Ms. Pernak was different, but still she was the same. The teachers stayed in place, and you, the student, moved on through life, racking up achievements, creating a new body of friends and work and a block of hard, bright status. And if you were ever in need of a slug of cheap gratification, you could always visit your old teachers and they might say: Look at you. You’ve turned out splendidly.
But here was Claudia Mellow now, age thirty-four and not entirely splendid. She was almost exactly as she had been in kindergarten, still short and somewhat stocky and unfinished but touchingly appealing to most people who met her. It was as though she was not fully baked, was still damp in the middle where you stuck in the toothpick to check for doneness. She felt uncertain as she lingered in the doorway, not quite in the room, not quite out. No matter what she did with her life, how she grew and altered over time, she was still Claudia, the insecure but affectionate youngest child of two parents for whom children were a serious responsibility, and sex was bliss. Her teacher called her in.
A little while later, sitting at a cluster of pushed-together desks, Claudia held the camera with a shaking, loopy hand, and at first she’d actually forgotten to remove the lens cap, a mistake that she rectified with a “whoops” and a quick mime of shooting herself in the head with a pistol.
“Take your time, take your time,” Ms. Pernak said.
“Okay. Thank you. Sorry about this.” Claudia dropped a light meter, which bounced off the leg of a chair and went skidding off. She chased it down and then returned, red-faced and muttering but determined. She pressed a button and there was a whirring sound. The film started rolling.
“I guess I wanted to start by asking you what you’ve learned, teaching here for so many years,” Claudia said.
“What I’ve learned?”
“Yes.”
Doreen Pernak tried to answer as best she could, and while she spoke, Claudia was a one-man band with all her equipment, steadying the camera on her shoulder, keeping a finger on the microphone, taking pauses to adjust lights and check cables. She was as insecure and determined as always. All those stories about how teachers molded young minds weren’t exactly true. An awkward girl tended, eventually, to be an awkward woman.
“What do you remember most from those years?” she asked.
“Let me see,” said her teacher. “Well, I remember a lot of things. It was a happy time, I think. The 1970s. You know. Everyone was so much more hopeful than they are now, I guess. I don’t even know why that was so, because we were still in Vietnam, and the economy was bad, but the children seemed more innocent to me. And when I would come here each day, it was like returning to that innocence.”
In the middle of filming, the door to the classroom opened, and two young women burst right in, both of them with winter coats on, laughing. “Yo, Doreen!” one said. “Get your coat on, wench. It’s happy hour, and we’re going to get hammered!” Then they realized that Doreen was not alone, and the woman clapped a hand over her mouth.
“Oh God,” she said. “We didn’t know . . .”
“It’s okay. I’m only in here shooting my Academy Award–winning role,” said Doreen Pernak.
Introductions were made all around, and the teachers, both of them fresh-faced and lively and younger than Claudia, retreated with further apologies. They were part of a whole new generation of teachers, modern, jazzy, armed with methodology that hadn’t even been dreamed up when Claudia was a child. “If you finish up soon,” the first one said, “feel free to join us, okay? Both of you.”
When they were gone, Claudia Mellow lowered the ungainly camera, placing it with a dull thud on the surface of the desks, and she looked at her teacher with an expression of lopsided intensity. “I guess I also wanted to ask,” she said, “what do you remember about me? I mean, this isn’t for the film exactly, it’s just for my own curiosity.”
What she might have said was this: Ms. Pernak, elementary school was my Xanadu. Nothing has felt as safe or as comfortable or as pleasurable since then, not college, not men, not work, not anything. And now I’m here in this body I don’t like, trying to figure out what to do, renting an incredibly expensive Arriflex and Nagra and trying to operate them just the way I’ve been trying to operate this body of mine, to make it move and thrive and be out there in the world, but it’s too hard, it won’t work the way it’s supposed to.
Doreen Pernak cleared her throat and fiddled with the cat pin on her blazer. “I remember what a tough time you had at home,” she began, “what with your parents and all. And I remember how much you loved school. And how much you wanted to please me. And that you did.”
Both women sat there for a quiet moment in the classroom, recalling another afternoon twenty-eight years earlier when they had stood together in that same room and clapped erasers, clouding the air with white and pink and yellow dust, knowing that even though these weren’t clouds of mystery, they were close enough.
When the sky took on the coloration that, in childhood, had indicated dinner and homework and the slow march toward bed, Claudia Mellow left Bolander and drove back through the town. Ms. Pernak had been as thoughtful and patient as always, and yet there was something boring about her that Claudia hadn’t noticed when she was young. Perhaps children want the adults who take care of them to be slightly boring, she thought; God knew, her own parents rarely were. They were endlessly interesting, at least to other people. But Doreen Pernak wore a cat pin with green eyes shining out from the matte finish of a 14-karat gold circle, and it seemed like the kind of gift that an entire class of parents would chip in to buy a teacher. And this would dictate the teacher’s personal aesthetic. It could have been worse; she could have been forced to wear rigatoni earrings.
Now Claudia planned to head back home to her fifth-floor walk-up studio on 7th Street in the East Village, where the heat came on only sporadically, as if following some internal rhythm. She lived alone and mostly liked it, but there were times when it was difficult to go back to that coldish room and its smells and textures and piles of things. This was one of those times, and she drove her white car around Wontauket once more, circling it all again, passing the Carvel where her father had taken the kids during his famous car ride, and the bank where she’d opened her first passbook savings account at age seven and the teller had called her “ma’am.” And then she drove back to Swarthmore Circle, understanding that she had planned to return to the house in darkness all along.
She parked right in front this time, a bold move on such a quiet street. Now, at night, the house was lit. There was excitement at seeing that—seeing a golden stripe of lamplight coming from the picture window, not from the living room proper but from deeper inside the house. She sat in the car and looked, listening to that numbing jazz, and then, as if sleepwalking back into her own childhood, Claudia unbuckled her seat belt and opened the door. Quiet, she was so quiet, so unassuming. So many years of virtual invisibility had given her the idea that she literally was invisible, and it was that sense of herself that allowed her to unfold her body from the Maxima and walk silently across the dark front lawn of the house she used to live in. She walked up to the very edge of the front window, shielded her eyes, and looked inside. Some sort of gauzy beige curtains misted the glass. She could see something brown in the near distance—a couch, maybe—and could vaguely make out a shape, then two, moving together and melding into one larger shape, then separating like amoebas. She stood and watched the shapes, and one of them peeled away from the other, moved out of view. Then there was a sound nearby, and she realized it came from outside, and Claudia turned in the darkness on the front lawn, and to her horror she found herself facing an Indian man in his sixties. Gupta.
“Just what are you doing?” he said, his voice tight and alarmed. He was a small, compact, bald man in an open dress shirt, hugging himself in the cold.
“I was looking,” she said, aware for the first time that she had no real business here, and that he had a right to be angry and frightened. ??
?I’m very sorry,” she said.
“I could call the police,” Gupta told her without much conviction.
“I used to live here,” Claudia said to him, hoping that would explain everything. His face relaxed slightly; he rubbed his head. “Is this true?” he asked.
“Yes. I lived here until 1986. This is where I grew up.” He kept looking at her so hard, and finally she said, “The door to the downstairs bathroom always used to stick. Maybe it still does.”
Something shifted inside him. Yes, apparently the door still stuck; it had to be forced.
“And you want to see the house now?” he said. “Is that it? At nighttime, without asking? Without telephoning?”
“Well, no, I didn’t think I was going to be able to come inside. I was just going to look, really quick, through the window.”
Mr. Gupta turned abruptly and started walking back to the house. “Well, come on, then,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s freezing out here.”
She followed him in. Walking up the three steps into the house, her legs knew exactly how high to lift as she ascended. The concrete steps were shallower than you would expect; only a seasoned pro could know precisely how to walk here, and that was what she was. She’d ascended and descended these steps thousands and thousands of times, never once thinking: Will this be my last time? Yet eventually there had been a last time, and by then so much had happened, and most of the family had already moved out, so that she had felt saturated in the house and all it represented, and was perfectly willing to let it go.
Claudia walked through the open door with Mr. Gupta and into the front hall. Once this had been all wood and white walls and photographs; now the walls were darker, an off-yellow color that made you feel that someone’s grandparents lived here. They entered the living room, where the carpeting was beige and a sectional sofa was broken up into right angles, and Claudia saw that the blurred shape she’d seen through the glass was a young Indian man of about her age, dressed in jeans and a U. Penn sweatshirt, and who, except for his full head of black hair, was a ringer for Mr. Gupta. They were father and son, both of them short, intense, a little odd looking, with slightly bulbous noses and wide eyes.
“This is David,” Mr. Gupta said. Then he nodded to Claudia and said, “The young lady lived in this house once. You’ll show her around?”
David looked searchingly at his father, attempting to find the code in his words and decipher it, but apparently there was no code, for Mr. Gupta simply left the room. The telephone rang a moment later, and Claudia heard Mr. Gupta striding upstairs, and then the sound of a door opening. Gupta the Younger looked at Claudia for a moment with displeasure; he didn’t want to show her around, not at all.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t ask to come in. You don’t have to do this.”
“My father asked me to,” he said flatly. “It’s all right. You lived here when, exactly?”
She told him the dates and he nodded. Neither father nor son had real trouble believing her; they couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to look around this house if there wasn’t a legitimate reason. She didn’t seem like a burglar, though of course she could have been casing the joint, she supposed. But from the little she had already seen here, there was not much of interest to see, or steal. The furniture was minimal; perfunctory attention had been paid to decor. The house felt like the inside of a large, clean box.
They walked through the kitchen, which was also spotless, though the oak table that had once sat beneath the round light fixture had been replaced by a metal folding table and folding chairs. David Gupta seemed to sense Claudia’s surprise or disapproval, which she’d tried to hide, for he said, “My parents are very slow to decorate. I offered to drive them to Ikea, but my mother said she doesn’t want her house looking Swedish, whatever that means. Then we didn’t discuss it again because she went to help take care of her sister in Karachi who has cancer. So I don’t know if they’ll ever furnish this place.”
“Please,” Claudia said. “It looks very nice. Look, I’m here for a minute, and then I’ll go. This is really awkward.”
“No,” he said. “You might as well see the rest.”
They toured the first floor, peering into the den, whose recessed bookshelves, which had once been stuffed to the gills, were sparsely filled. Now books alternated with small pieces of pottery, and there were wide-open spaces where nothing at all sat on the shelves, as though a family was in the process of moving in, or moving out. “My parents have almost no time to read,” David said, his voice becoming more apologetic, even slightly frantic. “They would if they could.”
That was when Claudia realized that he did not live here with them, but was just visiting. All of this was theirs, distinguishable from his. She wondered where he lived, and for a moment her thoughts tentatively landed on his home, his life, but she could not provide details, and she had no reason to try to imagine them, anyway. He offered to take her upstairs, and how could she refuse this? Up they went, David Gupta leading the way past pale green walls, underneath which the Mellow children’s ancient height marks were scratched. On the second floor, they went into the parents’ open bedroom and quickly backed out, for Mr. Gupta was sitting on the bed, talking on the telephone. In that quick moment, Claudia saw that the Guptas’ bed was high and austere, and that behind it on the unscuffed, undented wall was a shelf that contained a few knickknacks, including several Indian elephants of jade and bronze. There was no reason for her to have been astonished; what did she think, that after all this time some remnant of her parents would still be left behind?
“Let’s go up,” David said.
“Of course,” said Claudia, following him up to the third floor. “Ah. The children’s floor,” she found herself whispering.
He stopped briefly on the landing and said, “What?”
“This is where we all lived. The children.”
“It’s also where my sisters and I stay whenever we visit,” he said. The rooms were neat now; no sea monkeys and geckos lived here. There was Michael’s room, now a guest room with a day bed; there was Dashiell’s room, now loaded with cartons that said “Major Grey’s Chutney” on the side; and Holly’s room, which currently held a StairMaster and a Tunturi stationary bike, as well as a set of skis leaning against a wall. Indians on skis, Claudia thought, and she imagined the Gupta family schussing downhill in matching traditional garb.
Finally David took her into what had once been her own room, which turned out to be the room where he was staying. The bed was made, as if in a hurry, and there were a few books stacked on the night table and a filled-in acrostic from the newspaper. A piece of luggage lay open on the foot of the bed. One nautical print hung on a wall.
“This was my room,” Claudia said, and she heard how plaintive that sounded, and she felt flooded, light, nauseated. It was as though there were some recovered memory here, the kind women were always having on talk shows, under hypnosis or merely under the care of a kindly, motherish type of quack therapist. It was as though something had happened in this room, instead of nothing. In fact, she knew exactly what had happened in this room, and what had not. She wasn’t the one who’d had sex in this house; everyone else in her family had done that, but not her. Across the hall, Holly and Adam Selig had humped each other, doglike. If you’d stood outside and placed your ear against the door, as Claudia had done, you could hear repeated sounds of wet mouths sliding together, and the noises of interiority, the sounds of desire whipped up as if by a rabble-rouser within the human body.
But in this little room, this nunnery, Claudia had been intimate with no one except her troll dolls. She’d lain in the bed that used to be here, the bed with the rattan headboard. The walls were covered with posters, and the floor had had a carpet she’d chosen herself, an oatmeal grain shot through with purple. It had been her place, most intensely hers, and it had rarely occurred to her that one day she’d have to leave it, that the carpeting would be uprooted, revealing a stained wooden
floor beneath. That one day, she would have to give up the enclosure of her room and go out there into the world, for which she, alone among her siblings, was so woefully unprepared.
Here in the room, she thought she might not be able to breathe. Was it her, or was there no air here? “I think I’m going to faint,” she said.
“Oh. Oh no. Well here, come sit down,” David Gupta said, and he led her over to the bed. “Put your head between your knees,” he said, the only thing that anybody ever knew to say in such a moment, and she did as told, feeling the blood bathe the lining of her skull. David Gupta knelt in front of her on the now-blue carpet. She could see his face, staring so closely at her, his eyes wide with concern, or maybe irritation. He didn’t need this, after all. Who was she, this interloper, this sad girl who didn’t belong here or anywhere, really?
“I should go,” Claudia said, and she tried to stand up, but David placed a hand on her shoulder.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s too soon.”
“I’m fine,” she told him.
“You know, when I got my medical degree from Heidelberg,” he said, smiling, “the first thing they always told us was ‘never let the patient stand up too quickly.’”
“Oh really?” she said.
“Yes. Absolutely. And the next thing they told us was ‘always wait one hour after eating before you go for a swim.’” His face was so close, and the plunge into forced intimacy was so unexpected. “You got overwhelmed here,” he said. “It happens.”
“Apparently. I was feeling fine, and then . . . whoosh!”
“Are you any better now?” he asked, and she slowly lifted her head and realized that yes, she was better. The light in the room seemed brighter, and the floor wasn’t undulating. The room was just a room. Yes, she’d lived here once, but you would never know. She looked around anew.