In 1988, Nora would be one of the ACT UP women who protested a misleading article published in Cosmopolitan magazine, where a doctor purported that penis-to-vagina transmission of HIV was virtually impossible. The doctor turned out to be a psychiatrist; he wouldn’t take back what he’d said. More than a hundred women protested in front of the Hearst building. “Say no to Cosmo!” they were saying. Some women held signs: YES, THE COSMO GIRL CAN GET AIDS! Nora was disappointed there were no arrests, but she got to be on television. Em would write she was relieved that Nora wore more than a T-shirt on TV.

“It’s January, Em—everyone is wearing more than a T-shirt,” I wrote her back. Em continued to keep her distance from ACT UP, but Nora was proud to be part of it, and Mr. Barlow’s business as a copy editor was branching out. Not only did publishers of crime fiction and thrillers want her to work for them, but other publishers were interested in her, too. The snowshoer would soon be the freelance copy editor she wanted to be. Nora was the only born shit-disturber among us. Em was afraid Nora would get arrested. We both imagined Nora might fight back, if she ever got arrested.

Time stops in ski resorts; you lose track of it when you’re there. In Wengen, in the late 1980s, you wouldn’t know there was an AIDS pandemic or that people were getting arrested. Elliot and I never learned our way around Wengen; we were lost or confused the whole time. To begin with, it wasn’t just Wengen; snowshoers were increasingly unwelcome at ski resorts everywhere. Mr. Barlow and I got the hairy eyeball from skiers when we were carrying our snowshoes around the village. My mom and the little Barlows were not so secretly heartened to see ski resorts shunning snowshoers. “You and Elliot should just rent some skis and ski with us, sweetie,” my mother not so sweetly said.

An old stationmaster in Wengen told Elliot Barlow to take the train to Interlaken; he thought there were trails for snowshoeing near one of the lakes. A younger stationmaster in Wengen contradicted his colleague. The snowshoer was advised to take the Wengernalpbahn to Kleine Scheidegg; the Wengernalp train was a rack-and-pinion railway. From Kleine Scheidegg, you could transfer to the train to Jungfraujoch. The best snowshoeing was “oben,” a ski patroller told Elliot—“above” meant Kleine Scheidegg, where you could snowshoe above the tree line, or you could take a second train to Jungfraujoch, the highest station. We could see the Jungfrau from our hotel in Wengen. “Obenan,” another ski patroller said to the snowshoer—“at the top.” There were electric locomotives on the slowly moving cog railway trains. You could climb up the mountain alongside the train track, one of the ski patrollers suggested, halfheartedly.