As for the beyond-bald referee, the one with a limited understanding of stalling, it was a home match, at Exeter, where we saw him again. It was the first time Molly had come to see me wrestle, or maybe she’d come to have a look at how Little Ray behaved around the wrestlers. My mom and the night groomer were not sitting on the team bench; they were at mat-side, in the front row of bleacher seats. We were wrestling in that gladiatorial pit in the Thompson Cage. The legs of our fellow students dangled above us, their faces peering down at us from the board track above. The students sat on the L-shaped entrance to the wooden running track that circumscribed the dirt track below. From the mat, we could hear the starting gun for the runners and the hurdlers in the cage.

This was the first time my wrestling teammates had seen Molly, even from a distance. It was winter—the snowcat operator and my mom were wearing their après-ski stuff, not the most flattering attire. Even so, because the trail groomer was a goddess in my eyes, I was shocked that my teammates had eyes only for my mother. You can learn a lot about point of view from writing, and from sexual desire.

“Who’s the big blonde with your mom, Brewster?” one of my teammates asked me.

“That’s Molly—she’s my mom’s best friend. Of course she’s a skier,” I said.

“She’s a humongous friend and skier,” Zimmermann observed, speaking strictly as a 110-pounder. He’d been skipping rope and was sweating—what he liked to do to get his heartbeat going, just before he stepped out on the mat.

Fittingly, it would be Zimmer’s match—as usual, the first of the day—that exposed the beyond-bald referee’s failure to warn or penalize for stalling. Zimmermann’s opponent got taken down twice and decided to stop wrestling. Zimmer took him down, let him go, and quickly took him down again. It was 4–1, only halfway into the first period. Zim’s opponent, on the bottom, turned himself into a table. On all fours, head up, the guy spread his hands and knees apart—he was unbudgeable. Keeping his arms and back straight, the staller blocked every move Zimmer made on him.

“What’s he doing on the bottom?” Coach Dearborn calmly asked the ref, who did not respond. Zim cranked on the guy’s arms. He jacked up the guy’s ankles and ran him forward like a wheelbarrow. But the staller would not be broken down—he was committed to being a table.

“Stalling on the bottom?” the snowshoer suggested to the referee, but the ref remained oblivious to stalling.

“This is baloney, ref—he’s stalling on the bottom!” my mother screamed. At least she didn’t call him Baldy.