🎧 596: When the groups ...

13

WHEN THE GROUPS MET for the first time, a couple of days later, Miss Rheingold told us to spend the period discussing our questions. We didn’t have to come to any particular decisions at this first session, she explained. All we had to do was “make a start.” When those of us who had figured out that we were in the where-do-you-stop group brought our chairs into a circle around a table, we saw that we were only three. That couldn’t be right. Miss Rheingold had said that there would be four people in each group. The fourth member had to be one of the black kids. We waited, twisting on our chairs and looking around for whoever it might be, and in a moment he made his way over to us, holding his slip of paper, extending it the way we held our tickets out for the cranky man who barred the door at the Babbington Theatre at the Saturday matinees.
     “‘Where do you stop?’?” he asked.
     “Yes,” I said. We introduced ourselves. His name was Marvin Jones. The other members of our group were Matthew Barber and Patricia Fiorenza. I was amazed to find that at some point during the summer Patricia had developed breasts and begun calling herself Patti—or, for all I knew, the other way around.
     I felt that my combat with Elementary Introductory Physics qualified me to be the leader of the group, and no one bothered to oppose me. However, the first crisis of my administration occurred immediately following my election, when Nicky Furman, another of the spectacularly overgrown thugs who had sprung up in the summer between sixth and seventh grades, arrived at our table and announced that he was going to join us.
     “I was in the what’s-the-biggest-question-of-all group, but it wasn’t the right group for me,” he said. He grabbed a chair, shoved Matthew Barber’s chair to one side, though Matthew was in it, and insinuated his chair between Matthew’s and the lucky one that held the newly curvaceous Patti.
     “Why, Nicky?” asked Patti, poking her lower lip out lusciously.
     “The question wasn’t big enough,” muttered Matthew.
     “Let me tell you something,” Nicky said. He leaned in toward the center of the table, and the rest of us copied him. “Everybody in that other group is stupid.”
     This brought a snort from Matthew, which Nicky disapproved.
     “Hey, don’t make fun of them,” he said. “What can they do about it, you know? They’re dumb—that’s that. It’s not really their fault. They’re born dumb, they’re always going to be dumb. Too bad, but what can you do? We’ve all got our limitations, right? Even me and you, Barber. Especially you. So anyway I’m sitting there in the what’s-the-biggest-question-of-all group, and I look around and I see everybody in the group is stupid. Pow! It hits me. I say to myself, ‘These guys are stupid, therefore they’re going to get the wrong answer to this question. Where is that going to leave me? I know I’m not going to do any of the work. I’m going to leave it up to them, right? The answer they get is going to be wrong—not only wrong but dumb. I’m going to flunk. I’m at the mercy of fools!’ Then I say to myself, ‘I need to be in a group of smart guys, ’cause they’re going to get the right answer, whatever the question is.’ So I look around the room and I see that this is the smart group. Everybody in this group looks smart, you know?”
     He turned toward Patti and took her little chin in his hand.
     “Except you,” he said. “You look gorgeous.”
     “Gee, thanks, Nicky,” said Patti.

[to be continued]

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