Our sleeping arrangements in Amen Hall would not escape scrutiny. I’ll bet my mother and the little English teacher took my aunts’ sexual surveillance into consideration. Our two bedrooms in Amen were similar in size and configuration. Each had a queen-size bed and an adjoining bathroom—one with a shower, one with a tub. My mom insisted on my having the bathroom with the shower. “No boy your age takes baths,” she told me. I was fourteen, not likely to drown in a bathtub. To Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha, Little Ray made a different point. “Elliot and I are so small,” she told them, “we can fit together in the tub.”

Yes, those two could have fit together in that bathtub—this is true. Did they purposely let me hear them splashing and fooling around in the tub together, or were they only pretending to fool around? There was no denying their physical affection for each other. Everywhere they went, they held hands. Anywhere there was a couch, they would curl up together on it.

In our faculty apartment, the kitchen and the dining room (or the living room) was one room—not a big one. I guess we were supposed to choose which room we wanted to have, either a dining room or a living room. We chose both, or neither. There was one couch and one comfy chair. They faced the TV, which was always on with the sound off. There was a table between the kitchen and the end of the room designated for silent television watching. We called it our kitchen table.

In the evenings, the snowshoer lay reading on the couch—his head in my mom’s lap, where she played with his hair. She watched old movies with the sound off, her lips sometimes in sync with the remembered dialogue. If they were movies she hadn’t seen or didn’t remember seeing, she said she preferred to guess what the characters were saying—she believed this was better than hearing their actual dialogue. She watched TV Westerns with the sound off, too. “You don’t need to know what they’re saying in Westerns,” my mother said. Given Gunsmoke, Cheyenne, and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, I don’t doubt that this was true.