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  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.

  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.”

  Ruby extended her neck. “Mommy, what are my magnet dolls doing over there in that big bag by the door?” she asked, back to her regular voice.

  “You never play with them anymore, sweetie,” said Karen. “And we don’t have that much room in the apartment. I’m taking them to the Salvation Army so kids who can’t afford new toys can play with them.”

  “But I do play with them!” cried Ruby, squinching up her face.

  “The Salvation Army? Seriously? You know they try to convert people over there,” said Matt, a committed atheist whose parents attended a Methodist church.

  “Okay. But they also do a lot of food assistance,” said Karen, who was ethnically Jewish but who described herself as an agnostic. “HK even contracts with them.”

  “I just think the Homeless Solutions Thrift Store will make better use of Ruby’s old toys,” said Matt, his tone turning serious, “without bringing in all that salvation BS.”

  “But why can’t I keep my own toys?” moaned Ruby.

  “Maybe they will,” said Karen, ignoring her daughter’s lament. “But the Homeless Solutions donation center is two miles away, and there’s a Salvation Army on our corner. So I can actually drop stuff there on my way to the train instead of having to get in the car to take it somewhere—or instead of asking you to get in the car to take it somewhere, which we both know will mean that bag will be sitting in the hall getting tripped over for the next two years.”

  “Touché,” said Matt, conceding the fight and, in doing so, pleasing Karen, who smiled triumphantly.

  After Ruby went to bed, Karen and Matt sat on the sofa and shared frustrations from their workdays. Matt told Karen about what a hard time the staff was having getting the city’s housing authority to cooperate with his website. Karen told Matt about how the grant she was writing was taking forever—and also about what had happened at the community-unit party. “Which one is Maeve again?” asked Matt.

  Karen didn’t understand how her husband couldn’t keep straight their only child’s few friends, but she chalked it up to a failure of vision above all else. By nature, Matt wasn’t very observant. Karen could get a new pillow for the sofa, and two months would go by before he noticed—if he ever did. “The blond one who looks like JonBenét Ramsey who comes over to our house, like, every weekend?” said Karen.

  “She wears heavy makeup and cowgirl outfits?” asked Matt.

  “No! I just mean she looks like her. Blond and blue-eyed with a turned-up nose.”

  “Oh, right—I know who she is.”

  “Or at least it was turned-up until Jayyden got there,” joked Karen.

  “So he broke her nose?” asked Matt.

  “I haven’t heard,” said Karen, shrugging. “I mean, I assume her mom, Laura, would have e-mailed me if it was that bad. But who knows. She and Maeve’s dad, Evan, are probably out of town shooting an important GlaxoSmithKline commercial and haven’t heard the news about their daughter yet. Seriously, those two are never around. I honestly don’t know why they had kids.”

  “Did you know pharmaceutical companies are banned from directly advertising to consumers in every country in the world except the U.S., New Zealand, and Brazil?” said Matt.

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Karen, shaking her head. Then she launched into a harsh description of her run-in with Leslie Pfeiffer. “She might as well have said, ‘We couldn’t deal with all the black people at your school so we decided to send our precious firstborn to an apartheid-like all-white B-and-E program in the middle of a poor black school, where she won’t actually have to interact with any dark children because they keep them in their own holding pens.’”

  “That sounds charming,” said Matt.

  “Yeah, really charming,” said Karen.

  “People think Republicans are racists,” said Matt, who had grown up in Tacoma, Washington, where his not particularly warm but refreshingly sane parents toiled as a college secretary and a building contractor. “But I’ve always thought college-educated liberals are actually the worst.”

  “I totally agree.” To Karen’s mind, it was her and Matt’s shared political outlook and commitment to social justice, combined with their willingness to impugn those who didn’t share it, that had kept them more or less happily partnered for ten years. Also, they still had fairly decent if infrequent sex.

  After their chat, Matt and Karen went back to their computers, as they tended to do in the evenings after Ruby went to bed. Since there was no word from Laura, Karen briefly considered sending her a hope everything is okay–type e-mail. Like other mothers thrown together on account of their children’s affection for one another, and even though it was quite possible that Laura secretly disapproved of Karen as much as Karen secretly disapproved of Laura, they went through the motions of being happy to see each other on the rare occasions when they did. They also regularly Liked each othe
r’s Facebook photos of their children doing cute things, though Karen posted far fewer than Laura did. For no discernible reason, they also occasionally shared incredibly intimate details about their personal lives. The previous December, while at a birthday party for a classmate of Ruby and Maeve’s, Laura had revealed to Karen that for a year or more after giving birth to Maeve’s younger brother, Indy, she’d lost control of her bladder, regularly peed in her pants, and had at least once accidentally done so on her husband while they were having sex. It had been a detail too much for Karen, who hadn’t quite been able to get the image out of her head.

  But in the end, Karen decided to hold off on sending anything. She wasn’t sure what tone to strike and was concerned about coming across as either nosy or inappropriately blasé. There was something about Laura that made Karen feel like she was one of those overinvolved, overprotective mothers who had no lives outside of their children—or like she was totally negligent. There was no in-between. Besides, Karen was fairly certain that despite her tears, Maeve was just fine.

  On Saturday morning, Matt announced he had to go back to the office. Keen to work on her essay about nutrition and educational outcomes, Karen gave herself a temporary dispensation to remove all limits on screen time enjoyed by her daughter. As it happened, Karen ended up reading the paper and falling asleep. But the three of them went on a family outing to the zoo on Sunday morning, which Karen didn’t exactly enjoy, since it was still freezing outside and, at that point in her life, animals were not of particular interest to her. But returning to their warm home, she was happy to have gone, if only because, for once, the whole family was together and because it seemed like the kind of thing families did on weekends. And there was still a side of Karen that wanted to do things right, even though she felt haunted and repulsed by the sight of the baboons, whose bulbous red anuses suggested to her in a dispiriting way that we were all just animals whose sole purpose on the planet was to create offspring and then die.