What Has Become of You (2 page)

“How are you feeling about tomorrow? Any better?”

“I feel out of my element,” Vera confessed. “We’re supposed to start reading
The Catcher in the Rye
. I had to get a copy from the library today; isn’t that stupid? Somehow I have to link the novel to the idea of
personal connections
. I suppose I could talk about how Holden relates to Salinger, or how
Catcher
captures the sort of voice one sees in strong autobiographical writing. I’m just glad they already read
Macbeth
so I don’t have to deal with
that
.” Vera was babbling. She pressed her tongue up against the roof of her mouth and held it there.

“I’m sure you’ll do fine, darling.”

“Well, I put my clothes out for tomorrow, all ready to go. So I can’t say I’m completely unprepared. And now I’ve got
Catcher
. What else could I need?”

“Just your own self,” her mother said comfortably. “I don’t want to take up all your phone minutes, but I
do
miss you. When are you going to have some time off to visit?”

Vera winced again. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll have to sort out what my new schedule will be like.” Though her mother lived only an hour and a half away, Vera did not have a driver’s license—another source of embarrassment for her. It had all been very well and good to be without a driver’s license while living in New York City, but Maine was a different matter—not having a driver’s license was as much of an oddity and certainly as much of a handicap as having three heads.

“Well, let me know when you can,” her mother said. “You could stay here in the guest room, and we could watch TV and get pizza. Big doings. By the way, are you remembering to eat?”

“Of course. I eat a lot. Mom, you don’t have to keep asking if I
eat
. That stuff was
years
ago.”

“Now that I don’t believe. But me, I am getting a
gut
. It’s the most obscene thing you ever . . . Oh! I knew I had some gossip for you, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Your brother Ben ran into Peter at Home Depot the other day. He was with a woman. Great big, tall blond gal with a pretty face. Peter introduced her as his fiancée, but Ben can’t think of her name.”

“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 me
s, the
I can’t live without you
s, even the
you won’t survive without me
s—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.