It would later emerge that the snowshoer seriously outdid himself to look like a woman on certain late-night and early-morning expeditions, when he (as a she) drove out to Roland’s to pick up a pizza or took a ten-minute walk to Verne’s—under the pretense of picking up a pack of gum, or a take-out cup of tea to sip on his walk back to Amen Hall. I say the gum and the tea, or even the pizza, were pretenses, because I know now that Mr. Barlow made these intrepid sojourns as a woman to test his powers of transformation. But the way I learned what Elliot was up to was not quickly forthcoming.

When our wrestling matches were away, we had early-morning weigh-ins in our gym before we got on the team bus. The wrestlers who were worried about their weight went to the gym earlier to check what they weighed; if they were a little over, they put on their sweats and ran in the cage before weigh-ins. One early morning, Matthew Zimmermann was on his way to the gym to check his weight, when he saw my mother. She was walking on Court Street, coming from downtown. Zimmer waved to her, but she didn’t wave back. “Either she didn’t see me or she didn’t recognize me—she just kept going,” Zim said, when he told me of the sighting. We were talking on the team bus. Zimmermann was puzzled that my mom was in town in ski season, when we were wrestling away.

“It wasn’t her,” I told him. “She’s not in Exeter.”

“I would swear I saw her,” Zimmer said. “Nobody looks like her.”

He hadn’t seen Little Ray, but I didn’t think twice about it. I knew that Zim was gaga about my mother. I thought he’d been hallucinating and had imagined he saw her. I didn’t doubt that Zimmer imagined her when he was beating off.

When I later told the snowshoer how Zim had fantasized that he’d seen Little Ray walking on Court Street at an ungodly hour of the morning, we both laughed.

“Zimmermann must be cutting too much weight,” the little English teacher told me.

“Imagine Ray walking anywhere at that hour,” I said. “Skiing, sure—she’d go skiing in the dark.”

“Poor Zim,” Elliot said, sighing. “I fear he is so infatuated with your mother that he sees her in his sleep.” We laughed and laughed.