What Has Become of You (5 page)

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, loping 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 theory 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.

That David Copperfield Kind of Crap: Journal Entry #1, by Jensen Willard

I have to admit, I’m a little confused. Do you want to know about me in this journal or do you want to know about Holden Caulfield? Or do you want to know about me in relation to Holden? (Now I’m doing what you do—asking questions.) I’ll start with me, I guess, and move on to Holden as needed, or at your say-so.

With every journal I write I feel the need to reintroduce myself in case the previous journal gets lost and leaves the reader with no backstory—no David Copperfield kind of crap—whatsoever. After all, I’m no Anne Frank. I haven’t got an Otto Frank in my life to recover my journal from the enemy and share my story with the world. Not that I’m comparing myself to Anne Frank in any way . . . well, I guess I just did, but I know it’s not a good comparison. A comparison like that could piss a lot of people off.

My name is Jensen Willard. My namesake aunt is dead now, from a brain tumor. She already had the brain tumor when my mom got pregnant with me, so my mom got to feeling noble and promised her dying sister that she’d name her unborn child after her in some way, shape, or form. But my mom didn’t have an ultrasound—she was so convinced she was going to have a boy. After I was born, and after my mother inspected my body, searching in vain for a penis, imagine how screwed she must have felt. She didn’t like her sister’s first name, Nora. I don’t know why. To me, Nora is the name of a girl in an English or Irish novel who has roses in her cheeks and gets the shock of her life when she leaves the provincial lands and is taken advantage of by a cad. (I like that kind of story. Does that surprise you?) Jensen, my aunt’s married name, now used as a first name, calls to mind a pretentious, twerpy guy with a pipe in his mouth. Maybe a butler.

I am fifteen years old—I turned fifteen in October. My mother says I have the mental maturity of a forty-year-old and the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, and that’s pretty spot-on, I have to admit.

For the longest time I’ve felt older than everyone else around me. The social climate at school only makes this contrast more obvious. It seems like all my classmates ever talk about is who’s going out with who or what outfit so-and-so got at the mall. I could name names, if you wanted me to, from our very own class.