31
I WORKED HARD that night and all the following weekend. I drew diagrams, changed them, redrew them, made more changes, and redrew them again. I wrote, changed what I wrote, rewrote, made more changes, and wrote again. I didn’t seem to get anywhere. In fact, by Sunday night I seemed to be worse off than when I started. The idea that seemed so bright when it was leaping and darting and fluttering through my mind looked dull and dead when I’d caught it and pinned it to my paper. In writing it out, I had changed it. In my mind, still an idea, it had been ragged and confused, but interesting. When I wrote it out, I tried to impose on it the kind of orderly reasoning I found in my encyclopedia. The idea as I wrote it on paper made more sense, but it only made sense. It wasn’t an idea now, but the representation of an idea. It didn’t fly, didn’t flutter by, didn’t catch the eye as I thought it would. Something was missing, something vital, but I couldn’t provide or restore it because I didn’t know what it was.
The next Monday, the school-age population of Babbington again reached a critical mass. Three new kids were standing awkwardly at the front of my homeroom, but every seat in the room was filled, every seat in the school was filled. There was an atmosphere of crisis: we were marched to the auditorium, where the superintendent of schools, Mr. Simone, announced that we were going to have to go on split session again. At the end of the day, he explained, each of us would get a slip of paper—he held one up so that we’d recognize a slip of paper when we saw one—telling us whether we’d be going to school in the morning or afternoon. We were dismissed and sent on our way.
Worse news came in general science. Near the end of the period, Miss Rheingold, red-eyed and hoarse, told us that she had resigned.
“I have been asked not to tell you why,” she said, “but I hope that you will figure it out for yourselves, and when you do I hope you’ll see that what I’m doing is right.”
None of us knew what she was getting at, but what she said brought one big question to the collective mind of the class. Matthew asked it.
“What about our reports?”
“Well,” said Miss Rheingold, “your new teacher will want to give you assignments of her own, so I guess that—”
“You mean we don’t have to finish them?” asked Nicky.
“That’s right,” said Miss Rheingold. She seemed terribly sad.
“But I’ve invested considerable effort in mine,” said Matthew, “and it’s nearly finished.”
“Well, perhaps your new teacher will let you turn it in for extra credit,” said Miss Rheingold. “Or maybe she’ll even want all of you to continue working on them. You can bring up the idea with her tomorrow if you like, Matthew.”
“Bring it up if you’d like to experience death,” muttered Nicky.
“Whatever happens,” said Miss Rheingold, “I hope you’ll go on thinking about your questions, and I hope you’ll—”
The bell rang.
“Well,” she said. “Good-bye.”
I had to ask her something. I waited until everyone else had left, and then I went up to her desk.
“Miss Rheingold?” I said.
“Yes, Peter?”
“I know that all mammals sweat—perspire, I mean. And people are mammals, so people perspire.”
“Very good, Peter,” she said. She put her hand on my shoulder for an instant. “A syllogism. Very good.”
“But when they perspire,” I asked, “do they perspire from all over? I mean, do they just sweat from their foreheads and armpits, or do they perspire all over?”
“All over,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. “From their heads?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Certainly.”
“And their feet?” I asked, staying wide enough of my subject not to be found out, I hoped.
“Peter,” she said with a frown. “Don’t you have a pair of sneakers?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Then observational data ought to give you the answer to that question,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. So people perspire from all over?”
“Yes.”
“All over.”
She looked at me for a moment before saying, softly, “Yes, Peter. From all over.”
“Okay,” I said, “and when they perspire, actual molecules of their sweat go drifting off into the air, right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said. I held my hand out to her, she shook it, and that was our good-bye.
I wonder whether she understood what I had been getting at. I left her classroom tipsy with the idea of the conjunction of Ariane and me that occurred when we were in that little room, suspended out over the tidal stretch of the Bolotomy, watching television and breathing, something of her entering me, something of me entering her. There was a thrilling intimacy between us now, something reciprocal, something quite different from my relationship with the cabbage soup simmering on the Lodkochnikovs’ kitchen stove.
Just a few minutes later, back in our homerooms, when we got our slips of paper and compared them, observational data should have shown me why Miss Rheingold had resigned. It should have, but it didn’t, or, more accurately, I saw the reason, but I didn’t grasp it, didn’t see it for what it was. I was still only a kid, after all. I saw that Marvin wasn’t going to be going to school in the same session as I would be, but I didn’t see past that. When I came to school Monday afternoon, my first day back on split session, I saw the facts, but I still didn’t really understand the implications. All the kids who lived in Scrub Oaks were gone. They were the ones who would be attending school in the morning, the rest of us in the afternoon. The mornings would be mostly black, the afternoons mostly white. It took me years to realize what Miss Rheingold must have seen at once. She had great legs and a penetrating mind. She had seen that split session was being used to reinstate geographical segregation. She had protested. She had been ignored. She had quit.
[to be continued]
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