A Fistful of Fig Newtons

by Jean Shepherd

  “Boy, kids today sure are a lot smarter than we was when we was kids. Why, at his age I hardly knew nothin’.” The old man, sitting at the kitchen table with a can of Blatz in his mitt, was talking to my uncle Carl, who kept shoving his upper plate back into his mouth. He had gotten his false teeth from the Relief, and he was proud of them.

  “Tell your uncle Carl about Bolivia,” the old man ordered.

  “Why, certainly,” I said confidently. It was a command performance I had given many times before. “Bolivia exports tin.”

  My father, his jaw slack with amazement, turned to Uncle Carl and said in a low, emotional voice, “See what I mean? Kids nowadays know everything. Didja hear that, Carl? Bolivia exports tin!”

  “Geez.” Uncle Carl’s teeth clicked back into place. “When I was a kid they didn’t even have Bolivia! Boy!”

  They both nodded in silent humility, and went back to guzzling beer. Coolly, I made my exit through the back door, lugging a Kraft-American-cheese-and-jelly sandwich. Another triumph!

  The years passed, punctuated by occasional tight squeaks, but my true identity as a faker was never really in danger of exposure. Finally the big day came. On a glorious sun-drenched morning when even the red clouds of rusty blast-furnace dust glowed in spring beauty, Graduation Day arrived. I had made it. Dressed in our scratchy Sunday clothes, we were herded, along with parents, uncles, aunts, and a few scattered cousins, into the gym.

  The despised glee club sang the Warren G. Harding fight song, accompanied by Miss Bundy, the kindergarten teacher, on the piano, her crinkly straw-colored hair bobbing up and down with every beat, her huge bottom enveloping the piano stool. Then a famous local undertaker and Chevrolet dealer delivered a mind-numbing oration on how his generation was passing the torch of civilization from its faltering hands into our youthful energetic and idealistic hands. Naturally, we were seated alphabetically, and we in the rear caught only a few disjointed phrases.

  Schwartz, sweating profusely in his new sports coat, whispered, “What’s all that stuff about torches? I didn’t get no torch.”

  “They must have given them to the front of the class,” I answered. Little did I realize how right I was.

  But I got my diploma. It was official. I was a graduate. Clasping my sacred scroll there on the stage–while those even farther below me in the alphabet filed up to receive theirs–I found myself growing wise and dignified, a person of substance, well equipped to carry torches, to best foes, to identify the parts of speech, including gerunds, to draw from memory the sinister confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates.

  At last we were free. Warren G. Harding and its warm embrace, its easy ways, stood forever behind us. On our way home the old man, his clean white shirt crackling with starch, said: “Whaddaya say we celebrate by pickin’ up some ice cream at the Igloo?”

  Ecstatic, I sat in the back seat of the Olds with my kid brother, clutching the precious document on which–though I didn’t discover it till later–my name had been misspelled, in Old English lettering.

  That summer sped by in a blur of sun and gentle showers that made the outfields fragrant with clover and sweet William. In September I would be a full-fledged high school kid. Guys in high school had always seemed to be remote, godlike creatures who drove cars, wore thick sweaters with letters on them, and hung around Big Bill’s Drive-in. What actually happened in high school was never mentioned, at least among those of us in the R’s and the Y’s. A few rumors, of course, had filtered down to us, and they only added to our sense of rising excitement about the new life that was about to begin.

  The first omen of evil struck early in September, just a few days before school was to open. I came home covered with scratches and mosquito bites from a great day out in the weeds and walked right into it.

  “There’s some mail for you,” my mother grunted to me as she struggled out the screen door with a huge bag of garbage that was dripping coffee grounds onto the linoleum.

  “Mail? For me?” I was surprised, since I received very little mail except for an occasional announcement from the International Crime Detection Institute of East St. Louis, Illinois, informing me that I was frittering away my life when I could be “Earning Big Money Spotting Crooks.”

  I ripped open the envelope and found a printed form stating that high school registration and classes for freshmen would begin next Monday, and that I was assigned to Miss Snyder, to whom I would report at 8:30 A.M. Period.

  “Hey, Schwartz,” I barked into the phone, “didja get yer card?”

  “Yeah!”

  “What’s this registration stuff?”

  “I don’t know!” Schwartz shouted to be heard over the uproar of his mother screaming at his kid brother, Douglas. “I guess that’s where you pick the teachers and the classes and stuff you want to take!”

  “Yeah!” I hollered back. Ah, the dreams of youth.

  Registration day dawned windy, with a flat silver sun gleaming through the haze from the steel plant. Schwartz, Flick, Chester, and a whole crowd of us rode the bus to high school. No one had ever taken a bus to Harding. We all got there our own way, the girls strolling down the sidewalk, the boys scurrying up alleys, through vacant lots, over fences, past dogs, chickens, sprinklers, and one maniacal goose that from time to time rushed out of its yard and ripped a chunk from somebody’s corduroys. Catching a bus on the corner was a whole new thing. I sat in the back, amid the din, my guts in an uproar of excitement. High school!

  We carried rulers, fountain pens, erasers–a full arsenal of equipment for use on the battlefields of higher learning. Schwartz had a T square made of red plastic and a matching compass, God knows what for. I clutched the brown-and-white fake-marble Parker automatic pencil that my aunt Glen had given me upon graduation from eighth grade. And inside the front of my three-ring notebook, which had green imitation-leather covers, I had pasted a picture of an Indianapolis Kurtis-Kraft racer. I was ready for anything. In keeping with the gravity of the occasion, I was wearing my electric-blue sports coat and my silver tie with its red hand-painted snail, both stars in my wardrobe. The bus was heavily scented with Lucky Tiger hair oil, since every male aboard had gotten a haircut for the big day.

  I had lain in bed making plans the night before. I would grab the front seat in every class and listen to every word. No longer would I duck and dodge behind a screen of kids. That was all behind me. Mentally I crouched at the mark, waiting for the starter’s gun to send me flying down the track ahead of the pack. If others could actually learn, so could I. It was going to be a whole new ball game, a clean slate, a new start. I was the victim of another American myth, namely that things can actually change for the better, that if you try hard enough you can transform the lead of your crummy self into some golden ideal. Countless billions are spent yearly in our blessed country on diets guaranteed to peel suet off in seconds, books that promise incredible sexual bliss, and others promising stupendous riches and happiness to those who can master the Seven Golden Rules contained therein. Alas.

  The bus rolled up before nirvana and we piled out, some on the run yelling hysterically, others ashen-faced and stiff-legged with terror. A few pretended that it was like any other bus ride. The school loomed over us like the walls of the Grand Canyon. Made of dull red brick, it stretched out to either horizon. Thousands of kids milled around the outside, waiting for the doors to open. Girls bigger than my aunt Clara towered over me, and they had bumps in their sweaters like the ladies that Gene Autry sang to at the Saturday matinees. A blind torrent of fear washed over me. For a while, I had been one of the truly big men at Warren G. Harding and now I was nothing. Clinging to my lunch bag with a sweaty hand, I hunted frantically for a familiar face, but Schwartz and Flick and the others had been swallowed up.

  BRRRRR-INNNGGGG! I was carried forward on the crest of the horde as it surged in through the huge front doors. Great staircases with rivers of kids streamed in all directions. My card read REPORT TO ROOM 220. Kids all around me ho
llered and laughed back and forth. They all seemed to know one another. I had never felt so alone. Figuring astutely that Room 220 had to be on the second floor, I joined the torrent raging upward. The second floor looked even vaster than the first. The halls stretched so far in both directions that I couldn’t see the ends. Lockers banged and I smelled, for the first time, that indescribable high school building aroma, a rich fragrance made up of thousands of bodies, floor wax, chalk, leftover tuna fish sandwiches, chlorine from the swimming pool, disinfectant from the johns, and fermenting jockstraps from the gym.

  I tried to read the numbers on doors as I was swept onward like a salmon in the spawning season: 205, 207, 214, 218–220! My home room, where I was to spend four hellish years of my life. A gaunt, razor-sharp teacher sat at a gray steel and formica desk; silver gray hair, glistening rimless glasses, gray mannish wool suit; even her face was gray. Miss Snyder, my home room teacher.

  I sensed immediately that she wasn’t going to be a pushover for my Cute Look, but I turned it on anyway, at full candle power. She peered at me coldly through her rimless glasses.

  “Your card, please,” she snapped in a crackling, flat voice. I handed it over. She glanced at it, glanced up at me, registering my face in the rogue’s gallery of her mind. I could almost hear the shutters clicking.

  “Take that seat there back of Rukowski. He’s the one in the purple sweater.”

  I walked down between the aisles of alien faces to my seat. It was, of course, in the next-to-the-last row. It would be mine for the next four years. Ahead of me loomed Rukowski, a giant mountain of flesh over which had been stretched a purple jersey covered with chevrons, the number 76, and a row of stripes. Later I learned that Rukowski had been an all-state tackle for the past six years and was the bulwark of one of the toughest defensive lines in seven states. He was a good man to sit behind. I peered around the room. I was the only delegate to Room 220 from Warren G. Harding.

  Miss Snyder stood at the blackboard and hurled the first harpoon of the season: “You freshmen who are with us today are already enrolled for the courses you will be required to take. Here are your program cards.” She dealt out 3×5-inch blue cards, which were handed back to the freshmen. Each card was neatly lined into eight periods, and after each period was the name of a teacher, a subject, and a classroom. One period was labeled LUNCH, another STUDY, and so on. Every minute of my day was laid out for me. So much for my dreams of freedom.

  “Freshmen, this is your first day in high school. You are no longer in grade school. If you work hard, you will do well. If you don’t, you will regret it. You are here to learn. You are not here to play. Remember this and remember it well: What you do here will follow you all through life.” She paused dramatically. In the hushed silence, I could hear Rukowski wheezing ahead of me. None of this, of course, affected him. Anyone who could block the way he could block would have no trouble getting through life.

  “Your first class will begin in five minutes. Any questions?” No one raised a hand.

  I sat there, pawing in the chute, anxious to begin my glorious career of learning. No more would I fake my way. A new era was about to begin. The bell rang. The starting gate slammed open.

  I had thundered a couple of hundred feet through the hall with the mob before it hit me that I had no idea where the hell I was supposed to go. As the crowd surged around me, I struggled to read my program card. All I could make out was Room 127. I had only a minute to make it, so I battled my way down a flight of stairs. Then: 101, 105, 109, 112, 117–127, just in time. Already the classroom was three-quarters filled. Ahead of me, running interference, was Rukowski, trying his luck at this course, I later learned, for the third time in as many semesters. Getting his shoulder into it, he bulled his way through the door, buffeting aside a herd of spindly little freshmen. It was Schwartz, good old Schwartz, and Flick and Chester and Helen Weathers. My old gang! Even poor old Zynzmeister. Whatever it was, I would not have to go through it alone.

  “Hi, Schwartz!”

  Schwartz smiled wanly. And Helen Weathers giggled–until she saw, at the same moment I did, a tall, square man standing motionless at the blackboard. He had a grim blue jaw and short, kinky black crew-cut hair. His eyes were tiny ball bearings behind glasses with thick black rims. He wore a dark, boxy suit that looked like it was made of black sandpaper. The bell rang and the door closed behind us. I joined the crowd around his desk who were putting registration cards into a box. I did likewise.

  “All right. Settle down. Let’s get organized.” The man’s voice had a cutting rasp to it, like a steel file working on concrete. “We sit alphabetically in this class. A’s up here in front to my right. Get going.”

  I trudged behind Schwartz and Helen Weathers toward the dim recesses in the back of the classroom. Well, at least I’d be among friends. It was about a quarter of a mile to the front of the room, but I sat bolt upright in my seat, my iron determination intact. No more faking it.

  “Class, my name is Mr. Pittinger.” He was the first male teacher I had ever had. Warren G. Harding was peopled entirely by motherly ladies like Mrs. Bailey and Miss Shields. Mr. Pittinger was a whole new ball game. And I still had no idea what he taught. I would soon find out.

  “If you work in this class, you’ll have no trouble. If you don’t, I promise you nothing.”

  I leaned forward at my desk, scribbling madly in my notebook: class my name is mr. pittinger if you work you will have no trouble if you dont i promise you nothing …

  I figured if you wrote everything down there’d be no trouble. Every classroom of my life had been filled with girls on the Honor Roll who endlessly wrote in mysterious notebooks, even when nothing seemed to be going on. I never knew what the hell they were writing, so I took no chances. I figured I’d write everything.

  “Braaghk.” Mr. Pittinger cleared his gravelly throat.

  braaaghk, I scribbled, brummph. You never know, I thought, it might appear on the exam.

  He turned, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to scrawl huge block letters on the blackboard.

  A-L–the chalk squeaked decisively–G-E-B-R-A. I copied each letter exactly as he’d written it.

  “That is the subject of this course,” he barked.

  Algebra? What the hell is that?

  “Algebra is the mathematics of abstract numbers.”

  I gulped as I wrote this down.

  “I will now illustrate.”

  Pittinger printed a huge Y on the blackboard and below it an enormous X. I doggedly followed suit in my notebook. He then put equal signs next to the X and the Y.

  “If Y equals five and X equals two, what does the following mean?”

  He wrote out: X+Y=?

  Black fear seized my vitals. How could you add Xs and Ys? I had enough trouble with nines and sevens!

  Already the crowd in front of the room were waving their hands to answer Pittinger’s question. The class wasn’t thirty seconds old and I was already six weeks behind. I sank lower in my seat, a faint buzzing in my ears. Instinctively I began to weave. I knew it was all over. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Schwartz, next to me, had hunched lower and begun to emit a high, thin whimpering sound. Helen Weathers had flung up a thin spray of sweat. Chester’s skin had changed to the color of the cupboards in the back of the room. And from behind me I could hear the faint, steady click of Zynzmeister’s rosary.

  Second by second, minute by minute, eon by eon that first algebra class droned on. I couldn’t catch another word that was said, and by the time Mr. Pittinger wrote the second equation on the board, I was bobbing and weaving like a cobra and sending out high-voltage thought rays. A tiny molten knot of stark terror hissed and simmered in the pit of my stomach. I realized that for the first time in my school life, I had run into something that was completely opaque and unlearnable, and there was no way to fake it.

  Don’t call on me, Don’t call on me, Don’t call on me …

  That night I ate my meatloaf and red cabb
age in sober silence as the family yapped on, still living back in the days when I was known to all of them as the smartest little son of a bitch to ever set foot on Cleveland Street.

  “Boy, look at the stuff kids study these days,” the old man said with wonder as he hefted my algebra textbook in his bowling hand and riffled through the pages.

  “What’s all this X and Y stuff?” he asked.

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t much,” I muttered as coolly as I could, trying to recapture some of the old élan.

  “Whaddaya mean, ain’t much?” His eyes glowed with pride at the idea that his kid had mastered algebra in only one day.

  “Abstract mathematics, that’s all it is.”

  The old man knew he’d been totally outclassed. Even my mother stopped stirring the gravy for a few seconds. My kid brother continued to pound away at the little bbs of Ovaltine that floated around on the top of his milk.

  That night sleep did not come easily. In fact, it was only the first of many storm-tossed nights to come as, algebra class by algebra class, my terror grew. All my other subjects–history, English, social studies–were a total breeze. My years of experience in fakery came into full flower. In social studies, for example, the more you hoked it up, the better the grades. On those rare occasions when asked a question, I would stand slowly, with an open yet troubled look playing over my thoughtful countenance.

  “Mr. Harris, sir,” I would drawl hesitantly, as though attempting to unravel the perplexity of the ages, “I guess it depends on how you view it–objectively, which, naturally, is too simple, or subjectively, in which case many factors such as a changing environment must be taken into consideration, and …” I would trail off.