The occasional good stuff on TV perked up Nana’s and my mother’s attention. Little Ray turned on the volume for The Honeymooners and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. But, for the most part, our faculty apartment in Amen Hall was a sanctuary for silent television. In my Exeter years, I did my homework at our kitchen table, where Mr. Barlow would join me when he was grading papers. The ever-changing light from the soundless TV glowed or flashed over us—a distant war in a foreign country, sanitized, void of suffering.

Even in the ski season—in the long winter months when my mom was away—Elliot and I kept the quiet television on. We went to the extreme of reading TV Guide. We wanted to be sure our TV was on the channel Little Ray would have been watching. We missed her, but it was easier for me that I had company in missing her. The academy was hard—the schoolwork was overwhelming. I was busier, but more engaged in a good way, than I’d ever been before.

Outwardly, my mom and Elliot Barlow were the lovebirds on the Exeter campus. In those months they were separated, not counting the ski holidays, did they sincerely miss each other? Was that why they seemed so in love whenever they were together? “They’re not like a married couple,” one of my friends would tell me. “It’s like they’ve just met, and are head over heels in love.” I’m not sure I know what my mother and the snowshoer were really like. I just know that I loved the way they were together, and I loved our family of three. Four, counting Molly. It was the snowcat operator who said that Little Ray and the snowshoer never stopped looking like newlyweds.

“They give you hope,” another of my friends told me.

“What hope?” I asked him.

“Hope you’ll meet someone you can’t keep your hands off—hope she’s someone who can’t keep her hands off you. That hope,” my friend said.

I would wrestle at Exeter. The snowshoer was not wrong to recommend it. He regretted he hadn’t wrestled, but he’d grown up in ski towns in Austria and New Hampshire—not exactly hotbeds of wrestling. Elliot Barlow’s first opportunity to wrestle would have been at Harvard. He thought it was too late to start. Besides, he couldn’t have competed. The snowshoer didn’t weigh enough for the lightest weight class. If you asked him what he weighed, he sounded indifferent about it. “Right around a hundred pounds,” Elliot said—he always shrugged. But I knew he weighed himself obsessively. Only occasionally, when he weighed as much as 105, did the little English teacher say he was too big.

My mom was always weighing herself, too. When she weighed as much as 120, she said she was over her limit and going on a diet. Her normal weight was 110 or 115 pounds. In our faculty apartment in Amen, there was a scale in the bathroom with the tub—in their bathroom, as I thought of it. But for most of the night, when it wasn’t the ski season, my mother slept in my bed with me.