What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  The man who’d taken the seat next to her ordered a bottled beer and introduced himself as Sam—or was it Stan? Hard to make out over the jukebox, not that it mattered to Vera. He might have been in his late forties but wore a boyish-looking athletic jersey; even after all these years, Vera never ceased to be surprised when athletically inclined men paid attention to her. She thought herself too intelligent-looking to warrant a second glace from them. Perhaps the memories of high school jocks jeering at her in the halls had helped her to formulate this opinion. She could only conclude, then, that some men didn’t look at her very closely or were not very picky.

  “Let me guess,” the man in the athletic jersey said. “You’re a dancer, right? You have a dancer’s body.”

  Vera looked askance at him; she had heard this one before. “No,” she said. “I’m a teacher.”

  “What grade?”

  “I’ve taught college English.”

  “You look young to be teaching college.”

  “I’m a writer, too,” Vera said carelessly, draining her drink. This was something she simply never said to other adults. They never believed it, for one thing.

  “Yeah? Whaddaya write—I mean, nonfiction or fiction or what?”

  Vera wondered if he knew the difference between the two, never mind the or what. “It’s about Ivan Schlosser. He was what I guess you could call a minor serial killer from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. He killed a preteen girl in Vermont, a teenage girl in New Hampshire, and a teenage girl right here in Maine, in my own hometown. There may have been other victims, but those were the only ones they pinned on him. I’m afraid his crimes were eclipsed by the much more publicized crimes of Ted Bundy.”

  “Whatever gave a little lady like you an idea to write a book about a thing like that?” the man asked, seeming genuinely perplexed.

  A little lady like you. This struck Vera as rich. “Well, for one thing, the crimes really happened. And I personally find Schlosser very interesting.” Vera realized she was having a hard time saying the word Schlosser. Her next drink had arrived, and she took a long pull from her straw. “For another thing, crime itself is interesting.”

  The man named Sam or Stan said, “You oughta write one about that little girl they found choked to death. Now that’s a story right there.”

  “Funny, you’re not the first person to suggest that to me recently,” Vera said. “However, I suspect that story isn’t finished yet. Despite what the public seems to think, I don’t think they’ve arrested the right guy. I could be wrong, and I hope, for the sake of all the other little girls out there, that I am. Do you want to know what I think?” She leaned in a little closer to the man—not trying to be provocative, exactly, but wanting to be sure he heard her.

  “Sure, honey,” he said. “Who do you think did it?”

  “Well, that I don’t know. I was just going to tell you an idea that I’ve often thought about. See, sometimes I think it’s a fine line between being a writer and being a serial killer. It’s all about creation versus anticreation. Building versus destroying. They both require a lot of energy, don’t they? The difference between the two vocations might as well be arrived at by a coin toss. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one more likely to keep me out of jail.”

  The man named Sam or Stan processed this for a second or two. Then he muttered something about needing to excuse himself to go to the restroom. She knew he would not be returning to his seat near her. She was terribly tickled with herself. Nearing the bottom of her fourth gin and tonic, she wondered why the drinks were hitting her so hard; rummaging around in her recent memory, she recalled that all she had eaten that day was a small ham sandwich, consumed at six in the morning. The air around her was beginning to feel soft and muted and velvety, which wasn’t unpleasant; it was, however, a sure signal that she should leave soon.

  Once outside the bar, she found that a bitter wind had unexpectedly picked up—the first wintry night in more than a week—and as she drew her coat closer around her and ducked her head, a couple of frat-boy types rounding the corner and heading toward the bar shouted, “You’re going the wrong way, baby!” She smiled at them, head still held low. Was she supposed to act offended? She never knew how to negotiate such things.

  The more she walked, the more evident her excesses became. She felt as if she were swimming through the streets of Dorset with the purpose and precision of a shark, yet she somehow also felt as though she were seeing herself at a great distance, hurrying home, trying to look sober and dignified and, yes, driven, while the real Vera floated fuzzily overhead. Her bladder strained with fullness. On one of her more recent late-night walks home from the bar, when no one else was out on the streets to witness this, she had not been able to make it home before her bladder let go—her tights and shoes were soaked by the time she let herself into her apartment, and she’d felt morbidly ashamed. The last thing she needed was to become one of those drunks who soiled herself.

  Five blocks away from her apartment, she became aware of an even greater cause for concern than her straining bladder. She could hear footsteps behind her, and although it was too dark for shadows, she almost thought she could feel a shadow in front of her, cupping her like a cool hand—and she knew that such shadows didn’t stay silent and passive for long, the way shadows were supposed to. She knew that some shadows gathered and grew, becoming a whole coven of shadows, an unkindness of them—a mob.

  Hey, Vera, where are you going? Are you going to cast some more witchy spells? Are you going to wish for some more people to die? Death is just a part of life, right, Vera? You weird fucking bitch. You wanted that to happen to Heidi, didn’t you?

  This shadow had footfalls. This shadow was a certainty now. She tried to gauge its distance or nearness without turning around—no, she couldn’t turn around, for if she turned around she might freeze on the spot, just as one always did in nightmares. And the last time that had happened . . . well, the last time that had happened, all those years ago, it had ended very badly for Vera.

  Keep going, she told herself sternly. Don’t panic. She sped up her steps, clutching the strap of the purse she had slung, bandolero style, across her body in the manner she’d learned from living in New York City. She withdrew her apartment keys from the zippered sleeve of her purse, holding them so that the point jutted out between her fingers—a makeshift weapon suitable for stabbing an assailant in the eye, if it came to that. And then she was on the steps of her apartment, practically tripping in her haste to get up them and into the safety of indoors. She let herself in and turned around just long enough to see a man tramping down the street, away from her and toward whatever destination he’d had in mind all along.

  She closed the front door behind her. You’re a paranoid fool, Vera thought, now doubled over in front of the door to her studio, tears smarting in her eyes as she turned the key in the lock. In the battle between terror and her bladder, the urgency of her bladder now took precedence.

  After hobbling to the bathroom to relieve herself, she chucked herself onto her mattress, fully clothed, and fell asleep within minutes—a dreamless, stagnant sleep.

  • • •

  Next morning came early—even earlier than planned, due to the last-minute decision to photocopy the handout—and Vera felt weak and bleary as she prepared for her first class. She had a horrible suspicion that she still stank of gin, though she had given her teeth and tongue a thorough brushing before she left for work. She waited as the girls from her first section began to turn up, in pairs and sometimes in trios; she smiled wanly at each and wondered if she should make small talk, but doing so seemed too forced and pitiful. Better to sit and look busy with paperwork. She adjusted what few notes she’d written on the day’s assigned reading and stacked and restacked her pile of handouts as though the success of the class depended on their alignment.

  When the last girl had come in—Jensen Willard, l
oping a little from the weight of her giant army knapsack—Vera said, “All right, let’s get started. You all have Catcher with you, I hope. I ended yesterday’s class by reading a short excerpt from the first chapter. To put us in the mood of the novel, and because I think it bears hearing one more time, I would like to read the novel’s introductory paragraph again.”

  Vera knew she should probably ask a volunteer to read aloud, but she wasn’t sure she could stand to hear Salinger’s narrative butchered by a faltering amateur reader. Vera knew that she read well. Her voice was one of her strong suits, capable of producing many tones and emphasizing nuances of meaning through its inflections. And indeed, the girls all seemed to pay attention when she read, even though they had heard the exact same excerpt the day before. When she was finished reading, Vera stuck her bookmark in her copy of the novel and squarely faced the students. She wished she had thought to bring a bottle of water to class. Her mouth was so dry.

  “Now,” she said, working her way down the first row of tables, pausing again for effect as she moved down the second row, “Holden starts off by saying that what readers probably would want to know about him is ‘that David Copperfield kind of crap’—in other words, the basic biographical details that writers often provide for their characters at the beginning of a novel. Who he is, where he’s from, what his parents do for a living, what his grandparents did before that. But what’s interesting is that he does not, in fact, go on to tell the readers ‘that David Copperfield kind of crap.’ Do you think Holden is cheating readers of what they really want to know? Is it what you would really want to know, when first ‘meeting’ a new character?”

  “Depends on the character,” Jamie Friedman said promptly.

  Vera gave Jamie a small, approving nod. “Why do you say that? Why would it depend?”

  Jamie went blank. She had shot her wad too quickly and was now overthinking it, Vera could see. “Anyone else want to hazard a guess? An opinion as to why it might depend on the character?”

  “Well, with some characters,” one girl said—Martha True, a bespectacled girl with a sharp little chin and a wobbly, nasal voice—“their background is important to the plot. With others, you don’t really need to know all that stuff to be able to understand them.”

  “Sometimes having all that background stuff gets boring,” Loo Garippa said. “Some stories start off talking about somebody’s great-grandfather or something, and who cares? It doesn’t really have anything to do with what happens later.”

  Vera was already pleased with the direction the class was taking. These girls were sharper, sad to say, than some of her community college students had been. They were certainly more responsive. She uncapped one of her whiteboard markers and drew an uneven triangle on the board. For the next ten minutes she spoke about rising actions and climaxes (there was no giggling when she said “climax,” as she had expected there might be) and conflict and plot structure.

  “Holden Caulfield says things really funny,” Kelsey said out of the blue, making Vera wonder if she had been paying attention to any of what came before. “When is this book set again?”

  “I’d be happy to refresh your memory.” Though this hadn’t been on her day’s agenda, Vera began to talk about the 1940s and the life of the author who’d written The Catcher in the Rye. Inspired, she pulled down the movie projector screen and downloaded Internet pictures of young Jerome David Salinger himself as well as various quaint-looking pictures of New York City back in the day. She called this “providing sociohistorical context.” “Because of the different time period, it’s possible some of you might not feel a connection to Holden; things may seem quite different to you now. But many readers over the decades have found that the thoughts and emotions Holden has are universal and timeless. As we read further in the novel, I’d like for you to be especially mindful of his thoughts and emotions and whether or not you think they reflect what it’s like to be a person close to your age. These are issues you can explore in your journals as well.

  “That’s about all we have time for today,” Vera said. “I appreciate your attentiveness. Please don’t leave before you take this handout. It’s a list of discussion questions pertaining to chapters five through seven, which is your reading assignment for tonight. Please write answers to these questions—complete sentences, please—and bring them with you tomorrow.”

  There were a couple of audible sighs and groans as the girls gathered up their books. Vera felt a little dazed. The class had been a slight improvement over the day before, she thought—at least she’d looked more self-possessed, hangover and all—but she wished she had engineered a more focused discussion. There were so many things she had wanted to cover. She watched the students departing and observed that once again Jensen Willard seemed to be in her own little world, still working on the buckles of her knapsack when all the other girls were making their way toward the door.

  Then she raised her head, looking Vera dead in the eye. “Did you get my email?” she asked.

  “Your email? You mean from the other day?”

  “No, I sent you one last night. A new one. I sent it to your email account here.”

  It was all Vera could do not to blush. She hadn’t even figured out how to log into her new Wallace School email account yet. “I haven’t had a chance. What was the upshot of it?”

  “I sent you some pages of my journal. If you get a chance to read it early, maybe you could let me know if it is what you’re looking for, or if you want me to do them differently for Friday. I brought a hard copy, too.” Jensen handed Vera a rather substantial number of pages with a cover page on top, all clamped together with a binder clip.

  Vera, who still hadn’t become accustomed to the ways of high school overachievers, covered up her surprise quickly enough to say, “Goodness. I’m sure it’s just fine. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll try very hard to look at these pages tonight, and if I feel they need to be reworked a little, I can let you know tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.” Jensen finally managed to fasten her knapsack shut, and said, as though speaking to its buckles, “I like writing.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Vera said sincerely. “I figured you must, based on what we talked about yesterday after class.”

  “Your bookmark is nice,” Jensen said, looking Vera in the eye again. Her vacillations between indirectness and boldness had a disquieting effect . . . the eye contact that would hold fast for an instant and break away, as though the girl were sneaking little snapshots of things.

  “My bookmark? Ah—my bookmark.” Vera took out the bookmark she was using for The Catcher in the Rye; incongruously, its photograph featured a famous picture of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald posing at the bumper of one of their cars. Maybe Jensen had read Gatsby?

  “I don’t really like Fitzgerald’s writing,” Jensen said in the same tone of voice someone might say I hate onions. “Scott’s, I mean—I haven’t read anything by Zelda. I just think it’s interesting how he basically drank himself to death, and she burned to death in a nuthouse. That makes me kind of like them.”

  “Me, too,” Vera said. She couldn’t restrain her smile—grin, really. The grin disappeared just as quickly. She was betraying too much about her own morbid inclinations by responding with too much warmth, too much approval. She gave another one of her little nods to the girl and turned away, busying herself again. “Well,” she said, “we’ll see you tomorrow, won’t we?”

  • • •

  That evening at home, Vera struggled to activate her Wallace School email account. She gave up after her fourth attempt and allowed herself some diversions on the Internet—cleaning out the spam in her personal email account, reading an email from her old grad school friend Elliott, and then turning to the true-crime discussion boards she sometimes lurked (but never posted) on, one of whose topic du jour was the Black Dahlia murder of 1947. A particularly rabid poster was trying to catapult the t
heory that Elizabeth Short, the bisected murder victim, had been slain by a big-name Hollywood executive. Amateur stuff, Vera thought, and completely unoriginal. Bored, she closed the browser window and then Googled her ex-fiancé, Peter, as she sometimes could not resist doing.

  There were several hits—mostly links to articles published in the Bond Brook Gazette, all related to Peter Mercier’s small business—and then something new, an engagement announcement from that same publication. There was no photo, but the announcement described his betrothal to a florist named Betsy Gillingwater. A second Google hit led her to a wedding registry, presumably set up by the fiancée; she couldn’t imagine Peter bothering with something so fussy. Feeling like a consummate stalker, Vera looked at the items Betsy wanted for the marital home—percale sheets, Ralph Lauren towels, and all manner of cookware, including such extras as garlic presses and lemon zesters and something called ramekins, whatever those were. So she’s a domestic type—a cook, Vera thought. Peter must be loving this. The one time Peter had made the mistake of asking Vera to bake something for his company potluck, she had had to run out and buy a disposable tinfoil pan at the dollar store. Well, more power to you, Betsy. More power to both of you.

  There had been a time when the thought of Peter with any woman who wasn’t her would have driven her into a rage that knew no bounds—the sort of obsessive rage that would cause her to fixate on poor Betsy, to imagine terrible things befalling the hapless woman—but now she felt almost nothing. You’re getting soft in your old age, girl, she told herself.

  She closed her laptop and got up to pour a herself a generous glass of wine—the cheapest, most vinegary wine she had been able to find in the corner bodega—and, thus fortified, started digging around in her wheeled suitcase until she produced the folder for her morning class; email or no email, she could give the hard copy of Jensen Willard’s journal a look. She lay down on her bed on her side, glass of wine resting on the floor next to her—would students be appalled to know that teachers read their writing in bed sometimes?—and began to read. Her eyebrow lifted as she saw the title on the cover page for the first time. It was as though the girl had foreseen the subject of that day’s lecture—though, she supposed, it wouldn’t take the Amazing Kreskin to predict the direction Vera had taken.