“Tell her she must have a vagina as big as a ballroom!” the ski patroller shouted from the stove. “The risotto is ready, Ray!” Molly called to my mom, who was getting an earful from Jasmine. Among the many things Jasmine was saying, she must have said the wrong thing—or one of those things you should never say to someone’s mother. The trail groomer and I would not hear my mom use the word poor when she spoke of Jasmine again.

“Well, that’s not what I hear,” Molly and I heard my mother say to Jasmine. “I hear you’ve got a vagina as big as a ballroom,” my mom told her, hanging up the phone.

It couldn’t have been easy for Jasmine to find Nora’s number; Nora had changed her name, and she had an unlisted number. Nora thought “Winter” was a better stage name than “Vinter”—maybe not in Norway, but Nora had never seemed especially Norwegian. Two Dykes, One Who Talks wasn’t an act associated with last names; the two of them were called Nora and Em, not by their last names, but Nora Winter was known to be their spokesperson. Nora was the one who did the interviews—obviously, no one interviewed Em. At the start of the 1970s, I didn’t know Em’s last name, and I was one of the few who knew she’d been an Emily. Yet somehow Jasmine found Nora’s unlisted phone number in New York.

When Em answered a phone call, all she did was breathe into the mouthpiece until Nora came to the phone. The first time Jasmine called for me, she must have thought I was the one not speaking to her; Jasmine must have imagined she’d finally found me. She’d asked for Adam and heard Em’s breathing. “It’s you, isn’t it? You penis breath!” Jasmine shouted. This was not a welcome image to Em, who began to growl into the phone.

Nora, who was sitting on the toilet seat, could hear Em growling from the bathroom, where the door was closed. “I’ve told you not to answer the phone—just let the fucker ring, Em!” Nora was yelling, but Em was engrossed in Jasmine’s litany of the younger, bigger penises she was regularly enjoying in my absence. Nora told me later that Jasmine had used the springy word to describe one of the eager penises in her exciting new life; the image of a springy penis had particularly repelled Em.