT CALL
If we hadn’t turned away from the snowshoer kiss, we might not have noticed that the infantile emeritus was choking. At the periphery of my fixation on my mom’s interactions with the snowshoer, I had seen my grandmother wrestle the serving spoon away from Granddaddy Lew. For several months now, I’d been aware of the periodic appearances of the diaper-service truck in the driveway; the regressive emeritus was turning into a two-year-old. His table manners weren’t alone in going backward. The never-a-headmaster had reverted to stuffing his face and shitting in his diapers.
The historic kiss might have gone on forever, but my grandmother had pushed Granddaddy Lew’s forehead to the table; standing behind his chair, she’d begun to hit him between his shoulder blades. The blows to the back of the choking emeritus were resounding.
Showing no signs of oxygen deprivation or dizziness, the snowshoer quickly recovered from the kiss. “If that doesn’t work, Mrs. Brewster, I know another thing you can try,” Elliot Barlow said to my grandmother, as he stepped behind the slumping emeritus. With unexpected strength, the little English teacher clasped his hands above the belly button of the skinny emeritus, jerking him to a sitting position, ramrod straight in his chair. If the never-a-headmaster had been standing, Elliot wouldn’t have been tall enough to exert the diagonally upward pressure on the bottom of Principal Brewster’s diaphragm. These were abdominal thrusts, exerting pressure on whatever was lodged in the trachea of the toddler emeritus—with a little luck, perhaps expelling it.
“We’ll see,” the snowshoer said, between thrusts. “I saw a ski instructor in the St. Anton ski school do this, to dislodge some bratwurst—or that’s what it looked like, when it came out.”
For years, my mother would credit Hannes Schneider with this lifesaving technique—“a kind of Heimlich maneuver before Heimlich,” Little Ray liked to call it. Elliot Barlow never made this claim; it was just a trick some young ski instructor at St. Anton happened to know. Elliot would later express his doubts about the Heimlich maneuver. “Personally, I like to start with back slaps—then try the abdominal thrusts, then pound on the choker’s chest. I don’t count on the first thing working,” the little English teacher said.
What Elliot Barlow demonstrated that day was himself as a man of action; even though he didn’t initiate the unwatchable kiss, Mr. Barlow got the job done. He’d attracted my mom; with the probable exception of the near-to-death emeritus, no one at the dining-room table would ever forget how Little Ray had kissed the snowshoer. And Elliot Barlow saved the regressor emeritus from choking. Granddaddy Lew would live to die another day.
A great gob of food was expectorated onto the dining-room table. What the infant emeritus had choked on was no more identifiable than it had been before he’d tried to eat it.
“It looks like a potato, but it’s probably the pork,” Aunt Abigail said. It did not look like a potato; it resembled the first two phalanges of an adult index finger, but it had to be the pork.
In the throes of asphyxiation, the baby emeritus had filled his diaper; in shame, he lowered his head and pouted as Nana led him out of the dining room.
“When was one of you going to tell me about the diaper service?” my mother asked no one in particular, but she was looking straight at her sisters. “Does anyone in this family ever say what’s going on?”
“You should talk, Rachel—you of all people!” Aunt Abigail said.
“People in glass houses shouldn’t you-know-what, Ray,” Aunt Martha chimed in.
Uncharacteristically, my uncles had nothing to say. The kiss they’d seen and couldn’t watch was not a kiss anyone had bestowed on them—not even in their Tenth Mountain Division days, when they were alleged to be gallivanting around.
Best of all, my mom and the little English teacher were knocking back the beer and making plans to see each other again. It just so happened that the academy’s March break overlapped with mine. “I’ll be teaching in the ski school at Cranmore during Adam’s March break and yours,” my mother was saying to the snowshoer. “Maybe you and Adam can meet me in North Conway!” she said excitedly.
“If we have to, we can do something different with the sleeping arrangements,” Aunt Abigail informed them, sighing.
“We can put Mr. Barlow and Adam with Martin and Johan, in the boys’ bunk room,” Aunt Martha chimed in. “Then Abigail and I can sleep with you, Rachel.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Little Ray told them. “Elliot knows people in North Conway—Elliot and Adam and I don’t have to stay with you.”
“My parents know people who have an inn—the innkeepers are European, but the inn is very nice,” the snowshoer tried to reassure Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha. On the subject of my mom’s sleeping arrangements, it was clear there was no reassuring my aunts. “When I was at Harvard, I took the ski train from North Station almost every winter weekend. For the snowshoeing,” Elliot added; he kept trying. “I did my homework on the train—the same train that stops in Exeter,” he said. “I knew some Exeter boys at Harvard; they were boys who’d been teased when they were in school here. One of them had been tormented,” the snowshoer added. “When the ski train stopped in Exeter, it made me consider that I might teach here one day,” Elliot continued. “I knew I could help the boys who were teased—especially the tormented ones,” he told us.
My mother stood up from the table, a little unsteadily. She hugged Elliot Barlow, pressing his face to her breasts.
“You wonderful man—I hope you were never tormented!” Little Ray cried, smothering him.
Considering how tenaciously my mom hugged the little English teacher, and the obstacle to his speech and breathing presented by her breasts, he managed to allay her fears. “No, no—I was never tormented, just teased,” Elliot told her.
Not wanting to see more wanton displays of affection from my mother, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were busily clearing the table and breathing heavily; their tasks included the stabbing and brisk removal of the partial index finger with a fork.
“Noch ein Bier?” Uncle Johan ambiguously asked the snowshoer or my mom; Johan had already opened another bottle, which he offered to them. The four empties stood as silently judgmental as sentinels between their place mats. My aunts had already removed their beer glasses from the table.
“Yeah, why not?” my mother said, in her girl-jock way, releasing Elliot from her embrace. She was taking a long swig from the fresh bottle when my aunts marched into the dining room from the kitchen; they were carrying clean plates and the dessert, which was always a kind of fruit pie, strangely missing half the pie part. Nana didn’t overreach in the kitchen. My grandmother’s desserts were better than the rest of her meals, notwithstanding that there was no name for them. No name for it, I should say—there was only one.