Karen (1995)

My best friend in high school, Karen, was lovely right down to her soul. She was a slender, well-proportioned girl with long blond flying hair, pale skin faintly freckled, green eyes, a longish, horsey nose, thinnish smiling lips and elegant, long-nailed hands. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I knew, but, in retrospect I see it was her spirit and more than her physical attributes that made her so. I met Karen when I pulled her up onto the curb to save her from being run over by a bus during the first week of my first year in high school. She was grateful to me as was the lion to Androcles. Her main reaction, however, rather than relief at having not been killed was self-deprecating laughter at herself for having been so lost in a daydream. I remember the clothes she wore that day: a strange, dark straw boater hat trimmed with slightly mashed flowers, some sort of checked jacket and short skirt, ribbed dark stockings from the turn of the century and short Charlie Chaplin boots. She carried a garish flowered plastic shopping bag and a black umbrella. In short, she looked more like an eccentric elderly woman on an excursion to the grocery store than a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl.

Karen immediately began to question me. What was my name, where did I live, what did I like to do? She revealed that she was lately from Chicago but originally from New Orleans -- this explained her thick Southern accent -- and that her father was the top Electrox vacuum cleaner salesman in the entire country. She was the youngest of seven children, and, in fact, was considered to be something of a miracle, having been conceived as her mother neared the age of fifty. It was evident to me even at this first meeting that there was little that did not interest Karen. As I grew to know her very well over the years that followed I learned that her great gift in life was her absolute enthusiasm about everything. She was like a child to whom everything is bright, shining, unsullied. For Karen, each new day was an adventure and each person she encountered a walking story book, an encyclopedia of new and fascinating information.

Karen always seemed to be running, out of breath or laughing. Her contagious laughter often prolonged into a silent stage, when she simply surrendered, bent over at the waist, her head flopping helplessly, gasping for breath, finally finishing the fit with a couple of pained sighs and wipes at her tear-filled eyes. It was easy to bring on these hysterical laughing attacks in Karen during school. French class was particularly easy. Although she had spent much of her life around the French-speaking population of Louisiana, her own French was absolutely atrocious; her accent was almost painful and her memory for vocabulary fleeting. Our teacher, a just-graduated, doe-eyed child of twenty-two demonstrated the patience of a saint, but soon the whole French class learned it was necessary to cover one's mouth with both hands when it came time for Karen to recite. Karen gripped the edge of her desk, white knuckled, when called upon and often seemed to be searching her mind for the right French word like someone looking for one lost black sock in a dark and impossibly cluttered attic. She slowly began a sentence, her pronunciation growing worse as each new word was added, until even those of us who had resolved not to laugh no matter what exploded helplessly in chortles and snorts that we immediately attempted to suffocate. Karen continued, smiling graciously in a way that let us know she understood our laughter and did not blame us one bit, wavering word by word, like a drunken tightrope walker. Our young teacher fought valiantly to retain her composure, coaching Karen slightly or murmuring bien, bien until Karen finally fell off completely and we were all finally able to laugh out loud in relief. Then Karen laughed too, bent over at the waist in her desk, helplessly flailing her blond hair against the floor tiles in a fit of silent giggles.

Karen's wardrobe was astounding, even during those days of hippies and flower children. She always seemed to have put herself together from a trunk full of theatrical costumes. Her anachronisms were startling. She might arrive at school barefoot, wearing a floor-length velvet Ophelia gown, a leather aviator's jacket from World War II and artificial butterflies and bees in her hair for ornaments. Her normal uniform, however, consisted of a long-sleeved black leotard that had gone deep spinach green with much washing, a pair of gold paisley Turkish harem pants, striped Raggedy Ann socks and her Charlie Chaplin shoes with soles that flapped open at the toes. She topped all this off with a fringed Spanish piano shawl the size of a bed spread, and she carried with her a huge carpet bag in which she kept her lunch -- various morsels wrapped up in waxed paper, secured by red rubber bands. I could hardly wait to get to school each morning to see how Karen had arrayed herself for the day. She made necklaces from found objects -- chicken bones painted gold, broken doll parts, buttons -- and she once fashioned herself a grotesque walking staff from the hoofed leg of a deer.

Karen's bedroom was like something from Alice in Wonderland. In the center of the room she had piled mattresses up to within two feet of the ceiling, and she'd put a pea under the bottom mattress, as in the fairy tale. To sleep in this bed, Karen had to get a running start and use momentum to scramble all the way to the top. She converted her clothes closet into a second sleeping arrangement: hundreds of pictures of wild cats from color magazines -- leopards, lions, tigers, panthers -- were pasted onto the closet's wallpaper. A twin mattress just filled the closet floor, and on the mattress was a pile of fake fur coats gotten cheaply at thrift stores. To sleep in this bed, one burrowed under the pile of coats and used them for covers. A beaded curtain obscured the sleeping den from the rest of the room. Karen used two huge, baroque iron bird cages for storage since there was no conventional furniture in her room. She had shoved a mounted, antlered moose head though one half-open window from outside, and so the poor taxidermied beast appeared to be poking his head in out of curiosity. All available wall space was covered with Karen's watercolor paintings, tacked up floor to ceiling.

I found it difficult to believe that Karen's parents were tolerant of her unorthodox decorating scheme. At first meeting, Karen's mother seemed to be a normal, quiet middle-aged woman who was often busy knitting for her church's charitable activities. Her father seemed to be an aggressive but successful salesman who drove an ancient turquoise Cadillac with tail fins and enjoyed playing golf. As I got to know Karen better I learned that her mother had some very peculiar habits, among them freezing slightly used Kleenex tissues in case there should ever be another Great Depression, and serving jelly beans from a soup tureen as a vegetable at the evening meal. Karen's father had but one remarkable habit: he slept standing on his head, strapped onto a slant board, convinced that the resulting direct flow of blood to his brain, combined with principles he'd gleaned from Norman Vincent Peale's books, accounted for his success selling vacuum cleaners. Urns containing ashes of beloved, departed family members were displayed on the mantle of the living room's fire place. I loved to spend time at Karen's house; she was a character whose whole family were also characters.

My most vivid memory of Karen is the summer night we spent with a friend at her lake house when we were seventeen, just before I left for college. Some time after midnight Karen danced for us on the end of the pier, an incredibly beautiful dance which started slowly with circular movements and accelerated into a frantic St. Vitus dance, then died down again. Her flowing hair was back-lit by the huge full moon and she reminded me of a flame as she made this dance for us, a dance that flared and flickered and flared again. The shore of the lake was paved with millions of round, smooth white rocks which echoed the full moon's shape and Karen's moving silhouette reflected in the lake's dark water, shimmering. I would have been content to die at that moment, so utterly and completely beautiful was this dance at the end of a pier in the moonlight. I was certain I would love Karen for the rest of my life, even if our grown up lives sent us down separate, distant paths. And I have.

But why did I lose or jettison most of the precious little trifles she gave me, the tiny hand-made books, the photographs with captions, the drawings sprinkled with silver glitter, her illegible, uphill-writing letters with feathers glued onto them, when, after high school, for years I moved from city to city, state to state, trying to "find" myself? I regret, I regret so much the loss of all those little magpie gifts from Karen. I wonder if she remembers the invitation I once extended to her when we were just girls? That, some day, when we were ancient, white-haired ladies, she could come to live with me in my rambling, decaying Victorian house and we would have tea together every afternoon and play dress-up again and laugh until our sides hurt about all the loves and adventures and travels of our long, long lives.