The thing about teaching reading to seven-year-olds is that you say the same sentences hundreds of times and they become invisible, the way a doorframe becomes invisible, the way your own face in the bathroom mirror stops being a face and becomes just the thing you check before leaving the house.
“Close your eyes,” Mrs. Alderman said, twenty-three times a day, five days a week, thirty-six weeks a year, for nineteen years. “Now picture what’s happening in the story.”
She was good at it. The children closed their eyes. Some of them smiled. The ones who were struggling — the ones who read the as teh, who reversed their b’s and d’s, who stalled at every unfamiliar word like a car hitting a curb — those children sometimes opened their eyes again almost immediately, and she would kneel next to them and say, gently, “Try again. What do you see?”
She was forty-three when her daughter Grace, who was studying psychology at Sheffield, came home for Easter and mentioned over dinner that she’d learned about something called aphantasia.
“Some people can’t make mental pictures at all,” Grace said, pouring more wine than she needed. “Like, when you say ‘imagine a beach,’ they don’t see anything. They just — know things about a beach. Sand, water, that kind of thing. But no picture.”
Helen Alderman put her fork down.
“What do you mean, see?” she said.
Grace laughed. “Like, see. In your mind. A picture.”
“You actually see a beach,” Helen said. “Right now. If I said beach, you’d see one.”
“Obviously,” Grace said. “Mum, everyone does this.”
Helen looked at her husband, Brian, who was buttering bread with the concentrated attention he gave to anything that let him not participate in the conversation. “Brian,” she said. “When someone says ‘picture a beach,’ do you actually see one?”
“Course,” Brian said. “Scarborough, usually. With the seagull that stole your chips.”
She did not sleep well that night. She lay in the dark and tried to see Scarborough and saw nothing — not blackness, which would have been something, but the same nothing that had always been there, the nothing she had never noticed because she’d never known it was nothing. She knew Scarborough. She knew the curve of the bay and the colour of the sand and the particular way the amusement arcades smelled of sugar and old carpet. She knew the chip-stealing seagull, a herring gull, massive, that had landed on the wall next to her and simply taken the chips from her hand with a precision that felt personal. She knew all of this. She could describe it in detail. But she could not see it.
She went online at two in the morning and found a forum. Hundreds of people. Thousands. All of them describing the same thing: the moment they realised that “picture this” and “I can see it now” and “close your eyes and imagine” were not metaphors. A man who was a physicist. A woman who was a painter. A retired teacher — Helen stopped reading at that one, then went back to it, then closed the laptop.
The Monday after Easter, she drove to school and sat in the car park for ten minutes. Room 14. Twenty-three children. They were halfway through Charlotte’s Web, and today Wilbur was going to learn that Charlotte was dying, and Helen had planned to say what she always said: Close your eyes. Picture Wilbur in the doorway of the barn. What does his face look like?
She had said this about hundreds of characters in hundreds of books. Wilbur. The Gruffalo. Fantastic Mr. Fox. Harry, standing in front of the Mirror of Erised, seeing his parents for the first time. She had read these scenes aloud and told the children to close their eyes and see, and they had closed their eyes and seen, and she had closed her eyes and — what? What had she been doing?
She had been understanding. She had been feeling the shape of the scene the way you feel the shape of a room when the lights go off — not seeing, but knowing where everything is. She had known that Wilbur was standing in a doorway and that the doorway was in a barn and that the barn smelled of hay and manure and warm animal, and she had known that Charlotte was in the upper corner of the door frame, and she had felt something — the size of the barn, the lateness of the season — without ever producing a picture. The understanding had always been enough. It had always been, she now realised, mistaken for the picture.
She went inside. She taught the lesson. She reached the moment — Wilbur asking Charlotte why she was so quiet — and she said, “Close your eyes.”
Twenty-three children closed their eyes.
“What do you see?” she said.
“Wilbur,” said Ellie Farnham, in the front row, eyes screwed shut with effort. “He’s got mud on him. And he looks worried.”
“What does worried look like?” Helen said. She had never asked this before.
Ellie scrunched her face. “His ears are down. And his eyes are — they’re looking at Charlotte but Charlotte’s looking somewhere else. Charlotte’s looking at the sky.”
None of this was in the text. Ellie was generating a picture that included details the book hadn’t provided — mud, the direction of Charlotte’s gaze, a sky visible through the barn door that E.B. White never mentioned. Ellie’s reading of the book was producing a film that Helen had never seen and could never see, and Ellie was seven.
“That’s brilliant, Ellie,” Helen said. She meant it differently than she had ever meant it before.
At lunch she sat in the staffroom with her sandwich and her marking and did not tell anyone. What would she say? I’ve been teaching children to do something I can’t do, for nineteen years, and I only just found out. It sounded like a confession. But it also sounded like something else — like a question she didn’t have the shape of yet.
Because the thing was, she was a good reading teacher. She was. Her children loved books. They left her class reading above their age, most of them, and the ones who didn’t leave reading above their age left reading, which was the more important thing. She had taught hundreds of children to close their eyes and picture the story, and it had worked. She had done it without being able to do it herself, the way — she thought of this in the car on the way home and almost laughed — the way a singing teacher with no voice might still teach someone to sing by knowing exactly what singing requires without being able to produce it.
But that wasn’t quite right either, because she hadn’t known she couldn’t produce it. She had thought she was producing it. She had thought that the understanding, the feeling of shape and atmosphere and emotion that came when she read, was the picture. That what she experienced was what everyone experienced. That “picture this” was shorthand for “know this fully,” the way “see what I mean” is shorthand for “understand what I mean.”
Except “see what I mean” might not be shorthand either. Grace saw things she meant. Brian saw Scarborough. Ellie Farnham saw mud on Wilbur that the text hadn’t put there.
That night she pulled Charlotte’s Web off the shelf — her own copy, the one she’d had since she was eight, the spine cracked, the cover gone soft at the corners — and read the death scene. Charlotte, alone at the fairground after Wilbur has been taken home. No one was with her when she died. The sentence that had always hurt most: No one was with her when she died.
It still hurt. It hurt exactly as much as it always had. The words came in and the hurt went through her like weather and she could not see Charlotte — could not see the web going grey, could not see the empty fairground — but she could feel the sentence’s weight, its plainness, the way no one sat at the beginning and died sat at the end and between them was the whole lonely fact of it.
She closed the book and sat on the sofa and thought about all the children she had taught. All the eyes closed. All the pictures she had asked them to make, and all the understanding she had been making instead, and the question that was forming was not have I been doing it wrong but something harder: how many ways are there to be inside a book, and is mine less?
She didn’t know. She suspected not. She suspected that the understanding was its own kind of seeing — that the barn she couldn’t picture was as real to her as Ellie’s mud-spattered Wilbur was to Ellie, just built from different material. But she couldn’t be sure, because the whole problem was that you couldn’t compare experiences you could only have one of.
On Tuesday she asked the children to keep their eyes open.
“I want to try something different,” she said. “Instead of picturing the story, I want you to listen to how the words sound. Listen to the sentence. Feel the shape of it. Where does it go fast? Where does it go slow?”
The children looked at her with the expression children reserve for adults who have suddenly changed the rules. Then Ellie Farnham said, “Like the beat?”
“Like the beat,” Helen said.
She read the next chapter aloud, and when she got to a long sentence she slowed down, and when she got to a short one she let it land, and the children sat there with their eyes open, listening not to the story but to the sound of the story, and Helen thought: this is what I’ve been doing all along. Hearing the shape. Feeling the rhythm. Understanding the weight of no one was with her when she died not because she could see Charlotte alone but because the sentence itself was alone — flat, undecorated, final.
After school she drove home and did not tell Brian. She would tell him eventually. She would explain that the thing she couldn’t do was called aphantasia and that it didn’t mean anything was wrong, just that her mind worked differently, the way some people hear music in colour and some don’t. He would say something kind and slightly baffled and go back to whatever he was doing, and the conversation would become another thing she knew without being able to see.
But for now she sat in the car with the engine off and the radio playing something she wasn’t listening to, and she held in her mind — not pictured, held — all the classrooms and all the children and all the years of close your eyes, what do you see?, and what she felt was not grief, and not relief, but something in between: the particular vertigo of discovering that the ground you’ve been standing on is a different ground than you thought, and it held you just the same.