THAT NIGHT, I got on the phone right after dinner. It took hours, but by the end of the evening I had identified at least some of the members of every group. A competition had developed when kids decided that anyone who succeeded in figuring out all the members of the groups would get on the good side of Miss Rheingold. As a result, there was a reluctance to give out information, and I was convinced that some of the information I had received was what is called today disinformation or misinformation, the kind of information that back then we called lies. However, by charting everything I was told and comparing it against what others told me, I was able to draw some reliable conclusions. By the time my father leaned over me, depressed the switch in the cradle of the phone, and said, “Peter, go to bed,” I was sure that I knew who three of the members of the where-do-you-stop group were, counting myself. The fourth was still in doubt, but I had a pretty good idea that it had to be one of the mysterious black kids who seemed to have come from elsewhere or nowhere. I couldn’t be sure, though, because I’d determined this only indirectly, by inference. I’d gotten my information from phone calls to my friends, and all the kids I knew were white. I didn’t know the phone numbers of any of the black kids. I wasn’t even really aware of their names. So, I didn’t know how to ask them which group they were in.
IN DARKNESS, I groped my way upstairs to my room. It was a new thing of mine to leave the lights off when I got ready for bed. I’ve forgotten now just why I did this. Was it modesty? Did I think that someone was watching from the darkness? Did it have something to do with training the mind or the senses to get by on less information—was I already, unwittingly, anticipating the skills I would need for my game, that game that would lead to my commemoration of a single moment in the following summer, the same skills that I would need when Raskol and I finally got around to slipping into the Purlieu Street School some night and changing the combinations of the locks on the lockers? Or was it that I had begun spending a little while each night scanning the windows of the house across the street, where a girl I’d known for years as an annoyance was ripening into an attraction? It was probably that.
When I undressed, the scent of Miss Rheingold’s perfume surprised me. In the dark, quiet room my shirt seemed to be saturated with it. When I took the shirt off and gave it a shake the scent filled the room so richly that I thought my parents would surely smell it. I held the shirt to my face for a moment and breathed the aroma, but when I realized that I was trying to smell Miss Rheingold herself, not merely her perfume, I began to feel weird, and I put it aside. I got into bed and lay there, awake, quite intoxicated, my senses full of her. I tried to recreate everything, every impression from the forty-eight minutes I’d spent with her. This wasn’t at all hard to do, since my impressions were so strong. The memory was so vivid that its recreation seemed real, especially since it was reinforced by the sound of my father, downstairs, whistling and sharpening pencils.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 585, Mark Dorset considers Lies, Lying, and Information, Misinformation, Disinformation from this episode.
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🎧 585: That night . . .