Dining hall: "Fourths," the Penal Matron, and the tripod become the first found object

texture · 11 Nov YDAU, dinner

• When: 11 Nov YDAU, the E.T.A. dinner (the evening Ingersoll returns on crutches), after the afternoon's match.
• What: Three refs land in the anxious dinner-hall scene. First, her one romance becomes retroactive lore: "The Husky VI tripod of Mario’s near-fatal encounter with the U.S.S. Millicent Kent was only the beginning" — the opening instance of the accelerating cycle of inanimate objects appearing in wildly inappropriate places around E.T.A. (ceiling tiles, the dawn-kitchen lawnmower, the ball machine in the Females' Sauna, squeegees hung on a wall with no nails or nail-holes), objects that have given everyone the fantods. Second, Jim Struck points out Bridgette Boone and Millicent "returning for what Struck counts as Fourths," and Stice blocks the sight out. Third, she is the marquee example in Keith Freer's crude pet theory that E.T.A.'s serious female athletes are nascent lesbians: "sixteen and phenomenal on the incline bench-press, with breasts like artillery and a butt like two bulldogs in a bag (Stice’s term, which caught on), already looks like a Penal Matron, Freer likes to observe." The cruelty of the boys' register toward her body is the cameo's point.