“We’re happy to have you sit with us, Ray,” Coach Dearborn told her, “but you can’t talk to the referee from the team bench.”

“So I can’t tell him that refs wear black-and-white-striped shirts because they have sex with zebras?” my mother asked.

“Not from the team bench, Ray,” Coach Dearborn said, smiling at her. It was clear the ref had only partially heard her. She’d raised her voice when she mentioned the black-and-white-striped shirts, and again when she said the zebras word. She behaved herself for the rest of Zimmer’s match. When the referee actually warned Zim’s opponent for stalling—it was just a warning, not a penalty—Coach Dearborn gave my mom a cautionary look.

“Finally,” Little Ray said quietly—to the coach, not the ref.

When the matches were over, there was the usual milling around on the mat. Some of the wrestlers were shaking hands with their opponents, some weren’t. I was nervous when I saw my mother approach the referee. Technically speaking, she wasn’t talking to him from the team bench, but Coach Dearborn and I—and, of course, my teammates—were listening closely.

“I’m so sorry I called you ‘Baldy’—that was just mean,” Little Ray told the ref. I know my teammates felt a little let down.

Later, in the basement of the old James Gym, by the lockers for visiting teams, Coach Dearborn took me aside. “I’m very fond of your mom—as are your teammates, Adam,” the coach began. “But I believe Mr. Barlow would agree with me—as a rule, she shouldn’t sit with the team. We’ll see this ref again, and the way he calls stalling isn’t likely to change—if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I told him. I was nodding my head off, in a way that would have made Em proud. Not counting my uncles and the snowshoer, most of the Exeter faculty didn’t call me Adam—I was more commonly called Brewster. By calling me Adam, Mr. Dearborn made me feel like family. A wrestling team can be a family, if not exactly like my family.

I loved my family of four, counting Molly. Of course I knew there were other families who would consider us strange, but we were not strange to me—just different. I try to apply this principle when I consider my mom as both an object of desire and a substitute mother to my wrestling teammates—those physically self-abusing boarding-school boys away from home, missing their mothers and without any girls their own age around. Mothers—I mean someone else’s mother—can provide lonely young boys with a lot of erotic stimulation. Little Ray was small and sexy, and my wrestling teammates weren’t used to girl jocks. The wrestlers were also undone by how flexible and strong my mother was.