Legs were broken in these collisions, but not Nora’s. Knees needed surgeries, but never hers. In the leather-boots days—long, wooden skis with cable or bear-trap bindings—there were more lower-leg injuries, but not once Nora’s. My first skis were wood, of course. I believe they were made by the Paris Manufacturing Company (South Paris, Maine), and they had Kandahar bear-trap cable bindings. Or perhaps these were Nora’s first skis. So much of the past—I mean, my past—has been narrated to me by my older cousin.

Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan were telemark men, free-heelers till their dying days; they loved their nipple-tipped Nordic skis. I remember my uncles telemarking in the 1970s. Most alpine skiers switched to heel-and-toe safety bindings in the 1960s.

“Those old cable or bear-trap bindings caused more than a few spiral fractures of the calf,” I remember my mom saying.

Such fractures were not unknown among Nora’s victims—along with the upper-body injuries you would expect from such high-speed, hard-impact falls. Separated shoulders and broken collarbones were common, though never Nora’s. And if Nora tackled you and landed on you, there might be broken ribs and concussions, too. What made safety bindings safer was that they released when you crashed, and your skis came off. But skis have sharp edges; when two skiers crash together, facial lacerations can occur. Nora was proud of the scars on her face.

One time, her stitched eyebrow opened at night and bled on her pillow; in the morning, Nora’s face was stuck to her pillowcase. The girly-girl blondes were shrieking in the upstairs hall, grossed out by all the blood. Another time, Nora broke her nose; her nose was pressed against some guy’s sternum when she drove him into the hill. His sternum was cracked—arguably a worse injury than a broken nose.

“It was only a hairline fracture,” Nora said with a shrug. “And look at me—I have raccoon eyes. I couldn’t pick up a pervert, looking like this,” she added, pointing to her two black eyes.

But I had the feeling Nora liked her injuries, if not as much as she liked injuring dickheads. For one thing, if Nora had an injury, she had an excuse not to ski. And there’s no doubt that Nora liked looking a little roughed up. In our Cranmore Mountain years, I was not aware of Nora’s interest in picking up anybody—not even a pervert. Nora not only dressed like a tomboy; from the moment she’d been sent away to Northfield, Nora had made what her mother called “a haircut statement.”

“It’s called a crew cut,” Nora said; she made a point of not saying this in the exclamatory fashion of those dramatic Brewster girls. “How come when boys have a crew cut, it’s no big deal?”