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something like that if it were my son.”
    â€œOf course you wouldn’t,” I scoffed. “What’s the point? She told you because she couldn’t stand knowing it herself. She had to dilute the nastiness.”
    Sally blinked. “If she had any inner strength, she wouldn’t have told me.”
    â€œOf course. She has no inner strength.” I paused, then spat it out. “She’s not quality. ”
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    A COUPLE OF GUYS from Timbo’s old dorm had been at the funeral, so I assumed they knew. The word must have spread through the dorm, then leaked onto campus through girlfriends, classmates, friends of friends, acquaintances, professors. I heard about it in psychology class, only the ring had metamorphosed into a whole contraption, a blowup thing like a blood-pressure cuff, and the accident had been solely Timbo’s fault.
    â€œGuess the moral is, don’t diddle and drive,” someone said.
    â€œShows what a frustrated id will do.”
    â€œSad. Did he have a girlfriend?”
    â€œYeah, but . . .” Laughter and shaking of heads. My face blazed, I bit the inside of my cheek. These were my classmates? These were people I was supposed to feel close to? I’d thought this college was supposed to be liberal.
    In our dorm there were debates in the halls. Both males and females participated. What, really, was wrong with a penis ring? What was wrong with masturbation? Didn’t everybody masturbate? Should the fact that Timbo was wearing a masturbatory aide diminish his death in any way? The debates often deteriorated, going from principles of freedom into talk of things the ancient Greeks did, or the Chinese metal masturbation balls mentioned in Our Bodies, Ourselves, or the true meaning of the lyrics to “Layla,” which ostensibly no woman understood. Eventually, people dissolved into their rooms, less edified than stirred up.
    â€œI hate that,” Sally said. “I don’t want to hear about masturbation every moment of my life.” For a while, to escape the talk, she took a circuitous path—through a fire escape door and stairwell—to and from our room. Then one day she got angry. She held her head up and walked right past them.
    â€œNobody ever says anything to you, do they?” I asked.
    â€œAre you kidding?” Sally answered, her tone scathing. “They wouldn’t have the balls.”
    Balls? I thought, smiling to myself. Did Sally really say “balls”?
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    MARGARET—MY FRIEND with no cultural references—accompanied Sally and me to the Campus Restaurant for breakfast. “Do you like bacon?” Margaret asked Sally, then quickly put her hand over her mouth. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
    â€œWhat are you talking about?” Sally said, although I’m sure she knew.
    â€œClare told me you’re Jewish,” Margaret said in a confiding tone.
    â€œAnd?”
    Margaret seemed to realize at this point that she’d said something wrong, and her voice took on a mild whininess I’d heard before. “Well, pork, pork,” she said, and went on about the Bible and its dietary laws, which was something she knew about from Sholom Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof. I felt sorry for her. It had been hard to be raised in Guatemala with nobody around but missionary Baptists and native Catholics, no TV, no movies, no cosmetic ads. She’d never heard of Max Factor!
    â€œHalf the students at this college are Jewish,” Sally said. “Do you see people eating bacon in the cafeterias? Do you see many men wearing yarmulkes?”
    Margaret believed more in the images she got from movies and TV and reading than in what she could look around and see. This was her sublime goofiness, one of the things that made her, for me, such fun to be with. But I could see it drove Sally crazy.
    â€œPeople away at college are known to deny their backgrounds,”