What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  “Good for Peter,” Vera said sourly. “Really, I don’t care what he’s up to. I hope he does have a girlfriend or fiancée or whatever now. I hope he has a fiancée and is happy.”

  Peter was Vera’s ex-fiancé. Their separation, which had been Vera’s idea, had precipitated her move to Dorset. For all the whining he had done about the split, all the difficulties he had created and the fear he’d attempted to instill in her—all the you’re the only one for mes, the I can’t live without yous, even the you won’t survive without mes—it certainly hadn’t taken him all that long to recover, she thought.

  “Mom,” Vera said, “I’m glad you called. But I really do only have a few minutes left on my phone card. I’m sorry we can’t talk longer. I promise, if this school gig turns out to extend till fall and become something steadier, I’ll get a real phone again and can talk to you as much as you’d like.”

  “I’d love that. You know, when I was visiting the other day with Edna and Marvita . . .”

  For another ten minutes Vera listened to her mother go on about her friends from the neighborhood and how they got to see their daughters and sons at least once a week. It was hard to get her mother off the phone once she got started; Vera knew she was lonely, living in Bond Brook by herself since Vera’s father had died four years ago. She knew her two older brothers checked in from time to time, but as the only daughter, Vera knew that a certain responsibility fell to her. She also knew that she was shirking it. A son is a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life, her mother had always been fond of saying. The responsibility implied in that statement had never been lost on Vera.

  When she was finally able to hang up the phone, she sank back down at her table. She looked at the cashmere sweater and the skirt she’d hung from the hook outside her closet door. A pair of black tights hung there, too—the shoes she planned to wear would conceal the holes in the toes—and a bra and underpants so that she could wake up first thing in the morning and hop into all her clothes with no forethought. The large wheeled suitcase that she used for transporting schoolbooks and papers was also there, handle pulled out as though just waiting to be noisily dragged around the streets of Dorset. Vera unzipped the bag and took out the three folders that were used for each of her three new classes. Each had one sheet of paper in it—an attendance roster meticulously printed out by Vera the day before. She looked again at the names of the students for her first class, which would meet at eight o’clock in the morning:

  Ahmed, Sufia

  Arsenault, Katherine

  Cutler, Chelsea

  Friedman, Jamie

  Fullerton, Autumn

  Garippa, Louisa

  Hamada, Agatsuki

  Phelps, Harmony

  Smith, Kelsey

  St. Aubrey, Cecily-Anne

  True, Martha

  Willard, Jensen

  Names. Just names. Vera knew from experience that a name tells one little about a person apart from the aesthetic preferences of the parents who named her. Still, she tried to imagine a face to go with each girl on her list. Knowing their names gave her much-needed power, standing before a roomful of strangers on her first day. She viewed it as a private embarrassment that such power was even necessary—that after nearly eight years of off-and-on teaching experience, she still had to summon her every last ounce of composure to not fall apart in front of her students, mortified by the eyes and attention on her, or, worse, the downcast eyes and the lack of attentiveness. She wished she didn’t feel so fraudulent sometimes. She wished she were one of those brazen teachers who was comfortable in her own skin and loved the performative aspect of being up in front of a classroom—always glad not only to teach a class but also to put on a show. Instead, she forced her way through lectures and discussions, all the while thinking: They see through me. They know what I am.

  • • •

  Vera was strategically the first person in her classroom the following morning. She had shown up early not only to set up what she’d need for the class but also to get the lay of the land. After she had wrestled with all the chairs that were placed on the tables and set them right side up—the custodian must put the chairs up to sweep at night, she thought—she paced back and forth at the head of the classroom, skimming her fingers over the whiteboard tray, picturing the students who would fill up the long, empty tables and chairs in front of her. Near the whiteboard was a computer that one could use for teaching purposes with the aid of an overhead projector; though the computer was an older model, Vera turned it on and found that it worked. She did not have a proper desk, but another small table and chair up front seemed to be designated for the teacher. After some consideration, Vera pulled her table back a few inches from the first row of seating. She imagined that whoever sat nearest the table would appreciate not having the teacher right on top of her, so to speak.

  She placed her things on the table in the approximate order that she’d need them: her notebook of lesson plans, the stack of syllabi she’d photocopied, and her library copy of The Catcher in the Rye—the paperback version with the plain oxblood cover and mustard lettering. The serial killer cover.

  The halls were quiet. Eventually she heard footfalls, and she looked up as the sound came closer. A fellow teacher, most likely. Teachers’ walks always sounded different from students’ walks.

  A woman stopped short in the doorway of Vera’s class. “You must be the new long-term sub,” she said.

  “I am.” Vera stood up and approached the woman, extending her hand. She vaguely remembered having read that in ancient times, the handshake evolved when people were trying to find a way to show strangers that they weren’t holding weapons in their hands. Look, Ma, no gun. “I’m Vera Lundy.”

  “Welcome,” said the woman, looking down at Vera’s hand before shaking it. “I’m Karen Provencher. I teach eleventh-grade English—various classes.” The woman was wearing jeans and a crew-neck sweater. Not in a million years, thought Vera, would I dare teach a class wearing jeans. “Good luck to you, Vera,” she said in a manner that seemed fraught with meaning, as though she thought luck alone might save her. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around. Don’t hesitate to ask me any questions about anything.”

  “Thank you,” Vera said, “I appreciate that, I really do,” and then the woman was gone. She hated the fact that she had not been able to keep the shy, deferential note out of her voice in this brief exchange. Karen Provencher was probably close to her age, but Vera could not help thinking of herself as being younger than every other professional person out there—a perception that became more absurd as the years went on.

  More sounds were coming from the end of the hallway. Vera imagined students marching toward her classroom, crashing through the door, blocking off the entrance, leaving her trapped in the classroom with no way out.

  An old memory, fragmented and flashbulb quick, came to her: the angry, insistent fists pounding on the windows of her childhood home; the muffled voices exhorting her to come out from hiding, you weird bitch; and Vera herself, suddenly much smaller and cowering on the floor in the corner with all the lights turned off so no one could see where she hid. This is what it feels like to be under siege, she had thought way back then. Astonishing, the powers that old memories held . . .

  But now, when two girls entered the classroom, they took their seats without so much as a glance at Vera.

  “Hello,” she said to both of them at once, and then added inanely, “Are you here for English?”

  One of the girls nodded. Vera noted that they looked very much alike—both with light-brown hair parted in the middle, both wearing hooded sweatshirts and garish printed pajama pants. Both buxom, with the sort of overripe figures that many local teenagers seemed to have. “Who are you?” Vera asked. “I mean—what are your names?”

  “I’m Kelsey,” the girl who had nodded said.

  “
Chelsea,” chimed in the second girl.

  Two more girls came into the classroom as the first two were still shifting around in their seats and unloading their backpacks. Did all high school girls travel in pairs? Vera acknowledged the latest arrivals with a diffident nod. Hesitating, she got up and wrote “Vera Lundy, Tenth Grade, Personal Connections” on the whiteboard. “Lest there be any confusion,” she said aloud, hoping the girls might find this qualification humorous. No one laughed.

  “You’re the new teacher?” one of the newer arrivals said, tossing her hair. She had the kind of cascading blond hairstyle that was so perfectly layered and highlighted that it required a great deal of tossing in order to call more attention to it. She was impossibly tall, to Vera’s thinking—model-tall, at least five eleven. The girl beside her was equally Amazonian—a brunette, olive-skinned, willowy, with a long, elegant face like a model in a Modigliani painting.

  “I am,” Vera said, trying to inject enthusiasm into her voice, as though being the new teacher were some sort of delightful accident.

  More girls filed in, a steady stream of them now. The hallways outside the classroom echoed and reverberated with sound. Three minutes to start of class time. Too early to take attendance? Vera felt awkward, not knowing what to say in those crucial first few minutes. She waited a little longer. She felt she should be saying something, making polite chatter to put the girls at ease. But the girls were quiet. Quiet was something she had not expected. She had expected them to be talking among themselves, dismantling and filling up the silence. At last she counted heads—eleven in all—and said, “It looks like almost everyone is here. I’ll start to take attendance. Please correct me if I mispronounce any of your names, or if you prefer to be called by a nickname.”

  Some of the girls’ identities were not so hard to guess. Sufia Ahmed was a beautiful Somali girl wearing a hijab. Agatsuki Hamada, the only other nonwhite girl in the classroom, shyly told her that she preferred to be called Aggie. Between Chelsea and Kelsey and Sufia and Aggie, Vera had memorized four names—one-third of the class’s identity was mastered. The tall blond was Autumn Fullerton, and the tall, long-faced brunette was Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey. “Do you like to be called Cecily-Anne?” Vera asked, thinking she might prefer a diminutive, like Cee Cee—but the girl wrinkled her nose and nodded as though not only was the answer obvious but the question was distasteful, too. When Vera ticked off Louisa Garippa’s name, the girl called out, “I prefer to be called Lou.”

  “Lou,” Vera repeated, starting to make the adjustment in her roster.

  “I spell it L-o-o.”

  Vera looked at Loo, wondering if the girl knew she had fashioned her nickname after a British toilet. Loo had a nose ring and hair dyed a bright eggplant color. It was possible. “L-o-o,” she said. “Got it.”

  The girls on the whole did not look as Vera had expected they might look. Of course, she had not visualized a prep-school-girl stereotype—plaid skirts, blazers with crests on them—but she had not expected most of them to look as though they had just rolled out of bed, either. Vera knew from her experience at Princeton that sometimes the richer a teenage girl was, the more shabbily she dressed. In contrast, at the community college where she’d taught, the freshman girls—buoyed by the presence of lusty farmer boys in the classroom, probably—sometimes wore full makeup and tight, low-cut tops.

  “I’ll try to learn your names as quickly as possible,” Vera said. “And as for me”—here she tapped her own name on the whiteboard—“I’m Vera Lundy, your replacement for Mrs. Belisle. It may seem weird to you to have me coming in so late in the game. But I think with a little collaboration we can make the rest of the school year a good one, don’t you?” The faces looked unconvinced. Vera wished for all the world that she could take back that cloying don’t you? She hated hearing the strain in her voice already.

  “I know you all know each other at this point,” she said, “but since I don’t know you yet, it would be helpful to have a little info about you before we get started today. So what I’d like to have you do is pair up with someone. Pair up with the person you’re sitting next to; that would be easiest. I realize we have an odd number of students right now, so can we have someone be a group of three? Maybe you three up front?”

  Begrudgingly, the girls looked at one another. Some of them smirked. Some moved their notebooks a little closer together. “I’m going to give you five minutes to interview the person next to you,” Vera said. “You can ask her anything—about her family, her likes and dislikes, her favorite foods or TV shows, her favorite class . . . basically, anything that she’d be willing to share with the rest of us. You can jot down her answers in your notebooks so you don’t forget them. When five minutes are up, I will ask you to switch off, and the person you’ve just interviewed will interview you. When we’re done, you’ll be introducing your partner to me.”

  There was some buzzing, a possible threat of resistance, before the girls bowed heads and gamely went about the activity. In teaching terms, what Vera had asked them to do was known as an icebreaker exercise, designed to make students comfortable with one another on the first day of class. But these students were already comfortable with one another. It was Vera who was uncomfortable. She wondered if they could see through her transparent tactic to buy some time for herself—to put herself at ease. Based on the smirks, she suspected some of them did.

  She walked rather ineffectually up and down the rows of tables, pretending to take note of what the students were writing down. Most didn’t seem to be interviewing each other; she heard a girl in one pair say, “I called Ryan last night. He wasn’t expecting that at all,” but she didn’t chide her. At least the girls were talking and weren’t silently in revolt.

  The minutes passed. A little later than she perhaps should have—the girls had devolved into relaxed chatter about topics blatantly having nothing to do with their interviews—Vera raised her voice over everyone else’s and said, “Let’s regroup. Who’d like to start by introducing her partner?”

  Mercifully, a girl with short, curly auburn hair raised a chubby hand. “I’m Jamie Friedman, and I interviewed Harmony Phelps,” she said, gesturing to a broad-shouldered girl with a knitted cap pulled down over her eyebrows. Vera thought about asking the girl to remove her cap. She decided it wasn’t worth it. “Harmony is a sophomore at the Wallace School,” Jamie went on. The other girls tittered. “She’s fifteen. She’ll be sixteen next month. She’s a Taurus. She lives with her mom and dad and her brother and sister and her dog, Bella. She likes watching CNN and C-SPAN. Her favorite food is vegetarian stir-fry. She doesn’t eat meat. Her favorite subjects are political science and women’s studies.”

  She probably has a sister named Liberty, Vera thought, and a brother named Leaf. She nodded and listened, going up and down the rows, taking mental notes to help set each student apart in her mind. There was Aggie Hamada, for example, who seemed somehow more all-American than anyone else in the class—she radiated cleanliness, like an ad for Noxzema—and had won trophies for horse jumping. Then there was Martha True, a peer leader in a church youth group; Vera, who had no religious feelings of her own, worried that the girl would come to find her morally objectionable in some way. As they were nearly finished, Vera gave a start—there was a twelfth girl seated, a girl she hadn’t noticed before. “Ah. We’ve got a dirty dozen, after all. You must be”—she checked her roster—“Jensen Willard.”

  The girl sitting at the desk was small, with wispy dark hair cut in no particular style. She was wearing a charcoal-colored dress that looked like something someone’s grandmother had donated to Goodwill; it was made of a crinkly fabric, with a floppy, withered bow at the neck. The dress was accessorized with mud-caked combat boots, the long laces wound around her calves several times. Vera couldn’t help thinking that the girl’s style suited her. But how had she managed to creep in so quietly wearing those heavy boots?

  “W
e were just finishing up introductions of each other,” Vera said to her, “mostly for my benefit. Is there anything you’d like to tell me about yourself?”

  “Not really.”

  Vera gave a tight smile. “Okay then. I suppose it’s only fair if I tell you all a little about me, and then we’ll talk a bit about what we’re going to be doing the rest of the school year.”

  Vera abhorred talking about herself, but she did her best. She skipped the ignominy of her twenties (her acquisition of a flimsy undergraduate arts degree that netted her a succession of demeaning, low-paying jobs and inspired her decision to apply to graduate school) and bulldozed straight ahead to Princeton and the teaching fellowship and her job working for literary agent Christopher Sime. She tried to explain what a literary agent did, what the duties of a literary agent’s assistant were; she did not mention that the job had paid so poorly that she had had to move back to Maine, back into the arms of a high school sweetheart who had promised some financial security. She made a calculated mention of her experience teaching college English, neglecting to mention that she had never taught high school students before. Wondering how to wrap things up, she added lamely, “I live right here in Dorset—it’s just me, by myself. I’m working on a book based on a true-crime case, which I anticipate I’ll have completed within the year.”

  The part about the book based on a real murder might have been best left unsaid. She had thirty-two rough manuscript pages written—not exactly what one might call a work in progress in the true sense of the word progress. She hoped none of the girls would inquire further about this point. But of course one hand shot up. It was Loo Garippa’s. “What true-crime case are you writing about?” she asked.

  “Well,” Vera demurred, “I don’t like to tell too much about an unfinished project. I worry that it’ll jinx things. But I promise, when there’s more to tell, you’ll all be among the first to know. “