What Has Become of You

by Jan Elizabeth Watson

  “I think it’s better in your face. You look like a little rat peering out from under things. A pleasant rat.”

  “A pleasant rat?” I said doubtfully.

  And then something sort of hideous happened—something I feel funny even writing about, but I’ve gone this far. Bret’s face moved toward mine. He had to stoop way down to reach me sitting in the armchair. I could see the pores of his nose up close. They looked like little strawberry seeds. He’s going to try to kiss me, I thought in a panic. No one had ever tried to kiss me. Not even close. I imagined his mouth forcing my lips apart—a wormlike tongue, like you see sometimes inside parrots’ beaks at the pet stores. I turned my face away.

  “Why are you turning away? Do you have bad breath or something?”

  That made me laugh. “No. Well, maybe. Probably.”

  “Let me smell.”

  I breathed into his face.

  “It’s a little bit bad,” he said, “but it could be worse.”

  I laughed some more. I couldn’t help it.

  “Are you going out with anyone?”

  “Me? No. I mean . . . definitely, no, I’m not.”

  “Would you go out with me? I mean, just to try? I’m leaving for Columbia in about six weeks. But six weeks is kind of a long time away.”

  “Okay,” I said. Just like that. I couldn’t even begin to explain to myself or to you how this happened if you asked me. But I said okay. I really did. There was a part of me that thought: Well, maybe he’ll come in handy somehow. You just never know.

  It’s almost nine months later, and Bret and I are still boyfriend and girlfriend. It’s a funny kind of relationship, as you can imagine. Even in those six weeks while Bret was still in Dorset, we mostly just talked on the phone, and when we saw each other in person, it was mostly in groups with his friends. Every once in a while, he’d sneak me over to his house when his parents were out and his brother was away. More often, we’d go to his Aunt Miriam’s cottage when she wasn’t there. But mostly it was phone calls for us.

  Our phone conversations were epic. They still are, usually. I don’t have a cell phone, so I have to talk on my parents’ old corded phone in the kitchen—pacing around, sometimes going in circles and winding the cord around my body till I’m trapped in a web of cord and have to untangle my way out of it. And sometimes I lie on the carpet in the dining room and talk to Bret in the dark because conversations in the dark always feel a little more meaningful. In general, the subject of our conversations is predetermined by Bret; that is, we talk about things that he feels like talking about or is interested in. He is interested not only in fiction and poetry but also in the philosophical writings of Nietzsche, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. I’m having to do a little brushing up on this stuff to act as though I can keep up with him, to be honest.

  We write letters, too—real old-fashioned letters, with a strict no-email rule. That’s what I spend most of my time doing: writing him letters. I write him four or five a week, and I’m lucky if he sends me two a month. When he was here over Christmas break, we did this thing where we’d leave notes for each other inside books at the Dorset library, and it would be like this Easter egg hunt to find which book the other person had left the note in. Usually there were clues, though. Like if Bret said something about being assigned The Vicar of Wakefield for class, I’d leave a note for him inside the cover of The Vicar of Wakefield. That was the most fun correspondence we ever had.

  I have let him kiss me, but we haven’t gone further than that. Kissing isn’t quite as bad as I imagined, but it isn’t exactly what I would call good, either. His nose (which is sizeable) always knocks into mine (which is also sizeable), and his lips always feel chapped, and the whole thing feels kind of invasive. “You’re a very tense kisser,” he told me once, which is probably true. I wish people would kiss the way they did back in those old black-and-white 1940s movies, with their shoulders hunched up and their faces rigidly jammed together. It seems better than those probing, messy, exploratory kisses you see in movies today. But I guess I’m lucky that Bret doesn’t show much interest in going further than that—from what I understand, from movies and books and such, that’s pretty unusual.

  I don’t put a lot of faith in love and sex. I think it’s kind of lame, if I’m being honest. I think people start having sex at about the age their parents stop hugging them because they still want that infantile closeness to someone that they used to have, except it’s all muddied up in sexual desire. Maybe my views are tainted by my parents’ weird combination of openness and close-mindedness; once, when I asked my mother to explain a passage about male-on-female oral sex that I’d found in one of her books, her reply was, “A man’s face doesn’t belong down there.” I don’t know. I haven’t sorted this all out in my mind.

  During the many phone conversations Bret and I have had since last July, I’ve found there are some things I can talk to him about and some things I can’t. For instance, one time I was lying on the dining room carpet after having drunk most of a bottle of cough syrup, which had somehow made me feel more depressed instead of having the desired effect of making me feel mildly drunk. We had just got done talking about the mating habit of insects, specifically this mite that leaves its sperm behind in intricate patterns for the lady mite to sit on, if she approves of the artist’s work. I said I thought that was romantic. Then Bret started telling me about this guy who lived in one of his dorms who’d gone to visit his family for the weekend and had shot himself. He said, “He was this brilliant musician. I can’t believe he did it with a gun. I’m not even sure where he would’ve gotten one—not from his house, I know that. I met his mother once, and she had this huge peace sign tattooed on her leg and a ‘Bread, Not Bombs’ bumper sticker on her Prius.”

  Then, without even knowing I was going to say it, I said, “Sometimes I think it’s a good thing I don’t know how to use my stepdad’s gun.”

  Bret paused so I could hear the full measure of his distaste. “Your stepdad has a gun?”

  “Yes, the service pistol he got issued in the navy. I tried to pick it up once, but it’s too big for my hand—about three pounds. Still, sometimes I think about what it’d be like to bring it to school and hold a classroom hostage. I could go up and down the rows of desks, pointing the gun at people, and decide right then and there who’d live and who’d die. Wouldn’t that be interesting? I don’t think I’d know what I’d do unless I was actually in that situation. Maybe I wouldn’t even shoot anyone. Maybe I’d just make them think I would.”

  “I would call that extremely uninteresting,” Bret said, “and definitely not romantic.”

  He didn’t understand at all. He didn’t understand that I was just blowing off steam when I thought about these things, like I’d done with Scotty. That was the last time I brought up anything serious or personal like that with him. Since then, we’ve stuck to safe subjects—subjects he likes. Whether or not dark matter exists. Whether homeless people are visionaries. Whether Andy Warhol was really an artist. The number of starving artists who are actually starving.

  With Bret being away at Columbia, we don’t even have phone conversations that much anymore because of the long-distance bill. So now it’s just down to Sundays. And that’s what got me started telling you about all this in the first place—because of that call I just got. That call where he seemed distant, though maybe I just imagined it.

  This is part of the reason why my parents don’t like Bret. They say he doesn’t seem that invested in me. My mother always says, “An investment is something that you give to someone that you can’t get back.” Still, Bret’s about as invested in me as anyone else has ever been. And this, to me, has come to mean a whole hell of a lot—enough so that I don’t know what I’d do without him.

  I’m going to try to go back to sleep now. I didn’t mean to go on this long, but now I have, and I’ve worn myself out—and you, too, probably, if you a
ctually read all this.

  Vera laid the last page of Jensen’s journal on her table. She wanted to write a comment on the girl’s paper, an in-depth comment thanking her for the entries she’d written thus far—the sheer volume of them and the quality of thought therein. But somehow she could not think of how to respond to Jensen without revealing her own stories—stories, she thought, that were best kept to herself.

  Instead, she took out a fresh piece of paper and began to write a response to affix to the end of Jensen’s journal entries; she preferred the old-fashioned approach of handwritten feedback, though most teachers she worked with now relied on computers.

  Jensen,

  This is a general response to all the journals you’ve submitted thus far. I’ve made individual notes in the margins of each, responding to lines and phrases and sections that struck me particularly. What I want to say most of all, though, is that it is a pure pleasure to read your writing. I am honored by your candor, honored to know you have trusted me as an audience.

  Your emotional honesty and flair for writing are very good for someone your age. I appreciate how the entries range from savagely funny (even a little bit Holdenesque at times, which I’m sure isn’t accidental) to melancholy and derisive. You cover the whole spectrum of moods here. Though you make some statements that might alarm some readers, I want you to know that I don’t disregard these comments, but I am not easily shocked by them, either. I am someone you can always come to with such thoughts and issues, and if coming to me with them helps, then so much the better. You mentioned something about a therapist in one of your entries—do you ever think about trying a different one? Do you think there would be any value in doing so?

  Sometimes seeing the world too clearly can misfire and result in hurting oneself badly, but in my opinion, the clarity is still worth it in the end. In the best-case scenario, it can make you something quite special in this world. I know this may offer you little consolation now, but it is something to keep in mind for the future.

  Sincerely,

  Vera Lundy

  She had considered signing it, “Yours, Vera Lundy,” but decided at the last minute that that might be too much. She had said quite enough already, even while trying not to.

  Chapter Four

  The first morning of her fifth week of teaching, Vera sat reading an online journal article called “Criminology and the False Confession,” written by a criminal psychologist named T. E. Rubin. It was still dark out—not yet 5:00 A.M.—and her overhead light burned over her as she stretched out catlike on her bed, listening to the starchy calls of the chickadees outside her window, vocal and vigorous after a long and subdued night. The article stated nothing she didn’t already know, yet it struck her as especially resonant, the way a certain song heard at a certain time seems to hold all the answers to the world.

  When the person making the false confession is delusional, the false confession becomes his reality. But in the case of the nondelusional confessor, the confession itself helps him to feel grounded in a reality that had heretofore rejected him. Taking credit for a crime often becomes a highly public action, one that the world responds to. The confession, then, becomes a misguided attempt at achieving intimacy between him and the rest of society.

  It was interesting, Vera thought, to compare Ivan Schlosser’s ready confession (Well, what do you want to know?) to the initial false confession of Ritchie Ouelette. Had Ritchie, too, had a moment when he thought a confession might bring him closer to the world instead of further away from it, like a kid who seeks negative attention in a wrongheaded attempt to garner a mother’s love?

  Looking up from her reading and tapping her pen meditatively against the page, Vera smiled to herself. She knew what she and her girls would be discussing first thing tomorrow.

  • • •

  “Intimacy,” Vera announced at the beginning of her first-period class. “Isn’t that a pretty-sounding word? Intimacy. Some people name their daughters Chastity. Why not name them Intimacy? It has just as much of a ring, doesn’t it?”

  Clutching her library copy of The Catcher in the Rye, Vera paced the floor of the morning class, speaking of intimacy and how it related to Holden Caulfield’s fleeting desires to connect with the opposite sex. “What do you make of that behavior?” she asked her students. “What do you think is the driving force behind it?”

  “Desperation,” Jamie said.

  “Ah,” Vera said, giving Jamie a congratulatory little rap on her desk as she walked past. “Good answer. But what does desperation mean? Have you ever felt it? Tell me what desperation feels like.”

  “It feels like . . . grasping at straws,” said Katherine Arsenault, who seemed to have roused herself from the dead at that mention of intimacy.

  “Good, Katherine,” Vera said, and then remembered the way the girl had signed some of her recent journal entries. “Or do you prefer to be called Kitty?”

  “I prefer Kitty.”

  “All right then, Kitty. Why is Holden Caulfield desperate and grasping at straws in The Catcher in the Rye? What would make a sixteen-year-old boy feel so desperate?”

  “Hormones,” Loo Garippa deadpanned.

  “More than that.”

  “Loneliness?” Martha True said.

  “To say the very least, yes. Here he is, wandering around New York City alone, and he has no idea what to do with himself. Lost in his own hometown, practically.”

  “New York City is a good place to be lost,” Jensen Willard said. It was the first time she had ever actually contributed a comment during class, and Vera irrationally found herself wanting to hug the girl.

  “Yes!” she exclaimed. “Have you ever visited there, Jensen?”

  The girl nodded. But the invitation Vera had thrown her way, this small encouragement to say more, fell flat, for she fixed her eyes on the table before her and refused to look up again.

  “Let’s run with this idea of loneliness,” Vera said, turning away from Jensen and trying to ignore the tug of rejection she felt. “It’s such an important part of understanding Holden’s character. And isn’t it an important part of understanding the teenage experience, too? Isn’t it a lonely process, sorting out who you are emotionally and intellectually?”

  There were blank looks, a couple of shrugs. Vera was not completely unsurprised by this noncommittal reaction. After all, what teenage girl wanted to be the first among her peers to own up to this idea of sorting things out?

  “Funny thing about admitting that you’re lonely,” Vera said. “It’s like saying you’re depressed. People think it’s contagious. No one wants to be around you if you admit to loneliness or depression.”

  She was killing the discussion. As though illustrating her own principle, the mere mention of the words loneliness and depression cast a pall over the room, an almost palpable recoiling. She knew she had better shift gears.

  “Let’s talk about something else, then, that’s not so unrelated if you think about it: Holden as a liar. He’s always presenting himself as something he’s not. How does his tendency to lie or embellish tie into his loneliness? What might be the reason behind embellishing stories like Holden does? Do you think he’s trying to impress other people? Is it that he’s not happy with the real stories or perhaps doesn’t know the real stories yet? Either way, this goes back to what I said, about sorting things out intellectually and emotionally. And that kind of sorting-out process is the hallmark of adolescence itself, the key to coming of age.”

  “Coming of age to do what, though?” Aggie Hamada asked.

  “Get secondary sex characteristics,” Cecily-Anne St. Aubrey said primly.

  “Be on the rag,” someone else said in a stage whisper.

  Vera cleared her throat. “Come on now, girls. What are the motivations behind a lie? Think about it.”

  After a few seconds, the answers began to come.

  “To h
ide something?”

  “To protect someone else.”

  “To make yourself look good.”

  “To fool yourself or others.”

  “Good answers, all of you.” Vera was growing excited. She was scarcely aware that her pace around the classroom was quickening or that her low voice rose, rich and full-throated, in anticipation of the narrative she was about to tell.

  “Let me tell you a quick story about a real-life adolescent who lived a lie for a little while. Any of you ever hear of Penny Bjorkland?”

  Just as Vera had expected, no one had. She slowed her pace around the classroom, rubbing her hands together. She shot an almost defiant glance at Sufia Ahmed, who was sitting at her desk with her hand curled around a pen, ready to take notes.

  “Penny Bjorkland was a seemingly ordinary teenager who lived in California in the late 1950s. One day she woke up and told herself, ‘Today is the day I will kill someone.’ That someone turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old gardener named August Norry, who had the misfortune of offering her a ride that day. She fired eighteen bullets into his head, torso, and limbs. When the crime was later linked to her gun, she seemed unapologetic. She was described by the cops as a typical, gum-chewing, ordinary teenager with a tendency to giggle. When asked why she had done it, she said she had wanted to know what it would feel like to kill someone and not to have to worry about it afterward.”

  “Cree-pee, man,” Loo Garippa said. “That’s just weird.”

  “I daresay it’s the normalcy with which she approached it that made it weird. This is a pretty extreme illustration of the adolescent’s weakness in decision making, planning, and impulse control. On a much lesser scale, one can certainly see this in Holden Caulfield. Almost everything he does is based on impulse.”

  “But impulses aren’t always bad,” Cecily-Anne said, surprising Vera.

  “No, of course not, Cecily-Anne. Can you think of a good impulse you’ve had recently?”