At our age, this was a hard concept for Nora and me to grasp. We knew my mom’s aversion to foreignness didn’t signify an aversion to sex. On the contrary, Nora and I knew my mother was very selective about sex—she was very particular about it—but Little Ray wasn’t averse to it. Maybe her aversion to foreignness was more American than sexual, because my mom was decidedly a sexual outlier. Little Ray and Nora struck me as very comfortable in the outlier role.

Once, when I struggled to say all this to Nora, it came out a little tortured. “The first foreign-language films I saw made me like reading a movie,” I told Nora. “They made me love all movies with subtitles. Having to read those films made me feel I was writing them, or that I could write movies. It was as if foreign films were made for me,” was the way I said it to Nora, who was unimpressed.

Nora shrugged. “That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”

Outliers like going to the movies—we can see in the dark. Outliers are looking for other outliers. If you see an outlier on the screen, it’s exciting. If you can’t find one in the film, it’s exciting in another way. When you leave the theater, you’re even more of an outlier than you knew.

10. NOT TARZAN

Not only did I put off going to Aspen for the longest time, but I almost waited too long. Whatever man my mother met in Aspen in 1941 wasn’t the only mystery in the area of what happened (or didn’t) between my mom and men. Exactly what transpired between my mother and a different man would remain vague, but he became somewhat famous—both famous and infamous—and, at least for a while, everyone knew his name.

An American actor, Lex Barker was best known in North America for playing Tarzan of the Apes. In five years, between 1949 and 1953, Lex Barker starred in five Tarzan movies. Little Ray refused to see them. When I asked her why—I would have been eight—all she said was, “Tarzan is an ape, sweetie.”

Nora and I saw the first one (Tarzan’s Magic Fountain) together. By the time we saw the second one (Tarzan and the Slave Girl), Nora had heard the stories about Lex Barker and my mother. No one had told me anything.