Karen hadn’t always seen the world through the lens of race or class. Growing up in an affluent suburb, she’d actually paid scant attention to the subject. This was not so much because she had a naturally open mind or had been raised with good values but because pretty much everyone in her town was white and middle to upper-middle class. That included Karen’s own family. Her father, Herb, was a tax lawyer who made a good salary. Her mother was a housewife who sometimes helped in his office. Pretty much all the kids Karen knew attended the same legendarily rigorous public school, which sent as many of their graduates to Ivy League schools as the privates nearby did. To the extent that there was a pecking order—and there was, of course, by high school—it had mainly to do with whether or not you were having sex. Karen wasn’t.
Yet from an early age, she’d been hypercognizant of others’ suffering, beginning with her own family’s. When Karen was still a small child, her mother, Ruth, had started taking to her bed for days at a time. “Mom has a migraine” was always the official explanation. But eventually it became clear that the pain was more pervasive than that. Karen’s father had done his best to take care of her, driving her to endless doctors who never seemed able to find a cause or offer a solution. But despite his intelligence, he’d had a helpless quality when it came to interpersonal relations, especially those involving himself and his wife. He was by nature reserved—by Karen’s count, he’d spoken a total of three hundred sentences to her during his lifetime—and his wife’s depression seemed especially designed to make him shrink further into himself.
Meanwhile, Karen’s older brother, Rob, began doing bong hits in his bedroom while he was still in middle school. He was also a boy, and boys weren’t expected to help around the house. It therefore fell to Karen to keep Ruth Kipple happy and in the world. At least, that was how it had always felt to Karen. And her mother would reinforce the notion by saying terrible things that Karen realized were terrible only when she was older—things like “I would have ended my life long ago if it wasn’t for you” and “You’re all I have to live for.” At the time, Karen had considered them compliments.
At some point in her early teens, Karen felt compelled to take on certain aspects of the traditional-mother role herself—making meals for the family, doing laundry, keeping the house going and everyone’s morale up. But even before then, she’d internalized the notion that she’d been put on this earth to solve others’ problems. In early childhood, Karen had found an outlet for the sentiment by taking care of animals, especially sick and orphaned ones. Deprived of a pet—her mother refused to take responsibility for one while Karen was at school—Karen had a vast collection of miniature glass animals that she would sometimes break on purpose, forcing her to conduct “surgery” and glue them back together, an activity she found deeply satisfying. On occasion, she got to practice her craft on live beings. When she was around nine, a sparrow with a broken wing appeared on the front steps of her family’s home. Clueless, Karen tried to splint the bird’s wing with a toothpick and a piece of masking tape. Finding him dead the next morning, she wept and blamed herself.
Around the age of ten, Karen abandoned the cause of sick animals in favor of Third World children with cleft palates. She would spend hours staring at their photos and imagining their embarrassment and pain. Soon, she began donating half her allowance to the Smile Train. She was also drawn to tales of pioneer girls of early America, girls who had made do with so little. For all of her mid-to late childhood, her favorite book was Little Women. But whereas other girls she knew identified with Jo, the sprightly and unruly tomboy, Karen related best to the kind, obedient oldest sister, Meg, the one who wanted most of all to do the right thing and to please her parents. Indeed, it was as much for her mother as for herself that, after high school, Karen, the ultimate good student, had landed at an Ivy League university. Karen still remembered how Ruth had cried with happiness when she’d heard that Karen had been accepted.