I was reminded of my mother’s wedding—that moment when the electrocuted body of the diaper man was covered by a sheet on the outdoor dinner table. With the body between us, the little Barlows were telling me that their feeling for noir was very American. America would always be a frontier country, they told me; noir was the tone that captured the frontier best, the little Barlows said. And I’d imagined that the diaper man himself, from his infancy to his electrocution, had been a noir frontiersman.

I took the job at the not-very-good college only because it was in southern Vermont, a little more than an hour’s drive to Manchester, where my mother and Molly lived. I could see more of my mom and Molly without living in the same town with them. But in 1973, when I would go visit them, my mom always asked me, “How’s it going at the draft-dodger college?”

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” I always answered.

“That’s what everyone calls it, sweetie,” my mother would say.

Yet when the snowshoer and I knew we would (and should) be leaving Exeter, I had to go somewhere, didn’t I? Of course I could have gone to New York City. With Nora and Em living there, and with Mr. Barlow moving there, I was tempted. But I would have needed much more of a full-time job to afford to live in New York City; I wouldn’t have had as much time to write as I did at the draft-dodger college.

I’d written a screenplay, an adaptation of my first novel, but the movie was never made. I was bitter about it, at first; yet, in the process, I’d learned how to write a screenplay. For the rest of my writing life, I knew I would be writing novels and screenplays—often, concurrently. As for New York City, I knew I would be spending a lot of time there—even if I was just a visitor. I could always stay with the snowshoer, or with Nora and Em, I was thinking.

Looking back, 1973 was a political time; it was the year of the Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision about abortion. And for me, 1973 was the year I began to realize that every year was a political time. Where was I, when Nixon, in his first campaign for president, appealed to those socially conservative Americans he later called the “silent majority”—those Americans who disliked the hippie counterculture and the anti-war demonstrators? Or when Nixon was promising “peace with honor” in Vietnam—where was I then? Not paying attention, according to Nora, who later pointed out that I managed to miss the first four or five times Em declared she was going back to Canada.