Unlike Nora, Em had experimented with having a boyfriend—this was in high school, before she met Nora. Unlike Nora, not everything about having a boyfriend was repulsive to Em—just the penis part. According to Em, everything had been okay: the cuddling, the kissing, the fooling around. Then the penis came into the picture. In Em’s pantomime, she made the approach of the penis look like a one-eyed eel. In her penis pantomime, Em did a full-body slither. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, in the shape of the letter O—Em’s mouth looked like a single, sightless eye.

When Nora came out of the bathroom and interrupted Jasmine’s call, Em had taken one of the cushions off the couch and was stomping on it—the phone held fast to her sweaty ear. The couch cushion must have represented the springy penis Jasmine had conjured, and Em was clearly killing it. “Who is it?” Nora asked Em, taking the phone from her. Em’s pantomime—how Granddaddy’s ghost had scared the shit out of Jasmine—would not have been difficult for Nora to interpret. “Everyone knows you shit in bed,” Nora said to Jasmine; I know exactly how Nora would have said this, as if she were bored by bed-shitters. “Everyone knows your pussy is a subway station,” Nora also said tiredly, hanging up the phone.

The next time I saw Nora and Em, and Nora told me about Jasmine’s phone call, Em had perfected her pantomime of Jasmine’s pussy as a subway station. It had potential as a skit for Two Dykes, One Who Talks, I thought—together with Em’s pantomime of how Jasmine had shit in bed—but Nora told me that, even at the Gallows Lounge, they had to be careful how they put down straight women. There’d been some anti-lesbian backlash from the Gallows’ audience, and the comedy club had dropped Eric’s All-Gay Band—meaning Eric. But Eric wasn’t funny, I pointed out—only the homophobes had laughed. The comedy club wasn’t necessarily being anti-gay because they dropped Eric’s act, or so I thought.

What did I know? I had no firsthand experience with the kind of sexual hatred Nora and Em (or Molly and my mother) were exposed to; I had no idea what the audience at the Gallows Lounge really thought about Mr. Barlow’s getting groped in Eric’s lap, but I certainly could tell that the snowshoer wasn’t comfortable about it.

“It was the seventies, for Christ’s sake—everyone was angry, everyone hated someone or something,” Nora would say one day. “We thought the war in Vietnam was dividing us, but there was more divisiveness among us than we knew,” Nora said.