But it was there, in the hallowed, neo-Gothic halls of that elite institution, that Karen’s desire to be good mutated into a powerful desire to right the wrongs of an unequal and unjust society. A significant number of her classmates had, like Karen, gone to public high schools located in the upscale suburbs of major metropolises. But the most glamorous kids, Karen soon realized, were legacies and other well-connected types who had attended various prep schools, some boarding, some not, up and down the Eastern or Western Seaboard. Some were Southern debutantes, others were Park Avenue Jews, Persian ex-pats, or the progeny of Hollywood royalty. No doubt these well-off students had their own internecine tensions. But to Karen, they occupied a single fortress of privilege, impenetrable to the outside world. They also seemed to possess a shared body of esoteric knowledge. They knew about cocktails and catamarans, ski resorts and stepmothers. Life experience was only half the equation; confidence was the other. None of them seemed ever to have spent a moment questioning his or her place in the world, or even his or her place at an elite institution of higher education. And why should they? It seemed increasingly clear to Karen that the random luck of birth accounted for most of what people called success in life. Far Left politics, which she’d embraced around the same time, lent heft to the hunch. Then Karen became indignant on a whole other level.
If Karen had been entirely honest with herself, she would have acknowledged that the quasi-Marxist worldview she’d adopted around that time, with the help of several tenured radicals in the political philosophy department, had also provided her with an exit ramp off the aspiration highway. Being political meant you didn’t have to be pretty or popular. Karen’s new belief system even came with its own lifestyle—cafés at which to drink black coffee, film societies to belong to (in four years of college, Karen never missed a Mike Leigh or Ousmane Sembène screening), clothes to wear (vintage black leather jackets from thrift stores were a particular favorite). With her newly discovered political consciousness, Karen became a full-fledged campus activist, joining the local chapter of ACT UP and attending Take Back the Night rallies. She also got involved in the anti–South African–apartheid effort, for which she spent more than a few nights camping out in a makeshift shanty in the quad, one sleeping bag away, if she could arrange it, from Mike Grovesnor, a graduate student in political science who was obsessed with long-distance running and punk bands, particularly the Dead Kennedys. It was to him that she finally lost her virginity, the summer before her junior year, though nothing more came of their relationship after their one awkward night.
That same summer, Karen went to Guatemala to learn Spanish and help refurbish a rural school attended by the children of poverty-stricken peasants. At least, that was the plan. In practice, she and the other volunteers spent most of the time in an un-air-conditioned classroom conjugating verbs. Yo podría, tú podrías, usted/él/ella podría, nosotros podríamos… Though on occasion there were interactions with actual Spanish-speaking people. Karen still recalled the tiny little Guatemalan boy who, during a school visit and with what appeared to be complete sincerity, had asked Karen, who was partial to black clothing and admittedly had a pointy nose, thin face, and pale skin, if she was a bruja real—that is, a “real witch.” Apparently, a rumor was circulating. At the time, Karen had laughed off the question. But somehow the very notion had embarrassed her.
When Karen returned to college, she found that her position as a do-gooder Lefty gave her a kind of reverse status among the prep-school types, who had been groomed since birth to get dressed up and raise money. Indeed, her first foray into fund-raising, on behalf of low-income AIDS patients, took place during her junior year of college. By senior year, she actually managed to become friendly with some of the people she’d once considered adversaries, perhaps explaining why she grew ever more ashamed of her own merely bourgeois origins. The Kipples, Karen came to realize, were neither affluent enough to be impressive (there were no compounds on private islands, no great-grandfathers who’d helped found X or Y, not even trust funds passed down to the children) nor remotely poor and/or bohemian enough to qualify as exotic or authentic. Rather, Karen’s childhood, despite her mother’s problems, had been privileged in all the most conventionally upper-middle-class ways. There had been piano, ballet, and tennis lessons, winter trips to Disneyland, summer camp in Maine, even an SAT tutor when it came time for that in high school. Or maybe Karen’s shame had as much to do with the aura of melancholy that permeated her family’s four-bedroom center-hall Colonial with beige wall-to-wall carpeting. In any case, when people asked where she was from, she took to answering “the beautiful suburbs” in an arch tone of voice.
At 2:50 p.m., Karen returned to Betts to pick up Ruby. Not in the mood for a fight, she relented on the Italian ice front. But the sight of Ruby’s blue-stained tongue distressed Karen in ways she couldn’t begin to explain, calling to mind the defected Russian spy who, a few years earlier, had been slowly poisoned by radioactive polonium in his tea. Meanwhile, Ruby herself seemed to be energized to the point of mania. She was running in circles and doing cartwheels across the blacktop. Karen barely got her to gymnastics class on time, even though the Little Gym was only a few blocks away.
Matt got home at seven. “Hey, KK,” he said, appearing in the door. “What’s the news in Macaroni-Land?”
KK and Macaroni-Land were his affectionate nicknames for his wife and home, respectively. Karen thought Macaroni-Land was cute, but her own nickname always sounded to her ears a little too much like the acronym for the Ku Klux Klan. “Hey, you’re home early,” she said.
“Am I?” he said.
As he took off his coat, the last button on his button-down strained against his belly and revealed a tiny triangle of hair. With his compact build and swarthy complexion, Matt had never fit Karen’s ideal of male beauty, which tended toward the lean and fair. But she’d always regarded her husband as manly in a winning way. And although he worked out irregularly—basketball was his main source of exercise—he hadn’t grown flabby and double-chinned like so many of her friends’ husbands. He’d also kept his head of hair, which was still shiny and, for the most part, dark. “We aim to please,” he muttered. “You aim too, please.” Then he started chuckling.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?” said Karen.
“Did I ever tell you about that sign I saw in the men’s room of that Greyhound station in Eugene?” said Matt. “Damn, that was funny. I have no idea why it came to me just now.” He went over and put his hands on Karen’s waist.
“Maybe you had to be there,” she said, though she secretly found it funny too. Like her father, Karen was a lover of bad puns.
“Maybe.”
“Well, did you aim?”
“I did my best.” He kissed her on the mouth, then pressed his groin into her crotch.
“Don’t be disgusting,” she murmured as she kissed him back. It pleased her to think that after ten years of marriage, her husband was still attracted to her. She was still attracted to him too. Though in keeping with male fashion trends, Matt had recently grown a patchy beard, and Karen had yet to grow accustomed to the scratchy feel of it against her cheek and chin.
Just then, Ruby ran into the living room in her pajamas with her stuffed octopus, Octi, filling her arms. “Daddy!” she cried.
Matt abruptly withdrew from Karen. “Hey, Scooby Doobie!” he said, lifting Ruby into his arms. “How was school today?”
“Fine,” she said in the babyish voice she sometimes adopted in the evenings. “But Octi had a bad day. So can you say something nice to her?”
“Sure I can,” said Matt, draping two of the doll’s tentacles over his shoulders. “Listen, Octi—there are more fish in the sea than have ever been caught…”
“My mother used to say that,” said Karen.
“You mean after you brought me home for the first time.”
“Ha-ha.”