Read Online Best Friends by Martha Moody - Free Book Online

close my eyes and summon up that magic world, Sally and me in her Kharmann Ghia driving down one of those famous canyons, windows open, music spilling from the car. I could close my eyes and summon up that world.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    IN LATE AUGUST 1975, ten days after I returned from Los Angeles to Ohio, Timbo was killed by a drunk driver. Sally flew to Kentucky for the funeral. Timbo’s mother, it turned out, was odd. “What do you mean, odd?” I asked over the phone. Oddness to me was positive, but clearly Mrs. Timmey’s oddness wasn’t good.
    â€œIt’s a funny thing,” Sally said. “You talk to her and you realize she’s odd, and that makes you think, what is odd? What is it about a person that makes them odd?” Sally sounded exhausted, her voice raspy and soft with an undercurrent of tears. I could picture her swollen eyes, her damp cheeks. It was the first time, I realized, that Sally seemed adult to me.
    Timbo’s mother had never stopped talking, about anything that popped into her head. There was no internal censor. “George really liked you,” she had told Sally. “Although maybe it’s better you two never got any further, because you’re Jewish, aren’t you? That wouldn’t work with our family. And you’re from California, the godless state. People go to naked encounter groups in California. The sin.” What was she saying? Sin was everywhere these days. You had to throw yourself on Jesus’ mercy for forgiveness. Timbo’s family wasn’t going to press charges. Who knows? Maybe George’s death was God’s punishment.
    â€œPunishment?” Sally had said, incredulous, goaded into speech.
    â€œDon’t you know?” Timbo’s mother had said. “Didn’t you hear?” George had a rubber ring around his privates. His fly was open. He was driving down the road fondling himself when the other car crossed the center line and hit him. One drunk, one onanist. Didn’t it balance out? Never, never did George’s mother think her family would come to this.
    â€œOh my God,” I said, shocked. I don’t think I was very consoling. “Sally, that’s so weird.”
    Our first night back at Oberlin, Sally said, “I should have slept with him.” We had the same room we’d had the year before, the bathroom and phone still steps away.
    â€œSally,” I pointed out, “would it have made any difference? You sleep with him in May, he wouldn’t be masturbating in August? Maybe he’d be masturbating more.”
    â€œBut that ring . . .” Sally said.
    I too found the ring an icky touch, although unlike Sally I had heard of such things, from my brothers and their jokes.
    I thought of my sweet friend Sally, her memory of Timbo sullied, and Timbo’s stupid mother talking, talking, pouring out her sticky grief. A wave of fury hit me. Why did Timbo’s mother feel compelled to tell Sally—or anyone—exactly how Timbo died? Why should anyone have to hear about the ring? “Who else did she tell?” I demanded. “Did she stand up and give a speech about it at the funeral? ‘He was a nice boy, my son, but he got what he deserved.’ Any loving mother would have kept quiet. Hasn’t she heard of death with dignity?”
    For an instant Sally looked stunned. The thought that someone could willfully, and with good intentions, withhold something hit Sally the way it had hit me—as a kind of revelation. The Oberlin culture praised honesty, openness, letting it all it hang out. “She didn’t have to tell me,” Sally repeated wonderingly. “She didn’t.”
    I was furious. “Of course not. But everybody’s so open these days,” I said angrily. “Everybody’s so up front.”
    â€œYou’re right.” Sally leaned forward with a sudden urgency. “Why did she tell me? I wouldn’t tell