Nell Freudenberger

“It was a misunderstanding,” her daughter said. “It was a cultural thing, actually.” And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, “He’s not a rapist.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but if he raped you, he is a rapist.”

And Mandy said, “Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.”

He had come home to write his book, but it wasn’t going to be a book about Bombay. There were no mangoes in his poems, and no beggars, no cows or Hindu gods. What he wanted to write about was a moment of quiet. Sometimes, sitting along in his room, there would be a few seconds, a silent pocket without the crow or the hammering or wheels on the macadam outside. Those were the moments he felt most himself; at the same time, he felt that he was paying for that peace very dearly—that life, his life, was rolling away outside.

In Health class I’ve heard that you saw movies and even put condoms on bananas. The way I learned about sex was by looking up one word after another in the dictionary. It was time-consuming. I started simply, with “sperm,” properly “spermatozoon,” which led me to “spermatic cord” and “testis.” I could pretty much picture those, although the “scrotum” turned out to be much, much uglier than its definition suggested.