roughhousing. My mother loved her sister and brother-in-law; they always made her feel special and welcome-they certainly made me feel that way-and my mother doubtless appreciated a little time away from my grandmother's imperious wisdom. Grandmother would come to Sawyer Depot for a few days at Christmas, and she would make a grand appearance for one weekend every summer, but the north country was not to Grandmother's liking. And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at Front Street-and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen-she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren. For Thanksgiving, the Eastmans came to Front Street, a disturbance that my grandmother referred to in terms of 'the casualties' for several months after their visit. My cousins were active, combative athletes-my grandmother called them 'the warriors'-and I lived a different life whenever I was with them. I was both crazy about them and terrified of them; I couldn't contain my excitement as the time to see them drew near, but after several days, I couldn't wait to get away from them-I missed the peace of my private games, and I missed Owen Meany; I even missed Grandmother's constant but consistent criticism. My cousins-Noah, Simon, and Hester (in order of their ages)-were all older than I: Hester was older by less than a year, although she would always be bigger; Simon was older by two years; Noah, by three. Those are not great differences in age, to be sure, but they were great enough in all those years before I was a teenager-when each of my cousins was better than I was, at everything. Since they grew up in the north country, they were fabulous skiers. I was, at best, a cautious skier, modeling my slow, wide turns on my mother's graceful but undaring stem Christie-she was a pretty skier of intermediate ability who was consistently in control; she did not think that the essence of the sport was speed, nor did she fight the mountain. My cousins raced each other down the slopes, cutting each other off, knocking each other down-and rarely restraining their routes of descent to the marked trails. They would lead me into the deep, unmanageable powder snow in the woods, and in my efforts to keep up with them, I would abandon the controlled conservative skiing that my mother had taught me and end up straddling trees, embracing snow fences, losing my goggles in icy streams. My cousins were sincere in their efforts to teach me to keep my skis parallel-and to hop on my skis-but a school-vacation skier is never the equal to a north-country native. They set such standards for recklessness that, eventually, I could no longer have fun skiing with my mother. I felt guilty that I made her ski alone; but my mother was rarely left alone for long. By the end of the day, some man-a would-be ski instructor, if not an actual ski instructor-would be coaching her at her side. What I remember of skiing with my cousins is long, humiliating, and hurtling falls, followed by my cousins retrieving my ski poles, my mittens, and my hat-from which I became inevitably separated.
'Are you all right?' my eldest cousin, Noah, would ask me. 'That looked rather harsh.'
'That looked neat I' my cousin Simon would say; Simon loved to fall-he skied to crash.
'You keep doing that, you'll make yourself sterile,' * said my cousin Hester, to whom every event of our shared childhood was either sexually exhilarating or sexually damaging. In the summers, we went waterskiing on Loveless Lake, where the Eastmans kept a boathouse, the second floor of which was remodeled to resemble an English pub-Uncle Alfred was admiring of the English. My mother and Aunt Martha would go sailing, but Uncle Alfred drove the powerboat wildly and fast, a beer in his free hand. Because he did not water-ski himself, Uncle Alfred thought that the responsibility of the boat's driver was to make the skier's ride as harrowing as possible. He would double back in the middle of a turn so that the rope would go slack, or you could even catch up to the rope and ski over it. He drove a murderous figure ; he appeared to relish surprising you, by putting you directly in the path of an oncoming boat or of another surprised water-skier on the busy lake. Regardless of the cause of your fall, Uncle Alfred took credit for it. When anyone racing behind the boat would send up a fabulous spray, skimming lengthwise across the water, skis ripped off, head under one second, up the next, and then under again-Uncle Alfred would shout, 'Bingo!'
I am living proof that the waters of Loveless Lake are potable because I swallowed half the lake every summer while waterskiing with my cousins. Once I struck the surface of the lake with such force that my right eyelid was rolled up into my head in a funny way. My cousin Simon told me I had lost my eyelid-and my cousin Hester added that the lost eyelid would lead to blindness. But Uncle Alfred managed to locate the missing eyelid, after a few anxious minutes. Indoor life with my cousins was no less vigorous. The savagery of pillow-fighting would leave me breathless, and there was a game that involved Noah and Simon tying me up and stuffing me in Hester's laundry hamper, where Hester would always discover me; before she'd untie me, she'd accuse me of sniffing her underwear. I know that Hester especially looked forward to my visits because she suffered from being the constant inferior to her brothers-not that they abused her, or even teased her. Considering that they were boys, and older, and she was a girl, and younger, I thought they treated her splendidly, but every activity my cousins engaged in was competitive, and it clearly irked Hester to lose. Naturally, her brothers could 'best' her at everything. How she must have enjoyed having me around, for she could 'best' me at anything-even, when we went to the Eastman lumberyard and the sawmill, at log-rolling. There was also a game that involved taking possession of a sawdust pile-those piles were often twenty or thirty feet high, and the sawdust nearer the bottom, in contact with the ground, was often frozen or at least hardened to a crusty consistency. The object was to be king of the mountain, to hurl all comers off the top of the pile-or to bury one's attackers in the sawdust. The worst part about being buried in the pile-up to your chin -was that the lumberyard dog, the Eastmans' slobbering boxer, a mindlessly friendly beast with halitosis vile enough to give you visions of corpses uprooted from their graves . . . this dog with the mouth of death was then summoned to lick your face. And with the sawdust packed all around you-as armless as Wata-hantowet's totem-you were powerless to fend the dog off. But I loved being with my cousins; they were so vastly stimulating that I could rarely sleep in their house and would lie awake all night, waiting for them to pounce on me, or for them to let Firewater, the boxer, into my room, where he would lick me to death; or I would just lie awake imagining what exhausting contests I would encounter the next day. For my mother, our trips to Sawyer
