One at a time we came to the front of the room, reached into the fishbowl, and drew a slip of paper.
When I bring to mind the moment when I reached into the bowl to get my question, I experience it all again, not as memory, but as a repetition of the immediate data of experience. I am there. I feel the cool smooth rim of the bowl against the inside of my wrist, my knuckles brush the inside surface, the slips of paper rustle, Miss Rheingold shifts her position on the edge of the desk, and her stockings whisper to me. I feel the thin edge of a slip of paper. The scent of Miss Rheingold’s perfume, diffusing from the tiny open bottle, so much denser here at the front of the room than it was back at my seat, makes my head reel.
I returned to my seat with the paper still folded, as instructed. Miss Rheingold was having a lot of fun. The rest of us were tormented by anxiety. When everyone had drawn a slip of paper, Miss Rheingold said, “Now we have an interesting problem. We know that there are six groups of four students who have the same questions on their slips of paper. How are you going to find them? How will you figure out which of you are in which groups? How will you discover who is in your own group? Does anyone have any ideas?”
Matthew’s hand went up at once.
“Matthew Barber,” said Miss Rheingold.
“You could call the roll again,” he said, “and have us read our questions, and when you’re done we’ll know who’s in our group.” He said this in such a dismissive manner that there arose around me an incredulous murmuring and muttering. I had known Matthew for years, and he had never really been a likable kid, but something had happened to him, too, over the summer. He seemed now to be merely visiting us, not to be one of us any longer, but to be a tourist from another, better, place. He seemed disgusted by what he saw of the place he was visiting, and he seemed to find the natives here so stupid and boring that he could hardly bear their presence, hardly stay awake when they spoke, hardly stand to breathe their air. I wasn’t alone in this feeling. There had always been animosity toward Matthew, but now it seemed to be tending toward real hostility. We were hurt; we were offended. We wouldn’t have known how to describe his attitude toward us, but we recognized it for what it was: condescension, that putrid mix of contempt and pity.
“Very good, Matthew,” said Miss Rheingold. “Very efficient.”
Matthew beamed.
“Very efficient—” she repeated, and then she added, “—but not much fun.”
A quiet cheer went up from the back of the room.
“What I propose,” she said, “is this. I’ll write the questions on the board. You copy them. Then you figure out how to find the members of your group.”
These were the questions:
Where does the light go when the light goes out?
When is now?
What is the biggest question of all?
Why are you you?
What really happens?
Where do you stop?
We had just enough time to copy them before the bell rang, impelling us into the hall like so many mystified marbles, the image of Miss Rheingold’s legs imprinted in our minds, the scent of Miss Rheingold’s perfume wafting into the hall as we left, drifting, diluted, along the hallways as we walked away, mingling with all the other less exalted odors that fill a school hallway, some molecules of it lodging in the lattice weave of my shirt, to be shaken loose that night, when I undressed for bed, to bring her back to me, the dissipating scent of her arousing the indelible retinal memory of that moment when she had crossed her legs.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 583, Mark Dorset considers Experience, Immediate Data of; Memory; Allusion; Science: Big Questions; and School: Extraordinary Teachers from this episode.
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