I BEGAN MY RESEARCH the very next weekend. I’ve always been conscientious about such things. Give me an assignment and I get right down to it. I was one of those children who ate the lima beans first and saved the mashed potatoes for last, as a reward. I postponed work on the lighthouse until I had at least made a good start toward answering the question. Raskol was disappointed, but I wasn’t. I was so eager to please Miss Rheingold that the lighthouse didn’t interest me. He went on collecting materials and piling them in our garage.
“We’ll keep this stuff in reserve,” he said. “You never can tell when you’ll change your mind.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll probably get sick of this general science paper pretty soon,” but I got down to work on my question with the conviction that I would never stop working on it until the paper was finished.
I confess that I expected to find that, beneath its daunting surface, the question would turn out to be no more than the sort of question I had always been asked in school, a question whose precise answer could be located in, and copied directly from, the textbook. I owed most of my early success in school to a knack for inverting questions, turning them into the beginnings of declarative sentences, and finding in the murky paragraphs of my texts the matching conclusions for these beginnings. It wasn’t much more than a game, and not even a very challenging one.
So, I turned expectantly to my bulky new general science book. A slip of paper inside it instructed me in the proper way to open a new book so that the binding wouldn’t crack. I had found a similar slip of paper, with similar instructions, in each of the books I had opened already. Even so, I read this slip carefully, and I followed its instructions to the letter. There was always the chance that they—and they figured prominently and frighteningly in the life of a boy of the age I was then—might have slipped in a step specific and essential to the proper opening of general science textbooks and no other sort of book, just to see whether I was reading and following the directions. They were sure to catch someone; it wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to have to confess to Miss Rheingold on Monday that my general science book had come apart in my hands.
“Miss Rheingold?”
“Yes, Peter? Oh, my goodness! Your copy of Adventures in General Science, it’s—”
“It sort of fell apart.”
“How on earth—”
“I don’t know what happened, I—”
“Didn’t you follow the directions, Peter?” she would ask.
“Well, Miss Rheingold,” I would have no choice but to admit, “I did follow the directions, but I’m afraid that the directions I followed were the wrong directions. You see, I followed the directions for opening the English book.”
I could almost hear her, fighting back a tear, say, “Peter, Peter, this is a shame, such a shame. I’m sorry about this, truly sorry that this has happened.”
“Me, too.”
“You know what this means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’re going to have to go back to the sixth grade. You’ve failed general science.”
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 586, Mark Dorset considers Books: Care of (How to Open) from this episode.
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🎧 586: I began . . .