I asked Nora and Em if lesbians were like that—if they stayed friends with their former girlfriends. Boy, was that the wrong thing to ask. Em shrugged; then she did a sexy little dance. “What do you mean—you don’t know?” Nora asked her. “If you left me, and I saw you with another girlfriend, I would tear off her tits and dance on her dead pudenda!” Nora told Em, who started to cry. Em kept doing her little dance, but she went on crying. “If I left Em, and she saw me with another girlfriend, Em would just cry,” Nora told me, but I saw how Em was dancing. It was not exactly a dance on anyone’s pudenda; it was more tender and more complicated than that.

Just for fun, I asked my mom and Molly about it. “I would never leave Molly, sweetie,” my mother immediately said. “If I ever did, and Molly saw me with another woman, Molly would tie the woman to the snowcat and drag her up and down the mountain—until her tits fell off or froze, or her twat fell out, or something,” my mom said.

Nora would have been comforted by this kindred theme, I thought, but I couldn’t look at the snowcat operator, who immediately said, “That is not what I would do, Kid—and, by the way, I would never leave your mom,” Molly told me.

“But you would do something to the other woman, if I was with her—wouldn’t you?” my mother asked Molly.

“I would make her look at you, Ray, while I strangled her—so that you would be the last person she saw, as she was dying,” the snowcat operator said.

“You see, sweetie? That’s what I meant,” my mom said.

My mother and Molly came to New York to see the snowshoer; they liked coming to New York for visits, more than they had ever liked Exeter. In the little Barlows’ pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth, my mom slept most of the night with Mr. Barlow in his childhood bedroom. When I was visiting at the same time, I slept on the couch in what Elliot called the study. At night, I could hear my mother’s bare feet, padding back and forth between Mr. Barlow in his little bedroom and the bigger bedroom, where she slept with Molly. Nothing had changed: my mom and the snowshoer were still married; they always would be. They still couldn’t keep their hands off each other; they were still hugging or wrestling or giving each other piggyback rides, or they were curling up on couches or in chairs together. There had never been an edge, and there was no discernible edge now, to the way Molly called them the lovebirds.

At one time or another, I remember when my mother and Molly met Eric, Charlie, and Dr. Dave. “This is Ray, my wife. I’ve told you about Ray—she’s never around in the ski season,” the snowshoer often said. My mom already knew who Elliot’s boyfriends (or his former boyfriends) were, or she’d paid attention to what Mr. Barlow had told her about them.