Or was Mr. Barlow prescient enough to imagine he would one day be able to support himself as a freelance copy editor, one who actually worked at home? When the snowshoer moved to New York, of course he could have found a job teaching English and coaching wrestling at any of several schools in the city. I’m sure he had outstanding recommendations from Exeter, but it wouldn’t have worked out for him. How could Mr. Barlow be a schoolteacher and a coach when he became a woman? Surely someone would object—if not the kids, their parents or another teacher. Someone would say it was inappropriate for Elliot to use a women’s washroom at the school; the women, especially the schoolgirls, wouldn’t feel safe in the same washroom the little English teacher used. Of course I couldn’t imagine women or girls being unsafe with Elliot Barlow.

“Imagine Elliot as a woman, all four feet nine of her, being safe in a men’s washroom with a bunch of boys or men,” Molly said.

“Or in a men’s locker room with a bunch of wrestlers, sweetie,” my mother said.

As Nora had said, in the seventies everyone was angry. But what the snowshoer wanted to do would never be safe or easy, not even as a copy editor.

The snowshoer was living in his parents’ pied-à-terre on East Sixty-fourth Street. The little Barlows were rarely in New York; Elliot was welcome to move into their bigger bedroom, but he chose to stay in his childhood room. His women’s clothes filled his closet—they were my mom’s clothes, the snowshoer first told his parents. Some of them were. My mother cared little about clothes; she knew what Elliot liked to wear, and she loved giving him her clothes. But it made me sad that the snowshoer still had a hidden life, even after getting away from Exeter—a life he hid from his own parents. “From her own parents, sweetie,” my mom kept correcting me. She knew him so much better than I did, I would one day realize—knew her so much better, I should say. I loved them all—I completely sympathized with Molly and my mother, with Nora and Em, and with Mr. Barlow. Yet I would always be an outsider to their sexual differences; I would always be just an observer, and a slow learner, as Nora knew. Some writers are.