Nora brought a friend to my mother’s wedding—a college girl, Nora’s classmate at Mount Holyoke. She was an Emily who’d been shortened to an Em. Was Em the name Nora gave her? Was it a way to dominate her? Em was dollish and anxious-looking; she was startled by sudden sounds and movements. Em clung to Nora or hid behind her—at times with her doll-like face buried between Nora’s shoulder blades and her locked hands hugging Nora’s navel.

To accommodate the out-of-town guests attending the wedding—for the most part, the North Conway Norwegians—my grandmother had reserved several rooms at the Exeter Inn. The inn was a short walk from our Front Street house, where the marriage ceremony and the reception dinner would take place. Aunt Abigail had assumed Nora and Em would stay in Nora’s childhood room—in the faculty apartment Nora had grown up in, with her mom and Uncle Martin—but Nora and Em chose to stay in one of the rooms at the inn. “Trust me,” Nora told us all, “Em is a noisy sleeper.”

“Em doesn’t appear to make any noise when she’s awake!” Aunt Martha had chimed in. In fact, Em didn’t talk—not for the entire wedding weekend. Em was as silent as the nonspeaking emeritus.

I questioned Nora about the noises Em made when she was sleeping, although I had to wait for the right moment to ask—when Em went to the bathroom. At all other times, Em was physically attached to Nora in her quiet but clinging fashion. “You said Em is a noisy sleeper—noisy in what way?” I asked my cousin. I was fourteen at my mom’s wedding. The extremely small groom was twenty-seven, although he looked like an undersize fourteen-year-old.

“Em has ridiculously loud and hysterical orgasms, Adam,” Nora told me. “Each orgasm sounds like it’s her first or last time.”

In 1956, my experience with female orgasms was limited to the cinematic—notwithstanding how vividly I imagined females in orgasm, all the time.

The little snowshoer had driven me to the Franklin Theatre in Durham to see more foreign films with subtitles. These were (and forever would be) a bond between us, in addition to the snowshoeing. My aunts had forbidden Uncle Martin and Uncle Johan to take me to foreign films with female orgasms. I would see my first Ingmar Bergman films with Elliot Barlow. At the time, I was relieved not to have seen Bergman with my laughing uncles. In retrospect, a missed opportunity.