The Position

by Meg Wolitzer

  People always wanted to hear about that time, that strange experience, and usually she was willing to say a few things to them about it. Over time she formulated a canned response, which she used again and again, something along the lines of: Well, it was pretty intense. I guess it embarrassed me. It embarrassed my brothers and my sister, too. But we got through it. And then she tried to change the subject, to train the attention back toward the other person, which invariably the other person wanted anyway. She was relieved when she could listen again.

  As a child, Claudia had been the kind of girl whom teachers liked to have around. She’d clapped erasers fiercely for her kindergarten teacher, Ms. Pernak, whom she had loved, back when teachers used erasers and blackboards. She was a Mellow, a famous Mellow, and most of the teachers had felt sorry for her, poor funny-looking little duck, having to go through childhood living under the vast wing of her parents’ sex life.

  School had saved her from their sex life and from the uproar that sprang up around it. On the night that her father found out that his wife was ending their marriage, he had taken all the children for a wild car ride. Claudia, not understanding any of the specifics yet but still somehow understanding the essence of what was happening, had sat in the very back of the station wagon and closed her eyes. Think of school, she told herself. Think of school. As though it were a temple, a place of quiet worship. Her family was fracturing in ways that made no sense, but school was still there for her, day after day, and the teachers looked after her tenderly.

  And this was how, so many years later, Claudia had come to choose the subject for her student film. It was to be called K Through 6, and it would be a documentary about the teachers she’d had in elementary school in Wontauket. She would find out what had happened to them, and what they had thought about their students, and about teaching in general, and about their own lives over the decades that had passed. Claudia had looked them up on the Internet and had then contacted the ones she’d been able to locate, and each of them had agreed to be interviewed on-camera. None of them seemed particularly surprised that Claudia wanted to come interview them. Two were still teaching at the school, three had retired, and two more, she learned from the others, were dead. Today she would be filming the first of them, Ms. Pernak, and she felt a certain anxiety and excitement at the prospect, not only because she’d never made a movie before and didn’t know what she was doing, but also because she had no idea of what she would find.

  Claudia pulled her white car onto the Wontauket exit and headed into the heart of the town. She drove in broad circles, checking out the main drag dispassionately, the new nail salons and old stationery stores and the Brunckhorst deli, where macaroni salad sat for years in metal tubs. The car passed the Wontauket dump, where Dashiell used to dig, and on whose periphery Claudia and Dashiell played hiding and tagging games in a frenzy, unattended for an entire day, back in the time when parents could risk letting their children out of sight.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to make a movie in Wontauket,” Dashiell had emailed her the week before. Though he was always frantic at the campaign office in Rhode Island, their emails were fairly constant. Ordinarily Dashiell was kind and praised Claudia’s meek steps out into the world, but when she wrote that she was going out to Wontauket to shoot a student film, he had written back, “I don’t know why you’d want to do that. I’d never go back.”

  “Really?” she wrote. “Not even to see how it’s changed?”

  “No way,” he responded. “Let it change without me. I’m done with that place.”

  Claudia had been done with it too, but now, suddenly, she wasn’t. She didn’t have to be at the elementary school until four today, and there was time to kill, and the only way to spend it would be to go take a look at the house. Claudia hadn’t known the prospect would make her so anxious. She pressed the search function on the radio, quickly located one of those “smooth jazz” stations, with its honey-dripping female DJs and noodling guitar riffs. She tried to let the insipid music lull her, and all the while she looked around and noted that the chicken take-out place, Pluck of the Draw, had survived the years of her absence, its aromatic grease still being released through a furred vent, and that so had the Clothes Pony, where Claudia had gone with her mother to buy an ugly orange dress for the band concert in seventh grade. She’d been third flute, nothing special.

  Claudia took a right and plunged back into the neighborhood of collegiate streets, where the house sat waiting. Here were Amherst Drive and Bryn Mawr Avenue and Wellesley Lane; here were Princeton Court and Grinnell Way, which had always puzzled Wontauket residents who had never heard of that college, for it was all the way out in Nowhere, Iowa, unlike the other, East Coast jewel boxes, which were meant to inspire envy. The trees in the neighborhood were massive, and what had appeared brittle and young and anemic back then had now been filled in, as though a child had diligently worked a green crayon across an enormous page.

  She turned onto Swarthmore Circle and fastidiously parallel-parked across the street from the house, shut off the jazz and the engine. There it was, almost unrecognizable now, though still it evoked some feeling of being unnerved and vulnerable. The cedar shingles and rough brick had been whitewashed, and the front door was turquoise and gaudy, with geometric shapes gouged into the wood and a big brass knocker. The mailbox at the curb read “Gupta,” which at first was surprising, for she remembered that the house had been sold to a family named Feng. It seemed odd to Claudia that the Fengs would have sold the house so soon. The reason that Roz Mellow had eventually sold the place was because her marriage was long over and the last child, Claudia, was going off to college. The Fengs hadn’t seemed the type of couple to get divorced or even uproot themselves; both of them were tiny and deferential, and they had served Claudia and her mother a thermos of green tea and a bag of Brach’s hard candies to seal the deal.

  That year, 1986, was the height of pan-Asiafication in Wontauket. The suburb had gone from blond kids on banana-seat Schwinns to an oasis of darker ones who, as time passed, traveled on more evolved vehicles: dirt bikes, skateboards, electric scooters, and eventually longboards, those land-kayaks rolling along suburban tar. Claudia sat for a few moments in the car, just looking at the house and the peaceful street, which many years ago had absorbed the celebrity and scandal of her parents, and then the end of the Mellow marriage, all done in public, all done so everyone could see it and have an opinion. The ordinary had replaced the unusual, and the individual and collective sorrows of the Mellow family, formerly of 8 Swarthmore Circle, had been pulled into the atmosphere and dispersed over time.

  She would have liked to email Dashiell right now and tell him it was okay, he could come back here, it wouldn’t be as bad as he thought. She almost wanted to write to all of them and find some excuse to bring them here. But none of them would ever come. Holly was Holly—disconnected from the others, fucked-up, out of commission, essentially useless to the family, for reasons that Claudia had not been able to name, without resorting to a kind of babble that involved generic words like “damage,” “inadequacy,” and “anger,” specifically the “unresolved” kind. And Michael was so preoccupied. She thought about him now, off in Florida with their father and Elise. She pictured Paul Mellow in shorts and sandals, his beard a mix of curling white and gray, his eyes still kind and alert and wounded. It was difficult to imagine Michael relaxing down there with him, for Michael didn’t relax; it wasn’t in his uptight nature. So what was he doing down there? Though he had supposedly gone to Florida for only one week, two weeks had already gone by, and there he stayed.

  “I’m fine,” Michael had told his sister when she telephoned him at the condominium a few days earlier. She’d felt the need for a phone call so that she could actually hear his voice and gauge how he sounded. She decided that he sounded very strange.

  “Are you sure?” she asked him.

  “Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be? Did someone say something about me?”r />
  “Don’t get paranoid. I was just wondering, that’s all. I thought you were only staying a week.”

  “Yes, well, that was the plan,” he said. “But then the week went by and Dad hadn’t changed his mind about the book yet, and basically I thought, oh what the hell, I’ll stay here. Why not? It’s really nice. I got a little leave from work. No big deal.”

  It was unlike Michael to leave work for a minute. The story got stranger and stranger. “Thea thinks it’s fine,” said Michael. “And I think it’s very productive that I’m here. Dad and I are working things out. Mom will be pleased.” Then he’d quickly gotten off the phone.

  Claudia saw that someone was at the blue mailbox down the street now, opening it and depositing letters. It was a woman wearing a down vest and thick woolen headband, and she paused for a moment, looking in Claudia’s direction, and then approached the car. It was Elaine Gamble; the formerly pretty, crazy Elaine Gamble, whose son had gone missing in Vietnam, was now a senior citizen, her hair a silvery gray. Alone, childless, divorced, she had stayed on in her own house diagonally across the street from the Mellows’/Fengs’/Guptas’ house, and here she was, scrawnier, fairer, less wild-eyed than she used to be, as though time could even take care of the problem of incessant thoughts about a son, dead in a misbegotten war.

  Claudia opened the car door and stood to meet her. “Claudia Mellow? Is that you?” Mrs. Gamble asked.

  “It’s me,” Claudia said, trying to smile, and in one fluid movement the woman swept her up into her arms mother-style, though they’d never been nearly as affectionate back when the Mellows lived on Swarthmore. Elaine Gamble had been too stunned and disturbed back then. Now she was somehow sanded down, smoother, as though she’d been listening to nothing but that jazz station.

  “Well, what in the world are you doing here?” the woman asked. “And at this time of year?”

  “Actually, I’m making a little film,” Claudia said, at first with pride, and then embarrassment. The equipment poking up from the back seat of the Maxima seemed to give her away, the spindly tripod and lights and the handheld Arriflex and the Nagra, all of which she would have to clumsily manage today without a crew, without help. She was on her own here, alone, and it had all been her choice, but when asked to explain herself, she couldn’t. Something must have brought her back here—a very strong wind, maybe?

  “Well, isn’t that just great,” said Mrs. Gamble. “I don’t think we’ve ever had a movie shot on this block. The last time the cameras were here was, well, with your mother and father.”

  “Oh. Right.” There was silence. Claudia didn’t know what else to say now. Is Stu still missing in Southeast Asia, or did they find his remains? She wasn’t good in social moments like these.

  “I work at the library part-time,” Mrs. Gamble offered. “There’s a group of us ladies who’ve lived here forever. I get first pick of all the seven-day express books. That’s a plus; all the juicy novels. And you—you’re a filmmaker.”

  “No,” Claudia said sharply. “Not really. This is my first attempt.” She noticed, all of a sudden, that Elaine Gamble’s wrist was exposed and that she wasn’t wearing her old POW/MIA bracelet. Finally, she must have had it cut off or pried open. Claudia blinked and felt an unaccountable disorientation, and so she tried to smile.

  “Well, good luck to you,” said Mrs. Gamble. “And tell your mom hello. And your dad, too. And that sweet brother of yours, that Michael, say hello from me. I always liked him.”

  She turned to leave, and Claudia called after her, “Mrs. Gamble?” The woman turned around. “Who are the Guptas?”

  “Pardon?” said Mrs. Gamble.

  “The Guptas. Who live in the house now?”

  “I don’t really know them, but they’re a husband and wife with grown children. They’re Indian. Indian-Indian. Obviously. They own Bombay Café, the restaurant downtown.”

  “What happened to the Fengs?” asked Claudia.

  Mrs. Gamble squinted. “Oh yes, the Chinese. They moved out long ago. Went back to China, I believe, or maybe it was just to Queens. I’m embarrassed to admit I can’t really recall.”

  Then she was off with a shy, quick wave, hurrying back into her house. Claudia looked over at the Guptas’ house, which was dark inside and without a car in the driveway. What did the rooms look like? She wanted to go in and see what was there now, what had been dismantled, what no longer existed. Maybe, before she finished the shoot in a few weeks, she would return to the house and see if she could find a way to get inside. But now it was time to drive off to the school to meet Ms. Pernak.

  School had been wonderful because her teachers, particularly Ms. Pernak, had wanted to protect her from her parents, she had once realized, those exhibitionists, those pornographers, though surely at least a few of the teachers owned a copy of Pleasuring. “Why do you choose to live in the suburbs?” an interviewer had once asked Paul and Roz, and they’d answered that they wanted to give their children a life of “open spaces.” It didn’t matter to them that their neighbors might not be as sophisticated as people in the city. But only twenty minutes away by car, in a town less affluent and open-minded, candlelight marches were held in 1975 in front of the public library, and the marchers demanded that Pleasuring be banned, even though they hadn’t bothered to learn that the library had already removed the book from its collection. But the temptation of a march, with torches held aloft and a late-night claiming of suburban streets, was too great for angry village parents who had dreams of witch-burning and barnstorming in their heads, as though their own fierce response would drown out the sounds of two people making love.

  Claudia’s teachers presented themselves as being above the scandal, the gossip, and even being above sex itself. Some of the younger ones unconsciously began to dress less like women and more like the children they taught. If you looked back at class pictures from that time you would see twenty-six-year-old teachers in tartan plaid and flat shoes and even with the occasional pigtails hanging loosely from either side of the head.

  Claudia parked the car now in the near-empty lot at Felice P. Bolander Elementary. No one even remembered the woman whose name was gouged into a granite slab on the tan brick side of a building. She had died in 1965, in the era of space flights and molded gelatin desserts. Felice P. Bolander, Claudia had once heard, had been a librarian in the school district back then, recommending her favorite children’s authors to whoever would listen, until cancer felled her at age thirty-seven. There were no yearly mammograms back then to detect the lump that stayed suspended in her breast like a small chunk of fruit in one of those gelatin desserts.

  Someone on the board of superintendents had felt sentimental about the pale woman who used to stand copies of Blueberries for Sal and The Yearling up on the library table and actually polish their transparent plastic covers with a chamois cloth. So a few years later, when the ground was broken for the new elementary school, it was named after her. Eventually, the people who had known Felice P. Bolander began to retire, or move away, or die, and the new crops of yearly children thought of her not as a person but as a name, and then not really as a name but as a word. Where do you go to school? Bolander.

  Claudia dragged her Arriflex and Nagra and the rest of the equipment piece by piece from the backseat and trunk of the car. Her hands were unsteady as she lifted the cameras onto the carpeted wooden plank, and wound up the coils of rubber so they wouldn’t drag under the wheels.

  Inside the building, there were sounds of chairs being moved and papers being collated. There was a distant clang of gym equipment, or was it cafeteria trays, and Claudia stood still in the hallway with her burden of equipment, surprised at the lack of security in this age of Columbine, and finally she just walked on through, a giant in a strange, small land.

  A man appeared from the AV room and stood looking at her for a moment. Small, bony-faced, lightbulb-headed, yes, yes, he was Mr. Corcoran, who ran the media center then and forever after. “Can I help you?�
�� he asked.

  “Mr. Corcoran? I used to go here? Claudia Mellow?” she said, all questions, waiting for the lightbulb to in fact light up, which it did momentarily.

  “Yes, Claudia, right. We wondered what became of all of you,” he said.

  “Well,” Claudia said stiffly, “I wondered what became of all of you.”

  “Me?”

  “Not you in particular. My teachers, I mean. K through six.”

  “You’re making some sort of film?” Mr. Corcoran asked. “That’s heavy-duty equipment there. You should see what we’ve got in here.” He motioned with his head toward the AV room, and to be polite she let him take her inside to show her all the innovations, the taxpayer money that had been spent on media since she was a child. The room was filled with metal stands on which sat state-of-the-art video cameras and slide projectors and DVD players and monitors.

  “Very impressive,” she said.

  He nodded. “We should use this stuff to make a movie about you. About all the kids who’ve graduated, and what they’ve done with their lives.” He paused. “I didn’t ask you,” he said. “What exactly have you done?”

  At which point something inside Claudia tightened and squinted; she didn’t want to talk about her own adult life and its shapelessness and disappointments. K through six was a perfect bracket of time; that was where she wanted to be. “Oh, I’ve been in women’s prison,” she heard herself say. He stared at her for a moment, so she quickly put him out of his misery. “Only kidding,” she added.

  “Very good, very good, you had me there,” said Mr. Corcoran.

  Claudia found the kindergarten classroom by some sort of interior compass, and there was Ms. Pernak, just as she’d said during their brief but friendly telephone conversation, except she was a little different, as though she were Ms. Pernak’s aunt. She was still big and broad-shouldered, but her hair was short now, frosted. She wore a blazer adorned with a glittering pin. There was no teacher’s desk in the classroom—those had been done away with years ago, and the Socratic method, even the K through six version, had been abandoned, along with any semblance of unchallenged authority. The teacher never had time to sit, anyway; she wandered the room during the day, crouching, kneeling, tying, fixing, drying, wiping, saving, changing, imploring.