I pushed through the swinging door into the kitchen. The kitchen! Jack Tripper’s domain. Its walls were covered in orange plaid wallpaper that had a gaudily busy, cheerful effect, and on them hung various small planters, decorative straw or hemp baskets, old iron trivets, a note board. The round pedestal table and three bentwood chairs sat in the middle of the room, in front of the weathered Harvest Gold fridge. On the counter sat a set of cookie jars, a covered toaster, and on the stove sat a clear Pyrex stovetop coffee percolator. Crocheted curtains from Sears, that long-gone scion of department store industry, hung over the window above the sink.

The sun beamed through the window over the sink and a slice of light crawled up the wall, turning the plaid wallpaper into an even brighter, manic version of itself; everything gleamed in its humble yellow-orange-gold mix. The copper salmon-shaped molds hanging on the walls glinted so hard that my eyes watered when I stared at them—and I stared at everything, everything, sunk into the warm colors of a decade I had only ever dreamed about. Another reality had swallowed me.

I opened one of the cabinets, the one nearest the sink. I took down a box of Nabisco New Tea Time cookies, an authentic box circa 1977, and flipped it over. It was light, empty. It looked like a paper box on the outside, but inside the box was another, more durable box made from acrylic plastic, something I could fill and refill accordingly, so when I ate anything in this kitchen there would be no contemporary packaging or labels to distract from the otherwise airtight timeline.

I put the cookie box back where I found it and looked out the kitchen window. Instead of the wilderness, or the trees, or any of my property, I could only see the building next door, just like it was on the show.

There were two bedrooms—Janet and Chrissy shared a room, and Jack had his own—and these, too, were done up in the style of the first three and a half seasons. Chrissy and Janet’s bedroom was on a similar mechanism as the landlords’ apartment downstairs because the décor changed drastically in the fourth-season episode “And Baby Makes Four,” and outside their bedroom door I felt around until I felt a panel open, and I found a lever within just like the one downstairs. I pulled it and listened to the bedroom turn itself around inside. The doors to these revolving rooms needed to be closed in order for the change to happen, so I would never be able to witness the actual transformation. When it was finished, the room had indeed changed itself—the bed frames were painted a different color, a different wallpaper, different color scheme. I was looking three years into my own future. I shut the door and pulled the lever again, reversing the change, and when I saw the original décor back in place I felt better, cleaner, as if a potential catastrophe had been handled so smoothly and instantly that it slipped from my mind.